Elephants, Trains, and Monkeys. . .OH MY!

This past weekend, Julia and I planned a getaway trip to Kanchanaburi.

Or wait. . .really we just waited on the side of the road in Pakkred for a bus to come whisk us away. "Planned" might be stretching it.

Regardless of travelling on a whim, with no set plan, we had a blast!

Things I Have Learned About Travelling in Thailand
1. Speak Thai. Even though most Thai people selling something, or offering a service, can communicate in simple English, they often enjoy speaking Thai with westerners. It shows that you've put a bit of effort into learning a part of their culture. All you have to know is a couple phrases, and they think you're pro!

2. If you can speak Thai, ask for prices based on what you think it should be. Example- Instead of asking how much a piece of watermelon is by saying, "How much is this?" say "This is 10 baht, right?" You are less likely to get ripped off this way, and you don't have to barter as often.

3. Thai people will rarely admit they don't know where something is, or how to get there, or if they understand you. So if you ask to go to some mall somewhere 20 minutes away, don't be surprised when you're going in circles for an hour even though the taxi driver nodded at your request.

4. In reference to food, if your Thai is no good, they assume what you want. If you ask for fried rice with egg (Kai) they will often give you chicken (Gai) because it's more common for westerners to order.

5. Don't get into a taxi without a meter. You WILL be ripped off.

6. Your insurance probably doesn't cover moterbike transportation, with good reason.

7. If you only want to spend a certain amount of money, bring only that amount. Otherwise, you'll probably spend more. Bargains are everywhere.

8. Don't wear your hair down. Maybe it looks good now, but in 10 minutes, the sweat really changes that.

9. Thai people can eat fried food 24/7 and not get fat. You're not Thai, don't try it.

Whew. . . these are just a few.

Anyways, Kanchanaburi. How about a photo journal?

We arrived in Kanchanaburi at around 10am Saturday morning. It was about a 2.5 hour drive from where we live. From the bus station in Kanchanaburi we got a truck taxi to our accomadation.

The view from our raft house room window. This is the River Kwai, and that bridge, in the distance, that's the bridge built during WW II. I made the mistake of saying "Kwai" which means "buffalo" and should be pronounced "Kwae".

This is Julia looking out at the River from our window. Our rafthouse cost 300 baht (or 10 dollars total, 5 dollars each) for a room with two beds for the night.What a bargain!

 

This is one of several cemetarys in the area that commemorates the POW's that died during the construction of the Burma-Siam railway. It was a sobering visit as we stood among 7000 graves. Only a few days after rebembrance day, it really hit Julia and I. The bravery of these men is incredible.

After the cemetary, Julia and I devoured some rice with veggies and then followed a map until we reached the JEATH war museum. The following a map thing didn't work out so well, and we spend close to three hours wandering Kanchanburi with a lonely planet guide open to page 212. The museum itself was excellent. Simple, but interesting. It was about the lifestyle that the POW's lived as they built the Burma-Siam railway and the horrors they faced under the Japanese. "JEATH" stands for the five main nationalities involved during the contruction of the railway. These are Japanese, English, American, Thai, and Holland. It was in a replica of a hut that would have housed the Allied POW's during the war. An estimated 16000 POW's died during the contruction, as well as another 49000 local Thai, Burmese, and Malaysian labourers.

The Allied forces bombed the bridge over the river in 1944. This is one of the bombs.

The view of the river from the museum.

In front of the museum

Julia and I spent our evening at the local night market and then met some tourists at a restaurant later that night.A group of 5, a Canadian, an American, an English man, and two Aussies. The Canadian works for McAfee in Toronto. I had to bite my tongue from blurting out that I had uninstalled it because it seemed to create problems rather than fix them. All of them were older, with interesting stories! It was a good time.

In the morning we took a train to an elephant camp, it was a two hour train ride, filled with beautiful scenery! Too bad I fell asleep and only got to see about 30 minutes of it. . .

 

 

We got off our train, took a walk, and BAM. Elephants. We got our trek for halfprice by displaying our volunteer cards. A half hour elephant trek changed from 200 baht, to 100 baht (or just over 3 dollars)! The ride was amazing! Elephants are so powerful, you can just feel it riding one. All I could think was "I've only ever seen one of these behind bars, and now I'm sitting on one!" It was a lot of fun, totally worth the three dollars!

 

This was an absolutely amazing time! After the elephant trek, we took a taxi/truck to the erawan waterfalls! There were 7 main waterfalls, all of them were absolutely amazing. Julia and I spent hours swimming, going behind them, diving next to them, hiking up the mountain, and just taking it all in. At one point, we saw a whole clan of wild monkeys! Just hanging out, swinging on trees, and running past us; it was crazy.  The admission price was 200 baht, but we pulled out our volunteer cards once again and got Thai price, 40 baht! That's $1.30! It was an good time, full of adventure.

