. . . And a House for All Your Ghosts, Too

This is the spirit house outside my house. Or, technically, it's two spirit houses. They always come in pairs, one higher than the other, and the lower with a ladder leading up from the ground. The story behind these cute little things? In traditional Thai culture, giving a spirit a house of their own prevents them from haunting you. If they have a house, they don't need to enter yours. You'll find them outside just about every building in Thailand.

This wasn't the first view that greeted me when I got to Doembangnangbuat (or, as the mouthful shortened here, Doembang). The spirit houses are actually in the back yard. But that window you see in the background? That's my kitchen. Or something like a kitchen. I don't have anything that actually goes in a kitchen besides a table, a fridge, and an electric kettle (which is a recent addition). Beyond the wall, there's a rice field. Or I assume it's a rice field. Currently it's something like a lake. With herons, and sometimes ducks. But back to the house. To be honest, when I first got there, the thought that struck my mind was: holy crap, I'm going to be living like I'm at girls' camp for a year. This could be because while I have a bed and electricity, I didn't have air conditioning that first day. (It was installed in my bedroom the day after I met the school director/principal, possibly because I was very obviously glistening with sweat for the whole interview.) Also, I could tell from the way the occasional gecko skittered across the kitchen wall that there were enough holes in various places to allow entrance to the entire mosquito population of Thailand. That window has a screen rather than glass, and the shutters get closed when it rains. But what felt most like camping was the bathroom. I've gotten used to it since, but it was a bit daunting the first day to walk in and find two basins under two dripping taps, and a toilet that requires water from one of the basins to flush. No hot water, no shower-head. But you don't really miss hot water when you live in a place as hot as Thailand, and bucket showers are growing on me.

It's been slow in coming, but I am getting to the point where I think of my little Doembang house as home. It makes for simple living. Although I did have a neighbor offer to do my laundry and clean the house a few times a week (for a fee, of course), I've been doing my own cleaning, and I hand-wash my laundry in a bucket. Okay, it's not the lifestyle for everyone, and I won't be sorry to go back to some of the things I'm used to after a year. But it's interesting to see what simplifying does to your life. It's interesting to see what you can go without. It made for a rather insightful Thanksgiving. That being said, internet and air conditioning still made my list!

Welcome to Thailand Part 2: Once More, With Pictures

Okay, I know I said I was going to get on to the real deal with teaching in Thailand with this post, but I just recovered some pictures that I thought were lost forever, and with them I also found some more things I wanted to talk about from orientation.

This is Kanchanaburi, where you can not only ride elephants, but have them lift you up with their trunks or give you a massage, watch them play basketball, and feed them bananas. If they don't drop the bananas, which is exactly what the baby elephant in the photo did, right before the picture was taken. He found it eventually, though.

About that white string around my wrist: There's a traditional Thai welcome ceremony which was part of the second day of orientation. There were candles and incense, and each of the orientation participants went up to a row of chairs where our Thai hosts (OEG, not our individual schools) were sitting. You kneel in front of them, hold out your hands, and one of the Thai hosts ties the white string around your wrist, giving you a sort of blessing as they do so. The man tying the string around my wrist said something about being safe as I travel, making friends, finding inspiration, and always looking back on this experience as a good one throughout my life. You're supposed to leave the string on for three days for good luck. It was a sweet little ceremony. I can't think of anything so polite and welcoming that we do in America!

And, in case those of you who are acquainted with my fear of heights are doubting I actually rode an elephant, here is the proof:

Not nearly as bad as climbing the open stairs in the HFAC at BYU, in spite of all the rocking involved when you're riding an elephant.

This is my favorite photo from the trip to the Grand Palace:

But of course, that was earlier in the week. When we got back from Kanchanaburi, we went straight to meet with our school coordinators and head off to different parts of the country--and have the true adventure begin. :)

Orientation: Welcome to Thailand

It's hard to believe that orientation was almost a month ago. It was one of those weeks where you meet a ton of people, and all of you take it pretty much for granted that you're not going to remember a quarter of each other's names. After all, we all put into the same hotel for a week before being shipped off to different parts of the country. It was a good week, though.

