I completely forgot to mention the best part of getting back on Sunday night... having my parcel which my family sent to me waiting in the living room for me to open it! Honestly, it was like Christmas came early.. There were all kinds of wonderous things hidden within, such as Borat (watching that after being in a kind of reverse Borat situation, you know going from North American culture to something totally different, kind of sheds a new light on the whole movie), a video of the dance recital this year, salt and vinegar chips (yay, something other than seaweed flavour!), earrings from Jan, and all kinds of Canadian type souvenirs. It really made my day.
I spend yesterday doing not to much at all, just getting some much needed rest and catching up with people from back home. In the evening my host dad asked me to go for a bike ride with him for exercise. It's really starting to annoy me how much he's on my case about getting exercise. But I figured a bike ride would be nice anyways since it would give me a chance to explore the neighborhood a bit. Let's just say it was a very short bike ride, with absolutely no hills (imagine bike riding in Alberta, how tiring), and the bike put at a very low gear. I didn't even break a sweat. I did get alot of weird stares though. Afterwards I went up to the roof of my bedroom for the first time, where they have it all set up like a deck kind of. I'm not too keen on doing that whole experience again, since the stairs to get up there were scarier than the scary stairs at the restaurant in Paris.. for all of the two people who might be reading this who went to Paris with me.. everyone else just imagine some super rickety wooden stairs.
Today I actually managed to do something productive, and I studied Thai on my own for about an hour and a half. Although I deffinately haven't mastered the Thai language yet, I can feel my skills improving, mainly in the fact that whenever people tell me new Thai's words now, I can actually remember them. Before it was always as though the words would just go straight through my brain, and not "stick" at all. I've also begun teaching myself the Thai alphabet, which is already helping alot in understanding the Thai language. I think learning it will be a huge benefit since there are so many sounds in Thai which don't exist in English, and that way when people tell me new Thai words, I will know how to spell them in Thai with the correct sounds, rather than trying to write them using the English alphabet. In the evening I watched the rest of the movie The Water Horse, and showed Beam and P'Kla the video of the dance recital along with many other pictures from back at home in Canada.
For tomorrow my big plans include phoning my AFS coordinator to see if it will be possible for Rachel from Australia to come stay with me for a week in September, as well as to see if I can attend the massage course in Ayutthaya in October. I spent some time today looking into different meditation courses I can take in Thailand, and the best one I've found is actually the same one Nickolai did in India (visit www.dhamma.org to read about it). I really want to do it as soon as possible, since there is another program I can do where I go stay with the monks in a temple in North Eastern Thailand, but this program doesn't actually teach meditation, only the monk lifestyle, and therefore they recomment you take a meditation course beforehand. However, AFS says we're not allowed to do any meditation courses during school time, which means I would have to wait until April to do it! Hopefully I can convince them to make an acception....
Also, I've added the pictures from Chanthaburi to my photo page (http://community.webshots.com/user/kristenthailand )... I apologize in advance for my extemely bad hair in the pictures. This is what happens when my hair is subjected to both humidity and wind.
ไม่มีความคิดเห็น:
แสดงความคิดเห็น