Tuamos in Thailand

Although my family isn't religious, we still dye and hunt for eggs every Easter. In that spirit, they sent me an egg dyeing kit to use with Nont (my host cousin). A day or two before Easter Sunday I realized that the time was coming around, I hadn't told anyone yet, and all the eggs in Thailand are brown. Luckily, we found some duck eggs after checking two different supermarkets, and the egg dyeing ended up going swimmingly. In the process of having to explain all this, I ended up discovering the symbolism behind the eggs (new life or something). Indira was also staying with our family at that point, and she wanted to go to a church service, just to see what it is like in Thailand. The congregation appeared to be mostly Filipino, and we arrived just as they were lining up for what I thought was communion. In the end, it turned out that the priest was handing out plain boiled eggs and bottles of "Holy Water." After that, the service was over, so we left. I was thir

Songkran is the Thai traditional new year, celebrated over three days from April 13-15, although in some cities, celebrations continue much later into April. Water has always held a special significance in Thai culture, and the main Songkran tradition is the use of water to wash away the sins and bad luck of the previous year. The water is splashed on friends, family, and neighbors, as well as used to wash statues of the Buddha and symbolically wash the hands of elders. Devout Buddhists will go to the temple at least one of the days to make merit, and Buddha statues are brought out to be washed at temples, markets, and shopping malls in the week before the holiday. People also walk around with a wet powder mixture to apply to others' faces in another form of blessing. The powdery aftermath of my morning run In recent decades, the celebratory aspect has steadily grown, with the water buckets being mostly replaced by water guns and hoses. People wait by the side of the road t

Call it a lack of effort, personality fault, a cultural incompatibility, language barrier, or most likely all of the above, but I didn't do much to reach out to friends in the first 6 months of school. I would always greet the people I recognized, and I spent a fair number of days talking to friends late after school, but I often didn't make an effort to break into the conversation over lunch. Had I been invited anywhere, I would have said yes, but until the last week of school it seemed like no one thought to include me. The highlights of my social life were often playing some kind of game during a free period. At the time, I had some idea of what was going on. I was a little bit resentful that these people who were so nice to me and proclaimed to want to be my friend never thought to include me in anything they did - and also that a good number of my friends rarely did anything worth inviting me along to. In the end, though, it was just life. I was happy enough and I got on w