sangkhlaburi (finally)

i had an unexpectedly busy day today...four classes, grades to turn in, students doing make up tests, eating stuff, blah blah blah. i came home intending to turn on the australia channel and zoning out for a bit, but in an unexpected life twist, the australia channel isn't working but the internet in the apt is, so here i am, on the internet. hell yeah.

so sangkhlaburi* last weekend. it was absolutely phenomenal and is sitting on my top three list of places in thailand. it's way over in the north west of thailand, almost touching myanmar/burma** (although...myanmar does share quite a bit of border with thailand, so telling you this doesn't give you much of a hint as to where it is). joe, deb, ilan, alex, alex's dad, maddy, ally, lexa, and i woke up early on saturday morning to hop in a personal van to sangkhlaburi. the first couple hours of the trip were fairly uneventful--lots of flat, rice-paddy-filled central thailand goodess (sarcasm).

after a stop at at delicious coffee place (mmm white chocolate mocha), the drive got increasingly more beautiful. mountains started popping up around us, and our van started to wind uphill, through more and more forest-type situations. we stopped to overlook a lake and as soon as we got out, i could smell the difference in the air. you know that incredibly recognizable scent of forest? it was that. it came at me unexpectedly and all at once i realized how much i had missed this. suphan is SO FLAT. i can't see any mountains. even when we go up the tall tower in the middle of the city, i swear i can't see a single mountain. just...rice paddies.

so anyway, we make it to sangkhlaburi.

actually, i'm gonna pause the chronological story telling for a minute here to explain something. we organized this personal van+driver through brett, this older australian guy who works at school who has a thai wife and hooks us kids up with vans to cool places. it's awesome. the only thing is that the van drivers pretty much only speak thai. so if we have an up-in-the-air itinerary (like we sort of did this past weekend), there's a LOT of language barrier crap and a lot of miming what we want to do and getting through whole conversations with one or two thai words and pointing and, eventually, calling brett who will put his wife, cat, on the phone to actually talk to the guy in thai.

there was some sort of miscommunication with the driver, so when we got to sangkhlaburi, he took us to some wat and the mon village before we checked in to the hotel, and we were all really confused...whatever. we were wandering around this temple and stumbled upon a cemetery out back. i LOVE cemeteries. wandering through cemeteries is an arnold family favorite. i was thrilled and i took about a hundred thousand pictures. farther down this path was what looked like a crematorium...creepy. death abound.

after an hour or so we hopped back in the van, checked out the mon village real quick (more on this later), then drove over to p guest house. this place was absolutely gorgeous. the rooms were made of stones and overlooked this incredibly beautiful lake dotted by little shacks. if you go to sangkhlaburi--and my god, you should go to sangkhlaburi if you're spending time in central thailand--i'd say stay in p.

lol. stay in p. that's funny.

after a yummy lunch (curry and fruit shakes...nom nom nom), we changed into our suits and ran down to the lake. there was a bamboo raft about 20 feet away from the p guesthouse dock, and we spent a couple hours leaping off, swimming around, and just generally enjoying life. those were two of my most content hours yet in thailand.

just before sunset, we wandered down the way to what's rumored to be the longest wooden bridge in thailand (every city/region seems to have its superlative, no matter how inane it is) to the mon village. the burmese govt doesn't exactly love the mon people, so a fair chunk of them have ended up in thailand (go on, click that link for the wikipedia page if you're aching for more mon information). they live what seems to be an incredibly simple life. they live in basic little shacks near the lake (sometimes literally ON the lake), and i think they pretty much provide for themselves. it made for a quiet refuge and relaxing atmosphere in the whole area.

 

home sweet home.

oh my god, that sunset. i'd make the five-hour drive up there again just for that. you'll have to look at fbook pictures. 

on sunday, we woke up early and took a speed boat (which is not at all like this...more like this plus a motor) around the lake. the original sangkhlaburi was actually flooded over a long time ago, so in the middle of this lake pokes out the top of the old temple. during the dry season, you can see a fair bit of the temple coming out of the water. it was simultaneously awesome and a bit creepy. the lake during sunrise was tranquility at its best. it's like the fog knew exactly how to place itself on the water and around the mon houses to make everything look like a picture. 

on our way out of town later that day, we went to three pagoda's pass, a border crossing where you used to be able to buy a one-day burmese visa and kick it in myanmar/burma for a while. but, alas, the border's been closed for a couple years, so i just got to look at burma/myanmar real close. it looked the same. 

we made another pit stop at the saiyok waterfall a few hours down the road. lonely planet said it's a fun place to watch thai people frolic around. i was figuring we'd see a few families, maybe a couple picnic lunches, but mostly a calm, serene waterfall area. 

 

not true.

we made it back to suphan by 6 pm on sunday evening, and i immediately wanted to go back. good thing i'm here until october.

*it's really hard for my fingers to type the "gkhl" next to each other. they're rejecting all those awk constants stuck together.
**WHAT DO I CALL THIS PLACE? i want to be respectful of whomever i'm supposed to respect the most in this situation.

wake up, give finals, grade, grade, grade, sleep, repeat

that's all i'm doing right now. (real talk: i should add "eat" between every one of those.) i wanna upload pictures of sangkhlaburi and write about it before it all slips out of my brain, so hopefully i'll find an hour or two where i can do that. (slash when i'm really bored of grading, i'll procrastinate and do all of that.) sorry for my absence, internet.

but you know what a week of grading means? another blog post about the hilarious/incredibly sweet answers the students have given me. get pumped, but be patient.

interesting fact!

yesterday, feb. 14, was chinese new year. there's this chinese descendants' museum in our town and all last week they were setting off fireworks. on feb. 13, our chinese friends stayed up late, made dumplings, watched the celebrations in china on a big screen tv (i think it'd be something like us watching the ball drop), and exchanged those red envelopes with money in them. when i came into the office this morning, i asked efei, our resident chinese teacher, how her new year was. then i asked her if they say gung hay fat choi, just like every american kid learned to say during our super short lessons on chinese new year.

efei: "what?"
me: "gung hay fat choi...you know, like what you maybe say on new years. i dunno, that's what i always learned in school."
efei: "OHHHH gong shi fa tai. you say it like southern chinese people."

turns out that gung hay fat choi (which she said way differently, like an actual chinese person would say it and not the americanized way) is part of a more rare south eastern dialect of chinese. it's not the most popular way to say "good luck and you'll make lots of money in the new year" in china. i wondered why americans everywhere (seriously, hasn't everyone learned gung hay fat choi?) learned this rare version of the phrase. efei guessed it might be because they speak that in hong kong, where people are very rich and can travel/up and move to america.

new knowledge, learned and stored.