Finally made it to an internet cafe!

Heads up world. My mom has seen the conveniences of motorbikes and might invest in a VESPA for the south of france.



There are days when this term in Mae Sai is amazing and then there are days when I get soo frustrated with how differently things run compared to what I'm used to. I consider myself to be pretty lax and easy going...bordering flippant and somewhat irresponsible at times. But the staff here makes me feel like I suddenly have a type A personality.

My morning classes with the lil guys tend to get cancelled a lot. I normally find out by walking into an empty classroom. Then I double check with a staff member and ask them if the students have class and they say, "oh, nope. not today. they're cleaning today." Hygiene is emphasized here more than anywhere else in the world, it's intense. It's not a big deal for the most part when this happens because I do have other work to do in administration, activity development and tours. Tuesday, however, when class got cancelled again I just got so fed up with the head of the education department that I took him by the shoulders so he would look me in the face and said in my stupid Thai, "Pi Sike, Please. Please, please, please tell me about class cancellations, BEFORE classtime. Not as I'm walking into the classroom." And he nods his head and just smiles, "OK!."

After this cancellation, a member of the directing team found me. She said a few visitors from Cambodia would be coming over the next day and she wanted me to host them and show them around the place. No problem, I thought. I deal with visitors regularly. So the next day rolls around and I'm sitting in the office waiting for this group from Cambodia to come over and then a staff member calls me over to the conference room. Apparently they were waiting for me in there. So I walk in there where the loooong rectangular conference table is set up and there's a whole bunch of important looking people sitting around waiting for something to happen. The director of the organization said a few short words I don't remember and then said, "And this is Jamie, a foreign volunteer who will now give a presentation about our organization." And he points to his computer with a power point presentation projected onto a large screen. I pretend that I was expecting this. And I improvise. For ten minutes, following an outdated power point presentation.

Some of this gets lost in communication. But the director said to me in very clear English the day before that I'd be giving a TOUR. She said nothing about giving a presentation. No one even gave me the chance to LOOK at the presentation before I started clicking through it and started talking about the foundation of the organization and its recent developments. At the end of the day, it went fine. The people were very chummy with us afterwards, exchanging business cards and flyers. However, I still felt put out that I was put in front of a large conference room to give a presentation without any heads up. It's just something that wouldn't happen with any job I've had in the past. Including Happy Paws.

The Black Eyed Peas' song, "My humps" is probably one of the 3 most overplayed songs in Thailand. But the fact is, THEY LOVE IT. They love it almost as much as they love "Zombie" by the Cranberries. Music takes about 10 times as long to get old in this country than anywhere else.

My grade 4 class, my new youngest class, asked me what "my humps" means in Thai. The content of this song is perhaps a bit PG-13ish and that class age range is 9-18. I didn't think it was a good idea to convey what was REALLY being said. Thinking about how I should appropriately answer this question, I decided the best thing to do was to draw a camel on the board and point to the hump on it's back. "This. This is the 'hump' you guys were wondering about. Understand?" It was amazing to see the looks of recognition on their faces for a few seconds and then that gradual look of confusion in their eyes. "Camels? She's singing about camels?" "That's right. Moving on,"

TODAY
*will try to get to cafe today to upload pictures

*last blog entry: i spelled appalled wrong and in all caps. that's embarassing, but I do like to know these things. Thanks!

Who is "A'? Who wants to quit their job in September and hang out in Thailand???

Alright. I still haven't had time to sit in the internet cafe for 2 hours to upload my most recent pictures.

I started back with a fresh new semester of school just this monday and it was really refreshing to get back into the groove of things with all the kids from the half day school. I hadn't seen a lot of these guys in over a month and it was almost like going back to dwight englewood after not seeing some friends or good acquintances for a summer. ah, school.

For the last four days I've been meaning to go to my landlady to pay my rent but I can never remember long enough to get on my bike and just GO there. In fact, yesterday, I even got on my motorbike specifically to go to my landlady's place, but I forgot halfway there and just stopped at 7-11 to get a coke, then went home again instead.

So anyway, this afternoon, when it occurred to me yet again that I still hadn't paid this month's rent and fearing that my belongings might soon be thrown out onto the street, I tried stepping out of the office for 20 minutes to visit my landlady. That was, until I got stopped by a secretary on site who asked me, "Where are you goin?" And I told I was going to pay my rent. She asked me out of the blue how much I paid for it.

And this is the part of the story where I just make a series of poor judgement calls. I'd like to say in defense of myself, that for the most part, I just kindof got lost in the progression of events. Not a word of this dialogue was spoken in English.

Mistake number one: telling her how much I pay for rent: 3000 baht ($75 US a month). Of course, I will NEVER pay this little to live in a HOUSE ever ever EVER again in my entire life. However, it is also a fact that I am being ripped off by Thai people's standards. My house, however, is fully furnished with a bed, wardrobe and refrigerator. So to be frank: I don't care that this is, in theory, a complete scam.

Chulai (her name is Chulai) is APPAULED that my rent is so high and tells me that she has a house that she's renting out for 1000 baht a month ($25 US). She sortof insists that I should take a look at it. While I have no interest in moving, I decide to tag along, forgetting about the potential repercusions of my actions.

So I follow Chulai on my motorbike...for fifteen minutes (my house is less than 5 minutes from the site). And she turns around and asks me, "Is this far?" and only because I don't want to sound whiney I tell her, "no! not at all." And then we drive on for another 5 minutes. So it's a 20 minute commute. If I wasn't already uninterested in renting this place, I REALLY had no interest in renting this place now. She shows me the place: modest in size and a lot more holes between the planks of wood than in my house. The bathroom, like a standard Thai bathroom, has a squat toilet. Nonetheless, because this was her house, I didn't want to offend her. And so I was complimenting the place in a way to suggest that SOMEONE would surely want to rent it.

