A Year In Thailand: Road-trip to Loei Province

There was another three-day weekend last weekend because of a Buddhist holiday on Friday. On Monday, I the school director asked if I wanted to go with a bunch of the Thai teachers on their trip to Loei Province. I figured it would be a great chance to get to know some of the other teachers (there are about a hundred at my school), so I said yes.

Loei Province is in northeast Thailand, bordering Laos, and it's a popular spot to go and watch the sunrise over the Thai/Lao border. We left at six on Friday morning, dark and early, in a procession of vans with ten teachers each, plus a driver. The teachers in my van made a great effort to practice speaking English with me. Occasionally this led to some hilarious misunderstandings--when a teacher named Jung offered me something that sounded like "egg-hair" I found out he really meant "eclair." I also had to laugh at a conversation I heard between some of the teachers on the first morning of the trip, in which they were discussing my name. R and L are pretty much interchangeable in the Thai language, which means that my full name, Kimberly, is sometimes difficult to pronounce. I've noticed in a few of the student books I sign at the end of each class that my name is sometimes spelled "Kimberry" (which I suppose in some ways is at least better than Kimbelly). As evidenced by the conversation I heard on the first morning of the road-trip (which I only caught the gist of, since some of it was in Thai) this seems to have given rise to the belief that there's some kind of fruit called a kimberry. One of the other teachers knew my name was spelled with an L, so I didn't have to jump in and correct anybody, but I did get asked if they were pronouncing raspberry correctly.

Highlights of the trip included: stopping for fresh tamarinds, pineapple, and other fruit sold by the side of the road, a stop at a sort of international garden with lots of roses and other plants, a truly awful attempt at karaoke on my part (the other teacher did fine--I just happened to have the misfortune to pick a song where the music was faster than the words scrolling across the screen), watching the sun rise over the Lao border and a very foggy valley in Phu Ruea, walking through the street market at Chiang Khan, and visiting two really beautiful temples. Seeing the sunrise was a little funny, because all the other teachers, except one who's from China, thought it was freezing. True, it was cold enough for long sleeves--especially after experiencing three months of tropical heat. But it was only 16 degrees Celsius--something like 60 degrees Fahrenheit, a nice spring day in Seattle. Perhaps the funniest moment of the whole trip was on the last afternoon, when I was a little sleep deprived. We were walking through a market next to one of the temples--a temple the other teachers told me was built to symbolize peace and friendship between Thailand and Laos. I wasn't paying very much attention to where I was walking, just following the others and looking at the different stalls in the market. I walked straight into a metal pole, one of the supports for the overhead sunshades. The teacher in front of me had just walked under it without having to duck, but it hit the side of my head, and I had a very strange realization: as far as Thailand is concerned, I'm tall. At 5'4", who'd have thunk?