A New Host Family

Starting at the beginning of the month was my first official switch of host families. On the second, I packed up my bags and moved in to stay with Mae Oh, Aunt Asci, and my host siblings, N’Tonboon and N’Baiboon. I have another sister too, who’s also on exchange right now, in Illinois. But in terms of first impressions, simply put, they are great.

Asci and Mae Oh work together on a sugarcane plantation in the south of Nakhonsawan. It’s actually quite big. If you take the highway south from the city center, it stretches out into flat plains that go as far as you can see. The highway goes in a straight line into the distance. Mae Oh pointed this out to me “See this road,” she says to me, “Mom built it.”

backing my bags and leaving my first host family one of the many trucks used to haul away the sugarcane leaves after harvesting. these get sold as fuel for biomass electricity.

Right now it’s the sugar harvesting season, which is probably the saddest thing about staying with my current hosts. They work really hard; every morning at the same time as I’m going to school, Mae and Asci are getting ready to work. They spend all day in the fields with the John Deere harvester and often don’t stop working until late into the night, usually getting home together around 8:00 pm. But when I do see them, it’s super fun. Mae Oh has three cabins in the neighboring province of Uthaithani (about a one-hour drive). On the first weekend together we took a trip down to stay overnight. The region is famous for having huge hills that rise directly out of the ground, with systems of cave networks going through the sides of the valley.

you can treck into the caves with flashlights and explore the insides the outside of a rock arch in a nature park every morning at ten am sharp this little train drives through the valley. we hopped on at the cabins and went to a cafe.

We’ve also adjusted great to each other. There was a bit of drama with host families for a while, when my planned third host decided to leave the Rotary club, so we had to do some quick thinking about where people were going to stay. The president thought it might be best for me to move and come stay with her, but even though Mae Oh had only really known me well for a few weeks, she fought to keep me instead of doing more switching. I would have been flexible either way of course, but I’m really happy I get to stay with Mae Oh as well.

And yes, it was around this time that I did happen to make a นักแสดงรับเชิญ in a music video, Pleng Kong Ter, or ‘Your Song’ in English. I’ll put the link here, just in case anyone hasn’t seen it back home, but somehow the news has already leaked to my family back home and you guys had no problems at all spreading this information very quickly.

behind the scenes

Chiangrai: The North

For the second time, I took a trip overnight to the north, where Mae Yui’s rubber forests sit in the valley of Chiangrai.

each day mae yui and por nui work producing rubber sheets. they can make thousands of these in a single day

Our trip was pretty chill. Khun and Nadee rode up on the bus with us, and after an early morning arrival in Chiangrai we went to a 7 Eleven and a fried duck egg stand. Most days, we all slept in, then ate breakfast or just chilled on chairs at the porch for a few hours. At night though, there were a few more exciting surprises.

khun sitting in the seat opposite of me at the beginning of our ride to the north

Since before coming to Thailand, even since before applying to come to Thailand, I’ve listened to the band Tilly Birds. Last year, they were my #5 artist on my Replay, and especially now, I have started listening to much of their music to learn more Thai. It’s people of our generation, I think their music hits especially hard because of much of the way they look at relationships in their writing.

Really, I didn’t come to Thailand with many ideas or expectations of things I had to do during my year here, but if there was one thing I was going to make happen, it would be going to a Tilly Birds concert. It turns out Mae Yui was one step ahead of me.

the first night we saw milli, a rapper and arguably the most famous thai artist internationally. we are all in this picture, top right tilly birds paradox, one of the most famous rock bands in thai, played last. they are famous for throwing random objects into the audience

Singha, the beer and drink company, owns a massive park in Chiangrai, stretching over 3,000 acres. For the week we were in the north, the park put on a massive music festival, getting basically every major Thai artist over the stretch of eight days. I think we really lucked out. Normally to see an artist like Tilly Birds you would be in a large venue in Bangkok. Singha park is big, but most people sat at tables to watch the concert. Up at the front near the stage was surprisingly easy to get close. And the concert was so worth it. We got home at one in the morning that night.

Chiang Rai is also one of my favorite places for another reason. Doi, which is the northern Thai word for mountain, is the defining characteristic of the northern region of Thailand. On Mae Yui’s day off, we went to Doi Thung, one of the largest mountains in the region. Mae Yui drove us in her truck up the switchbacks, climbing almost an hour to get to a temple at the top of one of the peaks. After parking, we hiked up a stairway into the forest and walked along a path of 119 bells and gongs. As you walk, you take a mallet and ring each bell on the path. Looking out at all of the mountains and farmland below, this temple is one of my new favorites in Thailand. It’s incredibly peaceful.

the 119 bells along the forest path mae yui looks out at the view from doi tung

The Daily Life

School continues as normal, at least when we go to school. The Thai students had midterm exams so us exchanges didn’t even come into school. We did keep going to Achiwa, the vocational school.

a picture I took of a perfume for our product photography class. cooking guay jap yuan with our friends at achiwa

One day, we took a trip up to Chumsaeng, a town in Nakhonsawan to the north of the district. Along with a group of English teachers from Bangkok, we spent the day playing games and learning English together. We have another camp coming up soon I think.

my friends n'aise and n'riaw at the english camp chilling in the grass on the banks of the lake nong somboon with some food some cute little birdies sitting on my lap

This is actually a somewhat common theme. Personally, as the only native English speaker in Nakhonsawan, I tend to be quite in demand. Like, before our English midterms I would go to Central after school to help my friends memorize and understand vocabulary lists. And now everyone is preparing for IELTS and TOEFL too (college admissions). Basically though, when it comes to English, I get asked a lot of questions along the lines of “Why on earth do we need to know this?” which, actually… fair.

