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 ...

The title is not true insofar as it would mean I had mastered language and customs, but it was  gleefully shouted at me by a real Thai person when, one day after school, I rolled up to the songteaw stop on a motorcycle taxi, grocery bags in tow. I think if she had seen what was in the bags (salted peanuts and yogurt), the woman would have been less inclined to celebrate my Thainess. While I have really started to appreciate the food of Thailand, it has still been difficult to be really satisfied health-wise. To begin with, you need to be okay with eating small amounts of meat to have any culinary variety here, but proteins are often redundant, with eggs and meat in the same meal, and not really enough of either. Then I can go eat more eggs for protein, which is, of course, more of the same and gets boring. Other times, the meal will be entirely meat, rice, and sauce, often with a very fatty cut of meat. This is great for getting enough protein, but if not paired with a significan...

At about 10:00 on the last day of the term, September 23, I got the 4th toe on my right foot stuck in a drain grate. When I looked down, there was more blood than toe visible. On further examination, the toe was sagging below the others, and I looked up and said to my horrified class, "Yup. That's broken." Thank you to Heyha for letting me lean on him, and the kind teacher who happened to be motorcycling past - both of these people allowed me to get to the nurse's office without crawling. In the nurse's office, my classmates cleaned up the wound as best they could. Anyway, any American readers are wondering why my classmates were cleaning my wound. I'd been to the office once before with a smaller cut on my foot (this one had happened earlier, while swimming, and reopened), and that time also, students applied disinfectant and a bandage. It is apparently just the way things are done. The earlier cut was thanks to one of these if I'm not mistaken. ...

I said at one point that I would discuss the story of how I accidentally ended up on the school's tug-of-war (chak-a-yer / ชักเย่อ) team. I may have already shared this photo, but the story probably starts when, on my first day, I got this shirt. This is my PE uniform, with two PE teachers present:   Ok, well actually not that shirt at that time. There is a very similar picture that I appear to have lost of me in the same place, receiving this shirt, the school sport uniform, later that day: I used this shirt a few times for Muay Thai (as in the picture), and wore it outside of school a few times as well. Then, in my 2nd week or so, my classmate, Mai (or Mild pronounced without either final consonant; I'm not sure which spelling she prefers, or if both are even correct, and I certainly don't want to guess the Thai spelling) told me that I could come to a fitness class with her in the mornings. I went a few times that first week, and altogether I think I went regul...