Stepping Into Pictures

"Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die."

There are points of negativity, always, there always will be. Whatever we do, wherever we go, there'll always be a tangle or two. Messy emotions.
But they do not measure at all to the awe I see around me. Moments of negativity, elongated moments of absolute awe. In Thailand, I have truly stepped into the pictures. The pictures you see which speak to you, inspire you to get out there, to see everything the world has to offer; I have packed my bag, laced up my shoes and tumbled, feet first, into the rolling wonder of the world's beauty.

There's something about South East Asia which makes me proud to be part of something as incredible as this world. I've realised, finally, how lucky I am to be able to not only see these things, but touch them, breathe them, jump into them. I'm lucky to get to feel this way, it is a humbling, magnificent thing to feel. Liberating.

We've been back at the project for nearly a month now, finally being of some benefit to the school which feels so good. Our little house is feeling like home...especially when it's clean. The cat has learned not to pounce on our feet. We live in Thailand, in a pretty part as well, and that is a great, great privilege. Though I miss everything and everyone I left behind, the pangs are constant and painful, I would never ever trade this experience...not for all the Yorkshire Tea in the world. Though I've had my fair share of bad luck...and other people's shares, come to think of it...I have never once regretted coming here, I have learned so much already and what I've learned about myself, about this culture and about global society is invaluable. We need to interlink more, we need to learn more, we need more intertwining relationships. We need more explorers.

This life moves fast, I'm here for a year and that's only a spec in time. I know its a cliche (to be honest what in this blog is NOT a cliche?) but we really don't get much time to get about; we're constantly running to catch the next train, held back by paper obstacles, files, time limits, restrictions, and the old evil...financial instability. Limits, limits, limits.

I'm making it my personal mission to always go over my limits and I am very much resigned to the fact that that means I will probably always be poor but I am going to be very happy building my scrapbook life. Stepping into the pictures and indulging in learning.

"One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

Words: the beautiful, immortal genius of Tennyson.
Music: Yes, I am listening the the Brave soundtrack. 

   

The Reasons Why

This is what good luck is, finally we have some. This is why we do it. This is why we drag ourselves on through culture shock and feelings of "I can't do this, I wasn't cut out for this...why did I leave everything dear behind?" This is why we squat in dank holes, endure horrendous bowel movements and share showers with cockroaches, spiders, mosquitoes and blood suckers. This is why we came here. This is Thailand and this is our year.

We hefted a year's worth of our lives onto our backs and shuffled through Chiang Mai: Song Thaw, walking, bus station, floor, bus, Chiang Rai, Song Thaw, guest house, floor, beds. Heft, drag, collapse, that's the key. Chiang Rai held little promise, save for the White Temple, a gleaming reminder of the morbidity of Religion, it blinds in sunlight. Once again we hefted, dragged, sagged, squashed ourselves into a minivan which seemed too clean for our grubby feet. Everything is too clean for our grubby feet. There we stayed, huddled and contorted, laughing at ourselves as we wound up dizzily through the mountainside, up, up, up towards the heaven of Pai. It is a heaven, if one believes in such a thing, this is it. Pai is beautiful, it's views are the pictures you see in your mind when you think of Thailand, and there those pictures were, right outside our window and we were weaving in and out of them, incorporating into it, tiny ants in a vast sphere of awe.

9:00am and we hired scooters (stop laughing) to zip through and around Pai. If there's one way to really appreciate where you are, in this haze of rolling green and blue power, hurtling through it, feeling its stinging breath pelt you in the face and freeze your grinning teeth is certainly the way to go about it. Euphoria. There's a freedom comes from it, from being in control and being on your own two feet, it was so good to feel that.

Speeding on, we stumbled on these sights. Stumbled upon them! Only in Thailand could you unexpectedly crest a hill and be confronted with all this...breathtaking. That's the realisation we all need, being able to think "okay, THIS is why I'm here" is a great, great thing. Left, right, loop, return, up, down, this way, that way? We picked a direction and gunned it down, only two minutes in and we stopped to pet the elephants who loitered right next to the road. Another beautiful surprise, just there. Right there, in front of us. Just elephants. HA!

