Straws & Spoons

I’ve taught my last day of 4th grade at Watmethang Karawas, I’ve said my goodbyes to teachers & students, my room is packed into suitcases, and I’m leaving the sweet city of Phrae in just a few short hours. As my time here in Thailand comes to a close, I can’t help but to suddenly remember all the things I never want to forget. 

Forget-me-not Cultural Events: 

• That time we went to the Yi Ping Lantern Festival in Chiang Mai and saw thousands of lanterns float into the night sky, creating a man-made milky way 
• Being in a parade in full-on Thai apparel through the streets of Phrae for Loi Krathong  
• Running into Nongnoot, a teacher from the school, outside her house and having her take us to her mother-in-laws house, and then leaving with Thai hair-clips from her sister-in-law
• Witnessing a monk’s cremation, dangerous fireworks show and all 
• Having dinner with our middle-aged neighbor who spoke no English, and us no Thai (a lot of whiskey was consumed that night) 
• Overseeing the production of Cinderella by our 4th & 5th graders who are off to perform it in Malaysia (“The prince is giving a barrr” and “Imporrsible” were my fav songs) 
• The goodbye ceremony put on for us Foreign English Teachers during which our students gave us countless roses, gifts, and hugs 

Forget-me-not Cultural Tidbits:

• The numerous rides in the back of pickup trucks (a normal form of transportation)
• How absolutely every meal comes with a spoon and every drink a straw (even if both items are purchased at a convenience store)
• The 7/11s up and down every single street and alley 
• The ease of buying meals from street vendors 
• How every restaurant is simply the front portion of someone’s house 
• The phrases “Up to you,” and “Where you go?” 

Forget-me-not People: 

• Towns people
• The immense generosity, friendliness, willingness to accept, and genuine care that comes from Thai people is something I will always remember and attempt to incorporate into my daily life back in America
• Students 
• Even though they drove me nuts, my students will forever hold a special place in my heart for having taught me patience, language learning compassion, and the ability to game like nobody’s business 
• Friends 
• As always, before this experience, I never expected that the people in the coming phase of my life would have had such a grand impact on me, but they did just that. I didn’t even know there would be five other English teachers living with me, and once I found out, frankly, I was a little overwhelmed. But as time went on I grew to learn life with only them. We taught together, ate together, traveled together, and really shared life together for five months. It turned out to be the best, most intense community I’ve ever been blessed to live with. 

To sum it all up: thank you, Thailand. 

Now it’s off to Vietnam & Laos for a month, then back to Thailand for the Songkran festival, then to reenter the Western World in Spain with Wendy before going back to America on April 30th. Here’s to the next adventure! 

Wai Not?

Thailand is a very respectful country. The most common way of showing respect is by wai-ing to one another. “Wai” is when you bow slightly to someone with your hands pressed together in front of you (like praying hands, but the height at which you hold them denotes differing levels of respect, so your hands are held higher for figures such as monks, The King, and Buddha). At school, all the teachers wai to one another out of mutual respect, and our students wai to us to show respect for their elders. While wai-ing is a kind gesture, it’s also something of a cultural requirement, so Thai people go to extreme lengths to make sure they get their respectable wai in, this results in hilarious varying kinds of wais. For example: 

The One-Handed Wai:

Often times around campus teachers will be carrying papers or coffee or something with one hand, but then they see another teacher they haven’t yet seen that day, so they’re required to wai. In this scenario, they just lift the one free hand and pretend the other one is there, like an invisible place holder. 

The Umbrella Wai:

The other day it was pouring down rain in the morning, so everyone was clutching tight to their umbrellas. This did not hinder the immense number of morning wais. Teachers either opted to do a one handed wai, or they struggled to balance an umbrella between their respectful gesturing hands.  

The Driving Wai: 

A lot of the teachers drive to school in the morning and park on campus. In order to get to the parking lot, they must drive through the gate where all the students walk and where two teachers stand for gate duty. Despite the need to navigate through the narrow gate area & avoid hitting students, the driving teachers always manage to take their hansd off of the steering wheel and wai. Dangerous? Yes. Culturally unavoidable? Also yes. 

The My-Hands-Are-Full-Of-Heavy-Things Wai: 

Even when teachers’ hands are full of boxes, papers, storage containers, small children, what have you, they still feel the need to wai...sort of. This is the laziest of all wais. It’s more of a head bob and shoulder shrug to mimic the other body elements needed to wai, minus the actual hand motion. 

The Group Wai: 

This particular wai happens to me a lot. I often climb the multiple levels of stairs in order to get to my 4/5, 4/6, and 4/7 classes six times a week. On each level, there are teachers’ desks. And, of course, I must wai each and every one of the teachers occupying the desks. On the very top level, there are several teachers who are constantly eating a large spread of food. This naturally attracts more teachers to the area. When I approach that level, I adjust my papers & pens and get my hands in optimal wai-ing position for a big group wai. This consists of me wai-ing and holding it for the duration of my walk through the eating area. As I hold one constant wai, the women each wai me and utter a low moaning sound until I pass. It’s a good time for everyone. 

Sometimes when I approach campus in the morning and think of all the wai-ing that’s about to occur it seems scarily daunting. Then I think I’ll only be a teacher in Thailand once in my life, so wai not? 

Happy Walentine’s Day!

The morning of Thursday, February 14th my fellow teachers and I rolled up to school ready to start the day like any other. We had a little extra love in our hearts because, after all, it was Valentine’s Day (or as our students mispronounce it, Walentine’s Day). We hadn’t, however, prepared anything special for the morning assembly. But that didn’t stop the Thai teachers from forcing us to all stand in front of the entire school while dancing to some contemporary English love song. Twice. 

Then they told us to call students up on stage and ask them questions about the history of Valentine’s Day, which had just been read to them...in Thai. Sadly none of us knew the history of V-Day (Although one of my classes asked me and I made up something I vaguely remembered about Saint Valentine helping people in jail write love letters. Teacher fail.) Instead we asked them the most general questions even semi-related to Valentine’s Day in the simplest English possible. It was torture attempting to get the first student to volunteer to come answer an English question in front of all their peers, but after the first student answered the question correctly, didn’t die, and received candy, then the rest of their little hands shot up eagerly. 

We struggled to come up with questions easy enough for all these kids because there’s this secret agreement going on between the students and ourselves. The agreement: the foreign English teachers will pretend to teach English if the students will pretend to learn it, but really we’re all just playing games all the time. The other teachers and administrators don’t know this secret and have much more faith in the students and our teaching abilities than is accurate. So our impromptu, semi-relevant, simple English questions were as follows: 

• What holiday is today? (the word holiday tripped that student up) 
• On Valentine’s Day, what is your favorite color? (that question was used multiple times and one time a student said purple, we were going for red & pink, but whatever, candy for everyone)
• Valentine’s Day is a day about...? (I asked this question to my 4th grader whom I’d taught that to the day prior, but as he looked at me confused I held up my hands in a heart shape to which he yelled “HEARTS!” I was hoping for love but close enough) 

It was a morning of ridiculousness, and pictures of course, but the rest of the day only got better. We all received Valentine’s and roses throughout the day as well as dozens of stickers smacked onto our chests by tiny children. All in all it was an a-okay V-Day.

