This is what goodbye looks like

my scrapbooked journal: now an inch thick with travel stories

traveller bands: the yellow stolen from southern belle Lucy, the pink and yellow made for me by girls at the orphanage, the white and red, some string I found on Mod's porch and fashioned into a band

the brown books: messages from everyone at foundation. We all wrote in each others and vowed not to read them until on the plane home. They have quotes from funny happenings here, contact details and just funny things to read. There are so many beautiful and hilarious messages in those pages, testimony to my amazing and hilarious new friends!

thank you cards: from kids at my last placement: a reminder of the children, the lessons, the songs, the games...

I want to say thank you, lastly to so many people- those who started this journey with me- who sponsored me to come out here and the teachers and friends who inspired me to travel. Those who listened to this blog which now has almost 1000 views, that's so cool to see, thank you! And to the wonderful volunteers and travellers who I shared this experiences with, thank you guys. This summer has gone beyond words (coming from someone who writes a lot...). Anyone on this webpage must fall into one of those three categories, so THANK YOU ALL!

Lastly, my wish for anyone reading this page is that they travel. If you can't get on a plane this summer, get a bus and see your own hometown- go to new coffee shops, talk to strangers, get involved in local culture be it temples, theatres or bookstores nearby. Go out and see the world (well, a bit of it...)

Above 1: A quote I found on the wall in Peace Bar (Chiang Rai) and loved instantly
Above 2: Playing my favourite game- how many people can you fit round a table in Doi Chaang

 

Until next time
"Goodbye"
Georgia <3

Vassa (Buddhist lent)

So. (Notice how every time I start a story I begin with "So"? Sorry.).

Arrive in Chiang Mai for the weekend, sitting with the Irish girls in a café, suddenly a parade goes past us- with monks filing, drums banging and floats being pulled by people. The most unexpected thing!

 

This was the start of the huge festival that is Buddhist lent!

Here are the Monks walking through town to the temple where they will spend the next 3 months. Only under exceptional circumstances can a Monk stay overnight anywhere over than this temple until the end of the rainy season.

 

Asarnha Bucha Day, the full-moon day of the eighth lunar month, commemorates the Lord Buddha’s first sermon to his first five disciples after attaining Enlightenment more than 2,500 years ago. Evening candlelit processions will be held in all Thai Buddhist temples.

 

^Google kindly summarised what this is all about. On our way to dinner we walked past a temple to see Monks circling a pagoda, chanting and holding white lilies. It's crazy, how we keep stumbling upon these things!

 

 

Also, alcohol is forbidden to be sold on this day so our plans to hit the town were instantly dismissed...

We arrived at Mirror in the early evening on Tuesday so we could go to a Wat (temple) and observe celebrations. Sadly, Kartoon, our co-ordinator thought the ceremony would be in the evening, but it was in the morning, so we missed it. Instead we visited the 'temple of light' where we walked up 10 flights of stairs, took photos with a giant statue and had our fortunes told. 

Behold. The temple of light.

 

Ash, Trip I and...Buddha!

 

 

Placement no.3: Teaching

My sister, Nikita, after viewing all the fun posts I blog about weekends and evenings here with other volunteers asked me "Do you ever work Georgia?".
Yes. Yes I do!

Yesterday's timetable went something like this-

10-11 Grade 1 Questions   Joy  Gabby  Axel
10-11 Grade 4 Questions  Georgia  Jane  Aisling
11-12 Grade 2 Questions   Jane  Georgia  Gabby
11-12 Grade 5 Questions   Aisling  Axel  Joy

LUNCH

1-2 Grade 3 Question  Gabby Aisling Joy
1-2 Georgia Axel Jane Free
2-3 Grade 6 Question   Jane  Aisling
2-3 Grade 1-3 Song and Game  Gabby Joy
2-3 Grade 4-6 Song and Game  Axel Georgia

5-6 Karen Hilltribe Class  Georgia Jane

I love so much that 'Song and Game' makes up part of the curriculum. As well as meditation and exercise. It's makes for more well rounded students :) This means all the those I learnt in girl guide campfires became vital knowledge. A musical theatre variation of 'When the saints go marching in' became a favourite of the hilltribe girls last night and Aisling and I just taught 'Ollie Ollie Ollie/Oi Oi Oi' to Kindergarten class. Considering the entire chant consists of only two words this was surprisingly difficult. But they loved it :D

I'm trying to work out how to put this photo into better resolution, it's Aisling and I with this morning's kindergarten class :)      (I'm in yellow)

 

Another highlight of this placement has to be playing football with the children. The heat can be intense and yesterday the field was swarming with dragonflies- it was like a horror movie- the field was thick with dragonflies. It was my team vs Axel's team. We're not sure which team won, given the fact we don't know which child was one which team and because there were too many dragonflies to see what was going on. Fun though. Because even in Thai humid heat wearing flip flop I'm good at football. If only because I have a 3ft advantage over my 8 year old teammates...