On we went for the day, on and on, never letting up on the accelerator, never letting up on our grins. Pure, sweet, tangy life. Best day.

And then I just CHUNDERED EVERYWHAR...

Baptized By Fire

                                                            "So I'll be sailing on
                                                           Out into bermuda blue
                                                         Compass needle breaks
                                                        Like the heart I gave to you
                                                 I've been laying down in the devils lair
                                               Sailing into the sun I'll be baptized there"


Over a month has passed since I moved here, within that month I have been jerked and jived into a brutal tango, my flesh and bones clawed at by six inch talons, ripping away, exposing every sensitive, raw part of my being and watching with pleasure as I collapse in exhaustion from the constant pirouette. Sounds harrowing, don't it? Let me indulge you in woe.

I don't know if I expected to be gathered up and thrown into the pool of fire, or if I expected to be eased gently into it, either way it would've still felt like the baptism of fire it has been. And what a fire has burned, I've felt thrown about by change, music I don't want to dance to keeps forcing me up and around the room. I seem to be having to make peace with the fact that nothing here is ever going to be completely fine and I'm not sure if that is something that I should be making peace with...I'll try my best to change it, make things okay, but god damn everything makes that so hard. We came to Chiang Mai looking to forget the intensity, instead we got the opposite; frequenting hospitals, negativity and arguments heightened by lack of sleep, complications and being away from home. It's all on us here, some of us can't handle that fact. Me included, sometimes.

Don't get ill in a foreign country, just look after yourself and watch what you eat when travelling, its not worth the needles and pills and drips and long, long waiting hours filled with not knowing what the hell is going on or what the hell is wrong with you. I spent several hours on Friday with my head in a toilet - everything I've ever consumed in my life making an unwelcome reappearance for that entire time - my head and every pore of my body screaming for home. Take me home, where things are easy, why can't things just be easy? Why does everything have to be difficult? Being ill makes you seriously reconsider everything, particularly when you're so far from everything you know, so the whole "nothing worth having comes easy" attitude...not so easy to adopt when you're genuinely not sure if this is worth having. Like I say...you reconsider everything. 

Sometimes life enjoys buffeting and battering you around until you feel rung out, bruised and broken. I am utterly crumpled, this morning I could barely support what little weight I've managed to keep on me from being so sick, physically I probably could but to hell if I want to. To hell with telling myself tomorrow will be a better day; "yeah that's what you said yesterday..."

This country and the situations I've been thrown into are hellbent on stretching me, contorting my body and making me scream for escape, and damn if I haven't fallen into a heap and cried for home. But I will not let it beat me, I will not let it crush me into submission; it has hit me hard...and I will hit it back harder, its about time I started getting tough. I will find armour and I'll use it to carry on, through the storm, through the spinning. I will beat it. Because this is my dream, this is me and I will stay true to myself.

"So we beat on. Boats against the current..."

Artists seeing me through just now: Daughter, Spinnerette and Rae Morris

Great Expectations

"You'll be fine after two weeks. Everything will seem normal. Give it two weeks." Not quite, guys. Try again.

We asked a lot of ourselves after only a couple of weeks, we're still watching the bikes whoosh past carrying families, whole stalls and furniture and thinking..."hmm. Health and Safety would have a field day." I'm still reaching for my HTC phone whenever something interesting happens, thinking "damn that was interesting, I'd better let Lewis know about this interesting thing which happened to me IN THAILAND!" And then reality comes back and I'm standing in the heat, surrounded by people giggling at my excitement over their normality whilst oogling my alien paleness with the same wonderment.

It'll take much longer than a couple of flimsy weeks, to get used to this.

Uthai is strange, or rather, what it makes me think is strange. One day I'll be sitting under a much needed air con, feeling sorry for myself and thinking "this town is my hometown...in Thailand. Might as well have stayed home." "Urgh! There's nothing to do here!" (never mind that at this moment I am sat inside, not actually making any effort to explore...) and of course, the unwavering "I want my teddy bear!" All these I'll think and then I'll start a new day, such as today, and I'll see the little side streets, the scurried away stalls of glittering wonderment, the wooden trails of colour leading to glittering white shrines of religion. Inviting exploration. Senses increase and I can see that every place will always have secrets to be discovered, you just have to step outside of your insular security long enough to find the love in them. 

