Dear Charles #13,

didn't think I would be posting another blog so soon eh? gotta keep up with me...you never know...im like a cat...or a...different animal that's unpredictable...

this weekend me and kyndra had to renew our visas so that we could legally still be living in thailand. lucky for us we live right up north so our drive is much shorter then someone coming from ..chiang mai or somewhere else more south. the border is a mere 45 min. drive, which we ventured together on just a few hours of sleep and no breakfast (although we did stop on the super highway to get some pineapple...frickin 20 baht for a bag. such a rip off...haha just kidding)
mae sei was our destination which is the last city in thailand before the border to burma. mae sei (for any of you who read kyle's note on facebook about his journey to mae sei and burma, this is the same place....just in case you couldn't tell by the identical names of the places..) i feel like is a 'last effort of selling things in thailand sort of city. you're driving along the super highway, looking out the window to rice patties and mountains, and then all of the sudden there are big gold signs and out of no where a million little shops..all pretty much selling you the same overpriced strings of beads, and fake jade bracelets. once you find a place to park, the process is way more simple then i feel like it should be...simple to the point of being sorta sketchy.
here is the process of getting into this other country (burma) and getting your passport renewed: you walk up to this building that looks like a giant house with a car port that you might find on proctor street in tacoma, and into a room whose door is a piece of fabric draped off of a string at the top of the door. this room is dimly lit, with two desks and three burmese officials and ghetto old computers from before computers were even invented....in the corner of the room there is another piece of fabric which i can only assume covers the bathroom, as right beside it right there in the office is a rusty leaky sink with a stained mirror and soap scum lining the faucet. you give your passport to one of these officials whose desk it littered with thai and burmese and american passports...and he trades you for a piece of paper that is your 'temporary' passport while you're in burma. basically if you loose this piece of paper, you are magically a citizen of no country and you are stuck in burma until...they become a free country.
once this process is done you walk across a little bridge like deal, and are welcomed into burma by crowds of song-tao drivers wanting to take you to all the tourists attractions in burma, then down a flight of cement, uneven stairs into the market where you are bombarded by every burmese merchant known in the country asking you if you want to buy cigarettes and viagra. doesn't matter that they are asking two single women.....they just need to make that sale, however scandalous or illegal.

me and kyndra had clear goals for our time in burma so we did our best to power through the crowd, and kindly but firmly let them know we didn't not want their pills or playing cards. we came there for dvds and bailey's...and we were gonna get it. our first stop was 'scorpion dvd' where we both scored a stupid amount of illegal movies and tv series for..dollars. i managed to get the entire series of 'friends' for $27, as well as 31 other dvds for a dollar a piece. all of them being blue ray and most of them either still in theatres in america or not out on dvd yet. the only not so good copy i got was of 'the curious case of benjamin button' but even then..its still watchable. we tried to move quickly as half way through our browsing a policeman came into the store and started to paroozed around. he never took off his sunglasses, which from the movies i've seen...is never a good thing. we hurried up, unsure if he was about to take that place down or bust a couple caps.
we made our way deeper into the market where we ended up being followed by a teenage girl trying to sell us playing cards. kyndra graciously bought some from her, which made her like us and decide to stick around. the next thing on our list was to get a new bottle of bailey's irish cream, but we didn't want to go into the liquor store with her watching so....we busted out the polariod camera and took a picture of all of us. she was fascinated (as was every other person in the market, which was evident by the crowds and crowds of people that swarmed us, grabbing for the girls picture to see it. it was very..charlie and the chocolate factory, when charlie finds the last golden ticket) which distracted her for enough time for us to grab the bailey's and meet her back down the road.
we decided to make our way out after talking with the girl for a little while (mostly kyndra because she spoke no english) but before we left she gave us a huge smile, pulled the picture from her tray and said that we were beautiful and held up the photo. i have a feeling she'll probably be hanging on to that for awhile.

we traveled back into thailand after that, picking up our passports in the sketchville office (luckily they were still there), and spent the rest of the afternoon at one of our favorite cafes in mae fa luang (about a half hour past our house) called 'parabola' where we talked for hours and looked through thai home-keeping magazines.

so it is now my mission to get all my movies back into america without getting caught. i've heard that for every dvd you bring back into the states, its around a $500 fine :/ let's hope i don't get caught, eh?

