Sometimes I say "Thank you" instead of "Hello"

Here are some random tidbits from our day-to-day happenings..

As far as local creatures go, there are lots of pet dogs (some more mangy and disgusting than others), we’ve seen some house cats, but most everything is smaller. As in beetles, cockroaches, spiders, fruit flies, regular flies, mosquitoes, frogs, crabs, and GECKOS. They are our favorite! They’re out during the day, but you see them most often at night and they make the most hilarious noise. It’s so clear it almost sounds like a person. I can’t really describe they’re two-pitched noise, except for that it has a higher pitch and then a lower one kind of like a squeaky toy, but it’s a low enough tone that it sounds like it could be a guy talking. It’s so funny!

We have about 18 people here currently and it’ll stay that way for about 6 weeks. People are from Utah, California, Hawaii, Korea, and more, and they’re all super great! There are three bathrooms in our two story house, each with a shower, and even though two of them are capable of giving hot water we choose not to turn on the heat because the shower is the only place you can go to not sweat.

Still no word on our luggage. Our best guess is that it’s either stolen or somewhere in China. There was nothing in that bag but clothes, but it was ALL of our clothes. We spent over 3,000 baht ($100) on three new outfits and two pairs of shoes, and if we don’t hear from the airline soon we’ll need to spend a bit more on swimming suits, church clothes, and possibly stuff to exercise in. Slightly annoying!

Learning Thai will get easier, but for now we’re working on pronunciation, tones, and basic phrases. We’ve mastered hello, what’s your name, water.. and a couple others. For some reason we’ve both been hesitant to try speaking to people (weird since we’ve both had experience in other countries learning other languages!) but it’s coming slowly. Everything is so new at this point!

Also, our landlady has a dog that basically lives at our house. He’s a little black dog with lots of curly black hair who has sort of adopted us as his second family. Right now he’s in our room with his wet feet on our bed licking my (Justin’s) feet. I’m not sure if it’s making us want a dog more or less..the group calls him Chico, and we’ve decided he needs to learn English so he can understand when we yell at him to get out of the trash. Other than that he’s a lot of fun ;)

And this picture is actually from the first day but I like it so I'm adding it..big Buddha from the temple near our house!!

Starting projects and meeting children

Today our plan was to get acquainted with the local schools. First we went to the one we helped out at on Saturday. It was awesome to see all the little kids loving the “new” playground equipment. The principal told us that before none of the kids wanted to play on it, but they were all over it today. It was fun to see the kids in their uniforms, line up, say a pledge of allegiance, say a prayer, and then head off to their classes. We went to the other 5 schools we’ll be teaching English at after, and at each one the kids smiled real big at us, the people offered us water (and sometimes fruit), and they offered to take us to the next school. 18 people piled into, onto, and around a pickup truck is fun! The times we got to sit inside were the first times we’ve felt air conditioning since Taipei.

Some interesting things we saw at the schools: One had an agricultural section where they taught the kids life skills like pig, chicken and mushroom farming, fish hatching, and proper hut building. With all we learned there and our new-found love for hand-washing clothes, we decided we’re moving to the mountains when we get back from Utah. Another school had just bought 5 cows from the slaughterhouse and was planning on donating them to someone, but they were just keeping them on the front lawn until then. And at one school we got to play soccer with the kids! It was a ton of fun, but our feet weren’t calloused enough to play barefoot, and in the blazing heat/humidity we could only stay on the field for 10 minutes at a time. After we finished the Thai kids put their jackets back on! I don’t understand how they can handle the heat.

Overall it’s been an awesome couple of days. This week we’re going to start some more individual entrepreneurship projects- contacting local NGOs and assessing needs, then planning more projects. We’ve been amazed at what we’ve already accomplished in such a short amount of time, and we look forward to a very busy and very rewarding summer. Hopefully by the end we’ll be tolerant enough to the heat that we won’t have to sweat ourselves to sleep every night!

Not your average Sabbath

We’re usually able to go to church in a city that’s about an hour from here, but there’s a festival going on in town that made it impossible for us to find any transportation there. We made the best of it by taking a boat tour down the river that runs next to our house. We paid 400 baht a piece (12 dollars) for a four hour boat ride that turned out to be a seven hour boat ride.