And now I'm back home, sitting in Sirin house, making plans for Rainbow House for the week. For not planning a thing, Julia and I had a great time, and the carefree attitude towards it probably made it more enjoyable.

My grand total for the weekend which includes accomadation, food, transport, waterfalls, elephant trek, museums etc. came to. . .

40 dollars!

A fun weekend that fits into my tiny budget!

Anyone want to come visit?

Massaging Muscles

At Sirin House, we have a masseuse. At Sirin House we have a massage table.

You may think that means, "Lucky me! Massages whenever I like!"

But really, it means, "Hey, I can learn this too!" Which really, is a good deal as it is such an effective way to ease tight muscles in children here with cerebral palsy, and can even make the autistic and downs syndrome kids calm down. It's excellent; no more bites for me! Well. . .not as many anyways.

I also have an interest in massage because in the future I want to do physiotherapy. Due to my interest, Linda (the beautiful and talented masseuse) offered to teach me her skills.

So I got offered an incredible opportunity to go to a CCD project far away, spend three days and two nights with Linda and Khun Chariya (the founder of CCD's wife!), and partake in massage training that Linda would be offering to mothers and staff there.

We arrived at 10 Monday morning and immediately began working. I listened to Linda demonstrate Swedish massage to the Thai mothers at the CCD center, and then assisted them as they attempted to massage their disabled child. We massaged, talked, and laughed for three hours, grabbed some lunch and headed out to do home visits.

The home visits were a new experience for me. We drove deep into farm country and popped in to small farm houses, filled with family members who had no money, and no access to appropriate health care. The "children" (I am using quotations because two of them were in their 20's) were often suffering from severe cerebral palsy, and due to their lack of physio treatment, deteriorated into even worse condition. Linda offered up massage as a technique to stimulate the muscles in the body, which proved to be fantastic. However, I couldn't walk away without feeling like these children just need so much more.

They need consistency in their medical treatments, and a reason to stay motivated. A need an hour visit can encourage, but not meet.

We finished home visits around 6 and then headed to our hotel (yeah, hotel) for the night. I ate Som Tam, with two chillis (spice queen right here) and then headed to bed at 8.

The next two days were similar, with the exception of a trip to a market festival at a local temple. The whole experience allowed me to learn all sorts of massage techniques and brainstorm ideas for the application of massage. I'm a masseuse in training everyone.

So if you do not know me well now, you should get on that!

Linda massaging a child at the CBR 1 center

A mother practicing on her child

Demonstrating Swedish massage strokes

At a home visit teaching massage to the mother and CCD staff

At another home visit. Everyone practicing!

Having fun learning massage

Festival at a local temple

Same temple later at night

Mmmmmmmm, Kanom (snack) anyone?

A typical Thai mannequin

They eat these, seriously. It's not just to shock tourists. I've SEEN it eaten.

An excellent trip, an excellent opportunity. Thailand is allowing me to have many of these!

Arcades and Chocolate

This week, it was me and Vicki at Rainbow House/ Music therapy at the government orphanages. She was doing two days at the wards, I was doing one, and then this upcoming week I will do two and she will do one. The Oasis team is doing in depth Thai lessons for two weeks in Bangkok (jealous!) because they have a budget set aside for it. So me and Vicki are taking the brunt of the work and swapping jobs. Friday however, we were both at Rainbow House, and were asked to do a cooking session with the kids.

Well, as most of you probably know, cooking/baking isn't a talent, or skill I have to really. . .teach. So Vicki and I chose something easy. . .or so we thought.

Banana pops! Yummy and simple. You take a banana, shove it on a skewer, coat it in chocolate and then add sprinkles, peanuts etc.

We bought the ingrediants and set out to prepare the chocolate. Thailand is not the best place to buy chocolate, it's quite expensive for anything familiar, so we decided to purchase cheaper Thai chocolate so that we could buy more with our 300 baht budget. We brought our load of bars to the kitchen and dumped them into a pot. We were given a time limit; the kids were going to start piling in at 10:00.

I was given the responsibility of stirring the chocolate, and started to noticed something was off after about 10 minutes. It was melting. .. kind of, but in a weird chunky, nasty, not really melty, creamy sort of way. It sort of looked like this.

Clumpy dirt.

Turns out, Thai chocolate has an anti-melting agent in it. APPARENTLY, everybody knows that except poor Vicki and Emily. The kids were already lining up to stick their bananas on their skewers, and as soon as the chocolate was out of the pot it hardened immediately. There was no way peanuts or sprinkles were going to stick to that mess, and all I could picture was all the kids eating their snack of a banana on a stick. Cool!

