April 27 2009

So alot has been going on in the last two weeks....

First were the protests. These were blown so far out of proportion. Thais as a society and culture don't deal with confrontation well. They avoid it most of the time. One of the protests were going on near our street. They basically were having a big party in the middle of the street which shut down the streets. The state of emergency thing was completely unneeded. There were 2 places that were any trouble at all. Even if you look at some of the pictures, police would be chasing the red shirts (protesters) and people would be on the side of the street watching it. I was as safe as always during this time.

Next was Songkran, the Thai new year. It was one of the best things I have ever been to. There were two places where everything was shut down and people were walking the streets. There were so many people for about a mile the streets were full. Everyone just walks around and sprays each other with water. We bought water bottles and other people had water guns. There is also this powder they use. Just white powder that they rub on each others face. It was great cause everyone was just having fun acting like kids having a big water fight. The whole city was celebrating. Foreigners are big targets, and being a big foreigner I was an even bigger target. They will put powder on you and say "Happy new year" or "welcome to Bangkok". It went on for three days. We went for 4-5 hours the first day, took a break the second day, then went out for 3 hours in the morning and 3 hours at night on the last day. At midnight of the last day, the police come and clear the streets and restore somewhat normality. But it was a great festival for everyone. The only thing I want to do that might compare is the Tomato Fight Festival in Valencia, Spain.....

After Songkran we decided to go to Cambodia, to get our visas renewed and to visit another country. We left at 11 pm and got to the border at 6 am and got to Sihanoukville at around 9am, a fairly easy bus ride. In Cambodia, we drove on the right side of the road again (opposed to left side in Thailand). We found a place to stay for $6 a night. They use the US dollar. I was expecting Cambodia to be alot like Thailand. It looks the same, but the culture is very different. We went to the beach and found a place to eat and layout. They all had chairs for free as long as you got something to eat. From the moment you get to the beach people (mostly kids) are trying to sell you stuff. The older people women are carrying big buckets of lobster, carrying treys of fruit on their head, or trying to sell you a manicure/pedicure, massage, or hair removal, which they did by using string to remove hair. Then the kids would walk around selling bracelets, scarfs, fruit, and basically anything. This is where the difference in cultures in very apparent. Thai people and especially kids are very shy. The biggest reason they don't know English is cause they are shy and scared. They don't try cause they don't want to mess up. All the Cambodian kids (ages approximately 8-14) spoke very fluent English. They were all hustlers and the best ones I had met. From the moment we sat down there were at least 4 kids around us for about four hours. First it's hard to say no to a kid trying to sell you a bracelet for a dollar when you know they are poor. Then they sucker you in. They give you a "free" friendship bracelet which makes you feel bad if you don't buy another one. They do other things such as offer to play a game against you like tic-tac-toe. If you say no to buying something, they ask "why not?" and continue to ask questions and keep suckering you in. If they finally accept the no, they will ask "maybe later". Then they will make you pinky-promise to only buy from them. And if you see them another day, they do not forget you. I ended up buying $15 worth of stuff including some fake Ray-Ban sunglasses. But I didn't need to spend this much on junk, but they got me. Then we had to deal with the tuk-tuk drivers. Thailand is very strict against drugs, but in Cambodia there are not many laws. Every time we passed a tuk-tuk they would offer us first a ride, then other substances. I have never used the word "No" as much as I have on this trip. Every night we went to the beach where we would eat just a few feet away from the ocean for $3-4 a night. Everyone sold the same thing, barbecued chicken and fish. It was actually pretty good and a good break from Thai food. We went out the first night to this place on the beach. We met these beautiful Cambodian girls, then soon after found out they were prostitutes, so we had to leave that place. The next day we went and rented motor bikes for the day for $4. It was alot of fun. I almost crashed a few times, especially starting out. I got the hang of and it was awesome. I think the best way to see a country or city is to get a car or bike and just drive. We got to see so much. We went through these little villages and then went to this other beach that was more secluded. There were just like 3 restaurants. The waves there were huge and went and body surfed for a while. That night we met two American girls, one from Queens, NY and one from Scranton, PA. They also live and work and Bangkok and the one from Pennsylvania is working at the school Shaun is working at. This was about the same odds as hitting the lottery. There are hundreds of schools and Bangkok and only two foreign teachers work at this school and it was the both of them. It was good to hang out with some Americans though. We were there for five nights. Cambodia was a cool place. The culture is different but the people are awesome and very nice, even though they are trying to get something out of you. We booked our bus home that was supposed to take 9 hours to get back. We left at at 7:30 in the morning to the bus station. Our bus left at 8:30 and on the way the air conditioning went out. We ended up at the border for a couple of hours because the travel company messed up the next part of the trip. We were supposed to take a minivan to Bangkok from there. They overbooked or something and we had to take a minivan to another minivan. This new minivan then went 3 hours out of the way to another city before returning to Bangkok. The driver was going between 90-100 the whole time in the rain. It was pretty scary. But we made it home at around 10, not quite 9 hours but not as bad as it could have been....

