Let's Leave Phuket

 …but first we have to do a little teaching and make a trip to the Big Buddha.

We visited a few schools for the teaching practice required by our certification program. It was a bit of a joke, because we only taught for less than 30 minutes a day to a class of between 6 and 20 kids.  I currently teach about 5 hours a day to classes of at least 50 students, and use almost none of what I was taught in certification.

But never mind! The kids were adorable. We taught for the first three days in a Muslim school on the untouristy side of Phuket.

Roisin giving Thai children a Donegal accent

How cute are they??

  It was a lot of fun, and quite cool for a change because it rained the whole time. The school was small and very old, and surrounded by jungle.

Pouring. 

On the Thursday of that week we went to a sort of juvenile detention center, which I have no photos of because cameras were forbidden. The teens we met there weren’t so much hardened criminals as they were kids driven to minor crimes by desperate circumstances. They had next to no English, and seemed discouraged by our lesson since we had been told to prepare for their age level (older teenagers) rather than their ability. They were just sad high school kids, and even though the place wasn't horribly jail-like, they definitely wanted to go home.The whole visit was pretty distressing. 

On Friday, we went to the Football Youth Home.

 The Football Youth Home was founded and financed by one Henrik Lorenz, a German businessman and long-time footballer who settled in Hong Kong for 40 years and who died in 2006. 

Good guy. 

Anyway, he apparently came to Thailand, presumably saw kids playing soccer and kids in bad situations, and decided to do something.

 Here’s the website, in case anyone wants to visit or volunteer or donate: http://home.exetel.com.au/katjahouse/Thailand_html/index.html

These kids had incredible English from travelling all over the place playing soccer. 

There was also a class of little kids upstairs.

And we got a tour of the building, which had dorm rooms where each boy had his medals and belongings.

...is it creepy that I took a photo of a little boy's bed? It wasn't until I wrote this caption. 

It was a nice place, run by kind people. After we finished teaching the boys presented us with roses made from palm leaves. Cute.

Sometime in the mix of all this, we made a trip to the Big Buddha, which is exactly what it sounds like. Remember we saw it in the wake of the boat in the first post of any substance on this blog?

As promised, it’s big.

...although none of my photos provide any context for how big. Just take my word for it. 

Before you climb up to see it up close, you pass through a sort of hall with informative (I assume, they're in Thai) displays on the building of the Buddha:

requests to donate and to not feed the monkeys:

Happy animals (you'll always find happy animals in sacred places here):

Mai Pen Rai. 

And monks, blessing visitors:

I got blessed, which involved a monk sprinkling me with water, smacking me on the head with a water soaked broom-type thing, and tying a lanyard around my wrist, all the time muttering in Thai.

Climbing up the steps to the Big Buddha, we found that much of it actually wasn’t finished yet.

You can buy a marble tablet, scrawl something personal on it, and they’ll eventually use it in constructing the exterior of the Buddha. Right now the tiles are just piled up, waiting to be cemented on there, but it’s a sweet statement about the universal and internal nature of the Buddha spirit. Or something.

The views were the real attraction, even though it was overcast. Very cool.

Next! We leave Phuket for Krabi, where we take a long-tailed boat ride with a questionable character and climb 1,237 steps to the top of a mountain. Some of us do, anyway. 

Home Sweet Home

Before returning to fabulous, glamorous places, let’s stop off in Sakon Nakhon, the place I’ve called home for three months now. Sakon Nakhon is in Isan, which is a massive region in Northeast Thailand characterized by super friendly people, small cities, and a strong Lao influence. Sakon Nakhon is the capitol of Sakon Nakhon province, but only boasts about 70,000 people, and feels smaller. I love it. 

I have good friends here! My bestie is Kate, a gregarious goofball from Michigan. She’s incredibly friendly (we joke that she’s running for mayor because when we’re out around town she says hello to everyone) and has made my time here immeasurably more fun than if I had been here alone. I’m lucky to have her.

Such a nerd.

Also, Ben! Ben and Kate met in college, became buddies, and came to Thailand together. Ben and I also have a blast. 

Ben is the dude in this picture. Also introducing Kate's cleavage.

He’s a sweetie, and has an sharp scientific mind that makes for good conversation while hanging over the balcony of our apartment building. 

How can this not make you want to talk about stem cell research?

