learning a new skill

Yesterday (Friday) was spent biking through the countryside seeing the more classical life of Thailand.  Students planted rice in the fields and were greeted by numerous children who don’t see westerners too often.  In the afternoon we were greeted by a solar eclipse and then a wonderful sunset dinner at the historical park which was arrnaged by our guest house.  This is atypical, and our guide was not sure how they pulled it off.  We all sat on the ground, with pedestals of food and watched the sun set behind a 700 year old Buddha and the mountains in the distance.

Today (Saturday) we are off to Bangkok for four days.  There are two posts previous to this one that have a picture plus some words from students.  Be sure to read them all.  Here is what Lauren Torres has to say:

We just returned from a bike ride through Sukhothai, we saw the country side, the old and new city, and a lot of rice and tobacco farms.  It hasn’t been hard getting up at 7 each morning here and running around all day, it’s definitely a new experience actually being productive everyday and taking in so many new things.  The people here definitely put us to shame with our “Minnesota Nice” and for as many different places I have traveled I think that as a group we are so fortunate to come to this country that they are enthusiastic to please us instead of looking at us like we are intruders into their daily life.  So far we have traveled by plane, train, tuk-tuk, mega bus, a tractor, sungtao, bamboo raft, bicycles, on foot, and soon to travel by boat and elephant.  We are beginning to do a lot more traveling than we did on the first part of the trip but it is good to get moving around more often, giving us the chance to see rural and urban Thailand.  The best part of the trip is the times we are in the country side and as a group we can almost all agree that the most fun we had was our 6 hour trek through the hills of Chiang Mai, we had spent most of it going uphill and it would have been nice to see the path that we took or how far we really walked but at our turning point they told us that we were a 2 hour walk away from Burma, at that point some of us had hiker’s high and probably would have loved going that extra 2 hours but we stopped at the most gorgeous waterfall and saw several hill tribes that really makes you question how much work we really do every day to support our lifestyle compared to the hill tribes.  I have written in my journal using the word amazing way too often but it definitely is AMAZING and every single one of us is lucky to have this experience and are blessed with Mark, Kristin and Krin to have put so much effort into us coming here.

Lauren Torres

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