weekend update

So on Friday night my 2 houemates and I met up with Auy from work, and his geek (=lover, not to be confused with his fean, which means boyfriend. Appar. we will never get to the meet bf b/c he doesn't like to go out, which is just funny since Auy is so social.) I guess lots of young Thai people just rent a room in an apartment, and it doesn't have a kitchen or living room. So instead of pre-gaming at people's houses, they just get together early and get a table at the bar with the bottle of liquor they bring in. So we met up at Warm Up at 9pm, and the place was already packed. As in, had to get a talbe outside, which was fine cause there was this really pretty koi fish pond in the middle of the patio. And lucky for me, Thai people totally heart taking cheesy pics, so for once I didn't have to beg to do some played out cliche pose.

On Saturday, we just lurked around Chaing Mai in all afternoon. Found some cool little markets off the main streets, and an awesome second hand English bookstore where I convinced Ive (my Aussie friend) that both The Great Gatsby and Siddhartha are ultimate life changers. Then that night we went for a "quiet night out" at the tourist bars. According to the Aussies, it's completely acceptable to use this term when referring to any night where you aren't in a "club". So even though we bar-hopped to 3 separate bars, and ended up heading to Rasta Bar at 1 am to go dancing to some sweet live reggae, it was still a "relaxing quiet night".

Sunday was...an experience to say the least. Our boss had asked all us interns in the previous week if we were interested in going to what we thought was some sort of festival. I heard "NGO volunteer" festival, Ive heard "floral festival", all we knew for sure was that there "four tickets" and that we should bring our baithing suits. In the morning we went out with Mairi (the Scot) to this cool flea market on the outskirts of town. Then, we were picked up by a fellow co-worker and we went and picked up Kirsten, the other American intern. We stopped at this really cool wad (temple) way up in mountains which had some awesome views of the city. Then, it becomes clear that we are in fact going to spend the afternoon at our boss's house. He lives in this nice gated community, which they call a village. The tickets he spoke of were actually pool passes, go figure. So I spent the afternoon swimming with his adorable 3 year old in this nice country club pool. Then for dinner our boss's wife had prepared this really nice dinner for us all, including her best efforts at a vegetarian potato salad for me, which was super sweet even if mildly grody. When we got home, Mairi was feeling a lil homesick for something familiar, so we all went to the movies. We saw Body of Lies, which actually wasn't bad. It was just kinda funny cause our tickets said 8:50, but they wouldn't even let us into the theater til just after 9. I guess even movies here run on Thai time....

Today I had my first bit of real work, which was a pleasant change. I met with the OVC (Orphan and Vulnerable Children) Project Head to start work on the 3'rd year write up of their projects in Lamphun district. We spent most of the morning going over a list of the accomplished activities, as she tried to translate everything into English for me. It's interesting work, and a good experience, but clearly the language barrier is a lil frustrating at times. I have faith that communication between us will get easier as we get used to each other's accents, but since today was the first day it took a while. It's just annoying because for this first part, they just need anyone with a command of the English language to type up this part of the report. But I feel like I have the public health background, and I would love to be putting it to good use, but at this step in the process it's just too time consuming and difficult to get all the details I feel are relevant. But I know it's a learning experience, and she seems to have the same ability I do to laugh at any situation, so we have fun time. (yeah, my Thai is vaguely improving, but my skills at broken english are shooting through the roof.) Ok, that's all for now, keep me updated on what all y'all are up to. And thanks for all the nice comments, they help me to keep on keepin on.

xoxo
Rae