Unexpected Education: Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge Experience

Hey everyone. Something happened in our world’s recent history that you most likely don’t know about. I certainly didn’t. Many of my travel companions didn’t. My parents who were alive when this history was a present weren’t entirely aware of it. This looming it I’m speaking of is the Cambodian Khmer Rouge genocide of the late 1970’s. 

Before traveling to Cambodia last week, my friends and I cracked open our Lonely Planets and checked out which cities were big-ticket items in our neighbor to the east. Phnom Penh, the capital city, was of course listed. It claimed to be full of historical museums documenting the Khmer Rouge events that occurred in the city thirty-some years ago. I glanced over the descriptions of the events and skipped right to where to eat & sleep in the city. Some of my travel buddies read up on the Khmer Rouge and even watched a documentary the night before leaving. I opened the wikipedia page but quickly clicked over to Facebook instead, and I passed on watching the documentary as well. Describing me as ignorant doesn’t even scratch the surface. 

Once we got to Phnom Penh, we booked a day of Khmer Rouge historical activities. We went to Tuol Sleng (a former high school turned secret torture center) and The Killing Fields (the actual fields on the outskirts of town where millions were taken to be brutally murdered). Confused? So was I. Let me back up a bit. 

The Khmer Rouge was a Communist Party formed by men in the late 60’s who idolized and lusted after the idea of a completely self-sufficient agricultural society. The KR leaders wanted to purify the existing society and saw anyone who wasn’t on board as a threat to their idyllic future. These alleged “threats” included educated people, industrious people, anyone who associated with foreigners, and, most tragically, any of the listed people’s children. The reasoning behind eliminating these people and their families, children included, was that if anyone was left after the mass extermination they could grow to seek revenge upon the Khmer Rouge. KR leader Pol Pot felt it was better to sacrifice an innocent by accident than to spare an enemy by accident. 

Between the years of 1975-1979, The Khmer Rouge took people from their home villages, interrogated them in places such as Tuol Sleng, aka S-21, accused them of crimes of treason they’d never committed, tortured them until they admitted such fabrications, and then sent them to The Killing Fields where they fell victim to mass execution. The KR felt bullets were too valuable to be wasted on these mass murders, so instead they ordered their soldiers to kill the victims with anything possible--gardening utensils, sheer beatings, palm branches, anything available in the fields. One of the most horrific additions to the death toll was babies. There is a tree among The Killing Fields where Khmer Rouge soldiers would take babies by their feet and smash their heads into the trunk of the tree. 

Gut-wrenching brutalities such as this occurred for four years in near secrecy. At the time, the Khmer Rouge was recognized by the United Nations as a legitimate political party of Cambodia with the simple purpose of re-educating their nation; the UN even gave the KR money to support its efforts. Finally on January 7, 1979 the Vietnamese army ousted the Khmer Rouge and put an end to all genocidal activity. Many KR leaders fled the country in attempts to avoid punishment--and they nearly succeeded. Pol Pot, a main KR leader, died at age 86 on house arrest after living to see his grandchildren born and raised. Another former KR leader with the alias of Duch has since admitted to his hate crimes, but admits to them in such a way as if he were Frankenstein--creating a monster that grew beyond his control. Duch and other former Khmer Rouge leaders are still on trial for their crimes. 

One of the hardest things to hear during an audio tour amongst The Killing Fields was a concluding statement about the reasoning for turning the fields into a museum. The voice through the speakers described the urgency for education on the Khmer Rouge genocide, the need to spread this museum to future generations, because such atrocities have happened and keep happening in our world. He described how no one ever thinks it will happen to their country. Then he listed the previous genocides of humanity’s history: Germany with the Nazis, Russia with Stalin, and...The United States. I had forgotten how our country started. I’d never thought of the discovery of the Americas as a genocide upon the Native Americans. Apparently you never think genocide will happen to your country and occasionally you (or just me) fail to acknowledge that it has already happened. 

Bracelets and a plumeria offered at a mass grave in The Killing Fields

Cambodia was an eye-opening experience for me. In the middle of the audio tour in The Killing Fields, the headset tour guide spoke the word ‘ignorance’ in his accented way which emphasized it as ‘ignore-ance’. Despite ‘ignore’ being the root of the word, and me having a degree in English & Linguistics, I’d never thought of it that way. But that’s exactly what’d I’d been doing with the Khmer Rouge--ignoring it. So please, don’t follow in my footsteps of ignorance, but rather take it upon yourself to read the wikipedia pages you open, listen to your history educators, and go beyond the classroom. You’d be surprised what secrets the world’s been keeping. 

More info: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge

http://www.cambodiatribunal.org

http://www.yale.edu/cgp/

The End. (..of my 366 album)

A year ago I started a little project. I set out to take one picture a day for an entire year. The year happened to be a leap year, so my final product would result in 366 photos. On January 30th, 2012 I began this endeavor with a picture of a street near my home in Independence, Oregon where I was living with three friends and worked part time in a daycare. On January 29th, 2013 I took my 366th photo at Angkor Wat in Siem Reap, Cambodia while on vacation from teaching English in Thailand. 

It’s crazy to see how far you can go in just one year. A year ago I had no idea that the following year I would be in Cambodia. It wasn’t even on my radar. In fact, if someone had told me I’d end this photo journey in Cambodia and I was in Southeast Asia because I was a teacher there, I would have outwardly laughed at them and been sure they’d confused me for a more adventurous individual. But that’s where I’ve ended up. 

And in between I documented so many other unpredictable moments: Chelsea and I road-tripped to Idaho to see Kelly Clarkson in concert (shortly before I followed Chels to the other side of the world), I traveled to Scotland & Ireland with my dear friend Wendy, I contracted the stomach flu from my daycare children multiple times, I witnessed three beautiful weddings, I captured the beginning moments of blossoming love, I celebrated life of those passed on as well as life brought into this world, I saw Mumford & Sons in one of the best concerts of my life, I completed two organized races (despite considering myself to not be a runner), I drank & documented more cups of coffee than can be healthy for any one person, I said goodbye to old friends before greeting new ones, I moved home before moving across the globe, I became a teacher...in Thailand, I have traveled more than I ever thought I would, and I’ve experience more unique moments than I could have ever dreamt. And I must admit, I’m not sure I would’ve remembered or cherished all these moments had it not been for this photo a day project. 

