Some are wonderin' if this land's still made for you and me.

Fall 2004:

I ran five or more miles every day.

I counted down the weeks left of high school; I couldn't wait to be in college.

I feared that George W. Bush would be reelected.

But mostly, I was hopeful.


Fall 2008:

I run two or more miles a couple times a week.

I don't know what will happen after this year, and I don't think about it much.

I KNOW George W. Bush will not be reelected.

But mostly, I am scared.

Amurka

It is great to be home!

I had a wonderful time in England; I spent the first seven days there in Cheltenham, where Dan, Frank, and Victoria live and go to school. We then visited Oxford with Sasha, who attended the university there for the past semester. Dan and I went to London from there-- I liked London best.


Today I am off to Philadelphia, a place I have thought about a lot over the past few months. It will be good to return and see lots of friendly familiars.

My Interaction With The U.K. Customs Lady

I step up to the podium behind which a woman is sitting.

Me: Hello.

Lady silently stares, so I handed her my passport and card that I had filled out regarding my "business" in England.

Lady: How long will you be staying in the U.K.?

Me: Ten days. [(I didn't actually know exactly, but I figured it would sound better to give an exact amount of time rather than to sound ambiguous.)]

Lady: Where will you be staying while you are here?

Me: University of Gloucestershire. I'll be visiting friends there.

Lady: May I see your return tickets home please?

Me: I'm sorry?

Lady: May I see your return tickets please?

Me: Oh, I don't have them, yet.

Lady: You don't have them?

Me: No. Not yet.

Lady: So you bought a one-way ticket here?

Me: Well, I flew here from Thailand, I've been in Thailand for the past few months.

Lady: I see, and what were you doing in Thailand?

Me: I was- I'm a student, and I've been studying abroad there.

Lady: And you'll be staying at the University of...

Me: Gloucestershire. I have friends who are studying there, friends from my university in America. They're also studying abroad.

There is a pause, while Lady makes no attempts to hide her sheer astonishment. She shuffles through my passport (though I'm not sure why, there's not much to see in it that she hasn't already examined).

Lady: How much money do you have?

Me: ...You mean how much cash do I have on me?

Lady: Yes.

Me: Um, not...very much...

Lady: Alright, so how do you plan to get anywhere, or to meet up with anyone, you don't have a cell phone, and you don't have any money--

Me: I have a credit card, or, a debit card.

Lady: How do you plan to purchase your plane ticket?

Me: Online?

Lady: I mean if you don't have any money?

Me: I have a credit card...

Lady: Is it a friend you're visiting, or a boyfriend?

Me: My boyfriend and a few of my friends are at the University of Gloucestershire. I am visiting all of them.

Lady hands me my passport, silently, which I take as a sign that I'm free to enter her kingdom.

So I found something fun to do!  Today I am leaving Chiang Mai, and tomorrow I will fly from Bangkok to London.  I'll be in England for the next week or two, visiting Dan and other friends who are there.  From England, I will fly back to America, sometime in early May.  

A Banal Update - Now Complete with Pictures!

My apologies for the prolonged blogging absence. For the past month I have had limited internet access, and by the end of this post you will know why.

A couple days before we left our host families, we had a Farewell 

Banquet for the students, families, 

and others who gave their time to our program's two months in Chiang Mai.  Here is the only picture I have of my entire host family. It portrays the awkwardness of our coexistence quite well, I think.

On March 14, I moved all of my things out of my host family's house, and left with everyone in our program for what we have taken to calling "Travel Week."  We took a large charter bus to five different cities in six days.

Many of our daylight hours of the week were spent

 on said bus, and each night we crashed into a new hotel room.

During Travel Week, we rode bicycles through parks and temple grounds in Sukhothai, visited antique museums in Pitsanulok, teased monkeys in Lopburi, traversed ancient temple ruins and sang karaoke on a boat in Ayuthaya, and gawked at the millions of tourists at the Grand Palace in Bangkok.

While many in the group were dreading the heat and overwhelming nature of Bangkok, it was a bit of a Mecca for me throughout the preceding week. Gavin and I passed the time by singing Disney and Britney Spears songs loudly, as we eagerly anticipated the arrival of our beloved visitors, whose planes would land at the Bangkok International Airport. Dan got in safely at midnight Wednesday, and a few hours later, Gavin, Lizzy, Dan, and I were off to Ko Phi Phi!

The island itself was quite beautiful, especially around the edges (I think those parts are commonly referred to as "beaches"). The inner part of the island is crowded by post-tsunami-reconstruction and young Europeans, Australians, and North Americans, ready to party like it's 1999.

