Animal Encounters of the First Kind

Thanks for reminding me mom.
I completely forgot to write about the animal encounters that i wanted so badly from this whole program. those of you who spoke to me before i went may remember that the only clear goal i had was to see an elephant up close. well now i have touched one! i fed it bamboo (i think)! it was sort of amazing and sort of sad and not at all the kind of closeness to an elephant that i desired. it was some man riding an elephant through the streets so he could sell the food to tourists to let them feed it. it was still kind of a baby and the man on it had an ice pick thing that i never saw him use on it but was clearly intended for that purpose. dispite those sad conditions it was still really cool to be able to have an elephant wrap its trunk around your arm. though a little terrifying after seeing a "tame" elephant wreck jeff corwins arm on anderson. anyway it was really cool.
i had an equally touristy encounter with monkeys. thousands of monkeys. the little ones that are known for being extremely volatile. there was this really old wat that had a whole monkey reserve right outside it where you could feed them. they would just stand around you and reach up to take the food from your hands. or growl from behind you, race up, and rip the plastic bag of food from your hands, then tear the ear off of another monkey because it tried to touch the bag. a simulataneously amazing and terrifying experience. yeah that was fun.
i think thats it. catch yall on the flip side.

farming continued

i just have a few more updates about my last homestay. not much more interesting happened, but for posterity and my mother's sake i am trying to record most of what i did. one of the most fun things we did is to go swimming in the Mon (sp?) River. we just all jumped in in our clothes during a tour of a community forest. my feet sunk in the nastiest feeling mud ever, and the river had grasses and branches and things one would rather not identify floating all through it, but it was the perfect temperature and had a little pier thing you could jump off of. right before we were all about to get out a herd of kwai came swimming through us to get to the bank. a whole herd of water buffalo sharing our swimming hole! it was terrifying! but fun of course.
thats about it for the homestays, right now we are doing an activity called "follow the food." there are 5 groups who each pick a product and are supposed to follow it to its source. i am in the coca cola group so we are supposed to follow a bottle of coke. ours is not working out the way it was planned, because no one will let us into the coke factories, shaaaady. so today we decided to try to find the coke recipe online, find the ingredients, and make it ourself. what resulted was a very unique drink that sort of tastes like a coke if you try really hard to believe it, but is really tasty. it has a lot more flavor than a coke and we have to mix what we made with soda water to make it carbonated and watered down enough to be drinkable. i prefer this final product to a regular coke, and no union leaders were killed in the process. anyway, if you would like the recipe, let me know, it is quite the adventure to make. tomorrow we go to bangkok to the major coke factory. i had pizza for lunch today and it made me sick, which is just great. not only am i not totally used to thai food, but western food doesnt work either, yay!
peace everyone, wish my bro Jeff a happy (belated) birthday! he's a teenager!

earning my farmer's tan

alrighty i just got back from another homestay! this one was for our "Food" unit about organic farming and the farm bill and fair trade and stuff like that which i was vaguely aware of but really had no idea what it was. I spent 4 days living with a rice farming family in Surin province. They were really really nice people who had a rice farm, raised cattle and sold snacks and fruits and vegetables in a green market. i got to go out with the mom to the rice fields in the morning to weed. i don't know how many of you have ever seen a rice field or maybe pictures but it is all in like a foot or so of water. i took of my shoes and sunk like 4 inches into this thick mud and waded through pulling weed from between the rows. i had a little straw farmer's hat but my head was too big for it so i got crisped. the fields were gorgeous, and went on for as far as you can see with little huts and temples scattered throughout. all around the village there were kwai (water buffalo) roaming around. i thought they looked like a cross between a hippo, a cow, and The Lorax. (They have bushy mustaches and ears.) the family caught their own fish in the area, and the major pests of the fields are little fresh water crabs so they caught them too, and they fried them up for every meal, or used a mortar and pestle to smoosh them into a fish paste that looked and smelled and tasted like chum (i guess because that's what it is). They fried the little fish and you just popped the whole thing in your mouth all at once. I mostly just stuck to the fried eggs.
I also got to see our neighbors, who i think were also family, spin silk out of the silkworms. i never really thought about it, but i would have thought that they sort of spun silk like a spider and you just collected it or something. it turns out they are encased in this silk cocoon and you just throw a whole bunch of them into boiling water and pull the silk off. they have a little spool type thing that the string goes over and twists around so that it spins into a usable thread. i am doing a really poor job explaining it but it was really cool! i'll post pictures or something. by the way the rest of my group who actually have unbroken cameras are posting on flickr. if you go to flickr.com and search for cieethailand07 a bunch should come up. i have to go eat now, i will finish this later.
to be continued......dum dum duuuuuuuuh

