Chantale Meets the East

So I’m back in Hometown. My last days were so difficult. I felt nauseous most of the time because I was so nervous about leaving. I just wasn’t ready vet. I finally got my bags backed and everything settled, but I wasn’t ready to leave the people behind yet. 

There really isn’t much for me to say other than I’m back in Hometown and if you know where that is and feel like hanging out, give me a bit to relax. It’s been a really intense week.

22 hours of flights. 4 airports. 14 hour time change. Unpacking. Seeing people and catching up. I’m wiped out. 

This will probably be the last post of this blog, so if you’re following me, feel free to unfollow. If you don’t have a Tumblr and have just been checking in to see how I’ve been doing, thanks for caring enough to do so. 

ขอบคุณมากนะค่ะ 

Tonight was my very last Thai Rotary function.

I got to wear my blazer with my Inbound/Outbout/Rotex friends and I got to say my thank yous to the Rotarians in my club.

But then came time to say the goodbyes to the people who won’t be accompanying me to the airport. 

It hit me all over again that even though there are tons of things I miss from California, I’m not ready to let go of my life here.

I’m glad I got to have this evening, but I hate that my time is running out.

That’s right. I have less than 100 hours left before I fly out of Bangkok and leave Thailand. 

As of right now, it’s 94 hours. I plan on making the very most of them. Big Rotary thing tonight, school on Monday to say my goodbyes and หมูกะทะ with my class that night, packing all of my stuff and picking up Canadian Nerd on Tuesday, heading out to Bangkok on Wednesday, and then watching the sun rise for the 3rd time this year in the Suvanabumi Bangkok Airport on Thursday.

I can’t believe it’s almost over.

I feel like I just got here.

I’ve been really busy. I still am really busy. I’ll be really busy until the moment I step on that plane in a week. Just a quick rundown.

Tuesday was my last Thai Rotary meeting. I was unprepared because I thought it’d be next week, but I was wrong. I had to say my thank yous and everything without having anything prepared. I did it all in Thai. I managed to do pretty well, talk for five minutes or so, and cover everything. The Brazilian girl only said like 5 sentences that she had to read off of a paper in English phonetics. I was proud of myself.

Tomorrow is my last day of Thai school. I don’t know how the hell I’m going to survive the day without having any major breakdowns.

Tomorrow is also my going away party from my 1st hostfamily because they’re awesome and love me and own a really pretty resort.

Saturday I’m baking all morning because I finally found somebody with an oven. I’m going to Suhkothai that afternoon to do some more last minute shopping and then some Rotary function there.

Sunday is our big Rotary Hostcity function to celebrate the new Rotary year. It’ll be the last time all of the Hostcity inbounds are together and we’ll have to dress up in traditional Thai clothing. It’ll also be the last time I see the Rotarians in my club and the family of my Youth Exchange Officer. They’ve kind of my unofficial 4th hostfamily and I love them to pieces.

Monday is my day set aside for only packing and then going to eat หมูกะทะ (Thai/Korean style barbeque) with my classmates. They planned to take me last Tuesday, but I had to go to Rotary. So we rescheduled for Monday. Honestly, I’m really glad I’ll get to have one big get together with them before I go back to California.

Tuesday is another day set aside for packing because Canadian Nerd is coming and she is a BEAST at packing. She’s coming to see me off at the airport.

Wednesday I’m heading off to Bangkok with my current hostfamily, 1st hostmom and 1st hostsister, and Canadian Nerd. Yay for one final afternoon in Bangkok!

Thursday at 6:05 AM Thai time my flight to San Francisco leaves. I’ll be arriving at my final destination airport at 2 PM. 

And then it’s all over and I can finally sleep.

So there are lots of native speaker English teachers in Thailand who just go along living in Thailand without ever really learning Thai. If they do learn Thai, it’s just basic things to get on in day to day life and they rarely learn to read or write it.

One of the teachers at my school is British and actually has fluent spoken Thai, but cannot read or write at all and has no desire to even though he has lived in Thailand for over 8 years. My host sisters take special extra classes on the weekends (very common for Thai kids) with this teacher and when I went with my hostmom to go pick them up, this happened:

British Guy: Chantale, what are you doing here?
Me: Picking up my hostsisters with my hostmom.
BG: Oh, you live with them? How do you communicate with your hostmom when your hostsisters aren’t around.
Me: Thai.
BG: You speak Thai?
Me: Not perfectly, but yes, I speak Thai.
BG: Really? And you understand when they speak to you?
Me: Yes. Sometimes I have trouble if they speak too quickly, but I usually understand just about everything.
BG: Huh… So it took you about a year?
Me: More like 5-6 months.
BG: Really? How about reading and writing?
Me: I can read menus, signs, children’s books, and stuff like that. I can write pretty okay too. Sometimes I have to look up spellings for tone markers and stuff, but I’m pretty proud of how far I’ve come.
BG: Wow. That’s pretty good.

