Arrival at Khon Kaen University: Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Welcome to Khon Kaen University Faculty of Public Health! These are the five out of eight students in our group (see if you can find me!).

Meet my roommate Tok Tak (I unfortunately cannot pronounce her real name). This is a welcoming letter that she wrote me before I arrived on campus. She can write and speak English so well! She gave me a Thai nickname Geau, which means "crystal"  or "glass". I brought her guavas (farang) and drangonfruit (geau mango) fresh from my rural homestay family's garden.

We had a monk chant during our ceremony for about thirty minutes. He chanted for our "good spirits" to find us from America. It was a very nice experience, although I could not understand a single word that he was chanting about since it was in Thai! However, we had a chance to chant along once we got used to the wording.

This is the food we ate during the Welcoming Ceremony to Khon Kaen University. We had cow nheo (sticky rice) with pag (vegetables), lhab (ground pork, which reminded me of my mom's cooking, farsas), gai (chicken), kai toad (fried egg), and som-tam (papaya salad). For desert, we had saparot (pineapple) and a variety of Thai sweets (the blue plate with pink, green and white goodies). YUM!

The eating style here is communal. There are plates of dishes in the middle of the floor and everyone sits around the food and scoops up the food with the cow nheo (no need for forks and spoons).

This the apartment complex that I will be living in. It is a four story building with a beautiful view on the rooftop (which I think you can see the two-story balconies in the middle of the building). 

The building also has very high security. There are cameras on every single floor, covering every single angle. In order to get in through the entrance, you need to scan your fingerprint. There is also a security guard outside the entrance. All of the apartment doors have padlocks in addition to regular locks. I definitely don't need to worry about safety (so this post about safety is for you, mom and dad).

Here is my beautiful room! Can you guess which bed is mine? It is easy to tell because there is luggage near by that still needs to be unpacked! My roommate and I both have our separate desks so we can both get homework done, haha! Honestly, this is more of an apartment than a dorm because it is so big (more of a studio I suppose). 

My roommate and I have our own private bathroom. 

Bathroom: It is a flushing toilet, so that is normal. The interesting thing here is that (from my experience) Thai's do not use toilet paper, but instead use their hands. I don't mind this, I just found it interesting.

 Shower: There is still a shower head, except that there is an electric heating system (left picture) that you turn on when you want to use warmer water. The shower area is also not separated from the rest of the bathroom. You shower on the same floor (there is no "tub" or "shower glass space" to step into) as the floor where the bathroom is or the floor you use to get to the sink. The nice part is is that you rinse/clean the bathroom floor every day, but it is not nice when you are wearing socks and you step into a puddle of water because your roommate just finished taking a shower.

This is our balcony. It is rather small, so it is mainly used to dry our clothes. You can sort of see our view from the back of the apartment. It is mostly just cement and other houses nearby.

Day One at Khon Kaen: I am so excited to settle down into a single place that I will live in for the next four months! My roommate is such a sweetheart, the apartment is wonderful and it is so close to the CIEE office. It is exciting to start classes again, learn about the Thai public health system, and go on site visits to different hospitals.