Sarah and I have had a full on few weeks in Thailand, to say the least. I couldn't have coped without The Hives, Florence, Band Of Skulls and every other beauty. We arrived, we went to stay in a host house, with our host family, who we loved - we couldn't help but love them - but circumstances meant we had to move, and we had to move as soon as possible. Now we inhabit a small, deliciously clean, hotel room. Our toilet flushes. It's heaven. But I feel so temporary in a hotel, so out of place. I'm excited to move into our house. OUR house. Maybe then everything will fall into place and I'll feel a lot more like I belong. Despite the daily gawpings and "BEAUTIFUL [WHITE] GIRLS". 
 
The key to finding this town's inevitable treasures is to get lost, and I fully intend to spin myself into disorientation and discover its glitter.

Listening To: II by Unknown Mortal Orchestra (if you want to stay sane, some Beatles-like psychedelia is your medicine)  

And So It Begins

Hello, little blog of mine. It’s been a while. Let’s dive in, shall we?

First, leaving the UK; thank Thor and all good things all the volunteers were together for that! Saying goodbye to my family was...a gut-wrenching, physically tearing five minutes. If I'd had it my way at that point, I'd have clung onto my man for the whole year, rather than leave him. But leave I had to, and leave I did. It hurt, but thankfully there was everyone waiting with cuddles, tears in their eyes, the same pain in their hearts and adventure on their lips. We got each other through, again. Shortly after, we were chatting, taking our minds off things and things started to feel normal again. We could finally get excited. That first plane journey was a treat, so comfortable, a vast, empty airborne locker of cosiness, plus Kevin's hand to hold when it took off, which was a necessity. We flew over Dubai and saw the whole island, lit up like trails of fiery soldiers headed to battle, it blazed with the glory of decadence and life. That was a good moment, the young island which felt so full of promise and life, radiating up to us in our metal bird, very exciting. However, then we came to change at Mumbai...things went downhill, immediately we were hit by heat and stench, pure India, I suppose. The men in our party were inexplicably separated from the women, to be let through security without sign of fuss or suspicion. While we, the women, were huddled into a compact line, made to remove items from bags, despite being very obviously overloaded, then made to wait even longer while they let through Indian women with token wheelchairs. They didn't need them, one woman was wheeled straight to the front of the security queue, ahead of all the sweating, drooping, baggage-lacerated foreigners, just to be plonked in front of people actually standing in line for the beepers, where she stood up with no difficulty and strode right on through the machine to collect her bags at the end and waltz off like a swan sprung from the womb with full mobility. So after that trip to security took the full two hour layby we had in Mumbai, we legged it to the gate, to our tiny, tiny jet plane which we shared with a lot of disrespectful, demanding, impolite Indian men, all apparently intent on getting bladdered on complimentary booze and groping the stewardesses. Safe to say we've all been put off India now. (Sorry India vols!)

That took four and a half hours, I believe. One hour would’ve been too long, it wasn’t a pleasant ride. Eventually, however we arrived in Bangkok and were met, bedraggled and yawning, by Lucie. Wonderful, wonderful Lucie, who shepherded us through the airport and onto beautifully air con’ed mini buses to a lovely clean hotel, where she said the most glorious, longed for words we’ve ever heard from human lips…“Today you can sleep for the day, no need to do anything but sleep.” Glorious, and exactly what we did. Those couple of days in Bangkok were lovely, so relaxed and Western-friendly…we had a toilet that flushed. I miss that toilet. And we got toast for breakfast! Toast…two things, friends, to never take for granted; clean, flushing toilets and toasted carbs. You truly don’t know what you’ve got ‘til its gone. I love you, toilet. I love you, toast. Wherever you are.

Ahem…moving on.

