PraePan Rural Village Homestay: Tuesday, August 21, 2012 to Wednesday, August 22, 2012

These are just some of the views from our van going from Fah Fang Resort to the PraePan rural village. It is mostly green grass, fields and mountains, but there are also some stores and little stands that sell fruits, vegetables and cooked meat. Although most people ride mopeds around here (which is great because it reduces traffic and it is better for the environment), people still drive cars, especially Toyota's!

We arrived to the PraePan village stay! We are just unpacking the vans and getting ready to meet our families.

This was my host meh (mom) and host phaw (dad) at the rural village stay. As you can see, most people do not have furniture, but instead eat, sleep and watch tv (or in Thai, geen, naam and doo tee-vee) on the floor. 

Another interesting point about villages (both rural and urban) is that they are matriarchal. The husband will come live in the wife's house by paying a dowry. Because of this, the husband is sometimes very timid and shy and may not understand his role in the household.

This is what my host family's house looked like. It was very beautiful-- nice floors, a lot of space and a great view.

After settling into the house and before eating dinner with the family, we had a chance to visit my host family's dragonfruit garden! So we just jumped into the back of their pick-up truck, invited some more CIEE students to join us and flew off to the beautiful garden!

Once we arrived to the dragonfruit field, we had a chance to pick the dragonfruit ourselves! Of course, I was afraid to do it wrong so I took my sweet time and then my phaw had to teach me how to do it faster because he got inpatient with me. Oooops! It was still definitely amazing!

Our host family also grows chilli peppers and squash. So spicy!!

This is my host brother (ning schi) getting water for our dinner. As it rains in Thailand (at least in the rural village that we stayed in), the water is collected into these large pots and everyone drinks it without filtering it or adding iodine to kill the bacteria. I drank this water as well and thankfully no stomach aches followed!

This is my meh and roommate April preparing our dinner. As our meh cooked dinner, April and I peeled boiled bamboo. I never thought you could eat bamboo and thought that they were only Panda bear's staple!

Dinner time with the host family! We had fermented fish (in the brown plate), bamboo (the yellow root-looking thing), som tam (green-papaya salad in the white bowl) and mackerel fish from a can that almost tasted like it should be given to cats instead of humans. 

After dinner, it was time to get ready for bed. All three of us (April, Ashley and I) fit comfortably into this king size bed and slept soundly through the night.

Rise and Shine, it's breakfast time! I had a chance to cook fresh chicken in the kitchen without my meh's supervision. I have built trust into our relationship! For breakfast we had the chicken that I cooked, grilled chicken  from the market, fermented fish (again), dragonfruit, rice, sticky rice and cucumber. I still can't wrap my head around how much food Thai's eat for breakfast.

After breakfast we had a chance to walk around the village. As you can see, most of the houses are built from wood, there are lots of wild chickens running around and lots of space to run around for children.  

A little bit of history. The PraePan rural village is known for it's weaving. They make a lot of beautiful things. I even got a chance to weave myself  (it is a lot more complicated than it looks!) and I must say I think I did a pretty good job!

 During our walk, we had a chance to visit one of the local schools for grades K-6. You may not be able to tell through the photo, but on the board they were working on long division and worked out the problem in the exact same way that we solve long division as well!

Week One: I feel like I say this with every blog post, but honestly everything seems to be getting better and better. Perhaps it's not the fact that it is better, but more so of the fact that everything is new and I get to experience so much in such a small amount of time. I have only been here for a single week, but it seems as though I have been in Thailand for over a month. I not only got to visit Bangkok, which is one of the most exquisite cities in the world, but also hike through a national rainforest, stay at a beautiful resort and gain a new perspective on rural living. I feel like there is so much information to take in and so many thoughts to process that I am worried that my brain cannot fully register everything that has happened during the past week. Perhaps when I come back and look through all my photos and combine all of my experiences, I hope to fully group this into a single, significant event.  

Fah Fang Resort: Friday 8/17-Tuesday 8/21

Some of the breakfast foods we had during our stay at the Fah Fang Resort. Thai's do not have ordinary pancake, scramble egg and cereal breakfast. Instead, they have very hardy breakfast like fried rice, meat and vegetable soup or noodles. Yum!

These are two of the classes that we were in when learning Thai. During this particular day, our professor was Ajaan (teacher) Poi. With the combination of the bottom two photos and imagining that I am sitting in the empty chair in the middle, these are all the Public Health students. However, there are 26 more students in the Development and Globalization program.

There was always snack time in between classes and activities! This was probably my favorite snack: chicken pastry that tasted a lot like a samosa with black tea in 90 degree Fahrenheit weather.

This is an example of some of our activities in the afternoon or in the evening time. This particular discussion was on diversity, but we have also had discussions about gender and etiquette of Thailand and participated in Workshops on Organizing and Leadership in Facilitation (WOLF). These discussions were part of orientation where we would be able to use the information in the discussions to better understand the Thai culture and adapt our behavior appropriately. We would always sit on the floor and did not wear shoes inside any of the buildings.

This was one of the best lectures I have ever heard-- I even cried during Ajaans P' Decha's speech! He was so insightful on how to find ourselves and how to allow people to understand who we are and what we hope to achieve. It taught me about non-verbal communication and the power of learning by example.

Some of the lunch and dinner dishes. We had green curry, Thai omelette-type thing, fried chicken with herbs, beef with rice, pad thai, sticky rice with ground beef, etc. Honestly, all so delicious I am afraid I will need to buy two airplane tickets on my way back to the states since I will not be able to fit on a single seat!

Everyone always licked their plates clean after lunch and dinner!

This is pretty much the whole group and we would all sit in this hut right above the pond where catfish swam. We also fed the fish almost every night so they would always come by the hut and wait for their next meal.

During the evenings, we always participated in certain activities with the group. One of the nights we played BINGO because we had to practice the Thai numbers that we learned earlier in the morning. Of course, I WON (because of my wonderful Thai speaking skills, haha) a beautiful bag (first picture) that I will bring back as a souvenir!

On one of the other nights, we had a campfire and cooked hot dogs for dinner and got to know each other better!

And then, we were off again in our vans to our next destination: Homestay in a rural village of Khon Kaen, Thailand.