I am now trying to figure out what I want to do next. I love Thailand and living here. However, I don't know if I want to teach here. Most people who teach her do not like the teaching part. You cannot grade students, you have to pass everyone. There is alot of bull crap that goes on with scheduling and other things. Also, there is no discipline for the kids. It's not a place that I want to work. However there is an opportunity here that I'm very interested in. We are thinking about starting a business with the woman we worked a camp with. She works for the US Embassy and has all the connections we need. English camps are big in Thailand. They happen on weekends, holidays and summers. There are many agencies that offer this service. However there is not one that is focused on American English and American culture. Thais like Americans better for learning because of our culture and clearer accent. Also, if it is based in American culture we might be able to get funding to start it from the Embassy. This is something I would love doing. I would be working camps every weekend with kids that are wanting to learn English. Most of the camps here are all about money and they do not do a good job interacting with the kids, so I think I could be very useful in this, while enjoying my job. So this is very, very interesting. I also am thinking about coming home for a month and then going to work at Camp Unique again. I would be the only counselor back and they want me to come back to help them with whats gone on and the past. I am talking to the new director soon and then I will make my decision. After camp I would probably come back to Thailand if we could get this business going...

April 12th 2009

I thought our last trip was pretty bad, but it doesn't even compare to this one. We left Monday night to go find a train, but it's thai new year and everything is booked, so we had to get a bus for Tuesday. So we left on Tuesday at 7pm on a 14 hour bus ride (combination of 2 buses). They played an American movie that had subtitles in English, that had been translated to Thai and back to English. It was awful. We were on this first bus for about 10 hours, almost 10 minutes away from our stop, when a policemen pulls us over. There are 3 people working, 2 bus drivers and another guy. Both the bus drivers got arrested for who knows what. We had to wait on the side of the street for about 30 minutes and wait for another bus to come pick us up. We took this other bus to the bus stop. Here we had to take a 20 minute ride in the back of a truck to our other bus. There people were trying to sell us rooms, but we already knew where we wanted to go so they put us on another bus which turned out to be the local bus. It made stops every few minutes. We were miserable by this time. We ended up in our destination of Phuket town at almost 3 the next day. We spent almost 20 hours traveling on a bus! And i can't sleep sitting up on buses. We found a guest house in Phuket town for 500 baht a night, which is about $15, split three ways.....
Phuket is an island and Phuket town is in the center of this island. From there you can go to all the beaches, so we went to a different beaches everyday. It was mostly older Sweedish people. The beaches were really nice, but over crowded. The sand was clean and the water was clear. It was pretty expensive for food and things because of the foreign tourist. We spent three days here and it fairly uneventful. We just hung out on the beach and played frisbee or whatever. We had to book another bus back to Bangkok, but this time we found it for 1 bus, 12 hours and half the price. So we get in the bus and they start playing Thai music as loud as possible, and Thai music is probalby the worst music I've ever heard. They then played some movie dubbed in Thai, that in English was probably pretty bad. I had some woman in front of me leaning back into my lap and another person behind me laying down in his seat with his feet in the back of my seat, kicking me every 30 minutes. We did get there in a little under 12 hours, but it was still the worst traveling expierence of my life. I want to stick to trains and stay away from buses....
I want to add that Uncle Mark would be in style here. Almost everyone wears Chuck Taylor's and every shoe store has tons of them. But right now it is Thai new year, called Songkran. One of the top 10 festivals of the world. I'll tell you about it after it's over.

