W stands for "Wolf"

This past weekend I hosted an English camp at a national park and invited some volunteers to help me with it. In the evening they asked us to do a play for the kids, since they had prepared plays to perform. We decided to put on the story of The Three Little Pigs. From left to right, here are Katie, Merissa, and Emily in their piggy costumes!













This is me as the Big Bad Wolf. Cool ears huh! I even did a little rap that goes "Im the big bad wolf and Im hungry for some piggys...I like big pigs and I can not lie...you other wolfies may deny...when a pig comes in with a big round snout and a rump roast in your face you get HUNGRY!" I think this ammused us more than it did the children or teachers...as they probably didnt understand what I was saying hahaha. My "W" hand sign stands for " WOLF"!

A little Preview

This is a little preview of the play my kids, a co-teacher, and I have been working so hard on called "Why the rabbit has long ears", which is an African folktale. I will take more pictures and post them after we perform it at the festival in February. We are almost to our goal!! Thanks for donating!

Top Knot

I took a picture of this student, his English name is Little Thomas, as we have two Thomas's in this class, because he has a traditional top knot for a hair style. There are two students at my school that have this hair style. It is a very old traditional superstition where Thai people believe if you don't cut a piece of a boys hair they will stay healthy. If they cut it they believe the child will get sick. They usually cut it off when the boy becomes a teenager. This child has two that was tied together to make one pony tail. Sometimes they just have one and they can be placed anywhere on their head from the back, to the side, to the top, wherever... It is not a common practice anymore, but very traditional families still do this to their male children.

I want!

Here are some pictures of my second and third grade class. Here my co teacher and I are doing a child centered activity teaching the verb to want. They have been learning nouns like balloon, and doll, and ice cream ( kind of a new years theme)...so they were holding up signs with these words to form sentences like "What do you want?" and "I want a ball".





















Arnt they just too cute!

An afternoon at the park

It was such a nice day today, Bom, Ink, and I decided to go to the park. Here I am holding Ink. We played Wesley chases Ink most of the afternoon...needless to say Im exhasted tonight.









I thought this was a really cute picture of Ink. Today he was able to tell me all of his facial parts in English, say his numbers from one to ten, and his ABC's. He is just too cute!

Jan and Leo visit!

This past weekend my german exchange partner from high school, Jan, and his girlfriend Leo came to visit me. I was really excited to see them as this was the first time to meet Leo, after hearing about her all year. Since there isnt much to do in my town, we took a day trip to the province of Mae Sot, which is about three hours from my province. We were in a city right on the border of Burma. You can see Burma in the background of a few of these pictures. This city also had a very large Muslim population, so we had really great Muslim food .


This is Jan and I in front of a guest house. I was attracted to these bright red and gold chinese shirts, so we both bought them and decided to wear them together. I forget what his shirt says, but my shirt says expensive..haha.







Here Jan and I pose in front of Burma with some giant tooth picks in our mouths. There are also some Burmese refugees to our left, trying to sell cheap goods.









Here the three of us are sitting in front of Burma. It was such a nice weekend and I was really sad to have it end and leave the two of them. Oh well, another time and another country, as it always is with Jan and I.

A temple of a different color

This is kind of a special temple my friends and I discovered in the province of Mae Sot this past weekend. Its special because its blue and green. This is very unique as most of the temples here are almost completly gold with lots of adornments. This one was more accented in gold and mainly blue and green.






This is a golden buddha that had a very large real ruby in the center of its head.
















This is one example of one of the many very large buddhas in Thailand. If it gives you any perspective. I am about as tall as one of the fingers.









When we arrived at this temple, we were just going to take a quick look. But this monk seemed very excited to see us and gave us the grand tour of the place.

A family place

This is a sign in front of a bar in Mae Sot. I think maybe they were trying to make it more family oriented by adding the word milk. Maybe its the start of a whole new generation of bars where you can bring your children for some milk and you can sit and relax with your cocktail...hahaha!

Ink

I think this is just the cutest little boy ever! His name is Ink and he is 4 years old. He is Bom's little nephew. Every time I go over to his house he climbs all over me. He is so smart too, he already knows his English letters!




















This is a picture of Ink with his Grandma praying to the house spirits. His Grandma is teaching him how to say it. Every house has a little spirtit house that they pray to daily. They have spirit houses because they want to give a place for the spirits thats land they are taking.

Welcome to Djbouti!!

This past weekend a lot of the current PCV's went to Bangkok to give the traditional greeting to the new volunteers. That consists of a lot of screaming, signs, and happy smiling faces...just like being a superstar....the only difference is you have just ridden over 20 hours on a plane and all you want to do is sleep! Here are some of the current PCV's waiting for our newbies at the airport.






This is my good friend Emily. She made a sign saying welcome to Djbouti, which is a place in Africa....you think this might confuse some of the volunteers when they take their first walk into Thailand?















Here we are ushering in the new volunteers...we made a funnel for them to walk through as we clapped and cheered for them! This new group is really different from ours as more than a quarter of them are seniors, a majority are woman, and their are something like 6 couples out of 62 volunteers. Our group has 49 people, 3 of which are seniors(most of us are in our 20's), an even distribution of female to male volunteers, and only 2 couples.





