They made it!

Sitting on the cold, greyish white airport floor, staring up at the arrivals board as it flips to English, to Thai, then back to English again. It seems unreal... the reason I'm here. Yet... I check the time, one minute until landing. A wide grin spreads across my face. I glance back up at the arrivals board.

LANDED.

Welcome to Thailand, Mom and Dad!

The Best Day of my Life

North Trip!

I just got back from my trip to the North with all the other exchange students in my district (Space Peopls what we call ourselves) and all the Thai outbound students (one of whom is going to Alaska next year—shout out to Mew!). We saw tons of historical sights, went to the old capital of Thailand—Sukothai, visited the Golden Triangle, the famous White Temple (Wat Rungkun), saw two beautiful pagodas that were built in the mountains for the King and Queen, walked through many beautiful gardens, went to a few museums, a hot spring, a gorgeous and enormous waterfall, a painted fan village and a ceramics factory. All of those wonderful things and I still haven’t even listed my favorite three!

So here goes…

First, on April 11^th after visiting the gorgeous White Temple, sticking our feet and hard boiling eggs in the scorching water of the Mae Kajarn Hot Spring  we headed to the province of Chiang Mai where we visited the  Chiang Mai Zoo. Zoos are just awesome to begin with, and even more so when you are with your best friends and you get to see your favorite animal in the whole wide world! Those of you who know me well enough will know what that is…

Secondly, we all got to celebrate the Thai holiday Songkran on April 13th! Though Songkran used to be more of a family holiday in which people would go and visit grandparents and elders and be sprinkled in holy water, over time it has evolved and changed into modern day Songkran which is basically just three days (this year it was April 13-16) where everyone in Thailand stops, drops everything their doing, closes up shop and heads out into the street for a country-wide water and squirt gun fight! Songkran was simply amazing! Everyone in the whole country out to have a water fight on one of the hottest days of the year… perfect.

Thirdly, April 12^th may just have been the best day of my life up to this point. We started the day with watching the adorable elephants at Maetang Elephant Park play soccer, dance and paint beautiful pictures with their trunks! During the show an elephant presented my friend Turi with a basket of flowers! While standing around waiting for the show to begin, I got kissed by an elephant… well… more like it stuck its trunk on my face and got me all slobbery… that doesn’t happen everyday! After the show we took a ride in a cart pulled by two oxen, some early birds had already started playing Songkran, but luckily we didn’t get splashed… yet, we road the oxen to another area where we transferred from the low to the ground oxen carts to the high back of an elephant. I rode the elephant with my friend Lea, from Germany. As we walked through the forest bumping and jolting from side to side neither of us could stop smiling. We finally came to a river… which our elephant walked straight into and started to spray us a bit with water from it’s trunk. Let Songkran begin! Sitting on an elephant walking in a river through the mountains and forests of Northern Thailand was one of the most amazing and best things I have ever done in my entire life. After we returned to the elephant enclosure we got off, thanked our Mahout (elephant trainer) and elephant and we were off once again, this time we had a bamboo raft as our mode of transportation. Seven other exchange students from USA, France and Germany--Sophie, Willis, Jon, Turi, Alex, Tom, Maieul-- and I, our awesome Rotex Pick, one of our tour guides and two Thai boat men all floated together. As we started Pick asked “So… do you guys want to play Songkran?” “YES!” we all agreed. And so we splashed and screamed and sang our way down the river. The raft man let me steer the back while my friend Tom from France steered the front, we made a good team but unfortunately we were too slow so we let the raft man steer instead. By the time we got back, wet from splashing each other and being splashed by random Thai children and families swimming in the river we were all more than content. We headed to Bor Sang Umbrella village where we watched women hand paint on umbrellas, fans, papers and anything else you can imagine. My friend Saeko, from Japan, and I both got things painted on our cameras, Jonas from Germany got his wallet painted on and Helen and Ariel from Canada and Taiwan got their clothing painted on.  It was a fantastic and tiring day and we were all glad to be back at the hotel and take a shower… but no rest here because that evening we were off to a traditional Thai dance show where we sat on the floor and ate dinner while listening to live Thai music and watching the beautiful dances from all corners of Thailand. The day ended with staying up into the early hours of the morning talking with friends, a perfect way to end a perfect day.