The entire time he was giving me a look and tone of “I don’t believe you.” I understand that he’s kind of cynical because so many foreigners don’t really learn Thai or it takes them a few years to do so, but I just got so frustrated. I’ve worked my ass off to get to the point I am now. I spent countless hours one-on-one with Ajan Sawseethon learning to read and even more studying by myself studying vocabulary. Just because the majority of people who come to this country are lazy and don’t bother to learn Thai doesn’t mean I am too.

When I started packing I found another bag of tampons that hasn’t been used because my cycle has been even more out of wack than normal. That’s probably an overshare, but after living with Thai people who have no shame about bodily functions and exchange students that talk about EVERYTHING, I have no sense of boundaries when it comes to topics like this. There’s no point in me wasting space and weight in my luggage with things I can easily get back home, so the extra tampons are definitely getting left behind in Thailand. I told my female classmates that they could have them if they wanted to eventually try using them. To my surprise, instead of sqeeing and saying they were too scared, they told me they’d like to have them. I told them I was surprised and they said that they didn’t want to use them, but just have them to remind them of me from time to time.

Sometimes Thai kids are a little weird, but they are just the sweetest and kindest people in the entire world.

The Thai school year works differently than the American one because the seasons are different. 1st Semester runs from mid-May to the end of September, October is their equivalent to Winter Break, and 2nd Semester runs from November to the end of February. That probably seems a little weird, but that’s because March, April, and May are the hottest months of the year because of our proximity to the equator. I love this school year because it means that I got maximum vacation time and was never expected to really do anything at school because I came in mid-semester.

All of the exchange students in Thailand were supposed to go back to school for what is technically our 3rd Semester, but I’m fairly sure I’m the only one who is still going to school. A lot of the other exchange students don’t understand why I’m still going when my host family probably wouldn’t care if I just stayed home. The thing is, I don’t mind going to school here. I’m not a fan of waking up at 6 AM, but I actually made Thai friends. I actually enjoy spending time with my class.  I actually do more than just sit in the library on my laptop all day.

Things are a little different in the 3rd Semester though. This was the first time I got to experience the 1st day of 1st Semester. By the end of last school year, the kids at school were used to seeing me around. I nolonger had to deal with being pointed at and treated special because I look ฝร่ัง (farang).

Sidenote about the word “farang”: This is one of those words that has been subbed into my English vocabulary because I don’t really feel like the English translation to “foreigner” works very well. Farang is only associated with Caucasian foreigners. For me, I associate it more with tourists than with foreigners who live in Thailand, but Thai people seem to see everybody with white skin as farang no matter how long they’ve lived in Thailand.

My classmates, teachers, and the rest of the school seemed to be pretty over the fact that my skin is white, my hair is brown, and my eyes are blue, but when the new school year started, we had a new set of Mattayom 1 (7th grade) students come in. Now I have a couple hundred 12-year-olds gawking at me. Some of them even yell “Hello!” from across the halls or even weirder, wai and say สวัสดีครับ/ค่ะ (proper Thai greeting like they would do for a teacher) when they walk past me. While I know they’re just trying to be friendly, it just bothers me now. I don’t want to be treated special. I’m just like every other student in M. 6/5 (my class at school). 

Despite the new 7th grade students, I still enjoy going to school an spending time with my friends and classmates. Next week is my last week and it just doesn’t feel right that i have to leave them. Even a few girls who I thought didn’t really like me that much came up to me and told me that they want me to stay and graduate with them. I’m not ready to say goodbye next Friday at school. I’ll probably see a few of them again when I come back to visit in a few years, but we’ll never be all together as a class again. I guess I just need to enjoy the time I have left.

When I left California, I put off packing until the last possible minute and that resulted in the most emotional two days of my life. To avoid this, I’ve started packing with 13 days left.

First I packed up all of the things I’ve bought in Thailand. That filled an entire suitcase to 20-23 kg (44-50.6 lbs/I don’t really trust the scale I used). Yea, I’ve bought a lot of stuff, but most of it is gifts for other people.

