Bangkok (English Play)

After Korat I went to 2 days of school, one of which wasn't really school because there was a festival, so there were no classes. The night of the 2nd day, I came back to school around 10 to meet up with the cast of the school's play The Wizard of Oz (in English). I waited around for an hour or so, then vans came to pick us all up at midnight. From there, we drove to Bangkok, which took 6.5 hours about. I really don't remember much, I had my ipod playin tunes, and I was sleeping. We got to the AUAA campus (American University Alumni Association) and headed up the their auditorium so the actors could practice on the new stage. After they practiced, we headed to the hotel for lunch, and clean clothes. Once we had eaten, the girls went shopping, and me and a few guys went to go look for something to do. We ended up settling on going to see a movie: Death Race. It was pretty awesome, and after that we went back to the hotel for more food and down time. The next day, we got up pretty early to eat, and go back to the AUAA for the actual competition. There was more practice in the morning, and at 2:30, the real competition started. None of the plays were full length, most of them were under 20 minutes. Ours went 2nd, and did the best I've ever seen them, which still wasn't very good. After all the plays had finished, the best in my opinion being Hamlet (translated into normal English), performed by the regional winner from Bangkok. There was a short break, then the judges made their decision. We got 4th place out of 5, and Hamlet ended up winning. From there, we got into the vans, and drove to a market for food and more shopping. After we'd eaten, we started the long drive home. We didn't get back to the school until 3 in the morning, so I didn't get to sleep until about 4, then woke up at 10 this morning. Overall it was a really fun and relaxing trip, and I got to see Oam; he came to watch the play. Hopefully I'll get to go on another trip soon; but thus far, I haven't known until a day or two before, so who knows.

-Jamie

Korat (Project Work Expo)

Sorry that I haven't posted in a couple weeks, I've either done nothing, or been really busy. The busy was fun busy though, and recently I've taken two long road trips to two separate competitions. The first of which, was the Project Work competition, which is where a team of 3-5 people research a topic, really any topic they want, and make a presentation about it. I went along, because there is a seperate section of the competition for English Project Works; so I was there to help with English, and to carry things. It was pretty fun though, and there were a lot of kids from my school that went. The Expo was inside one of the college's buildings, and right across the street, there was a really big hotel that we stayed 3 nights in I believe. But before we got to the hotel, we stopped at Farm ChokChai on the way. This farm was very interesting. First thing we did was get off the bus, and go find something to eat. Me, Tata, and some of his friends walked around looking for somewhere to eat that wouldn't kill our wallets, and we took a few pictures too. Eventually we settled on the ChokChai hamburger house, or something along those lines. I ordered a beef burger, and it definitely didn't taste like the beef does back home, but there was cool music playing (My Sharona and Kung Fu Fighting) so it was neat. After that we walked around the gift shops waiting for our turn to do the Farm Tour. The school paid for the tickets, so there was no reason not to go. Once we got inside, we watched a short film about the founding of the Farm, which again, was very interesting. After that, we went outside, walked through some antibacterial solution, and headed to the milking parlor. When we were there, the farmers milked the cows by hand a little, then showed us the big milking machine, then let a few of the audience try to milk by hand; I got a few pictures, and will be uploading a ton once I get the right adapter. Anyways, from there we got onto this big train of wagons attached to a tractor, and drove off to see a cowboy show. There was gun twirling, and lassoing, and horse back riding. After we watched that, a few of the guys went over to a bunch of ATV's, and paid 180฿ to ride them slowly around a track once. After that we got back in the wagons, and saw about 4 different mini dog shows. Jumping through hoops, counting, obstacle course, etc. The whole thing took about 2 hours and 30 minutes. After that we got back on the bus, and went to the factory outlet, where some of the people got off the bus and bought stuff, but I didn't. Then we headed to the hotel, and the next day all the Project Works were presented, and the day after that they were judged. After the judging we packed up the bus with all the projects, and headed home.

P.S. Sorry if you've emailed me and I haven't responded; I'm trying to only answer them once a week. I'll reply to everybody's emails in 3 days.

-Jamie

First School Day

School for me is not really educational... for two reasons today. I don't speak Thai enough to understand what's going on, and there was only one one hour class today. Maybe more, there wasn't a clock in the room and I didn't care. Instead of back home where the kids move classrooms, all 40 of us kids were in one classroom, and the teacher came in about an hour after everybody got there. Basically how it works is: we got to school, met up with some of Tata (My older, but younger than Toto, host brother)'s friends, and got to the classroom. Once there, they kind of introduced me to some people, and people introduced themselves to me; simply because I was the whitest person in the school. After socializing for an hour, the teacher came in to teach math. Not just math though, Trigonometry, and it was weird Trig, so I pulled out my reading book and drifted off into fantasy land. After the teacher left we mingled for a little while, then Tata said he was going to go meet with his girlfriend, so I went with some of his friends to get some lunch. We walked over to a noodle cart while it was "raining"(a light drizzle by Oregonian standards :) ) and got noodle soup. It was really, really, really good. Probably some of the best food I've had since Bangkok, and this was just from a street vendor by the school. After everyone was done eating, we headed back to the school, and found out that there wasn't going to be another class, so we decided to go shoot some hoops. Since I was the white kid, I was automatically the best in their heads, and as it turns out, I pretty much was; even though I'm average in America. After a game or two, we were all hearded into the actual gym, which has concrete floors by the way, and sat down. It wasn't just sitting though, we sat in rows and columns cross legged. We sat like this for 3 whole hours. It was interesting for everyone else, but again, I still can't speak Thai. Near the end of the 3 hours, some type of tradition something something was going on, I have no idea, and nobody can figure out how to explain it to me. Still sitting cross legged, we bent over and put our foreheads and hands on the person in front of us' back. We sat like that for a good 20 minutes, with the leaders shouting at us; why? I have no idea. Some of the instructor people came and got me, again, because I'm white, and made me introduce myself to everybody. The introduction however, was not just an introduction, it was a song and dance routine. Literally. That was embarassing and interesting, but I lived. After that, school was over. We were going to get ice cream, but there was a KFC right across from the ice cream parlor, so everyone else wanted to go there. It is not our KFC, but oh my god was it nice to eat fatty greasy American food. It was the standard chicken, but one kind was breaded with chili batter. Also, they had regular fries, and the Ketchup was sweet. It was weird, but still amazingly good to get some fast food in me. After KFC, we went home on a pick-up truck that was basically a taxi bus. Then, I turned on the Olympics to see the Womens 150m freestyle, and some weightlifting. I tried to use the laptop at the house, but it gave me a BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death for those of you n00b5), so I asked my brother to take me on our cousin's scooter to an internet cafe, which is where I'm sitting now, shoeless, telling you all about my day. Hope you all are having fun!
Jamie

