suriya, this adorable older thai teacher in our office, has been taking care of her dad all year. he's very old and very sick, she explained. over the weekend, he passed away. apparently, when someone dies in thailand, everyone even remotely connected to that person goes to the funeral, because even maddy, tahsh, and i got invited. all the teachers in our office went. funerals here last for a number of days--usually about a week, i think. for most of the nights, tons of people come to the temple and bring huge wreaths and listen to blessings or talk about the person or something like that (i dunno, kanchana said the people were chanting in balinese or something, so i had no shot at understanding it). on the final night of the funeral, the person is cremated, and i'm under the impression that it's more close family on that night. anyway, the whole funeral thing didn't seem so sad (and i'm not saying that because i'm semi-dead inside). everyone was there, but nobody was crying (i even leaned over and asked kanchana one time if anyone would cry, and she said no). nobody seemed particularly wrecked, but this is probably because you'd lose face big time if you wept in front of the crowd. so though it was a funeral, it didn't have that same depressing air that american funerals have.
also, kanchana took us to her sister's house this week to help her niece and her niece's friend prepare for an interview on friday. we ate tons of food from the market--kanchana wouldn't stop buying us things--and hung out in this HUGE house. it was awesome. kanchana's gonna teach us how to make papaya salad there sometime soon.
someone in the office is about one month pregnant. that means i'm gonna get to see her have the baby. BABIES!! i'll try to get pictures.
late p.s. if you happened to see this post between 9 am saturday morning and around midnight on sunday night (thailand time), sorry this was all randomly in a different font for a while. and now i have no idea why it's still a smaller font. i tried clicking "normal" up there on the size button. that's real annoying. oh, well.
extremely delayed p.p.s. it's because i wrote this in times and the rest of my blog is in georgia. iiiiiiidiot.
No comments:
Post a Comment