Tuamos in Thailand

This whole year I've felt a little bit detached. There's been moments where I had a lot of fun, and while I don't exactly have a best friend, I have a few pretty close ones. I've been annoyed going to temples and not knowing what to do, but nothing approaching an immediate culture shock or demoralizing. I've been learning the language pretty slowly but steadily. I don't miss home. I tell people I miss snow if they press. I do miss you, ice crystals. Today I made some new friends. It's Indira's last day of school, so a group of boys who I've never seen before was afraid I would be leaving too. I didn't speak any English to them. Now I'm going to play takraw with them tomorrow. Yesterday I still didn't get homesick for Minnesota, but I got a little bit homesick for my extended host family. Two days ago I started using an online Thai course - I've been trying to do my own with pencil and paper and Nont's materials, bu...

I didn't like Thai music until this week. I think I should listen to Thai music because it's a good way to learn the language, so liking it is kind of important. I've always liked the jazz music (much of which was written by the late King Bhumibol), but that's not all I want to listen to. The next section (ends at the second video) is complaining, so if you want to go ahead and skip to the happy ending, don't bother reading it. As for what I don't like, most of what's on the radio or the top of any youtube or music app search is slow mid-2000s sounding pop-rock ballads that I often find indistinguishable from one another except by how strange the singer's accent is (some of them literally sound like Americans not even attempting a Thai accent). This music is pretty much devoid of traditional influences, so I don't really feel beholden to try to like it as a part of assimilating to Thai culture. Another popular style is what I've he...

I guess I never really properly introduced my community on this blog. The town of Phanat Nikhom (พนัสนิคม) is a little more than an hour's drive from Bangkok and an almost an hour inland (with traffic) from the southern coast in Chon Buri (ชลบุรี) province. Its 120,000 inhabitants are spread across a deceptively large geographic area, so although the few winding blocks of downtown are relatively busy and filled with storefronts under two or three story buildings, it never feels like living with close to that number of people. My house is about three kilometers north of the downtown, where the buildings stand out in seas of rice fields, fish ponds, and banana groves. Neighborhoods are often structured around temples, which are usually no more than a kilometer apart. Wat Bot (วัดโบสถ์), the temple which my neighborhood is named after. These are the old and new buildings equivalent to the sanctuary in a church. The entire temple is comprised of a complex of several buildin...

I'm starting this post with a few observations about the quality of this blog; while it's not at all representative of my entire exchange, there are some decidedly negative parallels to be drawn, the first being what I just mentioned, or in other words, that I'm not using this blog very effectively. I don't write with much regularity, when I do, I'm prone to rambling and providing needless detail where it is unnecessary, at the same time ignoring entire events that I wanted to write about, and there are fewer and fewer pictures with each post. To that end, this will be a post with some rambling that I feel particularly passionate about, intentionally sin fotos, and the last of its kind. Is exchange right for you? Before I went on exchange, I assumed the answer to this question was a universal yes, the naysayers among us simply having not realized yet or giving too much weight to their understandable apprehensions. Now, I'm less sure. I still think there are ...