With that said, I encourage everyone to pick up a camera (or your iphone-- shout out to the 4s camera as 75% of my photos were taken on it) and discipline yourself into taking one photo a day for an entire year. You’d be surprised at how much life can occur in 365  (or 366) days.  

P.s. while this is the end of my picture journey, it is not the end of this blog. I shall attempt to keep posting about my real Thai world, so no need to panic you faithful few readers. 

Children’s Day

Saturday, January 12th was Children’s Day in Thailand. So, naturally, Watmethang celebrated it big time on Friday. Initially we were told we would have to teach during the morning and then our afternoon classes would be canceled for Children’s Day activities. It slowly became apparent that none of our normal Friday routines would be occurring. 

The day started off with the usual morning assembly, which then led into the unusual visiting of a slew of monks. About ten monks came to our campus, draped in their fabrics of orange, in order to bless the children with chants and in return receive offerings from the kids. So instead of teaching my first period, I watched all the students line up and unload bags of snacks and gifts into the bowls of monks. This ritual went well into second period. It was adorable, to say the least, and quite the time killer. 

By the time my next period rolled around, many of the English teachers had already returned to the office with bags of goodies from the students and stories of parties occurring in their classes. To be on the safe side, I planned a lesson anyway and went with supplies in hand to my 4/1 classroom. When I got to the room, the desks were pushed aside, the kids were having a feast on the floor, and everyone was singing along to Thai music videos playing on the oversized TV in their class. The students invited me to sit, gave me a plate of food & a drink, and attempted to get me to sing along. A Thai teacher then came in and rigged a microphone to the setup, turning the room into a Karaoke frenzy. The kids took turns singing their favorite songs in the mic as students from other classes peered in the doorway making for quite the audience. The Thai teacher who brought the microphone--normally a stern woman with a knack for rule following--was singing each song louder than the kids, and when no one would take the mic readily she jumped on it. Though she doesn’t know much English, she was insistent on getting me to sing. She kept telling students in Thai to tell me in English to sing just one song. Sadly, I don’t speak or read Thai nor do I know any of the tunes to the songs. She didn’t believe me and continued to offer the mic anyway. 

After partying it up all morning, the kids went outside for an afternoon of carnival activities. There were booths of darts (with actual darts, too dangerous in America, but here it’s ok for elementary schoolers), balloon popping, eating races (This one was gross. Kids had to stuff their mouths with powdery sweets, run to a dish, splash water on their faces, eat more food, and then run again. I thought everyone was going to barf.), ring toss, “Thai golf” (students had to tie an elongated gourd of some sort to their waists and then thrust at a ball until they got it across a line, it was a really phallic game that only boys wanted to play), and of course a singing competition. At the singing competition, it was mostly students singing snip-its of songs in Thai and teachers dancing off to the side. But, at the very end of the day, an itsy bitsy boy shyly took the stage, whispered something to the temporary DJ, held the mic with two tinny hands, and started belting out the 70’s hit “I Will Survive.” And he was GOOD. Granted, he probably didn’t know what he was saying. Regardless, the crowd went wild and all of us English teachers couldn’t help but to sing along. After that success, more students emerged with their best versions of English songs. One humorously jolly 5th grade boy even busted out “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic. Turns out Thai ladyboys make for excellent Celine Dion impersonators. 

Once the day was done, the kids came away with armfuls of carnival prizes and us teachers came away with bags of Thai snacks. The extravaganza may have been more exhausting than a normal day of teaching, but it was also 100x more entertaining. 

Christmas at Watmethang Karawas

Christmas is usually such a beautiful, blissful time of year. The weather turns to a state  requiring boots & scarves, the lights comes out on houses at night, people grow friendlier each day as the certain vacation time approaches, and general merriment fills the air. 

Turns out that state of bliss is a cultural thing, not a global thing. 

In Thailand, as Christmas approached, the weather stayed hot enough for me to sweat through all my clothing, there aren’t really houses to put lights on, and the teachers surrounding me grew more and more anxious as the days until Christmas dwindled. You see, as teachers from English speaking countries, we were required to take on the task of presenting Christmas to a school of Buddhist Thai children. 

Initially, we were told we would not have to teach classes on December 25th. That moment of relief was quickly replaced by stress as the next sentence was, “Instead you will put on a day of Christmas activities for all the grades.” In true Thai fashion, we all put off planning the day until the week before. The result: a Christmas carnival of chaos. 

Before the chaos, on Christmas Eve, I received a very special present; my sister Nicki came to Phrae! Nicki was visiting Thailand for 10 days, she would spend three days in my town, and then we’d hop on a bus & a ferry to vacation on the glorious island of Koh Samet for five days. But she really had to earn that vacation before enjoying it. Since I’m such a good sister, and because she’d taught in Thailand before, I roped Nicki into helping out with the Christmas Carnival on Christmas Day. 

The day started with the usual morning assembly, but with the addition of all of us English teachers singing Christmas carols in front of the whole school with the special appearance of Santa Claus (one of the older American English teachers had a Santa suit made for the occasion). Then we split off into our stations at the Christmas Carnival. Nicki & I manned the Santa Sack Races. I came up with the idea for the station...and I’m not too proud to admit it was a total flop. The idea was to have five lines of 24 students, each with a sack (pillow case), and then the student at the front of the line would hop in the bag, run to grab a present (wrapped empty box) about 5 yards away, put the present in their sack, and hop back to pass off the sack to the next student in line. Turns out this is a very dangerous game. Students were tripping left and right, smacking their bodies on the ground, and fighting to continue to complete the race. Nicki pointed out that the students didn’t have the good sense to put their hands out when they fell, rather they held tight to the sacks and let their bellies and knees take the brunt of the fall. It was horrible and hilarious all in one. After a morning of 1st-3rd graders racing their hearts out, the pillow case sacks and empty presents were absolutely destroyed. During lunch, all the English teachers regathered, haggard and beaten, to discuss the morning. Most of us decided we needed a revamp. So for the afternoon of 4th-6th graders, Nicki & I hosted a Christmas carol singing and dancing station, which really just meant we spent the allotted 20 minutes per group splitting the kids up into circles of 10 and then individually explaining the rules. This was also a bust, but it was a great station in terms of crowd control, which counts as a success in my book. 

At the end of Christmas Day at Watmethang Karawas, we were all exhausted. Attempting to teach a Christian holiday to 1555 Buddhist students in a language that is not their own was more than difficult. But somehow, through a Christmas miracle, we managed to survive the day and truly earned our five day beach getaway.

