Monday, April 4, 2011

Singpore Day 2


Woke up bright and early this morning to leave for church at 8:15am! They go to a Methodist church of which Pak Kheng’s parents were some of the founding members. It was pretty funny because, while usually I do not like to single myself out as a newcomer when the pastor asks who is there for the first time, today it did not work, as I was literally the only white person in the entire congregation. The pastor looked right at me until I raised my hand. Hahahahaah. There was no being anonymous in that crowd! After church I met a bunch of new people whose names I forgot immediately, of course. Everyone wanted to know why I was going to Thailand and what the story of my visa was.

Pak Kheng’s uncle told me a story about 50 years ago when he went to Chiang Mai from Bangkok and the roads were not paved. They took a night bus up the road and they had to drive with all the interior lights off so that robbers would not be able to see inside and try to stick them up. When they arrived the following morning, everyone’s hair was red from the dust of the road!
This afternoon, Pak Kheng will take me to the subway and show me how to get to and from the embassy tomorrow morning. I have all my paperwork ready to go: passport photos, copies of my passport, my invitation letter, my application and my flight itinerary. I just pray that it is all enough and that the line for visas is small so that I can get it back by Tuesday. Tim Byers, the CEO of Kijikandee Foundation, said that he has been able to turn it in at 9am and get it back the same day, so that would be amazing, but I’m not super optimistic, judging from the way things have gone thus far. Tune in tomorrow for more visa updates!
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Sunday, April 3, 2011

Singapore Day 1


Got up very early this morning, headed to the SkyTrain to get to the airport. I left about 6:30am. I’m glad I left when I did because if I had to catch a later train, I may have not made the plane in time. The airport link seems to only come every 15 minutes or so. First, I took the BTS train to the Airport Link train, then waited and waited for that train. It only took about 20 minutes to get to the airport because there are only 6 stops from end to end of that route, but I was still a little nervous about making my flight. Thankfully, when I got to the airport, they opened up a new line just when I got there. There was a long line of people in front of me, but they seemed to all be part of the same group, so I didn’t feel bad jumping over to the new line. Plus, I had no bags to check, so why not, right?
Flight was delayed but uneventful. Arrival in Singapore was a pain. There were several other flights arriving at the same time into the passport control area and I didn’t know the address of the place I was staying! The one piece of info I always forget when flying into another country. You’d think I would have learned this by now. For crying out loud, I’ve filled up a passport and a half, yet I never fail to forget this minor detail of a local address. Anyway, as per usual, I end up in the slowest line. I watched the line next to me as 5 people went through for every 1 person in my line. So frustrating! It took an hour to get through, and I was meeting Gillian’s aunt, so I was feeling bad about making them wait this whole time. Plus, I couldn’t call their number from my phone. Luckily, Pak Kheng, Gillian’s aunt, called my phone so I could tell her what the holdup was.
By the time I got through passport control, I rushed outside the airport and right past Pak Kheng! She finally found me outside. Hahah I should have been paying more attention. Well, of course she and Philip, her husband, took me right to eat lunch and started stuffing me with food. I felt bad because when it’s hot and humid, my appetite disappears and I get full much faster, so I wasn’t able to finish everything they bought for me. I did have a nice coconut though. Man, that juice is good!
We ate in a nice park right on the beach, so after lunch, we went for a walk around a reservoir where they have cable waterskiing. This is an amazing thing. Maybe you have heard about it, but I hadn’t. Basically, there are a string of cables that encircle the area high above the water. You strap on this wakeboard as if it were a snowboard, boots, bindings and all. The cable runs continuously and they strap you onto it as it goes by. It pulls you off the platform and into the water, and you have to stay upright. You can either go just on the water, or there are a whole bunch of jumps you can do for tricks. We watched a bunch of people do it and were impressed, but when we walked to the launching place, we saw that it was more difficult than it looked. One guy just kept crashing upon hitting the water. I looked at the prices and you could pay $32 for an hour or $7 for just one go round. However, the stipulation was that no matter where you fall, that counts as one round. So, the bloke that was falling off the platform would have had that count as his $7. I hope he paid for an hour! Even with the difficulty, it still looked like fun. Maybe someday I’ll try it in the States. 

