Loneliness and Art Therapy

One week of solitude and counting. I know that's not a crazy-long time but It hasn’t been easy, and as much as I imagined my time abroad would entail a certain amount of loneliness, I never really experienced it until now. Marianne and Shaleas departed for their next life adventures last Sunday and I have been here in Thawangpha “alone” for the past week. Obviously there are still Thai people around and even the Chinese teachers have been here, but no one that speaks English as a first language remains but me. The first few days were rough; I think it was the shock of being alone. The next few days improved as I found myself getting into my own groove. Today, however, I had a bit of a relapse and felt sad and depressed again this morning. Loneliness is a weird thing, it is not like I am bored per se, there are plenty of things that I can and should be doing (do I really have to file my taxes from Thailand?). However, loneliness can be pretty debilitating sometimes. As a default, there is always the internet (assuming it is actually working) or reading and once I have had my fill of those things, I start doing weird stuff like spending an hour perfectly plucking my eyebrows, diligently manicuring my nails, or doing a great job of shaving my legs. I also have been doing yoga every day, which always cheers me up, but after two hours in this heat you gotta call it quits. I think that the hardest part is those weird times of the day when it is too early to watch a movie (besides, that was the plan for the evening) and it is really too hot to be outside for long periods of time. I find myself sitting on my bed staring at the wall having a profound understanding of why people talk to their plants and animals. It is quite a strange thing to go an entire day and not talk. Not very often do most people do this. The other morning I had been up for four hours and all of a sudden realized I hadn’t spoken a word out loud. All morning thoughts were running through my head, but I hadn’t muttered a sound. I finally decided to open my mouth and say hello to the gecko on my wall and I almost scared myself. Yes, I now understand what crazy feels like.

Now, it isn’t all as sad and morbid as I am probably making it sound, it’s just those moments of the day when it hits you hard. I guess it is what you do in these moments that matter. If you succumb to the sadness (which I have), you end up curled up in bed talking to geckos, on the other hand, if you choose to fight (which I do sometimes) you force yourself to go do something and ultimately you end up happy that you fought and won. Today was an example of this, I woke up feeling pretty melancholy, I checked my email and there was nothing new (you guys have no idea what an email does for a lonely person!) and soon thereafter the Internet stopped working all together. All of a sudden, it hit me, like a slap right across the face. I didn’t want to be here anymore, I wanted to be where my friends and family were. I wanted to be where people spoke English. I wanted to eat a burrito and watch The Soup for the love of God! I immediately felt like I had no control of my life, I felt trapped. I imagined you all bustling around on your Saturday night, eating sushi, watching a movie at home, or having a glass of wine with friends. Then I saw myself in the middle of nowhere on the other side of the world from all y’all, sitting in a cement box with roosters crowing in the back yard. I initially gave in to The Loneliness Monster and crawled back in bed. Then, my phone started ringing.

The Thai English teachers have been really sweet to me this past week. They know that I have been feeling pretty lonely so they have been making an extra effort to invite me here and there with them. While it is incredibly nice and thoughtful, it is also exhausting to spend a lot of time with them. The language barrier really makes it difficult to relax and just have a free-flowing conversation; which is exactly what I have been missing. At first I deflected invitations with this excuse or that excuse. I wanted to wallow in my misery in peace dammit! But after the fourth call from Cru Kai, I rolled myself out of bed, put on a happier face and went to meet her. As some of you know, Cru Kai’s husband teaches art at the primary school in town. A few months ago Marianne and I expressed interest in him teaching us to draw. He gave us a few assignments that consisted of drawing horizontal lines, then vertical lines, and then diagonal lines over and over. We were to complete these exercises before working on our pièce de résistance - a tree with flowers and mountains in the distance. Of course, time got away from us and usually drinking beer at night was more desirable than drawing lines. When we graduated to the wavy lines, we pretty much stopped trying. However, Cru Kai’s husband was willing to overlook my laziness. I got to the school and there were six of the most adorable ten year olds ready to teach me to draw. These girls were so shy that they wouldn’t actually talk to me, but they all fought over who got to sit next to me. We quickly got to work and I finished the now-shortened exercises I needed to do to draw my tree. Once Cru Kai’s husband realized I wasn’t going to get done fast enough, he enlisted these little angels to help me. We all sat around the same drawing of my tree and worked together to get it all drawn in. There is no way that I could be in that moment and feel even an ounce of loneliness anymore. I don’t think that there is much in this world that is more enjoyable than being taught how to do something by children. It is such a pure and genuine feeling that you can’t help but smile and laugh at how dopey adults must seem to them. There is no judgment or ego, only an eagerness to help and spend time with you. It was exactly what I needed. The day ended well, I came home and did some yoga before heading over to Cru Kai’s house to learn how to cook Thai food and drink beer. While I have more than a week left on my own, I now recognize how valuable this time is for me. I realize that it’s never really as bad as it seems, and it only gets worse the more you focus on it. I think that the next week and a half will still be a challenge, but I also know that the next time The Loneliness Monster comes knocking at my door, I will “Su! Su!” (Fight! Fight!).