Oh! I completely forgot the best part of this chaotic day. After nearly 6 hours of Christmas Carnival-ing, everyone was tuckered out and even the kids were losing steam. The solution: a school-wide dance party to Gangnam Style. Literally everyone was dancing--students, Thai teachers, English teachers, Nicki--and loving it. It was a redeeming moment in an overall chaotic day. 

Shocked.

The craziest thing just happened in my class. Actually, I’m still not really sure what happened. 

I went to teach my first class of the morning and the kids were as naughty as ever. They were being loud, disobedient, and potentially pretending to chloroform one another. I attempted to shout through my lesson on “Physical Appearance” and teach to the small handful who were listening. After setting up an activity for them to complete in their workbooks, I sat at a desk at the back of the room checking the work of the students who were finished. 

All of a sudden, a giant BOOM came from outside the open front window. Being on the third floor and in a class of very naughty students, my first thought was, “Oh God, they finally did it, they finally pushed a kid out the window.” I looked to the faces of my students for an explanation, but all they gave me in return were scared faces, confusion, and oddly a little bit of excitement. Then some of them started saying, “firecracker” and, worse, “bomb.” I looked at the window and there were traces of smoke and an unplaceable scent seeping into the room. I went into sheer panic mode, but had no plan of attack. Then my co-teacher came running in and yelled at the students to get out of the class. The hallway was filled with students and chaotic teachers. One small, older female teacher started motioning for students to leave the building. Having no idea what  hypotheses for the chaos were being spoken in Thai around me, I followed suit and descended. I ran into a fellow American English teacher on the first floor and, appearing less frightened than myself, I asked her if she’d heard the noise. She informed me it was an electrical circuit that had blown. Calming down, I thought about it and realized all the lights went out in my class after the loud noise. 

I slowly came out of my state of panic, looked around, and gathered in the parking lot with the other teachers and students. Some of my students came up to me with their notebooks in hand and asked me to check their work. Brown nosers. I found my friend Leah and we swapped terror stories. Turns out she was on the second floor right next to the electrical tower that had made the loudest of noises. Before she could even finish her whole story, the teachers started calling their students back to class. Leah’s Thai co-teacher whispered, “dammit,” because apparently the mini explosion was in the middle of her naughtiest class and she just wanted to go to lunch. Me too, lady.  

I hesitantly returned to class thinking there was no way my students would 1. all be there, and 2. be willing to listen. Much to my surprise, they were sitting in their seats, notebooks out, and working diligently on the activity. I guess all they needed was a midday freak out and a good sprint up and down the stairs in order to focus. Despite their random change of behavior, I ended class early because I was too frazzled to get back on track...and my lesson really sucked today. 

School continued on normally. No one went home. No firetrucks came rushing to campus. Nothing happened. We went about our days without any detail on the situation, and we also went on without lights and air conditioning. So bizarre. 

Competitions

Last week Chelsea, Mel, and I got to leave school for two days and go to Chiang Mai for part of English Competition Week. ECW isn’t really an official thing, it just so happened that a bunch of competitions for our students took place last week. These competitions are for speeches, spelling, math, science, dance, and potentially more. Mel and Chelsea have been coaching a 6th grade boy and a 3rd grade girl in speech competitions since about week two of their time in Thailand. I just started coaching a 6th grade girl in spelling about three weeks ago. For no necessary reason, our “coaching” skills allowed the three of us to accompany our students, other students, a handful of Thai teachers, and the school’s sub-director to the competitions in Chiang Mai. 

So Tuesday morning the three of us (plus Chelsea’s visiting friend Elise) packed our bags, did some last minute coaching, got to wear jeans to school, prayed for about 30 minutes to different Buddha statues around school, and then hopped in a van to drive four hours to the competitions. The actual competitions didn’t start until Wednesday morning, but we arrived the day before and got to spend the night. 

Side note: I like to play this game called “How Would This Go Down in America?” where I think about crazy Thai situations that are completely normal here and then picture them occurring in an American school. Most of the time, if the situations happened in America the result would be jail time. 

The spending the night situation was so different from what it would have been had this been in America. In America, if you took elementary-aged students on an overnight outing, I would imagine the children would be accompanied by their parents or there would be one adult of the appropriate gender in every hotel room. In Thailand, during this overnight excursion, there were no parents, but there was at least one adult in every room, however, gender did not matter. First of all, our accommodations were not really a hotel. It was a room of four beds and two shoilets (shower + toilet = shoilet). In our room, one of the toilets was completely backed up with whatever had happened in it from the guest before, so we were down to one shoilet. There were dead bugs on the walls and potentially in our beds too. None of us ended up using the “comforters” at the foot of the bed because some were stained and most looked filthy. I slept with a towel for a blanket that night. And not to be super first world-y, but there also wasn’t air conditioning. Now this is not something I would complain about in the states, but when the low of the day is about 82 with ridiculous levels of humidity, no AC is a game changer for comfort. Anywho, back to the student/teacher ratios. In the room next to us was our 3rd grade speech girl, two middle-aged female Thai teachers, and the 6th grade boy. When our 6th grade boy told us his room accommodations, he said it with pure nonchalance in his tone and didn’t even look up from his game of Angry Birds. Apparently mixed genders of students and teachers in a room is a-okay in Thailand. Just one example of when “How would this go down in America?” ends in jail time. 

The next day at the competitions, I split off from the other English teachers and went with my spelling girl, Um (I didn’t have a random mid-sentence language lapse, her name is really Um), and the Thai teacher Nongnoot. My purpose during competition day was to quiz Um beforehand on spelling words she often misspells. This lasted about five minutes and then it was competition time. The competition took place in a room of 44 students from all over Northern Thailand. The room was just a regular classroom with an entire front wall of windows. Plastered against the window wall was about three dozen parents and teachers snapping pics and recording videos of the room of spelling students (quality video that they’ll totally care about in the future). I stood back and looked at my poor little Um, the shiest girl I’ve ever met, who looked sick to her stomach sitting in the middle of the classroom. Round one consisted of a British woman reading 20 spelling words aloud and the students writing them down. They provide a sample sentence, but in all honesty it probably didn’t help whatsoever since these kids are memorizing machines, not English proficient pros. After each round, Um would emerge for a brief break and Nongnoot would immediately go into hounding her with more words to practice spelling out loud. Noot would turn to me and tell me to say words to Um from the spelling lists. It was ridiculous. Um was already nervous and knew as much as she was going to know at that point. I felt so bad for her. In the end, Um made it through seven rounds of spelling out loud and beat out a good portion of the competition by coming in 7th place overall. I was proud, but no one seemed to care because everyone was too distracted by our 6th grade speech boy who got 2nd place and will now be moving onto the nationwide competition in Bangkok (woot!). 

Overall it was a really weird experience and very unnecessary for us whiteys to be there, but I think the school gained some cool point for our presence and we all had a really good time.

