Wan Saow

Things that happened Today:

• I went to Spelling Bee for Thai high school students. In the morning, this consisted of me spell checking lists of words for the Thai ajaans as they clustered around a tiny TV straining to hear what was being said in the examination room. This was not easy feat as my spelling is abysmal and I haven't done any serious writing in English in about a month.
• After the first round of the spelling bee, I went to Kad Suwan Keaw (a giant shopping center) with my Mae because the English department at her school was receiving an award. I meant to stay with here for the ceremony but Mae Noy (Clare's host mom) insisted I would be bored and sent me off to explore the mall. For 3 hours. For some background, Kad Suwan Keaw is potentially the most poorly/confusingly designed building I have ever had the (mis)fortune to enter. I also had almost no money on me and zero interest in shopping so essentially I spent 3 hours people watching and being accosted by shop owners because I am clearly a farang, while simultaneously getting ridiculously lost again and again. Good times. Jing jing.
• In the afternoon we went back to the spelling bee because one of Mae Toi's students had made it to the final round. This time, the students had 60 seconds to spell as many words from a fixed list as possible. I have never before in my life heard anyone spell anything so quickly and I am sure that the Thai students would have sent me packing in about 2 seconds. It was ridiculous. But what do I know? I'm just a silly farang eating humble pie morning, noon, and night.
• After the spelling bee was over we met up with Nong Im and went back to Kad Suwan Keaw for ice cream and eventually dinner. This was my first time eating ice cream in Thailand and it was just as a-roi as it is in the US I am happy to say. (Fun Fact: Thais don't sweeten their whipped cream which is odd because they add ridiculous amounts of sugar to nearly everything else.) I had a really great time joking with Nong Im and telling her about all the different fruits she has to try when she comes to visit me in the US and warning her not to come to Michigan in the winter.

Ice cream and dinner were both really fun and heart warming experiences. All ISDSI students move into apartment at the end of the week so my family does not have a lot of time left together and the past month has absolutely flown by. At the ice cream parlor, Mae Toi told me "You have to come visit us all the time!" and that she and Paw Jade wish I could stay with them longer.  This was really touching to me as I generally very concerned about being too much of a burden and I worry about giving back to this family what they have given me. It also made me realize that I wish I could stay with them longer too.

Pi Aim, Nong Im, Mae Toi, Paw Jade and I post enormous dinner.

But, alas it is not to be. I have really enjoyed getting to know the family in the past month. They are the most wonderful, generous, considerate, kind, and caring people, and a very fun and vibrant family to be a part of. It's strange to think that a month ago, these people where total strangers, when now they are my second family and I feel like I really belonged with them here in Chiang Mai. I am so sad that this is my last week with them but I am going to make the most of it and I know that we have a connection that will last a lifetime.

Cheesy endings aside, I love my Thai family maak luey.

Geen Kaow Tuk Wan!

Attention!
I would just like to take a moment of your precious time and talk about rice. Rice (or kaow in pasaa Thai) is simply the best and nai brataed Thai, chan geen kaow tuk wan (in Thailand I eat rice everyday). And I am SO HAPPY about this because rice is the ultimate comfort food in every way.

I have also been eating many different things that are not comfort food but are delicious none the less. Here is a list of my favorites:

Pad Seeyu made by some lovely ISDSI students.

• Som Tdam- Spicy, salty, sour, green papaya salad. Spicy but delicious.
• Pad Seeyu- Like Pad Thai but better. So much better.
• Goi Tiao Rua- Translates to boat noodles. Delicious noodles, pork, assorted greens, crispy pork rinds, and fish cakes swimming in the most heart-warming and tasty broth you can imagine. Potentially my favorite dish so far. Really any kind of noodles. NOODLES.
• Kaow Neeaow Mah Muang- Mango Sticky Rice. Sticky rice and mango with condensed milk poured on top. Why does this not exist in America???
• Kaow Tohm- Rice porridge usually with egg, mushroom, and ginger, eaten at breakfast
• Cha Yin- Thai Iced Tea. Best drink ever. Cuts the spicy oh so well.
• Kung Ten- Dancing Shrimp. Not my favorite dish but still delicious and definitely the most interesting thing I've eaten thus far. Shrimp with lime and chiles, but the shrimp are still kind of... alive.
• Pom lah mai- Fruit. All day, every day. SO. MUCH. FRUIT. My favorites include: man kut (mangosteen), saparoh (pineapple), ngo (rambutan), persimmon (not sure what it's called in Thai), nam farang (guava juice-not really a fruit...), and of course, MANGOS

Goi Tiao Rua with Nam Farang in the background.
So perfect. I have no words. 

