Well this might be it... the last post from the other side of the world. I head home tomorrow. TOMORROW!

I've done a pretty good job of keeping myself busy in the face of all the stress and anxiety and excitement of homecoming that is filling up my brain. I spent three days in Northern Vietnam in a little town called Sapa. My days were spent hiking through jungly mountains and terraced rice paddies, my nights were spent shivering under a mountain of blankets in an unheated guesthouse (it gets cold up north!). So the days were lovely, and I had to buy myself a disposable camera so I could capture the best of the scenery.

Here's a picture stolen from a tourist website.... yup, it really was that good.

I got back from Sapa early this morning. Today I wandered around Hanoi. I picked up a couple more souvenirs for friends, and for myself. There was a point in this trip, only a couple days ago, when I thought I'd actually head home with fewer pairs of shoes than I'd left with seven months ago. That dream will not become a reality. Sigh. But I think I'm okay with that.

In between fits of spending every last dong that I have, I went to the Hanoi Fine Art Museum. The collection was really interesting. I saw a lot of scenes of brave soldiers fighting against the "American aggressors" in traditional laquer-painting style. There was also a really interesting collection of massive oil paintings that glorify Uncle Ho.

When I just wander around the streets, and look at pretty things, it is easy to forget about our history with Vietnam, in a way, the art museum today reminded me of it. I saw some pieces that were very beautiful, and very sad.

My plan for tomorrow is pretty simple. I don't have any grand adventures in the works, because I'm not sure my brain could handle it. Instead, I've got a book, and a lovely lake to sit next to and drink coffee. If I make it to another museum or monument, that'll be fine, but I don't want to pressure myself into seeing one more thing.

I am so excited to be going home. I feel like I've been out here the right amount of time because I do feel ready to go home. But I'm also feeling nervous, and anxious. It is going to be a big change to step back into a world where everybody speaks English, and there aren't a thousand motorbikes trying to kill, and you can drink water out of the tap.

US of A, here I come!

Halong Bay.

(not my picture, but simply stolen from the internet to prove how pretty this place is)

I've been in northern Vietnam for about a week now.

It has been wonderful. The weather up north is cool and dry, so I don't end up breaking into a sweat every time I step outside. The coffee is wonderful here, and thanks to colonial French influences I get to eat a crunchy baguette with that coffee every morning, and after months of rice, that is a very great small joy.

I've spent most of the week living on Cat Ba island. It is the biggest island in Halong Bay, which is surely one of the more beautiful places on earth - giant limestone karsts rising straight out of the ocean. We've gone on a bunch of adventures around the area: kayaking around the bay, going on a hike through the interior of the national park, sailing around at suset, but the highlight may have been the chance to go climbing up these giant rock formations and simply falling into the warm water if you happen to lose your grip.

Today I'm going back to basics, I have plans to read my book on the beach and eat mangoes for lunch, but that is probably all the excitement I'm looking for. Tomorrow I'm hoping to do a little bit of biking around the island, and the next day we'll probably catch a ferry and head off toward somewhere new!

I haven't posted in a while, because I haven't had a whole lot of time to sit down in front of a computer. This traveling thing has kept me pretty busy, but now I'm about halfway through my six weeks of fun touristing (which means I'm three weeks away from flying home! wow!) and I thought I'd mention where I've been and where I'm headed.

My sister flew out here the day after my job ended. We went on a whirlwind tour of Bangkok and Kanchanaburi, spent waaay too many hours in vans and buses to see Angkor Wat (which was simply incredible, but my camera died in awe of it, so I have no pictures to post) and then headed north to Chaing Mai and Pai. We went rafting down the river Pai, took a fancy Thai cooking class, and I failed at riding a bike up the highest mountain in that part of the country. All in all, I had a magnificent time (Thanks for coming to visit, Kate!).

Then a week ago, I took a long bus ride south to Koh Tao island where I started an introduction to scuba course (to get my basic certification) and ended up loving it so much I stayed on to get the advanced degree! Scuba diving was truly one of the most magical things I have ever experienced, it opened up a whole new watery world that was better than even "Planet Earth" made it look. I saw stingrays! I saw barracudas! I saw triggerfish and moray eels! I saw my fingers and my fins lit up in bioluminescent water!

It was so beautiful, I never would have stopped if I didn't have this darn plane ticket to Vietnam in two days.

My plans for Vietnam aren't entirely concrete, but I fly into Hanoi, and I'm hoping to spend a couple days there drinking good coffee and eating french baguettes, before traveling to Halong Bay and Cat Ba island. Then who knows? Maybe up to Sapa, to see the terraced rice paddies near the Chinese border?

The crazy thing is, I leave Thailand in two days, a country I've been living in for more than six months.... and I don't know when I'll be back again. There are just a couple more weeks of travel ahead of me, but in a way, I feel like leaving Thailand will be the beginning of heading back home.

