After two months of travelling around the world, I am finally back in my homeland (admittedly, my adopted homeland-as in Korea, not America. I am now realizing that this could be rather confusing. Clarification: I am currently in Korea). These past months were a great big ridiculous adventure in which I took 12 flights and went to four different countries. And believe it or not, this is actually tame compared to some of my Fulbright compatriots. So I'll just start from the beginning.
I started my journey on New Year's Eve by saying goodbye to my bff, who was the best and drove me to the KTX station after the end of my winter camp. Oh yah. Jk. Lemme talk about my winter camp real quick...
So winter camp is this thing that you teach when you are the native teacher at your school. Well, I have been told that not all schools have one (due to lack of funding, or lack of interest, idk), but it seems like at least half of my Fulbright compadres have had to teach one (or two if they volunteered). Also, quick side note, I'm not sure if I really talked a lot about what I actually do in the classroom. I've had a lot of rambly posts, but I don't exactly remember what always made the cut in those...so. A lot of elementary teachers here have to work a lot with the textbook. In high school and middle school, this isn't always the case, but in Elementary school, the curriculum is a little more strict than at other school levels. So, my role in the class, which is not the same for all schools!, but for mine, I am a tool used for pronunciation and also for making interactive "game" type of lessons for the students. Also, with one of my coteachers, I basically split the textbook with him and we each do a side of the page. Anyways, the point of that little anecdote was to let you guys know that I usually don't consider myself the lead teacher or lesson planner in my classes. That's just how it works at my school. BUT. and a big BUT (COVER YOUR BUTT! lego movie reference, if you haven't seen it, GO WATCH IT NOW. do it. NOW. STOP READING THIS. GO, GO NOW)................................................................................................
ok, now that you've seen it, I can start making lots of references to it in this post, and you, as the reader, can understand them. OK. back to topic. where was I? oh yah. Winter Camp. *****If you want to skip this long section about winter camp and just read about my winter vacation adventures, skip to the next section beginning with little stars (hey, I don't know your life, maybe you don't have time to do things like read this blog, but for some reason you find yourself here reading it, wondering why you are here, and don't want to hear my winter camp teaching nonsense. I understand, go ahead and skip it, I won't know)******** So I am not usually the lead planner or anything for class. But for winter camp, I am the leader. I plan all of the things. ALL OF THE THINGS. Originally, I had wanted to do a sort of theme to my camp. But, I wasn't really able to do that because my camp only ran for about three days (December 29-31). Ok, not about. It ran for exactly three days. Whatever....I'm really terrible at focusing haha, OK, deep breath, back to camp. So I broke it down into three days, and just tried my best. I was pretty lost on how to plan three days of material as I just hadn't really thought any of my ideas were good or fun. Also, one of my coteachers wanted the camp to be like 30 students, and I just didn't know how to plan with that many students. When all was said and done, I had 24 students in the camp, and one who just didn't show up for the first two days, but decided to show his face the last day....basically just for the pizza party. lol I'll talk about that later...So the first day I decided to do an introduction game as well as an American Slang lesson. But the slang I taught them was for the most part age appropriate, in case any of you were wondering. I divided it into three sections: Greetings, Descriptors, and Texting language. Then I taught them all how to play flip cup. Yes. THAT flip cup. But I obviously played it with fanta orange soda and pocari sweat. And left out some key details about where and why we play the game. So the kids super liked the game. I made them into teams and each person had to say and define a slang term we had learned before drinking/flipping their cup and moving on to the next team member. This could easily be harder, such as a dialogue, etc, but since I had a mixture of higher level 6th graders and lower level 4th graders, I kept it pretty basic. I taught them words like "ratchet" and phrases like "What's up" and texting language like "lol" because surprisingly (idk if it's because I am just in a more rural placement so they aren't exposed, or if they really are just too young) but most of them don't know any American/English texting language like lol, omg, brb, ttyl, etc. So that was fun. A few of them kept saying "Teacher. lol" in real person. Too proud.