After a wonderful week in a beautiful place that, incidentally, felt nothing like Thailand as I have known it because the Thai to tourist ratio was something like 1:12, we returned to the Bangkok airport, this time a little less excited. Dan boarded his flight back to England, and after lots of waiting and mourning, I took a quick flight to Chiang Mai, where I interneted and showered and went to bed at 7pm. I was happy to be awakened a couple times by friends who had returned from their own island excursions. The next day (March 28) we all left Chiang Mai for the our month-long stay in the Karen Hill Tribe Village, in a remote, mountainous area

 of northern Thailand.

The Village, as we call it, as if there is only one, is quite the experience. Each day we eat breakfast (usually pancakes or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches-- I'm not kidding), and then waste time, reading or sitting around, until lunch (usually vegetables and rice). In the afternoons sometimes we pile into a "refugee truck" (I call it this because it looks like the trucks that bring in the Burmese refugees daily who work in Chiang Mai) to travel about 4 miles down the dirt road to a lake, where we can swim. After swimming, we waste more time, sometimes we do this by counting down the minutes until it is time to eat dinner. Dinner is also usually rice and vegetables, and fruit for dessert. After dinner we waste time until it is a reasonable hour to go to sleep (anytime from 8-10:30pm... yes, one night, we stayed up till 10:30, it was crazehh). 

I was in The Village with the group for the first two weeks of the experience.  This was the house where I stayed while I was there.  I stayed here with four other girls from our program, and the five of us now have a morphed manner of speaking, so that one would likely not be able to differentiate one of us from another simply by hearing us speak.  House was the best thing about my time in The Village.  Since I am not taking the academic course that is offered (I don't need the credit), I felt largely purposeless from day to day, so I decided to hang around Chiang Mai for a few days and see if I can find anything fun to do. Thus far I've filled my time here with lots of internet things including emailing and talking to friends and family from home.

I am ready to go home, as I feel like I have accomplished whatever it was that I came to Thailand to do.  In three weeks I will be back in America.  Ready???

 

"The 'go pee pee' jokes might not get old, if I'm witty enough." -DW

Next Wednesday (that's just one week from now), our "spring break" begins. I plan to spend the week in Ko Phi Phi, pronounced "go pee pee." We will likely spend most of our time on the larger island, Ko Phi Phi Don, but perhaps take a day trip via longboat to the smaller island called Ko Phi Phi Leh.

The Beach, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, was filmed on Ko Phi Phi Leh. We are happy to welcome international guests Dan Webster and Lizzy Hawks to Thailand for the week of our break. They will join us in the former tropical stomping grounds of Leo himself!

HYOTP ?

Toilet paper often seems like a scarcity in Thailand. From what I hear and deduce, Thai people somehow use a hose to accomplish what my family and friends from home and I would normally accomplish with toilet paper. Any questions going through your mind about this process have likely entered mine as well, and I have not found answers yet, so don't ask me. But when traveling in Thailand, a good rule of thumb, I have found, is BYOTP, just to be safe.

Fortunately my host family keeps a supply of toilet paper in the home. It didn't take me long to realize that I was the only one who used it in the restroom (this realization came when I finished the first roll and saw that other people had used the facility but the roll had not been replaced). I asked my little host sister where I could find more, and she directed me to a large COSTCO-sized package of toilet paper rolls. Paradise! (Note: The package, along with several other Things, is set on the top of an old, dusty, shelf of some kind-- this is the space my host family uses to store their Things. It is unorganized, overwhelming, and not aesthetically pleasing in the least.) I knew that I was set, toilet-paper-wise, for the rest of my eight-week homestay.

Six and a half weeks have passed, and my in-home toilet paper experiences have been largely uneventful. I have even begun to snag a roll to carry in my purse, that I might adhere to previously mentioned rule of thumb. Largely uneventful, until this weekend. Saturday morning I was procuring a new roll to place in the bathroom, and I noticed I was down to four rolls. This would be fine, I calculated, four rolls to last me 13 days. By Sunday night, however, the roll was empty. I knew I hadn't finished it alone, because I was not the one to use the last of it. At this rate, it would not last me, but, I figured, I could always buy some more at Say-wen-Elay-wen, so, mai pen rai. I put the third-to-last roll in the bathroom Sunday evening. Monday night (last night), the roll was gone. I began to grow suspicious, but I placed the second-to-last roll in the bathroom last night before I went to bed. This morning, THAT roll was gone. These rolls of toilet paper are nowhere to be found. No one in my family has diarrhea as far as I know (not that they could or would tell me if they did), but even if they did, THEY DON'T USE TOILET PAPER THE WAY WE DO.

They're STEALING it. They're HIDING it. There is no other realistic conclusion. Now I have no choice: I must keep the toilet paper in my bedroom, perhaps I need to keep it hidden, even in my room, taking one serving at a time with me each time I use the bathroom.

I am thankful that it did not come to this any sooner during my homestay. I am also thankful, not for the first time, that my host family cannot and does not read this blog.

