Alright alright already! So many complaints about lack of posting but we've been too busy living life! (Semi-joking, I've also just been bad with posting because the times when I'm most inspired to write, I'm usually in the middle of doing something like working or grocery shopping and by the time I get home I just want to drink tea and watch Breaking Bad and read the Ender's Game series while helping to cook some awesome new dinner that Julia thought up. It's now summer break and since we're back from vacation I have no excuses.)
We have so much to catch up on both on our life in Thailand and on our trip to Vietnam! I think I'll start with Vietnam and possibly go backwards from there. Because it was a 26 day trip that included a visit to Bangkok, I'll probably break it up into a few blog entries. So here we go, Vietnam travels days 1-3: Bangkok
Julia made this brilliant insight a while ago before we began teaching about how our memory of past experiences and people who have come in and out of our lives end up being summed up in a sentence. This not surprisingly seems to apply to many aspects of life, from the way we describe our 1st grade teacher to the way we describe that 6 month study abroad trip when we come back and everybody is like, "Welcome back! How was [insert country here]?" and there's no way you can answer such a broad question with anything but a sentence that you repeat for every person who asks. She talked about how it's crazy that we're going to be with these students and see their progress and develop lesson plans for them for a year (or in our case, half a year) and they'll go on to other teachers and other schools and live their lives and we'll become a sentence. The sum total of our effort and caring and love and it will end with, "Yeah she was a good teacher" or "Yeah I didn't really like my ___ grade teacher." It's an interesting thought about our impact on other people's lives and of course, makes one think about the sentence that other people and memories have become in our lives. (At the end of our last day of teaching, I turned to Julia on the ride home and simply said out of context, "Do you think we're a good sentence?" and after figuring out what I was talking about she smiled and said, "I think we are.")
I didn't really like Mrs. Gilbert, my first grade teacher, but I liked all other elementary school teachers.
India was a crazy amazing experience and it's weird to be back.
Vietnam was a beautiful place with history and we are so grateful we were able to go.
With this one sentence realization, we've been trying to focus on fleshing out the experience in our minds before we lose all of the wonderful and nitty-gritty detail. Luckily, with the help of diaries, blogs, and pictures, we get to capture even more about our experiences to share with others and to reminisce when we're older and are fondly looking back on our lives.
Our vacation began with a train ride to Bangkok, where we would fly to Hanoi (if you're looking at this on a map, [Kendrice and JB I'm sure you are] it doesn't geographically make sense for us to do this, but these were the cheapest tickets). Bangkok is still a part of Thailand so of course we enjoy the city, but the appropriate sentence for Bangkok would be, it just isn't Chiang Mai. Everything is expensive, there's not much to do by way of tourism (it's definitely a city that's probably more fun to live in than to visit), and it's hotter than Chiang Mai as it's further south and more of a metropolitan area. (I've emphasized this in our blog entries in the past, but I want to make sure to say once again that this is not me complaining, at all. In fact, if you could hear me read this blog entry out loud, you'd realize that the way I describe everything is just me putting my own spin on our experiences. Julia and I actually have more of a tendency to laugh at and appreciate experiences than it is for us to complain about or regret them.We lived in India for goodness' sake.) I should say though that street food in BKK is different from northern Chiang Mai food so we had an awesome time trying bits and pieces of every delicious stall we saw. Jules and I spent our time in Bangkok mostly wandering around, marking the beginning of our losing weight as we always do when backpacking because we walk EVERYWHERE to save money and (Alex you would hate this), we also don't eat as often as we should. But that isn't about saving money, it's usually just bad timing.
We went to the Songkran Niyosane Forensic Medicine Museum & Parasite Museum. And I'll intro this with the Lonely Planet book description (as well as the description in the link), "This gory institution contains the various appendages and remnants of famous murders, including the bloodied T-shirt from a victim who was stabbed to death with a dildo." It was much more than that however. It was like if you took the Bodies Exhibit and made it so nothing had to be censored because we're in a third world and nobody would sue the museum for accosting their senses with such unexpected raw images. It included everything from real life preserved babies with birth defects to a section about how to test yourself for breast cancer (which included this awesome bust that had a small lump in it that you had to find. It was quite informative as I felt it's hard to determine when a lump is cancerous or normal, but this example showed me that it is in fact fairly obvious). The museum is across the river in an area dedicated to medical students. There is a school for medicine and nursing, clearly many talks are held here about the future of medicine, and there are tons of doctors and nurses walking around the area. In short, not many tourists go to this museum, so everything's in Thai and Julia and I had a fun time reading the Latin names for things and figuring out what that translates to in layman's terms. Interesting museum; probably not something people normally do in Bangkok.