Okay, some of it was boring. We had classes for a lot of the week, some on the basics of the Thai language, and more on the basics of teaching--with particular emphasis on what kinds of language problems we should expect from our students. While each of these classes sounded interesting to begin with, there wasn't much that I hadn't already come across either in my online TEFL course, or in the few books on Thai I'd picked up from the library a few months before leaving. 

The most interesting parts of the week were the field trips. As you might guess from the picture above, we saw the Grand Palace in Bangkok. We went in the morning right when it opened, but walking through the grounds (I kind of want to say campus) was still sweltering. This was my first prolonged test of how well I'm going to deal with heat and humidity for a year. I did okay for the first half. The second half I stumbled around in a dehydrated haze.

No photo can accurately capture the detail on any of those buildings. Inside one of them is the Emerald Buddha (which is made of jade, not emerald). It's rather like what I've heard seeing the Mona Lisa is like--smaller than expected. It was also where I accidentally lost my tour group. The funny thing was that it was actually an accident. I'm not one for milling around in huge tourist groups, but I'll take feeling like I'm in a herd over the feeling of being lost in a strange country. Luckily, once I found the exit (which was a feat in and of itself) all I had to do was wait for my group to appear.

Other highlights of the week included a stage production about the history of different regions of Thailand--complete with traditional Thai music, dance, elephants, people flying through the air on wires, and a river across the front of the stage--and a two-day trip to Kanchanaburi. It's tough to say what was best in Kanchanaburi: the Bridge over the River Kwae was beautiful, the dinner and dance music on a boat floating down the river was also hard to beat . . . and elephant riding and bamboo rafting--need I say more?

Orientation week was busy and exhausting and amazing. I'm not sure I want to feel like such a tourist sheep again while I'm here, but even that was okay for one week. It was a splendid and elaborate introduction. And with my next post we'll be on to the real thing . . .

A Late Start

I've been in Thailand for four weeks, and I've got some forty weeks to go before I move back home to Seattle. It was always my intention to blog about my time here. Unfortunately, due to some miscommunications and an uncooperative bureaucratic third party (which shall remain nameless for now), I'm just getting started. So, let me start at the beginning:

The Reality Check at 30,000 Feet

I left America on October 17th, 2012. I had a very convoluted flight path--from Seattle to Chicago, and from there to Tokyo, and on to Bangkok. Why cover so much ground twice, you might ask? Well, it wasn't my first choice, but the price was right. Even if it did add eight more hours to the trip.

The flight from Seattle to Chicago was pretty standard stuff--nothing so different from all the flights I took to and from Utah, where I went to college. At some point over the Pacific Ocean, though, the delayed reaction hit. The idea of leaving hadn't felt real for several weeks, even while I was packing and double-checking and re-packing. It felt real at 30,000 feet over the Pacific. Maybe it was just that all the announcements on the airplane were in Japanese as well as English. I'd been abroad before--even on a long-term basis--but I'd never been anywhere in Asia, and I'd never lived in a country that doesn't speak English as a first language. For a moment on the plane, I wondered if I was crazy to leave everything behind and go on this year-long adventure. It felt surreal. It felt like somebody else had made the choice to go, and I was just getting a very close look into someone else's life.

The moment passed, of course. Moments tend to do that. The moment on the plane, thankfully, wasn't a  freak-out, and I didn't exactly have second thoughts. It was a reality check . . . yes, I was really doing this, yes, I was really going half-way around the world, yes, I was really going all on my own. People I meet here sometimes ask me why I chose to come to Thailand. I don't have a good answer for them. Mostly it boils down to "because I wanted to experience something different" and "because I could." Which means it's going to be a great year. In the words of Doctor Who: Allons-y!