chaplin in thailand

ok so i had a little interesting moment, at least i thought so, and figured i'd share it with all you fine people. i came into my room last night and my roommate was watching City Lights, a charlie chaplin movie. i love those movies so i was really excited to finally be able to connect with my roommate over something (we don't get along all that well). i sat down and was immediately confused to find that the whole thing was dubbed in thai. it took a good 20 minutes to explain to her that the movie was actually silent, that there was no english in it to translate. i don't think she ever got it; i think she just decided i was really upset that i couldn't understand the thai. anyway i was still excited because i figured what could transcend culture better than a chaplin movie. watching him run back and forth behind the ref is funny no matter where you are from. what i found out, however, is that even something as simple as a silent movie has tons of cultural quirks that are interpreted differently everywhere. (for all you sociocultural anth people think "shakespeare in the bush") here is the best example that i could understand. for those who are not familiar with the film "the tramp" falls in love with a little blind flower girl, very cute. at one point he drops her off at her house and gets down on his knee to kiss her hand and hold it to his face in that cute old movie way. at this point my roomie started laughing hysterically. i was already all thrown off by the really weird thai that was dubbed over everything, so i was like 'what are you laughing at, this is supposed to be a serious romantic part.' she kept laughing and said 'didn't you see him kiss her left hand?' for those of you who have read a few of these posts you will know about the bathroom procedures and how the left hand is reserved for wiping and nothing else, left handed people have to change their eating habits so their left hand never comes near their mouth. so when chaplin makes this big romantic gesture in my eyes, in hers he is once again being stupid and ridiculous. yeah so i just thought that it was funny, it's not even language that separates us, its everything. not in a negative way, it just does.
peace everyone, my next homestay is in a few days so hopefully i will have something more interesting to say.

"things are going to start happening to me now"

so yay! i finally started actually getting involved in this program and found something to do that i am interested in. tomorrow i am going to go with three other people to interview some teachers and administrators at a slum school. we are looking at the kind of relationship the teachers and the school has formed with the kids from the slums, what kind of exceptions they have made in light of their circumstances, and hopefully will find out how these teachers think extreme poverty has affected these kids' education. it should be cool because the school we are going to is known for being really close with the community and pioneering some interesting programs to deal with impoverished families. anyway that should be cool, i have to right the questions tonight and everything because it goes better if our interpreter knows where we are going with our questions in advance. i was getting worried because all the causes people have been getting behind here just don't strike me; i.e. proper disposal of medical waste and locations of dams. but helping kids is something i can get behind. also for dinner today i had fried (? i'm not exactly sure how they prepare them) maggots, silkworms, grasshoppers, crickets, and silver dollar sized crabs for appetizer. anyway i'm feeling pretty good about being here and everything now, so sorry if i gave the impression that i was not before. it rained all day today, which is not exactly out of the ordinary but nonetheless a little annoying. all the teachers say that it is funny how all the students love to go out and play in the rain while all the thais run inside, they think we are insane. i have definitely gotten over the urge to play in the rain. moral of the story: go out and try a fried maggot, they are like extra crunchy popcorn.