I got a tour of the amazing beautiful house that was designed by Philip and Pak Kheng. It’s very open with lots of natural light and windows. They even have a wet kitchen and a dry kitchen. I guess it’s a Chinese thing, so the smells of the Chinese food can float out into the world and not get embedded into the walls of the house. They live here with Jonathan, their son, and Pak Kheng’s mother. It’s a great family.
I needed to get passport photos taken for both the visa and for my work permit, so Pak Kheng took me down the hill to the photo place and I got some shots taken. While we waited, we stopped at a fruit juice stand. You know how I love me some fresh fruit juice! They had freshly squeezed lime juice and Chinese pears, which I LOVE. Pak Kheng refuses to let me pay for anything! She is too generous!
So, today is Pak Kheng’s niece’s 25th birthday and a bunch of family is coming over to celebrate! We had to go grocery shopping for dinner, so we headed to the market and finally I was able to change some money. I need $100 Singapore dollars and I have to have exact change, so I got that done. When we got back to the house, the family was all here. Stephanie and Samantha are the cousins and their parents were also here.
Samantha is quite the chef and prepared lamb and mashed potatoes and potato salad for dinner. I tried to help, but it was a situation of too many cooks in the kitchen and I was just getting in the way. Haha I ended up just hanging out with Steph and chatting while dinner was being made. The men grilled some steaks and there was also soup. It was quite the feast! We all sat down to dinner and had a lovely time. Steph and Sam went to university and some of high school in Australia, so their accents are very fluid, especially Samantha’s. Sometimes she sounds American, sometimes Chinese and sometimes Aussie, depending on what she is talking about and who she is talking to. It made me laugh.
After dinner, we (Jon, Steph, Sam, Paul (Sam’s boyfriend), and I) attempted to play a game of Monopoly cards, which is highly confusing, but were interrupted by the demand for birthday cake, so the game was abandoned in favor of more conversation. Eventually, I just got too tired, and Pak Kheng started kicking people out, so I just went to bed. We had to get up for church early anyway.
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Saturday, April 2, 2011

Bangkok Holiday


Wow, my day here was a much needed break from visa stress! Bangkok is a pretty cool city, but it’s HUGE. Way bigger than Chiang Mai. They have a proper bus system and a subway and skytrain!
Stephen and Allison have a suite, so they have a really nice bathroom with a rainspout shower. It was the best shower I’ve ever had in Thailand! The shower in most places in Chiang Mai is a little electrical heater that heats the water a little at a time, so this was a nice luxury.
Since they are staying at the Marriott, they get free breakfast, so it was quite the spread. Egg and waffle bar, fresh fruit, pastries, plus local cuisine. I got to meet the executive producers and we chatted for a bit about what I was doing up in Chiang Mai. They are also Christians and the movie is another faith-based film, so it was nice that they knew a little about The Garden of Hope already and I didn’t have to explain it. Laurie invited me to come to her daughters’ birthday party that afternoon. Allison was happy about that because they had rented out a room at a bowling alley, so she didn’t want me to feel like I was crashing the party. Laurie said the more, the merrier, so we were all set. She wanted to hear more about what I was doing in Thailand as well, so we decided to talk later.
Stephen has been working like a crazy person on the movie for two months, so he finally got a day off and we decided to visit the Grand Palace and the Reclining Buddha. We took a taxi there and walked around for the morning. The Palace is beautiful and very ornate. It’s all very shiny and there are Buddhas EVERYWHERE. Everything is very large too. I took a bunch of pictures and a couple with myself in them. We went into the large temple where everyone had to take off their shoes. 


The most impressive thing to me was the elaborate wall murals and paintings. One little temple area had what looked like Buddha wallpaper, but upon closer inspection it was all handpainted! The moustaches were all a bit different, and the eyes too. Stephen joked about the guy who drew the first one. “He was probably like, ‘OK, Bob, Joe, Frank, do it like this, only ALL over.’” Haha. Of course, insert Thai names there!
After we were palaced out, we tried to figure out how to get to the Reclining Buddha. We wandered around for a bit, looked at the map and finally figured out which Wat it was in. This is also the place where Thai massage was born, and there is still a Thai massage school there.
So, the Reclining Buddha is HUGE but the building that protects it is not very well made. I mean, it’s fancy and all, but there are these huge pillars that block large parts of the Buddha. You can’t really get a good view of how large it is. It’s like they built the Buddha, then built the building JUST big enough to fit around it. The tip of Buddha’s hat is actually touching the ceiling. If they had made the building larger, they could have put the pillars further away and taken publicity photos to show what it looks like, but now, there’s no place to view the entire sculpture. 

