Tuesday, May 28, 2013

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!

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