PS: I may update this post over the weekend with more photos ect. but I want to publish it while we have internet connection (it comes and goes very quickly)

Placement no.3

Above photo: Taken from the hammock. Not the best quality as I forgot my camera so had to use my laptop camera. Hopefully you can make it rice paddies with a mountain backdrop.

 

I'm staying at the Tom  Karen centre- a functioning building with electricity and mosquito-proof windows. We are spoiled (this isn't sarcasm. The place is lovely). The bathroom has a light, an flushing toilet, dry floor and TOILET ROLL. All of this made for a lot of gasping from us volunteers.

 

We teach at a hilltribe school from 9-3 and for an hour after school at the centre.

 

Mod, our host Mum is wonderful. Last night Aisling told her she'd never seen a firefly, Mod ran to get a bamboo mat for us all to sit on and turned off all the lights Ash and I insisted everyone turn off their phones so we sat in complete darkness (it's not like there's any street lighting here..).
Soon fireflies came some only a metre away from us. It's like zooming fairy lights in the sky.

 

Mod also came to our school during lunch hour today and explained she had cooked tofu sweet and sour for Axel and I as the school was making pork curry and she knew Axel was Jewish and I vegetarian. She made food and bought it in for us. I love Mod!
(She also said she would teach us all how to cook Thai food tonight :D )

 

This is Axel, by the way. He's French and when he says 'Hokey Pokey' it sounds like 'Le Honky Pokeny'. I laugh about this approximately ten times a day.

 

 

TEFL: Teaching English (as a) Foreign Language

My favourite moment of teaching was probably when I was teaching ‘Time’ and, in lieu of a board eraser I used my hand. I then wiped my hand across my cheek (on accident) leaving army stripes on my face. The kids found this hilarious. One boy took out his pen and drew stripes across his cheek too (Ha! I’m a trend setter!).

My teacher partner, Steph, commented “You look like GI Joe” while I got the class to chant (chanting is the preferred method of teaching in Thai schools. I don’t know how much I believe in it, but it’s not for me to challenge their methods. After a month here, hearing Buddhist chants in markets, temples and around I realise just how ingrained chanting is in the culture, it makes sense it’s the centre of education, though I think the students memorise things they can’t understand) “One forty five is quarter to two, Two forty five is quarter to three, Three forty five is quarter to four…” and they perfectly echoed the intonation in my British accent. I try to over-enunciate everything I say so they hear distinct vowel sounds. Basically, I speak with Received Pronunciation, think stereotypical ‘posh’ British- Hermione Granger or Mary Poppins.

So that’s my best TEFL moment. Looking like GI Joe, sounding like Mary Poppins, trying not to laugh as a chorus of Eton-sounding Thai children chanted number patterns.

 

Long live the King(s)!

As my home country, England welcomes the son of Kate Middleton and Prince William, a future king, I thought it would be highly topical to mention about Thai royalty.

 

I’m sure the news at home and in America is saturated with news of the royal baby- here it’s not on any channel or news stand. Simply because Thailand has their own royalty so international ones matter little, rather than the Americans, who have Kardashians as the closest claim to royalty...

 

This is the king of Thailand. He, alongside his wife is framed inside of every school playground, classroom, hostel and roadside. You cannot go more than 10 minutes without seeing his picture. It's reverence approaching awe and worship- speaking ill of Thai royalty is also illegal. Foreigners have been jailed for this.

 

Jake's favourite game on the way to school (usually between a 40 minute and hour drive as volunteer accommodation is rural and 30 minutes from the nearest town...) is to play 'King'. Every time you see a picture of the king (or queen) you poke the person next to you.

 

 

This photo's for you Nan! It's Thailand's queen.

 

Mission Waterfall

Woke up around 10.30am, ate a pancake and then some of the others had already made plans and booked transport to take us to a waterfall. So there I was, drowning my pancake in honey to find plans already made for me! Perfect.

 

So, in the heat of mid day (33 degrees) and the humidity that comes with monsoon season, mountains and waterfalls we made the half an hour hike/trek to the enchanting waterfall in Chiang Rai.