Koen Kaen

Today was my first day at school; it was pretty cool. Before I get into that though, I'll talk a bit about yesterday. First thing that really started the day, was calling home. That was really a jump start for the rest of the day. I was feeling really depressed then, and although while I was on the phone things only felt worse, I felt better afterwards. My parents convinced me to fess up to my host parents about being homesick and lonely, so I told my host mom that whilst fending off more tears. She immediately sympathized, and about an hour later my host cousin was going to go to Koen Kaen, basically the biggest city in Maha Sarakham province, and essentially just a huge mall. He was going to shop for furniture, but it was fun anways. I had a nice conversation with Bio (my cousin) about his job. He owns and operates his own IT firm, as well as selling computers. When we got to Koen Kaen we shopped around for furniture a little bit, then met up with my older host brother Toto. From there we went to the central mall, and ate Japanese food. It was the same thing as in Bangkok too, there was a pot of boiling... liquid... in the center of the table, and you threw stuff in to basically make a stew. So we ate that, and my host brother and I finished before my cousin, because he had gone of shopping with a girl, who I'm still not exactly sure who she is. Anyways; my host brother and I went off to just be mall rats, when we ran into the miniature arcade. They had a PS2 that was hooked up to a machine that would turn the controllers on for X minutes; depending on how much money you put in. Toto and I played soccer for about 15 minutes on the Play Station, and then I went over to play "Guitar Beat"(An arcade version of Guitar Hero 1). I didn't really know any of the songs, so to be safe, I went with "More Than A Feeling" by Boston of course, on expert, and kicked it. After that we met up with Bio, and headed home.

First Day

My first real day in Thailand wasn't actually until yesterday. Our flight got in at 11:45 local time, not including customs and immigration. By the time we had left the airport, it was already 1:00 am. There is another exchange student named Daniel Rosas, who is from California, that flew in with me and is in the same city. We were picked up by the counselor for our rotary club, and her student Oam. We stayed the night at her sister's house, but I didn't get much sleep. Later that day: Oam, Daniel and I took a taxi to the Bangkok Skyrail station. The taxi driving is insane, and it's amazing that nobody dies. The Skyrail runs through Bangkok, and we got off at the stop that was right next to the main shopping center. We started to wander around the first mall, but then we discovered that it was mostly clothes. Clothes shopping didn't sound too appealing, so we walked over to the other mall. This other mall is coincidentally the biggest mall in Asia, square footage wise. Each floor is about the size of any other mall, maybe a bit smaller, but there are 7 floors! The top floor has an entire full size movie theater, Imax included. I knew what I wanted though, so first thing first, I bought myself a phone. After that we ate some Japanese food, that was really, really good. After eating we had a couple hours to kill, so we wandered up to the movie theater. ON THE 7TH FLOOR. The movie tickets were about 4$ for matinee, but 2.50$ after 8:30. Oam said that he hadn't seen the Dark Knight yet, and even though Daniel and I both had, we saw it because it's so amazing. A popcorn and pop combo was around 3$, but we didn't get any. After the movie, we wandered around trying to find a taxi that would take us home, but nobody would. We decided to take the Skytrain again, and as we were going up to it, I saw why nobody would take us. The streets were PACKED. There was traffic backed up for easily a half mile. It was insane. So once we got off the Skytain, we got a taxi back to the house, which still took a bit of searching. We sat in traffic for a grand total of probably 20 minutes on a 40 minute drive. We got back to the house around 7:30, which gave us just enough time to pack, and flag down two taxis to take us to the bus station. I was the lucky one that got to ride alone. Oam was going with us, so he and Daniel were in another cab. I just sat and watched Dodgeball on my ipod, which the cab driver was strangely very interested in. He also seemed to want to buy my hat, but I can't be sure. Seeing as he spoke very very little English (only hello, thank you, and good bye) and I speak very little Thai (about the same as his English) it was kind of awkward. When I got to the bus station I waited with my bags for Oam and Daniel. Once they arrived, we waited for our bus to come. Oam had paid extra to get us VIP seats, which were at the front of the bus with plenty of sleeping room. I finished watching Dodgeball, then watched Transformers. At some time during Transformers it was paused, and all of a sudden I woke up a half hour later. I on and off slept after the two movies were finished. The bus ride was a total of 7 hours. My host family was there to pick me up. They are all really nice, and I'm trying to get settled in. I hope everybody at home is having fun and doing well. I'll try and post another blog next week.
Sa wat dee krab,
Jamie.