Miss you guys!

Painting the Roses Red

The Thai royal family is very interesting if you ever have the time to read up on them. King Bhumibol Adulyadej Rama IX has been King and Head of State of Thailand since 1946, which makes him the world’s longest-serving current head of state and longest-serving monarch in Thai history. The King is held in very high regard by the Thai people and is even seen as being semi-divine. This is obvious when you get to Thailand, you will see large posters of him in every shop, restaurant, or home. There are massive billboards of him in his younger years everywhere and it is usually the first thing you see when you first drive into a new city, no matter what the size. There are shirts, bumper stickers, mugs, etc. everywhere that declare, “We Love the King!”. Similar to the yellow Lance Armstrong wristbands, there are "We Love the King!" wristbands that everyone here wears. The King is protected by lese majeste laws which means that any criticism of him can put you in jail for 3-15 years. Actually, very recently, an Australian man who had lived in Thailand for a while published a book that was critical of the King and Thai Royal Family and he was sentenced to 3 years in jail. Writing this is even making me a little nervous! The King is very interesting himself, he was born in the United States where his father was studying at Harvard, he went to schools in Switzerland and France before becoming King. The King had three daughters and a son. His second eldest daughter, Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, from what I can tell, appears to be favored by the Thai public. She is very involved in royal projects, which ultimately brought her to Thawangpha last Friday and to the school that I have been teaching at. Apparently, she has some ties with Nan Province specifically and has made a number of previous visits to the area.

For the past month, many preparations took place at the school for the Princess’ visit. What started off as basic improvements to the campus, evolved into a complete facelift of the entire school. Buildings were painted top to bottom, new sod was put down, new plants and trees were planted, other older trees were torn down. The school was a frenzy of activity day and even night. I remember one Saturday I was so shocked to see students that I couldn’t even get to show up for any of my classes, spending their weekend painting the fence that runs around the school. The week of her visit, classes ceased and everyone was decorating the school with yards and yards of white and purple cloth (her color, she as born on a Saturday). All of this reminded me of the scene from the Disney movie Alice in Wonderland where the jacks are all painting the roses red (otherwise, it’s off with our head!). I don’t think it was all done in fear of the princess, but in such a desire to impress her. Shaleas brought up a good point one day when she asked, “Why don’t you just leave it as it is, and then she will see that the school needs more money”. I kind of agreed with her, rumor has it that the school borrowed close to 200,000 Baht to make all of these renovations. I think that this is one of those cultural differences that is hard for us Farang to understand. It made me think about what would have been done to my high school had the US President come to visit. More than likely it would have been cleaned up a little bit, but nothing to the extent that was done here. Her visit was such an honor that they wanted everything to be perfect.

The security was also interesting to experience. About a month before her visit a group of about 30-40 military and police officers came to assess the campus. Since I have been here, I have never once heard a plane, helicopter, or even a kite fly over Thawangpha, yet the day before her visit, while I am out doing yoga; five military-looking helicopters are surveying things from above. The morning of her visit, I woke up to find military and police officers right outside of our building and standing every 20 feet or so. The whole thing made me quite nervous, especially being such an obvious foreigner, there was no way for me to blend in. We were told exactly what outfits we should wear and how to style our hair. I couldn’t wear my watch or my ring, just in case it could be used as a weapon. Marianne, Shaleas, and I pretty much camped out inside one of the offices all morning. Once she arrived, she spent a few hours visiting various rooms that had been set up for her and watching students perform traditional Thai music. At around noon, we were called out for pictures. We were in Group 3 to take our picture with her and I knelt about 2 feet away from her. She appeared to be a very modest and kind woman, even smiling for the pictures. After that, she went to eat lunch and then she left.