When we first got to Thailand we were still suffering from jet lag, so we never had our "One Night in Bangkok" yet. So this time, we were sure to fit that in. In the evening we wandered around to places like Cheap Charlie's, this eclectic street bar (to say the least, I got a few low-quality pictures of the place for you tosee) run by an expat that serves extremely cheap drinks. For some reason we also got this huge hankerin' for Indian food but funnily enough, Indian food is way too expensive anywhere else in the world, which made me miss India a little bit (more on that later, as while we went to Vietnam, our friends Haleigh and Sarah made a trip to India that reminded us of how much we love/hate it and want to go back/never want to see it again. It's a complicated relationship). We also went to Soi Cowboy. As I've described before, Thailand's street system is composed of main streets with a bunch of side streets called "soi's." Normally soi's are the name of the main street and then a number, so we live on Nimman soi 8, but this soi in Bangkok managed to become so infamous that they were actually able to get a giant light up sign up that has the name of the soi in big flashy letters. I say infamous because this is where the red-light district is and it's what Bangkok is famous for as far as the sex industry. It's like Las Vegas on speed cramped into this one 400 meter street. We went to see it for many reasons: 1. Whether Bangkok likes it or not, it's a significant part of the city 2. We were curious and wanted to analyze it from our weird sociological and psychological perspective as two young girls who are probably about the same age as many of the dancers and "dancers" in the bars. Soi Cowboy is also where you go if you want to see the Ping Pong Show, which if you don't know what it is, I am not going to describe nor link to it. It was an incredibly uncomfortable experience walking down that street, not because anything happened with us, in fact we were largely ignored because we weren't older white men, but because of the things we saw. And all I wanted to do was learn about the girls and their story. Why are they there? Do they enjoy it? Do they want to achieve more in life? And who am I to judge? Who am I from my feminist American girl empowered perspective to assume that this is something negative and low-down from which Thai women need to be saved. Anyway, I could (and Jules and I did) go on about that forever.
So those were our activities in Bangkok! There are two airports in Bangkok and the one we were flying out of is actually an hour outside of the city. To save money (of course), we decided to take a train there, which meant that we had to leave at either 11 at night or 5 the next morning. Since our flight was at 7 and we didn't want to push it, we slept (or rather "slept") in the airport.
Next up: Hanoi and our wonderful friend Jenna
We have so much to catch up on both on our life in Thailand and on our trip to Vietnam! I think I'll start with Vietnam and possibly go backwards from there. Because it was a 26 day trip that included a visit to Bangkok, I'll probably break it up into a few blog entries. So here we go, Vietnam travels days 1-3: Bangkok
Julia made this brilliant insight a while ago before we began teaching about how our memory of past experiences and people who have come in and out of our lives end up being summed up in a sentence. This not surprisingly seems to apply to many aspects of life, from the way we describe our 1st grade teacher to the way we describe that 6 month study abroad trip when we come back and everybody is like, "Welcome back! How was [insert country here]?" and there's no way you can answer such a broad question with anything but a sentence that you repeat for every person who asks. She talked about how it's crazy that we're going to be with these students and see their progress and develop lesson plans for them for a year (or in our case, half a year) and they'll go on to other teachers and other schools and live their lives and we'll become a sentence. The sum total of our effort and caring and love and it will end with, "Yeah she was a good teacher" or "Yeah I didn't really like my ___ grade teacher." It's an interesting thought about our impact on other people's lives and of course, makes one think about the sentence that other people and memories have become in our lives. (At the end of our last day of teaching, I turned to Julia on the ride home and simply said out of context, "Do you think we're a good sentence?" and after figuring out what I was talking about she smiled and said, "I think we are.")
I didn't really like Mrs. Gilbert, my first grade teacher, but I liked all other elementary school teachers.
India was a crazy amazing experience and it's weird to be back.
Vietnam was a beautiful place with history and we are so grateful we were able to go.
With this one sentence realization, we've been trying to focus on fleshing out the experience in our minds before we lose all of the wonderful and nitty-gritty detail. Luckily, with the help of diaries, blogs, and pictures, we get to capture even more about our experiences to share with others and to reminisce when we're older and are fondly looking back on our lives.
Our vacation began with a train ride to Bangkok, where we would fly to Hanoi (if you're looking at this on a map, [Kendrice and JB I'm sure you are] it doesn't geographically make sense for us to do this, but these were the cheapest tickets). Bangkok is still a part of Thailand so of course we enjoy the city, but the appropriate sentence for Bangkok would be, it just isn't Chiang Mai. Everything is expensive, there's not much to do by way of tourism (it's definitely a city that's probably more fun to live in than to visit), and it's hotter than Chiang Mai as it's further south and more of a metropolitan area. (I've emphasized this in our blog entries in the past, but I want to make sure to say once again that this is not me complaining, at all. In fact, if you could hear me read this blog entry out loud, you'd realize that the way I describe everything is just me putting my own spin on our experiences. Julia and I actually have more of a tendency to laugh at and appreciate experiences than it is for us to complain about or regret them.We lived in India for goodness' sake.) I should say though that street food in BKK is different from northern Chiang Mai food so we had an awesome time trying bits and pieces of every delicious stall we saw. Jules and I spent our time in Bangkok mostly wandering around, marking the beginning of our losing weight as we always do when backpacking because we walk EVERYWHERE to save money and (Alex you would hate this), we also don't eat as often as we should. But that isn't about saving money, it's usually just bad timing.
