Friday, January 9, 2009

Bangkok to Mae Sot




Sawtdee.
Twenty-eight hours after many hours on the plane, we were able to rest horizontally! I am jet-lagged as all can be. Ben is just fine :)
We had our taxi driver drop us off somewhere (it was 1am) and our Thai was pretty sad.
We ended up in the hip happening part of town. Tourists everywhere.
The next day we saw bangkok tourist style. Thailand is beautiful. Ornate art everywhere even on the overpassses along the highway. Temples every couple blocks. Beautiful!
First, we wondered around China town: ate a cool looking fruit (kind of taste like a dull kiwi).
We ran into a local thai who loved Obama and he hooked us up with a cool itinerary for seeing the sites: Stadning Buddha (50 meters tall), solid gold sitting budda (good luck budda). Our tuk tuk driver ( a three wheeled open air taxi that drives like a bat out of hell through the busy streets of bangkok) asked us to go into a tourist center and pretend to be interested in booking a tour so they would give him a coupon for free gas, the drivers and this buisness have an arangement i guess, we were only too happy to oblige. Then he took us to a massive golden temple in the middle of bangkok that gave a great view of the city and when we came back down he was gone. well, we got a free tour and he got some free gas, win win. we went back to our hotel and ate some great thai food, by the way this place has the best food in the world, and then we crashed out. next day we took the 8 hour bus ride to the northwestern town of Mae Sot on the burma boarder where we will be spending the next six months. We're way up in the mountains in a nice guest house. We met a woman, Diana, who has a couple orphanages around the area. She is from Wisconsin and some of her vistors from Maple Grove, MN will be arriving on friday. What a small world! Our first evening encounter in Mae Sot was with a mime. Three mimes performed at the woman's collective for the locals. We watched in amusment, jet-lagged delirium and in awe that this was Thailand.

The town is actually pretty cool, it has an amazing market, which sell everything from flip flops to fried grasshoppers (not to mention eels, frogs with their hearts cut out, baby turtles, bugs, and tiny pickled chicken babies). Our house mates are all volunteers at the clinic as well, one is a social worker, another a teacher and another a medical student, all from the U.K. We are very excited to begin our work at the clinic.

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