There were a bunch of other buildings in that little compound and, most incongruously, a huge basketball hoop. Stephen was like “Can you just picture a monk in a tunic flying through the air to slam the ball? He’d be like ‘I OWNED you! Sa wat dee krup.’” Plus, there was a weird beeping sound coming form inside a tree next to the bball hoop. I was like, “Uh, did someone throw an alarm clock in there or something?” Apparently it’s actually a bird. That must be one tired bird. The beeping is pretty consistent and fast. It kind of sounds like a car alarm.
After the Reclining Buddha, we called Allison and planned to meet up with her and the kids at the food court at one of the malls. There are 4 places called “Central” something in the center of town. Highly original. This place is simply called “Central” which is different from “Central Plaza,” “The Center” and something else that I forgot. It’s one big building of a department store and it’s 7 stories tall. The top floor is a ginormous food court area. You get a cardboard ticket with a barcode on it and you get food from whichever stand you want and they scan it. Then when you leave, you pay for it all together. Pretty smart. I just wanted fruit juice and Allison and Stephen got smoothies.
The kids who were there are the twin daughters of the producers, Whitney, a college girl who is a family friend of the producers and the twins and MJ who is the son of the Laurie’s best friend. The twins were turning 15, so after we ate, they went back to the hotel while we bought them birthday presents. (By we I mean everyone other than me. I did help pick out some coloring books though.)
We jumped on the SkyTrain to the huge mall that has a whole floor devoted to high end cars, Maseratis, Lambourghinis, Mercedes. I have no idea how they get them up to the 4th floor, but, more importantly, if you want to buy one how would you get it DOWN? 

They also have an IMAX and a full bowling alley and karaoke rooms. This place is amazing. The bowling alley has 24 lanes, plus 2 platinum suites. They had rented out one of the platinum suites for the party. This has 4 bowling lanes, couches, an eating area and a karaoke room all together. It was booked for 2 hours. We had a lot of fun. I only played 2 games because my arm was hurting, but they had snacks and drinks and three types of birthday cake. When it was time to sing, we sang to each girl individually, which I thought was a nice touch. They alternate years as to who gets sung to first and they are in charge of keeping track of whose year it is. Too cute. They turned 15 this year and I asked if this is the coolest place they have ever spent their birthday, they enthusiastically said “YES.” Although, they did live in Macedonia for 6 years of their life, so I would imagine that was pretty cool too. Their younger sister was also there and was much more interested in belting out karaoke than bowling. For some reason she was into singing all the Abba songs. haha  

While I was at the party, I also met another of Laurie’s friends, Rose, who knows about The Garden of Hope/Taw Saeng. She was actually supposed to meet with Rob and Judy when she was in Chiang Mai the week before I came, but it didn’t work out. She’s very excited that we’ve now met so she has a contact with the organization. She runs a company that employs girls at a decent wage to make free trade products like pajamas, purses and other textiles. They have a factory in Chiang Mai, which is why she was up there. She will be back on October, so I will probably see her then as well when she comes to visit the TS center. I need to get the website info from her so you can purchase some free trade clothes if you are interested. Stay tuned for that information.
Post-party, we headed down to the market, got some food for dinner (a nice American meal of spaghetti and bruscetta) and went back to the hotel. While Stephen went for a run, I tried without success to purchase a plane ticket from Singapore to Chiang Mai. Using my debit card here is proving to be quite the challenge!  I don’t know why, since it can also be used as a credit card and I’ve used it all over the world, but for some reason, I can’t seem to use it anywhere in Thailand except ATMS. Anyway, I ended up just having Rob and Judy get my ticket and I’ll pay them back next week. Thank goodness for good friends! I also got directions on how to get to the airport in the morning via SkyTrain. It was much cheaper than the taxi would have been. The taxi from the airport to the hotel at 11pm was 265 baht, and that was the closer airport. The SkyTrain was 65 baht to the new airport! 200 baht cheaper! That’s only about $6.50, but still.  
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Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Family Lessons


