Kuhn sa bai dii may?

BANGBANGBANGBANGBANG

...is that a knock? What time is it?

I got up and stumbled to the door, thinking I'd missed my alarm or something. But it was still dark outside... I glanced at my phone. It read 3:17am. My roommate Charlayna picked her head up, obviously as confused as I was. I pulled the door open, hearing more commotion the closer to the door that I got. I already couldn't see, having sprung up with no glasses, and was met with a smoky hallway full of dark figures rushing past.

"FIRE!!!! FIRE!!!! GET YOUR BUTTS UP AND MOVING! GET OUT!! FFFFIIIIRRRREEE!!!!"

... Well, shit. I was glad I'd actually chosen decent bedclothes last night, but still had to scramble to find some pants. After fumbling around hurriedly in the dark, my hands finally found a skirt and threw it on and began down the stairs with the rest of the panicked throng of people. We were on the 8th floor. The smoke kept getting thicker as we descended, and I had to pull my shirt over my nose while trying to hold another hand across my chest for modesty's sake. I thought I was fine until I had a chance to sit down outside. I wasn't.

I began coughing, I couldn't breathe... It was so frustrating. My asthma hadn't bothered me in 7 years until Greece last year, and yet again abroad it decided to join the party. I started to hyperventilate. I kept coughing and coughing and the more I coughed the less I caught my breath and the more I would hyperventilate and it just became a long cycle of trying so hard to take a deep breath just to start coughing all over again. In through the nose, out through the mo-coughcoughcoughcoughcough. I was shaking so hard both Sean and Chase were on either side trying to help me breathe slowly and steady myself and comfort me through the shock that was starting to set in. Finally, an ambulance came and Ben selflessly came with me, holding my hand through oxygen masks and the Thai EMTs telling me to breathe slowly. Which would have worked if I hadn't kept coughing and wheezing. Oh, and the shock. Ben was so frazzled, trying very hard to find the words for asthma in Heather's Thai phrase book while also trying to hold my hands to warm them and keep me focused on breathing. I'm certain I scared him.  He'd grab my head and make me focus on his eyes and breathe with him. My hands were going numb and I was shaking just about the hardest I ever have in my life. My face and hands were turning blue. I was lightheaded and swore sometimes there were two of Ben. I just kept trying to breathe in, breathe out. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Just breathe...  

We got to the hospital after a very short time, most of which I don't much remember, and I was put on an IV and drip. When I calmed down enough to breathe slowly enough, I was taken in for a chest X-ray. They rolled me in to the ICU and put me back on the oxygen mask and piled blankets on top of me (which I was so much more than grateful for, I was freezing). After a little while, maybe around 430 or 5 Maa Pet (the wife of the Yonok Foundation/Teach Thai director) came to make sure I was ok and took Ben back to the hotel for his belongings and so he could sleep.

Lucky devil. Between the IV, the oxygen mask, and the blood pressure machine along with all the lights and hospital sounds, I again got no sleep. Excepting between 12-3ish. Everyone in the hospital was so very sweet. They would come try to talk to me and were always making sure I was ok. I broke down at one point and started crying and like 5 nurses swarmed me saying "Oh no! What's wrong?! Are you ok? What can we do for you? Please don't cry, you're so pretty!" All I wanted was Mommy and Dad, and they immediately dialed and brought me the phone so I could talk to my parents. Thanks Mom and Dad, I know I woke y'all up being it was after midnight your time!

The director of the hospital came and gave me flowers and made sure I was ok... As far as hospital visits go, this one was almost pleasant. They made sure I ate breakfast and had coffee and juice and water.

Around 12ish, after settling everyone in to our new hotel down the street, Maa Pet came and I was discharged from the hospital. She brought me a change of clothes, I didn't even have any shoes or my glasses or contacts! We went to get something to eat for lunch (I got some delicious, delicious pad Thai and my favorite Thai spice tea), and she brought me to the new hotel and waited for me to change since I still wanted to visit the Thai school with the rest of the group.

