48 hours in Bangkok

Busy Street Bangkok

Khao San Rd.

Liz and Brienne Getting interviewed at the Grand Palace by some students.

This past weekend we grabbed a 4pm bus for Bangkok and set our modern dial ahead 20 years. The trip was long as always and we arrived around 9:30 to eat a meal with our friends Felix and Brienne at the spicy Asian restaurant, a favorite on Rambuttri St. We then went hotel hunting which proved to be quite hard, because we found that hotels raise their prices the later you arrive. We finally settled into the 10$ a night gem that is the New Siam. The beds were soft, and the rooms were clean, we had a problem with a fan that was wired backwards, so we spent the first night thinking that the high setting was the low setting. We went out for a few drinks on Khao san Rd. and settled in for the night. Saturday we headed towards the grand palace, or Wat Pragow, thinking we could swing a waived entry fee with our official Thai work permits. We were wrong of course so we postponed the palace tour to a later date. Undiscouraged we headed to Dusit Zoo, seeing everything from elephants to snakes to giraffes. We then grabbed a cab for the Siam Paragon, Bangkok's mega mall/ movie theater. The paragon has every kind of western food you can imagine, from Mexican to steakhouses. We grabbed a plate of nachos, which was our first taste of cheese since Christmas, and I topped it off with a real burger, my first since August. We reserved tickets for the 9pm showing of Avatar IMAX 3d and walked around this mega mall, which has an entire floor devoted to cars, including Ferrari, Porsche Lotus, and Lamborghini. After the movie we headed back to Khao San and to bed. Sunday was spent at the Chatachak Market, which covers 35 acres in Bangkok, we walked around and purchased a few 2$ t-shirts, at 4pm we grabbed the bus back to Chaiyaphum.

Khao Yai.

This past weekend we headed out on a camping trip to Khao Yai National Park. There were 18 “pharang” teachers and 2 guides. We arrived in khao Yai on Friday at about 7:00 after a 2-hour bus ride, and settled into bobby’s guesthouse, which would be our launching point for the weekend. We had a nice big hot meal, and settled in for a 6am wakeup call. On Saturday, we all climbed in the sogthaew truck, put on our leach socks, and started the journey to the campsite. When we got there, Chip, our guide, quickly put us to work, setting up tents and unpacking the trucks. Some wild deer wandered through the middle of the campsite fearlessly as we covered the tents with tarps because, according to Chip, they “weren’t waterproof.” We headed out to our first destination, which was a 1km hike past the waterfall made famous by the movie “the Beach” and towards a more private waterfall where we could go swimming. The water was very cold, but refreshing, and there was a small space behind the waterfall where you could sit, or even climb as the water ran down your back. We then headed towards the infamous bat cave, which is about 30 minutes outside the park, sitting in the middle of some cornfields. Chip pointed to the sky and told us in about 15 minutes they would come out and feed. 15 minutes later, a swarm of bats exploded out of the mouth of the cave and flew in a constant stream above our heads. It was mesmerizing to see this river of bats flying out of a mountain and off into the distance disappearing over the horizon line, all the while sending out high pitched squeaks, and forming patterns in the sky. This flood of bats lasted over an hour, and we were told that there are an estimated 3 million bats, and that the cave in over 1 mile deep. Chip said that the last time he ventured into the cave he found himself waist deep in bat guano.
We then headed back towards the campsite, where we spotted a wild elephant many different monkeys and a black bear. We retired for the night, after eating some delicious sweet and sour chicken and barbequed corn. The next day we packed up camp, as monkeys and deer played all around us, and headed to the highest point in Khao Yai. We hiked to various viewpoints, one that featured a 200m vertical drop, and then walked to a small-secluded waterfall. After that the sky opened up and we headed back to bobby’s to catch a bus home.

