Okay, This is Kinda Cool

Hi! Hello! Everyone, welcome back. There has been a lot going on since August, and once again, this post came together in a bit of a scramble. But don’t worry, being busy creates plenty of updates to keep up with. Plus, now that I’m settled in better, I started remembering to take more photos again. As a result, I’ve more than doubled the number of pictures with this post vs. last time! Actually, a lot of these photos aren’t even mine. Thai people really like to take pictures, so, the more, the better. Enjoy!

Meet my Host Family

My host family situation has been a little confusing so far. I stayed at three different places, and it was a lot of names to keep track of. Not anymore! I’m staying with my original host’s friend for the next few months. I’m actually not sure on their full family name, but honestly no one ever really uses their real names for anything in Thai unless you’re doing something for the government. Instead, we call ourselves the P Family. My parents are Por Dton and Phet, and I have three younger brothers. Post, the oldest, is 16 this year. We’re in the same grade though, only he studies in the olympic program. I think I would describe him as slightly quiet, but he’s also funny. Post speaks English the best of anyone in the family, which is also to say not very much. I mean, all of my brothers can understand English quite well, but I think maybe are a bit shy to speak it. Post has a girlfriend who’s in university right now. It’s very sweet, they’ve been dating for a while, and the other day he introduced me to her over FaceTime.

PlengThai is my middle brother. He’s 14 but turning 15 in November. He likes basketball and is pretty chill overall. My youngest brother, PorPeang, is so funny. He loves playing uno. This started at my host mom’s birthday party, then he bought a pack of cards and we play basically every night now. Every time he loses he jumps up and runs around the house in a circle, screaming “Oh my gosh oh my gosh.” PorPeang is turning 9 in a few days, as of writing this.

Oh, and speaking of birthdays—September was quite the firecracker! The month kicked off with Mali’s party on the 5th. She’s the exchange student from Brazil, and right now she’s staying with my third host. We headed over for a pizza dance party, and this adorable little kid named Nine was there. I think he’s their nephew from China or something like that, but man, Nine really knows how to dance! After school that day, I rushed to the mall and got a cake custom made that said happy birthday in Portuguese. She really liked that.

The next day wasn’t a birthday but a funeral. We went to Chainat, the province over from Nakhonsawan, for a ceremony for Mae Yui’s great grandmother. I stayed in Ken’s old room while monks came to the house. We prepared food and rice in jars, then took grandmother’s ashes out in a long wooden boat and released them into the water. The family picked up baskets of marigold petals and let them float gently from the boat as we chanted with the monk.

On the 7th (my birthday) we woke up once again in Chainat and made the drive back to Nakhonsawan. From this point onwards, I genuinely think I’ve never eaten so many cakes in my life. It’s fine by me though, because almost all of the cakes here, even the basic ones from the grocery store, are so good. Like, wow, it’s honestly shocking how good the cakes are here. Really, it comes down to the frosting. Somehow it’s rich and creamy like buttercream, but not sweet at all, almost like a light whipped cream but not light, rich. I need to find the recipe for these!

The most memorable moment on my birthday was actually a prank from my friends at school. I sit next to Job and Baimon in class, and I’ve kind of become part of a bigger friend group with several other people. So everyone decided to play a little trick on me. We had a free period in class, and Baimon started causing trouble. Majorly. My two other friends got caught up in it and they started fighting. It was too realistic. I sat between them, kind of shocked by the whole thing. Cheer, the exchange from Taiwan, secretly took a video of me, which is pretty funny to watch. This whole time I wasn’t expecting them to fight like that, so when Baimon stormed out of the classroom I was left sitting there thinking, “poor Baimon is so upset.” Then Job turns and asks me, “ugh, I never really liked her anyways, right?” In the video you can see him turning around and covering his face to laugh, but oh my gosh I was genuinely SOLD on The End of Their Friendship.

All that to say, when Baimon came back 5 minutes later, turned off the lights, and everyone started singing, let’s just say that was not the plot twist I was expecting!!

Finally, on the 8th, Mae Phet’s birthday arrived. We didn’t celebrate officially until the next weekend, but celebrate we did! All of Mae’s friends from all over the country came and stayed at the house. The theme was green—green balloons, decorations, matching green tees from Uniqlo for my brothers and I. The morning of the party we went out and got matchas, then that evening we had dinner, sang, danced, and, as mentioned earlier, played a lot of uno!

School

School in Thailand is really funny. I don’t mean that in a judgemental way, but at the same time, I think it would probably send any teacher from America into a coma.