So onto day 2. Day two consisted of two completely separate activities that took up each half of the day. The first half of the day, my students made up questions (appropriate questions to ask a foreigner to start a conversation) and then talked to my best friend from home, Sarah bearah (not sure if only her boyfriend calls her this, and now I've made it weird and known to the world, but she'll forgive me). (I actually stole this idea from fellow fulbrighters, and let me just say it was a total hit). Aside from the normal questions (what's your name, where are you from, what is your job, etc.-not one question was supposed to be repeated, although two were because it had been awhile since they had been asked...), I had some real stand out questions from some of my students. These include more serious ones like "How long have you known Rachel teacher" and "Why did you become friends", as well as weirder questions, such as "Are you bananas" (never got asked, but one student really wanted to say it but chickened out at the last second...), "Are you rich," and "Are you Barack Obama's mother." Needless to say, I have some kids that just have no filter. The second half of the day consisted of a quick Christmas lesson, as well as making gingerbread houses. Without gingerbread. Or any real icing. It was an adventure, but I ended up using some "Market-O" crackers, and nutella, as well as a powdered sugar and water mixture as icing. Then the coolest house won a prize! Woot woot.
The last day, I must say, I had the most fun with. First I taught the kids some basic dance moves, and then we played a jenga game, which is where one team would stand up and have to do the sequence I said of dance moves (like DDR!!) and then if they got it right, they got to remove and jenga piece. Teams that made the tower fall were eliminated and had to stand up and dance the sequences for the rest of the game while their compatriots competed some more. It was pretty funny. Then for the second half of the day, I took an idea from orientation and made a scavenger hunt review game where I hid my face (very weird faces) around the third floor and made students answer questions based on the ones that they retrieved. I had fun, and I think that's all that matters, right? Well I guess the kids had fun. They were screaming the whole time, so it makes sense, haha. One of my kids even danced the Beyonce "Single Ladies" dance. He's definitely not a single lady. Wish I could get that moment back (to video it, highlight of my year). Then we had a pizza party for the last period and ate pizza. Hence "pizza party." Anyway, it was a lot of fun and I really enjoyed being the lead teacher, something I initially thought was pretty scary, haha.
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As promised, this section starts with a lot of stars. Well, now that I have your attention again, let's talk about winter vacation. It started the moment my scavenger hunt ended and all of my kids left to enjoy their vacations. 민아 (Mina) drove me to the nearest KTX station, about a 30-40 minute drive away, and we waited for a few hours for my train to arrive. We had originally wanted to eat lunch together in 선산, but with the snow and everything, we were worried about traffic, so we packed it in early. But, that left us with three hours to waste in the station. LUCKILY they had an awesome sushi restaurant and we were able to have some tea after. After some really good eats and talks, I said my goodbye to 선산/구미 for what I thought was going to be a whole month. I hopped on that train and found myself wandering around Seoul station looking for my travel companion, Julia (henceforth, Jules). After we met, we went to our hostel, celebrated the New Year with a lil bit of wine, and the next morning, we headed out for the airport. Korea's awesome in that it has a 43 minute long airport railroad that cost around 3 dollars to ride. So convenient, so cheap, so clean, so awesome. And so the first of my 12 flight trip began. Flight number 1 was actually scary because United ended up getting us to leave way earlier than we had expected to on a Korean air flight. Not a bad thing, because it was direct to Chicago, but scary because we only had 1 hour to get through security and customs. Oops. Not our fault, though, so we were able to make it safely to our flight and we both headed out. Although, we both lost our awesome HAND SELECTED seats, as we were both stuck in the middle of the freaking middle of the airplane. But the flight wasn't too bad, as I had my mind in an American state, and was just super excited to be going home.
In Chicago, I said my bye byes to Jules for the next 13 days and went to see if the airport could change my flight. Because we had a direct flight through Korean air, I ended up being 8 hours early for my connecting flight to Charlotte. I was not thrilled at the idea of spending the entire New Years Day in the airport, so I was extremely happy that the lady was a baller, and did some "government work" as she called it (whatever, I don't think it was that hard to get the flight, but I was just so happy I could switch my flight, I humored her), and I was out of Chicago an hour earlier than planned. HOWEVER, this meant that my airport pick up crew was going to have to be informed of my 8 hour early arrival...But they pulled it together, shout out to the black pantha and my lovlies Sarah and Willy for pickin me up (and the Anna that was supposed to be there, but had to have lunch with her family). Love you guys. They even waited with me when YOU GUESSED IT my luggage didn't show up on the flight. At this point I was so exhausted I wasn't even angry. But, I did get it sent out on the next flight to Charlotte from Chicago, so I just had to wait around for about two hours for it. LUCKY ME WILLIAM AND SARAH TOOK ME TO CHICKFILA YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS best reunion ever. So next blah blah blah driving stuff saying hi to parents blah blah. I went to a party that night (hosted by Sarah) for my homecoming featuring some amazing people and amazing food OMG ALL THE FOOD. Thanks to you guys I love you all. And I spent the next 13 days doing uneventful things, but having such a great time eating the food and hanging with the peeps. I missed home, and I was so happy to get to visit it and see that not much had changed...and also see what was waiting for me after the next few months. I'll hate to leave Korea, but I really appreciate the comforts of home now that I live in a place where everything is new and requires an extra step, whether it be due to language barrier or a living by myself with no family thing. SO I was kind of sad to come back to Korea. Not because I don't love Korea, but because I was really enjoying myself at home. BUT THAT SADNESS QUICKLY FADED as I realized I was about to go on a Southeastern Asian adventure!!!!