Ants Nest in a Tree
"What do you think your looking at?"
Chip, Liz and Monkeys
Endless Wave of Bats

More Bats

Thai Jungle
Liz and Lucas
Chip and Waterfall

Some of the Phuket Crew, (Alex, Heather, Kat, Julia, Mia, Felix, Brienne, Lucas, Anna, Guy Andrew, Rich, Patrick.)

Ja Poa Festival

Last Tuesday there was a big festival for the founder of Chaiyaphum, Ja Poa Phayalae. We woke up before 5am to make it to the center of town, where the Ja Poa statue is. When we got there we didn’t really know what was going on so joined in with everyone who was walking around the statue (we found out later we were supposed to walk around the statue three times and make a wish). As we walked around we stopped and watched the many elephants dressed in Thai silk dancing to the music. They came up to us and would put their trunks around our arms and one baby was sucking on my foot. Later in the day we went to an elephant performance with about 20 elephants. When we arrived the biggest of the elephants were sitting cross-legged on the field. We watched while people volunteered to lie down on the field while the elephants would pretend to stomp on the people three times, a couple times they actually touched the person, good thing it was a baby elephant. We saw an elephant throwing darts at balloons but missed the elephants playing soccer. The festival lasts 10 days but other than the first day it’s pretty much just a huge county fair. There are a bunch of fair rides and games, lots of food, and some Thai crafts. When I asked my students what they did at Ja Poa they told me ca bum which I just assumed was Thai, later to find out it was car bump. Of course we had to check out the bumper cars so Friday night we went. Turns out bumper cars in Thailand, well at least in Chaiyaphum, is the teenage hang out. Everyone was dancing on the ledge of the bumper cars or on the bumper car floor.

It's been awhile so here's an update on what we've been doing...

Christmas

We had a pretty low key Christmas. We had school on Friday and then went to another teacher’s house for a little while that evening. We got to talk to our families on skype and Dylan was there for the opening of the presents and I got to see the Christmas tree and snow, so it was a little like we were home for Christmas. Then we came back to our apartment and enjoyed some krapow moo (sweet basil and pork) and a bottle of wine.

New Years

Christmas might not be a big holiday here but New Years (Phi Mai) sure is. On the 30^th we had a New Year’s party at school for the teachers. I don’t know why I didn’t think about karaoke being involved considering most departments in the school have their own karaoke machine and during free periods spend their time entertaining each other. But before we even sat down with our food we had already been asked about karaoke. Dylan was a little more eager and was quite the crowd pleaser dancing around on stage, which of course meant he was called up to sing 5 songs. I on the other hand was asked to sing “My Heart Will Go On” by Celine Dion. For those of you who haven’t heard me sing, I am slightly tone deaf. Anyways, the song was a way out of my range and as I tried to sneak off stage I was pulled into a duet with a male Thai teacher for song called “Evergreen Tree,” I’ve never heard it before so really it wasn’t much of a duet. But I quickly escaped and was only asked one more time to do karaoke, which was replaced with a request to dance. Any sort of party in Thailand means there will be dancing. And of course this means we must join in. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen traditional Thai dancing but the women keep there hands in an awkward position while the rotate their wrists, sounds easy enough and they make it look so graceful and easy, pretty sure this isn’t how I looked. In between songs they would call out raffle numbers and people would win rice cookers, microwaves, and a few big prizes including the small bookshelf we won. We were wondering how we’d manage to bring it home on our motorbike but a teacher offered so we never had to get to creative with that. Right now we’re keeping our cooking things on the shelves and our rice cooker on top, makes the apartment look a little more homey. It was a great night and fun to be with our teachers outside of school.

On Wednesday we headed to Laos to meet up with a bunch of the other teachers we met in Phuket. We spent the night in Vientiene, which is a really cute clean city about 6 hours from Chaiyaphum. There’s a large French influence there and the coffee shops and the small outdoor restaurants were a completely different feel from anywhere we’ve been in Thailand. The next morning we made our way to Vang Vieng to meet up with everyone for a few days of tubing, rope swing, slides, zip lines, bringing in the New Year, and so many baguettes. The town was full of foreigners from all over. It's a small beautiful town with the Nam Xong River flowing through the outskirts of town. The Nam Xong is just beautiful with cliffs surrounding the river. It was great to see everybody and a really fun long weekend; hopefully we’ll make it back there at some point in our travels. Now it's back to school with only 7 weeks left, it's flown by.

