Last week we had a "study week" so there were no classes. I don't know a single local student who traveled during this time like we do during spring break back home...they all spent the week at the library working on group projects and studying! But of course all of the exchange students were off traveling. This blog is mostly about my trip and it turned out to be a novel! I’m sure I have included many more details than you care to read about and I apologize for the extreme length. But I just wanted to have everything written down somewhere for myself. You can always just look at the pictures! =)
But first, I'll try to update on the first few weeks of february...
The chinese new year celebrations continued for 2 weeks. I went to the Chingay parade down by the river the second weekend. It was really elaborate and a lot like what I would have imagined a chinese parade to be like. There were the enormous dragons that spit fire that I always associate with chinese culture. There were a ton of dancers with magnificent costumes and they were extremely enthusiastic. It was funny because I'm used to tiny parades where the floats are sponsored by like the local car dealerships or something, but here there was a hong kong float, japan float, malaysia float, etc. The elaborate floats and enthusiastic people represented the different cultures well and I was very impressed.
Josep's 2 friends from spain were traveling SE Asia so they stayed with us for awhile. The 3 of them are the type of people who are pretty funny individually, but when they're all in the same room it's amplified and they always end up doing ridiculous, obnoxious, hilarious things. It was definitely entertaining. There was an event called the MRT pub crawl that we went to. It was just a planned event where everyone bought a t-shirt and then we went around the city on the MRT stopping at various pubs, bars, or even 7-11's to have a drink then got back on the subway. The last stop was a club in Clarke Quay where we spent the rest of the night. The funniest part was probably the shirts...it was around valentine's day so the front of the shirt said "kiss me quick" and the back said "____ me slowly" and then they provided us with permanent markers to fill in the blank. It got interesting! By the end of the night my shirt was absolutely covered with marker and a bunch of the stuff was written in a different language so I still don't know everything it says! We've also had other fun get togethers, such as a BBQ because all of the guys are going crazy with the lack of red meat served in Asia, but nothing really worth giving details about.
I came here with the mentality that I wouldn't have to do any work for school since I just need to pass but that is not the case! It's hard for me to compare the workload to what I have back home since my motivation here is so lacking, but I'm pretty sure the classes are harder. And the local students definitely devote more time to school than what I'm used to! Anyway, the schoolwork is starting to pile up and I just wish I would have done more traveling during the first half of the semester. I spent plenty of weekends in Singapore when I didn't have any upcoming projects or tests and it would have been easy to travel, but I think it was just too overwhelming to plan travels when living here was still so new to me. But now, I want to take 3 trips in the remaining 5 weeks of classes, but during this time I have 6 group presentations and 4 finals!
Okay, now to talk about THAILAND! I was truly amazing. There was a group of 12 of us traveling together. Me, Alba-Spain, Leslie-France, Mylene-Canada, Amandine-France, Olivier-France, Josep-Spain, Alex-Spain, Joanna-Poland, Monika-Poland, Caterina-Italy, and Manena-Spain. As of the night before leaving, we hadn't really planned anything, just our flight! So between that and having such an enormous group, I think we were all a bit nervous about how smoothly the trip was going to go, but it turned out great! We didn't have trouble at all deciding on where to go and what to do next, and we all know each other so well that the group didn't seem as huge as it was, it was very manageable. I think it's easiest if I just go through the trip day by day...
Thursday February 21st - Our flight left for bangkok at about 6:30am. As I just mentioned we had done minimal planning and were very unprepared for the trip due to midterms and projects due the prior week so Alba, Leslie, and I were up until about 3am packing then woke up at 4:30 to go to the airport! The excitement counteracted the fatigue though! As soon as we reached the airport we left Bangkok because we wanted to spend more time there at the end of the week. So from the airport we got a van to drive us a few hours to Kanchanaburi. It was a tight fit getting all 12 of us plus a driver in the van; by the end of the week we had definitely gotten used to uncomfortable traveling. On the way we stopped at the famous floating market. It's very touristic, but we felt like we had to stop because there were so many postcards of it. You just ride down the river in a little boat and the local people, either in boats or on the side of the river, sell you souvenirs or food. It's crowded though, the boats are packed in the river side to side! Once in Kanchanaburi we found a little hotel right on the river and spent the afternoon outside with our maps and Lonely Planet guides, planning the rest of the week. After dinner we rented bicycles. We rode aimlessly around the city and until we eventually went to the famous bridge on the River Kwai. The history of it was explained to me at the time, but I won't bore you with the details, there's a movie about it too. We went to another restaurant for banana shakes (we became obsessed with them) then went to bed!