The last night of the trip we sung karaoke, talked and danced. For some reason I was feeling kind of saddened by it all and so, when four of the Outbound girls came out with a cake and a big poster saying “We Love Inbounds!” with a silly face that matched each inbound’s personality drawn on it and then sang a song for us all, I’m sure I was the first one crying… but I wasn’t the only one. Luckily someone started a cake in the face fight and that wiped away all of our tears. After jumping in the pool the clean off we all stayed up late talking through the very last night of the trip.

We are meant to have a goodbye party sometime in mid June, but unfortunately some Inbounds probably will have left already… I didn’t realize at the time that that may have been the last time we are all together… ever.

I cannot thank Rotary enough for having these amazing trips for us and for giving me the opportunity to have this amazing year. I cannot believe how much my life has changed in the past 250 days. I will never, ever forget the memories of the Rotary trips and the friendships I have made with all the Space People of D3350 will definitely last forever.

I love Thailand! I love my exchange student family! I love life!

Here is the link to the photos of the North Trip ---> Adventures in the North

Hope you are all well.

Kearn

A new 7-11?!

On Thursday Alex and I went to Bangkok to meet up with Sophie, Turi and Crystle.
Sophie had her first Mexican food and we all walked around and went shopping. That night Turi, Alex and I all spent the night at Sophie's house. In the morning we took motorcycle taxis to the bus stop and then went to Central Plaza, a shopping mall, where we ate Krispy Kremes, D(insert 'o' with little dots on top here)ner and watched the movie The Host which was a really good movie and also, for us, a comfy one because we all cuddled. Back to Lop Buri to find that there is a NEW, yes NEWWWW 7-11. You really know you've been in Thailand a while when you actually care about the fact that there is a new 7-11 in your town. I mean... it's not that 7-11's are rare, in fact, they are the complete opposite, there are three within a 5 minute walk from my house, it's the fact that there is a new one... in Lop Buri... in my town! I think it's the fact that I've been here long enough to see the changes as the city develops. Strange, strange... and now I must go visit the new 7-11 because it most certainly is not just like all the others, right? It is especially nothing like the one across the street from it and down about 200 meters away now is it.

Rabbit Rabbit Swordfish!

I'm not sure which way it was... but in either my mom or dad's family when they were a kid they said "rabbit rabbit" on the first of the month and in the other family they said "swordfish swordfish" therefore in my family we've always said "rabbit rabbit swordfish!" I said it once while with my group of exchange students and no one understood so I figured it deserved an explanation! Anyways, Happy April Fools Day to everyone! I hope you had some fun with pranks or were pranked! Though I was not pranked and did not prank anyone, April 1st was the date that the prank war between four exchange student girls (Alex, Turi, Sophie, me) and four exchange student boys (Willis, Andre, Luca, Matt) was established. Next week is our Districts trip to the North so I promise I will update you later on all the silly jokes that go on! For now, here is an account of some fun things that happened on the District South Trip!

March 26

My host family owns a van rental company so at about 2pm all of us Lop Buri kids and a few others leave for Bangkok. We meet the others in Bangkok and by 6pm we are on our awesome VIP double decker bus and offff! The first hours are excited, loud, chattering and rambunctious! Slowly people begin to quiet down, tire out and drift off to sleep. 

March 27

At about 8am I open my eyes, I try and try to focus them but I can't. All I see is a strange blue, moving mass before my eyes. Within about a minute the bus lights are turned on and our funny Thai tour guide tells us that we have arrived! Oh... I put two and two together... blue wavy mass = the ocean. We check in to our hotel which is barely a five minute walk from the beach and take showers, half an hour later we are back on the bus, breakfasted and wearing our swimsuits under our clothes. We spend the day taking a small boat just big enough for our group of exchange students around the islands of Krabi, stopping for an hour here and an hour there. Swimming, swimming, swimming! That evening we walk around at the night market street and Alex and I go to a shop and get our hair done into a million tiny braids. We plan to keep them for the entire trip. After two hours we are only about 10 minutes late for dinner, that night we take a walk on the beach and finally roll into bed only to wake up in the morning to another day in paradise.

March 28

We take the bus to a hot spring, but it's not like the hot springs I've been to before, water coming out of the ground and creating a pool of warm water, no this is a hot waterfall! The many levels of the waterfall can fit one, two or even six or seven people in them and if you get to hot you can always slip on down and land in the cold river water below. We splash and play for almost an hour, even though supposedly one should only stay for 20 minutes... no more and no less. Later that day we go to The Emerald Pool. To get to the pool you must take about a fifteen minute walk through the beautiful jungle. It was very pretty and of course we all went swimming again! That evening we drove to Pang Nga and stayed at a hotel with a beautiful view of the river. We went swimming in the pool, dove around, took crazy photos, I once again stubbed my old fractured big toe and everyone got some betadine and bandaids for all the cuts from the rocks on the beaches.  