So, part two of my winter vacation began with me connecting with Jules at the Chicago airport again and flying back to Korea. We both went back home for a night to repack and stuff, and also book our places to stay...oops..., and met back up at noon at Seoul station. Back to the airport we went and ON THE WORST FLIGHT OF OUR LIVES, AirAsia from Incheon-Kuala Lumpur. Oh. My. G-O-S-H. This flight was excruciating. I did sleep actually, but there were two small children in front of us that WERE NOT HAVING IT. Also, the flight was freaking tiny and there was almost 0 leg room. I guess you get what you pay for? But on the upswing, Kuala Lumpur airport was kind of awesome. We had a 13 hour layover, but KL has a thing called "... uh oh...I forgot what it was called...compact? co-? NO WAIT container! That's it! It was a container hotel! It was where you paid like a few dollars to rent a little bed (like a hostel) for 3/6/12 hours at a time. We rented for 6 hours and got a nice shower and sleep before our flight to Krabi the next morning.
And so began our vacation. Offically that is. Krabi was gorgeous. We stayed through Airbnb, so we ended up renting an entire house (about 10 minutes from downtown Krabi Town). It was a pretty nice house, considering it was less than half the price of stuff down in Ao Nang (the major beach in Krabi). We explored the town the first day (which was admittedly kind of hard to get to since we really didn't have any idea how to work public transportation in Thailand...pictures of the "taxi" will follow...) and the second day we did a full day Island tour adventure. it. was. awesome. We basically explored the Koh Phi Phi islands, even getting out to swim around in the open water and walk along some of the beaches. legit beautiful. Floating in the water was definitely the highlight. Except for this one girl who literally couldn't stop splashing Jules and me in the face... -____________________- But, irrelevant now. After that adventure came the most gruesome travelling period I think we experienced. It was a 3 hour ferry ride and then subsequent taxi bus to Nai Yang beach in Phuket (a beach really close to the airport-our flight to Chiang Mai was 8:10 the next day). Except our hotel was apparently super vague and hard to find. We didn't stay at a main hotel, and we again booked through Airbnb...so...taxi driver kept asking people where it was. Note to self: always have a map picture of hotel. ALWAYS when dealing with Airbnb in foreign countries. And maybe have the directions in Thai...Anyway. We eventually were able to come full circle (it was literally 2 minutes drive off of the main road...-_-) and check in. We were both starving and it was like 8pm. So we got some dinner on the beach-which was actually really delicious, but also one of the more expensive meals we happened to get while in Thailand (food here was so cheap, y'all!)-and slept all night. Also, this time is cause for introduction to the Lego Movie again. Up till this point, I had thought of the Lego Movie as a weird children's movie of which I had no intention of watching. HOW WRONG I WAS. Jules had been quoting it basically non stop, and told me that I had to watch this freaking movie. So I took the plunge, bought it, and we watched about a third of it that night before falling asleep. SO. GOOD. We finished in on the plane the next day. Soon after, "Everything is Awesome!" was deemed the theme song to our vacation. Best. Song. Ever. (in a movie at least...). Phrases such as "Hippy Dippy Bologna," "Oh My G-O-S-H," and "The Polish Remover of Nai-ell" became frequent visitors in our everyday conversation. Ok. Enough about the Lego Movie. But I'm really not lying to you when I say you NEED TO GO WATCH IT.
