Birthday, Site Visit

When I posted the birthday picture below, I realized I didn't make any mention of that day yet on this blog. The quick highlights are: That day, we had a field trip scheduled to a huge rice farm / snack-making / soap-making place in a neighboring province. On the bus ride over, everyone started singing happy birthday and my language ajaan (teacher) brought me the watermelon cake you can see in the previous post. Really awesome. Then, the highlight of the rice farm was getting the chance to plant rice by hand. We took off our shoes, rolled up our pants, grabbed a handful of rice sprout-lings, and walked into the warm, muddy field to do the dirty work. It was great because of how great it felt. The mud gave us all a foot treatment that most people would have to pay for. When we finished planting all the rice, we were reluctant to leave the field.

That night, I went out to dinner with everyone in my host family and extended family - 15 people in all. The restaurant was spectacular. We had a couple whole fish, some curry, a delicious pork dish called lap muu, and soup called dom yam. The funniest part was my host mom, who had assured everyone throughout the last two days that "Joel ya liang tu-kon" (Joel will treat everyone). I knew she was kidding - and then the waitress brought the check directly to me after dinner. After the family noticed a momentary nervousness on my part, they all burst out laughing and my mom grabbed the 1,700 baht check. And the Peace Corps told us Thais were not accustomed to sarcasm...

Earlier this week we got back from our visit to Bangkok and our future sites. Some highlights of that are: Bangkok was crazy. After being couped up with our host families for the previous few weeks, everyone was understandably ready for a night on the town. We went to Ko Sahn road, which was probably the wildest scene I've ever witnessed. People, mostly foreigners, packed the entire street. Each step we were approached by someone trying to sell something, including a lot of suit salesmen, which I found funny that anyone would consider buying a suit on that road in the middle of the night. We ate pizza for dinner, hopped around between bars, danced a little, then took cabs back to the hotel - which, I should mention, is an experience in and of itself, especially if you catch one in mid-day traffic. New York cabbies are light years behind Bangkok cabbies. But anyway, Bangkok was fun on the whole, but not a place I will need to perpetually revisit.

The next day, I took an overnight, 10 hour bus-ride from Bangkok to Surat Thani. Before going to our sites, everyone spent two nights with a host Peace Corps volunteer who had already been serving for at least a year. It was fun to see how a Peace Corps volunteer generally lives, and mine was very hospitable. The area is much more rural than our training site in Chainat, which is good and bad. Bad because it won't always be easy to get food and supplies, but good because you can actually see a sky full of stars at night. That was the first thing I noticed after getting off the bus at 3AM, and it was a refreshing site at that hour.

A couple days later I got picked up by some future co-workers to go to my site. I'm in a unique situation at site; there was actually a Peace Corps volunteer from the previous group who had been serving in that exact place. She started her service about a year ago, and just left for America this past January. This means people in the area are generally familiar with seeing a white person around town. It also means that there's less initial work on my part - I already have my housing situation figured out, because I'll just move into her old house. It's a nice looking place, and the best part is it happens to be the only place I saw in all of Surat Thani with a sit-down toilet instead of a squat toilet.

The one night I spent at site was with a host family. I stayed with a 30-something year old man who serves as the Samachik Moo - the person who finds out what the villagers want/need and reports to the SAO (Sub-district Administrative Office, the local administrative building where I will be working out of) - and his mother. Squat toilet and bucket shower, but overall comfortable place and very friendly host. I will be staying with him for my first month at site before moving into my own place.

The situation at the SAO is not overwhelmingly good or bad. People are generally pretty nice, but somewhat shy. It's characteristic of the South for people to leave you alone a little bit and not constantly be chatting away. This is kind of nice, but in all honesty I missed my overly personable host family (who called me twice while at site to check on me) and the people of Chainat. Right now I don't think there's much of an opportunity for me to get work done at the SAO. I have a lot of language learning to do before that will be possible. And I have a feeling I'll tend towards spending time at the area schools, which is how the previous volunteer spent much of her time. During the visit, I got to know a few people in the area who were either village leaders or involved in community agricultural groups (including a group that produces and promotes the use of organic fertilizer, which was interesting to see). I'm excited to get to know more people once at site and see how I can best help.

And oh yeah - the people in the South speak a different dialect of Thai, and talk incredibly fast. Woo-hoo.

Always more to say, but I'll cut it off for now. One thing to note is the tense political situation in Thailand right now - I'm sure there are news stories about it if you look. But it seems like an interesting time to be here.