Today was my first official Thai lesson! I’ve been having informal ones all over the place, but today we actually sat down in a classroom with a book and did a proper lesson. Turns out I already know almost everything in the first lesson! So, I’m a step ahead of the game already.
I had Lucy teach me the months and a few other phrases I wanted to learn, such as “if you speak only English for 10 minutes, you get 50 points!” hahaha. I haven’t actually used that one yet. She had me repeat all the months of the year back to her and we were both very excited when I got almost all of them right on the first try!
Writing and learning all this stuff is all well and good, but I actually need to start studying it at night, so I at least have some rote memorization going on. One thing new I learned from the book today is that when you ask someone how old they are, there is one word for “years old” for ages 1-10 and a different word for over age 10. It took a while for Lucy to explain that one to me in a mix of really slow English and really rapid Thai, but I finally got it. I was so excited; I was like “Oh! I get it, I get it!” I repeated what I thought back to her in English and she was super excited too. It’s amazing how such a simple thing can really boost your spirits!
When we were done with the book lesson, I told her a story about seeing the cleaning lady this morning using as much Thai as I could remember and Lucy would tell me the words as I said the English words. It was kind of cool. I’m picking it up pretty fast! The hardest thing for me is the word endings. I sometimes can’t figure out where to put my tongue to do the different stops. Like, is it just behind the teeth, or at the back of the throat or the roof of the mouth? It makes different sounds depending, you know? Also, knowing where the tones fall is hard. Like compared to a piano, is the low tone at a C, an E or an A? And is mid-tone at E, G or B? I can’t explain it very well in writing, but it’s hard.
After my Thai lesson I printed out some stuff for my English class, then I was supposed to hang out with some of the kids as they studied Thai language. Judy was like “Uh, how are you going to know if they are saying it right?” I just had some papers that the kids were supposed to do in groups and then I had some worksheets they were supposed to fill in. Judy and Lucy ended up coming into class and reading it with the kids. We had Willow, Amelie, Sunny and Molly. They had each kid read the paragraphs out loud around the table. I was sitting next to Sunny, so after she finished, she shared her paper with me and ran her finger along the Thai words, saying it two or three syllables at a time and having me repeat it. It was so cute! She obviously picked up that from people teaching English by pointing to the individual words. But, to me all the Thai just looks like squiggles on the paper, so I am following along, but having NO IDEA what I am saying or what the letters actually mean on the page. The best part was the end, when Judy and Lucy had the kids all read the paragraphs together. Sunny still ran her finger under the lines so I could follow along, but she kept looking up at me like “Why are you not reading?” not understanding that I have not learned any Thai alphabet yet. It was still really sweet though.
Then we had English class. I started out with the kids reviewing what we learned. This is a good chance for me to practice my Thai also. I say the word in Thai and have them tell me what the English word is. We did that for a few minutes, then played the memory game again with them. Today we had Gabby and Willow as well. They were absent yesterday, so they had to catch up a little with the new words. They seem to be getting better with the recognition of what the words actually mean in relation to Thai.
I printed out two types of family word finds, so that kept them occupied for a while. I was impressed that they really didn’t start cheating off each other til they only had one or two words left. Plus, they were SILENT while doing this, which is amazing considering the usual volume in that room! When they had all finished finding the words, I had them write the words in Thai underneath and had Judy check those.
Oh, I forgot to mention that I basically ran class by myself for the first 20 minutes before Judy was able to come in and I was able to make myself understood and to understand them! It was pretty great.
The word find took most of class, but they did such a good job with finding almost all the words with no help! After they finished and all got stars and points on the board for their work, we did a few rounds of hangman. They are so funny when they figure out a word, they all want to be the first one to shout it out. Then, they want to be the first to tell you what the Thai translation is, so it gets pretty cacophonous! Most of the time I can’t even tell if they are saying the right word or not. I feel bad getting mad at them for being loud because they are just SO EXCITED and proud of their knowledge. I’d rather have them exuberant and excited to learn than quiet and not wanting to learn.
After class and dinner was over, Inna and I walked down to the Night market and walked around a bit. On our way back, I stopped for some ROTI!! Alloy, Alloy! (Yummy yummy).
Right now the cat is sleeping so sweetly stretched out on my lap. She is much nicer when she is asleep and not gouging my arms with her sharp teeth!

