First Work Week

Hi all! The first week of project work is quickly wrapping up. This week at work involved a lot of discussion between me and my WPI partners and our three Thai partners. We were very fortunate in that the two proposals we wrote ahead of time before we were ever in contact with each other, matched up nicely. We have many of the same ideas about what we want to do with waste tire management in Thailand. Our first task was to combine our proposals intro a short summary, this is due on Friday and we completed it Wednesday, so go us! Today we had our first meeting with our sponsor. She is actually a grad student here at Chulalongkorn University (Chula) but she works for our sponsoring organization, the National Science and Technology Agency.  The meeting went very well. We presented a powerpoint about our goals and objectives of our project and it was very well received by both our sponsor and advisors.  

Here is a view from the room at Chula that we work in most of the time:

Now for the more interesting stuff…Every day at work so far our Thai partners have taken us to eat at different places on and off campus. Chula is home to 40,000 students and needless to say the campus is HUGE. Here the different departments or colleges are referred to as “faculty”. Every faculty, or college, has its own open-air cafeterias (what they call “canteens”).  All of the students have their favorite faculty that they like to eat and it would likely take us all two months in order to go to all of them. So far I have eaten at the faculty of chemistry, economics, and accounting, with the economics being my favorite, go figure.  We have also discovered a milk shake place that has large Oreo milk shakes for 18 baht, about 60 cents. But everything here is really cheap; most of our meals are less than $2. Today our Thai partners took us out to a restaurant with another of the project groups. The cashew chicken I ordered was pretty good, although after eating pizza at an American restaurant for dinner last night I can’t help but crave more American food. Here are some pictures of part of the campus:

Now for the weekend plans….A group of about 10 of us are headed to Pattaya on Friday, a beach town 2-3 hours from Bangkok. Booking a hotel proved to be difficult though so I had my travel agent (my mom) book a hotel room for me.  I had to convince the people I am staying with to go for the “expensive” $50 a night hotel instead of going for the $25 a night one. We have all become so cheap.  We are staying at the Sunshine Hotel Pattaya incase you want to google it, and here is a link about Pattaya incase anyone wants to check it out, but I will post about it sometime early next week with my own pictures! 

-Kaily