Embracing Embarrassment

I experience moments of embarrassment pretty much every day in Thailand. Sometimes these moments are voluntary, like when I opt to mimic Gangnam Style in front of my classes, but other moments are so very not voluntary that I can only laugh to keep from bursting into red-faced flames. Monday was by far my most embarrassing moment to date in this country...or perhaps anywhere in the world. 

During the morning assembly each day, an English teacher is required to stand on stage in front of all the students and faculty and sing a song or do something English-y. I normally miss the morning assembly because I help a 6th grade girl practice for a spelling competition instead, so I’m fairly out of the loop when it comes to the routine of the morning assembly. On Monday, it was my turn to be the English representative and since it was the start of a new week I figured I would introduce a new song. I chose “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” because they know the song and motions in Thai and because I’ve already taught it to two of my classes. I figured it would be kind of awkward, but manageable. It was manageable, but more than kind of awkward. 

As I stood facing the flag, listening to the children sing the King’s Song, one of the head English teachers came over and told me it was time to go on stage. My friend and fellow teacher, Mimi, offered to come up with me and sing the song as well. This turned out to be more than necessary because as I reached the stage I was handed a microphone, and everyone knows you need two hands to perform “The Itsy Bitsy Spider.” Without much thought and with a small intro statement, I just started singing Itsy Bitsy Spider into a microphone in front of thousands of kids and dozens of teachers. I honestly couldn’t tell you what the kids or anyone in the audience was doing. I simply sang like it wasn’t weird and like I didn’t have a fear of public speaking, let alone public singing. Then the head English teacher guy whispered in my ear to hold the microphone closer to my mouth. That’s when things went downhill (not that it was going well before this moment). As I went in for round two of the song, Teacher Mimi was doing the motions next to me and accidentally bumped the microphone. I couldn’t help but to chuckle considering I’d nearly taken an elbow to the face, which resulted in me singing the lyric “Down ca-a-a-ame the rain” in a jolted, man-ish laughing voice. I’m not sure if other people laughed, or if the kids continued attempting to sing along, but I am sure an unnatural shade of red overcame my face. I pushed through one more round of the song, said good job to the students, and bowed out before I could even ask anyone how bad it was. 

Despite my public butchering of the beloved childhood song, I have continued to get requests from all of my students to practice it with them during class. Turns out nobody cares how poorly you perform things around here, as long as it’s in English it automatically gets 1800 cool points. 

Universal Camping

This past weekend marked the end of my third week of teaching, so of course all of us English teachers decided to get out of town. On Friday at about 3:00pm, the Sub Director of the school waltzed into the English department office and asked if any of us could stick around to teach on Saturday. Psh, yeah right. Though we were not traveling together, literally every English teacher besides just one was planning to leave town within the next two hours. That one guy got screwed. The rest of us hopped on buses and split town. 

My old friend Chelsea and my new friends Mel, Leah, Mimi and I decided to go camping for the weekend. We took a four hour bus ride to Chiang Mai, slept in a less than comfortable but more than affordable hostel Friday night, and met up with four of Mel & Chelsea’s English teacher friends who teach in Chiang Mai and Lampang on Saturday morning. The group of nine of us headed to the top of the tallest mountain in Thailand to get our foreign camping on. After a few glitches in transportation and some hours of fumbling to find accommodations, we finally found a campground to stay at for the night. Three more girls joined our group (friends of friends of friends), making our grand total for the trip twelve farangs. We rented four tents, twelve sleeping bags, twelve sleeping mats, and got ready for a good time. 

At first glance, camping seems to be pretty universal. The moment we found the campground, I felt like I was at home. Not San Ramon home, but camping home. There was a wooden welcome station, tall pine tree-type trees, a road that wound throughout the campground, less than luxurious bathrooms, and tents everywhere. That was the first difference between American camping and Thai camping, the tents being everywhere. There aren’t really campsites, but rather it’s a fairly flat area spotted with trees and you can put your tents anywhere you want. We made kind of a half-circle village out of our four tents and then set up our mats and a few towels outside to mimic a campfire pit. We couldn’t have an actual campfire because we didn’t have anything to separate the flames from the ground, but this wasn’t a problem because the campground had floodlights on all night. It was like nature illuminated with street lamps. Around our makeshift campfire, we played games and swapped stories and slipped into our own little camping world. Another difference from the kind of camping I’m used to was that this place had a convenience store/shack. This place was a saving grace. We didn’t think ahead enough to plan out food, so we all ate snacks from the shack for dinner Saturday night. You could also rent comforters from the store, which seemed random, but turned out very necessary because it actually got cold up there. I never thought I would get chilly in Thailand, but sure enough I had to pull my sleeping bag up over my head that night to fend off my shivering. That store also had the best morning surprise to complete any camper’s experience: hot chocolate. It was one of the most satisfying cups of cocoa I’ve ever indulged in. At random points during the weekend, we would look at each other and acknowledge, in a bit of awe, that we were actually camping in Thailand. 

After a not so great night of sleep, but an overall fantastic experience, we packed up and returned our rented items. Then another adventure began: getting off the mountain. If you think about it, it’s really not common to go camping without a personal form of transportation. In the states, you’d never take a taxi out to a campground. But in Thailand, we had no other choice. We had to take two songtaos up the mountain, and that was uncommon. So on the way back down we had a wee bit of trouble finding rides. We had such trouble that we resorted to hitch-hiking. It started out as a joke, but once a pickup truck filled with a Thai family on a day trip pulled over, they became our real solution. The family was so kind and more than willing to help us out, so we packed nine of us (the other three girls had their own motorbikes and had already left our gang) into their truck bed. Their only request: don’t crush their freshly bought mountain vegetables. All nine of us and our backpacks were very careful to squish into each other without squashing the veggies. Several minutes into the crammed ride, the family pulled off down a side road in order to do some sight-seeing. We weren’t in a huge rush and they invited us to join with encouragements of allowing them “just few minutes” to look around. We wound up in a beautiful garden where a wedding photo shoot was taking place. It was gorgeous and very random. Afterward the family packed back into the cab and us farangs into the bed of the truck. Once we reached a bus stop, we ended our time with the friendliest family ever by taking group photos, as per their request. It was an unpredictable way to end an unpredictable weekend, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way...well, maybe I could’ve done without the permanently wind-blown hair after the truck ride down the mountain. 

On Display

I no longer harbor any childhood dreams to become famous within the public eye. Since coming to Thailand, I’ve had my picture taken more times by strangers than a monkey in a zoo. It’s like the freaking paparazzi over here. 

A few examples...