After a week or two of settling in, we got our official introductions to the school and met the director and our teachers. Exchange students are separated into two grades at Nakhonsawan school, but we’re all in class 14, the multilingual program. Essentially it’s a fast track for students to learn different languages, so we take classes in English, Chinese, and Japanese. This makes it a lot easier to get into things, since everyone in our class speaks English with almost perfect fluency. Job, who I mentioned earlier, probably speaks English the best of anyone—you’d be hard pressed to tell him from a native speaker. It’s nice in many ways I suppose, but it’s also a pretty strong pressure against us learning Thai.

Oh, and the Multilingual Program is not very gender balanced! Our class has 26 people in total, but only four of them are guys. And adding the exchange students didn’t help at all—we have six exchanges, but I am the only guy out of all of us. Shaking my head.

Before the first day of school, my brother Post facetimed another friend from class, so that was my first introduction to the class. Don’t worry about school, she told me. At this point, my Thai level was pretty similar to when I had left America—in other words, not so great. At the beginning of the day on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, the whole school gets together for assembly. The Nakhonsawan School Marching band plays the national anthem and the King’s song, then we all sit together and pray, then we play the school song and the teachers read through announcements. Even on days where there’s no assembly, we still sing the anthem and all the other songs in our classrooms instead. It’s a somewhat interesting contrast to America, a country that most people would generally view as being very patriotic. But actually, I think people in Thailand are MUCH more patriotic in the general sense than Americans. Even outside of school, businesses and towns hang the flags of the monarchy or the Thai flag everywhere. One street I saw had probably thousands of Thai flags. You genuinely could almost not see the sky underneath the canopy of red, white and blue.

But anyways, back to school. We only had about two weeks of time in class before the end of the semester and vacation started. So things got settled pretty quickly. And this is where it gets interesting. I’d say, 100% straight, we do not learn anything in school.

You see, all the teachers here are actually very nice. But they also do not have a care in the world about what students are or are not doing in class. And it’s really hard to comprehend, but for basically every period, like really every class, people just watch Instagram, TikTok, play games, do homework (for other classes), or really do nothing at all related to what we’re learning. You almost have to feel bad for the teachers, because literally no one listens to them at all. And I think it’s also funny, because it’s not like Thai students are dumb either. They will do all their homework, every time. They will study before every exam. But in class?Literally nothing. One time the director of the school came in to observe a class, and we were all just sitting in a circle at the back playing the family restaurant game with each other. It’s a really different expectation than in the US. And I think this is largely true everywhere. Post is in class three, which is the olympic program, and even he says that people use the whole time (while the teacher is teaching!) to take naps or play on social media. It’s crazy. It’s also crazy fun.

One of my favorites is how much we can just hang out in school or even after school. Like, we can play just dance, or board games, or just talk and it’s all so chill. Lunch break is an hour long, so we have plenty of time to eat, wander the school, or get bubble teas.

Speaking of food, Nakhonsawan School has so many options. There are two huge cafeterias, a convenience store, two cafes, an ice cream shop, and two water stands all on campus. And man, the food is so so good. That’s a pretty common theme in Thailand actually. Some of my favorites are the sticky rice, which you can get with any sort of topping, or the curry, which is really good with fried chicken. They have noodles and soup and a bunch of other things too, but the lines are usually crazy to wait for those, so I haven’t gotten them yet. Pretty much everything you get is made by local street food vendors—they pay a fee to the school then can set up small shops indoors, so there really is a lot of variation in recipes depending on the stall you go to. But honestly, they’re all good haha. Thai food is just too powerful!

Malls, Part Two

Last month I was somewhat surprised that mall culture is… actually quite a thing in Thailand. I can confirm that in Nakhonsawan, not just Bangkok, we have some really good malls. The crown jewel is Central, owned by one of the biggest mall groups in the world—but it’s actually a Thai company, which is pretty cool. And it’s run by a woman CEO, which, though it sounds kind of bad to say, was surprising to me. In Thailand, I’ve noticed it’s very common for women to be big names in politics or own companies in a way that feels distinctly different from America. But that’s just a minor thing I’ve noticed. The main idea: Central Nakhonsawan is gorgeous. It’s a brand new location, just opened last year. The roof is made of several massive sloping pieces, so you can hear the rain on the roof and everything feels very open and light. Windows everywhere let in natural light, and inside, modern LEDs make it seem less like a mall and maybe more like a luxury resort. I actually didn’t have any photos of the entrance, so I’ll just use this one from online. Outside is a massive patio garden with a stream and fish that swim through. A covered path from the road goes up almost 100 yards to the main entrance, then indoors, small sellers have their own brands or small jewelry shops set up in the lobby. A massive tree stands over the entire indoor space. So like yeah, it’s really pretty. And really big. For people familiar with the Maine Mall, I’d say Central Nakhonsawan has maybe ~3x as many stores. There’s just so much to explore and see.

