Phuket vegetarian festival

Another interesting tidbit we ran across.  Every year there is a 10-day vegetarian festival in Thailand.  Apparently there are many street-vendors that sell delicious vegetarian food for the duration--sounded good to us!  There is also a religious processesion that visits a series of temples and monks (I believe?) pierce their cheeks with all manor of swords and other sharp objects.  This aspect of the festival I found, to be honest, pretty disturbuing.  Aaaaand here are some pictures!

http://www.phuket-photos.com/frameme.php?page=vegetarian-festival.htm

Right now our plan is to be in Thailand for next year's festival (though we probably won't be in phuket).  Should be interesting.

Environmental recording

Something I'd really like to do is start making environmental recordings--especially once our travels begin (hopefully to be posted here for everyone to hear and enjoy!).  

The sort of thing I have in mind is exemplified by the websites One Minute Vacations and Favorite Chicago Sounds.  They're just high-quality recordings of the ambient sound in a place.

Our friend Josh has a friend who runs a recordings studio and can teach us about different kinds of microphones, etc.  I've made a brief internet search for information (yielding the following), but have yet to sift through it all.  More later once I've had a chance to explore a bit more:

The quiet american diy field recording info.

Special topics in sound class webpage

Binaural recording overview

A few resources we're using

In our first post we mentioned that the main aim of our trip is both to see how others live around the world, and how we live in different places.  Part of this will be the process of getting ourselves oriented in each new place--exploring to see what there is, and finding comfortable patterns of life for ourselves.  Another big part will be interacting with other people.  

To this end we've found two so-far valuable resources for helping us find out about opportunities along these lines.

The first is WWOOF:  World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms

Travellers work for 5-6 hours a day in exchange for room and board on an organic farm in another country.  This is not primarily a work arrangement, however; it is intended more as a cultural exchange.  Farms are typically small, and travellers live and eat with the host families.  Typically the hosts are excited to teach about and their country, regional culture, and farming practices.  Obviously there is some possibility for exploitation (it all depends on how you value the exchange, after all), but it definitely sounds like the kind of opportunity we're interested in.  Our friend Nick did this a few years ago at an olive farm in Italy and had very favorable reports.

To give a concrete sense of the opportunities, here is a preview of the list of hosts for Thailand.  One I particularly like is:  "We are practicing organic farming and permaculture. An unusually enlightened monk, conducts the project. All cooking is vegetarian. Chinnaworn also teaches meditation, wild edibles, cooking, and Thai culture if interested."  I would love to learn about wild edibles, cooking and meditation.

Another resource, recommended to us by metafilter is the Thorntree forum at lonely planet.  This will most likely be of use to us on the road, but we've started reading it now to see what kinds of questions other people (who are currently in the places we're considering) are asking.

That's it for now!