The only other downside to the night were Dr. Nirund's assistants. A couple of the girls started calling as soon as they reached the bottom of the stairs, telling them that I was in an ambulance and the hotel was ON FIRE, to be met with the reaction that our plight wasn't serious enough to wake Dr. Nirund up. Thankfully, we got to Dr. Nirund shortly after and he did not at all feel that way, rushing down to the hotel and sending his wife to the hospital for us. I'm trying not to take it to heart because I didn't talk to the assistants directly (not that I could even talk. I'd try to crack jokes and lose all breath I'd gained; Ben kept shushing me), but that is really discouraging to hear. I'd like to know what the reasoning was, what part was insignificant enough that Dr. Nirund shouldn't have been woken...

The Thai school was a joy and a treasure! Given both my terrifying start to the day and their energetic and eager faces, I totally feel like I got this now! I am far less scared and way more excited. Everyone was so excited and eager to talk to us and ask us questions. Everyone was waving and bowing and smiling.... It was great. Not to even mention the round of applause from my fellow teachers when I rejoined and everyone telling me how glad they were I was alive. Thanks, guys! Me too....

So that was my day. All uphill from there, right? So many things I can now cross off the "I've never...." list. I'm alive and ok and in Thailand, and hopefully this hotel will be fine for the next 4 nights we have left.   

The title of this post, btw, means "How are you?" My response this morning, when I could talk, was "Mai sa bai ka!" Not fine. But now, I think I could say "Sa bai dii ka!"

Days 1 and 2 in Thailand

Monday was a pretty adventurous day. I got woken up around 930 by the rest of the group knocking on my door (thanks, guys!), and we wandered down to the local Walmart, aka The Big C. It seems like a combination market/supermarket kind of thing... Hard to explain, I guess combine Smiley's and Walmart and that's sort of what it was like. 

We found lots of great foods, including potato chips with favors like Sweet Basil, Hot Chili Squid and Lobster Hot Plate. I ended up getting the Nori Seaweed flavor, which have turned out being the best so far. We're going back for the Hot Chili Squid, which won the Facebook vote, although I really want to try the Lobster Hot Plate so we'll probably just get all of the above.

Also, peanut butter creme Oreos. I wiiiiiiin.

After The Big C, we wandered to the local mall, called Central Plaza. I was lame and homesick so I went to McDonald's for lunch (already? Yes. Shut up). We found out that department stores seem expensive everywhere. Although getting used to the baht system is really strange too... For example, 200 baht seems like SO MUCH money, but it's actually about 6 bucks. 

We came back to the hotel to regroup and then headed out for Thai massage... Best decision ever. 200 baht for an hour and it feels AMAZING. Definitely doing that at least once a week. We went down to the market and wandered about after that. So many fruits that I have never seen before, tiny purple things with green spikes, something called manganese, and the bananas are itty bitty! ...I'll have to be brave enough to try them soon. 

Several of us went down to The Riverside Guest House for dinner. The view over the river was really pretty, even if the river itself was refuse-infested. There was live music; hearing Jimi Hendrix's Red House with a thick Thai accent was a gem and a treasure. One guy ordered the special, beehive huts, which was literally a cooked cross section of beehive, larvae and all. Of course i had to try it. It looked really strange and the taste is really hard to pin down. Savory wet cardboard? I can't even begin. 

The Thai tea is just as I expected, which means it is delicious and abundant. And what made my night the most, because I am super lame, was our kathoey server. 

On our walk back from dinner, we stopped in a little ice cream shop called Mix Me. It seemed kind of like a Coldstone or Marble Slab, in that they mixed candies and things in with the spatulas and stuff. The ice cream wasn't frozen to begin with, though. The little man poured a cup of liquid in whatever flavor (vanilla, chocolate, mint, etc) into a shallow silver freezer. He let it sit for about 15 seconds and began scraping it up and mixing things in. We think it might have been made with coconut milk, and it was delicious. 

The rest of the night was really boring, we just came back to the hotel and did homework for our orientation. Orientation started this morning bright and early, with lots of filling out paperwork. They had to take pictures for our work visas and they made about 100 copies of our passports. We had a break for lunch, and for some reason I got light headed and shaky so I went and lay down for a while. I got to miss about an hour of the afternoon's alphabet lesson, and it seemed like nobody even noticed. Made it down in time to start the conversational lessons, so win win for me.

