- Don't ask if your lighter (which apparently you are now allowed to take on the plane. Absurd. Your tweezers get taken off you but lighters are fine??) is likely to blow up. You will get a horrified look. Just smile and walk on..
- Don't believe the guy checking you in when he tells you he will upgrade you for free. Likewise don't take him seriously when he jokes about your visas not being valid. He's just practising he's stand up routine. I didn't really rate it much.
- Do flirt with the security guy testing your toiletries for drugs etc.
- Don't offer him your hand cream to use
- Don't watch chic flick movies back to back after 2 weeks of minimum sleep and maximum emotion. It'll end in tears.
- Do watch 59 minutes of Louis Theroux. He's a genious and a complete stud.
- Don't sit behind a nutter who competes with any babies that cry. You are not likely to get ANY sleep on your 12 hr flight to Singapore.
- Do chat to the lovely couple from Melbourne next to you. They will give you their address and number for you to get in touch for a cuppa when you arrive in Melbourne. Really really lovely. We made lots of jokes about the nutter in front of us as well. He claimed to have taken 2 sleeping pills about 200 million times. That a lot of times. But quite frankly they didn't work. Thanks Deanna and Robert. Oh and Deanna informed me that we were flying on a brand new A380 Airbus. So anyone who's in to their plnes can be impressed by that. I was. It was huge. They had to build a new terminal at Singapore for it. Didn't realise they'd go to such great lengths for my arrival.
So I eventually I arrive in Bangkok on Friday 27th June @ 11am and get a small scare when my backpack is pretty much last to show it's pink self. But it did show. And the supervisor was there, as was Kimberley who I had been chatting to loads online for a few weeks. She's another volunteer. We jump in a taxi and drive about 30 minutes to what was going to be my home for the next 4 weeks. Kimberley informed me that Suvannah, the supervisor, was actually living with us as well. This wasn't what I expected and was a bit disappointed with it as I didn't care to be supervised in my own time as well, but there wasn't much we could do about it anyway. I was shown to my room and my rock hard bed and I made myself at home. This pretty much involved spreading my clothes out around the room and placing random bags on and around my bed. Ahhh. The house was big and clean.
The other volunteers were still at school so Kimberley said she'd take me on a bit of a tour around our little town. I don't think any of it had sunk in yet really. We walked up the road a little and Kim started telling me about the crazy transport. She then gave me a prime example of it too by actually getting hit by a motorbike... ok so it wasn't funny at the time but it is now. It completely came out of knowhere as we crossed the road. She got flipped up in the air and came crashing down. Luckily she sort of landed a bit on the bike which broke her fall so only ended up with a few grazes on her back. Oh and an awesome scar to tell the tale for years to come. So back we went to the house to clean up. Then out again, down to the mall for a mooch around. The mall had everything you need - McDonalds (joke), clothes stalls, food hall with dishes of food for about 50p, internet, supermarket, lepers... I bought a dress. I had to. It had stars all over it. But figured at the grand old price of 150 baht (about 2 pound) it'd be ok. And I made a rule that for every item I buy, I had to leave one behind.
We headed back, and I met the others. Kimberley, Stephen, Vikki, Natalia, and Coco. All lovely and we hit it off straight away. None were too pleased about the set up though, which I had already picked up on myself. There seemed to be a number of rather regimented rules that we had to stick to, which I would soon find out got even worse...
That evening (still Friday, when I had not really slept since Tuesday night) we took a bus in to Bangkok to go and see Pendulum, a Drum n Bass night. It was awesome. We had THE best night. What a way to start off. It was wicked. Lots of dancing, or in my case, jumping. Next stop McDonalds. It had to be done. But the nuggets were no good. I think Stephen did warn me but I went ahead anyway. They don't do BBQ sauce so it's just not worth it. We then got it in to our heads to go to a ping pong show, despite Vikki not thinking it appropriate after her burger, so we stopped a cab and Kimberley shouted 'ping pong' a few times at the puzzled driver. Luckily he didn't really get it, so we headed home. I actually slept like a baby.
Next day we went to a school opposite where we lived. We were there to just chat to some students. The school was far from underpriveledged, which does sound awfully picky of me, but I didn't really want to volunteer my time to rich kids. Anyway we went round in different groups and chatted about day to day stuff. They were 15-20 yrs old so they had a good grasp anyway. But it was like we were famous. Afterwards they whacked out their mobile phones and brand new cameras and took a zillion pictures. All the girls kept saying to us girls how beautiful we are. "I know" I replied... We were given donuts which we tucked in to, until we found curried potatoes inside. Slightly odd and not very nice. I wouldn't recommend it. Stephen had a funny moment when he was trying to explain to the group of gays at the back, that he actually liked girls. So he pointed to the girl next to him, who he claimed to have a 'nice set of pins on er' and said "beautiful", to which they all fell about laughing. He then noticed that she had pretty huge feet attached to her lovely pins, and a fairly big adam's apple. Haha.
Saturday evening we went to some Mongolian BBQ place with our supervisor and her family. We had to go collect the food in the middle which included meats we weren't too sure of and then cook it ourselves at our tables. We weren't too overly happy about cooking left out meat for ourselves but just went for it in the end and did it. I had a tiny bit of chicken and then just filled up on rice. It was nice, but I think we were still just over cautious about that sort of thing. Im sure we'll get in to it. So then we headed in to Bangkok again. Natalie, Coco and Stephen and I decided to stay there for the night so we could just get up Sunday and have a snoop around. So we found a hostel at 2 pounds a night... went for a few drinks. I stayed up with Stephen to watch the footie finals, which at 2am we realised wasn't on til the next day. Doh. So we got up the next day and had breakfast. We were in Koah San Road which is very commercialised so we had scambled egg on toast. Very Asian. It was scrummy though. We looked round and then decided to go to the cinema and watched Wanted. Don't bother. It's pants. Went and got some food (actually about 8 hrs gone past since breakfast so we're not just pigs). I had my 1st thai green curry which i had been craving and it blew my head off. But I ate it all. I don't like leaving food even if it does feel like it's actually burning my insides!
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