Our home away from home–very basic dorm room with bath and turquoise refrigerator–and very hard beds.
The street where we live
The power lines here fascinate me. Everywhere they look like the above picture. I wonder how Thai linemen deal with this when something goes wrong.
The second day we were here, Chuck and I took a walk in our neighborhood and came across this big temple complex. There are MANY wats (temples) in Bangkok. We have yet to see the famous ones downtown. Yesterday we ventured downtown by ourselves. First, a cab to the airport. Then the Air Link (elevated train) to downtown. After that, a change to the Sky Train, changing trains once, and arriving at the Chao Phraya River where we took a boat tour, seeing the city from the river. You will see the photos from that trip soon but, now that I can add pictures, I have some catching up to do. It is still a very slow process to load each picture.
Yesterday I wrote a long blog with several pictures and then found that only part of it, a small part, got posted. My mistake, I’m sure, so I’ll be more careful today.
So far, I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed. We live in a busy area, very crowded with tiny restaurants and other small stores lining the streets. Since we are located next to an ENORMOUS university–I don’t yet know how many students there are–which is really several campuses strung together, there are naturally students everywhere also and their favorite mode of transportation is motorbikes which line the streets. Mostly, we just walk in the streets because the sidewalks are crowded with “stuff” from the stores and restaurants spilling out onto them. There is a large, open air food court close by and we have sampled from the array of street food on offer. I will send some photos of that when I have a collection.
Everyone we have met has been so friendly and helpful but most have very little English. I find, once again, that people can generally get basic information across even when they don’t share the same language. I went to the 7 Eleven (yes, there are many here!) yesterday to try to find a card reader for my new camera. Two employees immediately came to help me when they saw me looking at each one they had. when it turned out they didn’t have one that would work for me, the young clerk led me out of the store and a couple of blocks away to a store that could help me. I couldn’t believe that. So nice.
Fr. Lee and others with the church have also been more than helpful. Serene, another temporary missionary (although she is about a third of the way through a year’s mission) from Singapore, has been so good to us. She lives two doors down the hall. She took us to a major shopping center on Saturday and we picked up a few things for our new digs. A shower curtain with a tension rod was one purchase as our tiny bathroom has a European-style shower–a shower head in the corner of the room which means everything in the whole room gets wet when you shower.
TUESDAY, MARCH 7,2017
I am having technological difficulties and cannot currently send any photos so hope to resolve that somehow today. It is frustrating because I have so many pictures I wanted to share. But, I’m posting anyway and will catch up with the pictures as soon as I can.
Yesterday was our first day to teach. For the first session, four students showed up. We observed Serene teaching and also participated. I really enjoyed the students who are eager to learn, friendly, and respectful. Afterwards the students hung around to talk for a long while and play board games. They seem to enjoy that a lot. They went out to get some dinner, brought it back, and we all ate together.
The Cornerstone Student Center where we teach is just across the street from us and there is a little “living room” there which is used as a second classroom when needed. We can use it to hang out in when we want so we don’t have to just sit in desk chairs in our room. It also has a washer which I will put to use soon. There are no dryers so I will bring everything back here to dry on our balcony.
Hopefully, I will have some photos the next time I post.
We have arrived! It was an incredibly long trip, made longer by the inevitable flight delays of all three flights. The longest was in Beijing where we waited, standing, about two hours. We were pretty tired by then after our 13 hour flight in cramped seating. From door to door, our travel time was approximately 36 hours. After arriving in Bangkok, it took to get through immigration, finding our baggage after we were given the wrong carousel number, and customs. Fr. Lee had been waiting for 3 hours when we finally appeared–at about 5 a.m. Because it has taken a while to get our computer up and running, my first post is much later than I expected and it is now Sunday afternoon.
Since we flew over the top of the world to get to China, I thought you might like to see a photo of what it looks like near the North Pole. We never did see that little barber pole with the snow on top but I’m sure it is there somewhere. We were about 7 miles up so perhaps that explains it.
Sa Wat Dee/Ka (Hello!) You can recognize that it is I, Bonnie, writing this because Chuck would have said “Sa Wat Dee/Krop– Ka is used after each sentence by women and Krop is used by men. That’s your first Thai lesson.
The time is winding down and it is now just 4 days until we will be leaving for Thailand. We are pretty much packed up and ready to go with just a few things left on our “to do” list. We’re very excited.
Here is a photo of us with our Thai language and culture teacher, Nina, at our final lesson. We are so happy to have met Nina; she is an excellent and patient teacher.
Sa Wat Dee/Ka (Goodbye–same as hello. Isn’t that easy?
Hello all our followers of our blog of 2011-2012! We are going on another mission trip–this time to Bangkok, Thailand. We’ll be leaving home on March 1 and will return on April 4. Therefore, this will be a much shorter trip than our trip to Lithuania. We have decided to do another blog for this trip provided we will have an available computer to use where we are going. I am letting you know early in case you wish to add your name to those receiving notification of our posts as they occur.
We will be assisting in the Cornerstone Student Center located next door to King Mungkuts Institute of Technology in the Lat Krabang district east of downtown Bangkok. We will be teaching conversational English and having fellowship with the students there. We know this will be an interesting experience and look forward to it.
