Yesterday (September 20th) was Teay's birthday! She was able to come back to Uttaradit although she has been busy with end-term projects and tests at Chulalongkorn University. That gave us an additional reason to have a party at Scott and Pim's house, with their new barbeque grill fired up. This week also has the Longsat Festival -- longsat is a kind of fruit that Uttaradit is famous for producing, and the festival is quite a bit like a county fair with parades, game/shopping booths, rides, etc.
Teay and I went to the parade yesterday afternoon and watched it go past her Mom's shop downtown. One of the customers at the shop spoke good English, so we were talking quite a bit. Her name was Pookie, and she had lived in Switzerland for a while so she also speaks German. After we had talked for an hour or so, she mentioned that she had a niece who had been an exchange student in America. I asked which program, and she said AFS. I asked which state, and she said Kansas. Then she said that her niece lived in Uttaradit, in the Nam Rit area. I put two and two together and said that her niece must be named Namwan, which gave her a good surprise -- it turns out she is a cousin of Nitaya Fangsawat.
After the parade, Teay and I got some supplies and went to Scott and Pim's for the party. Teay helped watch Jeffery and Danny (Scott and Pim's son and Spencer and Nuchy's son) and we chatted and chowed down on BBQ with everybody. The BBQ was a very good -- hamburgers, kabobs, and chicken legs were great and we all ate a pretty ridiculous amount of them as well. After we were pretty well stuffed, it started raining and rained us out of playing beer frisbee, but we were all full enough that it was probably just as well.
After some digestion time, we brought out Teay's cake. We hadn't bought candles, but Scott's last birthday cake had had number candles for "42", so we could swap the order and use them for Teay's 24!
I think that is all for now. I've got the full gallery of photos from this weekend HERE.
In addition, I took photos of all of the foreign teachers recently for a brochure for the school, and I've uploaded those in another gallery, which you can find HERE.
I've been pretty busy with school, so haven't updated for a while. Last weekend was busy also, but worth blogging about!
Last week was a short week at school due to 2 (related?) Buddhist holidays, Asarna Bucha day and Khaopansa. Khaopansa is the start of "Buddhist lent", where the monks are supposed to stay in their temples and avoid going out for alms rounds etc. The history of the holiday is that this is the rice growing season, so the monks would stay in their temples and in order to avoid traveling around by foot and damaging new rice plants. So, since the monks are supposed to stay at their temples, the people bring them supplies to last them through the lent period; food, general goods, and historically candles for light to read by. The candles became a symbol of the holiday, so now there are parades where huge candles are carted in the back of pickup trucks to temples, and some places even have giant wax sculpture candle festivals.
In any case, school was off for Thursday and Friday, so we had a 4 day weekend.
On Wednesday evening after school, I caught the train to Bangkok. It left at 8PM and was going to arrive at 5AM, so it was optional to get a ticket in the sleeper car, which I did. First time I have been on the sleeper here. It was pretty nice; the car has a central aisle with a double-level row of bunks partitioned on each side and curtains you can close to block out your partition. The bed space was pretty good, not long enough for me to stretch out but not so short as to really cramp me in either. So, I got some pretty good sleep on the way there.
On Thursday morning, I meet Teay at the main train station in Bangkok. We had plans to meet up with Namwan and Uncle Neung, but it turned out that Uncle Neung had to go to a funeral. I had a new laptop to deliver to Namwan, so we met her at Siam Paragon, a large mall. We had some lunch at a Japanese restaurant, and Namwan got to test out her computer on the wireless in the mall.Then we went up to the top floor of the mall, which has a bunch of theaters. We decided to watch the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight. Namwan was interested in watching it on the IMAX screen, and Teay had never been in an IMAX, so we did that. A ticket to a normal screen movie is 100 baht, or about $3, and the IMAX was 200 baht -- so I figured it was a good deal compared to $7 for a movie or maybe $15-20 for an IMAX in the states. I thought the movie was excellent, and I think Teay and Namwan enjoyed it also.
Namwan headed back home after the movie, so Teay and I went to a night market and looked around for a while before eating supper at a steak restaurant. I had a beef steak for what I think is just the second time in the year plus that I have been in Thailand. Pork is quite a bit more common, although it isn't impossible to get beef by any means, I just tend to enjoy pork more with Thai food. But at this place I had a sirloin steak medium rare, and it was quite nice.
For Friday, Teay had some plans to meet up with some friends and take a road trip to Pattaya. Pi At is a friend of one Teay's friends, and was providing the car and the driving for the trip. Once we got to Pattaya, we picked up Teay's friends Som and Bo. Then they decided it would be a good idea to extend it even further and drive to Rayong, pick up another friend named Wa, and catch a boat to Koh Samet island. I had been to the beach at Pattaya once before, but never to any of the islands in Thailand, so it sounded like a great idea to me!