She'd do anything for a Klondike

Sorry for the lack of updates. Nothing super-exciting has been going on, and I don't want to update about boring or annoying things, lest I lead my dear readers to conclude I am not enjoying my time here; I am. I have settled into a routine of class and internship every day, and some various other activities when I have time, but the novelty has worn off, so I forget that others might be interested.

However, that routine is about to change. Tuesday is my last day at my internship at the temple. Next week our classes will wrap up (presumably after tests and other assignments, but I prefer to avoid thinking about those kinds of things... I need a minimum GPA of 1.0 this semester in order to keep my scholarship at Messiah... I came to Thailand for mangoes and sticky rice, not academic evaluation). This time of year is when the Thai school year ends, so it kind of feels like late May/early June does at home. It is, in fact, the beginning of "summer," so, it's getting hotter by the day, at least I think so.

March came in like a lamb, as I assume it does every year in Chiang Mai. It is an exciting month for us here, because in less than two weeks, we will end our stays with our host families (if I thought my host family could read this, I might change the wording of that sentence). Then, next Thursday, our group will begin a week of traveling, to about four different cities. We will travel by bus and stay at various FOUR STAR HOTELS all week. I assume this means I will enjoy air conditioning and cleanliness (!!!), and I know for a fact that all of the hotels will have swimming pools. It's kind of like we're a group of children only settling for hotels that have pools.

I've become addicted to solitaire, or "Klondike" on my iPod lately. I play in class (it helps me pay attention as a matter of fact), and as I fall asleep every night, and any other time I might find myself bored. I write in my journalZ (plural) occasionally. I also have been reading Four Loves by C. S. Lewis, and a journal of short fiction that I borrowed from a friend. I recently finished The Time Traveler's Wife, and highly recommend it, more than this blog.

Pun Pun and Other Fun

I suppose I should share a little about my internship. Four days each week, I spend the afternoon at a Buddhist temple called Wat Suan Dok, where college-age monks attend university courses. I help to teach English by reading and answering comprehension questions with them. This part of the afternoon normally wears me out, because it's a lot of enunciating and speaking slowly and loudly. Fortunately, after this, we normally get a break that varies in time from five minutes to two hours, depending on the day. After the break, we sit and chat with monks, whomever of them chooses to join us.

There is a (forgive me) organic vegetarian restaurant called Pun Pun (Thai pronunciation "bun bun") on the premises, where I usually go and grab a bite during the break. There are about twelve tables, each under rugged-looking country club-goes-tropical umbrellas, surrounding a tree whose trunk is about six feet wide. The food is delicious, and the environment pleasant as a result of the sunlight that trickles through in between the large leaves of said tree.

I walk home from the temple every day around 5:00. On my way, I pass by all of the restaurants and vendors setting up shop for din-din. I hate most of the smells (fish, trash, sewage... I live in the city) and sights (whole cooked chickens, minus the heads, hanging in glass cases under heat lights), but I love it that by walking each day I save 10 baht that I would spend to catch a sii laaw. It helps me to feel justified in eating the overpriced, farang-targeted food at Pun Pun.

Too old for camp ?

Our group spent this weekend in a village in the mountains near Chiangrai, with the Lahu people. Picture West Virginia, Thai style. Okay, bad comparison. My point is that there are no Wal-Marts nearby, ugh. Alright, probably that's also a bad way to describe it. Main ideas: beautiful mountains, as well as palm and banana trees, surrounded us, modern-day plumbing did not, we slept on hard wood floors for three nights in a row. Addendum to the main ideas: I was sick (pukey, squirty, and fevery) the first full (Fri)day there, so I actually got to spend three nights and one full day lying on the hard floor. I had been really looking forward to the weekend as a chance to be on an adventure with friends and to have slumber parties under palm trees and bright stars, but I may have set my expectations too high (though those things did, kind of, happen).

I'm not one for homesickness, but I haven't been that ill in over four years, so at 5am Thursday morning I sobbed on Kaitlin's shoulder because of my belly ache and heartache for a bed and a mama. The worst part about Friday was being ostracized from what ended up being the highlights of everyone else's weekends: the fishing and the hike through jungle-ish territory. Not to worry though, each time loneliness made me start to feel sicker, Kaitlin and/or Evelyn would come to check on me and update me on any new important events that I missed. Friday evening, Gavin, Alex, Ev, and Kait brought me some rice in a banana leaf and sat with me while I ate and giggled with excitement at seeing four beloved friendly faces that I had missed so dearly all day long.

The weekend did not prove to be life-changing for me as we were told it would be, but it sure was nice to have time to think, and I know my mom will be happy to know I actively missed her. How's that for optimism?

