A Day in Comparison

A Typical Day in Khon Kaen University
With Thai class at 9 am, I get up around 8 to get ready and meet my friends for breakfast around 8:40am. My shower is warm enough to soothe me but cool enough to wake me up because there's a little water heater attached to the bathroom wall but there isn't any stall. It's just a bathroom sink, toilet, towel rack and a showerhead with a drain on the tiled floor. I change, get ready, walk down from the third floor and meet my friends in front of the apartment located 500 feet away from the CIEE office and classrooms. Within a 500 feet range of that CIEE office, there are stationary shops, multiple food and fruit vendors, a 7-11 (they're like Starbucks. EVERYWHERE), and a "cafeteria" that offers a variety of food stalls. A lot of stores and stalls aren't open yet and we still have yet to figure out what opening and closing hours are for Thai workers. Some of us get cut pineapple pieces or crunchy guava with cold sweetened coffee but I get these fried dough balls covered in sesame seeds and potato inside from a friendly vendor who waits outside the 7-11. Sometimes I'll get one little bag of sticky rice and three sticks of chicken skewers that were grilled earlier this morning. In total, it costs about 15 baht for breakfast - half a dollar.


Three hours of Thai includes review, new vocabulary, repetition and basic writing/reading skills. Sometimes we'll play games at the start of class and the ajaans will bring us bread from the bakery as prizes to share with each other. They teach using a sort of Rosetta-Stone method and we aren't allowed to speak English or take any notes while we're learning.


Then I'll go out to eat lunch with a couple of friends. We've found a noodle place to put on our top list of favorite and easiest places to eat. Since a lot of us have dietary restrictions or preferences, we've learned that ordering vegetarian by saying "jai" (like the letter J) can be relatively complications-free. Ordering at new restaurants is hard since we can't yet read and understand so we look for the pad thai and smoothie stalls in the cafeteria.


Next, we'll have another Program Facilitator Activity or a session for ROO (Resources for Ongoing Orientation). That usually means we'll talk about being global citizens, meditation, personalities types and traits or globalization. This can go on for 3 hours while we brainstorm, reflect, draw our reflections or thoughts and hen share our caveman-like illustrations. It's like elementary school all over again! But deep. Very deep.


Afterwards, we've got free time so we'll find another place to eat dinner and do the reading for the next day. We haven't had a lot of assignments yet since we have yet to go into our "units" that last about 2 weeks. Laundry in the apartments is free so we'll wash our clothes or we'll walk and shop around one of the adorable-looking boutiques that offer dresses for less than $10. Somehow, the last 5 or 6 hours of the day is spent just running errands, buying more food/clothes and...just doing nothing.
Oh, and it rains almost everyday for at least 2 hours. It's truly monsoon season.


A Day in the Railroad Community
I'll wake up around 7am but my host mother and my little host sister has already been up since at least 6am. She's dressed in her school uniform and ready to go to school. I wake up and my friend Alex is living with another family nearby so we eat breakfast together - usually some sort of chicken, egg or pork dishes with rice. Once we're ready to go, my little host sister Ehm will hold my hand to follow the rest of the CIEE students to the elementary school about 5 blocks away. The dirt roads leading to the school are surrounded with huge puddles because of the rain from the night before. For two of the three days we were there, we have our own Thai class to attend, but one day the CIEE students and I attended a fun activity session held for the children and they taught us cute dances sung in English and Thai. One was a fruit dance including bananas, oranges, papayas, and apples. We drew pictures together and played animal charades that the teachers organized for us. When the kids aren't guessing during charades, they're trying to hold our hands, talk to us in English and play clapping games. Later on, we taught them camp songs nostalgically reminding me of our childhood like the baby shark song and the go bananas song. We eat lunch with the children and it's so amusing that the children won't let us walk around without making sure our hands are full with theirs.


Then, there's another program facilitator activity - something that'll help us learn about meditation or about our own personality styles, of course. So, for a moment, all the CIEE students are together but after a while, we're going back to our own host families with one or two other classmates. Alex has a little host brother who named himself Champ because that's what he wants to be in life. He will write words he learned in English while Ehm will draw her mom and a house and trees with the notebook and pens I bought for her as a gift. I'll do readings but I'm mostly distracted by Ehm and her hand games or her little two-year-old brother we call monkey (ling) who crawls and hangs around the couches in the house. The headman's son also lives very close to us and he'll watch the children play while he slowly puts some English sentences together and have a conversation with us. We learned that he took two years of English a while back so it helps a little. Champ and Ehm's mom have prepared dinner for us so the children, Alex and I eat but the adults wait til we're done to eat later - we're treated so special as guests in the families. After dinner, I tried to help my host mother make chicken skewers that she would sell at school/university the next day but I failed terribly at it. A for effort though. At night, I shower for the first time without electricity in the bathroom because there is no lightbulb in the small bathroom that only consists of a squat toilet and a big bucket of cold, unheated water. It's a little hard to see and I'm afraid of getting bit by a mosquito but the shower feels really good after a hot, humid day. My host mother lets me sleep in another part of the living room sectioned off by some cabinets. There are some blankets and a pillow on the floor surrounded by a mosquito net and a little fan. They give me these small luxuries while the mother, Ehm and her monkey brother sleep in another room under a different mosquito net.
I love mosquito nets. They don't exactly prevent ant bites though. I'll wake up in the middle of the night because I've itched myself awake and I try to fall asleep again with some anti-itch medicine. I'll hear the train pass by at least 5 times throughout the day and it's nice to hear it passing through the night. I'll fall asleep to the train until the sound of roosters crowing wakes me up again in the morning.
Time flies.

my little host sister, Ehm <3