Well, I'm not sure I have anything witty this time either, but am going to push through and write anyways... Dustin says she needs an update on our travels and I hate to deprive her.
Life here is pretty good so far. The Sasa House (where we live) is clean and comfortable, we have a good group of folks to explore with (3 of us from Kellogg, 5 from UNC and a few from Duke), and we are starting to figure out some great tricks on how to make life easy. For example, today we discovered the undergrad dining hall!! Major score, particularly for Matt. It is not air-conditioned and all the words are in Thai (you really have no idea what you are eating ever) but the food is CHEAP and BULKY! Today Matt got a huge lunch for the equivalent of 60 cents. Woohoo!
We also had our first foray into street food! Matt ordered this delicious little guy, having not a clue what it was... turns out it was a deep fried banana. Pretty tasty actually.
We had orientation today at our new school.... Seems like it will be great, and is not that different from Kellogg. In fact there is a "Donald P Jacobs Hall" and a "Dipak Jain Hall"... sound familiar? (For mom and dad - these are names of former deans of Kellogg.) The students are all friendly and nice, and one of them said they will be "throwing us a party" this weekend - very welcoming! Sasin actually is very small - only 60-70 students per grade - and right now about 30 of them are on exchange. So we (the exchange students) actually make up a significant portion of the student body.
Okay, I promise to write shorter and more frequent blog posts. I'm embarassed by how long this is. There is a learning curve to this blog thing.
To close, I'll leave you with some new fun facts about Bangkok: 1) There are stray dogs everywhere... today there were 6 of them sleeping right outside the gym. It's pretty sad, and very weird. 2) This city is both very foreign and very familiar at the same time... there is more "traditional western fast food" within 2 blocks of our school than there is within 2 blocks of our apartment at home. (Starbucks, KFC, Auntie Anne's, Dunkin Donuts, McDonalds, etc. all within a stone's throw.) See the Texas Stop Sign photo below for proof:
Thanks for the update! I love the long post, but you probably won't have time to keep them up. Fried banana sounds interesting, better than a lot of other things they fry here. Alicia will be jealous you have an Auntie Anne's so close. On our infrequent forays to the mall she begs to get pretzels from there.
ReplyDelete