Friday February 22nd - The night before we booked a 1-day tour, so we had breakfast at the hotel and at 8:30am this pick-up with a hilarious hippie-like paint job picked us up. We all piled into the the back and drove about an hour to a national park. There is a trail that goes uphill about 2km and on the way you pass 7 waterfalls. They said it takes about an hour to hike each way and we had 4 hours to spend there, so we had an extra 2 hours to spend taking pictures and swimming! It was really beautiful!
Afterwards the tour included us riding the "death railway." (pic is of Joanna while we were waiting for the train to arrive). There's some history behind it, but it ended up just being an old train that goes along the side of a cliff. It was too crowded and none of us had seats so we had to stand in the aisle for the entire ride! Luckily this part of the tour was less than an hour. Everyone really enjoyed the falls and was happy with the day. In the evening we took another van to Sukhothai that was about a 6 hour ride. I had called a bunch of hotels in the morning to book us rooms but it was difficult to find a budget hotel with 6 vacant rooms to fit all of us. Eventually I found one, and the receptionist took my name and I repeated numerous times that we had 12 people and would be arriving in the middle of the night because his English wasn't great and I was nervous he didn't understand. Turns out I was right; when our Thai-speaking driver called there for directions as we arrived in the city at midnight, we found out they didn't have rooms available! Luckily the driver knew of a hotel, so he took us there and they had space available.
Saturday February 23rd - Despite our late night, we got up early to start touring Sukothai. For public transportation there's just men who drive around in covered pick-up trucks and you just hail them to pull over, jump in the back, and negotiate a price. We hailed one of these pick-ups and headed to the historical park which after a long confusing conversation with the hotel receptionist, we realized they call the "old city." The area is very large and there are a ton of different ruins, temples, and enormous Buddha statues to see so we rented bicycles and split into smaller groups to tour around. The weather was great, the biking was fun, and it was my first time temple-touring so I found everything extra fascinating. It was mid afternoon by the time we had gotten around to all of the main sites. We then headed to the bus station to catch the evening bus to Chiang Mai. We arrived about 9pm and grabbed some pad thai (the signature noodle dish of thailand that is sold absolutely everywhere for less than a dollar and we ate it almost every day along with our banana shakes). Then we just stopped at an internet cafe and hung out in the hotel the rest of the evening.
Sunday February 24th - We allowed ourselves to sleep in a bit (8am!) then headed to a nice place for breakfast. There are over 100 temples in Chiang Mai, and they're all just mixed in with the rest of the city. You could be at a 7-11 then turn the corner and see an enormous temple. So we just walked through the city for awhile seeing some of the big ones. At one of the buddha statues you could do a good-luck ritual involving lighting candles, incense, and giving the statue flowers which is what I'm doing in the pic below. It was probably a tourist trap, but whatever. Alex and Olivier rented motorbikes to get around the city but we were too scared. (when a few of the girls went to Langkawi, Malaysia last month they rented motos and Manena crashed and had to go to the hospital! She dislocated her thumb and had a lot of big scrapes, but she's okay now! Either way, we weren't doing that again!) There were a lot of monks around so we stopped and chatted with one for awhile. They welcome tourists to speak with them because they want to improve their English. After a few hours touring the city we paid for a 20 minute drive up a little mountain to the most famous temple called Wat Phra Thart Doi Suthep. There was also a great viewpoint of the city up there. After the usual picture taking, we headed back down to the city center. There’s a huge street market that is only set up on Sunday afternoons so we were very happy that we happened to be there on a Sunday. We walked through the market and bought a few pairs of thai-fisherman pants (pants made out of brightly colored, thin fabric that are made in one enormous size and you have to wrap and fold half of the fabric around the waist just to get them to fit, then tie them on tight. They’re super comfortable; everyone wears them in Thailand, especially the travelers.) There was also a lot of jewelry and other attractive shopping opportunities, but we were trying to control ourselves until we got to Bangkok. We bought pad thai from a street vendor for dinner, and I’m proud to say now I can even use chop sticks successfully while walking down the street and shopping! I haven't adjusted to Asian culture enough to start eating the crickets and worms that were being sold on the street though! That's too hardcore for me.
