Touchdown in Bangkok

The date was 29^th September 2014 when the aeroplane finally landed in Bangkok. Fifteen hours earlier we had taken off from Heathrow, and I had had about five minutes of sleep the entire journey, simply because Bollywood films.

We had finally arrived! Nick, our Overseas Representative, met us off the plane and delivered us to our hotel for the weekend before we all went our separate ways on Sunday. When I got to my hotel room, all I wanted to do was sleep for 24 hours, but there was a whole new city to explore! We walked all around the local area, round small streets, big roads and cute shopping centres. We even sat down for street food on one corner (I didn’t have any – too distrustful of things at this point), before the heat got too much and I just had to go back to the air con!

All the volunteers looking fresh after a 18-hour journey

That evening we met with Nick and Nicci for a meal in a nearby hotel, where I stumbled upon the spiciest thing I had ever eaten – I just kept drinking glass after glass of water, but I did recover eventually, even though I felt like my throat was going to close up. The food there was really nice in general; it was a new experience for us eating lots of different little dishes in the Thai style, with rice accompanying everything.

We did a number of things over the rest of the weekend, including going to MBK shopping centre, taking a boat along the river and visiting Wat Pho with the giant Reclining Buddha. Nick and Nicci took us out on Saturday night as well, but this time it was like a street food vendor/restaurant, so they set us out a long table on the road and the meal itself was set out much like the previous night.

There was a lot of travelling about, and a lot of it was by taxi. Unfortunately, being foreign in a new place like Bangkok didn’t go super smoothly, and a lot of the time we ended up paying a lot more than we would have needed to because we were being taken advantage of without the tools to avoid it or fight back. Hopefully we’ll pick up some tricks to do a bit better in these types of situations in the future.

On Sunday night, it was finally time for us to head to our projects (four of the girls had already gone on the train that morning but whatever). Unfortunately again (I feel like I’m going to overuse that word, unfortunately), Tonicha and I were on the latest bus out of the volunteers, and we set off at 10pm to unfortunately arrive at the unfortunate time of 1:30am.

We were greeted with hugs by our host teacher Pe Ae and another teacher at our school, Pe UIai, and Pe Ae’s husband too, who is from England. We were put straight to bed in a nearby hotel and wished a goodnight (with lots of snacks!) When we eventually woke up, Pe Ae took us for lunch (Pad Thai!) in a nearby restaurant, and then to the school to meet everyone and all the teachers!

After school today we went home with our new host sister, Pear, to stay at their house for a week. After that we will stay with another family for another week until we move into our own house.