Typical days in Thailand are hard to come by, mostly because of the atypical nature of every activity. Walking out of my apartment one day you might find apartment maintenance randomly jackhammering away at the concrete ground, a 7-11 employee on their break walking a poodle with three ponytails and a cigarette hanging out, a car parked in neutral being pushed out of the way because it is blocking others. Most people in Thailand park their cars in neutral so you can block others, but then if you need to move the car you can just push it out of the way.
The past week I haven't traveled anywhere exciting in name, but I have experienced the wonderful effects of being one of eight farang at the mercy of the hundreds of Thais living near me.
I walked into Tesco/Lotus (basically Wal-Mart) several weeks ago to try to find a new pair of flip flops since mine broke. My feet (size 11.5-12 american) are like radioactively mutated compared to Thais, so I found a weird pair of flip flops that fit well enough. But only with the help of the Tesco/Lotus Manager who then asked me for my phone number and told me to call him whenever I go back to assist me with all of my personal shopping needs. It was wild. He told me he is coming to the United States and will call me when he gets to North Carolina. Of course, many of my Thai friends say this, however this was especially odd considering he was probably 40 years old and the manager of a large Wal-Mart Thai store. Weird stuff happens when you're white in Thailand.
Several times I have been approached by senior girls in the Chemical Engineering department to do a mysterious "interview" for their english class. I am quite suspicious of this class project because I have encountered nearly 4 groups of 5 girls asking me to do this and the first two times I obliged, but I doubt their legitimacy. I think they just were being typical Thai women and shy and wanted to make friends with farang and concocted some scheme. It was fun though, and now I know a lot of people my age studying Chemical Engineering, haha.
I haven't updated in awhile--I started this post about 2 weeks ago. So here are some thoughts.
Interesting new food eaten- raw shrimp covered in fish sauce.
Favorite food that's not kosher - grilled pig necks. ka muu yang from the northeast served with sticky rice.
Highlights- Trip to Kanchanaburi
We stayed on raft houses, hiked around into a couple caves, saw some bats, and went to the Tiger Temple. I walked with a couple tigers and had my picture taken, my friends liked it more than I did. Tigers are cool, but they are in captivity being rehabilitated, so...
We hitchhiked back from the road of the tiger temple with some Thai family and they ended up driving us 60 km to Kanchanaburi. Along the way, they stopped to pray at a Chinese Wat, which was really cool, there were about 18 weird looking statues of Buddhas posing in interesting ways.
Been very busy with school. I had a 20 page report due on Monday and now am in the middle of exams.
But we have celebrated several birthdays in the school, which resulted in several fun party extravaganzas.
Yesterday I went to see a Thai movie called ha pang, which means 5 junctions. This horror film actually was a series of five disconnected stories, which made no sense. The movie was absolutely ridiculous because it made no sense. But Thai people are crazy in the movie theaters, hollering and shrieking during scary parts and laughing hysterically at the "twisted" ending, where the movie suddenly turns into a comedy.
There was a lot I was going to write a long time ago and then forgot it, and now it's not coming back. Oh well.
Thailand is awesome, Badminton is intense, and I am steadily accumulating a random vocabulary of Thai slang words.
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