FOOOOOOOOOOD!!!!

ok here's one that everyone can enjoy. i thought it would be nice to let you all know what kind of foods i am eating on a day to day basis. i was worried before the homestays about being forced to eat chicken hearts or blood pudding or fried bugs or something equally ridiculous and/or gross. what i have discovered however, is that i far prefer the homestay food to the food on campus. the food is just so much tastier (literally it has more flavor, often SPICY, make you sweat spicy) and more substantial. lots of other people complain because we eat so much rice and it just fills you up then disappears in an hour or so, but i freaking love it. i LOVE sticky rice. i love the way it tastes, i love being encouraged to play with your food, and i love that everyone takes it from the same basket and uses it to eat from the same plate. in case you have never been lucky enough to experience this, sticky rice (phonetically cow neow in thai) is kept in a circular basket thing that everyone then reaches into and takes a big handful of. you use your left hand to roll it into a log, and then rip little balls off with your right hand. then you use the little ball of rice to pick up pieces of meat or soak up some sauce or whatever from the communal plates in the middle. basically i want to eat this way all the time. granted no one really washes their hands, and you may have read earlier about the bathroom procedures, which is what makes a lot of people uncomfortable with this eating style. honestly though, it doesn't really bother me, ppl are germy, everything is dirty, i'm pretty sure we will live. ok i guess this just turned into my ode to cow neow but hey, it had to be said: sticky rice is pretty cool. the food that goes with the rice is usually chicken (gai) variations, or pork (moo). almost everything is flavored with lemongrass which i started out hating and now would just rather there was much less of. there are also a lot of curries, and most things are fried. i love the way they fry eggs, the difference from the ones at home is something i am unsure of, but am a definite fan of, i think it fried in fish sauce or something. sounds good right lol. the food at the university is much more bland, there is a lot of fried rice that is completely non-spicy, and uninspired pad thais. i'm sure that as i learn more thai and am able to actually ask for the things i really want the whole experience will be better. ok outta time, i have to go to a peer tutor for thai who will once again shatter any good feelings i have about my progressing in thai by not understanding one word with my pronunciation.
peace, love, and chocolate for all.

the clarks

i just want to take a minute to pay tribute to the clarks. i have loved them for a while, i have had clarks days, i have annoyed carolyn by only playing them for hours on end then singing them for the next few days, but i learned today that they are really the best thing there is. i spent like 2 hours in a van actively trying not to throw up from car sickness (side note: there are technically lanes on the roads in thailand, there are yellow lines painted on the ground, but they are more suggestions than anything. everyone is constantly weaving through lanes and changing speeds to narrowly avoid head-on collisions or smashing one of the hundreds of motorcycles that literally do whatever they want) anyway i put on the clarks full blast and tried to concentrate as hard as i could on the music to avoid thinking about what was going on on the road and in my stomach. in short i think the answer to anything in the world can be found in a clarks song. know them, love them. they will pick up your mood no matter what is going on, and, yeah, what more can you ask for?

the group process

so you may or may not know that this program was advertised to be student run and heavily dependent on the "group process," now affectionately known by us here in thailand as "the process which shall not be named." it is all we talk about, it is all we do. we hold sessions then have a meeting to discuss what we found out in the last session then a meeting to talk about our feelings about these sessions then lunch, then a session to recap the previous sessions. we do this everyday with a few changes. although everyone who came here had some idea about the extensive reliance on the group, but also thought that because it was "student run" we would have some say in what we focused on. the program also advertised a 4 week independent project at the end, a really cool idea which drew the majority of the participants to the program. we have now found out that neither the student run portion nor the independent project portion is included in the program this semester. we expressed a great deal of dismay at this loss of the independent project and a general feeling of having our lives completely out of our control in small groups of 4 or 5 people in a session entitled "hopes and fears."
when we did this session we were in small groups, encouraged to air out any general discomforts, and then to write them down for posterity. later that day the staff collected them and said they wanted to type them all up for us. the next day we had a meeting with the program director in which he used all of the fears we expressed,in what we thought was a safe and personal space, to accuse us of being extremely negative, untrusting, hostile, and generally just not cool people. he then said if we were not willing to hand ourselves completely over to his program the way it was then we should just quit right that minute and he would design a regular lecture-based classroom program for those who just couldn't handle the genius of this progressive program. it just felt like this ridiculous attack and basically made me feel like the person who is running my life for the next few months is a child who can't have his work criticized. anyway i decided to stick with the program anyway, because a big reason i came here is to put myself in situations i am uncomfortable with, and i am sure as hell uncomfortable with giving my life over completely to a man and a program i do not trust. i'm not sure at this point if i will come back brainwashed, inspired, or just completely beaten down, or if i will even know which i am. so yeah that is where i am at right now.
after all that i had to sit through a 4 hour car ride that 4 out of the 10 people decided to turn into a sing along. thats right, pity me.
hope everyone is doing well, sorry this one sucked.