Som Tdam made by yours truly, Eli, Rita, Liz and Ajaan Budsakorn as part of Thai class last week.

Hopefully the pics help you to imagine all this delici-ality. Have fun waiting for your next meal!

Dancing shrimp. I got this pic just before they all decided to jump out of the dish and onto the table...

Other things that have happened recently:

Visit to Wat Suan Dok which houses a university for monks, one of whom talked to us about Thai Buddhism. Super interesting and, dare I say, enlightening. We also got to practice meditating for a while which I have decided is one of those things that I will never ever be good at. 

We journeyed to Mok Fa Waterfall in Doi Suthep National park for a student and staff retreat. The waterfall was so beautiful and swimming at its base was a wonderfully cathartic experience. The whole weekend was spent bonding, team building, leadership training, talking about health and safety, and just hanging out with some really cool people in a beautiful place.

Learning to drum at a Lanna (Northern Thai) Village that we visited this past week. The man in blue is the village headman and he was showing us how to drum properly. It was very different from Taiko but super fun all the same.
Yay for experiential education!

I got a haircut! It's was sudden and unexpected but Mae Toi was getting her haircut and I went along for the ride.  I asked for a trim and got this. A somewhat frightening experience.

Field trip to Crazy Horse Buttress last Friday- Taken from 40 meters up while hanging from a zipline. So much fun climbing and rapelling!

View from the bottom of the cave! Sanook, Sabai, Suay!

All in all it's been a wonderful week. Can't wait to see what comes next!

Doi Suthep-in' It UP!

On Friday we took a break form our normal routine to hike up Doi Suthep and see the famous Wat at the top. It was a lot of fun to hike with all the other students and the Wat itself is BEAUTIFUL. Words won't do it justice so here are some pics instead.

HUGE spider we saw on the hike up

About halfway up we stopped for lunch at Wat Pahla.
Yes I got to eat lunch at a ancient Buddhist temple in the middle
of the jungles of Thailand. Be jealous.

Wat Pahla

Suay! So beautiful!

So much green!

Almost to the top! Only 300 steps to go!

Muang Chiang Mai!

A monk performing a blessing. 

Wat Prah That Doi Suthep in all it's glory!

I'm now realizing that these pictures don't really do it justice either. You'll just have to swing by Chiang Mai and see for yourself!

Cha Cha in Chiang Mai

Aloha blog readers!

So many things have happened since I last wrote. And it's only been a week! Crazy stuff.

Welcome to ISDSI!

This past week was our first foray into the "study" part of study abroad. We have class at ISDSI from 8am to 4 or 5 pm with the morning devoted to Thai language and the afternoon spent talking about Thai culture.

Rot Dengs are the best!

Getting to ISDSI in the morning is a bit of  chore. I currently live in Maejo, a suburb northeast of Chang Mai which means that I have to take the bus (rot deng/keeow). I was very nervous about this at first but Mae Toi kindly provided me with a map and instructions in Thai to show the driver. I also have the immense fortune of commuting with my lovely friend Clare who lives nearby. After a rough start (we were late the first two days of class) we now have the system wired. However, the entire process is made infinitely slower by rush hour traffic which means that I get up around 5:30am in order to leave the house by 6:30, meet Clare at her house so we can catch the 6:45 bus, and get to language class by 8am.

Language class, incidentally, is supes intense. We have very little time to learn as much as our Ajaans (teachers) can cram into our heads so class runs from 8 in the morning until lunch at noon. Four hours of pasaah Thai (Thai language) generally leaves my head feeling like a stewed pumpkin but I have been noticing a huge difference in my proficiency. I can now follow a basic conversation, tell someone where I'm from,  and recognize a few basic Thai characters (however this is somewhat moot as I don't have the vocabulary to read anything yet...). I can also count to 99,999 (take that little boy in the restaurant!)

At the same time I regularly get anxious and frustrated with how little I know. It's not so much a necessity, as Mae Toi speaks excellent English and I rarely have trouble explaining what I want, but I would love to be able to communicate in properly Thai. It would save me making a lot of blank looks whenever a rot deng driver, cashier, or my Kun Yah (grandmother) says anything beyond my extremely limited vocabulary. At the same time I have gotten several reminders from other students and my good friend Ellen (a former ISDSI kid and an awesome, badass friend) that we've only really been at this a week, which is sort of unbelievable to me and something that I have trouble remembering.

