Amy (and Monica) Take Thailand: Week 4 Part 2

     It's Thursday morning. My alarm goes off at 5 AM. I hate myself a little bit for agreeing to leaving this early.
   
     By 5:30 I'm packed, downstairs, and waiting for Grace, my travel buddy, to come down as well. I turn in my keys, drop off my deposit info, and run back to Jill's room to wake her up and say goodbye. And leave some random things in her room that don't fit. I don't even know if she remembers me waking her up.

     I also debated waking up another kid who said that I could wake him up to say bye, but once I got up there to say bye, I kind of chickened out.

     Grace and I get in a minibus by about 6:15 AM and are on our way to Bangkok where we have to make the first transfer.

Sunrise

Necessary morning selfie.

      Our arrival in Bangkok was not super smooth. Well, I mean, we got there fine. But once we were there, things started to fall apart. We asked for where we needed to go to get on a bus to Uthai Thani, people just waved us further down. Now I assume that I look like a terribly prissy American as I wander the streets around Victory Monument with one large suitcase and one carry-on sized suitcase in tow, while Grace at least has the decency to have only ONE bag that she chooses to drag around (along with a purse and a backpack).

     So we're wandering around Victory Monument, obviously have no clue where we're going, people are yelling locations in my face and I respond with "Uthai Thani" and they wave their arm forward. Grace needs to pee, so we take a break.

My first picture of Bangkok! This is Victory Monument.

      Someone told us to go up the escalator because we need to cross the street to get to the buses to Uthai Thani. Grace is unsure, but we've got no other option. I struggle to maneuver my stupidly heavy suitcases up the stairs to the escalator and some mom takes pity on me. She offers to take one of my suitcases up the escalator so I give her the lighter one. Then this man appears (I thought he was the husband) and motions for the mother to continue up the escalator with the daughter and that he'll help with my suitcases. First the man with my suitcase goes up, then the mom and daughter go up, and then me. In my head I'm semi-freaking out that this man will get to the top of the escalator and run off with my suitcase and then I'll never have underwear again. Rather, he speaks some English and offers his services to help us find the bus we need to get to. He runs off, tells us to wait, and that he'll come back once he knows where to take us. He comes back, and starts leading us in a direction. Once he gets to the next spot, he stops, runs off again, tells us to wait, and then comes back to us with the next stopping point.

     Now we have to go down a different set of stairs, Grace's arms are tired from her heavy suitcase so we trade. But again, for going down the stairs (STAIRS, not escalator) going down with a suitcase will be hard. Some other kind soul takes pity on me and helps me by carrying the other half of the suitcase down the stairs with me. Our new guide man takes us some relatively sketchy way to get to our bus and I legitimately thought we would either: a) get jumped and robbed, or b) at the end of this he would expect payment for helping us and hold my suitcase hostage if we didn't pay him.

     Neither of those things happened. He got us to our bus, talked to the drivers in Thai, figured out how much we needed to pay and made sure we had a ticket to get on the next bus to Uthai Thani. He was a very kind man and I appreciate his help and would take back all the worries I had about him if I could.

     Grace and I get on our next bus and Grace falls asleep while I fall in and out of sleep. I do attempt some pretty nice photos of the drive though since I kind of had a window view.

This bag was in front of me.

These bags were next to Grace.

An attempted shot at how the lines on the road are much more like "guidelines."

Blurry, artsy scenery.

More scenery! This is how the drive looked the whole time.

     We arrive in Uthai Thani and are picked up by our agent who then takes us to get some lunch. I was the token white girl and through poor communication it was believed that I couldn't use chopsticks, BUT I CAN, thank you very much! I do believe that I eat with a pained look on my face or something funny though because I was constantly asked if I was okay.

     Next we are taken to our agency office where we are told to sit and wait to meet the head of our agency. Grace asks most of the questions, the boss tells us about a camp that we are invited to do through our agency on Saturday and how we will be staying at her house. Then she goes off to do work and I am exhausted at this point because I didn't really sleep on the bus rides so I'm struggling to stay awake and all I want to do is nap but I can't just pass out in the lobby of our agency. When the boss says she's going out for coffee I got so excited. AND she bought this absolutely delicious bread thing that is like a mix between cinnamon toast and french toast and just sugary deliciousness that I want to eat every day for the rest of my life. Oh man, I am salivating thinking about it. THAT is how good it was!

     Then that fateful moment came where they said they were taking us to the agency's boss's house and I was relieved. Grace and I would be sharing a room for the next three days, it would be tight, but we said it would be fine. Initially, the plan was that Grace could sleep on the bed and I would sleep on the mat on the floor. But then the bugs started coming in, and the dog came in and Grace was asking it if it had fleas and it was laying on the mat I was supposed to sleep on. So plans changed and we shared the tiny twin bed.

The bed side of the room.

The "closet."

Their pet dog, Diamond.

     We were treated to dinner first from this girl Nina who is a Chinese teacher and works for Choose English (the agency), she made noodles and we were eating that when some of the agency workers from Choose English found us and said they were taking us out to dinner. So we were treated to another dinner and it was very good. Grace took pictures and then I started taking pictures of food too.

Or maybe just of Nina and the water.

