Dear Charles, #3

bobar kept me up all night last night...he's a snor-er. so i woke up a little grumpy. however i usually wake up really good here. unlike in the states (ive gotten accustom to saying 'in the states' as opposed to 'america' cause thats what everyone says here) where i would moan and fight my way to stay in bed. then again waking up early might have something to do with my singing neighbor. oh yes i said it right. my neighbor lady wakes up at about 4:30 or 5 every morning and starts singing her heart out, and doing laundry and dishes...and maybe ceremonially breaking a few plates or something. maybe she's greek....hhmmm i'll have to look into that. whatever it is its noisy, but sometimes the tropical birds and the sound of the wind in the trees drowns her out. oh wait...no....that would be the noise of her two rot-whilers fighting to the death. aahh the natural sounds of thailand. so beautiful.
so i made it through my first week in this foreign place, and i love it. and yes for those of you who were wondering, i have eaten strange substances from street venders and ridden on the back of a strangers motorbike (dont tell my dad). everyone and their mom rides a motorbike here, they even have special motorbike parking areas in the grocery stores. its a really effective way of getting around, but im sure the people that dont wear helmets and end up in the hospital would tell you different. i get to school every morning with a family named 'Fish' i hop in the back of their pickup and it takes about 7 min or so to get to school from my house. you definitely cant be persnickety about a hairstyle here and ride in the back of a truck to work. the wind in your hair at 50 miles an hour on the super highway does a number to it.
earlier on this week i asked my room mate kyndra where i could buy a hair straightener and she told me to talk to a woman named nok who works at the cafe we frequent and that she would love to help me. so i walked to the cafe around mid-day and asked pi-lu (the owner) if nok was working and he said she was out but asked if he could help me, so i snickered, feeling a little silly asking this 40-something thai man about a hair straightener but he was very helpful. he pointed me to a beauty supply store (where you can obviously just go and pick up some spare beauty, luckily enough for me) across the street and told me i could buy one there. he proceeded to walk me across the super highway (streets here are something between a freeway and a normal street- many cars at fast rates) to the store and said that nok would be right over. he left me there and a few min later nok and her partner ak came into the store over-joyed to help me find this hair straightener. the two of them have been speaking english for about 3 months, which made everything a little trickier, and of course i know how to say..hello....how are you and...no which did me very little good. they were speaking to the sales lady in thai and trying to convey to me what was going on which was...well i had no idea what was going on. i ended up getting the idea that the ones they had were no good and that we should go somewhere else, so back across the super highway we went to a diff shop where they were no good either. i felt horrible that i couldnt converse with these two, but they did pretty good at saying what they could to me in english. all i really remember was them pointing at a orange and white striped cat on the street and saying ' oooo you lie ga-field moobie? ga-field da cat" haha i nodded and we agreed that odi was an exceptional dancer. SOOO, we went back to the cafe and pi-lu said that we could use his truck to go to a store in town to find one (this all became a much bigger deal than i meant it to be) so i hopped on the back of a motorbike with nok and we went to go get pi-lu's car. we got in the truck and went to a different beauty supple store and finally found what we were looking for. nok was so happy that we got there and found a good one that she bought one too :) afterwards she asked me if i wanted to do some more shopping, so i agreed and ended up buying a pair of converse all-star tennis shoes for like $9 which is tight cause they're like 40 or 50 in the states. nok did her best to teach me thai in the car, but i of course failed miserably. she taught me like 5 or 6 phrases but al i remember is..'chai' which means 'right'.
so within my first 5 days of being in this country ive never been, i ended up going all around town with this girl i just met who spoke hardly any english and came out victorious with shoes and a hair straightener. i thought it was so funny while we were going across the super highway on her motorbike that i was in the situation that i was in, and how i got there with three words of thai. haha, and here's to many more adventures to come. sawadee-ka, anna