the fantastical islands of phuket bay

i decided to write a story about the islands in the bay because the shapes sticking up out of the water are so interesting... check this out.
craaaaazy shapes. looks like peter pan and smee dropping off tiger lily. story soon to come... or maybe i will just write it and read it to eliza, which she loves.


so check this face out. this is a monkey. yes. a monkey. i saw a MONKEY.

can you see how he's raising one eyebrow? how is it that they look so human? i got close to take photos and then one started loping towards me and grabbed at my shoe. having been warned about rabid thai animals and having heard horror stories about the 7 shots to the stomach i must receive if i am bit by any animal here, i ran for my life, not sure if his teeth were after my foot, or his little monkey hands were after my camera. either are entirely possible.

this was at the pier while waiting for my boat to koh yao yoi on thursday. i went to the only high school on the island for an assembly, which is where i found my story. i'll stick to newspaper protocol here and not give information away until the story is published. but its crazy. the craziest thing i've ever worked on for sure, i know because my coaches were laughing out loud in disbelief at my photos tonight.

i stayed with a family involved in the ecotourism program on the island. they keep a room open for visitors with a mattress and a mosquito net and they feed me lots and lots of food. they're really nice and the mosquito net is very exotic (and practical). i kind of want one when i go home.

thai BABIES!


they train them young... all babies who are able MUST do this to any adult. its so precious.


yo grrrl wut up

sweet little girl on the bridge at koh yao noi

so cute... i would totally do this too if i could. how great is a nap in a purple hammock?

rubber forests...so cool

catching dinner at the crab farm


my host family... saa is on the right, i am the shiniest i have ever been in my life, and we are making omlets and fish and chicken and rice. i ate this every single day, and will eat it again every single day next week.

goodnight!

assignment: koh yao noi island!

sa wat dii ka! this is my new headgear for a good chunk of the trip as i received my assignment this morning and i am spending a week or more on a muslim island a good ways away from our base. i have to be careful about what i wear, i'm not allowed in mosques (boo), i must keep my head covered, and i won't be seeing any pork for a while... i'm excited!! i'm doing a story on the culture of the island, which locals are concerned about preserving since the influx of tourists in the 90s. i'll be staying in a thai girl's dorm at the school i'm covering, which no foreigner has apparantly done (according to one of my coaches).

they also have a different greeting than the traditional thai wai, which kendrick and i will demonstrate here :)




yesterday we visited the pier built by kenan institute asia, our host group here in thailand. it was built after the tsunami as part of recovery efforts and includes a boat repair shop. the boats here are long tail and are used for individual, small fishing enterprises.


a fisherman at the boat repair shop, framed by prayer flags (maybe?)


thai popeye at the navy restaurant we ate at... his forearm is a bit large and seemed to be broken off and supported by a piece of wood.


sea turtle hatchery owned by the navy base... turtles are an endagered species here, so the navy helps them out. these are only 15 days old!


this little guy is sleeping


zach climbing the police boat that washed ashore 2km during the tsunami.

+ +

about half of the group has already left for their stories, but i won't leave until tomorrow. today i'll exchange some money, swim a little, get a royal family polo (which honors the king and is always appropriate) and MAYBE get to ride an elephant. this is my number one objective while i'm here (after, of course, producing an awesome story).

the journalist blood in me is pumping and i'm ready to START. i won't have internet on the island, so more updates when i'm back!

typhoons and tree houses

...or rather, tree house singular. but probably typhoon plural. there's a crazy one in the indian ocean right now, which is dumping heavy rain on us in phang-nga province (pronounced pang-a).

its the monsoon season, so typhoons are fairly regular. people seem to be more laid back about them than north carolinians are about hurricanes.

backing up, we flew for 36+ hours, NYC to seoul to phuket. seoul, the short time we were there, was great because we saw all these couples wearing matching outfits. identical tshirts, identical pants, the women always in heels, even with shorts. no one could figure it out, but then the very chatty korean i sat next to on the way to phuket explained that they were honeymooners and they dress alike when they leave on their trip. its the cutest thing, but somehow i think i will have a hard time convincing an american male to match me, no matter what the occasion.

we got to phuket in the middle of the night and then had an hour drive to our hotel in khao lak, one of the areas hardest hit by the tsunami. everyone here is so friendly and smiley... we learned in orientation that the more you smile the better, as thais dislike confrontation and try to "save face."