After this we headed to the bus station. We took a bus that left at 9pm and would arrive in Mae Hong Son at 5:30am. We had set up a 3-day guided trek in Mae Hong Son that would start at 9am, so we knew we would be tired after spending the night on a bus rather than in a hotel, but we thought we could handle it. Unfortunately, we weren’t anticipating that this would be the bus from hell! We paid an extra few dollars to be on the nicer, air-conditioned bus. It turns out having air conditioning means practically freezing to death. I swear it couldn’t have been more than 50-some degrees in there, and the vents over every seat couldn’t be closed so it was constantly blowing on your face. Also, they make you store your luggage in the lower compartment of the bus so we couldn’t even get a sweater or something. We joked that the “wind chill” from the vents made it feel even less than 50! Josep tried to steal some blankets that were sitting by the driver’s seat while he was filling gas! It was hilarious because he tip-toed up there thinking he was so sneaky and that the driver couldn’t see him, but the driver was totally watching him through the window the whole time. Though we were miserable, we still had plenty of good laughs about the ridiculousness of the situation. On top of the temperature, the road was extremely curvy, and extremely bumpy. At one point Leslie actually fell off of her seat into the aisle because of a bump! Hilarious.
Monday, February 25th – This was an extremely long, eventful, great day! We arrived at the Mae Hong Son bus station just before 5:30am and I think we each had about an hour of sleep, and even that was just an accumulation of sleeping 5 minutes then being woken up by a big bump and having to start all over. We could have done trekking leaving from Chiang Mai, but the tours there seemed very money-making based, and we thought it would be strange to be near such a large city. We decided to take the extra 8 hours each way of travel to go to the smaller city that’s cheaper, way way less touristic, and more surrounded by jungle in order to have a more authentic experience. I had called and booked the trekking tour for us with a man named Mr. La. He grew up outside Mae Hong Son and owns a café there. He has been planning and leading treks for 20 years (since he was 18). We all grew to love Mr. La but he didn’t make the best first impression on us because he had said he would meet us at the bus station, but he overslept. So we were just standing in the parking lot, (there wasn’t an actual building to go into where we were dropped off, just a parking lot) it was still dark out with hardly anyone in sight, no one spoke English, and we had no idea how to get to the café. Around 6am we figured that even though he spoke English well, there was probably a misunderstanding and that he wasn’t coming to meet us. So we just started walking down the street and bought some food at a 7-11. Everyone was getting crabby by this point! BUT luckily, after only 10 minutes or so of walking Mr. La found us and explained that he had overslept. Northern Thailand is very cold at night and we were all still freezing so Mr. La brought us to his café and immediately offered everyone free hot chocolate. This is the point where all was forgiven and we started to love him!! His café also had dining area with low tables and pillows on the ground to sit on rather than regular tables and chairs, so since it was so early and there weren’t any customers, he let us move the tables and gave us sleeping bags. We slept on the floor for an hour or two which doesn’t sound like much but I think we each felt like it was the best sleep we’ve ever had. When we woke up everyone’s mood had done a complete 180 and we were super excited to get started with the trek! It cost $2000baht for the whole trip. This is only about $60USD and it was completely all-inclusive, we didn’t spend another dime the entire 3 days, everything was provided for us. Mr. La made everyone a great egg breakfast, we packed mini-backpacks and stored our huge ones in his place, and we were ready to go! There are 2 other guides (friends of Mr. La) that he hires to go along on the treks and help out. They carried the packs with all of the food, extra blankets, camping supplies, etc. They didn’t speak any English but we still became good buddies with them by the end of the trip. Our first half-day was spent closer to the city. We started out by riding in pickups down to the river to do bamboo rafting. There were 3 people on each raft. They don't look like the most sophisticated rafts, at first I couldn't believe we were supposed to trust them to get us down the river. The bottoms of your feet totally go underwater when you step on it, but it ended up not being scary at all because the river is very calm. It was a great, relaxing hour and a half ride down the river. Occasionally we would see locals doing work or cleaning clothes or something on the shore, but other than that it was just jungle. The weather was beautiful and cloudless our entire trip so I was pretty red by the time I got off the raft.
