Nostalgia

Every time I watch Family Outing Season 1, a Korean variety show that I'm a huge fan of, I become uncontrollably nostalgic for the 4 months I spent living in Isaan. Especially when we had our homestays with ดาวดิน ("dao din," meaning "the stars [and] the earth"), the social justice club at Khon Kaen University, in two villages in Loei province.

We would wake up absurdly early, spending our morning feeding the animals, doing some rice and/or rubber harvesting, and coming home to eat lunch before noon so that the hot, afternoon sun wouldn't give us skin cancer and damage our eyes. Then, sitting on the front porch with my friend ทราย ("Sai") who was a part of ดาวดิน at the time, homestay sister, homestay grandma, and a three-legged dog, talking about life. Eventually, ทราย would get bored, so we would go down the road to the village general store and grab two homemade red bean popsicles, which would both be suffering badly from freezer-burn, but we wouldn't care because at that time of the day, it would be upwards of 95 degrees Fahrenheit. We would walk around the village, talking about girl stuff and eating our popsicles before eventually going back to the homestay house. Our homestay sister, who would how bored we were, would take a break from hanging up the family's clothes on the clothesline in the backyard and tell us to take the motorcycle around the village. Since I can't drive one, I would sit behind ทราย on the motorcycle and silently rejoice in the coolness of the wind whipping at us at the sadly sluggish speed of 20 miles per hour. We would drive past the homestay houses of my American friends, and their homestay families would kindly offer us some food and snacks, as was customary in every other rural village I visited. ทราย and I would eventually find a mountain somewhere and do some hiking, with me completely unable to keep up with her pace, despite the fact that I grew up in the middle of the Great Smokies. We would eventually go home and eat dinner, maybe watch a movie, talk about who would dump icy cold water on ourselves from a small bucket shower first the next day, and go to sleep. Or, as ทราย and I experienced at another village in the same province, the village would have a gathering at someone's house, and everyone would get drunk, sing karaoke, gossip, and just generally have fun. There would always be "that guy" who had a guitar and sat in a corner with his friends and some of the villagers, singing songs about love and sadness. And eventually, the most alcoholic of us Americans would try to go shot-for-shot against the 80+ year old grandmas who supplied a homemade moonshine-like concoction that they had made from rice. We wouldn't be able to stand a chance against them.

I miss that.

I miss that a lot.

And I really hope I'm making the right decision in going back to Thailand.

I've been really aiming to go back to Bangkok for the wages and the friends that I already have there. Maybe it's the North Carolina in me, but it's at these moments where I wish I was at a financially stable place in life so that I could just take a low-paying job at a school in a more rural setting. It would probably be better for the soul, too.

My mom already says that "my mind is over there," referring to Thailand, when I complain about not being able to find a job at home or elsewhere in the US. To an extent, that's true. But that's not to say I won't miss some things about home.

I'll miss being able to order food from a menu rather than from a person who can pretty much make any dish you want, but oh, it has to be Thai, and oh, it has to have so much MSG that your mouth becomes numb, and oh, we don't have tofu today, and oh, are you sure you don't want meat in that??

I'll miss the comfort of leaving out a napkin full of crumbs in my trashcan without worrying about hordes of ants invading my room during the night.

I'll miss the mild, 70 degree weather that we get here throughout most of the year.

I'll miss the lack of mosquitoes. 

I'll miss being able to comfortably speak English every day.

I'll miss my betta fish.

But mostly, I'll miss seeing and talking to my parents every day.

I really hope I'm doing the right thing.