Apr 6 2009

We worked again at another Muslim school. It was about 45 minutes from our apartment, so they got us a hotel for four nights to stay at. The camp was very cool again. We were treated like rock stars again. I really don't know if these kids have seen Americans before. They are really shy at first, but then they get comfortable and ask alot of questions. One of the boys even started asking me about the economy and politics, which I tried to explain the best I could. We were both using a translator. One of the things we did was make pinatas. The kids went crazy. They had never seen pinatas before. So we made them and then busted them open on the last day. They were all running for the candy and falling over each other. Some interesting things happened though. It was a very religious school. All the kids wore the religious scarfs or hats. They prayed at 12:45 everyday Remember, these kids have very limited English. So one of the girls was talking on the phone and I asked her who she was talking too. She said her girlfriend. I said, "oh your best friend?", trying to help her English I though. She said, "No, my girlfriend. I'm a lesbian." So I met a lesbian Muslim, which until now I didn't know existed. At the camp I was in charge of sports everday. We had frisbees, but they got tired of that very quickly. They said they wanted to play monkey in the middle. They loved that game. We probably played for 30-40 minutes and they never got tired of it. I've never played that game that long. We also had a talent show and somehow I got up on stage to do a traditional thai dance with some of the teachers. I made a fool of myself trying to copy what the other teachers were doing, but it was fun. In Thailand, everyone has a nickname, either given by yourself or a friend. The students decided to give me one. I told them I thought some actress here was pretty and they named me Nonkhuntong after her actor boyfriend. We ended the camp again by going to cheesy Dreamworld. Here a group of about 10 Muslims asked me if I was American, and then asked me to take pictures with them, which of course I did cause it was fun and an ego boost. This has happened three or four times already. I wish we were still working at camp. The kids are awesome. They really want to learn and are very respectful. I wish we could run the camps more often...
I have learned some of the Thai langauge. I have learned numbers 1-6, how to say yes, no and hello. I can tell the taxi how to get back to the apartment. I can say good, bad, and serious with variations of these words. I learned high-5 and a joke that goes with that. And then I have learned a few phrases. I'll sound them out in English even though they have different characters. The first is Pom Shu Mike (my name is Mike). Kutouy thai rump pow (are you a ladyboy). Ben fan gan mi (will you be my girlfriend?). Shwauy Ma (your beautiful). And most importantly Mi si pak (no vegetables). Haha, I guess a good start learning the important things....
I have also learned a few more things about Thai culture. I thought most people here were gay at first, including the students. Alot are, but overall Thai culture is very immature and very feminine. The boys like little toys and are very dainty. It's very weird and I've yet to figure out why. They are also immature. The 14-15 year olds are very into cartoons. Not superhero comics and cartoons but little kids stuff. For example they like teletubbies. Also the high school students are very into High School Musical. I think everyone just matures slower and the boys are not taught to be tough.....
It is also amazing how much people love Barack Obama and hate George Bush here. I have a feeling that is how it is all over the world from meeting alot of foreigners. I just finished Obama's book, "The Audacity of Hope". I like him alot better now. That doesn't mean he's going to change the economy, but it was good to read his thoughts on the country unfiltered by media. One thing is clear though, he is restoring respect of the USA to the world. The US was not respected under George Bush anymore, but that is coming back now. The people view the US in a strange way here and probably in much of the world. They do not like them and alot of the things they do. However, everyone wants to go live there and be apart of it. But I really haven't every known how great it is to be an American til I came out here. It's amazing the oppurtunity and freedom we have at home. For example, one thing I have learned is that if you say anything against the Royal Family of Thailand, you will be put in jail for 15 years. This is also the only law in Thailand that you can make a citizen's arrest on. Just one of the freedoms we enjoy at home. But we just got back from Phket, a beach town and I will write about our trip in a couple of days.