After the rafting we got back in the pick-ups and headed to the long-neck village. This was the only time during the whole 3 days where we saw a few other non-local people. It wasn’t on Mr. La’s original plan, but we asked him to take us there. You all probably have some image in your mind from National Geographic of the women who wear heavy gold bands their whole life that extend their neck...well we also had this image in our mind and decided we must go there. It ended up just feeling awkward and we understood why Mr. La didn’t originally feel it was a necessary visit. You have to pay to enter the village which made it feel like you are at a zoo because you’re paying just to go look at them; so that was kind of disturbing. I can’t imagine wearing the bands is very healthy, and according to Mr. La at one time the tradition had almost disappeared. Then along came tourism and they were seen as an attraction, so the ritual continued just so these women can stand there and have people take pictures of them all day, while they try to sell souvenirs. Anyway, it was by no means a bad experience; we talked with the women and quickly became more comfortable. At one point I heard a cell phone ring and one of the village women pulled out a little flip-phone and starts chatting which was a pretty funny thing to see.
After the village we went to go do some ELEPHANT RIDING! We were very happy with the place we went to, we had seen advertisements for elephant riding in the bigger cities but you could tell the elephants would be held in a zoo-like fashion near the city making it very touristic. This place was in the middle of the jungle, and apparently they have 30 elephants in the jungle. They need to be told a day ahead of time if someone wants to ride them so they can gather the number of elephants needed and bring them to the picking up/dropping off station. So Mr. La had gotten 6 elephants for us. I paired up with Olivier. You just sat on a little bench thing strapped to their back. It swayed back and forth as they walked so I was definitely gripping the seat a bit…and then the guy leading the elephants encouraged us to crawl forward off the bench and just ride the elephant like a horse! So we each rode straddling the bare neck/shoulders of the elephant for half the time (we rode about an hour total). There was nothing to hold on to so I was just gripping the top of her head! There was an adorable baby elephant that we of course named Dumbo. When we crossed the river, (which was a bit scary by the way because it was while I was riding up front with nothing to hang on to!) Dumbo was just barely tall enough to walk through and was rolling, splashing, and playing in the water.
While we were riding Mr. La and the other guides went to get us lunch. We sat in the grass under the trees and ate pad thai. After eating we were dropped off near a Hmong village. This was the farthest the roads went into the jungle so from this point on there were no more vehicles, only hiking farther and farther away from the city. In this Hmong village, they practice polygamy every man had about 4 wives and every wife had about 5 children, so there were over 400 little kids in this village. We were there in the afternoon so all of the adults were working in the mountains, and the older kids were in the school. This means the entire village was swarming with kids age 1-6 running around playing outside. I only saw 2 or 3 adults the entire time we were there, but there must have been about 100 little kids outside! If any of you have read the “his dark materials” series, this place totally reminded me of Cittigazze with no adults! Anyway, there was obviously the language barrier with the kids so we just handed out lollipops and looked around the village while they played.
From there we hiked for an hour or two further into the jungle to a smaller Karen village. There are only about 11 families in this village (and no polygamy). Mr. La asks these families to let us spend the night in their homes when he does these treks, so we split into groups of 3 and slept in 4 different homes. First, we spent the evening with the entire group and guides hanging out with one family in their home. They offered us rice wine, but we didn’t drink very much because it’s as strong as a shot! I must have been outside when this next part occurred because I totally missed out on it, but apparently they also offered us monkey as an appetizer. I hear it didn’t taste good at all! While we were socializing in one home a group of men were preparing dinner for everyone in another home. They have a fire pit right in the middle of their hut to cook on and keep warm so they made us some tea as well. For dinner we had rice, pork, and plenty of cooked vegetables. Mylene, Alex, and I stayed in the same home which was a different place than were we ate or where they were cooking. In the hut there is one wall in the middle that separates the main room with the fire pit from a bedroom. The family obviously slept in the bedroom while us three slept on the floor of the main room under a mosquito net. It was cold and the floor was hard, but we weren’t expecting a Hilton so it was okay.
