In honor of a week in which I have spent too much time being afraid about my inability to complete a number of relatively simple tasks needed for graduation, a list of reasonable and unreasonable fears I have about Thailand:
Reasonable fears:
-something bad will happen to my dad or someone else and I won't know or be able to get home in time
-my reservedness will cause me to miss out on interesting opportunities
-my placement will be overwhelmingly stressful and not enjoyable and challenging
-I'll run out of time to see all the things I want to see
Unreasonable fears:
-the little Thai children will assume my haircut means that I am a boy and tell me such, in Thai
-my boyfriend will forget about me and fall in love with someone else
-I'll run out of time to see all the things I want to see (of course this will happen! I want to see everything!)
-swimming in the dark
-being bitten by something rabid or stung by a scorpian
These lists are both shorter than I thought, which is reassuring.
Sunday, April 1, 2007
Saturday, March 3, 2007
procrastination station
My newest procrastination past time is reading the travelpod.com blogs about Thailand. A lot of them aren't terribly exciting, but I like to think I'm building up a resevoir of things to do, see, and eat, and things to avoid. If I find any particularly good ones, I'll put the links up.
A couple of the blogs have mentioned the Emerald Cave, which is off on of the islands to the southwest. Basically, you jump out of a boat and swim through a tunnel to reach a pool that's unreachable any other way. Pirates used to hide their booty there (cooooool!). So that's high on the list, although one blogger also mentioned that doing this involves swimming in the pitch black for 30 yards or so, something I have a feeling I wouldn't be to into. I don't even like swimming underwater at night.
A couple of the blogs have mentioned the Emerald Cave, which is off on of the islands to the southwest. Basically, you jump out of a boat and swim through a tunnel to reach a pool that's unreachable any other way. Pirates used to hide their booty there (cooooool!). So that's high on the list, although one blogger also mentioned that doing this involves swimming in the pitch black for 30 yards or so, something I have a feeling I wouldn't be to into. I don't even like swimming underwater at night.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
OK, so...
I'm not actually in Thailand yet (obviously--I'm in the snowy tundra that is the 7-county metro area) but I'm going.
The nitty-gritty:
I'm going for nine weeks, July 7-Sept. 12 or so. I'll be spending the first five weeks in Bangkok and the last four in a small town near the southwestern coast, Trang. I'm going with an organization called Cross Cultural Solutions. They'll set me up with a Thai non-profit, hopefully an orphanage/preschool/something where I don't have to know a lot of Thai, and I'll be volunteering in the mornings and exploring/taking Thai language classes/going on what amounts to field trips in the afternoon, with weekends free to travel the rest of the country.
One of the things that I really like about this program is that they work with existing Thai non-profits. As much as I think it's a great thing volunteer anywhere that extra bodies and extra hands are needed, being an American going to a developing country to work with the underprivileged smacks of imperialism. That's at least partially mitigated by the fact that all my supervisors will be Thai and that I'll be doing work in the community that Thais think is important, not work that Westerners think is important. Of course my motives for going are not as altruistic as all that: I found the program because I was looking for a long term (well, more than a couple of weeks, anyway) experience abroad where I could be more directly involved in the culture than most tourists tend to be. I leapt into this one, there's no question about that. Less than two weeks passed between the time I found the organization and the day I called them up and gave them $500 to reserve my spot. But I'm really, really excited.
The impetus behind this blog was the realization that I won't be in close contact with a lot of important people for the two months that I'm there, and that last time I was abroad, and internet access was limited, I wasn't always great about keeping in touch via email. As much as I feel a little silly about putting my life on the internet, I like to think there are people (hi mom and dad!) who'll be interested, especially once I actually get to Thailand. So leave a comment, I'll be happy to know you're here.
The nitty-gritty:
I'm going for nine weeks, July 7-Sept. 12 or so. I'll be spending the first five weeks in Bangkok and the last four in a small town near the southwestern coast, Trang. I'm going with an organization called Cross Cultural Solutions. They'll set me up with a Thai non-profit, hopefully an orphanage/preschool/something where I don't have to know a lot of Thai, and I'll be volunteering in the mornings and exploring/taking Thai language classes/going on what amounts to field trips in the afternoon, with weekends free to travel the rest of the country.
One of the things that I really like about this program is that they work with existing Thai non-profits. As much as I think it's a great thing volunteer anywhere that extra bodies and extra hands are needed, being an American going to a developing country to work with the underprivileged smacks of imperialism. That's at least partially mitigated by the fact that all my supervisors will be Thai and that I'll be doing work in the community that Thais think is important, not work that Westerners think is important. Of course my motives for going are not as altruistic as all that: I found the program because I was looking for a long term (well, more than a couple of weeks, anyway) experience abroad where I could be more directly involved in the culture than most tourists tend to be. I leapt into this one, there's no question about that. Less than two weeks passed between the time I found the organization and the day I called them up and gave them $500 to reserve my spot. But I'm really, really excited.
The impetus behind this blog was the realization that I won't be in close contact with a lot of important people for the two months that I'm there, and that last time I was abroad, and internet access was limited, I wasn't always great about keeping in touch via email. As much as I feel a little silly about putting my life on the internet, I like to think there are people (hi mom and dad!) who'll be interested, especially once I actually get to Thailand. So leave a comment, I'll be happy to know you're here.
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