     We went to sleep that night with the lights on (and every night we were there) because if the light was on, the bugs flew around the light, and not in our faces. I also burritoed myself so tight every night. I hope I hardly moved on that bed for the sake of being a good bed sharer with Grace.

     Day 2 in Uthai Thani started off lazy. I don't think we actually left until about noon and we were going to walk into town but got a ride from the boss's husband into town. So Grace and I explored Uthai Thani. It's a small town (or so I thought at the time, I'd call it a large town now). We walked around their market. I bought popcorn that tasted like kettle corn (highlight)! And then we went to the coffee shop with the delicious bread and stayed there for hours. Grace gave me an awesome glimpse into her life and I no longer felt like I had done enough cool things that were worth mentioning, so I hardly talked.

Breakfast! I think it's pork.

I liked this model's hair.

Coffee and kettle corn.

Literally the best toast I have ever eaten ever.

Fish!

     Once we left the coffee shop we were looking for some food to eat since we never really had lunch, but all the spots we were driven to closed at 4 PM. It was 4:15. We bought some street food at one of the market vendors and walked back to the agency and ate our food outside.

     That night, we were treated to Thai BBQ and we met some more of the teachers who work for Choose English. On the way to dinner, I rode on the back of a motor bike driven by Mike from Cameroon --I was excited, I thought he was the buddy I'd have at my school in Lat Yao, I was wrong. He commented that he could tell how nervous I was. I said I had never been on a motorbike before. He said "In Thailand?" And I responded with "In ever!" And he said he was very excited to be my first motorbike ride. But he still teased me about my nervousness making him nervous.

     We arrived at dinner safely. This was also a first for me and it was DELICIOUS! I took pictures!

I mean one picture!

     After dinner it was back to the house to prepare for Saturday's English camp! This included creating a shower schedule and sleeping pretty much.

     We wake up on Saturday, get to make ourselves breakfast (Nutella sandwiches and coffee!) and then are transported to the school we'll be doing our camp at. Now this English Camp is much different than the first English "camp" I did with XploreAsia. First of all, in a realization that I was only slightly saddened by, I was given a men's v-neck t-shirt to wear for the day. Everyone else got to wear a brightly colored collared shirt. All of the students happened to be wearing pretty much the same color shirt as me, so without my blonde hair, I would have been one of the kids.

Breakfast time!!

The boss.

     We literally played games all day. I don't even remember all of them anymore. But basically it was me and a Chinese teacher in charge of a group of like 30 kids and of these 30 kids, two picked to love me and want to hang out with me. One was this boy James who I adored. He could obviously tell how oblivious I was to the Thai instructions and would translate and explain the games to me. The one I understood the least was this goldfish and tuna game that I could not explain for the life of me. I had three kids trying to help me figure it out. It did not go over well. The other kid who followed me around was this girl Name. She was a total sweetheart, super quiet, but really nice. She grabbed my hand whenever she could. I found it cute.

Name & James!

     The games we played were stuff like rock, paper, scissors, and if you lost, you had to line up behind the winners. We played some ball pit game where the students had to take the ingredients out of the ball pit and bring them to the teachers who had recipes to make, we did a bunch of dancing and singing games. And in one of the dancing games (we were either dancing like a fox or like a frog -- the jury is still out) I was picked with another teacher to show off my sweet moves.

This photo makes me look better than I am.

My group. We had pink ribbons.

Get excited everybody!!

We had hamburger. No one knew what went in a hamburger.

This is the game I didn't understand.

     They fed us lunch, they gave us snacks, some of the teachers even got free ice cream and gave it to me. And the icing on the cake of this fantastic day was that I was not the only white person anymore!! The whole time Grace and I had walked around Uthai Thani, we started turning it into a joke that she was showing me around since she fit in so well. But this day, there were like 6 other (it was probably way more than 6) obviously foreign teachers and I talked with them and they were really nice and they all came from XploreAsia as well, just the month before us, it was just good.

This is Grace. She is awesome.

Part of  "the crew."

     We ended camp with an activity where all the kids wrote "Thank you" notes to the teachers. I took pictures of all the ones who said they liked me. And I was also asked to pose for photos with some girls who really liked Justine Bieber because they thought I looked like him.

     After camp we were all treated to yet (another) delicious dinner! Except this one was focused on seafood so I picked the vegetables out of everything because I think seafood is gross. It all looked nice though!!

     After dinner, it was back to the agency's boss's house to pack up and prepare for Sunday, when Grace and I would finally be sent our separate ways to go meet our Department Heads and see our accommodations and get ready for the real teaching job!

Just some scenery of the boss's house.

Got some nice grass.

Some cool trees.

A playset.

And jungle. Lots of jungle.

Found this little guy in the sink.

     During this whole time, Monica is busy being a real teacher, and having the idea thrown at her that she may be switching jobs from being an English teacher for 16 classes, to being a 4-5 subject teacher for one class of 30 students. She was also busy exploring her new hometown of Phayao (which I can now vouch for her, is pretty awesome!)

Phayao has a lake.

This is her school.

Dragons!!

Different colored dragons!

Lanterns!

*Monica had no say in the pictures I chose. I just picked pretty ones that I stole from her camera.