I’ve made it clear I think—everyone likes to spend time here. Oftentimes, we don’t even go to the mall for shopping per se, but more like just walking around with friends or to get food. There are so many restaurants. Many nights if we go out to eat, we’ll just find a restaurant at Central. Or take Mae, for example. She likes to go to Central and use the gym there. There’s also a full Chinese market inside, so you can just grab a quick snack or meals or fruit from smaller sellers. One week they also opened a thrift market and hundreds of sellers came in from the community to sell secondhand clothes. We found some really good deals here—people were selling tshirts for like $0.30 and jeans for maybe $2-3. It was crazy. Plus, you can’t ignore the fact that Central has AC and is just a fun place to hang out. After school, maybe 50% of the tables at the food court and in the cafes are kids in their school uniforms doing homework. It’s cool, I promise. I feel like that’s what sets the vibes apart from Thailand and the US when it comes to places like Central. Here, they feel like a part of a bigger community, sort of like the place to be, not a place to go shopping. You get what I’m saying?

There’s also this really interesting overemployment thing in Thailand. Well, I guess it’s not really a problem per se, but it is really weird when you do go into stores. Essentially, labor is so cheap here that I’d say most places hire five to six times more employees than in the US. There’s also just a much stronger focus on hospitality and customer interactions here. Like, one day I was shopping for a belt, so I went into a store and there were already several workers free. They walk up to me, ask how they can help, and bring me straight to the belts and show different options. It’s hard to pin down what makes this feel different, but the US definitely pushes more for automation and high-productivity kind of jobs, you know? It’s a different mindset for sure.

Vacation

After school started, we ended up having just two weeks left in the term before vacation. So as you can imagine, a quick two weeks later, exams started. Just for fun, I decided to take two of the exams—Advanced English, and another one, I think it was either Social Studies or Economics. For the English exam, I’d say I did okay. I got the equivalent of around an 80%, which sounds bad on paper but I didn’t use the word bank for the answers like everyone else did so… not bad from memory I say. As for the other exam, I dunno what it was even about, so I ended up just writing down random words in Thai that I thought sounded good. Hopefully the teacher had a good laugh reading that one.

But anyways, for the rest of exams, which took like a week, me and the rest of the exchange students in Nakhonsawan ended up just chilling while everyone else was frantically studying for exams and going to school. My favorite part of this was on a Monday evening, when all of us exchange students from Nakhonsawan School went to Paradise Park, a somewhat ostentatious name that’s not at all related to the park’s actual name in Thai. If we actually translate directly, it’s something more like “An Abundant Marsh.” So yeah, we’re at the park. Outside the main gate, a massive sign and picture of the king that’s maybe 30ft tall. Inside, a huge statue of a Chinese dragon overlooks the southeast of Chai Krui lake, and smaller dragons sit around the water’s edge spewing water back into the lake. It’s gorgeous. A three point two km walking and biking trail goes around the lake. I’d already been running here with my friend Aomsin before, but for everyone else, they were taken away by how beautiful it was. We set up our little picnic dinner just before sunset, so we got the last of the daylight over the city.

Since vacation—but actually many times even when we’re just going to school like normal—we will go and see temples. I think in Thailand the architectural style is so different, and temples are probably the strongest example of that. They’re so gorgeous. Everything is covered in gold or bright colors and carved into ornate shapes. One of my absolute favorite temples we’ve gone to is in Uthai Thani, which is one of the neighboring provinces to Nakhonsawan. Mae Phet took me and Post to go see it, and we met my third host family there. At the temples, oftentimes we do not stay for a very long time, but you have a moment where there is just peace. It’s really beautiful. At Rotary Orientation, they teach all of us kraab, which is a triple bow that represents the three beliefs of Buddhism. Sometimes when we pray I feel a little bit awkward, because quite honestly I don’t know that much about Buddhism or how the religion works, and I don’t want to be disrespectful to my family. I think that’s one thing that, looking into the future, I would recommend other exchange students learn about.