Tuesday February 26th – We woke up and gathered in the home where we had dinner and ate some scrambled eggs and bread for breakfast. The village just had two outhouses which are right in the middle of everything and the boards making the walls are broken and spaced apart so privacy is minimal. Inside there’s just one of those toilets that only go a few inches off the ground so you’re meant to stand over it, not sit. (too much information, I know, but this is the type of toilet that is even in public establishments in the Thai cities and some places in Singapore as well, so I figured at some point I should describe it!) Then there is a “shower” which is a hose next to the toilet with freezing cold water. You can imagine how stinky we got by the end of the trip. We spent the morning at the school. There were 17 kids. The teacher had asked us to play games or sing songs or do whatever would be fun with the kids for awhile. So we sang the song “head, shoulders, knees, and toes” with the motions because that was pretty manageable given the kids didn’t know English. Then we played hot potato and some tag/capture-the-flag type game that Alba and Alex came up with. They seemed to have fun and we definitely enjoyed it. The teacher also gave us a pen and notebook and asked us to each write about what we thought of the morning before we left: the school, the kids, anything. We couldn’t think of much and mostly just expressed gratitude for how welcoming they were. Before we left Mr. La told us he was going to give them a monetary donation so we got the hint and made a donation as well when we returned the notebook. We each gave $100baht which is only $3USD but that’s worth a lot more in Thailand than in the US and was multiplied by 12 people plus Mr. La’s $500baht donation, so hopefully it will actually help them out a bit.
From there we started about a 3 or 4 hour hike to a waterfall. The hiking was through hills covered in trees and bamboo forests. It was mostly downhill and considerably steep. The ground was all loose dirt and small rocks, so it was veeery slippery. I think almost everyone fell at least once. Alba and I ended up with almost identical bruises on our hips! One time I slipped when we were walking sideways across a very steep hill, I caught myself without going too far down the hill away from the trail, but after that I was a bit paranoid on the steep parts. We were relieved to reach the waterfall. It was a bit taller than the ones we saw in the national park earlier in the week. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any pictures of it. There were actually 2 waterfalls, and you had to climb up this really scary, unsecured bamboo ladder next to the first smaller fall in order to get to the big one. We all climbed up in just our swimsuits and no cameras because we were scared of dropping our belongings or getting them wet. We jumped in the freezing water just to clean off the sweat and layers of dirt from hiking. We then sat on the rocks and ate lunch. Mr. La is very concerned about being eco-friendly on his treks, so the things the guides provided for us were always made from the surroundings. The lunch they had packed for us was white rice with pork and vegetables, but they had used giant leaves to individually wrap the rice and tied it together with some sort of thin vines so once we were done eating we could just drop our leaf-plate into the river. After eating and resting we hiked another hour or so to get to the campsite. The only things that remain set up at the campsite are the fire pit and a shelter to sleep under (the “shelter” is wooden boards laid out to make the ground level to sleep on, and a tarp tied up overhead to block rain. It was just big enough for the 12 of us to sleep next to each other, we felt bad that the guides just slept on the ground.) Farther down the stream there was a mini waterfall that a few of us went to take a shower in. Of course it was freezing but it was the first time I used shampoo in days so I was happy. Mr. La had gotten a few more guys from the Karen village to come along with us this night to help set up camp. It was amazing how much they created from nothing. They actually made us an entire table just from the bamboo around us! Mr. La said he had never done that before, so we’re not sure why during our trip he decided to make the table, but we’re happy he did because it was amazing to see them construct it from scratch. It was picnic table style with benches big enough for all 12 of us to sit at! Then they cut the smaller bamboo pipes into cups, and cut the larger pipes both horizontally and vertically to create half cylinders that we would use as bowls for our dinner. They even made us bamboo candle holders! Everything was cooked in the bamboo. They would fill the bamboo pipes and place them over the fire: one boiling water for tea, one cooking rice, one steaming the vegetables, etc. It takes forever to make food! Both in the village and at the campsite dinner took 2-3 hours to prepare. We insisted on helping with dinner even though at first they told us not to. Eventually they trusted us to cut the vegetables. I peeled cucumbers with a giant machete, using a huge leaf as a cutting board! They once again had plenty of rice wine for us to drink but we only drank a bit to be polite because it really doesn’t taste good! The guides had plenty though which was hilarious. By the time dinner was ready they were feeling pretty good! One guide even had a sentimental moment where he had Mr. La translate to us that even though he had never met any of us before this trip, it felt as though we had met each other many times before…or something to that effect. We were happy that the guides liked us and didn’t have any resentment towards us for being “rich” western tourists. Dinner was absolutely delicious and we stayed at the table for a long time after eating just talking and having a good time. Sleeping on the ground was cold and hard, but we were so tired from hiking we still slept well.
