Maybe a correction

Okay so i am now not sure if the papaya salad was papaya or mango. it was a light green fruit about the size of an avacodo that was shredded and was a lighter green on the inside but it has been called into question as to what it actually was...if anyone knows and would like to enlighten us please feel free!

Thailand

So I have now officially added thailand to the places Ive been, but at most it is a hollow achievement. I am only here for 8 days and i will not get to see much of the country, which to me is the whole point of going to a country. Anyone can go see 12 countries in 12 days in Europe or jsut travel to the capital of a place but that doesn't seem any fun. So I have to come back and do Thailand properly, maybe take a few weeks or a month at some point though I have no idea when. It is also depressing because even though I am living in China and traveling through Southeast Asia for a month i am constantly meeting people who are traveling for a year. Now I am having a great time but still, it would be alot of fun to travel for a year. I met a girl who had come to thailand via China and the Trans-Siberian Railroad and another who had just arrived to start her travels and she had quit her job at an aquarium.
Anyways, on to the travel update. bangkok is alot of fun, very big and crowded but the Skytrain makes it relatively easy to get around. Everything is cheap but that just means that you spend alot of small amounts of money that add up to a large amount of money(relatively speaking). Also everyone thinks I am a pervert and ask if I want adult DVD because I am a foreigner. I did walk by several go go bars that lie along the night market, nothing really special that i saw, just a large amount of thai women in bikinis sort of half dancing on stage. Eh. Also did a cooking class that was alot of fun. It was 4 hours and only had me and one other woman from Canada and we made fresh curry paste, a very nice mint salad, pad thai, a really good soup and then a dessert called rubies in coconut milk. I have all the recipes so I can make them when I get back. I also went to the old Siam capital and that was cool, lots of ruins and what not, took alot of pictures. Anyways, then I went to ko Chang which is an island and that was really laid back and relaxing even though we were only there for two days but that beach was really nice, kinda made me wiosh I was traveling with a girl but c'est la vie.
Finally, the food is amazing! Street food is so good and they need to have it in the states, maybe thatll be the theme of the restaurant I open, all street food, which includes alot of different thigns, from pad thai to meeat on a stick to papaya salad(Which was incredibly good!!!!). Anyways, on to Phnom Penh and Cambodia so i will let you know what comes next!

So I leave for THailand in two days which is very exciting for me.  I ate the last of my perishable food today and so for dinner i went out to a noodle place, not one right next to me but one a 5 minute walk away.  To get there I have to go past I guess what would be the "town" or "village" square.  Id never been there at night before and just as in the park it was full of people.  Theere were kids watching what looked like a Barbie cgi movie and groups of people ballroom dancing and doing tai chi and practising some sort of dance involving cymbols, small drums, and red fans or scarves i wasn't sure which.  Anyways, the point of this is that I kind of like the Chinese community spirit thing they have going here.  I don't know if it stems from cultural differences or because of the whole socialist thing but at night in any neighborhood in the US you wouldnt have all these people out and about at night all just at one place doing things together.  The same thing, only on a slightly larger scale happens at the park only there it is mostly people ballroom dancing which is fun to watch.
Also people here have been asking me about the election happening back home so that has been interesting.  They don't really have a good idea of how things work as far as elections for president go, at least not that I could tell and Im not sure if that is because of a language barrier when we talk about it or because the government doesn't want them to know or it's just one of those things that they ahppen not to know about.  At some pont it would be ncie to find a person that speaks fluent fluent english and talk about it and see what they have to say.  i know that alot of people that I have talked to over the months do expres dislike for the party and all but I wonder how much they know abut alternative forms of government.  Anyways, good night and I am very excited for southeast asia.  Also, I was thinking, we call the general region of Iraq Saudi Arabia, UAE the middle east, but we dont call any region the East.  Why is that?  Also with words with the prefix of mis, they usually mean soemthing bad, what does mis mean?

Well it is beautiful today outside.  There has been a cold snap around here but it is slowly getting less cold, a few days ago it was freezing.  But today, while in the morning it was really cold it has warmed up to merely a bit chilly and with my new scarf and my jacket it is a very nice day, the sun is shining, which in itself is a good thing since every once in a while China's almost perfect enviromental record there can be a smidge of smog on the horizon but today and yesterday it was almost perfect.  Two nights ago I made chicken soup and then last night french onion soup.  Tonight I was going to make chili but i hink my tutoree's(is that right) mother is taking me out to dinner for spicy food because we both like it apparently.  
New Years was spent in hong kong and it was alot of fun, lots and lots of people everywhere.  We went to a few different bars, including one which is a brew pub or something that had a really good house beer that I am blanking on the name so i will have to go back at some point.  They also have escalators that take you up from the harbor into the Soho district which is where there are alot of foreign restaurants, bars, and people.  I found this out after already walking all the way up the streets which are fairly steep but now I know.  I hope everyone had a good new Years wherever they were!
I went walking in the park near me again and caught the tail enf of Aladdin, the disney version, in chinese.  After that they put on a shadow puppett show, not sure of what was going on but there were puppet dragons, small children, chickens, frogs and other things that I did not recognize.  I didn't understand the show but from the laughing I took it to be a very funny show.  
I am going to have to get my hostel in bangkok today or tomorrow and then we also need to book one for Cambodia where I am meeting up with some other friends.  I guess that is about it on this front so I hope you all had a Happy New Year!