Northeastern Thailand

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Mei Ling's Arrival

I met my sister Mei Ling in Bangkok, she'll be travelling with me for 2 months through the more remote areas of Thailand, Laos, then into Vietnam. Paolo has less than a month before his flight to Nepal so he's visiting the key destinations in Cambodia and Vietnam. After 5 months, it was awesome to have Mei Ling around, teaching her key backpacker survival skills (like collecting rolls of toilet paper when they're free), and having someone to carry my winter clothes for me. After Mei Ling purchased an entirely new summer wardrobe, we headed to Korat in NE Thailand.

Korat

The bus dropped us off in front of 'The Mall', an air-conditioned mall with Western restaurants and a high ratio of Western men married to Thai women half their age. After exploring the main sights, which took all of 2 hours, we had to escape the heat and head back to 'The Mall' where we watched the middle class Thais eat ice cream sundaes and buy petite size designer clothing.

Kham Khaun Kaew

We were scheduled to teach English in this remote town. Our first task was trying to figure out how to get there. It didn't exist on my map, I didn't know how to pronounce it properly, and I didn't have it written in Thai. We couldn't find anyone in Korat that could speak English except for Phansak, the lawyer-turned-store-owner that we bought our water from. He brought out a local map, found out which buses we needed to take, and even drove us to the bus terminal the next morning!

We arrived in the town, Panpawee our host picked us up and took us to her home. She assured us that malaria was not an issue here, but I've come to realize that it's not an issue for them because the mosquitoes don't attack them. Whenever we all sat in the same room, the mosquitoes chose only to bite ML and myself!

While we were there we had 3 main tasks:
* 1. Teach high school students how various nationalities greet each other and explain that kissing a stranger on the cheek is social acceptable in some places.
2. Help a group of enthusiastic tweens rehearse their musical for an English competition.
3. Participate in a weekend English camp organized to assist those students that believe English serves no purpose in their lives.

Teaching English was hard, especially when I don't know how to speak any Thai. I stood in front of the class, explained the lesson clearly and slowly, and the students just sat there and stared. They had no idea what I was asking them to do, and half of them didn't care. They were more interested in taking photos of me with their camera phones. There were however some eager students, and they were encouraged to stop by the house after to school to chat with us.

The highlight of each day was when the kiddies came to the house after school for rehearsal of "The Little Dogs". They sang and danced, and by the end of the week we were humming the melody of each song and knew all the lines. One afternoon it was too hot to practise, so they took us to a swimming pool. It was 1.5 times the size of an Olympic pool, in a farm field, where the owner charged kids a few cents to use it. Imagine, a swimming pool in the middle of nowhere! Too bad the water was warm...

After a week of trying a variety of authentic Thai food, and having the other English teachers laugh at my minimal tolerance of spiciness compared to them, I had gained a few pounds. Even ML gained some weight from her 8 meals of vegetarian Thai green curry. With our bellies happy, and our bags stocked with granola and peanut butter we are ready to cross the border into Laos.

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Photos

Thai BBQ
A chunk of fat is used to grease the top part of the pot where the meat cooks, and then the fat dribbles down to the soup for tasty goodness.