It's miserable and magical, Oh yeah

Previous blogposts of waterfalls and generally pretty things paint an illusion that we volunteers live in luxury. You could say we live 'la viva loca' or that we 'viva la viva' or celebrate 'la vie boheme' because my memories here are wonderful. But most of us are living 'on a shoestring' so we stay in the cheapest hostels avaliable (as long as it's clean I don't care) but yesterday the sink fell off the wall in the bathroom when I put down a toothbrush. It ain't luxury!

Today's hostel has the benefits of sinks securely attached to the wall (I checked) but the water comes out black so I'm washing and brushing using bottled water. It's gross and it's grim but there's about 30 of us staying here so it's kinda great.

 Walking today with Karan and Ash- we didn't make plans or directions. We wanted just to see the city without a guide or attractions, so walking down backstreets, turning random corners we came across a terracotta garden- full of old broken statues of deities: both Hindu and Buddhist :)

 

 

This reminds me of the Muses from Hercules, Thai style!

 

 This is my favourite photo from today. It was so hot and we'd been walking some time. So Ash and Karan found some shade and lay down. This is their high five in relief of the cool breeze.

Obligatory hipster photo

 

Yesterday everyone went to different restaurants and cafes. I've been here 3 weeks now and had never eaten street food, which is embarrassing considering Thailand has world class food for, like 30p on it's streets. So I walked around and got a pancake, some fried rice (funny how as soon as I leave the foundation I crave rice) and another dragon fruit smoothie. It was one of the coolest things because yesterday was the first day of Buddhist lent so I could taste the incense in the air, gongs were sounding and the drone of chants in unison carried over the yells of vendors and hustle. I kept walking until I found a more secluded area- which was full of locals- always a good sign. I sat (cross legged on the floor of a marquee, thai style) eating my food while a group of novice monks (teenagers) sat about a metre away from me, laughing with each other and passers by and switching their face and posture to reverent and melancholy whenever the older monk accompanying them turned around.

I also didn't bring my camera, it was nice to just experience something without looking at it through a lens.

 

 

 On a completely separate note: Thank you to the over 700 people who have viewed this blog- friends, family, strangers and fellow travellers. My sister, Nikita, is currently in Washington DC, America doing an internship in a Naval museum. For any readers here interested in culture and travel here's the link http://nikitagoestotheothersideofthepond.blogspot.com/ 

 

 

 

Thai Culture

FOOD!

Not gonna lie. The thought of eating something other than rice has me excited all week long. Because there’s only so much comfort given by Oreos. So while people around me plan temples to visit and daytrips, I create menus in my head. Tonight I had a cocoa frappe (a week without dairy products made the arrival of a cream-laden chocolatley drink to my table worthy of whooping) tomato soup, fries (A CARB THAT ISN’T RICE!) and a Dragonfruit (try it) and Kiwi smoothie. I’ve literally been walking round the town making food plans for tomorrow “So breakfast can be pancakes and then it’ll be pizza for dinner…”.

On weekends we volunteers tend to gorge ourselves on western food- fries, pizza, milk, cheese, chocolate, waffles, pancakes. Obviously the rich, oily, sugariness came as a shock after a week of rice so a lot of us spend Saturday night feeling ill. But I have no regrets

This is half the volunteer group at Doi Chaang, the Asian version of Starbucks. So far I’ve had around thirty bowls of rice. Rice is good. Rice is constant. It’s the side dishes- the mushy dark green, foul looking vegetables that I’ve taken to avoiding. Ew. Hey, I tried them. My first week I tried every dish but I kept making this face, every meal. So I soon gave up.

 

PANTS!

I don't know if there's an actual name for these type of trousers but we all just call them pants. Perfect for this climate: loose fitting, pretty pattern cotton pants. We all wear pants. We all love pants. Pants! That is all.

 

SA WAT DE KA!

This is the standard Thai greeting (for girls, for guys it’s Sa Wat De Krup). You cannot buy anything at the shop, ask a question or say hello without saying SA WAT DE KA!  And wai-ing. (Smiles are also obligatory :D )

 

MOSQUITO NETS!

SQUAT TOILET!

Urgh. Not so glamorous. There’s not really much to say about squat toilets, except that they are everywhere and they are not my favourite thing.

 

MONKS!

The Monks here are just Thai men who happen to wear orange robes. They own iPhones, have tattoos and go to cafes around town.

 

SHOES!

In Asian culture it’s polite to take your shoes off before entering any temple, classroom ands some cafes.                   

 

THAI TIME!

Everything runs late. I call it “running on thai time” because if you arrange to meet up at 8.30 and show up at 9.15 you’re not considered late. Similarly, last week my first class of the day started at 9am but the school didn’t collect me until 9.15am.

Above: Chiang Rai clock tower that lights up on the hour

 SKIN WHITENING!

It's funny how at home everyone wants to be more tan and here girls lather themselves in skin whitening products...

 

STREET VENDORS!

For those brave enough (so far Emily and Sam) there is a variety of fried insects to buy and eat. That’s right. People PAY to eat bugs here. Mealworms and Crickets and other winged beetle things.

 I was quite excited about getting street food, which is world class here. Here I am, getting a dragonfruit smoothie. I think my excitement shows…

 

 

 



 

 

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."

 

 

Weekend Adventures!

We get time in the evenings and weekend to do what we like. It’s fun- the girls on my last placement were English, Irish, American, Australian, New Zealand and India so dinnertimes sitting round talking about gun crime felt like a UN meeting with all our different accents. We’ve been visiting 7/11’s (like a corner shop) and stocking up on oreos and things. Oreo is now a food group in my diet.

 Visiting the White temple (Chiang Rai). It is, like it's name suggests, a white temple.

 The Night Bazaar in Chiang Rai. Here's where I bought some pants we all wear out here and it's full of Asian food to try (Sam, Lisa and I got some deep fried banana. You should try it)

 Lilly and I out in Chaing Mai (everyone went out to celebrate Kate's 20th birthday). I didn't know the cocktail matched my dress until it came over. Cute!

We stayed out until 3am. I told Kate in Britain it's still technically her birthday so we should keep celebrating. So we all (Josh, Tom, Alex, Martin, Lauren, Kate, Lucy, Laura, Arthur and I've forgotten a name...) went to nightclubs and rain dances in the street.

 10 of us in a songtao (pronounced song-toe). You can also have two people hang off the back on rails. There's no safety standards in Asia.

 

Behold: This weekend's hostel. It costs 400baht for two nights (almost £9! And it's gorgeous!)

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.

 

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!).