Birman Smokes

 Here in Thailand we have some very strict laws on drugs. Any kind of drugs is strictly forbidden.
And when I say strictly , I mean  strictly, in the asian way.
Not that drugs like cannabis are not available, but it is not easy to find it and most of the time apparently dealers are the first to denounce you to the local authorities. And thrust me you don't wanna spend some time in thai prisons. Especially as a "farang".

It's not in the thai culture to smoke. You'll barely see people smoking cigarettes in the street.
On the campus, the only people I've seen smoking are outcomers ( "farang").



Apparently things are slightly different in Birmany which name is now Myanmar.
I'll probably gonna pay a visit in this country so you will soon have more insight of this country.
But friends of mine made a trip few month ago in myanmar and came back with many pictures. 
I've just pick up this picture of an old woman smoking birman homemade cigarettes. I assumed its cigarette but in fact I'm not sure.

Old birman woman smoking

Click on the picture to go to the 4 pictures album. You'll get a chance to see the size of the smoke. It's simply astonishing.



I was wondering whether my dear friend Sarkozy will allow these smokes on the french soil. What do you think?

Temperatures are falling

Surprisingly, instead of temperatures rising, the weather is getting cooler. 
Temperatures are even relatively cold. Yesterday night temperatures were around 14/15 degrees.
I was still wearing a short sleeves T-shirt but many of us were wearing a pull-over or a sweat.
I did sleep without the fan and with my T-shirt.

This can' t really compete with the weather in France which sounds to be, let's say, a little bit cold.
But somehow, we also have our cold weather. Ok don't kill me, I was just joking.

Welcome Dinner from the African Student Union

I'm just back from the welcome dinner given by the African Union to the new african students.
We are 3 new african students, but for different reasons, the other two couldn't be there.
So I've meet others africans on the campus.  They're for the majority doing a PhD in different fields.

There were also people from differents continents

I therefore had the chance to talk with ely, who is finishing is thesis
for his MBA. The topic is really great, it's on How to etablish a venture capitalistic market in a country  in order to obtain a sustainable growth.

It's really a mix approach who reconciliates capitalism and social welfare. It's souds to be an exhaustive work. the idea is to provide a kind of template that can be customised and applied in every developping country. Needless to say that I was more than interested by the subject.

I know it isn't very clear but i'm gonna be clearer in a post which will be only on this thesis. We had a very interesting discusion and I'll attend to his presentation which is a next week. What a timing, isn't it?

I'm too tired to write more on this, but seriously I am more and more looking in the direction of economy studies. Just add that there were some doctors on the table, one of them giving Law classes at the School Of Management (SOM). It was really cool to have these interesting people at the same table and to chat with them.
More on these dinner soon..

P.S: I didn't have any picture because foolishly I left my camera at home. Sorry!

Contact lenses you should avoid

I went to an optical store yesterday. I wanted to check the prices for contact 
lenses and cleaning product.
They have the same european brands, but this store didn't have the brand 
I'm currently using which is Precision UV. 
It's not a big deal, one can change brands as long as the one choosen fits 
comfortably. 

I first looked at daily lenses. It's really expensive. It's not surprising because 
it's the allegedly the same lenses that I had back in france, but I was kinda 
expecting some lower prices anyway, at least to match the living standards here. 

So I went back to my monthly lenses. I have some concerns about this, because of the heat and humidity. Monthly lenses could be hard to keep clean 
for a whole month. But they are less, less expensive. I was hesitating, thinking that maybe I should go to another stores to compare prices. But the girl at the store popped up with this cheap lenses which were nonetheless one I knew. It was Acuvue2 lenses. I do know the brand, though I'd never one of their products. For a fair price of 180 baths (about 4euros) for one monthly pair, I thought I should give it a try.

So I did at the beginning of this afternoon (basically when I woke up).
Greatest error of the day. This is the worst pair I've ever worn. It was more than uncomfortable, it was irritating my eyes. I had to carry it on for 
the 3 hours my class lasted.
Plus we had a powerpoint presentation to do and I couldnt help to keep on blinking.
These lenses shouldn't be allowed to be sale. I don't know if this has anything to do with the fact that it was made in thailand. I don't think so but who knows?

The conclusion is simple: Avoid Acuvue, it simply sucks.
I'll try to find a decent lenses here. Otherwise, I'll seriously start to consider the glasses option.

Oh BTW, I did a quick test of my eyesight power. The result was disappointing, it went down again. I'm a -4.50 now. Dammit!


 

Little test of embedded albums

This post is just to test the option of embedded album provided by Picasa web albums. 
Let's see what it does.

SU party #1

Edit : It's just adding a direct link to the album and added the album cover. That's pretty simple, but it means that I won't need to write the HTML code. This is the kind of small improvements that really make your daily life easier. I like it.

Oh! BTW I was the one with the digital camera so I don't appear on any photo. But I'm gonna add some pics with me on them. And pretty soon you will also be able to enjoy more beautiful pics when I start to travel around the region.

Web albums now available!

I've been busy working on the photos issue and it turned out that Google has created quite a complete ecosystem.
For one year or so, I've been using Picasa and I've been very happy of it. It very simple to use but in the same time enough powerful to do some fine tuning of pictures. Of course it's not Photoshop but it does what I want it to do. It's a google product and therefore it's free.