Last minute thoughts: I forgot to say that I saw Aung, our tailor from back in November when the guys in our group got suits made. He is leaving for seminary in Burma in April, but I thought he would be gone by March, so I was excited to see him. He remembered me, and showed me a big posterboard they have on display with people who had suits made. There are 3 pictures of our group! One of them is the silly one of the guys in Oceans 13 pose. :) hahaha One of them is of our entire group, so I’m on the board too, even though I didn’t get anything made. Aung says hello to our gang though.
The other thing is I was telling Judy that I want to do piano lessons for kids who are interested. Ning was very excited by this and was telling me today that it’s been a dream of hers to learn piano for years but she couldn’t afford lessons! So, perfect. I told her there are 2 ways to learn: by hearing and by reading music. I am going to teach her to read music so that after I leave, she can still play any music she ever finds. Our lessons start next Wednesday after I get back from Singapore.
Also forgot to mention that I got my ticket to Singapore this morning. I’ll be there over the weekend and hopefully get the visa Monday no problem! Prayers still please!






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Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Visa Disasters, Part 2 and Teaching, Day 1

  March 29, 2011
Today was supposed to be a good day. I was supposed to meet with the visa coordinator and she was supposed to tell me that I was good to go in Bangkok. I called her up, and asked when I should come. She said now was fine and gave me directions for the song thaew driver. I remembered pretty well where the building was, and found it ok. I sat down and she said “I have the bad news for you.” I was like, “No. Way.”
So, apparently, the airport gave me a transit visa, rather than a normal 30 day tourist visa. I have no idea why, and nobody has ever seen this stamp before or heard of anyone having this problem. Yesterday she talked to the embassy and they said if I had a tourist visa, it could get changed to a Type O in Bangkok no problem, but with a transit visa, I have to leave the country by April 21 and reenter. This puts a crimp in the whole teaching thing! Also, incredibly stressful. I barely feel comfortable making my way around in Thailand, and now I have to go to an entire NEW country and find my way around? Great.
Plus, remember how I already bought my ticket for Bangkok? Yeah, that was awesome. It costs more to cancel than it did to buy the ticket in the first place. So, the new plan is to go to Singapore or Kuala Lumpur. Both of these sound so foreign to me and the concept is kind of terrifying. I need to know where to go, who to see, what to do, and what paperwork to take. I don’t even know what language they speak in these places! (before you post comments all over the place, yes I know now that Singapore is a British protectorate and they speak English.)
OK, here is what I finally decided to do: Keep the flight to Bangkok on Thursday night and hang out with Stephen and Allison on Friday. Fly Saturday morning to Singapore (about $55) which is way cheaper Sat than Sunday night (about $200). Stay the weekend in Singapore and be at the embassy an hour before opening Monday morning so I can get my visa request in first. Hopefully pick up the visa at the end of the day and fly back to Chiang Mai Tuesday morning. Of course, I can’t buy my ticket til I find out whether the visa will actually get processed in one day, so that will be more expensive still!
Oh, and she still doesn’t have internet or a working printer, so I still don’t have the paperwork to take to the embassy.
I decided to walk back to Taw Saeng and think. I should have had my ipod with me cause my thoughts just freaked me out even more! When I got back to the center, I immediately jumped online to update people. I was really happy to see my sister and Ahna online and I talked to them for a bit and they tried to calm me down. At this point, I was so stressed and feeling so not in control of the situation that I just felt like I’d burst into tears at any second.
Finally, the group gathered for songs and prayer. I was really fighting back tears for most of it and then when they prayed for me, I did cry a little bit. The kids started coming, so I had to pull it together! One of the women from church had given me a kids book about Psalm 91 and God’s protection over us, so I thought it would be a good one to use for library time. When school is not in session, they have listening comprehension for library time. So, they read a story in English and have to answer questions about it so they understand what it is that they are hearing in English. I thought I’d have a whole big age range in my class, so I came up with some harder questions, but I ended up having middle school age kids.