At this point, we had only really visited beaches, so it was time to venture into the world of no water. Off to my personal favorite city, Chiang Mai. Chiang Mai is also the city that we happened to spend the most time in. 3 nights and about 4 days. We also stayed in basically a whole house while in Chiang Mai. It was basically an old office building turned into a home...but it was comfortable enough. Also, the owner of the property, Apple, was really helpful at telling us some things to do around town. Basically, visit all the temples. The two main ones were Wat Chedi Luang and Wat Phra That Doi Sutep. The former was in the "old city" part of Chiang Mai, and the other was up in a mountain. Both were really beautiful. Personally, I preferred Wat Chedi Luang as it felt less flashy, but both were really amazing. Especially all of the detail that had to go into building them. Also, in Chiang Mai, we went to Tiger Kingdom, the zoo, and Mae Sa Waterfall trail. Tiger Kingdom was probably the highlight...I mean, come on. Was there really any competition? I got to pet TIGERS. REAL LARGE TIGERS. It is up for debate as to whether or not the large tigers were "drugged" but the younger ones were definitely NOT. Jules and I really wanted to go to the Elephant Nature Park, but we didn't realize you had to reserve at least by 2pm the day before. We logged in at 3 and were not able to reserve. Sucks because I really really wanted to do this. Many people have been asking me if I rode any elephants. I didn't feel personally comfortable doing that after hearing about the mistreatment that the elephants can be subjected to at camps that do trekking. So that's why Jules and I agreed to do the Nature Park instead, which is where you bathe, feed, and just chill with the elephants. But, alas, our opportunity was missed. We are both pretty type B people, so planning can be...needless to say...a problem. But at the zoo, we did get to see and feed and *touch* an Elephant. So that was cool. At least I got to make one friend. I think I also need to mention that the waterfall was basically abandoned. There were some people there, but if you're an adventure looking for some peace and quiet, that was the place to go. I'm not sure how it would be during the "on season," but it was a really nice to just take a break from the constant people around all the time. Although, I did almost wipe out and got half of my leg and my hand covered in moldy mud water...pros and cons, people, pros and cons. PS. the food is amazing. Like amazing. If you go there, please try Khao Soi. It's so amazing. Basically curry soup that contains meat and vegetables and noodles. So good.
Information about my next moves will be uploaded at a later date. This post is getting too long. PS Sorry for lack of Pictures in this post...without them everything is boring, but just deal with it...<3
Until soon after today,
Rachel
I started my journey on New Year's Eve by saying goodbye to my bff, who was the best and drove me to the KTX station after the end of my winter camp. Oh yah. Jk. Lemme talk about my winter camp real quick...
So winter camp is this thing that you teach when you are the native teacher at your school. Well, I have been told that not all schools have one (due to lack of funding, or lack of interest, idk), but it seems like at least half of my Fulbright compadres have had to teach one (or two if they volunteered). Also, quick side note, I'm not sure if I really talked a lot about what I actually do in the classroom. I've had a lot of rambly posts, but I don't exactly remember what always made the cut in those...so. A lot of elementary teachers here have to work a lot with the textbook. In high school and middle school, this isn't always the case, but in Elementary school, the curriculum is a little more strict than at other school levels. So, my role in the class, which is not the same for all schools!, but for mine, I am a tool used for pronunciation and also for making interactive "game" type of lessons for the students. Also, with one of my coteachers, I basically split the textbook with him and we each do a side of the page. Anyways, the point of that little anecdote was to let you guys know that I usually don't consider myself the lead teacher or lesson planner in my classes. That's just how it works at my school. BUT. and a big BUT (COVER YOUR BUTT! lego movie reference, if you haven't seen it, GO WATCH IT NOW. do it. NOW. STOP READING THIS. GO, GO NOW)................................................................................................
