Sa wa dee ka! Wow time is flying by. Sorry it's been over a month since I posted last. I have been very busy but am loving my life here. The longer I am here the more I just love Bangkok. I had to get over the fact that it is a crowded, dirty, polluted city to have my eyes opened to what a great place it really is! It is SO international, I have met people from everywhere here, and there are restaurants and areas from all over too! There is little Arabia, Korea, Japan, Chinatown, and more. I have found really good Italian food and Mexican food and Spanish food, it's pretty amazing. Every Wednesday I go to a hang out for international people to just meet each other and hang out, it's definitely one of the highlights of my week. Seriously one of my very favorite things about traveling abroad is meeting people from all over the world. I just love hearing their stories and their different perspectives on things, and experiencing all kinds of personalities and foreign accents and such. It's pretty crazy how I have changed from being a very introverted person to an extrovert who wants to meet people and be around them all the time! I feel like a different person than I used to be in like high school.
Anyways, teaching is going pretty well. I am still figuring out how to control my crazy kids but so far things are going fine.
I have been attending a church, the Evangelical Church of Bangkok, the past two weeks; it has been really really good. I just signed up for a weekly bible study that I can hopefully attend regularly.
Here are some exciting things I got to do and see the past month:
For the first time in way too long, I went to an art museum, The Bangkok Art and Culture center. It's a free 9 floor contemporary museum in the center of Bangkok. The first few floors just had random German comic strips.. but the top 3 floors I LOVED. It had a whole exhibit of prints from international university students the walkway up was full of interactive art and stuff. There was also a whole floor with mostly paintings all about how great the king is and they were all so beautiful and very Thai. Some of the best photorealism I've ever seen in person. It was the kind of contemporary art you can really appreciate and not just wonder what the crap it is/its significance. It made me reallyy miss making art and consider going to grad school for it, something I didn't think I would do for quite a while! I would love to do it in some foreign country but we will see.. it's just an idea.
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| Buddha made of post-its |
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| Amazing detail, enlarge this one |
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| This is a PAINTING! |
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| Also a painting |
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| Detail of one of my favorites |
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| One of my favorite prints from the university students |
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| Some ropes you had to climb through to get through the walkway |
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| Graffiti all along a wall |
One day me and some friends went to try to see the Grand Palace. It ended up that it closed at 3:30, right around when we got there, but there are tons of temples in the area so we still explored around, took lots of pictures, and had a good time.
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| Hien, Kelly, Cara, and I wai-ing |
Also recently, I went on my first field trip with my students! We went to a lotus flower museum at a nearby University in Bangkok. The lotus flower is very very important to Thailand and has a lot of Buddhist significance. We spent the morning looking/learning about different types of lotus plants. Apparently this university has won international contests for breeding certain kinds of lotuses. We then learned how to plant a lotus flower. (The one I planted I got to take home and is still alive!) After lunch the kids wrote poems and did an art project using the lotus leaves to make patterns.
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| Gawin, one of my favorite students :) |
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| All the student's artworks |
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Andd this is the shirt all the teachers had to wear for the field trip.
Definitely the nastiest thing I have ever worn. |
For my 2nd time traveling outside of Bangkok, I went with to Ayutthaya. Ayutthaya is the old capital of Thailand (back when it was still called Siam). It was one of the most important trade centers in the world but in 1767 was ransacked and burned by the Burmese. There were tons of temples and palaces which are now all amazingg ruins. As a photographer, I LOVED it. Cara and I took a 2 hour, 3rd class open air train for about 50 cents each way! After being harrassed by a tuk-tuk driver right outside the train station and getting a bit lost, we rented bikes for about a dollar for the whole day and biked around to see the temples in the center. We got very very hot and were feeling like crap, I think we both were dehydrated and had heat exhaustion (we were in the sun with no air conditioning the whole way there). But we pressed on because we wanted to see the city so badly. There are about 20 temple ruins but we only saw 3, but it was awesome. There was even a Buddha head that had trees growing around it (see the photo below). Most of the heads of the numerous Buddha statues (Ayutthaya was a religious center as well) were knocked off, but a few remain whole. It was a very spiritual and peaceful place, and I want to go back when it is cooler so I can see more and really enjoy it.
Also, right before we were going to leave, we saw people riding ELEPHANTS in the distance! We almost got run over because we wanted to get close to them haha. Elephants decorated in bright colored fabric, with the old temple ruins in the background and a religious ceremony with monks singing nearby, it was a very surreal experience. I am really loving this country!
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| Out the window on the train ride there - houses on stilts |
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| AMAZING |
Thanks for reading!
~ Elisa