Final Friday Explanation Point!

Today is my last Friday as a kindergarten teacher in Nonthaburi. You'd think that would be the same same as my last day as a kindergarten teacher, but no, I still have to work four more days next week. However, the finals have all been taken, the grading is about halfway done, and all thats left is for me to spend hours and hours wasting away at my desk, organizing picture cards and dreaming about the next 7 weeks of adventures.

Looking back on this semester, I am honestly amazed at how much my students have learned. All of them say "Good Morning, Teacher!" when I walk into the room. 75 percent of them can say the words "cat," "ice cream," and "fish" when they see a picture of that item. When they say the word "kangaroo," they jump up and down (sometimes I wonder if I've just trained them to do things that make me laugh - I also have them make lots of silly faces every day). Three year olds have a much huger capacity to learn and remember than I ever expected.

Even now, when I'm not quite done with my job, I look back on it and think, "well, that wasn't so bad, I probably ought to do this again sometime." That thought in my head is a funny thing, because I honestly have to force myself to remember the times when I was so frustrated I wanted to walk right out of the classroom and out of the school, the times when all of the assistant teachers left and I was stuck with 36 screaming children hitting each other in a pile on the floor or jumping up and down on top of their desks. Memory is such a wonderful, crazy thing that those moments are already fading.

Yup, I think I want to do this again sometime.

Some thoughts about Bangkok:

The ugliness of the stray street dogs put those weird zombie ones from Resident Evil to shame (why did anyone let me watch that movie?)

I can get a two-hour long Thai massage at the spa on the first floor of my building that is the best feeling my body has ever had (it is like having someone lovingly do yoga to your body) for ten bucks.

The Bangkok Art and Culture Center is a contemporary gallery but also a space for collective community art organizations to exist and promote themselves and their artists, and going there makes me feel like a hipster again.

I can get the best papaya salad in Thailand from the lady outside my apartment who sometimes lets me taste it before she sells it to me, and sometimes chases me with tiny blue crabs.

Every single day I step outside and feel assaulted by pollution and concrete, and somehow, I'm already starting to feel nostalgic for it.

The bus system here is as confusing and convoluted as the traffic jams themselves. But I love paying 25 cents to go anywhere in the city and feeling like I'm on the slowest moving tour in the world at the same time.

Yesterday I saw two rats fighting in a trashcan.

On Saturday I went to what is supposedly the largest market in the entire world (in terms of the largest number of vendors, I believe), Bangkok's Chatuchak Weekend Market. Vendors at the market sell new and used clothing, handicrafts, food, collectibles, and live animals. It was an incredible place to wander around, I saw something new and interesting every time I turned my head.

We took a city bus there, so after about 45 minutes of slowing creeping through Bangkok traffic we made it to the market, which is in a park, so it was surrounded not only by big city buildings, but also green trees and a little pond with rowboats.

The market had everything and more than you could ever possibly want. I was expecting more of the same cheap, tourist-y stuff that we see everywhere, but there was actually an incredible selection of handmade items, used clothes, antiques, stationary supplies, fake flowers, and lots and lots of puppies (that I still wasn't allowed to touch!)

We snacked as we walked, on shaved ice topped with condensed milk and fresh mangoes and coconut ice cream served in a coconut shell. There were big stalls and little ones. Some people sold sunglasses and fake perfumes off of mats on the ground, while others had shops with two or three interconnected rooms and atmospheric lighting. One section of the market entirely sold vintage western shirts and leather goods, another corner was full of local art, with contemporary paintings lining the white walls of mini galleries.

If you could imagine something, some impossible, crazy thing, I have no doubt it would exist somewhere within the winding aisles of Chatuhak Market.

The other excitement from this weekend is that yesterday, the census-people came knocking on my apartment door! After a moment of confusion for all of us when I opened it, from me, because no one ever knocks on my door, from the census takers because they weren't expecting my farang face, they found me a form that was written in English and handed it over.

So as of yesterday, the Thai government now knows that I am the only resident of my apartment. They know I have a college degree but am unable to read or write in Thai. They know I have a tv, a fridge, and air conditioning (they don't know I lack a chair, a spoon, and actual sheets). They know that I have an actual flushing sit toilet in the house and that I don't drink water from the tap. They know everything there is to know about me!

I was out of the country when the US census happened back home, so all this time I've been worried that maybe I didn't actually exist, but now I definitely do! I exist as a foreigner who doesn't even know her address or phone number to fill them in on the census form! I exist in Thailand!