ok, now that you've seen it, I can start making lots of references to it in this post, and you, as the reader, can understand them. OK. back to topic. where was I? oh yah. Winter Camp. *****If you want to skip this long section about winter camp and just read about my winter vacation adventures, skip to the next section beginning with little stars (hey, I don't know your life, maybe you don't have time to do things like read this blog, but for some reason you find yourself here reading it, wondering why you are here, and don't want to hear my winter camp teaching nonsense. I understand, go ahead and skip it, I won't know)******** So I am not usually the lead planner or anything for class. But for winter camp, I am the leader. I plan all of the things. ALL OF THE THINGS. Originally, I had wanted to do a sort of theme to my camp. But, I wasn't really able to do that because my camp only ran for about three days (December 29-31). Ok, not about. It ran for exactly three days. Whatever....I'm really terrible at focusing haha, OK, deep breath, back to camp. So I broke it down into three days, and just tried my best. I was pretty lost on how to plan three days of material as I just hadn't really thought any of my ideas were good or fun. Also, one of my coteachers wanted the camp to be like 30 students, and I just didn't know how to plan with that many students. When all was said and done, I had 24 students in the camp, and one who just didn't show up for the first two days, but decided to show his face the last day....basically just for the pizza party. lol I'll talk about that later...So the first day I decided to do an introduction game as well as an American Slang lesson. But the slang I taught them was for the most part age appropriate, in case any of you were wondering. I divided it into three sections: Greetings, Descriptors, and Texting language. Then I taught them all how to play flip cup. Yes. THAT flip cup. But I obviously played it with fanta orange soda and pocari sweat. And left out some key details about where and why we play the game. So the kids super liked the game. I made them into teams and each person had to say and define a slang term we had learned before drinking/flipping their cup and moving on to the next team member. This could easily be harder, such as a dialogue, etc, but since I had a mixture of higher level 6th graders and lower level 4th graders, I kept it pretty basic. I taught them words like "ratchet" and phrases like "What's up" and texting language like "lol" because surprisingly (idk if it's because I am just in a more rural placement so they aren't exposed, or if they really are just too young) but most of them don't know any American/English texting language like lol, omg, brb, ttyl, etc. So that was fun. A few of them kept saying "Teacher. lol" in real person. Too proud.
So onto day 2. Day two consisted of two completely separate activities that took up each half of the day. The first half of the day, my students made up questions (appropriate questions to ask a foreigner to start a conversation) and then talked to my best friend from home, Sarah bearah (not sure if only her boyfriend calls her this, and now I've made it weird and known to the world, but she'll forgive me). (I actually stole this idea from fellow fulbrighters, and let me just say it was a total hit). Aside from the normal questions (what's your name, where are you from, what is your job, etc.-not one question was supposed to be repeated, although two were because it had been awhile since they had been asked...), I had some real stand out questions from some of my students. These include more serious ones like "How long have you known Rachel teacher" and "Why did you become friends", as well as weirder questions, such as "Are you bananas" (never got asked, but one student really wanted to say it but chickened out at the last second...), "Are you rich," and "Are you Barack Obama's mother." Needless to say, I have some kids that just have no filter. The second half of the day consisted of a quick Christmas lesson, as well as making gingerbread houses. Without gingerbread. Or any real icing. It was an adventure, but I ended up using some "Market-O" crackers, and nutella, as well as a powdered sugar and water mixture as icing. Then the coolest house won a prize! Woot woot.
The last day, I must say, I had the most fun with. First I taught the kids some basic dance moves, and then we played a jenga game, which is where one team would stand up and have to do the sequence I said of dance moves (like DDR!!) and then if they got it right, they got to remove and jenga piece. Teams that made the tower fall were eliminated and had to stand up and dance the sequences for the rest of the game while their compatriots competed some more. It was pretty funny. Then for the second half of the day, I took an idea from orientation and made a scavenger hunt review game where I hid my face (very weird faces) around the third floor and made students answer questions based on the ones that they retrieved. I had fun, and I think that's all that matters, right? Well I guess the kids had fun. They were screaming the whole time, so it makes sense, haha. One of my kids even danced the Beyonce "Single Ladies" dance. He's definitely not a single lady. Wish I could get that moment back (to video it, highlight of my year). Then we had a pizza party for the last period and ate pizza. Hence "pizza party." Anyway, it was a lot of fun and I really enjoyed being the lead teacher, something I initially thought was pretty scary, haha.
