Speed blogging take 1

This updating my blog to my life thing is not as easy as it sounds. Things keep happening to me and I can't keep up. So I learned how to do the thriller dance. About 15 of us performed it at a multicultural festival on campus. There were legit hundreds of people watching. I'll attach a video for your viewing pleasure. There's really not much else I can say about it.

After our dance some Thai students represented Spain through a dance that involved pretend fellatio and the female dancers on their heads, legs spread, with the guys pretending to go at it.

"And we were scared to point our toes." -Elizabeth putting it best.

Life is just hectic. I went bowling. It was glow in the dark and on the very last turn of the very last game I broke the thing that brings the pins down. Mikaela stepped on the kings head and we peaced before things got heated. Then we ate Italian food made by an Italian it was pretty epic and strange to eat non Thai food. We also drank homebrewed beer. The dark stuff was pretty light but it was better than the watered down water known as Leo's. Tyler got to drink with some government officials from Bangkok.

I went to a milk bar. Met some Thai's who leave to work at Six Flags Jersey in a month. Drank milk and experienced the Thai tea ice mountain.
I don't know what my life was like before this. I'm not sure I want to remember.

After, we got a tour of the city. Turns out Alex's roommate Toom doesn't have her license so we had a mildly terrifying time avoiding the cop checkpoint. Sarie, Jenny and Sarie's roomie Saxopone were chilling out playing music at the apartment. Saxy sang the Cranberries "Zombie." It was pretty cool.

Ummmmmm.

Crazy farang

This blog is a good two weeks behind in story telling. Josh thinks that's a good thing. I don't think he wants to be overwhelmed by all my awesomeness.

Anyways, Thailand is pretty cool. Hot. Humid. I've gotten in the habit (along with Lukas and occasionally Luke) of wearing a crazy triangle Thai style straw hat whenever I go eat. Well Lukas and I do it when us poor jaes have to eat alone. The amazing thing is, despite the strange hats (Lukas wears a sombrero) Thai's don't even give us a second look. We only get the initial "hey look farang" glance. Nothing more. Nothing less.


Sometimes I feel a bit like a circus act. Like when my second homestay family (in Nonchai) kept telling me to sing. And I when I explained I couldn't they told me to dance. And when I said I couldn't they pointed at the karaoke machine and insisted I sing and dance. A family friend came over one night, she spoke significantly more English than my family, and when she was told I didn't sing or dance she said something along the lines of:

"You must be weird. It's rare to meet a farang that can't do either."

So we have peer tutors and for two hours (after an entire day of class 9-5) they come and sit with us one on one to go over Thai lessons. My tutor, Pang, is pretty chill. Sometimes she accidentally teaches me Chinese and the Ajaans will look at me strange when I repeat it.

We spent an entire tutoring session teaching eachother how to say things like "how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood" and some other Thai phrase that when mispronounced can mean something dirty. I find most of the Thai students I hang out with are super friendly. Pang calls me pretty often to hang out. Ying (my roomie) always wants me to go back to Rad bar with her.

Speaking of going out I went to a festival in a neigboring village last week with some other students. P'joy, one of the van drivers (but he is so much more than that) brought us to his house first where we were served kenoms (snacks) and homemade sticky rice wine. Sep mack.

The festival involved monks shooting guns at weird stuffed animals, shiny pieces of paper with numbers where you win a lot of canned mackeral and ramen, a drag show and six-year-olds doing muy thai. Just another village party.

So I can't remember exactly when this occured but there was an Art festival in downtown Khon Kaen that I attended. Sara, Perla and Hannah all went on their roommates motorcycles and I was left to hop on Nongs motorcycle. I had to sit side style cause of my skirt and Nong couldn't speak English that well so he kept trying to tell me that I could hold him.

The ride downtown takes a good half hour. You might think things were awkward. Girls on the program were warned about Thai guys and their different societal norms. Anyways Nong and I had a great, strained, conversation that involved singing Backstreet Boys songs together.

The art fair was amazing it was outside of a wat (the really ornate Thai style temples). There was a sick area where a former Ajaan of the program served really good tea but more about that at a later date. Nong and I reunited back at his motorcycle when it was time to head home.

We rode to the night market. A huge market full of food and clothes that's open all night. Strolled around for about 10 minutes. None of the people we came with were there. Nor did they show up. Apparently there was some kind of miscommunication that resulted in Nong and I alone together taking a leisurely walk around the night market. Anyways we rode back. I told him I was a writer. He told me I must be romantic and sensitive. He dropped me off and I never saw him again.

Ok I will update more later. My goal is to be uptodate before the next homestay.

Kaw tairoob dai mai kah?

Every morning my homestay family and I watched the news. Despite my inability to understand more than one word every 10 minutes, I watched it pretty intensely. The female news anchor was stylish, the male kind of balding and gross. It was a weird dynamic. She mainly smiled and said "kaaaaah," while he blabbered on about something important.