So I booted it and with great speed, flew to Tesco's and purchased some peanut butter mixed with nutella. Proud to say, that saved the day, and the kids loved their creations. But that moment when we realized the chocolate was not happening was a pretty stressful moment.

Cooking and I don't mix. I should just accept it now really, and make sure I marry a man who can cook.

This week Vicki and I also took a group of three boys from Rainbow House out for arcade games and ice cream! It was a lot of fun, but hectic too! As soon as we got in the taxi to leave, one of the boys, Tee, reached over and repeatedly honked the horn of the car. That pretty much sums up the night. Boys with lots of energy to spare on exhasuting Vicki and I. However, it was a good time. We had a lot of laughs, and burned many calories as we chased them from arcade to arcade.

Sombut and Mayom racing

Sombut stuffing his face

I really miss you all at home. Just being able to have contact with people I love is an awesome blessing. Simple words and comments mean more to me than you can imagine! Thanks for keeping in touch! I love you all.

I Love My Family!

Today I recieved an incredible, and encouraging piece of mail!

A PACKAGE!

It was a good size, the biggest any volunteer in the house has gotten (oh yeah, from MY family) filled with goodies from home! Here were the contents.

My HIGHLAND DANCE SHOES! Along with my music! I was so excited to recieve this. Rachel and James had mentioned me teaching some of the kids highland. Can you think of a cuter thing? Thai children in kilts with their hair in buns?

A blacklight puppet! Not this one mind you, but similar. It glows under blacklight which is an excellent stimulus for some of these children. I didn't bother to bring it originally because I didn't think I would have access to the appropriate equipment. But alas! Rainbow House has a blacklight in their sensory room. I cannot wait to use this!

YAY! You may wonder why my parents would send this. Well, I asked them. Everything here is "whitening" because Thai women want to have pale, fair skin. Believe it or not, even the deodorant is whitening. Since I was not fond of the white armpit look, I asked if my parents could send me some regular stuff asap! And they sent me four sticks! woohoo!

They also sent a fun, puppet cd! This CD has already gotten use. I popped it in as soon as it arrived at Rainbow House and pulled out Flo (the blacklight puppet) and danced with Samon, Pookow, and Krit. The other children got to go to the computer room, and since these three were sitting doing nothing, I managed to create a bit of a party. We were having a blast!

and last. . .but NOT LEAST

Chocolate! A big bag of halloween sized reese peanute butter cups, oh henry's, and reese's pieces! Did you know that people in England do not eat these? Niether do Thais! So I spent the afternoon spreading the chocolate and enjoying everyone's love of the peanut+chocolate combo. My bag is already half gone! I gave some chocolate to the cook at Rainbow House and in return she gave me a big bag full of. . . .

Sugar Bananas! They are smaller banana's, very sweet, and very good! She gave me two bushels as a thank you for the chocolate. What a treat!

So all in all, today was a super day. At the bottom of the package was a letter from my dad, and a few days earlier I had recieved one from my mom and my sister. All three made me cry. I love my family with all my heart, and miss them immensely.

THANK YOU MOM AND DAD AND KAYLIN. I love you forever!

Short and Sweet

This week has been a busy one, truly an emotional rollar coaster!

Monday and Tuesday I was at Rainbow house
Wednesday I was at the government wards
Thursday I went on an hour bus drive to a CCD project called CBR 2. It's a drop in center for mothers who have children with disabilities. They can bring their children, and have them recieve physio treatment, and interaction with other disabled children.
Friday was a Holiday! No work, so me and Vicki (a new volunteer from England) captured the opportunity to hang out and get to know each other better.

The Oasis team went away on a vacation to a beach this long weeked to relax! I could've gone, but I thought I would save a trip like that for when I really need that relaxing time. So, me and Vicki are sticking it out at home this weekend, which is proving to be a blast!

Julia, a girl from the Oasis team, has come down with quite the combination of illnesses. She has bronchitis, and a huge, painful  boil on her knee that needed to get drained at the hospital. She's been camping out at the hospital the past two nights, and may be there for the rest of the week. It's an awful thing to have happen here, it really can make a person homesick and just want the people closest to them to be there. Please keep her in your thoughts and prayers!

Playing in the sensory room at Rainbow House! I'm giving Anna her favourite thing. . .airplane ride!

Beautiful Down Syndrome baby at Rainbow House taking a nap

Some of the kids at Rainbow House laying down for a nap

The physio, P'Por, at CBR 2. Helping this little girl walk.

A really sweet boy at CBR 2, so determined to walk!

Little chub man and I playing away

Last night me and Vicki took a trip into Bangkok and met some backpackers! We bused ourselves in and explored the city, while eating some delicious Pad Thai! yum!

And of course the highlight of our night was going to the Bangkok Hospital to visit our beautiful and very missed Julia!!