point of process

ok so this is just to let anyone who may be reading this know that i have now decided what i want the purpose of this blog to be, which is basically a travel journal. i was thinking before it could just be a way to let people know the major events, but i don't feel like keeping a separate journal so i'm just going to do it here. i will skip (most) musings about the color and consistency of my bowel movements for your sake, but much of what i write here may not be very interesting. on the topic of pooping i just want you all to imagine (or maybe recall if you are lucky) the experience of having explosive diarrhea on a squatter toilet with no toilet paper in a bathroom who's walls don't go to the ceiling less than 4 feet from a family who does not speak the same language and is eating dinner. exciting right? anyway that is what's going on so i'm sorry if some of the following blogs make little or no sense or are just plain boring.

i forgot the best part

i forgot to talk about the best part of the slum homestay. the last night we had a dance party in the street and it was amazing. the houses are all really close together and the whole community acts like family, most of them really are, so people would just stop by to dance a little or just watch the farangs (foreigners) make a fool of themselves. there was lots of beer and a couple of ladyboys and this one really chubby guy who was doing this ridiculous/amazing cheerleading dance which someone took a video of and i will find a way to post here because it was crazy. ok so maybe it isn't as interesting when relayed as it was being there but, as usual, we made the most real connections with these people to whom we can usually only say "what is your name?" and "is this food spicy?" t0 when beer was involved. parties bring people together even if they can't speak the same language. we are pitching the idea of a bar crawl to learn more thai and really connect with the university community to our teachers, i'm not sure if they will go for it though.

slumming it

ok so as you may have noticed i do not have the energy to write in a remotely good way, deal with it yo. so i just came back, about 10 minutes ago, from my landfill/slum homestays. I spent one day at the landfill, we did a "tour" for about 4 hours, and worked with the scavengers for like an hour. In case you did not know these people existed, which i did not, this is what they do: they live next to the landfill and go out 4-6 times a day to go through the new garbage as it is dumped in the landfill to find recyclable materials to sell back. they live off of the money that they make from that, and they pretty much have to work all day to do so. we slept there that night and then we went out with our families for the 7am garbage dump to help scavenge. most of you know that i have a slight problem with smells, so i struggled through most of the time there, you would think that there is just a garbage smell, but there is in fact a whole range of subtly different smells that hit you at different times so you can never get used to it. we put on these rubber boots and cloth gloves and used these rake/pitchfork things and just waded in there. i honestly have no idea how they do it everyday. there were sooo many maggots just everywhere and you have to reach in and brush them off with your hands to see if their home is a valuable piece of garbage. i also had some pretty nice encounters with roaches, belize broke me in to that a little bit, but having a roach crawling on your neck is just not something you can really prepare for.
after spending just the one full day and one night at the landfill we went to the slums. they are these mini communities that cover pretty much all of the land next to the railroad throughout the city. we all expected them to be really intense and run down, but it turned out we were in one of the "rich" slums, and the one i was living in was actually a little nicer than my first homestay. the only thing was that the ceiling was really low, i couldn't stand up straight in any room. we were there for two nights and three days, and i dont really have much interesting to say about it honestly. my "meh" (mom) worked as a cook in the market so i spent a lot of my time just sitting there while she cooked. if you want to know more about slum issues or landfill issues i have a lot to say, but it would bore most and is just too much work at the moment. hope everyone is having fun where ever you are, i am leaving again today for a "retreat" the location and conditions of which our group leaders refuse to tell us. i'm praying for a week stay in the hotel sofitel, which is a five star hotel right down the street from us (literally right next to the slum community as well) but i think the chances of that may be slim. later dudes.