Another one of my absolute favorite temples is right at home in Nakhonsawan. Aomsin and I went running again, but this time at Wat Khiriwong, a temple that sits overlooking the city. I really wish I had brought my camera, because it’s really hard to describe just how beautiful the panoramic views of the houses, rivers, and fields are, with evening light washing over everything below. It’s also quite a hike up to the top. We ended up running a 10k in total—up and down twice, then up another smaller hill before running to the night market for dinner. I was legit wiped for days afterwards. I think I need to get back in shape!

Oh, one other thing we did during the start of vacation was go to the zoo. Actually, several zoos. It seems like a pretty popular thing in Thailand here. And honestly, surprisingly cool. I got to see a lot of animals that I’d never seen in America before, like giraffes or zebras, really interesting things. Plus the elephants, of course. Perhaps the scariest though is the crocodile. In Thailand, it’s somewhat famous to have these crocodile shows where a man, usually like a young guy too, will go out and try to touch real crocodiles in an aquarium. If they can calm the crocodiles down, they’ll even stick their head or hand inside their throat. It’s crazy. And you might think, “Oh, it must be really safe. Like, these are trained animals.” Which is true to a degree, but also deaths are surprisingly frequent here in Thailand. You know, where the crocodiles… fight back. So watching these shows is truly terrifying. And there’s like all these little kids in the audience. I dunno.

Speaking of animals though, one thing that is super fun is feeding the catfish. In all the waterways in Thailand, there are these huge groups of catfish that just wait at the shores. Sellers, especially near parks and stuff, will sell old loaves of bread or popcorn for a few baht, and you can rip them up and throw into the water. It’s so fun to watch. Thousands of fish suddenly appear out of nowhere and fight to the surface of the water for a chance to get food. Makes you really think twice before wanting to go swimming!

Movie Reccomndations?

I haven’t actually watched that much TV since I got here, but I thought it would be kind of fun to talk about, because I’ve seen a few things that I thought were moderately interesting. If anyone else watches these movies, respond in the comments and tell me what you think! If you don’t watch any, write a comment anyways.

The Shadow’s Edge

During the first week of vacation (everyone else was still in exams), we all wanted to go see a movie. The options were pretty limited though, because they dub all the films into Thai and only a few get subtitles in English. Actually at first, we thought The Shadow’s Edge was a Thai movie, but it’s actually Chinese, and it has Jackie Chan! The exchange student from Taiwan was very quick to notice once the movie started going. “It’s China!” she pointed. This is honestly kind of how I felt about it too. Like, it’s definitely ‘mentioned’ several times how good the police’s technology is to keep people safe, or other subtle things like that. It felt very different from western action movies honestly, in a way that’s slightly off-putting, because it’s not the narrative you’re used to, right?

I don’t mean to say that as a bad thing in every way though, because like, would I still recommend watching the movie? Yeah, absolutely. It has a 97% audience score on rotten tomatoes after all. Trust me, if you like action movies… it’s one of the better ones I’ve seen in a while. The setting is Macau, so you get that international crime casino feeling, and genuinely the number of plot twists in this thing is insane. Every five minutes, you’re like, “Wait, WHAT?” and yeah it’s just so much worth watching.

Billionaire Bunker

The number one show on Netflix Thailand right now. It’s pretty dark and messed up. It’s also not even Thai, it’s actually from Spain I think. The premise is pretty interesting though—basically the world’s richest people buy this massive bunker to survive world war three. It’s moderately entertaining and the plot reveal is kind of worth it in itself, but if I’m being 100% honest, the show’s not that great. And it gets progressively worse the more you watch. Maybe see like episodes one and two for dramatic effect then move on to something else!

How To Make Millions Before Grandma Dies

If you only have time to see one movie, watch this. It is really a look into Thailand and the country’s culture as it is right now that I think captures the emotion and feeling like very few movies can do. That’s not just my opinion either—this movie ended up breaking box office records globally and ended up being one of the highest reviewed Thai films ever. Like Paradise Park, the English name here is somewhat whack. The more natural translation would be “Grandma’s Grandchild,” which I think does better justice to this film and its emotion. When it came out last year, apparently everyone was posting videos online of themselves crying to the end… likeeeeee. It’s so good. Just watch it.

I will say, sometimes you do feel somewhat uncomfortable with this movie too, because it’s one of those films that simultaneously feels like a story but also seems strangely applicable to different people’s lives, across cultures and circumstances. 10/10, five stars, would highly recommend.

There’s more, soon

We’re still on vacation for the next month here in Thailand, so there should be some pretty exciting stories coming up. I have to tell myself to stop writing at some point. Hope you liked what was here, as I start getting settled into life. It’s only my second month after all, right?

Best,

Declan