May 1, 2005
Everyone! For further updates, please link to our personal webjournals located on the left of this page. You can access our photosite (which will be maintained) on either this site, or our personal webjournal pages. Thanks for perusing our sites and hope you've enjoyed what you've seen/read so far! Stay tuned for more - from Korea to Dawson City, Yukon!
Susan & Ryan.
April 8 2548
Ya, thats right, 2548 and soon to be 2549. Its almost Thai new year (Songkran) and the festivities are starting to begin. To start with, there is the week long water fight that happens every year. Everyone is fair game for a friendly drenching with dirty moat water. Everyone that is except Buddhist monks, but I don't think I will be doning the saffron robes just to stay dry. I have already been fired on by children with water pistols, hanging out the windows of cars. I have seen people being pushed into the moat and belive me, it is an experience I would rather forgo. By the middle of next week the city will turn into a truly insane place with water being thrown everywhere. I will let you know how I was able to survive this insanity in the next update, it will likely be by sitting pool side for a week.
Work has been on the slow side, right now I am only working two days a week but I expect that is due to Songkran coming up. Susan has decided to return to school after a long break and persue the leagal secratary program at Camosun. She is leaving at the end of this week to travel in Thailand for a while (why not when you are here already) and then she will be headed to Dawson City, Yukon on the 17th of May to work and explore. I will be staying on in Chiang Mai, at least for a while. So we will be going our separate ways. There are no hard feelings, it is just that we are going different directions right now. We will both be maintaing the web site, or having different sites but there will be a link to both of them on this site when we figure out the logistics. I have been thinking about going to Vietnam or Korea to make some good money. It is about time that I start paying off my student loan. My closest friend Jenn will be here in a couple of days and we have been planning on going some where together to teach so we will be working out logistics then.
Because work had been slow and oh so frusturating (there is nothing more frusturating than dealing with Thai burocracy) I decided to go to Ton Sai for a couple of weeks. The trip was great although it was too damn hot to do anything but nap in the afternoons. Susan is jelous becasue I managed to get my tan back and yet again, I am darker than her. I got some good climbs in but the trip was more to visit with people, Jenn especially than to climb so climbing took a back seat this time around. I did however manage to get in a after dark ascent of groove tube, which turned out to be a lot more fun than waiting in line to climb it in the day. It is really nice to be in a place where you can travel to world class destinations for 10% of what most people pay for air fare to get there. Some times, I don't think I will ever be able to leave this place and to be honest, I am really torn whether I want to try and make this more of a permanent home. I do miss things about Canada some times but I know that I would miss things about Thailand if I was back in Canada. For example, spending about $5 Canadian for both Susan and I to stuff out faces to the point of being uncomfortble. Or paying $150 dollars for a fully furnished appartment with mountian views and a swiming pool. If anyone knows where I can find that deal in Canada, let me know.
I will keep you up to date on the Songkran festivities (if I survive them). Keep sending the emails, it is great to hear from everyone.
March 10, 2005.
Well, it's been about 5 days. Ryan is doing a much better job than i at keeping this place up to date. As ryan said, he is taking off to ton sai for a few weeks. i am so jealous! my job has seen fit to give me about 10 hours of work over the next 2 weeks which makes it impossible for me to go. although now i am dreaming about beaches and coconuts and the ocean. it has made me realize that before i leave here, i want to take at least another month just for travelling. i think i will head to the island of ko tao, to do some more diving. (not to mention travelling to the places up north i haven't seen - like pai and sukhothai).. so, while ryan is off having fun in the sun, i will be working a whopping 2 hours a day. unless of course i'm able to pick up some more hours. i had a job interview yesterday for a better job - work visa and 40 hours a week. the only problem is that they wanted me to sign up for a year contract, which at this point i am unwilling to do. so, while the extra cash would have been nice, i wasn't about to sign on for a year knowing i'd be bailing sooner than that. plus, i've gotten used to not working so much. monday - saturday is a bit intense. so, i'm content for now to just see how everything goes. while ryan is gone i think i'm going to do a lot more reading and definitely sit by the pool more often! anyway, we spent a great day the other day at the chiang mai zoo. ryan has loaded some new photos onto the site for you to look at. all in all as far as zoos are concerned, it was one of the nicer ones i've been to. a few of the enclosures were really sad to look at, but they had an amazing avery with so many different bird species. the peacocks were especially incredible, as you can see from the photos. the zoo is built on huge inclines and declines, so our whole day there was spent doing a lot of walking (my legs still hurt!) but it was a great day to get some awesome photos. anyway, take care for now, and enjoy the new pics!
susan.
March 5
Its cool today. Rained last night for the first time in months. I was woken at 1:00 in the morning to what I thought was the telivision comming on with a static channel on quite loudly. When it rains here, it really rains. It was nice, the air has been cleaned, the streets have been cleaned. The forest fires that have been plaguing the mountians have doubtfully survived the kind of rain that we had last night. It is so refresing to have a cool day, with clean air.
