An Odyssey: Monks, Crickets, and an Ambulance.

I wasn’t planning on updating this extremely often, but a lot has happened, so I might as well.

Yesterday was my first full day at the foundation. It starts with breakfast at eight and for those of you who know my picky eating habits, I actually don’t mind the food that much. There’s rice literally at every meal, but there’s also some vegetables. The meat looks really scary, so I’ve stayed clear of that. We learned about the surrounding hill tribes in orientation, which was incredibly interesting. After lunch we went to our first school to teach an English lesson. There was eight of us and we split into two groups, a beginner group and then my group that worked with more advanced kids. We traveled to a temple/school where we taught Buddhist monks English. The beginner class had ages ranging from 7-10 and my group had older boys from about 11-15. From what I’ve heard, in Thailand becoming a monk isn’t for life and they receive free schooling so a lot of parents send their boys off to become a monk for a couple years to get educated. Our topic for the day was “Around the House.” We taught them vocab and had them play some games to practice spelling, speaking, and writing. For the most part, it’s like any American classroom, there are some kids in the front completely absorbed in everything you’re saying and then there are the class clowns in the back. There were 30-40 kids in our class, which was a lot more than we normally teach at one time and was a little hard to handle once in a while, but it was really fun and interesting. We forgot to take a picture with our group at the end, but I’ll be going back there soon.

After dinner about fourteen of us decided to catch a taxi and ride into town. It’s about a 20-minute drive and costs 400 baht round trip. Split between all of us, it came out to 21 baht a person, which is around 70 cents. Taxi’s don’t get paid until the return trip—more on that later. There’s a night bazaar that happens every night in Chiang Rai. They spend so much time setting up all their venues and they don’t attract that much traffic, especially since it was Tuesday night. I bought two pairs of hippie pants, that everyone wears here and are incredibly comfortable and cool, for five dollars each. I can probably only get away with wearing them in the states if I’m at Delores Park or Cochella, but I’ll definitely get my use out of them here. In the food court they sell plates of fried maggots and crickets, which of course we had to try. We each tried a cricket, but no maggots; none of us were down to stomach them. I actually ate a couple crickets; they’re quite crunchy and salty. I haven’t been getting my very much protein so I figured I could use some extra bugs. After I had cricket leg stuck in my throat, I decided to wash it down with a smoothie. You choose the fruit you want and it’s right in front of you in jars and then they mix it with some ice and water. I tried pineapple and strawberry and it was obviously the freshest smoothie I’ve ever had (and cost a whopping 70 cents). Every night at nine, they slow down traffic around this one temple-like statue that lights up and plays music. It was awesome. After that, it was about time for us to meet our taxi that we told to meet us at 930. We walked back to the station where he was to meet us and waited around. We knew everyone runs on Thai time, which means no ones ever prompt, but after we waited thirty minutes we started getting a little worried. We’re supposed to be back at the foundation by eleven and the later it gets the more expensive taxis become. The other issue is that there are not many taxis that can fit fifteen people. We walked around trying to find a large taxi but we couldn’t find anything but tuk-tuks. There’s a rescue station in the bus station parking lot we were at, so we approached them and tried to communicate our problem. They tried to call a couple taxi places (I think) but then decided to take us all in the ambulance instead. So fourteen of us piled into a Thai ambulance and we rode back to the foundation for 500 baht. We got the driver to turn on the siren and run through red lights. You know what I always say, why ride in a taxi when you can ride in an ambulance?

We did have to pay the taxi for taking us to Chaing Rai. I guess he misunderstood time and showed up at nine. At least we know what happened.

We went back to the Temple today and taught the monks another lesson. The other group that taught yesterday were convinced to sing Céline Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On,” so now they want us to sing when we come. The best part is the initiator happens to be the head monk. We sang the chorus of “Party in USA,” for them and then they sang a traditional Thai song for us. One boy wanted us to sing Lady Gaga and started rattling off a bunch of songs, but the other girls didn’t know any of her songs. One of the girls promised we would sing her next time. I guess singing has become our group’s thing now.