The Great Flood

I got a frantic phone call from Moon at 6:30 in the morning on Monday. It went something like this:

Moon: Hey! What happened in Chiang Mai!!?! My sister called me and told me there is water everywhere! Was there a tsunami?
Me: Moon, its 6:30 in the morning and there are no oceans anywhere near CM.
Moon: By my sister said there floods everywhere!
Me: Its fine here, I haven't heard anything. Let me sleep!

Anyways, upon being woken up an hour or so later by Rob to say that we might not be able to make it to school today because the roads are flooded. We attempted to go our usual route, which didn't work. The water was pretty deep most of the way, but we hit one area wher the water must have been nearly a meter high. The river is completly full and many areas were hit very bad. I'm not sure on the numbers, but a fair amount of people died. A number of my friend's houses had their first floor submerged and lots of furniture and the like ruined. I'm told the smell of the filthy water and the mud left behind as the water receeds is awful. The flood didn't come near me (center-city), but it made traffic just awful in the city.

Not so many people made it to the first day of the new semster. As such, a number of classes were cancelled for the week. I did sit in on Academic Writing, Creative Writing, Environmental Problems in SE Asia, Chinese III and Thai IV. Academic Writing seemed like a bit more than writing then I want to get into this term, so I picked up Creative. The other major changes, are that I dropped Chinese and Thai IV. After one class I knew that both classes would just be a waste of time and money as my level exceeds that of the other students considerably. So, I dropped 3 classes and added two more in total. I'll be studying Translation I, EP-in-SEA, and Creative Writing. The CW teacher is a published author and liberal feminist. Should be interesting. Its always a pleasant surprise when a qualified teacher pops in among the rather mundane lot of teachers I'm used to. As 3 classes isn't really enough credits for me this semster, I'm going to test out of 3 or 4 other classes later this term so I can catch up on some credits.

Tonight was my first Japanese class at the new night school. The stuff is pretty good for my level, but its kind of boring and I have my doubts about the efficiency of the teacher's methods. I did however learn a bunch of new words and the class is small (3 girls and me) so I will make the most of it and hope she improves.