Dear Charles #12,

hot season has officially started. can you sense the excitement in my voice? i thought it was hot when i first got here, but oh no. i had no idea that 100 degrees and 99% humidity were on their way over here from africa. i swear if i don't come home with the most perfect golden brown skin, i'm gonna be not stoked.

as my mom and kyle were here a couple of weeks ago, i got some days off of my volunteer job (haha, it will never get old) to see a bit more of this country with them. for the most part, they stayed at school with me during the day which was great! the kids really took a liking to kyle and no one took a liking to my mom....(just kidding mom, please don't throw me out this summer. i bet you look really pretty right now...*nervous laughter*). they were able to help out in a bunch of different areas of the school, including making costumes for the elementary green day play we had last week. they were so cute..just like you would picture costumes for a play like that, big flowers and fish made out of felt and paper, with big holes for their heads to poke through. the play turned out...like was anticipated. there were crowds of kids who didn't know where they were supposed to stand, the one who thought no one could see him picking his nose, the kids who didn't know any of the words to the songs situated right in front, and the girl who just waved at her parents the whole time. the gang was all there :)
so the days we did have off from school, we made it to a couple of hot spots in chiang rai, as well as chiang mai, including, but not limited to...waterfalls and bamboo forests, crazy temples, beautiful flower gardens dedicated to the queen, boat rides through a river, riding elephants, going to a zoo and feeding giraffes....oh wait, i'm sorry, did i just say riding elephants!? why yes! yes i did!
this was the coolest thing in my opinion..i may be partial cause elephants are my favorite animal, but it was the coolest experience. me and my mom shared one elephant, and kyle got his own. i was surprised once we were done that we, and so many other trust the seat on top of the elephant, as it looks like a small park bench that is roped the the elephants body. one false move and...i don't know. i don't want to think about it. after about 20 minutes the driver got off the head of the elephant and grabbed my arm and pulled me down to where we was previously sitting, so for the rest of the time (about 30-40 min) i got to ride on the elephants head. unfortunately for me i was wearing a skirt, and the elephant forgot to..shave its body....i don't know how many of you have felt an elephants hide but it is..not soft. my inner thighs were quite sure of that. other then slight discomfort, it was by far one of the coolest things i've done since i've been here.
having my family here was so exciting. being able to take them to all my favorite places to eat, and having them try all the weird foods i now crave here, walking through my neighborhood and meeting the people who i am currently sharing life with. im pretty sure they had a wonderful time...either that or they really are as good of actors as their college diplomas say they are.

since them leaving my life here has slowly gotten back to normal. i finally made it through the series 'friends' this past weekend. finishing the last episode out of 39 disks....(ugh i'm so pathetic), managing to laugh til i peed a little, cry til i realized that any extra condensation on my face was murder, and take an afternoon of acceptance that i wouldn't see these friends everyday. i was actually depressed on saturday when i finished...depressed. if this is how i act for a t.v. show, i am screwed for coming back to america after 6 months here. you all better get me some darn good welcome home presents.

the realization that this school year is close to ending is creeping into my brain. after this week at school, we're into april where we only have two weeks of school then song-khran (2 week spring break) then we only have may left, and then conner comes to visit and we hang out for a few weeks before we both go home. i basically have like 5 min. to do everything else i want here...*sigh*
i might not get to posting anything again before i leave for my vacation in a few weeks. so to hold you over until my next one...i'll leave you with these thoughts to be extremely jealous of me. i am going with a few other families from the school here to hui-hin for a week. hui-hin is a beach in the south of thailand. for those of you who dont know about the beaches in thailand they are....literally paradise. when you think of paradise, what do you think of?....a room full with bags of sour patch watermelons, and hugh grant serenading you...? no, although that is...a wonderful thought...
no. this paradise is white sandy beaches, blue/green water, palm trees, cool drinks, hammocks...aaahhhh. for a whole week! i can feel my sun burn forming already. so while im doing that, hey, washington...enjoy that rain and slushy crappy snow. i'll be thinking of you while im sipping a cool 'non-alcoholic' drink ;)

Dear Charles #11,

This last weekend I had the opportunity to go to an Aka village with the principle of my school and a few other teachers here. The principle and her husband's main ministry here in Thailand, is working with the village, and employing some of the women there with an arts and crafts project. So they have been involved with this village for the past 9 years or so, visiting them, and also paying 2/3 of the transportation costs to bus the kids in and out of school everyday so that they don't have to stay there during the week. In some of the villages there isn't enough money to get the kids to and from school everyday so they stay at school during the week, and only come home on the weekends. So that's cool.

