Advertisement
Published: August 30th 2011
Edit Blog Post
DSCN3478
river in the city Finally made some time to make my blog! My first few days in Thailand have been pretty mellow and have already gone by quickly! We arrived in Chiang Mai on Sunday morning and I was so exhausted from the 24 trip to the country. We met our group of Thai buddies at the airport (all english majors at Chiang Mai University) and took these red taxi trucks to our hotel. You sit in the bed of the truck on these benches and it costs about 60 cents to get most places in the city. Our hotel is a short walk across the street from the university and next to a 7/11 and tons of food vendors. Rowan and I are sharing are small and somewhat grungy room right above a backyard full of 30 chickens that are obnoxious at all hours of the night. More than half the group is staying in the resort with us and it has been lots of fun meeting all of the people in the group. Sunday afternoon our thai buddies took us shopping for uniforms (a white collared short sleeve shirt and any type of black skirt) and then we ate dinner at this restaurant
DSCN3438
in the red taxi called Boat. I had this delicious soup with spinach (thai brocolli), pork, and noodles and it only cost $1! YUM. Then we went to one of the malls in the city. It was so different from Parkway Plaza or Fashion Valley. Almost all the stores were shoes stores and the layout was so confusing. None of the stores had store fronts, they are all open and kind of mesh together. Everyone stares at us wherever we go and it is still really hard getting used to being the foreigners. On campus people will give us the funniest looks and sometimes laugh at us, makes me feel very out of place at times. Everybody is really nice that we have met, although the language barrier is a little difficult to overcome. Most Thais speak some english tho, which has been very useful. On Monday we had our orientation and picked out our classes. I have class M-Th and am taking Thai Language, Thai Civilizations and Culture, Hill Tribe Society and Cultures, and Buddhist Philosophy. All of the classes sounds so interesting! For the Thai civilizations class we will be taking numerous field trips around the city. In the hill tribe class
we have two small field trips and a 3 day backpacking trek to 2 different hill tribes where we will stay in the two villages and also get to ride an elephant and take a bamboo river raft for a few hours. The buddhist philosophy class consists of 30 class hours and 15 hours spent in temples and meditating. We also get to have the most highly respected and well known monk in all of Thailand coming to lecture us, and our professor just got an award for being one of the best in Thailand. I am very excited for my classes, but wish I had a little more time during the week to do some traveling and sight seeing. After orientation we went to the center of Chiang Mai a market to find an outfit for our tradition Thai welcome dinner than is tomorrow night. I got a long purple skirt and interesting white shirt to wear (pictures to come). The markets were crazy! There are so many people and they are crowded with so much merchandise. They sell the weirdest stuff! Chiang Mai is a beautiful city surrounded by a moat and a wall that used to guard
the city. There are many rivers running through it and it is very lush and green! I am still trying to get used to the heat and humidity, being hot and sticky all the time is still unbearable! It rained SO MUCH last night when we were walking down one of the streets last night. Luckily, we were inside when it was the heavy part of the downpour. Today we had our first class (hill tribe society) and we are going out to dinner in a little bit. It is so incredible being in another country, I am still completely shocked by my surroundings and have not adjusted yet. Thailand is not as clean as America and smells very funny. Everyone drives on the wrong side of the road and I always look the wrong way when crossing the street (crossing the street is SCARY- cars and mopeds everywhere that won't slow down and no crosswalks/very few lights). The streets are lined with food vendors and cheap shops. Everything is cheap, I bought 2 school uniforms for less than $20, meals are around $1, and all goods are almost nothing. It is so eye opening to see how the world
lives in another part of the globe. I can't wait to become more familiar with the country and see places other than the school campus (which is ENORMOUS and very beautiful!)
Advertisement
Tot: 0.103s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 5; qc: 45; dbt: 0.0667s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Jaimie
non-member comment
Oh my goodnesss bring it homee :)