Are You Smarter Than a Thai Student?

Here are 5 real examples from the last English exam. See how many you can get right.

1 of 5

0 correct

Another event was our midyear counseling with the Rotary in Bangkok. We woke up at four am to take the minibus into the city. Rotary rented out a hotel as the conference space, and we spent the morning on our typical orders of business. In the afternoon, we had a speech contest. To be honest, I know I didn’t prepare well for the contest. I had a speech, but I didn’t like it very much, so the night before, I wrote a completely new one with more simplified vocabulary. At least by using simpler vocabulary, I knew how to pronounce what I was going to be reading a little bit. You can watch the speech below if you’d like, I put the original English next to it so you can see the meaning.

Overall, I came in fourth for the speech contest, which I think is not bad for how little time I spent preparing. Plus, I won a Starbucks gift card from that, which I am actually using right now, as I type this blog, from the Starbucks at V-Square. So, thank you Rotary for encouraging me to sit down and write this post!

From the Land Where Palm Trees Sway

The extent to which Thai people celebrate Christmas is not very extensive. Here I would describe the holiday as more of an ‘aesthetic’ than a celebration. Central put up a 100-foot Christmas tree, a few chocolate shops opened downtown. However, Achiwa, our new school, was apparently most inspired by hosting exchange students for the first time, and decided to host the “Brush up your English Skills by Christmas Festival.” Each of us exchange students set up a station with an activity, food, and decorations.

all of us on stage after finishing our dance show fellow exchange student marie at the french booth the both me and a teacher at achiwa organized putting together.

Two weeks before Christmas, we found out about this plan, and so we, along with a group of students from Ashiwa, started choreographing a dance for Christmas Day. The morning of, we came in early to put the finishing touches on our stations. Then, a group of monks came to the school to make merit, and we practiced our dance another time. At 10:30 in the morning, the school filed into the auditorium and sat in front of the stage. The director of the school gave a speech, then a student. Suddenly, the music came on, and a girl burst into the back of the room with two Santas walking behind her. She sang the opening song and walked slowly up through the center of the crowd, while the Santas threw candies into the audience. After that, we appeared from behind the stage and started doing our dance.

At night I opened up the package sent from America and read all of the cards sent by my family back home. Actually I felt a little bit sad because even though Christmas in Thailand was fun and a celebration, seeing all of the mini updates from everyone back home was a different feeling. We also had another activity, with the Rotary for Christmas, wrapping over 200 gifts for students at a school in the next province over. The day after Christmas, we drove and sang carols with the kids.

a gift I wrapped. look at the cute little glasses and smile!

But anyways, after Christmas, the celebrations actually kept getting bigger. Christmas isn’t really celebrated much, but New Year’s definitely is! Actually, New Year’s is probably the biggest holiday by far in Thailand. It’s split into three parts: the Western New Year’s on January 1st, the Chinese New Year in February, and the Thai New Year’s in April. In Nakhonsawan, we mostly celebrate the Chinese New Year, but who said the celebrations couldn’t start early?

n'tonboon lighting up a roman candle on new years eve playing the classic game of umq with my host cousins on new years we took a ride on mae oh's car to go get snacks at night

Mae Oh and Asci took the weekend off from work, and we went back to Uthaithani with our cousins from Bangkok. Basically everyone in the family is much younger than me, but we had a good time hanging out and waiting for the countdown to midnight. We played with fireworks for a while too, then set off some big ones at the stroke of midnight.

Back in Nakhonsawan, the entire of Nong Somboon park was transformed for the annual lantern festival. Hundreds of different street vendors set up shops, clothing stands, and games all along the banks of the lake. I won a small beta fish and brought it home to live in my room. Almost every day we would go to the festival and get something to eat or see the lights. Each stretch of trees along the banks was set up with lanterns from different cultures: Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Indonesian, etc. The island at the center of the lake was set up with thousands of strands of Christmas lights, making patterns across the ground, all through the trees, and into great tunnels of lights covering the bridges across to the island.

evening boat rides through the lake on the lantern festival mae phet sang Thai traditional music at a performance on one of the last days of the festival

Finally, once getting back to school after the break for new years, we started off the new semester strong by having a new years party all day long at school. We got a bunch of fried chicken and green papaya salad for our classroom, and everyone went to buy gifts then we did a random swap and got a gift from someone else. I ended up getting the teacher, and she gave me a giant yadom, the famous thai herbal inhaler. But like, a GIANT one, like you can smell the scent so much it singes your nose and opens up your lungs to the extreme.

our class new years celebration the first band to sing at our concert battle

we also had a k-pop dance competition, and wow… after five or six groups performed, I’m convinced there’s more dance talent in nakhonsawan school than the entire state of maine.

In the afternoon, the whole school came outside and stood around one of the dome auditoriums at school. A group of students played 20 second clips of random songs and whoever wanted to dance for each clip could run out of the audience and dance on the main floor in front of everyone. I wish I knew any of the dances, because it looked super fun from the side. But of course, things only got more intense from there. We had a dance competition and all of the school bands came up and played a set of songs. Grand Havas, the music video I acted in came up and played too.

That’s all, for now

I’m actually on time with this update, believe it or not, so I hope it gives you guys a little bit of context about what is going on here in December. Plus, now you know my next host family! Write a comment below if you found anything here surprising :)

Best,

Declan