It was an interesting experience, I am sure that I will always remember the time that I “met” Thai royalty. I will definitely never forget the frenzy of preparations that took place beforehand; it was a true taste of how much the Thai love their Royal Family.

Christmas in February

As most of you already know Thailand is like 95% Buddhist and the other 5% is probably a mix of Christians and Muslims. In fact, there is a Christian cemetery next to the highway going to Nan that I noticed the other day. It was weird because it made me realize that I hadn’t yet seen any cemeteries since coming to Thailand. Of course, that is because Buddhists are typically cremated so they don’t really have a need for them. This cemetery was weird too, the graves were sort of above ground and they were tiled with big crosses on them. Strange. Oh, but I have digressed, haven’t I?


Anyway, even though the country is mostly Buddhist, Thais love any excuse to celebrate. While they don’t do Christmas trees in their homes or anything, they definitely know about Christmas and they love to sing the carols (of course). What I find to be interesting as well as admirable is that they do not see this as betraying their own religion at all. It is possible that this is because they don’t see Christmas as a religious holiday, although after talking to some Thai they are aware it is only celebrated in Christian countries. I just found that it was refreshing that they aren’t afraid of it; they embrace the things about it that are fun - singing and dressing up like Santa Claus.The Foreign Language Department put up a Christmas tree outside of the office a few weeks prior to Christmas Day. Decorating that fake Christmas tree got me in the spirit a little bit, even though the Thai teachers kept wanting to put the lights on going up and down versus around. They even had some boxes wrapped in paper as if they were Christmas gifts and I spent some spare time in the office making snowflakes and hanging them from the ceiling. The students were really into singing the Christmas carols, especially Jingle Bells, which could be heard at any given moment coming from a classroom or being sung by a passerby. The morning of Christmas, they set aside special time on the field to celebrate. They brought out the tree and gifts and one of the larger Thai students dressed up like Santa Claus. I read out loud the story of Santa Claus and asked questions afterwards, one of the best 3rd year girls read about Rudolph and the other reindeer. Some Thai teachers asked general Christmas questions and handed out gifts as prizes while Santa walked around throwing out candy. The teachers and some students sang Jingle Bells up in the pavilion and then came the big finale; Shaleas, Marianne, and I sang Silent Night in front of the whole school while Devon played the violin. It was beautiful and even though we are not great singers, it really brought it home. I was almost in tears. Ah, the spirit of Christmas!

The rest of the day was pretty routine. That evening the four of us cooked our Christmas dinner. We picked up a few roasted chickens and some corn on the cob. Marianne’s friend had sent some instant mashed potatoes that were pretty scrumptious. She also got some nice Christmas desserts that reminded us all of home. After dinner we settled down to watch A Christmas Story, which I had downloaded onto my computer. All in all, it was a nice Christmas in Thailand. It wasn’t a white one, but it was unique and I am sure that I will always remember it. Check out more Christmas Day photos here.

Thai Haiku

I can barely believe that I only have 4 weeks of teaching left. The time here has really flown by and I find myself feeling like I only got a small glimpse of life here. I have mixed feelings about almost being done with teaching. If you asked me Monday morning during my worst class of the week, I would say that I can’t wait to the hell out of here, but if you asked me Tuesday afternoon during my best class of the week, I would say that I need to stay here longer. Just like with so many things in life, I am feeling so many opposing emotions.

The other challenge right now, since I am in my last weeks, is to come up with new and fun ideas for lesson plans. I feel like I have exhausted most of my good ideas and now I am standing in front of an empty fridge, trying to decide what meal I could make out of a carrot, yoghurt, and some peanut butter. So, as most ESL teachers do, I consulted the Internet and friends and voila!, we have the 10 words game, which I have now dubbed Thai Haiku.

Thai Haiku goes like this, the students are told to write on the board 10 English words, anything goes. Once that is done, I split the class and each side has to write a story using the 10 words in order, one word per sentence. At the end, I review and check for mistakes and then I let each side read their story to the rest of the class while acting it out. I originally thought the game would be pretty boring. But, even for my low level classes where they pretty much just write a bunch of random sentences rather than a coherent story, I have found that unbeknownst to the students, they are writing simple yet beautiful poetry. Below are two of the stories from my 3/8 class, my best Matayom 3 class.