The two directors that were running the company that I was working for quit last month and the effects are starting to be felt. It is becoming increasingly frusterating working for the company. At the end of this week I will only have two hours of teaching time a week and at this point they keep promising me more hours but have yet to deliver. They have however, managed to hire six new teachers who they are giving hours to becasue they are new so they get to fill out their schedual so they won't leave right away. For some reason the logic here is that having more teachers that you need will protect against the possibility that it might get increadably busy and company won't have enough teachers. In the mean time, they are going to lose the experienced teachers that they do have because they are not giving them any hours. I am getting to the point that I just want to quit after this week and go travel for a while on the money that I was able to save, rather than fight with management for enough hours to sustain me. Call me crazy but I don't really think it is all that fair to be giving all the new teachers hours when you don't have enought to keep your experienced teachers happy.
Anyway, this is the way the Thai system works. You have to deal with it or go else where. It can't say it would be so bad to travel for a couple of weeks to a month before heading to Korea??? where I can make some real money with garenteed hours.
Yesterday Susan and I spent a lovely ten hours on a bus to do our fifth visa run. They are becoming a neccecary pain in the ass. I also get in trouble for these at work becasue the staff have no idea how immigration works. Our passports are getting pretty full of $5 stamps from the Myanmar border. All in all the trip was the least painfull so far with the border being relativly quiet. We got through in 15 minutes, a round trip which takes a good hour when it is busy. On the bus ride back we witnessed the after effects of a motorcycle accident which left one man (at least) dead. It was sobering to see and it made me realize how fragile and precious life really is. It is not something to be trifled with and the old adage to live every day like it is your last does not seem so cheesy after witnessing this. All of this comes in the wake of the devistating Tsunami which I have yet to be able to find the words to describe. Life truely is a gift.
I have been trying and thus far succeding at giving more regular updates. There and a load of new pictures on the photo site and I have recently replaced the broken memory card in my camera so very soon there should be some shots of the lovely Chiang Mai and surrounding. Keep your emails comming, it is so nice to have contact with home.
Ryan.
March 2 2005 at least thats what the calender tells me. I still find it hard to belive that it is March already.
Well, it has been a while since the last update and it has been even longer since I (Ryan) put an update on the site. We have now been in Thailand for over six months. It is hard to belive that time has gone this fast, it seems as if only yesterday I was planning this trip and saving up for it. Looking back on the last six months, I realize just how lucky I am to be here. I have made great friends here, have had great friend come to visit and learned things that I never would have imagined would be possible. Things have been going well in Chiang Mai. Both Susan and I have been teaching and after some initial shock to the system, both from working again, and from getting used to the way things work in Thailand (ie. they do somehow but nobody knows how or why), we are getting pretty used to teaching. I have become really attached to the kids in the kindergarden that I teach at. It will be sad to say good bye to them at the end of the week. (In the Thai school system summer holidays start in March). I am supposed to be getting quite a few hours of teaching after this week because of summer programs but to be honest, I am hoping to get none and to take off to Ton Sai again. I have come to love it there and having Jenn there right now makes me want to go even more. If you ever come to Thailand Ton Sai is one of the places that I would say not to miss.
For some reason, it feels as if my time in Thailand is comming to a close. I have been thinking about what to do upon return to Canada. I have been looking into jobs in Korea. I'm starting to get a little sick of being in one place for so long. Chiang Mai is a beautiful city but there is so much pollution that it is hard to breath some times. On some days you can barely see down the street it is so smoggy. I have been sick more here than I ever have been before. Partly I know it is due to working with the kiddys but it is also the pollution. Thai drivers can also be a little nuts. I thought before that Thai drivers were good as there never seems to be any accidents. I only recently saw my first accident here. But now that I am driving in this city ( I got myself a motorcycle for those of you that didn't know) I realize that they are just lucky. You have to watch all the time. You can come around a corner here only to have two lanes of traffic comming right for you down the wrong side of the street. It has been amusing to learn to drive a motorcycle here as well as down right scary at times but now that I have had a motorcycle, I don't think I could ever be with out one. I used to hate driving a car but the increased manuverabiliby of a motorcycle is amazing. I know that I could not drive a car here, I would go crazy.
In other news, I have been practicing my Thai, which is increadably hard to learn because it is a tonal language where one word has multiple meaning depending on the way in which you say it. However, I have been taking lessons from the manager of a restaraunt buy my appartment. I trade him some english for Thai lessons which works well for both of us. It is slow going but I am memorizing more and more words, I figure by the time I get out of here I will be able to comunicate at least. Thai language barely has any grammatical rules so at least I will not have complex rules to memorize on top of about five meaning for every word. It has been nice to spend time practicing a foreign language, I didn't think I would ever learn one and it is a relif to find that I could possibly become proficient with Thai if I was to spend more time here.
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