14 again: First homestay, part 1.

Wow. Each week seems longer and longer... It's ridiculous.

Anyway, since I last wrote, I did a whole bunch of things. Unfortunately, my camera ran out of batteries on the first day away from KKU, and I didn't bring my charger... So, I took, like, zero pictures. Sorry. :/ So on Monday, I finally took a tour of the city of Khon Kaen with the rest of my group. We then went to Suan Sanuk Municipal School right here in Khon Kaen to meet our first homestay families! The school, from what I gather, caters to kindergarten-age kids to 15-16 year olds.. I should probably look up the whole Thai education system at some point. Anyway, here's a few pictures provided by their website, since I failed at bringing my camera charger.

The front of the school!

Courtyard area where the kids have recess.

Classrooms, another view of the recess area.

So we awkwardly found our host brothers and sisters through a long process of introducing ourselves in Thai in front of a crowd of chattering children and having our respective family members come up to the front and introduce themselves to us in English. My little sister ended up being the most adorable girl EVER; her nickname was "Tha" which, I'm assuming, comes from the fact that her eyes are gigantic ("tha" is "eye" in Thai. Or grandfather. So yeah). She stood at a height of maybe 4'0", even though she told me that she was 14 years old. In fact, all of the host sisters looked way, way younger than their counterparts in the US, I think. We then took a van ride to their homes, which varied in distance from a short drive to a 1+ hour excursion into the forest. For example, my sister lived in a urban-y area that was a 15-ish minute drive away from the school, whereas the family of another guy in my group lived on a farm on the outskirts of town, and it took him about an hour and a half to get there.

My first night at N'Tha's house was... awkward, to say the least. She told me that she lived with her aunt, uncle, and older sister. For the rest of the afternoon, we watched some awesome Thai dramas and gameshows, and I found KBS World! So she and I watched the episode of "Invincible Youth" (SUBBED IN ENGLISH), while I attempted to summarize what was happening in my broken Thai. It was quite an adventure, to say the least. Then, we decided to do something easy for dinner and cook some ramen (I'm assuming at this point that her aunt and uncle worked late or something). Finally, after taking a shower (okay, it was kind of a shower and kind of a bucket bath, where I had to fill up a bucket full of cold water and pour it on myself. Yeesh), my host aunt and uncle come in. I greeted both of them with a wai and my friendliest "Sawatdee, ka!" and got... nothing. My aunt asked N'Tha who I was and the uncle just walked upstairs without a word. I awkwardly stood there, and then N'Tha told me that she had to do her homework upstairs. I followed her, and then while doing my Thai homework, she asked me to help me with her English homework. Her class was apparently working on superheroes, so I had to try to explain what "invisibility" and "walk through walls" was in Thai to her. But my crowning moment came when I had to explain "burst into flames." I asked if she knew what Pokemon was, to which she replied with an enthusiastic nod of her head. Then, I said, "Charmander. Flamethrower attack," and she went, "OHHHH," and proceeds to write the phrase, "burst into fire" in Thai beside the phrase "burst into flames."

After watching a particularly intense drama (it dealt with the gruesome murder of some ridiculously skinny, pretty woman in skimpy clothes and how her best friend was the one who murdered her. Or something), we decided to go to sleep. On the floor At 9 PM. And we woke up at 6 AM. Hm, I forgot what it was like to be a middle school student. Anyway, I woke up and saw a random girl sleeping in the bed while N'Tha and I slept on the floor. Apparently, this was random 17 year old older sister.

We took a sawng tao into school, which is basically a pickup truck with two rows of seats on either side of it. It functions as a bus here, and here's what one looks like.

Dangerous.

I promptly had to get into the CIEE van after arriving at the school because I had a Thai lesson with another professor, Ajaan Maliwan. She's the official Thai as a Second Language (TSL, f yeah!) professor at the university and usually works with students studying abroad from China. And she's probably the kindest, most warm-hearted people I've ever met. EVER. She told me not to worry about my broken Thai and to just speak, even if it's wrong... And I guess my biggest fear is speaking incorrectly, so in the past, I just never spoke Thai in order to save face. But she told me a story about when she was studying abroad in Australia (SUP BILLIE.) and accidentally asked like, 5 people in her dorm, "Excuse me, where is the chicken room?" when she meant to ask, "Excuse me, where is the kitchen?" You can see how that made me loosen up a little bit. Then, before we even began the lesson, she bought me some kanom, or treats! One was a sushi-shaped paste made out of taro and topped with some gelatinized coconut milk, all wrapped in strips of banana leaves. The other was some fried dough with some filling on the inside that I wasn't able to quite identify. It was absolutely delicious, though. She then told me that her lesson plan was based on listening and speaking, since those would be most practical; so for 3 hours, we spoke in Thai, and if I didn't know a word, she would write it up on the board in Thai, and I would copy it to study later. She even wrote up the karaoke spellings so I would know how to pronounce the words, too! :D

After the lesson, I went back to meet with the rest of the group and had a 5 hour meeting. We all then returned to our homestays, and I actually talked to my host aunt for a bit! That night, she explained that she worked at a nearby open-air market and thus woke up early and came home late at night. The uncle is some sort of businessman, but I didn't catch what exactly he did. Keep in mind that I still haven't met the 17 year old sister that supposedly lived there.

Anyway, this is getting super long. I'll continue it in another post!