Good evening,

The week after I got back from Mellaka was convocation, it was a nightmare, 5000 or so students graduating ceremonies in a week, too much traffic and too many people on a normally too-crowded campus... I stayed in my room most of the week, but cought up on a lot of work I wanted to do, so was good.

tom from hull university came up to visit this weekend, he is studying at NTU in Singapore, where I studied last year, and the international office in Hull put us in touch.

He came up to see Penang, but after a drunken night out on Friday, at 3am we decided that we'd go upto Thailand for the weekend, which, if you are reading this from most other parts of the world, will sound really cool. and it was...
We left 8.30 saturday morning, and arrived in HatYai at 1pm, after changing the clocks forward an hour. I can't remember if I said before, but last month when I went upto Bangkok to visit Julian, I met a Thai couple on the train, who invited me to come and visit their home near Hat Yai and the border to Malaysia.

So I took them up on the offer. and as they had said I could bring friends along, I invited another friend, Hendrich, from Germany who we had met on the bus ride up. I first visited Thailand 3 years ago, and came away with a bad impression, I was almost scammed into buying "gems" in the infamous Bangkok Jewelery scam, and all I saw was a land of too many tourists, too many prostitutes, and too many dirty old western men. Whilst all 3 groups have probably doubled in number since then, I thought it would be nice to experience "normal" Thailand, and that's what we did, Hat Yai is a normal town, there are no big tourist attractions, and nothing particularly there, although it is "a commercial hub of southern thailand" according to the lonely planet... Anyway, Anna and her husband Petchalat and her Mum, live in a cool little house next to a monestary in the hills outside Hat Yai.

We hung out, chatted with the monks, walked up into the hills, ate lots of fruit and took lots of photos. In the evening we headed into town to a festival at the Hat Yai University, after doing some shopping at the local Tesco lotus store! The collection of photos of Tesco shops in S-E asia is getting quite sad now. At the festival we ate the best Thai food I have had, and better than the Malaysia festival food I'd eaten during Convocation at USM the week before. We headed back afterwards for an early night, as we were getting up at 6.30 to give the monks offerings of food. That was cool too, but the language barrier makes it a little annoying. Anna has a sister in London and she can speak some English, but it would have been nicer to say a bit more than please and thank you in Thai, but that's a start I suppose. Anna's mum was chinese, and spoke Mandarin so with my chinese and Anna's English we got by ok-lah. Buddism is cool, hope to find out more about it.

We left this morning and they took us out to the beach in Sonklah (?) and another couple of giant buddah statues which scatter the Thai landscape. it started to raina bit about midday so we headed back to the centre of Hat Yai. Because of the weather, we decided to take the early bus back to Pinang and left at 12.30, to give us a bit more time for Tom to see Pinang before he went back,we left Hendrik to stay another night in HatYai, and Anna and her Husband to go back home again. they were so friendly and hospitable to us it was amazing, a very different side of Thailand than I had seemn before... and some friends for life I think.

On the way back to Pinang met a U.S-chinese guy called Lewis, who had been sailing a sail-ship around the world and was living off Malaysia at the moment. Very inspiring for the future...

Tom headed off by train to Kuala Lumpur tonight and will spend some time there tmrw before going back to Singapore for classes on Tuesday. He has the same Law teacher I had when I was at NTU, Valerie Low, who is also the friend of two of Sarah's (my sister) friends from Cambridge.

Ok, now I am being bitten by Mosquitoes, so its time to stop.
goodbye.