(pics: the table in mid-construction, our amazing dinner, and olivier goofing around with one of the guides who had been indulging in some rice wine!)
Wednesday February 27th – We woke up to a well prepared breakfast of hot chocolate, hard-boiled eggs, pineapple, and toasted bread. After sitting around being lazy and trying to wake up, we eventually packed up all of our things to set off for our final hike that would lead us back out of the jungle. It was about a 5 hour hike. We just stopped a couple times to rest on the rocks and eat some oranges and cookies. The hiking was very different than the day before. Instead of being in the forest part of the jungle, we followed the river the entire way. This meant being on rocks instead of dirt ground so I was happy because it’s less slippery and I didn’t fall at all. It still got difficult at times to climb over some of the rocks or balancing on unsteady rocks and logs to cross the river. There isn’t one trail that goes the entire way on the side of the river; we had to cross over the river numerous times in order to stay on walk-able land. Sometimes we were able to hop from rock to rock to get across, but other times there weren’t big rocks so we just had to walk straight through. The water was never higher than the waist so it wasn’t too bad walking through, but it was uncomfortable to be hiking with wet pants and soaked tennis shoes. It seemed every time I would start to dry off a bit we would have to cross again. Sometimes the guides would have to walk us across the river one-by-one holding our hands because the bottom was really slippery or the current was really strong. Anyway, we were glad the hiking was a bit challenging because otherwise it would have gotten pretty boring after 5 hours!
(group picture at the end of the trip, Mr. La is the one squatting and wearing white T-shirt)
Eventually we got to the road where Mr. La had a pick-up waiting for us. They drove us to this little restaurant in the middle of no where. They had a pond with plenty of fresh fish that ended up being our lunch. Our last stop of the trip was a hot spring. We didn’t go in it though because it was too hot and didn’t seem appealing after being in the sun all day. There was a place with like 12 public showers though so we all were very very excited about that. Mr. La waited for us to shower then we drove back to Mae Hong Son and got to his café at about 5pm. We had said we wanted to leave to go back to Chiang Mai asap to catch a train back to Bangkok, so he called a van service (because we weren’t taking the bus again) to pick us up. We looked around at the outdoor market and ate some cheesecake and banana shakes at the café while we waited for the van. Even though the van is much faster than the bus, we still didn’t arrive in Chiang Mai until close to midnight, so we were too late for the night train. So, we had the option of taking the train all day Thursday, or spending another day in Chiang Mai and spending Thursday night on the train. This is where our group split. All of the girls agreed that we didn’t want to waste 12 daytime hours on transportation, so we would spend another day in Chiang Mai and sleep the following night on the train. The three boys, however, didn’t feel it was worth it to spend another day in Chiang Mai since we had already toured it so they took the early morning train and we met them in Bangkok on Friday.
Thursday February 28th – This was our wonderfully relaxing recovery day. We decided we could reward ourselves for surviving the 3-day trek, so instead of touring more temples that were all starting to look the same we had a “girls day.” We got a nice big breakfast then headed off to get hour-long Thai massages. It definitely helped the sore hiking muscles! Then we continued the pampering with a manicure and pedicure. The women didn’t speak English but it was really funny to see the expression on their faces when they saw our disgusting, dirty, and blistered feet! In the afternoon we took a Thai cooking class. (Thailand is known for having amazing food so cooking courses are very popular.) It was really a great advantage at times to be traveling in such a large group, because people are willing to make exceptions and accommodate you since they'll get so much business. All of the cooking courses available were like 6 hours long and really expensive. Or there was a shorter evening course but it was too late so we would miss our train. Sooo we met with a woman from the cooking school and basically made them create a class just for us! We said we still wanted to go to the food market like the big class does, but we only wanted to learn 2 dishes instead of 6 or 7 because we only had like 3 hours to devote to the class. We also negotiated a huge discount since we were a big group and having a shorter class. So we were picked up at our hotel mid afternoon and taken to the market. Here our young, goofy teacher told us all about the different curry pastes and had us smell them. They smelt so spicy that we were too scared to taste them. Then he explained all the details of the different vegetables we would be using. After exploring the market we drove out to the school. We already had our own little stations set up with all of our supplies and ingredients. He had us slowly pronounce our names so he could translate it and write a nametag for us in Thai. We learned how to make Pad Thai and Sweet and Sour veggies to put over rice. The pad thai was way spicier than normal, even though when we were adding the chili pepper he assured us it was the amount normally used, but other than that it was very tasty! The flames from the onions and oil were good photo opportunity.