March 29th

We took a boat from the pier infront of our hotel and visited James Bond Island. I've never seen the movie that was filmed there so that is on the list of to do's now! While there, a few friends and   I explored some caves and disturbed a few bats. Later that day we took the boat to a tiny village of about 200 households on a tiny island. Most people living there were Muslim and they were in the process of building a mosque. There we ate lunch and walked around. We saw the floating soccer field... the rules are that whoever kicks the ball off has to jump in a go get it! Then we donated a bunch of mosquito nets, a water filtration system and some snacks and candy to the local school. A few of us played soccer with some small Thai children... I sort of sunburned the bottom of my feet from this but it was totally worth it. I spoke to a group of girls and learned that many of them did not know how to swim... that surprised me. Also while talking to a woman there we learned that her pet gibbon's name was Turi! The lady let our friend Turi hold the gibbon and we took lots of pictures, even though usually the photos are 50 baht the woman didn't make us pay. Turi was pretty overjoyed. How often do you go to a tiny island with 200 households and find a gibbon with the same name as you? Once in a lifetime for sure. That night we checked into a really beautiful hotel, we played in the pool and then went to dinner. Dinner is a whole other story... now we can get foreign food, sort of, but nothing good and nothing thats not ridiculously expensive so when we walked in to see that the food was an International All You Can Eat Buffet you can probably imagine what happened next. After eating ourselves into what we like to call a "chicken hangover" (the chicken was really, really, really delicious), we rested for a bit before going out to the walking street market to buy some new bracelets and look around.

March 30

In the morning we headed to Phi Phi Island. On the two hour boat ride we met some nice people, especially one couple from Brazil who were travelling all over the world. We ate lunch at Phi Phi Island and then went snorkeling. It was absolutely beautiful. Our chaperone started feeding the fish and there were so many of them and so close together that they were swimming into us! That night we all got a bit dressed up and went to Phuket FantaSea which is an amazing show of Thai dance, magic, other dance, elephants and all sorts of animals! My favorite was the group of about fourteen or so trapeze artists swinging and twirling in the air above us while everything was dark except for their neon outfits. My friend Lea and I walked to The Hard Rock Cafe Phuket later but everything was way to expensive so we couldn't even get a pin for our blazer. Later we walked around at the street market again and we jumped into the ocean after midnight to celebrate Sophie's 17th birthday! 

March 31

We swam at the pool, gave birthday gifts to Sophie, went shopping a bit more and finally started the long bus ride back home. On the bus we watched The Sound Of Music and Turi, Daniel and I all sang along. The chaperone had prepared a cake, so we all sang and Sophie blew out her candles on the top of a double decker bus somewhere between Phuket and Bangkok.

It was an absolutely amazing week and I couldn't have asked for any more wonderful people to spend it with than the awesome Spacepeople (inbound students of District 3350), few outbounds who went and our awesome Rotex-- Coco and Ohm! Thanks for everything, especially the goodnight hugs! :)

Also, here is the link to the album of my photos from the trip-- Krabi, Phuket, Phi Phi and more!

and here is the link to my youtube-  Kearney on Youtube!

Kearn

Generosity

I poke her flat stomach, she playfully falls to the floor but quickly leaps back up. Pointing at my shirt she exclaims "ling! monkey!" I smile, "yes!". Then she twirls away, slips on her high heel, magenta, flower adorned, plastic shoes and dances across the room with a rhythmic tip tap. She stops by the new office chair and points... "gleen!" she proclaims, mixing up the "l" sound with the "r" sound as the majority of Thais do. I smile... "yes! excellent job!". And in this fashion she keeps dancing, skipping, tapping across the room finding colors and exclaiming them in her tiny, sweet voice. Her energy seems never ending, she can't sit still long enough to peel up a sticker from her sticker book so instead she stands, leaning on the table moving her legs and chattering away to herself. "Which one do you like P'Kaohom?" she asks. They are Disney stickers from Toy Story... I smile, pretend to think real hard about it and then point to a little square sticker with Rex, the dinosaur, on it. I look away for a moment and when I turn around her little hand is outstretched towards me, the Rex sticker on the tip of her finger. I smile. This is generosity.