This past weekend I traveled about an hour north of Bangkok to go to Ayutthaya, which is the former capital of Thailand that was sacked by Burmese invaders about 300 years ago. That means it is a place full of historical value, where ancient ruins poke up every which where around a modern town and you can tour through the ruined temple grounds. Which is what we did. It was a little bit of a drizzly day, but the weather seemed to perfectly match the moment of meandering around and looking at pretty old things. It was a magically photogenic little world, here's a snippet:

Well, I've fallen behind a little bit in my blogging, but I have the pictures from an amazing weekend in Kanchanaburi to make my apologies for me (we actually went a week ago, this past weekend was spend on a rather boring beach in Hua Hin, where the highlight was that there was good coffee everyday, olive tapanade, and a tv with english movies in our hotel room - so good things, but not really exciting ones)

But last weekend, I went back to Kanchanaburi (of the elephant riding and the waterfall swimming) It was, again, an immensely happy and fun weekend. I'm beginning to think its my favorite place in Thailand.

went back to the elephants, they're still hungry

it is still incredible to swim on them, with them

we saw a cave, with a temple in it

giant buddha relaxing in a natural cave


and then for the amazing day! On Sunday a friend and I went to the Safari Park, where, we'd heard, you rode around in a big safari van and got to be accosted by giraffes who were hungry for your company (or really, for your carrots). It more than lived up to my wildest dreams of a Safari Park in Thailand. Here are the highlights:

feeding carrots to kissing giraffes (and one of them kissed me!)

freaking out over how many giraffes had entered our bus

meeting the sweetest, saddest gibbon that has ever existed

holding on to that gibbon's hand, when he really didn't want to let go

Katie fed a baby tiger

I fed a baby leopard (and oh my gosh.... he just looked up at me with these big green baby leopard eyes. It was the most incredible thing, he was basically calling me mom)

We had a four day weekend for Buddhist Lent Day this past weekend. My friend Katie and I traveled to the second biggest island in Thailand, Koh Chang, which is on the eastern side of the country, close to Cambodia.

The holiday was characterized by rain, rain, bugs, rain, power outage, water outage and a lot of naps. I managed to get a ridiculous looking sunburn in the few moments that it wasn't raining. But actually, for all that the biggest thing we did was eat grilled corn and we spent most of our hours hanging out on the porch of our beach hut, looking out at the waves, it was a pretty perfect weekend. It was absolutely relaxing.

Now I'm back at work and we're learning the letter I this week! Tomorrow is English Day at school and apparently I'll be performing in a "Fable Puppet Show" which has no script for two hours. The head of the English proram has already warned us that the day will be "utter chaos." I'm excited.

Pictures from an awesome weekend!
(I apologize for them all getting a little bit out of order...)

the view off our porch/raft

at the waterfalls

waterfalls!

waterfalls!

feeding elephants!!

petting elephants! (their skin is so rough, kindof leathery)

elephants have impressively long eyelashes, apparently, they never stop growing

so big!

working hard to cut down the elephants' food

hauling grasses (no, I'm not super skilled at it)

back at the waterfalls.... absolutely idyllic

back at the elephants, where it is also pretty much paradise

my hand is magically covered in butterflies

swimming with elephants

This past weekend may well have been the absolute best 48 straight hours I've spent in Thailand. The only part that wasn't perfect was that it ended.

With 8 of the other English teachers I know here in Bangkok, we went to Kanchanaburi for the weekend (a little over an hour west of Bangkok) a little hippy-ish town on the banks of the river Kwai. It was a perfect town, with delicious restaurants, outdoor bars, easy access to amazing adventures AND I got to sleep on a raft floating in the river!

On Saturday we went to see the waterfalls that the area is known for; seven waterfalls of varying sizes all along one upward trek. Each one has a pool to swim in and rocks to clamber about on. There are fish in the waters that nibble the dead skin off your feet (something you can pay for in Bangkok as a tourist attraction!). I slid down a natural rock slide and spent about an hour tanning on a fallen log over the waterfall, while butterflies walked all over me. One butterfly literally sat on my nose for about 10 minutes (they didn't love on any one else, just me. it was awesome.).

We didn't make it the entire way up to the 7th waterfall because clouds rolled in and it started to pour. We hiked back down the mountain, splashing in mud, getting soaking wet (but we'd been swimming, so getting wet wasn't much of a problem) and marveling as the entire path seemed to turn into one long, muddy waterfall.

I was starving by the time we got back to town, so a friend and I went out to dinner and found a tiny little cafe serving thai food and white wine. I hadn't had a glass of wine in weeks, so that, accompanied by an amazingly delicious massaman curry made for a pretty fabulous dinner. Which was followed by drinks with more of our friends and the chance to make new friends at a couple of the little outdoor bars around the main road.

The next day was even better. I woke up early-ish to find a group of my friends getting ready to go on some elephant adventure. They weren't quite sure what they were getting into, but we'd met a Thai guy the night before who told us all about this place and said he could take us there. So of course, without knowing what on earth I was getting into, I went.