After dinner we went back to The Big C for more crazy junk food. We tried both the Hot Chili Squid and the Lobster Hot Plate after the Facebook debate. They both lost with a capital EW.

So that brings y'all up to speed with my past couple days. I'm almost over jet lag and have more grueling orientation. If I can get through the next couple of weeks and be ok, it should all be a breeze from there!

Flights

I'm never flying like that again.

I'd already gotten little sleep (mostly purposefully) on Thursday night due to a great send off from friends. Then I got up around 6 to spend time with Mom before she went to school. And while I went back to bed afterwards, I still got back up around 9 to run more last minute errands. I know, I know... I should have had everything done by Friday. Clearly I have mastered the art of procrastination. 

So that was about 5 hours of sleep.

I flew out Friday, around 6ish. Atlanta has a new snazzy international terminal which made the whole business so very much faster, Dani, Joe, and Josh all rode up to the airport to see me off, and when they all started looking sad as I went through security I almost lost it. There were 6 others from my group at the gate and we pretty much immediately started looking after each other.

No sleep on the flight Friday, which was 9 hours. 

Watched 4 movies: Django Unchained (good), The Guilt Trip (decent), Parental Guidance (meh), and The Great and Powerful Oz (crap; couldn't finish it (and I thought I could watch anything with James Franco); don't waste your time)

We landed in Frankfort, Germany, around 9am. Since we had an 8 hour layover, we decided to explore the city a bit. That made for an interesting trip, being that out of 7 of us maybe 3 have any travel sense. Several members of the group decided that stopping and looking around crazily and wondering aloud several times where we should go was far superior to picking a direction and walking to see what lay ahead. Needless to say, we heard several people call us stupid Americans. Eventually, we found the metro, and more eventually, we figured out how to work the ATM and then the ticket booth and found our way to Hauptwache. The architecture was what I expected, but not much else. Although in retrospect I'm really not sure what I was expecting. We found ourselves in the middle of a couple of festivals, one with shitty music by a girl that could not really hit Adele's high notes (soooo flat), and another was a Korean Buddhist celebration of some kind. In German. There were several different types of traditional Korean dress, and it was really interesting. We got coffee and a waffle for breakfast, which I couldn't finish because it had sugar clumps baked into it and was almost sickeningly sweet. I stopped to sketch a statue, and tourists not only came up to see what I was doing, but several sat on the bench, put an arm around me and snapped a picture.

We had a short hop to Vienna from there, and a mad dash to the next gate, as we landed with 45 minutes until our next flight left. Even though we could have walked from one plane to the next, we had to wind around the halls and up three flights of stairs to our next gate. No sleep on that plane either. 

From Vienna was our flight to Bankok, 10 hours. I got maybe 3 hours of sleep. 

Watched 3 more movies, Water For Elephants (not bad), and due to lack of sleep I forgot the others.

5 hour layover in Bankok. We sat at the gate and tried to sleep, while also trying very hard to make sure the bottoms of our shoes were not pointed at anyone, which proved difficult. Mostly we took turns wandering around our section of the terminal. The flight to Chiang Mai was pretty short, and I luckily slept for most of it.

Total: 10 hours of sleep in 72. Never again. 

I will say: those noise canceling headphones made for much better plane rides. They didn't take the noise away entirely, but it took away the oppressive bass from the engines and made the movies easier to hear. 

We were met in the airport at Chiang Mai by the director of our program, Dr. Nirund. He ushered us onto a van to Lampang, which was about an hour and a half that most of us slept through. Since it was around 9 pm, it was already dark outside and there wasn't a whole lot to see anyway.

We're now being put up in the Weingtong Hotel, in which I have been given my own room. Score! It may change tomorrow with the arrival of new people, especially considering that everyone else is paired, but thankfully tonight will make the second in which I am still in here alone. 

I'll update my adventures from today later. It's 1am here and I have to be up at 7 for orientation.