Yesterday Rachel and I decided to venture to Siam Paragon. And when I say we ventured, I mean WE ventured. We got there all by ourselves, first by taking a van to The Mall, then a taxi to the JJ Market BTS (Skytrain) Station (well we got a little help from P'Kla there, because we couldn't understand the taxi driver so we just phoned Kla and he explained to the driver where we needed to go), then the BTS to Siam. Yay us. I actually felt quite proud of us for making it all the way there and back on our own, and I'm also feeling quite pleased with the fact that my host family even let us go there and back on our own. Hopefully that means that in the next little while I will start experiencing a bit more and more freedom of my own. At Siam Paragon, we ate Big Macs at MacDonalds, and ice cream at Swensens. We just looked around at all the fancy shops including Gucci, and then ended up spending the rest of the time in a bookstore that had quite a good English book selection, even better than the selection at The Mall. So I ended up buying myself 3 books: Eat Pray Love, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and The Five People You Meet in Heaven (Rachel's recommendation). I also bought a couple gifts for a certain person for Christmas which means I am now officially done my Christmas shopping! Now I just have to wrap it all up and somehow ship it to Canada, which probably won't all happen until after my massage course. When we got back to Nongchok last night, my host dad picked us up to drive us home, but on the way we stopped at a random Catholic Church for him to, "make a donation" because his mother was Catholic apparently. Apparently she is also burried in the cemetary across the road. We didn't stay long. Rachel and I both agreed it just seemed weird hearing people saying Christian prayers in Thai. I don't know how to explain it. It's just that Thai isn't the kind of language I could imagine something really beautiful being written in in the first place, so for me to imagine praying in Thai just seems odd. It is a very beautiful written language, but spoken it doesn't sound so great. And another interesting thing about the Thai language is that they have no equivalent of the English letter "V", which is weird considering that the Thai language has forty something consonents, many of which we don't have in English. I remembered a couple instances when Thai people had asked me what is the different between "V" and "W" , and pronounce the letter "V" like "wee", so Rachel and I were wondering whether or not they actually have that sound in their language. We looked it up in the dictionary, and they don't.
Today we spent the morning just hanging out, and Rachel packed all her things up for going back to Ubon. We went and ate lunch at yet another politcal rally thing my host dad's party was putting on. It was weird, when we were done eating we kind of just wanted to leave because everyone was staring at us. So we asked P'Kla to drive us home but he told us to stay for a while because, "Thai people want to see foreigner." We were like, "uhh see us do what?" Yet another thing that makes it seem like they just want us around for votes. In the afternoon we watched CasaNova, and I took up knitting. I started making an afghan, and so far I have all of 1 1/2 rows done. Yay me! I'm actually quite proud of myself though, becaues I only learned how to knit today, and I can already purl quite quickly. At around 4 we went with my host parents to ChinaTown to do some shopping and eat dinner until we had to take Rachel to the train station. Now, guess what we had for dinner? Shark Fin. It was like Shark Fin soup. And then we had coconut shrimp. Rachel and I liked the coconut shrimp, not so much the shark. But my host dad kept going on about how the shrimp was cheap but the shark was expensive. That man is absolutely obsessed with money. It kind of drives me crazy. He was going on to Rachel about how he gets to fly anywhere in Thailand for free, and how he spent 70,000 baht today but the government gave him 100,000 so he made a profit..... It honestly kind of makes me feel like I am just another one of his purchases to show off. Anyways, we got to the train station a bit early and waited around for the train. When it finally arrived we got on to find Rachel's seat, but another person was already occupying it. It appeared that they both had the exact same tickets, until a train worker noticed that Rachel's was actually for tomorrow night. How nobody seemed to notice that before we got to the station (trust me, both my host parents spent about 5 minutes looking at her ticket, as well as the lady at the ticket booth at the train station) is beyond me. Rachel decided though that she would rather see if she could get a ticket for tonight instead, since we had already driven all the way to the station and what not, and there ended up being one available, so I had to say goodbye to her... Which was really not fun. Now I'm back at my host families house with my knitting. When I originally asked them if she could come and stay with us, I told them I would go stay in Ubon with her in November, but for some reason they were all under the impression I was going with her today. They asked me about 5 times each if I had my ticket for today and what not, and then when I got back home Cherry looked at me and asked me why I was there. Gotta love language barriers.
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