厉害!

First home-cooked meal I've had in over a month, though simple, absolutely wonderful and caused my feeling of well-being to increase tenfold. After that my uncle and I went to an upscale gym for a two-hour workout. My uncle and I walked through the underworld to get there, him smoking a cigarette en route and back.
Yesterday I went up and down the Chao Phraya on a river taxi, wandered lonely through ornate temples and palaces when suddenly I remembered I am in the land of M. Bison and Sagat from Super Nintendo's Street Fighter II. I made it back to central port and found my personal driver Pornthep awaiting me, after which we went to buy some fruit.
I noticed that bicyclists are non-existant here, and traffic is 落后. For one thing, traffic lights are not computer controlled, but police controlled via a little tiny station at every light where a couple of officers sit and decide whether a light will stay red for 3 minutes or 35. What that means is, a commute that should be 10 minutes can often take 2 hours during the rush hour or inclement weather conditions.
In some ways it is nice to have this break to let all the Chinese I have been learning to sink in a bit; the academic program at Nanjing U is a bit 厉害, so I am constantly bombarded with more and more material without much time to actually absorb it. Now I physically feel some of that hardening in my brain like a thermosetting polymer. A thermosetting polymer such as that created by formaldehyde and melamine put together, the latter of which has grossly contaminated milk products coming out of China. Sometimes when I want to speak, Mandarin words come to my mind before English. That's a good sign, but it doesn't help me here, and the discovery that I actually don't know any Thai language is always a new one...