The old town night market: 

There are street markets going on all the time around here. There are at least two nightly markets and then every weekend/week there seems to be an excuse to have several more. Whether it’s the first of the month market, or the vegetarian festival, or a full moon celebration, there’s always something to explore. It’s usually a really good time, unless the market is located in Old Town Phrae. The area around our school seems to be used to white people walking around. Students all yell out, “Teacha! Teacha!” and request high-fives from us. But the farther we get from school, the more looks we get, especially at the market in Old Town Phrae. The other day we were strolling down the street--all eight of us farangs--and a woman stopped two of the girls from our group and asked them to take a picture next to a dried fruit stand. Then everywhere we walked on the street she would stop us and make us take pictures with either her or the merchandise stand/food cart. Then once she started doing it other people appeared with their cameras and got in on it. It must have been a great time for them. For us, it was mostly just hilariously weird. 

The Assembly: 

This past Sunday we had to work. Lame. It was an open house type deal, but it was nothing like open houses in the United States. Instead, the director sat at a table on a stage in front of all the parents and literally read from a packet--a packet which all the parents had in front of them--for more than an hour. This assembly could have easily been replaced by a newsletter. All the English teachers were placed off to the side in a group in front of the assembly. Randomly I would hear the director say “America” or “farangs,” but for the most part it was over an hour of Thai whipping past our ears (actually, it was directly in our ears because they placed the speaker next to us). As we sat there, two teachers and multiple school photographers snapped photos of our presence. Then, at the end, they made us English teachers stand up, introduce ourselves, say where we’re from, and which grade/subject we teach. Then we had to go sit in our classrooms and wait for parents to come talk to us, which they never did. The director continued talking, and once he finally stopped all the parents wanted to leave because that meeting was most likely boring even if you understood it. As far as I could tell, we were there strictly to be seen by the parents and for documentation for future pointless assemblies. 

Gate Duty: 

Every day a Thai teacher and an English teacher stand at the front of the school and greet the arriving students. Last Friday it was my turn to be the English teacher up front. It was 45 minutes of me saying “good morning!” in a sugary sweet tone with a smile pasted on my face to the point of pain. The kids are just too stinkin’ cute to not smile and wave at. Also, if there’s any Up fans out there, my school is filled with little Russells. The boys either wear khaki shorts with their button-up uniform shirts or little tan boyscout outfits. Adorable. Sometimes I actually lol at their uncanny resemblance to the Pixar character. 

Along with greeting the kids just outside of the school, all of us farangs are like celebrities within the gate. We are regularly high-fiving and shaking hands with kids of all grade levels. In the mornings, it takes us only about five minutes to walk to school. After school, it takes nearly three times as long because we’re constantly being stopped by kids who want to utter their few standard English phrases, and as English teachers there’s no way we’re going to stifle this desire just to get home a little faster. 

All in all I feel like a celebrity here...sort of. No one knows my name or anything about me, but they sure do like to take pictures and shake my hand. 

Halloween in Thai Town

Halloween tends to be one of my least favorite holidays. I figured one of the benefits of teaching English in Thailand for these few months was that I could skip all the hoopla of the holiday this time around. I was wrong. In fact, this was quite possibly my most active, engaged, and public Halloween to date. 

Acknowledgement of the day began the night of October 30th. One of the American English teachers suggested all the English teachers dress up and put on a skit in front of the school on Halloween. I thought, “Ok, well, I’m not doing that.” It’s not because I’m a party pooper, I just thought it would be hard to achieve and awkward if successful...alright I’m kind of a party pooper. But, because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, I became oddly involved in the developing of the skit and the planning of the costumes. At about 8:30pm the night before we’re supposed to “perform” two other girls and myself were shopping at Big C (like Walmart for Thailand) and found absolutely nothing in the way of face paint or costumes, which, of course, makes sense since Thailand doesn’t celebrate Halloween. As we were exiting the store with our heads hung low, all of a sudden a little boy comes strutting through the automatic doors in a full on Spiderman costume. We frantically asked him and his mom where they got the costume. Luckily the woman spoke a little English and was able to tell us this one bit of Halloween gold was from Tesco Lotus (the other Thai Walmart, maybe Thai Target). It was getting late and we were on our bicycles, so we decided not to explore that option. Instead we brainstormed and decided to print out masks from the internet, because, let’s face it, the internet solves most of the world’s problems. 

The next morning I arrived to the school at 7:05am in order to print out a variety of scary masks. The rest of the teachers trickled in to print, color, cut, and finally tape the masks to our faces. The American English teacher in charge of the our Halloween festivities came prepared with themed tattoos, those were a big hit all day. An older English teacher from America came in with an entire devil/vampire/scary dude costume, face paint and all. Apparently his Thai wife and her family had some supplies stockpiled. Once we all got masked-up, we exited the teacher room walking like zombies down to the morning assembly. We waited for our cue and ran out into the crowd of 1st-6th graders growling and screaming “boo!” at them. They were confused, terrified, and above all else delighted. Then we hopped up on the stage for our Halloween skit. Two of the teachers held bags of candy and pretended to be home owners awaiting trick-or-treaters. Chelsea and I got to be the trick-or-treaters. This was awesome. Chelsea and I joked how we thought our days of trick-or-treating together were long over, and yet there we were mimicking the American tradition for 5,000+ Thai children. After Chelsea and I received our candy and the skit ended, one of the teachers threw the rest of the candy into the crowd of kids. I’ve never seen such utter chaos. The students, who normally sit with perfect posture in the straightest of rows, broke into sprints & threw elbows to get some of the coveted candy. Afterward we all agreed that was a bit dangerous, but also really entertaining. 

The rest of the day I revolved my lesson plans around Halloween. I had my students play hangman to guess Halloween vocabulary like ghost, zombie (they super love zombies), vampire, witch, pumpkin, and Jack-o-lantern. Then I had them trick or treat to me at the front of the room. The would knock on a desk, I would make scary creaking door opening sounds, they would say “trick-or-treat, trick-or-treat, give me something good to eat,” I would ask them which of the vocabulary they were dressed as, they’d answer & sometimes act out zombie or vampire, and then I’d give them candy. They had fun with it and I loved that it was a super easy lesson. Also, Halloween lasted about three days for me because I had to be fair to all my classes and teach them each about the holiday, but I don’t see all my levels of classes on the same day, hence my three-day celebration. 

Overall it was a great Halloween and my party pooper attitude was turned completely around by the end of the experience. This is a contender for my best Halloween yet and it definitely takes the bag of candy for most unique. 

Oh, and Thai fun fact, everyone at the school and around town calls it “Halloween Day.” So I’d go to get my iced coffee in the afternoon and they’d wish me a “Happy Halloween Day!” It shall forever be known as that in my mind. 

First Days

It’s the end of my first weekend here in Phrae, and as far as first impressions go, this place couldn’t get much better. My housing accommodations are fantastic, the town is like a Thai version of Monmouth, and the people I encounter are some of the kindest I’ve met. General living here is wonderful. 

