We left Chiang Rai on Tuesday - went to the bus station at 12, and got on the bus at 3:45. I had gotten a little sick that morning and was semi-delirious during the wait with a mild fever, but I thankfully survived the 3 hr. bus ride and dangerously unsanitary public squat toilets back to Chiang Mai with the help from my friends Pepto, Cipro, and Ibuprofen. (Thank you Marianne, my traveling pharmacist!) We arrived in Chiang Mai and immediately searched for an overnight ticket to Bangkok with our favorite bus company, NCA, but unfortunately all of their buses were booked for the evening. Our 2nd second choice was Sombat Tour, which was a little cheaper (by about 85 baht) and looked pretty decent... not quite. The seats weren't as comfortable as comfortable as NCA so it was challenging to sleep, and although we had a toilet on the bus they still made a community lights-on pit stop at 2am at a very mosquito-infested bus station. The real highlight, however, was when they turned on the lights and began playing Kpop, which is just extremely cheesy Korean pop music, at full blast on the speaker system at 6am, and we weren't arriving in Bangkok until 7:30am. Insert grumpy face.
So we're waiting at the BKK Mo Chit bus station for a couple hours for our school coordinators to come pick us up from Rayong. I'm super excited at this point to finally get to our apartment, settle in and rest after almost a full day of transit across Thailand. After getting into the school van, our coordinators told us that not only were we going to spend several hours shopping in Bangkok first, but they also had about 8 other Thai teachers with them who were at the market. I was in a gray t-shirt, running shorts, hair up, glasses on, and stinky. You may also recall that I likened shopping in Bangkok to shopping in a TJ Maxx on Black Friday in an earlier post. Lee and I just looked at each other and were like oh my god... pleeease just take us to our apartment. We picked up the other teachers who were very nice but most of them didn't know English, so they kind of ignored us (which was fine at this point in my homely state) and headed to the Platinum Fashion mall, which seemed like a slightly smaller mall than the others I went to my first week but it was still 7 stories tall. Lee and I did get some sweet beach towels, but most of our time and efforts were spent in the massive food court getting rice and chicken dishes, papaya salad (one of my fave things here), a chinese vegetable bun that was terrible, and ice cream cones from KFC - delish. Thank God For KFC.
We finally arrive in our town of Wang Chan around 5:30pm (it took about 2.25 hours from Bangkok by van). During orientation, one of the current CIEE teachers who has been teaching since May in the neighboring province told me that the former participant in our town/school nicknamed Wang Chan "Dog Town" due to all the stray dogs in the area. Fact: there are stray dogs everywhere in Thailand... but within 5 minutes of our arrival, there was definitely a stray dog brawl right outside of our apartment. I shall be referring to Wang Chan lovingly as Dog Town from here on out. Our apartment is pretty decent; it's a little 2-bedroom house with A/C in the bedrooms, a seat toilet, a shower that's almost right above the toilet (no hot water), a kitchen that i plan on never using due to fear of ant infestation, and there's several geckos in and around the house that i have fondly dubbed as our Gecko Patrol since the eat mosquitoes... we watch them set up a perimeter around our house every night, and it makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. If i could catch some and put more inside our house to increase the small army of small gecko foot soldiers, trust me, I would. We also refer to the downstairs as the Blue Dungeon because the walls, floor and ceiling are all a violently bright acid-Carolina blue color, and we keep the windows shut in order to keep bugs out. Pictures coming soon...
I got up early the next morning and decided to see what this town was all about. It's very small, and absolutely everything we need is within a short walking distance. We live on the school grounds and it's like a mini college campus inside a gated area. I exited the gates and did a walking tour around the market and main street. On the way to the market, I passed a sketchy looking body of water that is surrounded by a cement jogging track, which is perfect for me! I estimate it to be about 525 meters around. At the market, i bought a bag of pineapple chunks and 2 mini pumpkins for Halloween which made me very happy. Most people I saw assumed I was Thai at first and would begin speaking Thai to me after I said "sawatdee kaa" (hello) and "tow rai kaa?" (how much is it?), to which I smiled and pointed at myself - "sorry, I am farang". At orientation, they told us that Farang means foreigner; to be exact, farang actually means Guava, which is a foreign fruit, so they use this term to refer to all foreigners... and that is how you tell a lie.
After I got back to the apartment, I was reading something online and noticed that it said Farang meant white person... we went to dinner with our coordinator that evening, and I asked her exactly what Farang meant. She said that Thais use Farang to refer to someone who is from Europe or America, generally. Temporarily reassured, I said oh, so it's not just white people, but anyone from Europe or America? And she said no, it's only white people. Therefore, people who are Asian that come from America like yours truly do not fall into the Farang category... therefore, there are probably many shopkeepers in my town that may or may not think I'm delusional... Good thing I'm responsible for educating their youth.
More posts about Koh Samet and our first week of teaching coming soon!
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