So our accommodations were...awesome. We stayed in a bamboo hut, a few feet off the ground, and slept on the floor under mosquito nets :) I personally, loved it. We got to have dinner and breakfast with the Pastor of the village and his family, and hang out with the kids and other adults there in the evening. The Pastor and his wife were working with a few men that had been addicted to opium, and are recovering from other addictions, so we got to meet them as well. I had a lot of fun playing with the kids in the evening and taking pictures of them and just being goofy. There is something so cool to me about going and playing with children that you have never met, and especially when you don't speak the same language. It's so much more simple. I love how easily kids will just accept that you are a new playmate too, they don't ask questions, they just play, play, play. Especially these kids...their playground is a big dirt field and their toys are their imaginations. I so envy sometimes the simplicity of their fun, and it really makes me think about all the stuff we think we need to have a good time. Those kids have an honest-to-goodness good time, everyday.

After playing with them, and talking with some of the other village people (if you're wondering if they were wearing hard hats, police outfits, shades, and a Indian head dress...you're correct) we headed off to bed. I was looking forward to a long nights rest, to have enough strength for the next day when we would go to a waterfall, and my mom and brother were due in. Of course that is not what I got. Why would I have a perfectly good nights rest in a village in the hills of Chiang Rai, Thailand? It was all going well until 2:30 am when the roosters, apparently, thought it was time to get up. I swear they have some sort of vendetta against the human race because they were..not letting up. There was one rooster, who might as well have been under my pillow, who would crow once....then a few seconds later another one from across the field would start it up. You can guess this was a domino effect...all the while part of me praying that they were just practicing, and that I could go back to bed. This sort of happened...I blocked out what I could (ha) and tried for some more shut eye. But oh no...at 3:30 am, lo-and-behold my alarm went off! I shot up, feeling...really un-stoked, thinking it could not possibly be 6:30 already. What I did not know was that the day before, my friend Kyle, that works as a chemistry teacher here, got in to my phone and set my alarm to go off. Obviously I kicked his butt. So after that ordeal (which woke up the other 3 ladies in the room...) I once again did my best to roll over, put it all behind and get some rest. The roosters had something else in mind. They went strong all morning, AND at 6:00, the village bells went off to wake everyone else up...you know, just in case the freakin roosters didn't manage to do that at 2:30 am. What made it worse was the the rooster that was hangin out under my pillow started going hoarse. He couldn't even finish a whole crow after about an hour. Poor little fella, I felt like I should of gone and gave him a cough drop or something, but hoarse or not...he was showin off for some hott chicken.

The rest of the morning went alright, we finally all got up (well, we were all already up, obviously, so we got out of bed, is what I meant to say), went to church and then enjoyed a nice breakfast with the Pastor and his wife. Around 11:00 am I got a call from my brother, Kyle, who said that him and my mom got an early flight our of Bangkok, which was GREAT. So we finished up and headed out to the airport to pick them up. I wasn't expecting them to get in until about 3:00 pm, so I made the executive decision that they would get to go the waterfall with us all straight off the airplane. We all know the best way to cure jet lag is to go straight to the top of a 900 meter waterfall. It ended up being great, we all got all sweaty and stinky, but it was beautiful.

So mom and Kyle have been here since Sunday, and it has been great showing them around, and having them experiencing this part of my life. It's bizarre sometimes to think that they are actually here, in my house, in my city, eating my favorite foods, but it's also really fun. It's nice to be able to have someone else experience the same people and places I do, so they can back up my stories so I don't sound like some crazy lady, who you wonder might be drinking the water like she's not supposed to. I think they are really enjoying themselves here.
We're headed down to Chiang Mai this weekend for a bit, after we go to the Elephant Village, and a pottery making place called Doi Den Dang. I'll be sure to tell you about that when we get home. Sending my love to all :)