Thursday, August 31, 2006
Okay. Yesterday I got home after spending 3 days in the middle of the jungle with about 100 students from my school. Besides Grace and Well and a few of the other kids from my class I didn't hear any English the entire time. It was nice but also overwhelming. The camp was really a lot of fun. We started at 6 30 am on Monday when we all piled into three buses. Then I quickly learned that buses in Thailand have karaoke. For 3 hours students from my class sang and tried to get me to sing. We stopped at 7 eleven picked up Junk food and were off into the middle of nowhere. When we got to camp we were told to put are bags where we would be sleeping. There were a few different buildings and we were split up into 2 groups of girls and one group of guys. I slept in the main building. Like all buildings in Thailand it had a roof but not complete walls so we were still opened to the night which was nice but as I found out a little cold. The first day we went on a short hike and learned or well they learned about the ecosystem. At night we had to do presentations of what we learned during the day. And best of all we played games. So I can't remember if I ever talked about the games we played at orientation in Bangkok but these were even better. The thing about Thailand is most of the time they are very very conservative and you have to be polite but once they are in the proper place Thai people are crazy. Alright so they do these games where you run around and have to get into groups and put your heads together or you have to sit in a huge circle and they come and scream at you and you scream something back and raise your hands. anyway games a lot like camp games back home. But then they separate the winners and the losers and make you do a dance. You have to do the most awkward things and no one no one in the US would do it because you look so ridiculous but one thing that is really nice about it is that in Thailand everyone does it, so you don't have to worry about looking stupid and then having everyone else laugh at you because in the next second they probably are going to look worse that you just did. It made it so much more fun and I was able to let go and just laugh and have a good time. And let me tell to you Thai people know how to shake their hips and love to do so, especially the guys. We had a bunch of advisors that would take us around all young mostly guys and just 3 girls. These were the people that first showed us the dances. All this went until about 11 30 at night and then it was off to bed. We had yoga the next morning at 6 but first came showers. Well I finally got to see what most of Thailand is like except for when your in a city they use buckets of water to take showers and just pour the water over yourself. The bathrooms I saw on the first day we really really dirty and the Thai girls were all avoiding them as well as I was and we found that inside the building they had 2 showers that were much much cleaner and that's what I used. It actually was refreshing but let me tell you I'm just so so happy I got placed with the family that I did and that not only do I normally have a real shower but I have hot water. Now I know even more just how lucky I am. So the yoga was fun but then came the best part. My friend Earth said she was going to lead aerobics. The aerobics they do here is intense and very entertaining. Soon however it became even more entertaining. One of the advisors put on music and My Humps by the Black Eyed Peas came blasting out. So in the middle of the jungle I watched about 50 Thai girls do aerobics to My Humps and then a remix of Que Sera Sera it was one of the most entertaining and odd things I had ever seen in my whole life and I don't think I will ever forget it. After that we had breakfast and prepared to go out on a 7 km hike in the jungle. Yup that's right 7 km! Oh I also forgot to mention that at this point I had one bottle of water and I found out that they didn't have any and everyone was drinking water that they had just put in a bucket that came from a hose on the side of the hill. At this point I have to admit I got worried. how was I supposed to go 3 days on one bottle of water let alone go on a hike through the jungle and how do I explain that there is no way that I could drink that water without getting very very sick. Luckily I talked to Grace and I found out they could boil the water for me and then shortly after I saw a teacher with bottled water and asked for one for the hike and he gave me 2. I don't know what I would have done but I lucked out. Alright so then we headed off to get started on our hike. I went with Grace and our group which was about 15 people with one teacher and 2 guides/advisors. The hike was amazing we followed this stream up a mountain thought the jungle and then passing by a rubber tree forest and then back into jungle. At the top we climbed this muddy bank so that we could see just where the river began. while they listened to one guide two girls showed me this tiny little crab among the wet leaves. It was so weird there was a crab in the middle of the jungle at the top of a hill. It was so amazing. Everything was very beautiful and quite a lot of it reminded me of hikes I did last year in Hawaii and reminded me when I started to think about study abroad. We started to head back down and stop at a little clearing to sit and eat our lunches. I ate lunch looking out to the amazing Thai mountains that I just love to look at and was now in the middle off. It was so nice to finally be outside really experiencing natural Thailand. The hike was fun and hard but as we headed back to the main camp I realized I wasn't as tired as I thought I would be. Then came some thing that I know I will never forget, but that will have to wait for another day. I'll try to finish this up before I leave next week for AFS camp and I'm working on getting some photos up. More soon.