When we first arrived he also made us write down a name to put on our “certificate” that we would receive "if" we passed the class. He really encouraged us to come up with silly nicknames rather than our actual name though. I of course ended up being “Chef Baby Beth.” I am referred to as “Baby” more often than “Beth” these days so I’ve just learned to respond to it as if it’s my name. (fyi - if you haven't read the other blogs they started calling me baby the first week in s'pore because I'm 3-4 years younger than most of the exchange students here.) After we finished eating our delicious creations, our teacher drove us to the train station. We left around 9pm. It was actually very comfortable on the train, it was a lot like the service on a flight. The seats were comfortable and we were served dinner and breakfast which we weren’t expecting. However, our dinner was rice with chopped meat and peppers, and it was so spicy I wanted to die. I saw the peppers and knew it would burn a bit, and usually I can handle some spice, but this was intense! I couldn’t sleep for an hour until my mouth cooled off from the two bites that I had.
Friday February 29th – There’s the city of Ayutthaya about 1 hour north of Bangkok and the train passes through it, so we got off there instead because it’s a very historical city that Lonely Planet listed as a “must see”. We rented two tuk tuks (main form of transportation in Thai cities, see picture) for 3 hours to take us around to the historical sites.
We only visited 3 or 4 of the main attractions including ruins, temples, and more buddhas because like I said, they were all starting to look the same. 3 hours was just enough time to be impressed and enjoy the touring without getting bored and tired.
By lunch time we were already back on the train heading to Bangkok, our final destination. I love this city, mostly because the shopping is amazing. I also liked the type of people we saw there. It's full of tourists which normally sucks, but they weren't the old couple, fanny-pack-wearing, typical tourists; it was all young backpacker-travelers. After arriving we wasted a bit of time finding accommodations, showering, and stopping at an internet café. In the early evening we headed to the night market that was on the street parallel to our hotel. This is my favorite place EVER. There are tons of clothes, jewelry, shoes, food, souvenirs, art, everything, for sale. Price is completely based on bargaining. I hate having to bargain, but at the same time it’s great because everything is so cheap. We always started offering 50% of what their original price is, then ended up buying it for about 60-70% of the original price.
We knew that a lot of the exchange students who spent the week in Thailand or Cambodia were going to finish the week in Bangkok, but we weren’t expecting to run into anyone because the city is enormous. However, we ran into everyone in this market! We went to this super fancy restaurant with a group of our friends who had been traveling Cambodia all week. We didn’t realize it was that nice of a place before going, we just heard the food was good, so we looked kind of rude wearing our thai fisherman pants and flip flops when the other customers were really dressed up. The “fanciness” of the restaurant was actually kind of funny, there were enormous fake-looking chandeliers and other tacky overdone decorations, and a live band with a woman singing wearing long sparkly gown. The food was good though. It was my first time having curry. Though it was red, not green which is the spiciest, and they had a spicy-scale of 0-3 and I only asked for a 1 so I was still being a wimp and playing it safe. Some of the guys went out to party, but we decided to have an early night and save our energy for Saturday.