Then I moved on to other miscellaneous things I won’t be needing to have access to on my last days. That suitcase is now also almost completely full to its allowed weight capacity (23 kg/50.6 lbs). This doesn’t allow for about half of my clothing as well shoes and some books. 

Moral of the story: Chantale has too much stuff and is going to have to pay United Airlines 6,600 baht ($220) to take a 3rd bag because they’re jerks and don’t make special exceptions for exchange students. 

Going through all of my stuff here and sorting it into what’s going to be taken back to California and what’s going to be left in Thailand has been hard. Everything has a memory that I don’t want to forget. How do I decide what’s worth taking back and what isn’t? 

Canadian Nerd made us all CDs of songs that essentially define the amazing times us Inbounds have had together. It’s a mixed CD that would be completely illogical to anybody not a 2010-2011 D3360 Inbound. I just listened to it all the way through and it’s the first thing that’s going into the CD player of the Mini when I come home. I’ll probably end up crying when I hear it, but that’s just the way it’s going to be. These songs will forever hold special memories.

D3360 2010-2011 Inbounds, I love you all. Come see me in California. I’ll show you the beauty of the Sequoia and Yosemite National Parks, take you to the beach, and even introduce you to Mickey Mouse. And we’ll do it all while listening to the YE Mix.

When the other exchange students and I heard that The Hangover Part II was going to take place in Bangkok, we insisted to go see it together in a huge group. We planned it all out to go opening weekend, but then our evil inbound coordinator tried to shut it all down. It’s a long, complex story that involves lots of political Rotary stuff, so I’ll just leave it at she’s evil and I got to go because her superior loves and trusts me. 

Roughly 20 of us ended up getting to meet up in Chiang Mai to go to the movie together. The Hangover Part II hasn’t gotten amazing reviews, but I think there’s something to be said about a movie that can make kids from 7 different countries all laugh hysterically. It was probably more funny to us because we’ve actually been to Bangkok and could point out all of the inaccuracies. Our main beef was that the hotel room was filled with bottles of Singha Beer. We realize that Singha is the only one imported to the US, but the US needs to realize that it’s gross and nobody actually drinks it here. I don’t want to give away the movie, but it was hilarious and I’m so glad I got to watch it with my Inbounds.

We then went to dinner together to eat “real food” (aka, not rice). At the end of the meal we took a million photos and then each said a little something about what this past year has meant to us. I’m so glad I got to share that evening with them.

I love my Thai friends and families dearly, but there’s something special about the connection Inbounds have with each other. Only we know how each other were feeling when we were thrown into this crazy situation. Only we can relate to each other when we just don’t understand what is going on. Only we will be able to understand how it feels when we go back to our home countries, but we miss each other and Thailand so much. We all laid it on the table and told each other how much we mean to each other and it was a beautiful moment.

Sadly, that was the last time I’ll ever see most of them until our YE D3360 10-year Reunion in 2021 in Chiang Mai.

Not really an update on what I’ve been doing, but an amusing anecdote until I get more time on my hands…

For those of you who don’t know, tampons are unavailable in Thailand. Pads are the only alternative and pads are gross. I was warned of this beforehand, so I came to Thailand with a year’s supply of tampons. The cashier at Target looked at me like I was insane when I bought a year’s supply of tampons at one time. Since they’re unavailable in Thailand unless you go to a fancy tourist pharmacy in a big city, most Thai girls just don’t know what they are.

Yesterday at school, one of my classmates pulled a pad out of her bag and asked me if we had them in America. She looked rather confused when I told her that we do. Then she asked if we had *hand-motion depicting tampon* instead. I told her that we had both and she just got kind of quiet. A few seconds later she asked me if I had ever used a tampon. I told her of course I had and most girls do and pulled one out of my purse to show her. At this point, most of the girls in my class were eavesdropping on this and intrigued. Most of them had never even heard of a tampon let alone seen one. The girl who initially asked me about the tampons asked if it hurt and I couldn’t help but laugh. 

We all took a fieldtrip to the bathroom so I could demonstrate how they work using a bottle of water. They all freaked out and told me they were afraid to ever use one. Again, I laughed. There I was teaching 17-18 year old girls about tampons and they were afraid that a glorified cotton swab would hurt and/or make them nolonger a virgin. I’ve been living here for almost ten months and there are still times when I just don’t understand Thai culture. Sometimes I feel so much older because they’ve been so sheltered their entire lives.

Even though it was a bit weird and frustrating for me, it was still a great bonding experience to have had with my friends. Friday the 10th will be my last day of school with them. I’m not ready to have to say goodbye.