I arrived in Bangkok at the 16th of December. The morning of the flight I felt very sick. I caught a cold. It is never a good idea to fall asleep when you still sweat from carrying your backpack through the city. I woke up with a bad sore throat and a feeling of weakness in my bones. Nevertheless I had to get my plane from Beijing to Bangkok that day at 2pm. I trudged to the subway and then to the airport. Somehow I managed to send some stuff I wouldn’t need in Thailand home (jacket, boots, scarf etc.) and got on the plane. Looking forward to go to a nice warm place I found out that Thai-people like air conditioning a lot. Literally every plane, train, car and restaurant cool down the air to fridge conditions. I arrived at my hostel, which I booked in advance via internet and was quite happy to have a place to stay for the first night. After arriving at the hostel I got to know one American and 3 Swedish guys, Brandon, Marcus, Jonas and Eric, nice greetings to you, if you’ll ever read this.
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Some days in Bangkok
Bangkok, which official name consists of about 30 words, is a crazy place to be. There are so many “farangs”, western people as they name them, that you just don’t stand out in the crowd of white skin around you. Of course we visited the Khao san Road where you can get lost with buying things and refusing offers from street vendors.
Thai people like sports a lot. Especially ping pong- Everybody offers you to play with them on the street, which I find is really nice. For some reason they only want to play with foreigners- so I think they want to improve their skills by competing with other nations. ;-)
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Brandon and me stayed one day longer in Bangkok than the others did so we discovered the city from a different side as well. We took a water ferry to go to one of the beautiful temples of the city but we missed our stop- so we got completely lost at the attempt to walk back to the temple. We found ourselves in some Thai neighbourhood, where there were not a single tourist but parents bringing their kids to school and Thai families praying in temples. We stumbled into a school where pupils performed a really cool dance and girls cheering at special hip movements.
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Arriving in Nong Khai
After doing some research I found a volunteer organisation named Open mind Projects (www.openmindprojects.org) and decided to stick to my quest as it is to fix computers for bed and breakfast. I took the train (10 hrs) from Bangkok to NongKhai, which is NorthEast Asia, at the boarder to Laos at the Mekong River. The train unfortunately did not go the whole way to Nong Khai but stopped at some town near. On the train I met a Thai girl, Poja (there is nothing funny about this name my Spanish friends!!). As her English was not that good and my Thai was not existing at all we found a very nice man, who helped us with translating some sentences. Poja told me that her brother is going to pick her up at the station, and that they would go to NongKhai. It happened that they life just half a kilometre away from the Organisation, where I volunteer. We arrived and indeed her brother took us with him to KFC for having dinner- within five minutes 4 of Pojas friends where sitting at our table, laughing their asses off, as the white, blond farang didn’t understand a single word Thai. After that they took me to my new home for the next weeks: openmindprojects at NongKhai.
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Poja is the girl on the left and she is, believe it or not, 24!
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