First Day in Thailand!

(My Sunday, the 29th)

Houses around our apartment building

Took a long Sunday morning walk and explored around the place where we will be living.  It is beautiful, in a grungy sort of way.  There are chickens and soi (street) dogs everywhere.  People keep a lot of stuff outside, I guess because the nice weather they have.  We also saw a ton of Mom and Pop stores, selling all sorts of things like cooked meats, fresh eggs, dried and fresh fruit, but also things like straws, candy, bottled drinks, and a ton of stuff that I couldn't tell you what it is.

Later in the day two wonderful women from Lertlah school took us shopping.  We got cell phones, and a bunch of stuff we need for our apartments, like fans, bed spreads, shoe racks, hangers, cleaning supplies, etc.  We went back after having a wonderful lupper of pad thai and chicken on green chili from a soi (street) vendor.  Unfortunately, my feet couldn't really take all the walking around because I got huge blisters, as you see in the picture.   

Not for the faint of heart.

I still hate my apartment.  Last night I found out that a there is a colony of ants living in my bathroom walls.  I am going to see if the 7-Eleven down the street from us has any ant traps.  I am also pretty sure that there is some kind of spider nest in my walls because I have killed about 7 of the same type of spider  *shudder*. Today I will talk to someone today about being moved into a different apartment.  There is a free one upstairs that I would love to nab, and I would totally be willing to pay extra for it.  It's a corner room and, from what I can tell, quite nice.

Anyway, aside from the feet and the apartment, everything here is wonderful!  The people are beautiful, the city is amazing, and the school that I am going to be teaching at is better than what my expectations were.  :)

Love you all,

Kelsey

The Flight

In Thailand safe and sound!  Here are a couple of back-posts, as I didn't have internet until now :)

The plane rides were very, very difficult.  It was straining and an emotional rollercoaster when thinking about how much I am going to miss everyone.  Secondly, I had to do that for 21 hours of flight time. 

It wasn't all bad though.  The longest flight - 13.5 hours, my seat ended up being next to the cutest little Korean boy.  The first thing he said to me when I sat down was "...would you like to share some chips?" as he pulled out a large bag of lays BBQ.  My response? "Sure!"  Instant friends!  He is in grade 5 and was coming home to Korea from a homestay program, in which he went to school in London, Ontario for 4 months.  He certainly made the plane ride more entertaining, especially since none of us U of W students were able to six next to each other.

The layovers were not very exciting.  It was remarkably easy to navigate through the airports, and we never really came across any long lineups.  The paperwork was also very simple to fill out, and we walked right through customs as we had nothing to declare.  Both layovers also had WiFi, and Tim and I were able to chat during the second one, which made me feel a lot better :) 

Then finally we arrived in the sweaty city at around 11:00pm!  Being the smallest of the two groups, there being only six of us while there are 14 in the other group, we were able to organize ourselves quickly and take off for the apartments.  An easy half hour later we were at our apartment building!  Unfortunately, I got the worst apartment - my view looks directly onto a wall.  Oh well, will try to make the best of it!  I should be used to an outside wall view by now, right Tim?  One nice thing is that there is a small patio, so I am thinking of buying one or two large plants to at least get somewhat of a tropical feel when I look out the window.  

Goodbyes....

It was hard yesterday, the last day of my practicum at SMS, to say goodbye to all the students and staff.  I had a really great eight months there, and I will miss them!  I also had a really nice send off in the form of a surprise pizza, pop, and cake party - yum!  

I also wanted to thank Karla, my awesome Zumba instructor, for the wonderful send off.  She had me and my girl Kiera up on stage for "our song" - it was magical!  Later a bunch of us Zumba girls went to Earl's for drinks and appetizers - again, so hard to say goodbye as they will all be missed.

Testing, testing.....

This is me testing my blog!  

I am trying to see all the neat things I can do with it before I leave.

I plan on (trying) to keep this blog up-to-date while I am teaching and traveling abroad.