Teaching, on the other hand, could do with some improvement. I’ve been teaching the fourth grade for three days so far and it has been the definition of chaos. Allow me to indulge in a ranty list for further explanation: 

• There’s an assembly every morning at my school, during which on our first day us teachers were required to make an impromptu introduction speech to the student body of 5,555 students
• The 10 English teachers (eight from America) were given schedules, all of which were slightly wrong in one way or another
• I skipped my very first class to go on a tour of the school (and by tour of the school I mean one of the English teachers from last term was told very casually asked to explain all of the building to us newbies) 
• Once I made it to my first class, there was no Thai teacher there and I was greeted by a class of screaming kids who only spoke English when they were attempting to get me to play a game with them
• On day two, the foreign language director (a 50-something shorter slender Thai woman with short black hair, glasses, and a stern face) came up to my desk, showed me a piece of paper with another new English teacher’s picture on it and said very matter of factly, “She will make 28,000 baht each month, you will make 25,000 baht.” I came to find out this was because she’s teacher certified, whereas I am not. Although another new teacher from America is going to be teaching science and since he has a degree in science they will give him 28,000, but my degree in English and my teaching of English does not result in such a salary. Confusing. 
• On day two I also was given the task of teaching music in English. So now I’m an English and music teacher. No one told me what this is supposed to mean, so, when left to my own devices, I taught the kids The Itsy Bitsy Spider. 

This post is random and probably doesn’t make sense because I’ve given about zero background and lacked much detail, but I’m not going to fix it since the randomness of it serves as a perfect metaphor for my teaching in Thailand experience thus far. More stories--and hopefully more clarity--to come soon.

Thai Times

I’ve been in Thailand for three days and I’ve already experienced three once-in-a-life-time events. I also feel like I’ve been here a lifetime. 

Event number one: Tiger Kingdom 

Chelsea, her mom Jennie, her aunt Sarah, and I went to the Tiger Kingdom in Chiang Mai. It’s like a zoo, but only for tigers: big tigers, medium tigers, small tigers, smallest tigers, sick tigers, feisty tigers, sleepy tigers...and a couple random parrots. The draw of the Tiger Kingdom is that you actually get to hang out with these grand cats. You go into their cages, lie down with them, rub their bellies, feed the babies, and take a million pictures as urged by the tiger attendants. We began our tiger experience with the biggest ones, which were about two years old. It was initially terrifying. This big Thai man told us to sit next to these cats nearly twice our size, and if we weren’t comfortable looking enough he would tell us to lie down with them. It was an experience so opposite from the United States. It was virtually rule free, which goes against every obediently raised bone in my body. There were a few guidelines, like don’t approach the tiger from its head, don’t use a flash on your camera, and don’t make loud or fast motions. But for the most part you just do what you want around these tigers--including wrapping the tiger’s tail around your neck. The best part of the day was lying with the itty-bitty baby tigers. They are like playful kittens, but also sleepy kittens. (Side note: this is why you can hang out with the tigers. They are pretty much constantly sleepy. They aren’t doped or anything, they’re just sleepy. These ones were also raised by humans, so they see people as one of their own). The attendant in the smallest tiger playpen was a jokester. He kept himself entertained throughout the day by messing with us farangs (white people). He started by telling us the tiger we were playing with was a liger (any Napoleon Dynamite fans out there?). Then when Sarah was petting it he said, “It’s a boy, you see--one furry ball. You can touch one furry ball. So smooth, touch furry ball!” As Sarah gently fondled the baby tiger the attendant man laughed and laughed. Despite being made out to be a fool, I can appreciate someone enjoying their job. 

Event number two: Flight of the Gibbons 

Gibbons are monkeys in the jungle and flying like them means zip-lining amongst their trees. The four of us partook in a four hour zip-lining excursion with our Thai instructors Home & Boat. Boat didn’t speak English very well, but Home was pretty good, so good that he was able to joke with us nearly the entire time. Home kicked off the day by including himself in our family and telling us we could call him Homie. He would say from the top of a zip-line platform, “Are you ready, my family?” We became tight with crazy Homie throughout the course. The zip-line course was so long that I lost track of how many platforms and lines we crossed. We zip-lined downward, then hiked up for a long time, saw some monkeys, and then zip-lined downward again for hours. Some lines were long, others were sort, during others Boat & Homie would say, “Look out for that tree” and then swing us on the line right next to it. The platforms that connected the lines were like tree houses--the best tree houses ever. If we weren’t zip-lining from one platform to the next, we were walking on Indiana Jones-like rope bridges. Unlike a rollercoaster where you wait all day and then the high lasts for a mere 30 seconds, this experience went on for hours and was thrilling every moment. 

Event number three: Elephant Training & Trekking

Speaking of moments that last forever, the next event was a three day elephant trek in the jungle of Lampang. Chelsea signed us four up for The Mahout Training School and the rest of us had no idea what we’d really gotten ourselves into. The experience began at 8:30am on Sunday, October 21st. We were given Mahout suits to dress ourselves in for the next three days. Mahouts are the elephant trainers and they wear special uniforms of dark blue and a thick linen, so you can imagine how sweaty us foreigners were in the getup. After dressing for the occasion, we were briefed on Thai elephant commands and then drew cards with the names of our elephants and their official mahouts. My elephant was Singkorn, who is 33 years old and a mother of three with another on the way (I didn’t find out until about 36 hours into the experience that she was pregnant, so I felt very bad for kicking & yelling at a pregnant elephant). My mahout was Berm, a 40-something year old Thai man from Lampang who spoke nearly no English and deeply loved Singkorn. This was common of the mahouts; they love their elephants and don’t know two licks of English. After meeting our elephants and mahouts, we were instructed to climb atop them. This went so poorly for all. At one point, my mahout looked at me, terrified & clueless atop my elephant, and questioned “3 days?” and I ashamedly replied “Yes...” and we both buckled up for a very long trekking experience. Luckily the experience only got better with time. The first day we went on to watch other elephants put on a show, learned how to make elephant dung paper, and bathed our elephants in a reservoir. By bathed our elephants I mean our mahouts lead the elephants with us on them into a body of water until they dunked down to the point of making us float. Then we left the elephants in the jungle to sleep for the night as we returned to our accommodations at the training school. When my mahout and I returned to the jungle to fetch Singkorn the next morning, she had torn down the tree she was chained to. My mahout simply said, “Oh...wow” then we carried on with the day. The second day consisted of trekking into the depths of the jungle on our elephants for an hour or so before finding our camp. The camp had three raised bamboo huts; that night we slept on one under mosquito nets while our mahouts slept on one on the opposite side of the camp without any amenities. There was also a kitchen type hut and three Thai-style toilets (ceramic toilets without plumbing, so you flush by pouring a bucket of water down them). Along with us and our mahouts, there were a couple older Thai women who served as kitchen staff as well as a young Thai woman named Mat who served as a sort of tour guide/organizer/language mediator. Mat was awesome, she gave us much insight into the mahout lifestyle. After settling into camp, our mahouts took us on a jungle hike to a beautiful waterfall, stopping along the way to pick wild nuts, exotic flowers, and chop down bamboo walking sticks for us. Despite not being to communicate, the mahouts were very kind and generous toward us. Later on they each carved us our own bamboo cups and made rice and hot water in bamboo shoots over a campfire. Once the evening set in, my favorite mahout moment occurred: the mahouts invited us to take moonshine whiskey shots with them. They carved their own bamboo shot glasses, made their own whiskey, and were kind enough to share it with us. It was a hilarious situation looking back on it. Chelsea and I had never really drank together before and Chelsea and her mom had definitely never taken shots together before. The whiskey was shockingly good, some of the best I’ve had. The mahouts would speak in Thai, us in English, and occasionally we’d stumble through questions in the same language. Mat assisted in translating from time to time and Chelsea did the best she could in Thai, but for the most part we all just laughed at each other taking shots. The best was when my mahout found out we were teachers. He acknowledged the word, gave us a look of shock, and then passed an adamant shot our way accompanied by a  gleeful chuckle. It’s safe to say we slept soundly on our stiff beds of bamboo that night. The next morning we roused ourselves, mounted the elephants one last time, and headed back to the Training School to receive our official Mahout Training Completion certificates before saying our goodbyes. It was a rocky start, but in the end I can admit this will likely become one of my most cherished adventures. 

