Cold in Thailand

Over the last week our temperatures in Thaialnd have taken an amazing plunge. Our thermometer has been consistently reading in the upper 40s at night. This is very cold when you have no indoor heating! It's also very cold when you have a very weak hot water heater, so showers can be a chilling experience. Washing dishes is rather like bathing your hands in ice.

We've taken to sleeping in long pants, hats, and hooded sweatshirts, covered by layers of blankets. Two layers of socks are necessary for protection from our cold tile floor. We're starting to wonder if our upbringing in the northern climes has been completely useless, as we seem to have no tolerance for this weather.

I don't really mind the cold now, though, because I know that in just a few weeks I'll be roasting hot again.

Christmas Eve at the Mission

Located a couple kilometers outside our town is a Catholic mission center run by a group of Italian priests and nuns. They serve hill tribes living in the surrounding mountains, conducting Sunday masses on a rotating schedule and helping giving kids a chance to have a regular education. We've enjoyed attending Sunday services from time to time. The Italians speak Thai better than English, so that's how we communicate!

Twice a year, for Christmas and Easter, the hill tribe people come into the Center for mass. On Sunday evening, after returning from Bryn's Christmas Eve party for volunteers, we rode our bikes out to take part.

It was freezing cold -- I was wearing a turtleneck, a sweatshirt, a hat, and a hooded fleece jacket by the end of the service, and still shivering! -- but nonetheless we enjoyed seeing the many different people. Some were similarly bundled up, but some were wearing their local clothing. During the offering, pairs of girls and women in matching outfits carried up baskets of flour, grapes, and flowers, which was quite lovely. I was proud that I understood the majority of the Thai sermon, but when the petitions were read in Hmong I couldn't follow.

After mass, we rode back home in the dark cold, lit up our tree, and made spaghetti. A very pleasant Christmas Eve.

Train Travel

One of our favorite modes of travel in Thailand is the train. We usually ride second class when traveling between Bangkok and our site. It's about a ten-hour trip, but usually fairly comfortable, with air-conditioning and two coffee breaks.

After our day in Bangkok, Leah accompanied us on a train ride north. The photo was taken at Sam Sen station in Bangkok as we were waiting for the train to arrive. You can see a monk waiting nearby, a Thai flag, and if you look closely, some Thai writing. You might also notice that Robert is wearing a sweatshirt -- a cold spell has come across Thailand, and we're freezing! (Leah, coming from America, doesn't find it quite as cold as we do.)

Wat Arun

Our friend Leah is visiting us here this week and on Monday we had a pleasant day in Bangkok. The weather wasn't too hot and though we were all tired from our 2am return from the airport, we managed to keep our energy going until after dinner.

As our 15th visitor, Leah knows we've spent lots of time showing family and friends around the major sites of Thailand. She offered to forego a few of the tourist "highlights" so that all three of us would be able to see something new, so we chose Wat Arun, the temple that is featured on the 10-baht coin. We had gazed at it across the river many times and it always looked appealing.

Wat Arun is a Khmer-style wat, and the biggest surprise was realizing that the grey towers we had seen so many times from a distance are actually, when viewed up close, composed of thousands and thousands of tiny colored ceramic pieces. Here are Robert and Leah in front of one of the multi-colored structures. The Chao Praya river and Grand Palace temple are in the background.

Christmas Visit

I invited students from my Monday-Thursday school over to see our Christmas decorations this Saturday afternoon, and it was a big hit!

Robert's cousin Karin sent us a singing wreath, which welcomed the kids when they arrived on the porch. They found it hilarious and spent a lot of time over the course of the next hour and a half trying to figure out how the motion sensor worked -- trying to sneak past it without setting it off. It played pretty constantly anyway.

They admired the presents under the tree, played butting heads with the musical reindeer antlers, and ate some chocolate pieces I had found at the store up the street. When they had seen enough of Christmas, they moved on to exploring the rest of our house -- books, magazines, photos, large-sized shoes, shortwave radio, Western bathroom, and maps.

It was fun to be able to share a little Christmas cheer with someone in our town!

The Pink House

This is our house in Thailand. It's a one-story, three-room house. (One main room and two bedrooms.) And it's very pink! If I had included a photo of the bathroom, you would have seen that it, too, is very pink.

This photo was taken just a week or so after we moved in. I think things look a bit messier now -- the lawn is a little overgrown and patchy, the potted plants are relocated to a corner and replaced by bicycles, and the laundry is usually hanging on the patio. The pink paint is also a little faded in dirty in some areas as a result of last year's flood.

It's a very comfortable little house for two people to live in for two years!

Party Meat

Before coming to Thailand, I expected it to be something of a vegetarian’s paradise. All those fresh fruits and vegetables! Plenty of soy and tofu! Just like at the Thai restaurant down the block from our apartment!

In reality, though, I have found the Thai people to be some of the most gung-ho meat eaters I’ve ever known. No meal is considered complete, it seems, without a large portion of pork, beef, or chicken. In most northern Thai dishes, in fact, the meat is the main component of the meal – simply chopped and seasoned with locally grown herbs, and eaten with sticky rice. Tofu, if eaten, is usually mixed with fish or pork. I have yet to meet another vegetarian in our town. The closest I have come was about 20 months ago, when I met a teacher from another school district who eats vegetarian on "Buddhist days" – approximately once every eight days, according to the cycle of the moon.