Okay so, second day in Bangkok was brilliant, lots of touristy sightseeing and market-buying, etc. Relaxed. Then we had to say goodbye to a few people, as they headed off to their projects that night, the rest of us stayed the night and then headed to ours in the morning. Morning came; we hoisted our life-heavy bags onto our tiny, frail bodies and headed to the train, waved goodbye to Lucie, our guiding light, and spent the next five hours sweltering on a rickety old tram-train. Food vendors walking up and down the tiny, narrow aisle singing their products; buckets of ice carrying questionably coloured fluids, stacks of even more questionably coloured meats, wandering up and down and up and down, while we dosed in and out of consciousness, leaves stroking past the windowless sides, the smells and sounds of the city ever diminishing and becoming green country while our tired, foreign eyes tried to make sense of it all. After many awkward attempts at Thai “where are we?”’s with the security/conductor people, who really were very friendly considering how annoying we probably were, we finally did arrive at Nakhon Sawan, where we were met by gorgeous Pe Ae, Pear, countless others, all so excited to see us, like being welcomed home by our families. And there is the end of our feeling completely comfortable for quite some time.

The ongoing story of our struggle to adjust continues in the next instalment with “The Woeful Misadventures Of A Geordie Away From Greggs.”

Peace.

No Stopping This Train Ride

Okay so...Training! Yes, yes the glorious week of early mornings, insane country prep sessions and lesson planning, coupled with the world class banter at the hands of the Thai, Indian and Senegalese volunteers. Banteers! Am I right?!...No...okay, moving on.
Training takes place on the Isle of Coll, way out in the Hebrides and is a massively important part of your year out with Project Trust, why? Because this is the week where it all gets way real. Like, holy ham, we're actually going...we're actually going to be teachers...we're actually going to have to eat that...Yeah, it hits pretty hard.
So, after a 4:30am start (the pain of that speaks for itself) to get the 5am ferry from Oban to Coll, which takes about four hours, I think...I'm not sure, I fell asleep for a good deal of it. Which is not an advisable way to take on sea journeys if you get seasick, just a pointer for you there. We got to to our beloved Coll around 9/10am and were immediately thrown into the bombardment of information and scary talks that is Training.

(From top to bottom) Me, organising my lesson activity, bossing it and Mei being super organised and neat, while the rest of us looked on in dis-Mei...see what I did?
And so the week continued in much this way; get up, breakfast, couple hour session/presenting lessons, more sessions, much needed coffee break, more sessions/lessons, lunch, more sessions/scary talks on what infections we can get/what are the ways in which we're likely to get attacked, dinner (oh how we love dinner...) then our time of lesson planning and nursing sore heads. As we got further into the week, however, we began to venture out into the wild. By which I mean we went to the beach and had a jolly good time. Here are some delightful shots of us thinking it's a great idea to run into the cold, strong-pulling sea:

It may sound as if I found Training to be exhausting and difficult and the reason for that is because it bloody was! But I've never been around such supportive, enjoyable and banter-iffic people since Selection, and the hard work paid off, I can now go overseas feeling slightly less "OH MY LORD I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THIS PLACE" and that's a good feeling. There were some tears, like I said, this week was when it really hit home for us all that we're leaving, and we're leaving soon. But we nursed each other through, became each others' support systems, made each other laugh. It was in these moments when we felt most weak, that we found that we were strongest of all, and that is why we do this; to find our comfort zone and climbing right up out of it, higher and higher until we reach the stars.

What to listen to today: Baby Darling Doll Face Honey - Band Of Skulls
 

It's All Relevant

Sawadee ka!  - Hello! Welcome to my blog, which for the next year and a bit will be about all things Thailand; throughout my year in Uthai Thani, Central Thailand, I will be attempting to fill you in on what I am gauging about the culture I'm inhabiting, while almost certainly keeping you amused with a few anecdotal quips on culture shock, what I've fallen over or onto that day and maybe secret little hiding places (or more likely, food carts) that I've stumbled upon. In all honesty, though, I am the worst at remembering to write things...so the frequency of this blog is going to vary...quite substantially. Sorry!
Anyway, onto the exciting parts! Alons-y!