Welcome to the Real Thai World

On Wednesday, October 17th at 2:50pm I left from SFO to fly to Beijing then onward to Bangkok. I’m currently sitting in the Bangkok airport waiting for my Thai Airways flight from BKK to Chiang Mai where I’ll meet up with Chelsea and her family. 

It hasn’t quite hit me yet, but I’m in Thailand. And I’ll be here for five months. So far the trip has been just peachy. Flying and traveling in general can be a doozy, but this trip has been surprisingly successful so far. Don’t get me wrong, there have already been snafus and there is great potential for it all to go downhill from here. 

It’s crazy to think that just this morning (er, yesterday morning? Time zones are confusing) I was watching Price is Right in my living room in San Ramon. Yes, PIR was my last American TV experience, and I’d have it no other way. And coincidentally enough one of the grand prizes in the final showcase showdown was a trip to Thailand. So crazy. Despite that aligning coincidence and being packed & ready to go, it was ridiculously hard to leave. Saying goodbye to my dad and my dog at home was one thing, then the farewell with my mom at airport really made me lose it. So I tucked my pride aside and began this independent journey as a weeping girl in the security check line. Off to a good start, right? 

As I sat at my gate, I had this panic attack of what am I doing. Sometimes I don’t understand why I choose to do the things I do. Luckily Donald Miller understands them better than I do in his book “Through Painted Deserts”: 

“It’s interesting how you sometimes have to leave home before you can ask difficult questions, how the questions never come up in the room you grew up in, in the town in which you were born. It’s funny how you can’t ask difficult questions in a familiar place, how you have to stand back a few feet to see things in a new way before you realize nothing that is happening to you is normal.”   

Well said, Don. Anyway, as I’m mid perplexing thought, I hear a “Hey there!” from behind me. It was none other than Derek Lopez, my longtime college friend and fellow future Thailand teacher. Even though Derek & I are not going to be teaching in the same city, he and I planned to fly to the country together. It often times makes layovers and transfers less stressful to spout out confusion and airport frustrations to a familiar face. 

Derek had flown from Portland to SFO with two girls teaching through the same program (CIEE) as him. Suddenly I went from being very lonely to part of a foursome. None of us sat near each other on the plane, but that was probably for the better. Derek said he strolled by my seat a couple times and I was conked out. Initially I thought I wasn’t going to sleep on the flight, but then I popped some Dramamine and next thing I knew I’d slept through an entire movie and perhaps a snack (drat!). Btw, for anyone flying to Asia in the near future, I wouldn’t recommend Air China. There is only one TV per section of the plane and it’s not very good quality. The first movie played was some Chinese movie, fair enough. The next was War Horse, which I had to stop watching because the idea of a boy giving up his horse to a war was more sad to me than the idea of me going to Thailand for five months. Seriously, I said in my head “Sheesh, at least I didn’t have to give up a horse.” Once I unplugged my headphones from the sad movie, I slept pretty much the rest of the time. It wasn’t until later that I found out they had played The Lorax next. 

After our 12 hour flight, we got to Beijing and the foursome met up again to attempt to figure out where to go. It was way more difficult than it needed to be and we only had an hour and 40 minutes to get it figured out. After finally finding the International Transfers booth, we had to wait for a worker to come acknowledge our presence--frustrating. That took longer than needed before we could head down to the Chinese security. This was just the worst, most poorly organized security I’ve ever been through. There were two young workers, a boy and a girl, and I’m fairly certain they were mocking us or flirting with each other the whole time. There were no signs indicating what to remove from your bag, so it took each of us about three tries before they cleared our carry-ons. I pulled out my water bottle and asked the male worker if I could keep my water. He said “yes, yes” then proceeded to throw it away. After that snafu, we had to walk what must have been half a mile to our gate, which was now boarding passengers. We had zero time to enjoy the luxuries the Beijing airport had to offer. 

I slept through pretty much the entire second flight, which was 5.5 hours long. I woke once for the food service, and then I realized if I ate that food I was going to hurl, so I just mushed it around in the containers before returning it to the flight attendant. After this flight we found another CIEE program member and the now five-some traveled to customs and baggage. Customs was suuuper easy and took a total of 2 minutes tops. Then we all got our bags really fast (last time Wendy & I went to Thailand it took about an hour for our bags to pop out, so huge improvement this time). Then came the awkward moment where the CIEE peeps & I had differing plans. They left the airport to split a cab and find their program hotel, whereas I had to figure out how to stay in the airport in order to catch my separate flight to Chiang Mai. 

I thought this would be really nerve-racking and scary to navigate on my own, but so far I’m loving it. Seriously. Thai people are so friendly and helpful. I found a rolling cart for my giant travel backpack and I’ve been pushing it around like a content shopper ever since. They don’t have free wifi here, but they do have these web phone/internet access machines. I used one of them to contact my family and was lucky enough to catch my sister on gchat. After that I bought some Thai water and a coconut/taro biscuit. Lol to Thai food. Now I’m writing this blog and realizing I still have to navigate a flight transaction on my own as well as find Chelsea in Chiang Mai. Here goes nothing!