we've spent two days in orientation and talking about workflow, which is journalist lingo for how we go about collecting and editing stories. we watched footage from the tsunami, taken by tourists in resorts close to ours. i learned that tsunamis are not tidal waves... they are basically series of very quick floods, caused by earthquakes. people die because they are carried out to sea before they have time to outrun the flood, not because a huge wave crashes down on top of a village. this doesn't make it any less dangerous, but it did change my perspective a bit.

we have our meetings in what's called the tree house, which sounds a lot cooler than it is, because its not really a tree house proper. trees grow through the porch. the resort we are staying at is built into the side of the hill and ends at the shore below. at times it feels like swiss family robinson, or jungle book, full of twisty vines and big leaves and straw roofs. i saw an elephant between the rubber trees today. my goal is to ride one before we leave.

the food is amazing and SO spicy... even for breakfast. we've been eating fruit, salad, and pad thai (noodles with fried vegetables and meat) in the morning, some kind of fried vegetables and rice for lunch, and last night we went to the viking restaurant, which i suppose caters to norwegians and swedes, not so much thais. jet lag seems to be worse the 2nd day as we were really tired from traveling yesterday and slept well. the time different is 11 hours, so we are flipped and afternoons and evenings are hard to stay peppy for.

we get our story assignments tonight or tomorrow morning and should be beginning on thursday... orientation is almost over, so must run to learn some more thai. sawatdeeka!

photos!


proof that i am here and alive! this is part of our beach


crazy typhoon that i thought would blow my windows in last night


so much green in the green season (which is a positive way to say rainy season)





da beach


breakfast! fruit i've never heard of... rose apple in the middle. its like a hybrid of a honeydew melon, an apple, and a pear.


beautiful thai script


room 436 (on the right)


our building


view from my room... the andaman sea


orchids everywhere... on pillows, bathroom counters, in drinks, as napkin holders...


these are the faces of jet lag.


i love murals... we shall be revisiting this one as the typhoon limited what we could do with it.

t-minus

thailand is now about 36 hours away. and when i say thailand, i really mean the time i embark on the journey to get there, seeing how i won't actually BE there until monday.

but i truly am getting excited... the kind of excited i used to get before i began traveling frequently. the kind of excited that you get antsy when you think about prepackaged plane food, buying trail mix in the terminals, waking up in the middle of the night while breathing stale air, and watching movies in a cramped seat to fall asleep.

that kind of excited. seriously, that stuff used to thrill me in middle school, now i dread it. but the reward of new cultures is always worth it.

if i had looked at this stuff first, i might have pushed past all the administrative details to let my anticipation truly build.

i finished the first part of my internship at the paper on wednesday. i'll be back in late july, but here's what's been in front of my lens lately...

fife & drum corps web gallery [click]

pen show in cary:


this woman was straight from harry potter. she had so much personality and something about her was... magical? yes, magical. in a harry potter kind of way. except she specializes in inkpens, not quills.

just to give you an example of her verve, let me just give you some excerpts from my notebook.

"one of my specialites is things that write in extreme ways."
"i'm flamboyant by nature."
"[Choosing pens] is stagecraft."
"Imagine having a signature so great that it becomes a common noun." (in reference to John Hancock, of course)
"Its like having a Ferrari; you can shift it any way you want, but it will tell you when you're doing it right or wrong. And in a few days you'll get really good."
"[A fountain pen] is not judgemental. Its like dancing with somebody. There's some people or pens you never want to dance with again. And some it gets better every time you dance with them."
"[Fountain pens] make you better."

see what i mean? i had no idea there were people on earth who loved pens so much.

i had another assignment that i worked on all week, but i don't think its been published yet, so we'll have to wait for that one. i went back three separate times to do photos because the lighting wasn't so great. i've been told that is 80% of assignments, so i suppose it was good to learn.

since i'll be on the plane for hours and hours, i need some good music. any suggestions?

so much hot

its so hot. for such a long time this spring i kept saying, "what nice weather we're having! this is incredible for north carolina in may!"

i am now eating my words. the first week into june has felt like july 4. its absolutely sweltering.

so what do newspapers report on during weather extremes?

the weather extremes! so three times in the last 6 days i have taken pictures related to the heat wave. day 1 and 2 i struck gold with a story about a farm in chapel hill that hoses down their horses to keep them cool. (as sandra has requested pictures, i will link them here, but also post below)





today one of my editors told me he has made a conscious effort the last few days to not assign me heat pictures. thanks matthew!