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As promised, this section starts with a lot of stars. Well, now that I have your attention again, let's talk about winter vacation. It started the moment my scavenger hunt ended and all of my kids left to enjoy their vacations. 민아 (Mina) drove me to the nearest KTX station, about a 30-40 minute drive away, and we waited for a few hours for my train to arrive. We had originally wanted to eat lunch together in 선산, but with the snow and everything, we were worried about traffic, so we packed it in early. But, that left us with three hours to waste in the station. LUCKILY they had an awesome sushi restaurant and we were able to have some tea after. After some really good eats and talks, I said my goodbye to 선산/구미 for what I thought was going to be a whole month. I hopped on that train and found myself wandering around Seoul station looking for my travel companion, Julia (henceforth, Jules). After we met, we went to our hostel, celebrated the New Year with a lil bit of wine, and the next morning, we headed out for the airport. Korea's awesome in that it has a 43 minute long airport railroad that cost around 3 dollars to ride. So convenient, so cheap, so clean, so awesome. And so the first of my 12 flight trip began. Flight number 1 was actually scary because United ended up getting us to leave way earlier than we had expected to on a Korean air flight. Not a bad thing, because it was direct to Chicago, but scary because we only had 1 hour to get through security and customs. Oops. Not our fault, though, so we were able to make it safely to our flight and we both headed out. Although, we both lost our awesome HAND SELECTED seats, as we were both stuck in the middle of the freaking middle of the airplane. But the flight wasn't too bad, as I had my mind in an American state, and was just super excited to be going home.
In Chicago, I said my bye byes to Jules for the next 13 days and went to see if the airport could change my flight. Because we had a direct flight through Korean air, I ended up being 8 hours early for my connecting flight to Charlotte. I was not thrilled at the idea of spending the entire New Years Day in the airport, so I was extremely happy that the lady was a baller, and did some "government work" as she called it (whatever, I don't think it was that hard to get the flight, but I was just so happy I could switch my flight, I humored her), and I was out of Chicago an hour earlier than planned. HOWEVER, this meant that my airport pick up crew was going to have to be informed of my 8 hour early arrival...But they pulled it together, shout out to the black pantha and my lovlies Sarah and Willy for pickin me up (and the Anna that was supposed to be there, but had to have lunch with her family). Love you guys. They even waited with me when YOU GUESSED IT my luggage didn't show up on the flight. At this point I was so exhausted I wasn't even angry. But, I did get it sent out on the next flight to Charlotte from Chicago, so I just had to wait around for about two hours for it. LUCKY ME WILLIAM AND SARAH TOOK ME TO CHICKFILA YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS best reunion ever. So next blah blah blah driving stuff saying hi to parents blah blah. I went to a party that night (hosted by Sarah) for my homecoming featuring some amazing people and amazing food OMG ALL THE FOOD. Thanks to you guys I love you all. And I spent the next 13 days doing uneventful things, but having such a great time eating the food and hanging with the peeps. I missed home, and I was so happy to get to visit it and see that not much had changed...and also see what was waiting for me after the next few months. I'll hate to leave Korea, but I really appreciate the comforts of home now that I live in a place where everything is new and requires an extra step, whether it be due to language barrier or a living by myself with no family thing. SO I was kind of sad to come back to Korea. Not because I don't love Korea, but because I was really enjoying myself at home. BUT THAT SADNESS QUICKLY FADED as I realized I was about to go on a Southeastern Asian adventure!!!!
So, part two of my winter vacation began with me connecting with Jules at the Chicago airport again and flying back to Korea. We both went back home for a night to repack and stuff, and also book our places to stay...oops..., and met back up at noon at Seoul station. Back to the airport we went and ON THE WORST FLIGHT OF OUR LIVES, AirAsia from Incheon-Kuala Lumpur. Oh. My. G-O-S-H. This flight was excruciating. I did sleep actually, but there were two small children in front of us that WERE NOT HAVING IT. Also, the flight was freaking tiny and there was almost 0 leg room. I guess you get what you pay for? But on the upswing, Kuala Lumpur airport was kind of awesome. We had a 13 hour layover, but KL has a thing called "... uh oh...I forgot what it was called...compact? co-? NO WAIT container! That's it! It was a container hotel! It was where you paid like a few dollars to rent a little bed (like a hostel) for 3/6/12 hours at a time. We rented for 6 hours and got a nice shower and sleep before our flight to Krabi the next morning.
