District Conference

     I know this is kind of late, but my district of Rotary had a district conference in the middle of December. The conference was held in the northern city of Chaing Rai. Well the other exchange students from my city and I arrived late, because on the way up we stopped by the city of Chaing Mai. There we went to it's walking street and say some pretty strange stuff.

Just a random statue near a restaurant in the walking street. 

We found some lady boys who found a fancy for the Mexican exchange student Raul.

    Needless to say we finally arrived to the conference and were reunited with our friends, and made some new ones as well. The exchanges students from one other district came as well.

They gave us some weird snack food, but it didn't kill us.

     That evening we came back and had a nice dinner with our friends, but then we had to perform once again for the Rotarians. Luckily we weren't the only ones; the other district also had a group that would be performing, but I'd have to say they were much better than we were.

I still didn't get to keep the costume!

They had guy dancers too, but they only danced for a short time while the girls danced the whole time.

    The next day, the Rotarians who took us told us we could skip out on the rest of the activities and go with them to the northern border and Thailand's famous white temple. Who would disagree with that? 

This was at the border crossing. There is a river behind us.

This is the river that was behind me. There was some random kids that happened to run into my picture as well.

This is the awesome white temple. It was actually kind of weird, as you can see by the skull topped cones beside me.

This was just like a small pond of hands, and if you look closely you can find a hand that has the middle finger up.

Just a great group picture.

This was inside the temple (a place where you are not suppose to take photos).  On the walls they had painted famous movie characters. There were most of the superheros (Spider man above), supervillains made an appearance as well, and just some random ones like Neo from the Matrix and the Predator from Aliens vs. Predator.

This temple looking building was actually the white temple's bathroom!

    It was an amazing trip, and I met many new friends from the other district. Hope all enjoy the photos.

The Holidays in Thailand

         Thailand, a place of wondrous beauty, easy going peoples, and... religiously Buddhist! When people from my home talk about the holidays, they normally are talking either about Christmas or Hanukkah (depending on religion) and the New Year. Well here in Thailand they basically skip the part about Christmas and Hanukkah and only think about the New Year, because they are Buddhist (Buddhism is considered the practical atheist). So the only Christmas spirit I received here in Thailand was that of the local shopping centers, who use the Christmas theme as a great selling technique, a package from home carrying home baked goodies and a few small presents (thanks mom and dad), and a nice Christmas eve dinner with some of the other exchange students in my city.

We ate an Italian restaurant where we were served a 4 course meal. It was ok, but nothing like homemade Christmas eve dinner.

The two ladies in the middle are family of the workers in the restaurant. Fabio (the guy next to me) is partially Italian and can speak Italian, so he knew the people pretty well.

    So after Christmas comes the New Year. It was at least more celebrated. I saw on the T.V. that there was even a count down in some of the bigger cities of Thailand. As for me, I got to spend some quality time with my new host family in a place called Radburry (pronounced really weird, so that even I haven't completely mastered the pronunciation). We left on New Years house with the whole family, even the cat came a long! We stopped a few places a long the way, like an aunt's house and other family members' houses. We finally arrived at Radburry at around 9 or 10 at night, and we were fed a bunch of food.

See the fish? Well it just happened to be the best fish I had ever had! This was where I have come to find out I love fresh fish! It was delicious.

    Well we all stayed up for the countdown, but the biggest celebration was locals shooting of fireworks near enough to hear. After the countdown I was pretty tired and just headed to bed. The next day I woke up and one of the family members took me to the river near by. There he showed me the process of selecting fish to sell that had already been caught.

They catch the fish and then bring them up in buckets from the river.

Then they weigh the fish and dump them into large tubs in the back of trucks for transportation.

   After that we went into town (which was right next to the river) for lunch. It wasn't that exciting, but it had a great view. The next day turned out to be the most interesting. We went to a floating market (my second one), but this one had stuff for sale that you could buy right out of a boat! It was an awesome experience, and I had a lot of fun watching other foreigners look like complete tourists.

Now I know some of these pictures are turned sideways, but I have found no way of rotating them with "Blogger". So if you can stand of few minutes of neck cranking I hope you enjoy the pictures.

I went with my whole family. My host mom is sitting behind me.

My host brother and host cousin look at the cool stuff to by, while my host mom looks for my other host cousin.

The canals got crowded toward the end of our boat ride. But it made it that much more interesting to see how the Thai navigate their boats.

This guy had a huge snake with him. I don't really know what he was doing, but I hope he never looses sight of the snake!

After the floating market we went back to the house and packed up. We took a lot of stuff to deliver to family on the way, and we even took and extra passenger home with us...

Our new dog, named Brown (but pronounced blow with Thai accent).