We went to the Songkran Niyosane Forensic Medicine Museum & Parasite Museum. And I'll intro this with the Lonely Planet book description (as well as the description in the link), "This gory institution contains the various appendages and remnants of famous murders, including the bloodied T-shirt from a victim who was stabbed to death with a dildo." It was much more than that however. It was like if you took the Bodies Exhibit and made it so nothing had to be censored because we're in a third world and nobody would sue the museum for accosting their senses with such unexpected raw images. It included everything from real life preserved babies with birth defects to a section about how to test yourself for breast cancer (which included this awesome bust that had a small lump in it that you had to find. It was quite informative as I felt it's hard to determine when a lump is cancerous or normal, but this example showed me that it is in fact fairly obvious). The museum is across the river in an area dedicated to medical students. There is a school for medicine and nursing, clearly many talks are held here about the future of medicine, and there are tons of doctors and nurses walking around the area. In short, not many tourists go to this museum, so everything's in Thai and Julia and I had a fun time reading the Latin names for things and figuring out what that translates to in layman's terms. Interesting museum; probably not something people normally do in Bangkok.
When we first got to Thailand we were still suffering from jet lag, so we never had our "One Night in Bangkok" yet. So this time, we were sure to fit that in. In the evening we wandered around to places like Cheap Charlie's, this eclectic street bar (to say the least, I got a few low-quality pictures of the place for you tosee) run by an expat that serves extremely cheap drinks. For some reason we also got this huge hankerin' for Indian food but funnily enough, Indian food is way too expensive anywhere else in the world, which made me miss India a little bit (more on that later, as while we went to Vietnam, our friends Haleigh and Sarah made a trip to India that reminded us of how much we love/hate it and want to go back/never want to see it again. It's a complicated relationship). We also went to Soi Cowboy. As I've described before, Thailand's street system is composed of main streets with a bunch of side streets called "soi's." Normally soi's are the name of the main street and then a number, so we live on Nimman soi 8, but this soi in Bangkok managed to become so infamous that they were actually able to get a giant light up sign up that has the name of the soi in big flashy letters. I say infamous because this is where the red-light district is and it's what Bangkok is famous for as far as the sex industry. It's like Las Vegas on speed cramped into this one 400 meter street. We went to see it for many reasons: 1. Whether Bangkok likes it or not, it's a significant part of the city 2. We were curious and wanted to analyze it from our weird sociological and psychological perspective as two young girls who are probably about the same age as many of the dancers and "dancers" in the bars. Soi Cowboy is also where you go if you want to see the Ping Pong Show, which if you don't know what it is, I am not going to describe nor link to it. It was an incredibly uncomfortable experience walking down that street, not because anything happened with us, in fact we were largely ignored because we weren't older white men, but because of the things we saw. And all I wanted to do was learn about the girls and their story. Why are they there? Do they enjoy it? Do they want to achieve more in life? And who am I to judge? Who am I from my feminist American girl empowered perspective to assume that this is something negative and low-down from which Thai women need to be saved. Anyway, I could (and Jules and I did) go on about that forever.
So those were our activities in Bangkok! There are two airports in Bangkok and the one we were flying out of is actually an hour outside of the city. To save money (of course), we decided to take a train there, which meant that we had to leave at either 11 at night or 5 the next morning. Since our flight was at 7 and we didn't want to push it, we slept (or rather "slept") in the airport.
Next up: Hanoi and our wonderful friend Jenna
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| Terrible picture of Cheap Charlie's, but captures some of the eccentricities |
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| Soi Cowboy |
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| Julia sticking out like a sore thumb |
You know, when I tell almost ANYONE about what you and Julia are doing, I almost inevitably get at least a shocked look,a "Are you CRAZY?" or they flat out ask "Are you ok with THAT?!" Almost all of these people either don't have children yet or never had. I just laugh but I can see that reading about you guys walking in that Red Light area will make some people cringe. But As you have shown, being smart and aware is most of what you need! Love You!!!!!
ReplyDeleteI am so amused that you went to the forensic medicine museum and parasite museum. That sounds kinda gross but well also awesome. Soi Cowboy seems intense! Also I think you guys are a good sentence, too.
ReplyDeletePS. YAY finally an update! So excited.
ReplyDeletecome home
ReplyDelete-sammers
Finally made a profile so I can comment on your posts!
ReplyDeleteI'm so glad to get the mention, and yes, I really did check a map.
Sounds like an awesome vacation! I'm not sure if it's weird that I totally understand you wanting to observe the Red Light District. I would too. Just to observe the situation, see if it's worth the hype.