 

Man, it was sweaty. And the altitude was HIGH. And the path is rocky (I mean boulders, not pebbles you had to watch your feet the whole walk). But when we reached the top-

Enchanting

*Insert Hallelujah chorus here*

I forgot my swimming costume. So, here I am, in my best dress, after swimming/frocking/posing/climbing the waterfall. That was fun. Imagine being so hot and so tired and so sweaty and then reaching a paradise. That was the best shower I’ve ever had.

Tree Three Free

I’ve spent the last two days tutoring this girl for an English competition; she’s reciting the story of ‘The Three Little Pigs’. I think the volunteer who taught her numbers must have been Irish because she kept saying the ‘tree little pigs’ which was equally endearing and frustrating, it’s cute, but it’s wrong.

We chanted ‘Three, Three Three’
We counted ‘One, Two, THREE’
We walked outside, I pointed to a tree and demonstrated “This is Tree, you say Three”
All to no avail.

Then miracle struck, in the form of Youtube. I got up John Mayer’s ‘Free Falling’ because in the chorus there’s an on going repetition of ‘I’m FREE FALLING’ and the ‘free’ is the same sound used for ‘three’ so I played that on loud and she started singing ‘FREE FALLING, NOW I’M- FREE FALLING NO-OW’ with John Mayer and I (paha!).
And suddenly, after two days of wanting to head desk, she could pronounce ‘Three’.

I took a shameless selfie just after that moment. Here’s us, after singing John Mayer (for totally academic purposes) :P

 

Open your eyes and the world will open up to you

Note: This blog is basically yesterday's journal typed up with some photos slotted in because I know people back home like to 'see' stuff. I'm having a great time, but I want this blog to be a real reflection of this experience- not all saccharine and twee. So I'll leave the stories of massages and gold temples for another blog. Here's a very different story-

"I knew I was volunteering in a third world country. But the poverty is hard to understand. I was angry at first to see skinny cats wander round the foundation. I pointed this out to Momo and she said “that’s what a cat’s supposed to look like Georgia, that’s how they look in India too; you feed them too much in England”. And I wonder which is true?

Then there’s the stories Thai staff told us about stray dogs in Chiang Rai getting driven to Vietnam and sold as meat. Wait, what? Cute fluffy stray dogs… but then I remembered horsemeat and Tesco and I wonder just how similar or different the East is from the West.

We were told in Orientation that we’ll be teaching in the poorest parts of the country. You don’t see that when the classrooms I teach in are pastel painted and decorated with children’s work and paper flowers. But the kids sleep on blankets on the floor in their homes and the nearby stream I’ve seen the hilltribe kids play, bathe and dive in is a murky brown. It could hold any number of diseases or snakes. But they are happy.

It’s hard to say what I really want to say here. It’s fascinating, for sure, this world so far from home. And weirdly, I’ve felt calm all the time I’ve been here- I’m happy to leave all my valuables in the back of a taxi for the day and trust the driver will return when we phone him, or dance in smoky clubs all night with people I met that morning.
If that’s one thing I’m learning, it’s that people are people. And however crazy it sounds, trust everyone you meet, everywhere you go; you’ll never be lost, alone or bored."

 

 

My Senior Prom Night

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytBR7ET_6uU

Tonight, back in England it's my senior Prom.
The story Facebook shows is of girls in pretty dresses and boys in tuxes sitting in a decorated room.
I'm on a bamboo platform hut, totally exposed to the elements in rural east Asia. It's Tom, Andy, Sam, Jake and I. The conversation alternates from sociology and cultural politics to the stuff you would expect teenagers to speak about.

But tonight's incredible. So much more so than Prom could ever have been. Ever. Last week, these guys were strangers, tonight the only thing louder than the laughter is the rain- it's a monsoon. Torrential, deafening, but not cold, heaving streaming, pouring, like you've never seen it rain. So we sit for a few hours, until gone midnight on this platform. Listening to crickets. Watching fireflies.

I've never seen a firefly before.

 

First School Placement

Note: I’ve been on a homestay for a couple of days now, and everyone could get wifi except me! So sorry it’s taken so long. Blogging will probably be pretty erratic, even at the foundation it’s hard to get signal unless no one else is connected (never) so  I’ll have to wait until 1am or something…

On Wednesday morning a van pulled into the foundation to transport my group to Chiang Rai for our first placement. The man on the left of this photo with tasselled socks is the head teacher for the next few days he’s our go to guy, whenever any of us asks a question like “What time do we start teaching” he laughs and says “Don’t be serious!”, I think that’s his favourite phrase, in Thailand there’s never any schedule, you just have to ‘go with it’ and be prepared to tear up the lesson plans. He, like all his students is wearing a scout uniform as that’s what they wear on Wednesdays.
 We’re the first international student teachers the school has had and they were as excited we were there as we were to be there, which was really fun. The head teacher (his English name is Jimi) took a photo of us all in the van before we got to the school to send to the staffroom because everyone was really excited.