Words: look, book, cat, car, world, pan, van, table, postcard, flower

When I look at the blackboard, I can see many pictures such as a picture of a book, a picture of animals; I see lovely cats. I see the car that is driving on the world for buying a pan and a van. My friend who sits on the table tells me somebody sent a postcard with flowers for me.

I look out the window. I see the bookstore. I see a cat that sleeps in front of the bookstore. A car hits the cat. It is the world’s history. Then I go to buy a pan. I go by van. When I come back home, I put the pan on the table. I see a postcard from my friend. There are flowers on it.


I just think that they are so great! So, if you are bored today at work, try writing a Thai Haiku with your coworkers, you never know what sort of genius lies beneath all that boredom!

Thailand is Like a Box of Chocolates.

You really never know what you are going to get. This applies to pretty much everything here, from ordering food to spending time with Thai people. You think that you know what you are in for only to find out that you really have no idea where people are taking you half the time. It can give me a sense of excitement as well as annoy me, depending on my mood.


One of the Thai English teachers, Cru Fah, and I have become “friends” over the past few months. She is really sweet and is married with two sons, ages four and 6 months.As you can see from the photos, I love to spend time with her and her children, the little Buddha and Pukan. The little Buddha is one of the happiest (and chubbiest) babies I have ever met. I don’t think I have ever heard him cry, and he smiles and stares at me all the time, which is typical for a Thai person, but it is much more endearing coming from him. In fact, in a lot of ways, I see him as an equal when we are out and about; neither one of us ever understands a word anyone is saying and we are both pretty much just along for the ride.

So, it was nothing strange one Wednesday at school when she invited me to have dinner with her. I told her I would be at her house at six o’clock. Upon arriving, I immediately realized that we were going out somewhere; she was more made up than usual. We get her kids packed up and into the truck to take them to her parent’s house. This is when she tells me that the dinner is a work function (she sells insurance on the side) and I would be her date because her husband could not make it. Okay, I think, Mai Pen Rai! This company she works for in Thawangpha is small, maybe 20 employees, so I picture a dinner party at her boss’ house or something. However, once we leave her parents house, I notice that she turns south, heading out of town. Now I am really confused. Where are we going? It appears that her boss lives in Nan, 42 kilometers away. I am still a little confused, but as you do with everything in Thailand, you just kind of roll with it. She tells me that her boss has an exchange student living with her from Australia and they thought we would enjoy talking. Sounds cool, why not? We get into Nan by 7 o’clock and pull up in front of the biggest and nicest hotel in town. Apparently we are late because she rushes us inside and at this point is when the realization finally hits me. There in front of me is a massive sign-in table and a huge poster welcoming the employees of AIS Insurance to the Annual Blue Jeans Night company party. We walk into this large banquet room, filled with close to 400 people, all wearing their favorite jeans. I just smiled and thought to myself, “…of course you have ended up at Blue Jeans Night, Kelly, you’re in Thailand. Duh.”


We proceed to hang out and eat dinner, the whiskey and beer were flowing and there was even live entertainment, which was like a 15-year-old dance group, but entertaining nonetheless. After some employee sales awards and a cheesy company slide show, I meet the only other Farang that is there. After introducing himself to me, we start doing the typical Farang in Thailand Q&A: How long are you here? Where have you been? Do you eat the Laap Gai? The hilarious part was when he started to ask me about Australia.
I confusingly tell him I have never been there and he confusingly says that he thought I was from there, upon which I say I thought he was from there. Turns out he is from Switzerland and I am from America and we had no idea where the Thai people got Australia from. The night ends when Cru Fah realized that she had to get home to get her son because he is hungry. We head back to Nan and she drops me off at home, still slightly bewildered by my night. I realized that this was probably the most eventful Wednesday night I could have had.

The moral of the story is, if you ever come to Thailand, I suggest you never try to predict or expect too much. You will always end up at a random person’s house or in a random person’s car. That is what makes Thailand so fun most of the time. In fact, even purchasing items can bring excitement. For example, I was given two power strips when I first moved into my apartment. I opened the box of the first one to find that it came with a free miniature screwdriver. I thought it was weird, but could see the relationship a little bit. I opened the second box to find a free spoon.

Like I said, Thailand is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get.

Viewer Discretion is Advised.

Since I have to decided to throw chronology to the wind, this post will be of a video I made about a month ago. Now, I was hesitant about posting it, because I come off like a pretty big dork, but after some positive feedback from a few folks that have already seen it, I decided what the heck?