Five of my friends and a Spanish guy we met on the way all climbed into the back of a pickup truck with our Thai friend from the night before. We drove about an hour into the countryside, past fields of grasses, herds of skinny cows with big ears, surrounded by the rounded peaks of gorgeous green mountains. Turned out we were headed to a place called Elephant World which is a refuge for older elephants who used to work but have been injured or simply gotten to old. It is not a tourist destination, its more of a non-profit do-good magical place. We were not only the only white people there, we were the only people there who didn't work/live there. It was paradise. There were five elephants in the field and Day, our guide, led us to each one, told us a little about them and let us feed them bananas. the elephants would reach out to us with their trunks and take a banana (still in its peel) out of our hands. But I also put a banana in an elephant's mouth and got to feel how remarkably rough its big pink tongue is!

We did a little bit of work (which was more fun than actual work) going out into the fields to chop down the grasses the elephants would eat that day - with machetes!! and then delivering and feeding that glass to the elephants.

After the elephants had eaten, we went swimming in the river to cool off.

AND THEN the workers brought the elephants into the river, so they could cool off too. So I swam with the elephants. And I got to climb up onto them as they swam in the river. I brushed the dirt off their faces with a scrub brush. I held on as they swam underwater.

The elephants seemed to love the water. They squirted it out of their trunks, and on the command of the Thai guys who live/work there they would try to buck us off their backs, going under water and flipping around. Attempting to cling to an elephant's head using only my knees and my hands on its ears as it rolled into the water is officially one of the most difficult things I've ever done. And one of the most fun.

When the elephants were done swimming they all went for a walk in the woods and we dried off, packed up, and headed back to the city so we could eat and then catch a bus back to Bangkok. The van ride home was pretty tame, but it was fun to meet up with the rest of our friends and hear about how they'd spent their day (with tigers!). There is no doubt in my mind I'll be headed back to Kanchaburi again, I want to do it all over again and more.

I'll try and get some pictures of it all up later this week, but suffice it to say that this was an absolutely splendid and magical weekend. And it only got better when I got home to find two big wonderful packages of goodies waiting for me at the front desk of my building.

Thank you!!

It is the end of our first week of midterms, and honestly, I'm surprised how well it went. I was complaining a lot last week about what I considered to be the absurdity of giving a midterm to a three year old, but it turned out to be pretty interesting. This week was the first chance I've had to be one on one with any of my students away from the distractions of the rest of the classroom. It was actually amazing to find out how much some of them get.

I can show a picture card of the letter A and ask "what is this?" and they respond "A!" I can show them a picture of a cat and ask"what is this?" and they say "cat!" or sometimes "c! cat! me-ow" because thats how they've learned it and I think thats an acceptable answer. If I tell them to stand up, they stand up. If I tell them to clap, they clap. Granted, they can't all do all of it, and some of them don't seem to understand anything, but a couple students in each class have more than aced their midterms so far. I'm so impressed with my students. And I'm a little excited to have had this opportunity to really find out what they can do.

One of the highlights of the week was a little girl who, when I said "touch your mouth" put two fingers into her mouth and stretched it into silly faces at me. Of course, I responded in kind. One of the low points was a little boy who was crying even before I called him out to take his test and could only keep crying while I asked him questions. So I wiped the snot off his face and gave him a passing grade (side note: they all get passing grades)

Next week we will finish up the speaking and listening and do "reading and writing" which will be tracing letters and matching letters and pictures. I still think the concentration on the alphabet is probably not the best way to learn a new language, but even so, it seems they are learning something!

I spent this past weekend in Bangkok. But on Sunday I desperately needed to escape the concrete and highways of city life, so I went to this little tiny island (Ko Kret) in the river just north of the city, to spend a couple hours wandering around shops and seeing handmade pottery being made. Most importantly, I went for a long walk and admired all the greenery.

one of the temples on the island

a house on the shore

green! the most vibrant swamp you could ever imagine.

a tiny house seemingly floating in that vibrant swamp of green

almost forgotten little shrines, hidden around the trees

an orchid in its natural habitat

"Hey Emily! How's life in Thailand going?"

"Oh, its pretty swell."

"What did you do today?"

"I gave midterm exams to three year olds."

"Huh??"

"Exactly. And thats what I'll be doing for two more weeks."

Pictures!

Finally!

A random assortment from the past couple weeks... its not great, but its something!

the grounds around the Emerald Buddha Temple

so much shiny gold!

Around the Grand Palace

and then.... this is my home:

the mall right next door

the view upon walking outside

looking up the street, another mall




And these ones are from this weekend in Khao Yai National Park

that little blur in the center is a herd of wild elephants

pretty nature

grasslands where the grasses grow taller than me (and can cut you)

jungle

bridge into wild Thai jungle

a monkey that ignored me