Sawatdee kha!
Hey all, this is Paige writing to you, the SEAsia group’s resident blogger of the week. We touched down in Chiang Mai two weeks ago now and SO MUCH has happened since.
After we finished up our brief time of orientation, we pretty much leapt right into the thick of things with a two week homestay in a little village called Mae Rim just a little bit outside of Chiang Mai city. With only two language classes under our belts, we knew we were in for a an experience equal parts hilarious and embarrassing as we tried to get around the language barrier and live with families whose lifestyle and culture are rather different from our own.
From toilets whose flushing mechanism is a mystery to those not in the know, to bucket showers, and hardly being able to articulate to your host parents about what you are planning to do tomorrow, we’ ve all experienced awkward moments.
But in the other end of things, we’ve had plenty to smile about: teaching host siblings monkey in the middle, playing with babies, dancing and singing with our host family, learning how to cook Thai food, and being fed enormius amounts of rice (I swear, I’ve eaten more rice in the last two weeks than I’ve eaten in my entire life.)
Our daily schedule goes something like this:
- wake up sometime between seven and eight
- eat breakfast with our family
- head to school. class starts at 9:30 and breaks for lunch at 11:30
- Our second class of the day starts at 1:30 and ends an hour later
- at 2:30 we’ve got the afternoon to ourselves before heading back to a host family’s house at 5:30
- there we hang out and eat dinner before eventually turning in
With three hours of Thai language lessons a day plus trying to speak with our host families, our Thai has gotten much better than I’d anticipated. While our vocabulary is still pretty small, the sentence structure of Thai is prett simple so now we can say things like “tomorrow I will go to the water fall with our group” (which we actually did do. It was beautiful.) “today I ate a thai ommelete and rice and vegetables” (this has been my dinner a few times), and “yesterday, I went to the store and bought an ice coffee” (this is a favorite thing for us to do when the afternoons get unbearably hot).
With so much free time built into our schedule, we’ve beem able to do a lot of exploring. We’ve gone to local markets and bought ingredients for our cooking class, biked around, learned the dance in Footloose, found restaurants, meditated in a forest temple, and spent a day at a waterfall where we swam amd sunned and ate copious amounts of fruit.
Tomorrow is our last full day in our homestays. It has been a great and challenging experience, the perfect start to our trip.