But apparently I said "yes," to something I completely misunderstood because the next thing I understood out of her mouth was, "So, when do you want to move in?" and then I felt like a deer in headlights. I have no recollection of ever agreeing to move in there during this conversation and so I tried to walk around it by being like, "Uhhhh...ya know, Garry was kindof unhapppy with his rent situation, maybe HE'D be interested in checking this place out." but then she sortof brought it right back to ME.

So I danced around this for a while. And I know that ultimately, my problem was that I never flat out told her "NO, I'm not interested in moving in," though I swear, I also can't remember where I sounded like, "PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE LEMME STAY HERE!" But in any case, I ended up going back to the site without giving her a clear answer. I just didn't know how to gracefully decline her offer politely and in Thai. We're used to dealing with street vendors and beggars pulling on our sleeves to whom we can just say, "no, no thanks", "I don't want that," "please stop," or for more drastic situations, "Go away!"

And remembering how much I appreciated my own living space, much closer to the site and stocked with my package of western conveniences, I finally went to my landlady's house to pay up for the month.

That's my long winded and pinballed story for the day.

Forgot to mention the most amusing part about having mom over for the last 2 weeks. No matter where we were, it didn't matter if a Thai person spoke to her in English. Didn't matter if a Thai person spoke to her in Thai. Mom'd whip out the french with EVERY Thai person: waiters, shopkeepers, staff members on site and the repairman that came to my house. The french language, by the way, does as much good in this country as Swahili does in the United States. What makes it all the more endearing is that she never did it intentionally. It was always just automatic. I miss her already.

I saw my mom off at the airport yesterday. :( sad.

A lot of people have a rough time with visitors when it's soooo much one on one time and there's not a lot of time for personal space, but my mom was sooo mellow and such a trooper with her new knee for the last couple of weeks. It was such a bummer to see her go.

Yesterday was my first time in a big international airport since being in JFK this last January. Big airports just cultivate nervous energy for me. I remember being nervous when my brother Winston saw me off at the airport and I was nervous last night being surrounded by multiple pieces of large luggage and saying bye to my mom.

This week (or maybe this whole month) marks the halfway mark for my stay in Thailand. I extended my stay from July until the end of September, going back and forth, not being sure if I wanted to prolong my stay even longer, but now, it's official. I finish my term on the 7th of October, and maybe with a few weeks of travelling to follow, I'll be back in the states well before Halloween. It's an itinerary I have to work out when I'm not in an internet cafe (as of now, my flight goes back to the states in July). I think I'll be ready to go home by then.

When I get back to Mae Sai tomorrow I have to post pictures of my mom riding on the back of my motorbike!

I have the position of volunteer coordinator at the NGO which means it was poor planning on my part to arrange to go to Bangkok with my Mom this week, just 5 days after two new volunteers came in. Whooops! I tried giving them both as much of a proper orientation as I could, but it was hard trying to juggle as much as possible last week, haphazardly going to work for parts of the day and then playing tourist games with my mom other parts of the day.

Now we're in Bangkok. I'm in an internet cafe and my Mom's in a spa: much needed after I subjected her to climbing mountains and stairs last week, just weeks after she had knee replacement. It's her mother's day present I can't afford, so she's getting it for herself (I bought her a t-shirt from Cambodia, not nearly as effective as a spa).

Check out my Mom at the top of the Queen's Stupa at Doi Inthanon!





My Mom and I came back to Mae Sai together and we're both staying at my house now. I was so impressed with her when she told me, after an hour of staying at my house that she had a "to-do" list for while she was in Mae Sai. I thought she'd have an itinerary with trips to the Golden Triangle, Myanmar or Doi Tung. But no. She had a shopping list, not for souvenirs, but for house appliances and cleaning products. I am now the lone owner of a vacuum cleaner in Mae Sai. The word "vacuum" doesn't even appear in my Thai-English dictionary. Having mom come visit my living space is great because she notices all these things I NEVER would have noticed, even if I lived here for 5 years. The curtains on my window, for example: I'm impressed with myself that I even live in a house that comes with curtains. My mom took them down and sent them to be washed.

Then there were the really practical things that I really should have taken care of before my mom got here, like my bed with a dip at the foot because the frame sortof collapsed. It's much more comfortable now that she made me talk to my landlord about it.

The rest of this week I am going to try to make her stay a little bit more lax and try to make things more enjoyable for HER...no more shopping for the house or cleaning.

Mom :)

My Mom's come to Thailand and I'm in Chiang Mai with her for the weekend! This is very exciting because I get along really well with my mom and she'd be the first visitor from home I've seen since I've been here.
My mom had knee replacement less than two months ago and yesterday she climbed EVERY STEP of the both the King and Queen's Stupas at Doi Inthanon. The queen's is 55 meters tall and the king's is 60 meters tall. She didn't even need the assistance of a handrail. At the end of it she was tired and needed to ice her leg when we got back to the hotel (it still gets a little stiff), but the point is, she did it. Tomorrow I'm making her take a Thai boxing class with me... Ok, fine, maybe I should wait at least another week for that. When we get back to Mae Sai on Tuesday, I have to post the pictures of my Mom standing on the tallest point of all of Thailand (and other pictures of Doi Inthanon).