yesterday the trouble i ran into was FINDING people outside in the heat. who stays outside when its 102 degrees?

after a few hours of driving/walking around/sweating off 10 pounds, i found some delightful ladies at a garden center in carrboro who were most helpful and seemed virtually immune to the heat. barbara told me that when she goes home at night she puts on long sleeves and sweatpants because her house feels so cold after being in the heat all day. good gracious.

good news: thailand will probably be even hotter than this.

oh bloggy blog blog blog. i was reading somewhere today how we plaster our whole lives on the internet and are then amazed that our privacy does not remain intact. how much the world has changed...

also reading somewhere else about generation y (that would be me, and probably most of you reading) and how they (we) have never known life without computers.

NOT TRUE. i remember before our family had a computer and my dad would bring home his "laptop" (the size of a microwave) from work and we'd play solitaire. then we got our first MS-DOS machine with elmo's farm, all in black and white, where we'd push dump trucks around and feed chickens DOS pellets for hours.

and here i am blogging on my couch with a sleek silver machine, connected to a superhighway that can broadcast my words far and wide in the blink of an eye, to the remotest places that i may never even see.

wild.

well, as this is a practical rather than philosophical blog, i'll return to updates on life in journalism.

last week was intern orientation aka learning company software, ethics policies, meeting the bigwigs, hearing about the perils of the industry and how its taking a nosedive, and most importantly, learning our way around the labyrinth that is the news & observer bureau.

if there was an anthrax spill in the air vents and we had to run to the safety of the streets, i don't know if i could find my way out alive, but there are some very interesting nooks and crannies on the way out.

first off, shout out and props to judson, who works in the graphics department, for having a really sweet office and sitting on a yoga ball instead of a chair. if ever i have a job that requires me to have an office (which i hope i don't) i want to be just like you and have a yoga ball as a chair. what judson doesn't know is that after all the interns left the office, we commented on how he probably does crunches on the yoga ball when no one is in there. multipurpose, multi-tasking. its what journalists do best. go judson.

also saw what is known as the morgue, or where the computers go to die, and also where they keep dead papers. aka papers that are older than today. so whenever i am published and my mom and grandma want copies, i go to the morgue. it is as morgue-ish as it sounds.

actually the entire building is rather dark and dank and creepy. it was apparantly built in the 50s and some think it is a prime example of modern architecture. in my opinion, the 50s and 60s produced some of the worst architecture known to man. did they know about windows then?

anyhow, i've had some interesting assignments lately and "been driving a lot" as robert goulet likes to say. its true. i have been driving. a lot. some days i put in nearly 200 miles.

last week i helped cover this child abuse trial in smithfield, which is an hour and a half away. all day i sat in the media balcony with various news stations and travis, who did video and transmitted, and listened to testimony from the defendent's adopted children about the technique and frequency of the abuse. so depressing. then i drove all the way home with those thoughts in my head and then went to work and was in a bad mood.

how do you distance yourself from these things? is there some kind of firewall i can erect to prevent my soul being permeated by misery and the terrible things that people do to each other? and is there a way to do that temporarily like an on/off switch so i can just keep it up while i work? how permeable does that wall need to be in order for me to make an effective photo and connect with my subject?

photography is exciting and can lead to a rewarding career, but it definitely comes with mega wear and tear physically and emotionally. i know a photographer in his 20s who has already had knee surgery. and what about the countless journalists who have divorces because what they see and experience changes them beyond the understanding of their spouse? how do i avoid all this? can i?

today i got sent out feature hunting, which as i said is 85% of the job. waiting for news to happen and trying to make good pictures in the meantime. i didn't have to drive far (for once) to find something interesting, but little did i know that my editors would find it THAT interesting.

i went to a horse farm in the country, beautiful place. i saw two white arabian horses in the shade, and thought what a nice picture it would make. driving a little further i saw a foal rolling in the dust and thought he must be trying to cool off. since i was instructed to look for pictures of people cooling off, i took some interpretive license and took some of animals cooling off. the editors liked them so much they told me to go back and take more tomorrow so that they may run front in a few days.

its funny, the things i think aren't a big deal at all end up being important... always. life lessons in journalism.

aaaand i'm back to philosophical.