After Thai language class we have lunch which is ALWAY a-roi maaaaaak (delicious) and then go into Thai culture class. Then after class on Tuesday and Thursday we have Cross Fit, which is... interesting. I've heard Cross Fit compared to P90X but not being in tune with the latest in fitness slang, I have no idea what that is. Suffice it to say that Cross Fit is hard, especially for someone as out of shape as I am. The point is to get us in shape for the field component of the semester which it is doing a marvelous job of. For you crew people out there, some of the workouts include erging, something I was really excited about up until about the 5th stroke of our first piece at which point I think a piece of my soul died.

A super intense game of Spoons. All the Thai Ajaans thought this was hilarious.

This past weekend was also full of interesting experiences. I spent most of Saturday with my Mae at the school were she teaches helping with English Camp. This consisted of myself, Mae Toi, Clare, and two other ISDSI-ers, Reid and Jenny, teaching groups of Thai high schoolers the Cha Cha Slide. For 8 hours. It ended up being hilarious, tiring, very strange, awkward, confusing, dorkalicious, surreal, rewarding in an odd way, and very, VERY sweaty. But it was loads of fun and after teaching it to 7 different groups of students I think I can say with confidence that I can dance the Cha Cha Slide as well as DJ Casper himself.

All the Thai girls swarmed Reid after class to get a picture with him.
This earned him the nickname, "Ladykiller." Happy Birthday Reid!

The Thai nak suk sah (students) were sooo nice to us farangs and several of them asked to take our (or just Reid's) picture. Two girls also gave me the paper fans that they made at one of the other activity stations. It was very touching and I'm sad I didn't have the words to express my thanks besides a simple krap kun ka (thank you). Hopefully all the students enjoyed themselves, maybe learned some more English (though they speak my language much much better than I speak theirs), and have a newfound appreciation for an American classic.

One of the classes after 40 minutes of intense Cha Cha Slide-ing.

Anywho, its been a lovely first week or so, full of excitement, intrigue, and bad 90s dance music. Can't wait to see what comes next!

Toodles!

Dazed and Confused. Standard.

Sawadee Ka!!!

I made it to Thailand! After a very, VERY long journey I am finally here!

Not much can be said of the flight such except that it was very exhausting and Korean Air is by far the shwanky-est airline to ever sail the skies.

Moving on. We got in around 11pm local time (10am our time) on Thursday night (day?). When I say "we" I mean me and 27 other students from K and other schools who will be studying at ISDSI this term.  Really a lovely bunch of people. I'm excited to spend more time getting to know them. The next day we woke up bright and early (So. Much. Jet Lag.) for a short orientation and then left with our various host families that afternoon.

My host family is WONDERFUL. Mae Toi (my Thai host mom) is very warm and friendly. She is a teacher at a local high school and speaks very good English but is always encouraging me to practice my Thai (which is completely and utterly abysmal). Paw Jade (my host dad) is very nice too and is trying to improve his English by practicing with me. We do a lot of exchanging words, mostly during meal times, so my running list of Thai looks more like a menu than anything else. I also have two host siblings. Pi (older brother) Aim, who reminds me a lot of a certain twin of mine, and Nawng (younger sister) Im, who I bonded with over Pokemon this morning.

The past two days have been very confusing, mixed in with a healthy dose of excitement, fun, jet lag, exhaustion, spicy food, Orientation, disorientation, and reorienation. Foreigners are called "farang" here and I get the feeling that it's used kind of like "gringo". Basically it means that no one thinks that I know what I'm doing. (The sad thing is they're right.)

Here are some examples of my cultural faux pas for your amusement:

