Like I mentioned previously, I am trying to transfer my blog so that I have it all in one place. Last October I was spending my year in Thailand doing research, and this blog stems from that.
This past month has been amazing, splitting this up into a few blogs to make room for everything will be difficult as they flow one right into the next. Starting at the beginning, I boarded the train with less than a happy attitude. It was humid and around 100 degrees outside of my second-class sleeper to Bangkok, which had a sticky floor and table, and the fan that was for my seat, didn’t work. Oh yeah, and the squatty potty; that you had to walk through a flood to get to. They set the beds down at around 7pm and took them back up at around 430 am when we were near Bangkok. Getting off the train I literally jumped on the city bus, as they don’t stop but merely slow down, to the bus station and boarded a bus for Chiang Mai. We arrived in Chiang Mai by 4 pm in the pouring rain and found a place to stay near the gate, which is the city entrance and still standing from the 1300’s. I stayed in a 300 baht per night room with no window and it smelled like mold and mildew, but it was central to everything, clean enough with its thread barren sheets, ratty blanket and stained mattress. The bed also bent every time you sat on it, having to readjust the legs when you woke in the morning. Never would I ever stay in a place like this is America. This first night I met some people who I would be working with and went to dinner, Mexican! You will never understand how much you miss something until you have no access to it. In my town, your choices for food are Thai, KFC, or starve. Needless to say I would gain a lot of weight on this trip. We went on a short tour of the city and then called it an early night as I had been traveling for over 24 hours.
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