BKK and Beyond

I arrived back in BKK on Thursday after a long 3 days at summer camp with 90 9th graders. It was a lot of fun, but completely exhausting! I got to be the MC of the camp so that means they basically just handed me a microphone and told me to speak English. The camp was in Prachuap Khiri Khan, a beautiful beach about 3 hours outside of BKK, but nothing can compare to Ton Sai....sigh. I already want to go back :(

Friday morning I had an interesting adventure. My insurance card was mailed to me via priority mail, but since I was out of town I had to go pick it up at the post office. The slip for the package was entirely in Thai so I asked the front desk for directions and started out on foot. After about a mile down the road I decided to grab a cab. Naturally I showed the cab driver the slip because it was in Thai and he was Thai. Well I think he just wanted to play a mean trick on me because he brought me to a post office alright, but not the one that was mapped out on the slip with my package. After about 15 mins inside I had to grab another cab back in the direction I was walking to the actual post office with my package. The entire process took about 2 hours of my morning. It was the first time not speaking the language has really been an issue. After the post office adventure I bought equipment needed to hand wash some of my clothes at my apartment since I don't have a washing machine and they charge by the piece around here. That was an experince, but not quite as painful as I thought it would be to handwash some of my clothes.

Jenny and I decided to take our first weekend trip together out of the city to Kanchanaburi. There are a couple of different ways to get there (bus, train, mini van) we decided on the mini van option because we heard it was the fastest. We took a cab from Jennys work to Kha San Road (backpackers area of BKK) and had to walk a good bit to get to the hostel with the travel agent, but of course during our walk it started monsooning! We managed to stop at subway on the way and get turkey sandwiches. Side note you wouldn't believe how hard it is to find turkey here. They have every type of ham you can think of in the stores, but NO turkey so you can only imagine our excitment. Anyways, once we arrived we had to wait an hour for the next mini van to leave, and then when we thought we were finally on our way they took us to another stop where we waited for an hour for them to fill up the van. Jenn and I were the only foreigners in the van, and I'm pretty sure we were the only ones that spoke English. The entire adventure took about 6 hours.

We had a great time in Kanchanaburi. It was awesome to get away from the crazyness in BKK. We met up with one of my friends from the summer camps, Scott, and one of his friends from Ton Sai, Amy. They are both from Canada. The first day we went to the Erawan National Park about an hour outside of the town. This park is known for it's 7 tier waterfall. We hiked up to the first 5, but had to stop there because the top two were closed. The 5th tier had these awesome rock waterslides so we stopped there for a bit and swam. The slides reminded me of the ones we went to in VA except there were monkeys climbing in the trees here.On Sunday Jenny and I went to the Death Railway Museum. It's a museum that's dedicated to the Thailand-Burma railway that was built during WWII by Asian laborers and POW. The Japanese built it because they wanted to extend their reach west and conquer India, but in order to do so they needed an alterative supply route to the sea. Overall it was a really good museum. It gave us a lot of really good information about the history surrounding the railway. After the museum we took an hour truck ride to the Wat Pa Luangta Bua Yanasampanno (Tiger Temple). This place was just plain crazy! We lined up and guides took each of us around to about 8 different tigers. We took pictures touching either their paws, backs, or tails. After the photo session we went behind a waist high fence and watched the tigers "play" in the pool and on the rocks. We were literally only a few feet away from the loose tigers and the guides were only using sticks to keep them away! It was really crazy how close we were able to get to these animals. It's hard to believe, but apparently they aren't drugged they are just naturally that calm.

We decided to take the bus back to BKK. It was a lot cheaper and actually nicer than the mini van. I arrived yesterday at the 2nd camp. This camp is about 2 hours outside of BKK in Cha Am just north of the last camp location. It's with the same school in BKK, but with 178 7th and 8th graders.

Now that Jenn has Internet in her studio we will be posting blogs a little more frequently.

Xoxo,
Nichole and Jenny