5k

This morning at 6am I met two of our friends to run a 5k, keep in mind even though it’s warm here right now it still is dark until about 6:30. We arrived to a mass of people ranging from 6 years old to probably 70. There was a 10k also, so most of the people around our age were running in that. As we ran we took note of how different this was from running in the U.S. Most students were wearing there school shoes, which really aren’t made for running and we even passed a couple kids without shoes. When we came through the finish line the announcer ran through with us. It was a lot of fun and we even got a medal and shirt.

Sports week

"Takraw"

(above is our school's swimming pool.)

We missed monday and tuesday classes due to our visa run, and showed up wednesday, which is the first day of what Thailand calls sports week. Which is basically a five day long sports extravaganza, pitting all of the high schools in the Chaiyaphum province (there are 42 of them) against each other in all different events. The first day included a giant ceremony where all the schools paraded and sang their school songs. We were able to catch some swimming, which was at our own Muangpayalae, and "Takraw", which is a game that originated in Thailand. It involves a rattan ball and a low volleyball net, the players are only allowed to use their feet or heads to move the ball, and the rules are similar to ping pong or volleyball. Here are a few pictures of some Chaiyaphum students playing the game. As you can see the games get pretty intense and are very fun to watch. On friday we watched some Muay Thai boxing and a few basketball games. Thursday ended with an elephant sighting on the way to the gas station.

(Above are pictures from the ceremony)

(and the elephant on the way to the gas station)

Khon Kaen Visa Run

This week began with an interesting visa run, after a fun weekend in Bangkok. We woke up monday morning to pick up our work permits at the local Chaiyaphum office, and made our way to Khon Kaen, (a two hour open air bus ride.) We arrived around 1:30 pm. When we arrived we went straight to the visa office where we encountered a long queue with "take a number" box. we took numbers 71 and 72. We then sat and sat while watching other teachers, some american families, but mostly American men with thai wives/girlfriends receive their visas. 3 hours went by, and we were still 10 numbers away from being helped, and we were told to come back the next day. We took it in stride and grabbed a city bus back to the city center. and found a cheap hotel for about $6 USD. We took this as a chance to explore Khon Kaen, a city of about 250,000, though the census numbers in Thailand seem to be skewed. Khon Kaen is very different from Chaiyaphum, it features an airport, a train station, many nice restaurants (Chaiyaphum has 1 nice restaurant), but the pride and glory of khon kaen is its brand new 6 story super-mall which was constructed last year. We bowled a round at its bowling alley, and then grabbed some street food, and an english newspaper published in Bangkok, and headed to bed. The next morning we woke early and camped out at the visa office at 7:30, we were finally awarded with our visas around 10 am.

Liz's Birthday in Bangkok

We headed to Bangkok for a weekend of birthday celebrations. We met up with some of the other teachers from our TESOL course on Khao San road (backpackers paradise, in other words cheap hostels, cheap food, clothing vendors, and bars). After a long bus ride and a mix up with our hotel we finally got dinner around 9:00. After being in Chaiyaphum for 2 months the idea of pizza was impossible to resist. We then went to meet up with everyone and celebrate our friend Sara’s birthday. Saturday we woke up and ate brunch and decided to head to the markets on the other end of Bangkok. After a boat taxi and sky train ride we finally made it with less than two hours to walk around since we had a reservation for dinner. We probably managed to see about a tenth of what there was to see at the markets but it was plenty with the crowds and heat. For dinner Dylan took me to a wine bar that had a Saturday deal all you can eat tapas and a bottle of wine. You would think with this kind of deal they would try to get you in and out as quickly as possible and we weren’t sure the tapas would really fill us up. It was the exact opposite. The waiter made sure to check on us after every dish came out and would encourage us to keep ordering more. After goat cheese, apple walnut salad, tuna, asparagus wrapped in bacon and many more tapas we couldn’t possibly eat any more; this is when the servers come out with a half a cheesecake and sing Happy Birthday. It was the perfect place for my birthday, exactly what I wanted. Afterwards we walked around Bangkok center and it started to feel a little bit like Christmas with all the decorations and then we met up with our friends. On Sunday we had a hard time leaving and ended up taking a late bus in evening but it was totally worth it, such a fun weekend.