The staff room was gorgeous!

He gave us a tour of his school and all the students wai’d to us (a wai is when you put your palms together and bow your head, it is used as both a greeting and a sign of respect).  We are expected to wai back to teachers who have the same status as us but not to the children. All my wais to teachers were conducted with my water bottle between my palms. I’m not sure if this is allowed but I was thirsty and didn’t want to go anywhere without my water!

 

The Thai sense of humour is cute. They like to laugh. So I spend lessons pulling faces, dancing round and trying to get them to shout answers back. At first they shyly laughed but by the end they were all dancing, even the shy kids (special credits to the kids that did ‘Gangnam Style’ with me). That was funny. We can’t speak Thai and they speak little English so minutes were spent repeating “you have paper?” and waving paper in the air to no avail, but when I said ‘Gangnam Style’ every child knew to start horse hopping.

Classes!

 

Our third class of the day were impossibly shy, going round and asking their names was painful, I couldn’t hear most of them. So we made paper hats and everyone wrote their names on the hats.

While on the tour the head teacher pointed out one boy in the class and told the group he was a host family one pair would stay with. The little boy (he’s 8) then pointed at me and said something in Thai, roughly translating as “I want her!” all the teachers and students laughed, the joke was lost on us but later translated. So that’s how Chandra and I joined the Chutimadee family.

The 48 hour day, Villages and Campfire-ing

 

I planned to write about the journey here (I arrived in London at 9.30am and landed in Chiang Rai at 9.35am (Thai time). Which was confusing. Basically I spent 24 hours travelling across a time zone and arrived 5 minutes later, the next day. I didn’t sleep for 48 hours, I had breakfast-lunch-dinner-breakfast-lunch-dinner and then slept (for 6 hours). And then this morning I woke up (voluntarily) at 6am for a shower. A cold water shower. Hot water doesn't exist here.

Anyway, instead of writing about the foundation or things that happened over the 48 hours I wanted to write about this evening. There’s around 60 volunteers right now from all over the world: Ireland, India, America, Canada, France…and we’re all aged between 18-27 so it’s like being at a summer camp. Constant craziness and banter. It’s also hilarious the language differences between US/UK/Australian/Canadian English. We all keep laughing at each other and having to explain what was funny. Example-

Emily: I’m just going to nip to the toilet
Steph: You’re going to  do what to the toilet?

Steph: We just had our national celebrations
Emily: Independence day?
Steph:*laughs* No, it’s like Canada’s birthday?
Me: (deapan) What do you do, bake a cake?

Then we walked into the local village. The village shop is basically a load of products at the front of this womans house. Her cats and kids run around the ‘store’ (her house) this never fails to amuse me. It’s so far from CMK: the huge air conditioned shopping complex. She then told us if we turned right we could visit her hilltribe village, and that seemed to nice and offer to pass up. So four of us went.

We also befriended the cutest hilltribe kids who we played with for a while.

 

Tonight we decided to make a fire.
I love campfires. Campfires camping, campfires at parties. So when an older volunteer mentioned we could make campfires whenever we wanted I was literally like-

 

 

The foundation is located between all these hills covered in lush green jungle so it’s the most beautiful place to be. It’s superhumanly beautiful: lightning on the hillside, dragonflies and twenty teens and twenty-something's sitting on logs under the stars. We could literally be the advert for a travel brochure. Then MoMo got out her Ukulele so we all sang (cumbaya style) 'I'm Yours' and 'The A Team' and roasted bananas (you don’t get marshmallows here. You can't get anything sugary in Thailand it seems, but that’s a whole other blog!).

 

 

 

"Hello Blogspot"

So, in July I'm off to Thailand for a month to teach English to school children and monks with 'The Mirror Foundation' through an agency called IVHQ. This blog is for family, friends and anyone else who is interested to open my journal and read a diary of my thoughts, photos and experiences while I'm 12,626km away. I didn't want to be "that girl" on a 'gap yar' annoying everyone on Facebook with constant travel status' in a smug hipster way so I've got a blog so people can tune in/tune out instead.

It's going to be fun and challenging. The trip. But also using BlogSpot as I'm unbelievably bad with technology (when I say bad I mean last month I actually found out how to change the ringtone on the phone I've had for 2 years...). Right now I've got a pile of paperwork to get through- application forms, visa, passport, CRB, insurance, flights, medical checks and all the forms that go with university and student bank accounts...fun.

Thanks for coming along the ride with me. I promise the next post will be more interesting!