• Yesterday I went with Mae to her school because she had to give her students an English proficiency test. While they spent 2 hours working on reading comprehension, grammar and advanced vocabulary, I struggled with learning to count to 10 in Thai. 
• At lunch later that day, while I was showing off my mad counting skillz to my host parents, a little boy who looked to be about 5 sitting at the table next to us decided to practice counting as well. He could count higher than I can.
• Today Mae Toi asked me to help her peel garlic for breakfast. Simple, right? Well it's a little trickier when the cloves are each about the size of your fingernail and you really could never use a knife properly to begin with. It took a good 15 minutes of struggle before she noticed and came over to rescue me. Both she and Kun Yah (host grandmother) thought that was very funny.
• Every time we go out somewhere, I try to get into the wrong side of the car and/or am almost flattened because I look the wrong way before trying to cross the street. (Thais drive on the left side of the road and the driver's seat is on the right side of the car.) Mae has started holding my hand whenever we cross the street so I don't get run over.
• Since my first meal in Thailand (during which I drank at least a liter of water) I've been handling the spicy pretty well (so I thought). However, it turns out Mae Toi has been ordering my food "mai, mai, MAI pet." (Mai=no/not/don't, pet=spicy) I found out this morning and it was quite disheartening. I also learned that this is the way dek deks (little children) eat their food.
• EVERY time I learn a new Thai word it has to be repeated multiple times for me to remember it. Trying to learn a language that is made up of completely different sounds is very hard and very confusing. I regularly misremember, mispronounce, mix up, or completely forget words that I was taught no more than 10 minutes prior. Everything Mae Toi tells me goes in one ear and out the other. Fortunately, she is a very patient teacher and I DID eventually learn to count to 10. Small victories.

In short, I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing. However, I am having loads of fun doing it and thats really more of the point, yes? :0)

To end, I leave you with some photos of all the new and exciting things I have encountered. 

The mountain is called Doi Suthep and there is a famous Buddhist temple there that we get to see next week. I don't know whether the temple or the mountain or both is/are Doi Suthep. So much excitement and intrigue! This was taken down the road from my house.

Mah muang (mango) trees in the front yard!!!

So beautiful! Unfortunately I don't remember the name...

Mae Toi's favorite. Mangosteen is a-roi mah (delicious)! 

Rambutan- The strangest looking fruit I have ever seen. Also a-roi. I think we should petition Lady Gaga to wear a rambutan skin dress to the MTV Awards this year. Who's with me?

Another temple, again the name went in one ear and out the other. 

Must. Learn. Thai.

Walking Streets Market, held every Sunday night. Bigger than Ann Arbor Art Fair. Ran into a few fellow ISDSI-ers there!

Wow, this ended up taking longer than expected. I need to sleep. FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL TOMORROW!

Ra dee sa wat ka! Good Night!

Wait... what? Emma's going to Thailand?

AHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I leave tomorrow! It's kind of cray cray. A lot. 

But YES! It's happening! Bags are packed, all my summer reading has been returned to the Library, goodbyes have been said and tears have been shed. The lovely Dorraine Duncan (my former roommate and awesome friend) is staying the night here so she doesn't have to leave from Kalamazoo and get up at an even more ungodly hour and in OHMYGOD UNDER 12 HOURS we will depart!!! 

Anywho, it's been a lovely summer here in the Ace Deuce with the illustrious Dolce/Yamada contingent but I am sooooo excited to be going on this new adventure.

(I am somewhat less excited about the 24+ hours of planes, airports, and other obnoxious tomfoolery, but let's be optimistic, yes?)

Big Red, Little Red, and Mama Suitcase are all ready to go!

Things I learned while packing:

1. At some point you kind of just have to stop shoving differing things into piles and start... packing. Who knew?
2. Packing light is honestly wayy more nerve-wracking than packing too much.
3. Roll your clothes. It will change your life.
4. My mother is a packing GOD. 
5. Which would make me Packing Jesus.

Ooh! Packing God Mom made peach pie! 

See you later America! Catch you on the flippety flip!

So... This is new.

Salutations!

This is my attempt at a study abroad blog. For those of you who don't know already, I will be studying abroad in Chiang Mai, Thailand at the International Sustainable Development Studies Institute (ISDSI) for the next 6 months or so. Hopefully I won't completely fail at keeping this thing somewhat updated-ish.

Just to test things out, here is a picture of me and Peter on our birthday. I was very excited, Peter, somewhat less so. Standard.

Ooh! It worked!

Anyway, THAILAND: 

I'm super-duper excited about the whole study abroad thing, so much so that I've been losing a fair amount of sleep over it (oops). I've also been doing a fair amount of bouncing around, something  that will undoubtedly continue once I get to Thailand (hence the name of this blog).

In other news, I just finished my internship working for the Gretchen Driskell Campaign for State Rep (if you live in the 52nd District in Michigan, please vote for her because I can't), and the Sierra Club. It was generally fun and and interesting work, if time consuming and exhausting. Anywho, I'm done now which means I can devote myself to getting ready to go and worrying full time. 

In terms of trip prep, I had a minor gear crisis this morning which will hopefully be solved tomorrow, and I also remembered earlier today that I have two pre-departure assignments to complete. Fun.

Ok. I should probably sleep. 

Toodles!