Stonehenge of Thailand and the Sticks

Today we took a trip to the "Stonehenge of Thailand" which is located about 35km away from Chaiyaphum, up in the mountains. The trip was interesting as we were trying to read the signs in Thai script that directed us to this natural wonder. After a few wrong turns we found ourselves climbing the final leg of the journey on a dirt road dodging construction equipment and oncoming traffic. Finally we were rewarded with the sight of many rocks jutting out of the hillside about 40 to 50ft high, and a bustle of Thai people, we knew we were in the right place. The rocks were sandstone, and I think they were the remnants of a giant reef, though we can't be sure because all of the signs were also written in Thai script. We snapped a few pictures and began to head home, as we drove back down the hill we noticed that were the construction equipment had been working before, it had all stopped. We scootered past one of the construction workers hiding behind a rock, with a long lead wire headed to a rock the size of the car that we were now driving right next to. I put it all together and realized we were driving through a blast site, we continued driving and found another construction worker. I asked him dynamite? He nodded, and then I asked, meu-arai? Which means when, he muttered the word for now and pointed at the ground and smiled. He then yelled to the man behind the rock, seconds later rock was sent a hundred feet in the air, decimating the road we had just driven over. We continued on our way, stopping at a small music festival in a village, and taking some pictures of the countryside. It was an interesting trip and it was good to get out of Chaiyaphum to see the slower side of life for a day.

Some school pictures, some days off.

Gate Duty, basically say hello good morning 1500 times

The last week has been interesting, we've been settling in nicely to our teaching positions, our apartment and Chaiyaphum. We have to apologize for not updating this blog more often, but its not often where we are around Internet. Last Monday, we were told that school was cancelled for the day, and an activity would hold its place. All of the classes put together presentation boards to display what they had been working on this semester, and all of the students who will not be going to a university next year prepared food and drinks to raise money for their class. On Friday we participated in a celebration for the king's birthday where all the students and teachers lined up along the school roads and gave gifts to visiting monks as they walked through a gauntlet of people. It was hard to keep the students attention because of their anticipation for the long weekend and the festivities planned, but it gave us a good excuse to take some pictures.

Liz teaching her young ones.

Liz giving food and money to the monks

Me and some students from my 5/1 class, Hibari and Lactosoy.

A few of my students from different classes

Travels so far.

Here's a map of our route so far, click on it to show more detail. click between satellite and map and back again if it is showing up blank

Tour of Chaiyaphum

So we’ve been in Chaiyaphum for almost a month now, but it feels like we’ve been here for a week, and its strange to think were already ¼ of the way through our placement. We are really getting to know the town and have our “go-to” restaurant, “Mama’s” which has been catering to the farangs for many years. The weather has been cool, in the mid 50’s at night and around 75 during the day with a surprisingly new England fall-like breeze. Last Tuesday we had a significant amount of rain that left about 10 inches of rain in the streets. This obviously made for a fun ride to school in the morning, trying to dodge the spray from trucks, and hoping that we would not get caught at a red light. Yesterday we went for a walk around Chaiyaphum center and tried to snap some photos to get a feel for what we are seeing. The album is in the photo gallery to the right, and here are a few pictures from it. It’s weird to think we will be missing Thanksgiving; but we are working on finding some turkey, and well be celebrating it 12 hours before you do.

Our School, Muangpayalae

Phi Mai Race

Video from the race