I imagine the conversation went a little like this:

"Millions died when the ice caps melted and flooded all of Europe."

"Kaaaah"

Anyways, that morning there was a particularly graphic video of a group of young men beating a tuk tuk driver to a pulp. The security camera at what I think must have been a 7/11 caught every last detail of this merciless beating. It definitely wasn't something Good Morning America would air it in its entirety.

Champ turned to me, arms raised, hands contorted to replicate guns, "Bang Bang," he shouted cheerfully. My Meh and Paw smiled, Champ pointed at the wall where inbetween glass trinkets and posters of the Royal family was a machine gun hanging idly by a nail. "Bang Bang"

Next up, a photojournalist, Nic Dunlop, guest-lectured my class the other day. Seems like a pretty cool guy. Anyways he taught us a bit about photography and sent us on our merry way. We had four hours to get 5 quality photos of people at work in Khon Kaen.

Myself and Muriel wandered down the road past our apartment. We never really walk down there except to go to the bars on that strip. During the day it vaguely resembles a resort town and you half expect the ocean to be just beyond all the construction sites.

We wandered onto a construction site for luxury apartments. There were four woman crouched around a water jug. Water at the homestays and everywhere pretty much is served in jugs with just one cup perched on top. Everything is communal. I forgot to mention everyone eats on the floor and no one has their own plate. Sticky rice is your utensil and the rest is up for grabs.

Anyways we were interested in these woman because we had never really thought of women as manual laborers in Thailand.

"Kaw tairoob dai mai kah?"

Blank stares followed. Maybe we said "can I take your picture." Maybe we said something else. I'm going with the latter. Before we knew it we were ushered over to a skinny trendy looking Thai woman sitting in an outdoor office. She grabbed some blue prints and beckoned us to follow her further into the construction site.

At some point in this interaction Muriel and I led this woman to believe we really wanted to move into this apartment building ASAP. We got the grand tour, complete with granite counter tops and actual, not squat, toilets.

This apartment was for farang to rent out. The Thai's doing the actual labor could never afford to live in a place like this. Even the secretary was wearing slippers while she showed us around the site. Muriel and I entertained her with questions about rent, availability, size all sorts of apartment related jargon all the while creeping around the construction snapping photos. She must have thought we were out of our minds taking so many pictures of people drilling holes and painting walls. At the very end of our half hour tour she broke out her iphone and asked if she could take a picture. Of us.

Sahbaideemai?

I want to update on everything that has happened on this trip, but it is making me ultra behind in blog posts. Last week I stayed with a family for 5 days. I went to the Nonchai school everyday with my nong-chai Champ to take Thai lessons. The kids at the school were constantly following us farang around, touching our skin, grabbing our cheeks. We were their main source of amusement.

Every morning we sat in lines with the rest of the kids and went through the flag ceremony. There were endless songs and exercises that involved massaging your mouth. After school I'd go back to my families house and play a lot of badminton. We didn't have a court or anything, just a yard where we sat around drinking the juice straight out of the coconut and hitting the badminton around. My family was pretty big, I had a nong-chai, 3 nong-sows- two of them were four-year-old twins and 2 pi-sows and a pi-chai. Along with a ya and my meh and paw.

My family was relatively well off compared to most. They had two houses and four cars. One is where my pi-chai, his girlfriend, my pi-sow and her two kids lived and the other is where my nong-chai, nong-sow and meh and paw lived. I had my own room. My bed was a wooden board, no mattress just a sheet.

The house had a big screen TV, 2 desktop computers and 3 laptops. They didn't have a kitchen, just a rice cooker, fridge and microwave. My meh bought food from the market every day. For some reason Thai's eat unlimited amounts of food, ride their motorcycles to cross the street, and add sweeten condensed milk to everything yet they are insanely skinny.

For some unknown reason every Thai I have met is pretty insistent on constant food consumption. Maybe because farang are naturally bigger so they assume we need more food, I do not know, but it's a full on assault every meal. Im lao kah kop kuhn kaht has become my new mantra. We went out to dinner one night at a place where everyone cooks their food on a burner in the middle of the table. My family brought me big plates of onions rings and french fries. "Gin it's jey gin gin." It was disgusting.

I came back to my house late one night after an exchange with HIV/AIDS patients to find that Champ was out. My pi-chai, his girlfriend and my pi-sow invited me into their house where I proceeded to translate a Budget rental inspection guide. They coerced me onto a motorcycle and dropped me off across the street from a 7-Eleven. I was instructed to get off and they drove away. Mind you not only was I left in a random location with out a cell phone or wallet, I was also shoeless standing outside for 10 minutes unbelievably confused. My pi-sow came back like no big deal. We got some snacks and went back to the house and watched Thai soap operas.

Other than that I discovered the amazingness of the bucket shower. There is just a massive tall tub of freezing cold water and a smaller bucket in the hong nam. You dip the bucket in the water and dump it over your head.

Anyways, I will eventually catch this blog up to present time. Until then... peace.