One month of greatness!

We hit our month mark today!! It’s hard to say whether it has gone fast or not—in some ways we feel like we’ve always been here, and yet our arrival still feels very recent!

In Taiwan, waiting to board our plane to Bangkok

Since a one month post is a good excuse to add old pictures and then not ever worry about catching up, we’re going to take that opportunity and run with it.

Getting pictures from other volunteers here has been exciting! We’ve been collecting them over the past month and it’s fun to see the “good old times” resurface. Like it was that long ago..haha.

The back of our heads and the backside of our elephants

Eating curry in Bangkok

Getting Japanese Encephalitis shots at a local health clinic...sketchy, but it saved us over $400!! Hard to say no to that.

 Justin and I trying to reach out to a lonely new student but he didn't want to ride horses with us..sad day.

Thailand is way exciting as far as wildlife goes. Millipedes, centipedes, shiny black worms, HUGE spiders, lizards, geckos, etc. Pretty soon after we got here,  we noticed an unusual smell in one corner of our room. Later that day when I was opening the window to let some warm air into our hot room (not really better but it helps a bit!), I noticed there was a smashed lizard behind the hinge outside our window. The poor little fellow had probably just been relaxing there one day when we closed it and crushed it. It was..incredibly disgusting and getting him off the window was one of the grossest things ever, so I’ll spare you the details! 

Gigantic spider with a crazy web

Cicada leftover bodies. They are so loud during the day.

Typical lunch! Instant noodles and fresh mangoes. 

The occasional festival is a good excuse to go out at night and see outdoor markets and blowup toys that remind us a lot of PG’s Strawberry Days! I bought sandals and a really neat skirt at one last month, and we bought Thai cotton candy. It is more stringy and hair-like than American cotton candy and is meant to be eaten wrapped in a crepe, but it’s really delicious!

The markets have a lot of other smelly dried meats and clothes but mostly we like hearing people talk about us: we learned the Thai word for foreigner, “fa-rang”, and kind of enjoy hearing it as we pass. This particular market was right as we were learning to listen for the word, but now that we know it we here it EVERYWHERE. From our English students, random people we pass on the street, food vendors, etc. If only we knew what they were saying about us!

And here are some random pictures we never posted but would be a shame to leave out!

Our first morning in Thailand! Up the mountain at the Buddhist temple. Still wearing the same clothes...

Spot the Angry Birds cake. Angry Birds are all over the place here!

Home sweet home. We miss our non-air conditioned room when we travel!

 Squatter potties! You grow to love them.

 One night Justin went to pull this converter out of the wall, and it came apart and those metal parts near the top touched and shot sparks everywhere. It lit up the room like lightning! It was terrifying and we're just glad Justin wasn't zapped! The power conversion is tricky sometimes.

And big news..after a month of living by a huge brown river, we finally got in it! People have gone swimming loads of times, but since we lost our swimwear on our way here, it was a good excuse for us to stay out of the river we watched elephants poop in on our first Sunday here (sure it was downstream, but who knows what it happening upstream in Burma!). We had a great time tubing down the river last week, and although the water really is about as dirty as it looks, it at least doesn’t smell bad and is really warm. That made it okay! We don't have pictures yet, but here's a nice view of the Buddhist temple from the river.

Every day is very different from the last, and despite the challenges we’ve had—losing a suitcase with all of our clothes in it on our way here, adjusting to a hot and humid climate, eating some questionable food, living in a house with 18 other people, not being able to communicate with any of the locals, lots of manual labor, and trying not to itch our legs off from all the mosquito bites—we’re loving every day! It is a really special time we’re able to spend together here as a brand new married couple, and truly an experience we will remember forever. And it’s not over yet! We have lots to do and learn before we ship off for America on August 4^th. On to wave two! Stay tuned ^_^