We rode on long motorized fishing-looking boats down the river for about two hours though some amazing looking jungle scenery, tangled vines, corn fields, Buddhist temples, resorts, and villages. We saw kids swimming in the river every so often and waved to them, but I still haven’t quite decided how I feel about getting into the brown silty water myself. Our swimwear is still lost so I haven’t really had to come to a final conclusion yet. We’ll see! After riding for long enough that our bums started aching, someone yelled, “Elephants!!” and we saw them. A dozen huge elephants at a camp at the side of the river, just waiting to be ridden. We pulled up on shore, paid 300 baht total (10 USD) for half an hour, sat down on the little saddle thing with the elephant driver man in front of us, and we were off! Justin and I couldn’t help but laugh that it was our very first weekend in Thailand and we were already on an elephant! Our whole group was piled on eight elephants in a long line, just having the time of our lives. We thought maybe we’d just walk on a scenic path or something—but no, we practically forded the river on our elephant! We lumbered right down the bank, across to a little island, and down the river a ways. The water was pretty deep, and we liked how the elephants used their trunks as snorkels.

Yep, this is real life!

We left the river 15 minutes later, walked through a village, along a little paved highway with pedestrians and scooters, and then finally back to the elephant camp. We bought some bananas to feed them and bought little elephant figurine souvenir.




First weekend in Thailand? Not bad! We went up the river a ways to a random little restaurant where we ate THE BEST pad thai we’ve ever had to date. We’ve been talking about it ever since. Pad thai is a lot less oily and saucy here than it is at home, so we’re determined to find it’s equivalent somewhere.

Yum yum yum. Must learn to make this!

There were some hot springs that were closed, but we looked around and saw this awesome section of the hot springs where you can buy eggs to boil in the water there. Too bad we were already melting or it would have sounded more appealing. We made one last stop at a little village on the way back because our boat tour man thought we might want to see the lifestyle there. It was by far the poorest place I’ve ever been in. There was some livestock, an extremely fat pig, and I think a dog, but the families literally lived in bamboo huts. Everything was dirty, I don’t think they had running water, and the kids were shy so I doubt they’d seen foreigners very often. Everyone’s Thai language skills are pretty awful at this point, so we sort of muttered some hellos and took some pictures, but it was a short visit. We rode the boat for another two hours up the river and finally, the sight of the mountainside Buddhist temple told us we were home. At nights we usually eat next door at the landlady’s restaurant, and we’ve had some amazing dishes so far. We eat curry a lot…which is a good thing because we like it, but we also look forward to the non-curry meals, but that night we had a great red curry with some potatoes in it. We’re doing our best to figure out what we eat so we’ll be able to order ourselves and hopefully learn to cook something by the end, but it’s a lot to take in at once! Rice and noodles are a staple, which is great! Thai people eat with the fork in the left hand and the spoon in the right, using the fork to shovel food onto the spoon and the spoon to get the food into your mouth. Justin is happy because this is how Persian people eat, and I like it because it’s efficient! We should adopt it at home..haha. There actually ARE chopsticks here, but they are kind of a novelty thing and you don’t find them at every restaurant. Still though, go Asia. Our room has no air conditioning, so we have two floor fans that we have blowing right on us all night, and that makes it bearable. We don’t have screens on the windows or doors to keep the bugs out, so we can’t even get a fresh breeze going through at night! We do our best to air out the room with the lights off just before bed—we’ve already got the system down!

Finally here!!

In Thailand! Here's how the flights went down..

Our flight to Taiwan was really long and actually very wonderful. We were so sleep deprived and crazy after dealing with the international terminal in LAX that we hardly had time to eat our in flight meal before falling asleep. Aside from being a little cramped, we both slept really well, woke up for the in-flight breakfast, and didn't even have a chance to finish Sherlock Holmes 2 before landing. We really loved Taiwan (so many Asians!!! And plenty of Chinese people just for Andrea ;) ). We brushed our teeth, put on deodorant, and felt a little better about ourselves.

Welcome to Asia! There was even a Hello Kitty airplane and terminal.