To the right in that photo is Carinne,  a liberal Texan who Ben met and fell in love with in Phuket, and is often in Sakon Nakhon because her job in Bangkok (which she recently quit- woo!)  was absolutely horrible. So we get to hang with her sometimes!

Thai friends! Ben met Thon while looking for apartments (here on the left with his friend Doo).

Represent. 

Thon speaks superb English, and until he left to go south and translate for the U.S. Military (which he does whenever they're training in Thailand - his English is that good), he was our main man in Sakon Nakhon. We miss him and hope that he comes home soon, although Kate and I plan to visit him while he's translating for attractive American men in uniform... In any case, we would have been adrift much longer without him there to show us the best things in town. 

Speaking of which! The following are all within five minutes of our apartment building:

The largest lake in Thailand, which is incredibly beautiful:

It's much bigger than this, but the lake stretches to the east from us, so this is a sunset view of a sort of inlet thing. 

An adorable coffee shop where they know us by name:

 where you can get this:

Ignore the cupcake in the background. I have no idea how that got there. 

A gorgeous park full of flowers built around a pond:

Photo courtesy of Carinne, who has spent more time there while we're in school than I will ever have the opportunity to.

A fabulous, gilded wat:

This is, incidentally, where I watched a full lunar eclipse. 

We get from place to place by bicycle (jak-gra-yan in Thai, in case you were wondering). Kate and Ben and I terrorize this town on our bikes- we're a regular farang bicycle gang. We tear through the alleys and frighten unsuspecting Thais when we pop out on the street (Kate: "Hello!! Sawadee-kha! Sabaidee baw kha? Gin khao young?").

 I’m in love with my bicycle. I want to ship it home to the U.S.

My precious. 

Biking another fifteen minutes brings us out of the suburbs for scenic views and encounters with local fauna:

The Thai word for "stupid" is the same as "buffalo", and these vacant stares demonstrate why. 

Homeward bound. 

Maybe they're not stupid- this momma seems to be contemplating the sunset. 

And just the other day we went out aimlessly biking and stumbled on the ruins of a tenth century, Khmer influenced wat.

Same era as Angkor Wat- no big deal. 

Just another day in Sakon Nakhon. 

A Few Scattered, Barely Connected Notes about Phuket, in Which I Lie to My Mother

I miss Phuket. I mostly spent the month I was there trying to come to terms with the fact that I was in Thailand, which didn’t become at all real to me until the third week, despite eating dinner every night looking at this: 

 and this:  

Our hotel was really out of the way at the southern tip of the island, and we had to take a tuk-tuk, which is basically a big pick-up truck outfitted with benches, to get anywhere.

En route to Patong. We have no idea what we're in for. 

At first I thought that an inconvenience, but after a few excursions  to more traveled areas of the island like Patong:

This is a tame picture. The whole place is basically a brothel. 

I found that I preferred it that way.


Our hotel had some sweet little touches, like this ...basin? Massive vase? Thingie?...

...where women would sit once a week placing tiny blossoms in the water:

in various designs.

Just outside the hotel was a spirit house.

I've since learned that these are found all over Thailand, outside private residences, office buildings, schools, and even big box stores. They’re based on the vestiges of a belief that by building in a certain place, you’re displacing spirits who already live there. If you don’t want bad things to happen to you, you build them a house of their own and bring them offerings of rice, sugary drinks, water, incense, and all the other things spirits apparently enjoy.

Spirits are thirsty.

There were cats and dogs wandering all over the little community supported by the two hotels on our beach. Some of the dogs were friendlier than others, and the friendly ones sometimes came to hang out with us when we were lounging on the beach during the day or singing Bob Marley off-key in the evenings. I made friends with this one, and called her Lucy. 

Pitbull/ corgi mix, maybe? Cuteness. 

She was a sweetie.

One Sunday I rented a motorbike (which I may or may not have promised my mother I wouldn’t do) to explore the island a little bit. I didn’t get incredibly far, since every time I came to a road that was more than two lanes I panicked and turned around and went back the way I came, but I followed the coast south:

and then north,

climbing steep hills on this incredibly girly, not at all kickass motorbike.

I saw some nice houses

 and some not-so-nice houses

 and other sweet stuff.

And just to prove that mothers are always right even when they're halfway around the world, I did indeed crash my motorbike.

Carnage. 

Thank goodness I was wearing a helmet.