Tonight we returned to campus around 4pm, and some friends braved the "asking host parents' permission to go out" realm. All went quite smoothly, and Gav, Kait, Ev, and I made it with little difficulty to the "Walking Street," a large Sundays-only-market-type-place that offers all kinds of foods and clothes and bags and jewelry and trinkets for very cheap. Many of the merchants seem to target farang (=foreigners) with more primitive-looking merchandise, while several others clearly attempt to appeal to the Thai people by providing more Western (yes, meowch) paraphanalia. Last Sunday I went with my host sister, May, and I noticed that we were each attracted to opposite kinds of things: she to shiny clutch purses; me to earth-toned shoulder bags sold by an individual claiming in the few English words she knows that her products are hand-made, hand-made, so she will settle for a price no less than 260 baht.

Thanks for the comments and response emails, it's nice to know people are reading and enjoying. Send any comments/questions/suggestions to the mailing address below. Be on the lookout for my upcoming articles published in TIME magazine, their annual "visit a third-world country asap because it's hip" issue.

LYLASABADAMAGAFABFF. No more getting carried away, I promise. Oh eight.

Hoss Fom Ali

Meow! I'm in an internet cafe and cannot access my email, so you blog-readers-only get lucky today.

Today I met my host family and moved into their home. I have a 20-year-old host sister who likes to do fun things that I like to do, and an 11-year-old sister who laughs every time she sees me. I live in the city and can walk or at least catch a red truck (=taxi) to places that seem important, even though I don't know my way around yet. We do not have a maid (which the students had been told was pretty likely); the family seems to be of lower class than most of the host families. I don't want a maid, that's weird anyway, but a lack of a maid is no excuse for a lack of a clean house in my opinion. I'm not sure if it's appropriate for me to offer to help clean, but if they could understand me when I spoke, I might consider it. None of the family speaks English. 20-year-old sis understands me, kind of, but can't respond very well. We're working on it. We laugh a lot at the misunderstanding, I hope the laughing lasts. My room is an 8x8 cell with no dresser and a window that is six inches away from the next building. Mai pen rai! Mom runs a beauty salon and it is part of our downstairs. Dad has a ponytail and is larger than any Thai men I have seen (perhaps he's not?) and sleeps, watches tv, and has not said a word to me. Parents evidently do not care what we do.

I think these are all exactly what I would have preferred over the realistic alternatives, so I am feeling positive about the situation. I actively miss my friends who are in various homes around the city as I type. Fortunately we will be reunited in school tomorrow morning. Perhaps this week I will look more forward to Thai language class, for multiple reasons.

Pics

Here is the web address for where the director of our program posts pictures of our trip. It takes a long time to upload pictures to the interweb, so maybe there are some good ones on this site (I haven't really looked yet). Enjoy.

http://travel.webshots.com/album/562113740pkpUqS

On Top/Bottom of the World

I have arrived safely in Chiang Mai. My traveling process took almost 48 hours in total, due to the delay of our initial flight out of JFK by about 3 hours, and lots of rearrangements that had to follow as a result. We are currently staying in a hostel on the campus of the university. It has a nice environment; the staff is very friendly and all of the students in the program I'm in are on the third floor together.

I am enjoying the process of getting to know other people in the program. About half of the group is from The West Coast (ever heard of it?), which has perhaps provided me with more culture shock than Thai culture could ever hand me. Nonetheless, I'm overcoming some of my own reservations and getting to know people about whom I have (mostly accurate) stereotypes. Overall the kids in the group are more hip and fun and attractive than I might have expected. We'll leave it at that for now--after all, I just met them.

One thing that you all at home are probably concerned about is my sense of humor and the translation thereof. Well, fear not. People (even the West Coasters) have begun to adapt and even appreciate it. In Thailand, apparently, a general motto and way of life is "mai pen rai" (= literally, "it does not matter," or, basically "don't worry be happy"). I mostly listen passively to this concept as it is taught to us and then try to see how it plays out in my interactions with people who don't understand what I'm saying. This is a process that has only just begun. However, a guy from Pepperdine University (California) came up to me after an orientation session yesterday and told me he thought of me in hearing about this element of their culture, because it's a motto similar to "Live your life," or something of that sort. I was impressed; I had just met him the day before. Sometimes my irony is too extreme and it throws people off. But a handful in this crew are keeping up so far.

Today I rode an elephant and a bamboo raft. From the location of those activities we went to a buffet lunch at a restaurant in the midst an orchid garden. Also saw a waterfall and a collection of enormous greenhouses on top of a mountain. Today was also enhanced by the fact that my most important piece of luggage arrived this morning. It was the last piece of luggage for all 32 of us to arrive. I was grateful. Ecstatic, even. I finally feel like myself because I'm wearing my own underwear, and clothes.

I took likely hundreds of pictures today, but I don't know how to go about getting them onto the internet, so we'll see about that. Don't worry I won't post all of them that would be boring. I assume you could google images of "riding elephants in Thailand" and find pictures better than my own.

Guess that's all for now.