First few days

Here is what the first few days looked like, starting with the traveling bit.

I flew out of SFO (luckily getting away with a 50.6 pound backpack when the maximum is 50!) at 1:35am and pretty much slept the entire 13 hour flight to Taipei. Except for the two meals they served, one being at about 3 or 4 am I would guess. Is that normal?? After a few hours waiting in the Taipei airport, I flew 3 more hours to Bangkok. Grabbed a shuttle bus to the train station in town. It was a pretty neat bus trip through the town and I saw nothing riot, etc related (as you'll be glad to hear). I got to the train station at 2pm and the next (and only) train to Nongkhai left at 8pm, so it was a long 6 hours in the train station. It did have shops and food stalls so I thoroughly explored it.

I was on a second class sleeper train with air con that got me to Nongkhai in the morning. I was relieved to see a guy with a sign that read Travel To Teach when I arrived. He turned out to be one of the coordinators and took me straight to the dorm to show me around. After a few hours of getting settled in, the other volunteers got back home from teaching. There are 6 other girls here at the moment (4 from England who are friends from home, 1 from Holland, and 1 from Switzerland who arrived the same day as me). They have all been here for 1-2 months already and are getting ready to continue on in their travels. In fact, the girl from Holland left on Sunday along with one of the English girls and the other 3 English girls will leave next week. We have picked up 2 boys (both American I believe) over the weekend so our current number is 7.

As mentioned in the first email, the next couple days were full of biking, eating, etc. I have already learned the favorite spots of the other volunteers and we definitely frequent them. Two days ago it rained super hard for 30 minutes and now it has been considerably cooler since, which is just fantastic.

Alright, so that's the recap for now. I will post for sure once I've done some teaching which should be in a few days. If there is any specific topic of interest, let me know and I will try to write about it. I figure a what I did at 9 am, 10am, 11am blog post daily is not very interesting. I figure maybe focus around topics like food, transport, etc? Let me know what you want to hear about through a comment or email and I'll see what I can do.

- Vi