This guy looks pretty happy, even though I am sure he is overcome with exhastion. Welcome Peace Corps Thailand group 118!!

Elephants in the market

There are always baby elephants in my market with their handlers, and I never have my camera. Finally, I had it on me the other day when there were two elephants. So, my friend Bom and I decided to feed the elephants. Trainers and their elephants often wander towns with food to feed their elephant. You pay maybe 20 baht and get to feed the elephant. At first, I thought this was bad, but now I dont see it as such a bad thing. The elephant helps support the trainer and the trainer helps support the elephant as there isnt a lot of land in Thailand for the elephants to roam free and they have replaced elephant loggers with machines.


Here I am feeding an elephant! What a strange feeling!













Here is Bom feeding the elephant.





























Sorry the pictures are blurry, but it was at night. This is an elephants behind. The elephants all wear red traffic lights on their tails, as when its dark and they are walking down the streets you really cant see them. This elephant was amazing as I saw it play the harmonica, while standing on three feet, while spinning a hulla hoop around its trunk!
These days, when I see an elephant on the street, I dont even think of it as anything out of the ordinary any more.

Making Merit

This picture is of monks lining up to get their morning food. They walk from house to house and the people give them food which is making merit....in other words kind of like earning their way to heaven. Monks are considered the next best thing to Buddha as they help spread his teachings. Monks depend on the charity of others for everything from food, to food, to the upkeep of the temples. The monks in these pictures are all novince monks, or child monks. I always see them either on the streets or sitting waiting for people to come give them food. They usually say a prayer on the peoples behalf that give them food as well.

Eleanor and a Lizard

I tell you what... I am going picture crazy now. I have started carrying my camera everywhere. Good thing I bought rechargable batteries recently.

I was going to Rajabahat, the university in my town, to do some paperwork and saw this really great lizard on a tree outside of one of the buildings. The lizards that live on and in my house are generally smaller, but this one was really big and colorful. I have no idea what kind of lizard it is in English but its called Gink Ga in Thai. This one was a baby, but they generally get really big and are really frightning as I have seen three footers and they climb on walls like spiders!




I walked into my kitchen/concrete room this morning to discover my siamese cat Eleanor sitting in the shoe box I keep my socks in. Isnt she beautiful. She still won't let me touch her, but shes finally taking treats from me. By this time next year she will hopefully let me pet her.

Thanks Kate and Robert!

Kate and Robert, a married couple and volunteers up in the province of Lampong, just recent sent me some great pictures they had with me in it. I thought I would share them with y'all.


So this is my Peace Corps Volunteer group number 117 the first day we all met back in LA. Can you guess which one I am? Wow, I can't believe this picture was taken a whole year ago.










Right before we left for our sites we had a goodbye party for our host families. This is me and some of the guys getting ready to perform a traditional Thai issan dance. We wore paccines, the brightly colored plad things around our waistes. We also wore white face powder as you often times see people with white baby powder on their face to make themselves look whiter and surprisingly it does keep you cooler. Unfortunatly it was medicated and burt a few of the guys faces.






Here are some of us on a fun performance day we had during training for our trainers. My group decided to sing about what it would be like to be actual Peace Corps Volunteers and the great times we had had already as trainees to the tune of Summer Lovin from Grease. We had some theatre majors in our group and well me of course haha. :)







This last picture is of me in my friend Brynn's bathroom up in Lampong. She had just recently moved to this house and we had just come home from a long day of teaching at an English camp. She walked in her bathroom to find a scorpion that had crawled inside. Since I was the only one with experience having scorpions in my bathroom I got the honor of being the scorpion slayer yet again.

New Years in Pai

On New Years my friend Merissa, a peace corps volunteer located in Chiang Mai, and I went to a city called Pai, pernounced like pie, in the province of Mae Hong Son. This is a far north province in Thailand. It was such a great weekend. It was also surprisingly cold as we had to wear coats all weekend and even bought scarves to wear in the morning and night. As its very hot in my province its surprising when you can see your own breath. Pai is located in a valley in the mountains and is very scenic as you can see. It has a very large farang, the word for foreigners (really white people), population. Most of the farang living here are very hippy and very different. Infact, I would say that if you dont fit in anywhere else in the world, this seemed like the city you go to be as crazy ding dong freaky as you want to be.

This picture is a great example of the people that live in Pai. This woman had a shaved head and wore layers and layers of white all weekend while constantly carrying a large bottle of water balanced on her head. Once, we saw her in a cafe where even then she had it just balanced on her head as she relaxed and had a cup of coffee.






This is a picture of Merissa and I on our last day in Pai!

Christmas Presents

This is a picture of my best friend Bom at site. He's a teacher at the local university and about a year older than me. In this picture we are teaching an English activity to some students






This is a picture of the girl that was given to me as a Christmas present this year at an English camp. Her name is Nam which means water in Thai. When they told me to open the box, on the stage, I thought it looked a little funny. In no way did I think there was a girl inside that would start dancing up on me...A Christmas I will never forget.