This is a video tour of where I live in Thawangpha. Post-production took a lot longer than actual filming and no script was prepared. There wasn't enough money to pay for hair and makeup and lighting was free. The actor was not paid and no harm came to any of the animals in this video.

Enjoy!

RetroPost - Sukhothai

I’ve obviously gotten very behind with my posts. A combination of holidays, travel, and pure laziness is to blame. To get all caught up I will plant some random retroposts in with the more recent happenings. Hope that's cool with you because that's what I'm doin' here.

Back in November, right before Thanksgiving a few of us decided to meet up in Sukhothai for a weekend. Sukhothai was the capital of the Sukhothai Kingdom in the 13th and 14th centuries. From what I can tell, it was one of the first capitals of what is now Thailand. Check out Wikipedia for more info on all that. Old Sukhothai (Sukhothai Historic Park), which contains all the old temples and ruins, is the main tourist attraction of Sukhothai, the ruins are about 800 years old and span a fairly large area.

Marianne and I arrived into Sukhothai late Friday night, around 2 am. It was an exhaustingly long day of bus travel and we were so happy to finally be to our destination. Our friends Lisa and Kim had already been there for a while making friends with Sergeant Smith, a local Thai man who didn’t speak much English but seemed okay to hang out and buy us beers anyway. After a few beers and some street food, we decided to get some rest for the long day of touristy stuff that would be ahead of us.

Our handy Lonely Planet guide informed us that the best way to see and get around the ruins is to rent bicycles and pedal around. Since the Lonely Planet guide told us to do it, that's what we did, just like the good little backpackers we are. Right outside the entrance to the park we each rented a piece-of-crap bike for the day. Each bike looks exactly the same, with the same number 9 painted on the fender. Oddly, no information was taken from us, no deposit was required, we just handed over 30 baht and pushed off. After paying our farang entrance fees to get into the park, we pedaled on over to the first set of ruins. We locked our bikes up in a group and walked into where the ruins were. The ruins are truly amazing and beautiful. It is unreal to think that these ruins are 800 years old and there was really nothing stopping us from climbing all over them. The entire place had such a calm and peaceful aura about it. I really just wanted to sit there for hours and soak all up all that wonderful energy. After spending about 20 minutes walking around these first set of ruins and taking an obscene amount of pictures, we walked back to where our bikes should have been locked up only to find that two of them had been stolen. I had a moment of panic where I was worried that we would have to pay the rental place a ton of money because we lost their bikes. But, once we started to think about the fact that they took no information or deposit from us, we realized it was probably all a scam anyway. It is likely that they were stolen back by the people that rented them to us in the first place and they just wanted a quick turnover. After debating whether or not we should steal someone else's bikes, we decide to just double up on the remaining bikes and take turns huffing it around the park. The park is actually quite large and there are even ruins outside of the main area that can be biked to. There were so many Buddha images of various sizes, including Wat Si Chum, which is truly a sight to see. This Buddha is the largest I have seen so far and as you can tell from the picture I wasn’t even as tall as the hand. It is sort of mind-blowing that something this huge could be built 800 years ago. The entire park made for a beautiful bike ride and was even more breathtaking around dusk. Once we were all biked out (actually Kim did most of the work while I rode on back, but my butt definitely hurt at the end!) we decided to just ditch the bikes and take a tuktuk back to our guest house where naps and showers were definitely in order. Once we are all clean and sparkling, we went to a place called Poo Restaurant (poo means crab in Thai), which is recommended in our Lonely Planet guide. Owned by a Belgian man and his Thai wife it was supposed to have good food and maybe even some Belgian chocolate for dessert. Turns out that the food was just okay, came in really small portions, and was way over-priced. The service was pretty crappy and the only people there were farang who also read about it in their Lonely Planet guide. As a side note, the Lonely Planet guide is good for helping you find a place to stay or to figure out how to get around Thailand, but it SUCKS when recommending food. If there are a lot of farang in a restaurant, be prepared to pay way too much for okay food. The best advice is to eat where the locals eat….on the street.



Anyway, we of course ended up at a Karaoke bar that night getting stupid drunk and singing to an empty bar. We were entertained though and I think the band thought we were pretty funny. When the Thai girl came along to show us up with her good voice, we decided it was time to go to bed, but not until after we made her sing Rok Som Sow! The next morning we started the long journey back to TWP. It was a nice weekend trip with the girls, though it was short. To see more photos, click here or check out Facebook.