So we parked the car at Rayong and got on a medium sized converted fishing boat to shuttle us to the island. Our boat was slow, so it took about 45 minutes to get there; groups can charter a speed boat and get there quite a bit more quickly for a bigger fare. We arrived in the afternoon, about 3PM or so. We asked about housing, but due to the holiday extended weekend we heard that it was pretty likely that everything would be full. So, we got a pickup to shuttle us down the beach until the road stopped, and then walked a bit further, asking about rooms at all of the hotels. We eventually found one that would put up tents, and we figured that would work fine.
So we had 3 tents put up, walked the beach, and ate good seafood before packing in to the tents for the night.
Teay and I woke up pretty early on Saturday to walk the beach and look around. I had a good breakfast of fried rice with bacon, and Teay had seafood spaghetti that was quite nice also. We ended up taking a pickup back to the docks and riding back to Rayong a bit before lunch, and everybody ate Phad Thai (Thai-style fried noodles) at a shop there.
From Rayong we went back to Pattaya, and did some shopping before heading back to Bangkok and saying good-bye to Teay's friends. Then we went back to Siam Paragon to eat supper -- I chose a shop similar to a Panera that makes sandwiches in bagels, and soup in bread bowls etc. It was great, particularly because fancy bread is pretty uncommon in Thailand. Rice is a large part of essentially every meal, but wheat and breads from wheat flour are rare.
Sunday was a pretty early morning, so I could be dropped off at the train station at catch the 8AM train back to Uttaradit. Pretty nice train ride back, but shame the weekend wasn't a bit longer!
I think that is all for now.
Here is a link to the gallery of photos from Koh Samet:
http://picasaweb.google.com/JonFrahm/KohSametTrip2008
I've been pretty sparse on updates recently. Part of that is just me having less new stuff to talk about on here, but also recently I've had my attention diverted elsewhere...
This is Teay (pronounced quite like the name Tia in the US). Teay is a friend of Scott's wife Pim, and I first met her at a party at their house. She is also a teacher, and has been teaching pre-school at Nampung's school Sartit, as well as private lessons. Towards the end of the summer school break, we started seeing quite a lot of each other.
This weekend was Teay's last in Uttaradit before going to Bangkok to study for her Master's Degree in Early Childhood Education. So, we spent most of the weekend together traveling around. Saturday we went to Phitsanulok by bus so we could watch the 2nd Chronicles of Narnia movie. Movies there are dubbed in Thai, with no English subtitles. My Thai is slowly getting better, but I still follow the movies mostly from context with the words that I do recognize mixed in. Teay's English is quite good -- way better than my Thai -- but we're both getting good practice talking to each other.
On Sunday, we went to Si Satchanalai with a Thai friend of mine named Ben. Ben is going to move to Singapore and work for a British company, so this summer I've helped him practice up on English and build some conversational confidence before he goes to work. He lives near Si Sat (place names are commonly abbreviated in conversation like that, Phitsanulok becomes P-lok, Uttaradit to U-Dit, etc.) and offered to take us on a tour of the old city.
Sunday evening, Teay's cousin was having a wedding reception in Uttaradit, so we also went to that before she had to catch the train to Bangkok.
So now it's been 2 days without my girlfriend and I'm missing her already! Fortunately we can keep in touch with phones and online chat, and we already have some ideas for times when we can visit each other. She is very smart and great with her students, so I know she'll do well at University.
HERE is a photo gallery from this weekend.
Yesterday (September 20th) was Teay's birthday! She was able to come back to Uttaradit although she has been busy with end-term projects and tests at Chulalongkorn University. That gave us an additional reason to have a party at Scott and Pim's house, with their new barbeque grill fired up. This week also has the Longsat Festival -- longsat is a kind of fruit that Uttaradit is famous for producing, and the festival is quite a bit like a county fair with parades, game/shopping booths, rides, etc.
Teay and I went to the parade yesterday afternoon and watched it go past her Mom's shop downtown. One of the customers at the shop spoke good English, so we were talking quite a bit. Her name was Pookie, and she had lived in Switzerland for a while so she also speaks German. After we had talked for an hour or so, she mentioned that she had a niece who had been an exchange student in America. I asked which program, and she said AFS. I asked which state, and she said Kansas. Then she said that her niece lived in Uttaradit, in the Nam Rit area. I put two and two together and said that her niece must be named Namwan, which gave her a good surprise -- it turns out she is a cousin of Nitaya Fangsawat.
After the parade, Teay and I got some supplies and went to Scott and Pim's for the party. Teay helped watch Jeffery and Danny (Scott and Pim's son and Spencer and Nuchy's son) and we chatted and chowed down on BBQ with everybody. The BBQ was a very good -- hamburgers, kabobs, and chicken legs were great and we all ate a pretty ridiculous amount of them as well. After we were pretty well stuffed, it started raining and rained us out of playing beer frisbee, but we were all full enough that it was probably just as well.