On the other side, Blogger is, as you might not be aware, as Google product. Actually, the company, formely known as Blogspot, has been bought by Google. Anyway, the thing is that these Google guys have done a pretty good job and the two products are interconnected by another one which name is Hello.

Hello wasn't in the first place designed for that, and you can see that when you used it. The process is not so simple.  Good things is that you can use hello to send photos to your friends very easily and very quickly. There is also a chat service embedded. Basicly it's like MSN messenger except that you have a very nice file manager inside which is 10000 better than MSN one (who really sucks). Plus of course the integration nicely done in picasa.

The conclusion of that is that:

1. I have a very simple to add any kind of picture on my blog. I dont even have to open my blog, and that's great!
   
2. I've created Picasa web albums so that you guys can see the whole albums. Not all of you will find it interesting but some might. thats why they are kind of set apart of the blogs.  Those who are not interested can just read the posts on the blog. If you wanna see the whole gallery, just clink on the links that will be provided and that's it.

The link to go to the entire gallery is :

http://picasaweb.google.com/tntresor

In the future, everytime I'm gonna add new photos, I'll provide the direct link to the related album. But to get an overview of all the albums, just use the link above.

I'm quite happy to see that I've built a kind of ecosystem which is gonna simplified my life. Have to thank Google.
I know I could have use a different system like for example a MySpace+Flickr combination. But thing is that I would have needed to find a software to handle the transferring process.
The fact that I was already using Picasa was the decision point. That's a smart move of Google.

Ok. I think I really gonna go to bed. It's 8AM over here and I have a meeting with my group in just 6hours from now.

Feel free to leave ay comments

The SU cafe

SU stands for Student Union (rather explicit name) and we have a cafe on the campus which name is The Cafe (!) where you can get a drink between 9PM to 1AM everyday. It also where parties take place. The last one was on thursday. Photos are to come as soon as I know where to store them. This is just the main entrance, which was decorated accordingly (at least that was the original idea) to the caribean theme of the party.

Storage of my pictures

I know people are gonna ask for pictures pretty soon, so I've already started to list the different options. Obviously I can't use this blog to store pictures, because there are gonna be dozens of pictures. So I have to find a site dedicated to house my galleries.
I'm hesitating between Ringo and Flickr. Already have a ringo account so it sounds to be the easiest way but on the other hand I've heard a lot of good critics on Flickr. I feel like i'm gonna give it a try.
If you have better ideas, please leave a comment.

In all cases, I'll post the most funny/interesting pictures here so that you people would be able to leave comments.

Time in Thailand

Thailand belongs to the GMT +7h region. Which basically means +6h on time in France during the winter and +5h during the summer.
So when I talk with you folks on MSN during the evening (in France), it means that my night is gonna be seriously short (like now for example).

This might be useful to know if you intend to call me. Since I go to bed very late most of the time, you can try between 2PM and 8PM ( 11PM during the week-end) Paris time. Of course you can call earlier if you call on my cell. If you hear a girl saying something really wierd and ininteligible, that means that i'm probably in class. In this case, just leave a message after the tone.

Time to go to bed.

Temperatures in Bangkok

I'm gonna post from times to times about the weather.
Now the weather is pretty fine, meaning it's not too hot. I don't have the precise temperatures, i'm just gonna say what it looks like.
During the day, it's around 24/26 degrees. And during the night we have a really nice 19/21 degrees. At least these has been the weather for the last 3 days.
I have a fan pointing on me, but I turned it off several times. But the temperatures are soon to rise, and it's gonna be hell in march.
I'll let you know.

First things you notice

When you arrive for the first time in Thailand, say Bangkok, they are many things you can't miss.
Here is a short list of my first impressions :

1. When you first get into a taxi, you notice taht the wheel is on the right side, so is the driver (obviously). you may find it funny at first place, but when you have to deal with it ain't gonna be that funny. Like for example, you have to be very careful when you ride a bike, especially at the beginning.
   


2. The trunk is half full because of some kind of a blue container. I asked to know what the hell wat that. It is the for the Air conditionning usually called AC here.
   


3. Bangkok have an incredibly modern highway network. It is amazing! However, enjoying that cool roads lead people to drive insanely fast. You might wanna look at the road when take a cab. Have been told that mine was rather slow. yeah right! So I hope you gonna be lucky when you choose your cab.
   


4. People are not tall. I like to put it this way. Because when I arrived in AIT, I was surprised by the size of the bikes (lots of bikes around here). They all 
   look like bikes for kids (say between 12 and 14 years old).  I would find at later that everything here is at this scale.

So these is the first things you might wanna know when you arrive in bangkok. In a next post, i'll talk of the food. Cause food & drinks are one of the main concerns for "farang" in here.

P.S : "farang" is the thai words for non-thai people. It's gonna come back very often in my posts, as being a farang impacts your daily life.

Ouverture de mon blog

Avec beaucoup de retard sur la date prevu, j'ouvre officiellement mon blog.
Disons qu'il m'aura fallu un certain temsp pour poser mes bagages et m'acclimater a la vie ici.
ce billet est en francais mais par la suite j'utiliserais essentiellement l'anglais, primo parce que c'est un peu ma langue de travail, et deuxio parce que j'ai un clavier QWERTY donc je n'ai pas les accents ce qui est hautement genant pour ecrire en francais.

Je declare donc mon blog ouvert!