Saturday March 1st – After breakfast we set off to see the grand palace. This includes the palace itself where all of the royal families have lived before the current king, as well as bunch of temples, other religious buildings, and statues surrounding the palace. We actually paid to have a guide give us a tour around the palace grounds because it would have been beautiful but meaningless buildings to us without the explanations. It was really nice because we talked with him a lot about the royal family and the traditions in Thailand. The princess (the 80 year old king’s 84 year old sister) had died on January 2nd of this year so every Thai person visiting these temples were wearing only black clothing to mourn her death. They love their king and royal family. There are billboards everywhere of the king, and twice a day they play the national anthem and everyone in the streets stops where they are and doesn’t speak or walk until it finishes. Of course the first time this occurred we didn’t realize what was happening so we continued to walk and talk until we noticed the stares! Anyway, I asked how long they would wear black when visiting her (her body was in one of the temples we saw) and the guide said normally it is 100 days but they were going to keep her there until November because they cremate royalty and the burning occurs outside, so it has to happen during dry season. My favorite temple was one where the entire outer walls were decorated with flowers made from colorful, broken, Chinese pottery. The last temple we saw here, and the only one we could go inside of, is considered the most important one in Thailand and contains the “emerald Buddha.” We weren’t allowed to take pictures in there. Compared to the enormous statues we had been visiting, this one was tiny. The ceilings are very high and the Buddha is on top of a huge throne of various gold things and he’s probably only 2-3 feet tall. I’m not sure why this statue is so much more important than the others but you had to kneel inside, not stand, and it was packed with people on the ground praying. After all of the palace grounds, we visited two more historical sites. One was the biggest Buddha of the entire trip, which was Buddha laying on his side and was 40-some meters from head to toe. The other was Wat Arun temple which was nice because it had stairs going up the side so you could climb up and get a great view of the city and river.
After this we took a boat down river to Chinatown and explored the absolutely chaotic market for awhile. Then we headed to MBK shopping center which is just a giant mall, but the shops are all tiny and supposedly keep the atmosphere of the outdoor markets but without the bargaining. It turned out to be a pretty forgettable destination though. We ate at a pizza place and headed back to the night market to meet up with everyone else. This is when we found out that due to elections occurring that day it was absolutely illegal for anyone to sell alcohol until 12midnight Sunday night! We didn't go out to clubs or bars at all during our pre-bangkok travels, then we had passed up going out on Friday, and now on my last night of the trip every club was closed! So we just did more walking and shopping, got some ice cream sundaes, caught up on e-mails, and went to bed!
The last 2 pics just show how we would squeeze 4 girls in a tiny tuk tuk, and the driving in bangkok (and basically everywhere else in SE Asia) is insane! The tuk tuks just swerve all over between the cars. Half the time we weren't even on the correct side of the road!
Sunday March 2nd - We all had flights home at different times because some of us had Monday class and some didn’t. Amandine and I were the first to depart in midafternoon so we woke up really early and took the bus to the weekend Chatuchak market. It’s this famous, enormous market that is only open Saturday and Sunday. We were happy we went early because it got more crowded and hot every minute. Considering how many markets we saw and how much time we spent shopping I did pretty well to control myself and ration out my money across our 48 hours in Bangkok. There were so many great things though, and they’re so cheap! I think I spent less than $450USD on the entire 11 day trip, and less than $40 or $50 on clothes, jewelry, and souvenirs. And I bought a LOT of clothes (3 pants, 2 skirts, about 8 shirts, and new Converse high tops for less than $40?!?! This is why I LOVED Bangkok). After grabbing our last dish of street-vendor pad thai, Amandine and I headed for the airport. We had been told it takes “a while” to get there so we interpreted that as around 30 minutes. Then when we were checking out of the hotel, about an hour and a half before our flight departed, we asked how long it takes by taxi and the receptionist replied “an hour if there’s no traffic”!! So we grabbed the first taxi we saw and had a very panicky, stressful drive there. It was my first time being one of those people who frantically sprints through the airport and then repeatedly sighs unnecessarily loudly as they wait in line at immigration, haha. But we made it! The flight was running a bit late. I was sad the amazing trip was over, but it was SO nice to have a hot shower, a normal toilet, and wash my clothes. I don’t think our backpacks will ever smell normal again after carrying around sweat covered clothing and stinky tennis shoes for 11 days.
Now I’m back in Singapore trying to frantically get some work done for school so I can be guilt free for my trip to Cambodia next week!! If anyone other than my parents actually reads this entire blog I will be touched and amazed, because it’s enormous!
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