When I say that I am vegetarian, most people assume that either a) I eat meat most of the time, excepting a special days, or b) I am probably crazy. When I tell them that I haven’t eaten meat for over 11 years, they look momentarily befuddled, and then decisively pronounce that that’s why I have such good skin.

On Sunday evening, we celebrated Robert’s birthday at the house of some school district friends. The meal was a typical Thai celebration meal for a large group of people, called "sukiyaki." (I think the concept originally comes from somewhere else in East Asia.) A large cooking device, slightly resembling a wok, is kept constantly heated. Diners sit in a circle around the heat source. Different bowls are scattered about containing a variety of ingredients, usually including raw pork, thin rice noodles, chopped vegetables, and chili sauce. Each diner has their own mini-bowl and set of chopsticks. Diners take turns using their chopsticks to arrange the meat on the heat source for cooking. A large bowl of broth is also kept constantly on the heat source, and diners will add scoops of noodles or vegetables as they desire. When satisfied as to doneness, diners will transfer cooked ingredients to their own bowl and then eat them with the chili sauce. It’s a very festive way to eat!

Sunday night, the main ingredients included fresh pork, processed pork balls, processed fish "tofu," processed shrimp "tofu," eggs, rice noodles, cauliflower and water spinach. I had my own separate bowl of pre-mixed noodles, boiled vegetables, and regular soy tofu (not shown in photos). It was a chilly night, so the heat in the middle of the mat kept us warm as we talked and ate for over three hours!

COS Conference

Last week we traveled to Cha-am, three hours south of Bangkok, for our Completion of Service (COS) conference. 50 volunteers arrived in Thailand on January 14th, 2005, and 45 of us made it to this conference – an impressive statistic!

Our last date of service will be March 27th, 2007, so to help us wade through paperwork, medical tests, packing, and planning during these last three months, Peace Corps puts on the COS Conference. Over the course of three days, we spent time reflecting on our original goals for our time in Thailand and what the highs and lows of our experience have been. They gave us lots of information about our upcoming doctor and dentist appointments, how to deal with future health issues resulting from PC service, buying our plane tickets to go home, and how to find RPCV (Returned Peace Corps Volunteers) groups in America. We also spent lots of time working on our resumes and talking about graduate school applications, job searching, and networking. Several former volunteers from different countries who are now living in Thailand came and talked to us about what we might expect our post-PC experience to be like.

There was lots of laughter, as well as a few tears. Time on the beach, in the pool, and at the ping-pong table. Buffet meals, "coffee breaks," noodle stands on the street at night. A wedding invitation. Nervousness and excitement about what lies ahead.

The photo doesn’t show the whole group, but if you look closely you might find both Robert and me.

Hitchhiking!

Earlier this week, I made reference to our disappointing travel over last weekend. Perhaps I spoke a little too strongly in referring to it as "calamitous," because we got several concerned inquiries from home wondering what happened. I have now edited out that wording, and I will explain a bit more about why we felt it wasn’t our best travel weekend ever. Please know, though, that several days later we have pretty much forgotten all about it!

Thailand is at a fascinating developmental stage, in which large numbers of the population live in poverty – including a majority of the students we teach – while large numbers also live very well, in fact, quite comfortably compared to the United States. In addition, Thailand’s huge tourist industry has quite an impact. Most tourists, of course, are quite wealthy compared with most Thais, and they pour lots of money into the economy.

Our Peace Corps living allowance is designed to enable us to live at the level of the people in our community, in particular the people with whom we work. What this means practically, for us, is that we are much wealthier than the families of most of the students we teach, but nowhere near as wealthy as the teachers we teach with, except the very young teachers who have just started in the civil service. We are "poor" compared with the tourists, even the backpackers, which occasionally causes frustration when we travel because Thai people expect us to have bottomless pockets of cash like the other foreigners they have encountered.

In any case, the area we traveled to last weekend – the Golden Triangle area in northern Chiang Rai province – is not designed for people with limited budgets. We had assumed that, like most places in Thailand, we could use local transportation to make our way between destinations for an affordable price. As it turns out, it’s not worth visiting that area unless you have 1) your own vehicle, or 2) a large budget, useful for renting vans and chartering songtaews. Even the Thai tourists we saw traveled almost exclusively in rental vans, hired complete with driver. Public transportation was infrequent and difficult to find.

As a result, we spent more money than we had planned on last-try transportation, including an extra 100 baht apiece for a "VIP" bus that we hoped would get us to a particular destination on time but didn’t. We walked at least 3 kilometers along highways, not in itself a long distance but one that feels considerably longer when you are walking in the sun with a large backpack on your back. We skipped a couple of meals. And we "hitchhiked" twice, once in the back of a pickup along the Mekong River during the day, and once in the back of a station wagon on the highway back to Chiang Rai at night. And for all that, we never did reach our primary destination: a Chinese mountaintop village.

But, six days later it doesn’t seem as bad as it did then. We did enjoy the Hall of Opium museum, the shiny statues at the Golden Triangle, and of course, our dinner by the Mekong. And we got to see a nice fat rat digging through our bags in the middle of the night at our guest house in Chiang Saen. (Avoid Gin’s House unless you want a similar experience.) So, unpleasant though much of it might have been at the time, I think it will make a good story someday!

[Note: Robert says it was not really hitchhiking because we didn't flag these cars down. We just looked pitiful and they offered assistance, which we accepted. But I think "hitchhiking" sounds more exciting than "accepted help."]