And so began our vacation. Offically that is. Krabi was gorgeous. We stayed through Airbnb, so we ended up renting an entire house (about 10 minutes from downtown Krabi Town). It was a pretty nice house, considering it was less than half the price of stuff down in Ao Nang (the major beach in Krabi). We explored the town the first day (which was admittedly kind of hard to get to since we really didn't have any idea how to work public transportation in Thailand...pictures of the "taxi" will follow...) and the second day we did a full day Island tour adventure. it. was. awesome. We basically explored the Koh Phi Phi islands, even getting out to swim around in the open water and walk along some of the beaches. legit beautiful. Floating in the water was definitely the highlight. Except for this one girl who literally couldn't stop splashing Jules and me in the face... -____________________- But, irrelevant now. After that adventure came the most gruesome travelling period I think we experienced. It was a 3 hour ferry ride and then subsequent taxi bus to Nai Yang beach in Phuket (a beach really close to the airport-our flight to Chiang Mai was 8:10 the next day). Except our hotel was apparently super vague and hard to find. We didn't stay at a main hotel, and we again booked through Airbnb...so...taxi driver kept asking people where it was. Note to self: always have a map picture of hotel. ALWAYS when dealing with Airbnb in foreign countries. And maybe have the directions in Thai...Anyway. We eventually were able to come full circle (it was literally 2 minutes drive off of the main road...-_-) and check in. We were both starving and it was like 8pm. So we got some dinner on the beach-which was actually really delicious, but also one of the more expensive meals we happened to get while in Thailand (food here was so cheap, y'all!)-and slept all night. Also, this time is cause for introduction to the Lego Movie again. Up till this point, I had thought of the Lego Movie as a weird children's movie of which I had no intention of watching. HOW WRONG I WAS. Jules had been quoting it basically non stop, and told me that I had to watch this freaking movie. So I took the plunge, bought it, and we watched about a third of it that night before falling asleep. SO. GOOD. We finished in on the plane the next day. Soon after, "Everything is Awesome!" was deemed the theme song to our vacation. Best. Song. Ever. (in a movie at least...). Phrases such as "Hippy Dippy Bologna," "Oh My G-O-S-H," and "The Polish Remover of Nai-ell" became frequent visitors in our everyday conversation. Ok. Enough about the Lego Movie. But I'm really not lying to you when I say you NEED TO GO WATCH IT.
At this point, we had only really visited beaches, so it was time to venture into the world of no water. Off to my personal favorite city, Chiang Mai. Chiang Mai is also the city that we happened to spend the most time in. 3 nights and about 4 days. We also stayed in basically a whole house while in Chiang Mai. It was basically an old office building turned into a home...but it was comfortable enough. Also, the owner of the property, Apple, was really helpful at telling us some things to do around town. Basically, visit all the temples. The two main ones were Wat Chedi Luang and Wat Phra That Doi Sutep. The former was in the "old city" part of Chiang Mai, and the other was up in a mountain. Both were really beautiful. Personally, I preferred Wat Chedi Luang as it felt less flashy, but both were really amazing. Especially all of the detail that had to go into building them. Also, in Chiang Mai, we went to Tiger Kingdom, the zoo, and Mae Sa Waterfall trail. Tiger Kingdom was probably the highlight...I mean, come on. Was there really any competition? I got to pet TIGERS. REAL LARGE TIGERS. It is up for debate as to whether or not the large tigers were "drugged" but the younger ones were definitely NOT. Jules and I really wanted to go to the Elephant Nature Park, but we didn't realize you had to reserve at least by 2pm the day before. We logged in at 3 and were not able to reserve. Sucks because I really really wanted to do this. Many people have been asking me if I rode any elephants. I didn't feel personally comfortable doing that after hearing about the mistreatment that the elephants can be subjected to at camps that do trekking. So that's why Jules and I agreed to do the Nature Park instead, which is where you bathe, feed, and just chill with the elephants. But, alas, our opportunity was missed. We are both pretty type B people, so planning can be...needless to say...a problem. But at the zoo, we did get to see and feed and *touch* an Elephant. So that was cool. At least I got to make one friend. I think I also need to mention that the waterfall was basically abandoned. There were some people there, but if you're an adventure looking for some peace and quiet, that was the place to go. I'm not sure how it would be during the "on season," but it was a really nice to just take a break from the constant people around all the time. Although, I did almost wipe out and got half of my leg and my hand covered in moldy mud water...pros and cons, people, pros and cons. PS. the food is amazing. Like amazing. If you go there, please try Khao Soi. It's so amazing. Basically curry soup that contains meat and vegetables and noodles. So good.
Information about my next moves will be uploaded at a later date. This post is getting too long. PS Sorry for lack of Pictures in this post...without them everything is boring, but just deal with it...<3
Until soon after today,
Rachel