forays into buddhism

unfortunately i know absolutely nothing about buddhism and this program does not teach a whole lot about it, none up to this point in fact. we did, however, have this really cool buddhist ceremony to welcome us to KKU. It was a string tying ceremony that is supposed to call back the spirit that protects you in case it got knocked loose on a long journey. i knew nowhere near enough thai to understand what the monk was saying, but he said some prayers for a long time (while my leg fell asleep and reached a point of numbness that i never would have thought possible because there is a specific way that girls are supposed to sit to make sure that their feet are not pointing towards anyone, its sort of the cheerleader sit but more tucked under) and then he went around and said a prayer to each of us, put some flowers around our neck, and tied a little white string around our wrist. then they handed out more of them and everyone did the same to their homestay families who had come to the ceremony too. it turned into a pretty cool thing because since none of us knew thai we just sort of made up little prayers for the person's life and wished them health or whatever they wanted. it is hard to explain but it was really great and really created this great sense of happiness and family. corny i know but hey. we all ended up with a couple of inches worth of strings around our wrists, now it looks like we all have really thick, really poorly made, off-white bracelets on. i am clearly well on my way to being crunchy. none of us know how long we are supposed to leave them on though. anyway i hope everyone at home is having a great time too, and that you are enjoying any free time that you have, because i have none and, let me tell you, it kinda sucks. well that was a downer ending but yeah. peace.

baby's first homestay

so i have just come home from my first homestay, and it was definitely an experience. we were all assigned a nung sow (phonetic thai for little sister) from the school that we went to for our thai classes. mine was a third grader named view. my room was a king bed, bed being a very general term for a pallet on the floor on which you sleep, on a concrete floor covered with contact paper. there was a huge cabinet thing to create a kind of room area with one foot of room on either side of the bed. the rest of the "house" was some sort of recycling depot, i think they may have colllected bottles and stuff like that to sell back to make money, im not sure. so the whole thing was basically a garage; it had a tin roof which only came down to about five inches above the walls. which means that along with everything that came in through the doors and windows which were never closed, these huge lizards were always climbing over the walls to chill in the house. the rest of my family seemed to all be part of an extended family which i could never really get an explanation of because i dont know enough thai at this point. they all lived in this house across the "courtyard" aka mud pitt which i only saw the living room of. there were 4 kids who hung around with my little sister and me all the time, and some neighbors, so the room was always packed with crazy kids. My hong nam (bathroom) is like the majority of thai bathrooms unless you are in a western tourist hotel: a squatter. there are these two little ridged foot spots on the sides of a flat porcelen thing with a hole on one end. you squat over it. when you are done you use a bowl to scoop water out of a bucket next to the "toilet" to "flush" (move the waste products towards the hole) and also to splash yourself to get clean. i really have not yet gotten used to that and don't see it happening anytime soon. the shower is a huge basin of water with the same type of bowl which you fill with the cold water to dump on yourself. the water just goes down a drain in the corner of the room. that was actually not bad at all because it is so hot all of the time. i got ridiculously bit up by mosquitos or something, during a class i counted and i have at least 112 from the knees down. they looked pretty horrible for a while but i took a benadryl and some of the swelling went down. it has all been really interesting so far, there is about 20 minutes of down time per week which is getting exhausting, though this weekend we dont have too much. i only got about 4-6 hours of sleep a night at most in the village because my family had alot of chickens and roosters within 20 feet of my would-be-sleeping-head and dogs running around and for some reason they were always going in and out on motorcycles all night. the yie's (grandma that ran the house and did all the cooking) kitchen was two electric burners and a fire outside under a tin roof type thing, which is also where the table where we ate was. my favorite thing to eat was cow neow (sticky rice) and my yie thought that it was hilarious, she started referring to me as cow neow by the end.

messages from the other side of the world

So I decided to just create a blog so that i don't fill up anyone's inboxes with lengthy descriptions of every little thing i do. hopefully this way you can just check to see if i am still alive at your leisure.