It actually worked out really well, though, because Judy was with me and translating and then Lucy, my teacher came in too, so I was trying to use some of the words she had taught me yesterday. Even as the teacher, I still want to get an A from my teacher. Hahaha Well, basically, we’d read each page, then the kids would have to figure out what it meant in Thai using the English words they knew already. Then, we’d read the question on the board and they’d have to translate that into English. Then, they would actually answer the question. It was quite the process, but they all did such a great job! Every kid was participating and answering with good responses. They definitely earned their prizes at the end of class!
After library was art class. I was in charge of today’s origami project. Field showed it to me on Sunday, and today we were supposed to do a crane. I was like “Oh, yeah, we made cranes in 4th grade. I can totally do a crane!”  So. I cannot do a crane. At all.
I had two girls today, Sunny and Molly. Here’s the deal. There’s an origami book and paper. The book shows one fold and has like a paragraph in Thai of instructions. I cannot read Thai, and the pictures leave a lot to be desired. Sunny is a genius at origami. She read the instructions and was showing me how to do the folds. I just kept saying “I’m glad you know what you’re doing, cause I have NO idea.” She would just chatter away in Thai and do a bunch of folds. Molly and I kept looking at each other and shrugging out shoulders, like “I don’t know how she does that!”
We got to a point where we were supposed to fold the crane’s wings down, only to realize that we had folded wrong and the wings were attached, not foldable! We backed up one step at a time, til we decided we just needed to start over. I decided to just let Sunny figure it out and then I’d try to emulate her. She actually did it! It took some refolding and repositioning but she did it. Then she finished mine, and then Molly’s too. At this point Molly was like “OK, easier one.” She picked a boat and we started on that. Again, I only got to about step 10 til I was like “WHAAAAT???!!!” and Sunny had to finish it for me. Hahaha
The last part of the day was English class. My class learned some words about family last week: mom, dad, grandpa, grandma, brother and sister. However, I was not confident in their comprehension of this when they did presentations on Friday, so I asked Field if I could do another week on family while she was gone and teach them some new words. I taught them aunt, uncle, cousin, son and daughter.
Yesterday when I was doing my lesson with Lucy, I had her teach me all these words in Thai, so I could tell the kids the correlation. Judy was with me in class to give instruction, but she was shocked that I knew those words and could pronounce them. She was like “Heather! You haven’t even been here a week and your tones are amazing!” I don’t know if I mentioned this, but Thai has 5 tones: low, mid, high, falling and rising. It’s hard. So that was encouraging. She was saying that she’s been here for 5 years, and my tones are already almost as good as hers!
Anyway, so the kids practiced saying the new words and the Thai meaning, and then we played a game of memory using cards with family words on them. We are implementing the use of points in a big way this week. If the kids got a match and could say the English word: 5 points. If they could then say remember the Thai equivalent, 10 points! We took off points for cheating and added them for sitting quietly when it was someone else’s turn. After we played a few rounds, I decided to switch gears and do a game of hangman to try to teach them the spellings of words. They LOVE hangman, so that was fun. That took us to dinnertime and I told them that if they walked quietly all the way down the stairs, they’d get 20 points each! Normally, those kids tear out of there like their hair is on fire and sound like a herd of elephants on the stairs. Today, it was so quiet, I had to check behind me to make sure the kids were still with me! I tell ya, points work!
Next step is to add rewards for point levels. The plan is that when I get back from Singapore, Field, Inna, Judy and I will sit down and construct a point system and come up with a quarterly reward system. I’m thinking something like a movie one quarter, the zoo one quarter and maybe a pizza party one quarter. I think we could do something smaller monthly as well, like an ice cream or pizza party, or face painting using the paints we brought back in November. That was a HUGE hit.
After dinner, Ryan helped me with some blog stuff. He’s going to show me how to password protect some posts so I can put up some pictures of the kids and post some of the more sensitive stories.
When I got home, there was Bible study at my house! I was excited because I haven’t been to Bible study in a while, so it was nice to have it. I guess it rotates, but today it was here. We had 7 people including me and discussed Hebrews 11. It was an interesting discussion. The end of the chapter talks about people who were martyred for the cause and we talked about why you don’t hear a lot of stories about getting sawn in half for your faith. I suppose it’s not a big selling point for Christianity. “Hey, follow Jesus! You might get sawed in two, but at least you’ll go to heaven!” haha. Anyway, it was nice to have a good theological discussion. Our group consisted of two Aussies, a Brit, a Philipino, a Russian, and three Americans. Good mix of cultures and people!  Love the multi-cultural aspect of being in a foreign country.






