A Busy Month

The past month in Thailand has just seemed to fly by. I can't believe that in only one week I have to bid my Thai family goodbye as we begin our three week long tour of southern Thailand. Since I didn't really do a great job of keeping up with the blog the last few weeks, I figured that I should just give a brief overview of all the different things that have been happening over here. 

I have been exploring some caves with my friend Peter on
one of our weekend trips.

I have also went on a couple of hikes with my
friends in the mountains.

There were a lot of bats in the cave, but it was really cool to
explore. It actually went really far back underneath the
mountain, but I couldn't really take any good pictures
inside.

I also got to go pet a Tiger. It was really a pretty scary
experience. There were trainers inside the cage with
us, but all they had was a little piece of bamboo that
they would hit the tiger with whenever it looked at us.
Sorry the resolution is so bad on this picture.

We also got to play with some of the baby tigers, which was
much more enjoyable for me. 

They had just been fed a big bottle of milk and didn't seem
very inclined to play. They reminded me quite a bit of our
house cats at home taking a nap in the sun.

I also went to the Royal Flora Flower Garden with my host
family's niece and a couple of her friends.

They have all kinds of different flowers from around the
world and it was a great time. 

It was raining pretty hard the day we went so we ended up
looking at the indoor gardens the most. 

I have also been having a great time in
art class. In case you didn't know,
that is supposed to be a lotus.

Working hard or hardly working.

One day, our art project consisted of shaping an aluminum
sheet using a hammer and nails. Despite initial difficulties,
I think it turned out to be my favorite project so far.

I have also visited a bunch of different temples for our
Thai Culture and Buddhism class. It has been a really
interesting experience, although all of the temples have
began to blur together a bit in my mind. This one was
particularly memorably because it is gilded in pure silver.

Here is the gold plated pagoda at Wat Pra Sing, one of the
main historic tempes in Chiang Mai.

One of the temples we visited had a huge stairway leading up
to the pagoda. My friends and I wanted to find out how many
stairs it had, so we climbed it.

468 stairs later!

We also had our last week of internship at San Sai Hospital.
It was sad to leave everyone and we have had a great time
getting to know many of the other student interns.

Overall, It has been a great couple of weeks. All of our classes are finally winding down and we have a couple of finals this next week. I am definitely thankful for all of the good times I have had so far, but also looking forward to travelling in Southern Thailand. 

Last of all, I realized that I haven't put up a picture of my Thai family yet, because I didn't have one of all of us together. I finally got everyone to take a picture in our living room even though my kun mae was disappointed because the lighting might not make her look her prettiest haha. 

I would say this is a fairly typical picture haha. Nong Petch
is on the left and Nong Ping is on the right with Kun Mae and
Kun Paw in the middle. 

They are a funny bunch and I am going to miss them a lot. They told me that I can store all of my stuff at their house while I travel, so I will definitely see them again before I leave.