Ubon

What can I say about Ubon... I had fun, but honestly didn't really do much. My week there consisted mostly of going to school with Rachel (and a Rotary girl from America called Andrea) for a little bit in the morning, then ditching and sitting in The Pizza Company for the whole afternoon until it was time to go home in the evening.

For some reason Rachel's host family didn't want me to stay the whole week with them, and neither did Rachel's Advisor, so I kind of just got dumped on a foreign AFS teacher from Germany who lives in a small apartment at Rachel's school. She was nice, but I understand that she didn't come to Thailand to become a host family.. and felt kind of bad because nobody even asked her if it would be alright for me to stay there, they just kind of informed her that I would and she had no say in the matter. So, that kind of put a damper on the whole week. Everyone just seemed to be under the impression that I wanted to just go to Ubon for a week and go to school there, when really I basically just wanted to go to see Rachel, esepcially since it was the last time I will see her for at least a few years (so it pretty much sucked that I couldn't see her in the evenings.) However, we found a few ways around the whole only seeing eachother at school thing. Rachel and I spent one night in a hotel, I spent one night at Rachel's house, the two of us spent the night at Andrea's house, and pretty much all the other nights I actually slept at the German girl's place. On my last night there, the plan was for me to stay at Rachel's house again, but when we phoned her host mom to pick us up from the German girl's place, she said she was too tired to pick us up so we'd just have to stay with Rebecca (German girl). There was no other way for us to get back to her house, so we dropped off our crap at Rebecca's, and then just solved the whole being homeless problem by not sleeping at all that night. To tell you the truth, we spent the entire night at Rachel's school. First just hanging out under one of the buildings where they have all these picnic tables set up, then eating steak which was cooked on the tiniest fire known to man with the members of a band from Rachel's school. They were nice enough to give us steak and let me play a bass for a bit, but they really weren't too interested in us because apparently they were all really good friends with the exchange student from America at Rachel's school last year who was gorgeous and spoke really good Thai. They just basically thought we were crap compared to her, I guess. Rachel and I sat together in front of Rebecca's apartment and watched the sun rise, tried to go out for breakfast everywhere and discovered that everwhere was closed, so we just went into Rebecca's so I could shower, and then it was time for me to get on the bus back to Bangkok.

On the Friday I spent in Ubon, there was some AFS conference thingy going on in a town nearby, so Rachel and I got dragged along. It was nice to see some of the other exchange students who I haven't seen since July at the arrival camp, such as the Italians, since they are all going home in December with Rachel. The whole she-bang though was kind of pointless, and really just involved us all sitting around while the Thais sang karaoke ("My Heat Will Go On".. I swear that's the only song I ever hear in this country.. Thai people are all besotted with it), and complimented eachother on how many foreigners they each brought to the event (Rachel's Advisor brought along 2 ROTARY exchange studnets, not AFS, probably just so she could say "hey look how many of them I've got!")

I didn't take too many pictures during the whole trip. I took some but they are just of Rachel, Andrea and I all hanging out. However, the internet at my host families house isn't even working at the moment, so I will upload once I get a chance...

Oh, and just so you all know how bad my English is getting.. at one point while I was with Rachel, she tried to send a text message to someone, but it didn't go through. I asked her, "why fail?" Not even, "why did it fail?" just "why fail." Eek.