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Monday, March 28, 2011

Staff Meetings and Coconut Juice



This morning, I thought I was getting to work really early, but when I showed up everyone was there already! I was like “uhh, did daylight saving time happen when I wasn’t looking?” but they just forgot to tell me that they meet at 10am on Mondays when there is no class. Since I came at the tail end, we were just wrapping up, and prayed for a bit. Then we headed out to lunch.
We ate at a Shan place (that means Burmese, I think) and it was really good, except when we were just about done, I started having a little stomachache. Oh, no! Flashbacks of when I got MSG poisoning! Did I remember to ask for it with no MSG? Of course not! I was too excited eating new food! Thankfully we figured out what would have msg in it and I just didn’t eat any more of that. Then I drank a lot of water the rest of the day, but my stomache was still pretty achy for the rest of the day.
After lunch, I went to the big warehouse, Macro, with Judy, P’Bua and Lucy, my Thai tutor! This place is like Costco. It has two huge floors and everything you could possibly need in bulk. They also have a bakery, a deli and lots of imported foods like ketchup and Kettle Chips.
Judy had decided that this would be the perfect opportunity for my first Thai lesson, so luckily I had made pages and pages of phrases and words I willowted to learn. We went through them all, with me saying things over and over until I got a thumbs up and “Good job!” from Lucy. Often, we would stand with our cart in one place practicing over and over, and then look up and realize Judy and P’Bua had taken off and left us, so we’d race around looking down all the aisles til we found them. Then, we’d get distracted with a new set of words and lose them all over again. We kept cracking up over this, even though typing it, it really doesn’t sound that funny. All in all it was a fun first lesson and I think I did start to learn a lot.
At first, I was thinking that I should refrain from asking other people at the center how to say things because it would take away from my time with Lucy, but then I realized, I should be practicing as much as possible, all the time if I really willowt to master the language.
After we got back from shopping, everyone was packing up to head out for the day, even though it was only 4pm! I decided to use this opportunity to go buy a big map of the city, so I could stop using Jaz’s old, fragile copy. ;) I also headed down the street to one of the big fancy hotels that has a gym. I have been willowting to find a place that has a fitness center or pool that is walkable from either home or work. Since I live on a busy highway, it’s not very conducive to running in the mornings. Well, this place was pretty fancy, they had a lot of high end equipment and a huge swimming pool that wraps around ¾ of the building, and it’s only $30 a month. Unfortunately, with the new visa and travel charges and needing a scooter, this doesn’t seem like a workable option.
After I went down to the used bookstore and resisted my impulses to buy a bunch of books, I caught a song thaew home. I was posting some of these blogs when Ruth came by to see if Jaz was around to go running. I was itching for some exercise, so I decided to come too. Jaz wasn’t home yet, so I made some dinner, did a bunch of internet things and finally, she arrived and we headed out in Ruth’s car. This time we went to the University. There is a footpath that runs in a circle around a big soccer field that is perfect for running. Sadly, there are no lights, so it takes a bit of getting used to running in the dark! Jaz used the podcast training program from the other day, and it was pretty good. Last time, I ran a lot slower to stay with the girls, but this time, since it was a circular track, I just took off when it was the running interval and then walked back to them for the walking portion.
After the run, Jaz and Ruth willowted to eat dinner. I had eaten earlier, so I just got some coconut juice in the coconut and some homemade ice cream! Not bad for $1.10. However, I have to stop eating out! I bought groceries for a reason, after all.
After I got back, I decided I  had better buy a plane ticket to Bangkok if I was going to go on Thursday night! I tried a couple times with my debit card, but no luck. Then Ruth said she would put it on her Thai credit card and I just gave her some cash. This would prove to be a big mistake…
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