Only in Thailand....

Only in Thailand does a 7 hour road trip turn into 13 hours. Every time our directors offer to bring us on a trip we skeptically accept. Don't get me wrong, we are very thankful they want to share Thailand with us, but nothing ever goes as planned. For example, on Sunday they took us to a tourist attraction in our province. We were told we would be leaving at 8:30 a.m. and be home around 2. Perfect. We get to see an attraction and still enjoy Sunday. Of course, this was too good to be true. Friday as I was leaving school one of the teachers stopped me to say we would be going to Pattaya also. Pattaya is by no means close to Samut Prakan, we are talking about 2.5 hours away. Being the grateful teachers we are we all still went knowing we were getting ourselves into a long day. They said we would return home around 5 or 6, but none of us were holding our breath. Turns out we didn't get home until 9. Surprise, surprise.

The first stop on our mini road trip was to the Ancient City in Samut Prakan, my province. The 7 English teachers, a Filipi

no teacher, our two directors, and the wan (van) driver piled into the

school wan (van) at 8 am for a little adventure. (Thai people have substituted the w sound for v, so a van is a wan and we live in a willage not a village) The Ancient City is a 140 acre area that has replicas of all the major attractions in Thailand. Nothing in this 140 acres is original, everything is a copy. The ide

a is good for people who are not staying in Thailand for long, but since I will be hear for a year I would much rather see the real attraction. I saw one of my students at the park, but being the shy 2nd grader he is of course he would barely say hello.

After the Ancient City we piled back into the rickety and uncomfortable wan for a 2.5 hour trip

to Pattaya. Pattaya is on the Gulf of Thailand and known as a dirty tourist area where white men flock to find Thai women (for a price of course). I was excited to see the water, but it wasn't

exactly what I bargained for when signing up for this trip. We were not told why we were going to Pattaya, but we all knew it was because our directors had a little errand to tend to (on Dec. 10 we are taking our students to Pattaya to clean up the beaches). When we get there we soon found out that our directors were ditching us to meet with local officials to discuss the clean up. Hmm, how convenient. After 2.5 hours in the wan they never thought it was necessary to tell us that as soon as we got there they would literally jump out on the side of the road leaving us with the non English speaking driver. We all just looked at each other in disbelief and astonishment (it's in situations like this I'm very happy that I don't get easily upset). After

laughing it off we hopped out and headed for the sand. It felt great to enjoy the sounds of the ocean in November and looking out at the water was a nice break from the city.

Besides the beach, Pattaya had a great mall with a huge Christmas tree set up in the plaza. I'm not sure I've ever seen a Christmas tree surrounded by palm trees, I think I like it. We ran into the wan driver and through pointing and pantomiming found out we would be leaving at 4:45, yeah right. We headed inside to find a little dinner, it was fairly unanimous that Burger King sounded the best. Not having a lot of time we quickly ate and were headed outside to meet our directors, but of course we crossed their path in the mall. They were on their way to order pizza. Making a plan with these people is virtually impossible. Long story short, we didn't end up leaving Pattaya until after 6. Mai pen rai.

We weren't home free yet. As we were all beginning to fall asleep in the wan, the driver stopped because our directors wanted to go to a fish market. We were told to get out for 20 minutes and I think the directors quickly saw our lack of excitement as we just stared at them. There was a narrow pathway through the market with dried fish products on the left (gag me) and candy on the right. After looking at about 4 booths I quickly figured out the next 30 were going to have the exact same products for the exact same price. Our directors bought some goodies and then, finally, we were on our home. After 13 hours we made it home. It was a long day with a lot of unexpected plans, but seeing the ocean and sunset was pretty great.