It wasn't a very long layover, and after we met up with a few other volunteers at the terminal, we got on the plane for Bangkok! Same airline, same Asian in-flight meals, and same movies available. We finished Sherlocke Holmes while eating curry chicken, and had just enough time to finish We Bought a Zoo before landing in Bangkok. Bangkok is a HUGE airport full of people from all over Asia and the middle east. It's probably a major international connector between the middle east and the rest of Asia. There were even a few Persians! After we got through immigration, the luggage carousel was pretty empty. We noticed a few of the airline personnel were looking at a few bags, including one of ours. After we got it from them, we realized our other bag wasn't there!! We told a BKK worker, who took us to our airline counter, and after ten minutes of trying to figure out what happened, they didn't know where our bag was! We gave them Nat's number, and borrowed one of their phones to call and let him know they'd be calling. We had a 7 hour layover in Bangkok, so we exchanged some money, got some SUPER spicy curry, and walked around a bit. It was suffocatingly humid, but really pretty!

Our flight to Chiang Rai took off after the sun set, but there was a thunderstorm so we could occasionally see flashes of the ground below. lots of farms, jungles, and scattered villages. In Chiang Rai we met up with the rest of our group, piled our luggage under a tarp in the back of a rusty pickup truck, and then all 15 of us crammed into a van. We luckily shared the front seat with our driver who didn't speak a word of English. Our drive lasted an hour- think road to Hana in the dark- It was a VERY windy road through the mountain, and I think we ran over at least 18 frogs along the way. We also passed a lot of people riding scooters and holding umbrellas. Ooh, and they drive on the left side of the road! That was fun:) We dumped our stuff into our unairconditioned room and passed out under our fan until 9:30 this morning:) Oh!! We woke up at 3 for a bathroom break, and had to go outside to get to the bathroom across the patio (our house is halfway between a cheap motel and camping), and it was so loud with frogs, geckos, crickets, bugs, and possibly monkeys. Today we went to a Buddhist temple on the hill, drove 25 minutes to a nearby town so we could buy groceries and clothes (oh yeah, the airline still doesn't know where our bags are...), ate an awesome lunch for less than a dollar, cleaned out our room, killed a huge spider, and finally showered in wonderfully cold water. Every day is a new experience but we are loving it!!

First day of work!

Saturday! It has been interesting finding projects here because last year’s HELP group was in a different city. We’ve talked to a few people, but as of our first day, only had plans to help move supplies into a new building at a local school. We arrived at 8 only to find that the local monks had told the teachers the most fortunate time to move in would be at nine, so we could only move desks, chairs, and nasty eroded furniture to the front door of the new building until then. People here ask the monks specific questions like that—what time to have a marriage or move into a new house so that they have a blessing over it. Pretty neat! We moved school equipment for a couple of hours and swept out a few rooms. We found PLENTY of gross looking spiders, cobwebs, and cockroaches, but for our only plan of the day, we were excited about it. As we were cleaning the school told us we could paint the metal kindergarten playgrounds and the lines for the sports courts if we wanted, so one hour later we were armed with gloves, paint brushes, and bright colored paints. We sanded the equipment first and got to work in the HOT and incredibly humid weather. It’s so muggy here that the shade doesn’t even feel cool! We painted the lines to the basketball and a type of volleyball game with your feet (I don’t know what it’s called yet!), which was blistering hot standing out on a concrete slab. We finished by 4 or 5 and rewarded ourselves with ice cream. We could get used to cheap cold treats!

It's really slow downloading pictures so I'll just add a couple!

Us at the house! We look outside and see a hillside Buddhist temple. Sweet!

Delicious little bananas. Way more flavor than we are used to back home!

We're coming!!

Only two days left until we take off! Our country directors are in Thailand as we speak, and they've sent us these beautiful pictures of where we will be living for the next three months. Seeing the house got us SO EXCITED!!

...okay just kidding, but our country director did post that picture of a sweet Buddhist temple near where we'll be living. Alright, here's the house:

There will be between 15 and 20 of us living here.

 Sitting right on the Kok River

 That is a huge Buddhist temple. Yep.

First and second floors

 A bedroom. Ours?

Kitchen and cooking area

 Living room? We can watch Thai television here

From now on we'll be in all the awesome pictures we post! Woohoo! There's still a lot to be done, and let's be honest, we have FIVE flights ahead of us, but we're pumped! We're almost completely packed and just have a couple of last minute errands to do. Our next post will probably be from an airport somewhere!! See you soon!!

Hot and humid

Record highs in Thailand right now! You'd better believe we're looking forward to it!

 iPod Touch..we will be good friends :)