Tiger Kingdom

     I'm sure nobody is very surprised that once again, I haven't updated my blog in a pretty long while.  To start catching up.. again.. I wanted to just post pictures from my trip with Parker and his parents (when they came out to visit a couple of weeks ago) to Tiger Kingdom.  It's a place just outside of Chiang Mai where you can go to get inside cages with not only adult tigers, but also the little babies, and medium sized ones.  It's pretty crazy... I gotta say I will never experience something quite like that again in my lifetime.  So, you're probably thinking right about now: "how the hell could you get in cages to pet the tigers without them ripping your arm off?"  and then you might think that they get drugged.  Actually though, their entire mission statement revolves around the fact that they do not drug them, nor do they even need to be drugged.  First of all, they're bred, and raised into captivity, so they get trained (with just a tap on the nose with a small bamboo stick) not to be too playful with biting or clawing from when they are young.  They also talk about how tigers sleep for 18 hours a day, and are nocturnal, so that during visiting hours when the park is open, they're at their laziest.  Now, at this point maybe you're thinking "so what, they could just be saying that, and actually are drugging them."  We saw it all first hand when we went into the baby tiger cages and played with them.  They were getting tapped on the nose anytime they were getting a little bit too aggressive with their playfulness.  Check out the website and read about it more if you're interested: http://www.tigerkingdom.com/Home.htm  (its not a very well put together website, and looks a little sketchy, but so it goes with so much of what you see in Thailand).  It really is a pretty awesome place, and it's extremely clear to the visitors of the park that the tigers have plenty of room, and are not just cooped up in cages all day long with no room.  Enjoy the pictures!!!!

tropical vacation in the gulf of Thailand

     Creeping up on about a month ago now, the Thai studies kids all had a mid-semester break for ten days.  Most of us took a trip down to the islands in the gulf, while some went to other parts of Thailand.  Those of us who went down to the gulf all made a first stop at Koh Samui, and then a few of us headed over to Koh Pan Ngan for the days leading up to the full moon party where we were all reunited again.

     To start out with, the traveling was brutal.  For the first leg of the trip, everyone went down in different ways but some of us started with a train down to Bangkok.  The trains here are pretty cool, especially if you take the over night train--which is what Parker, Pope, and myself took.  The only bad thing about the train is that it is pretty much guaranteed to be delayed anywhere up to three hours.  Luckily for us, ours only took about an extra hour to get into Bangkok though.  It was an awesome experience to take a sleeper train.  The seats we were sitting in folded down into beds, while other beds folded down from the ceiling.  Its a little bit hard to tell in the picture to the right, but the white slanted panels in the picture are the beds that fold down. It took us 16 hours to get from Chiang Mai to Bangkok, which placed us in Bangkok around 7am.  From there, we found out where the bus station was so we would know where to go when we needed to get on a bus for the second leg of the trip at 5pm later that day.  While we waited for the time to pass, we checked out a pretty big market (JJ markets), and also went a little farther downtown to where some big malls were.  Actually, right near the malls that we passed was quite visible damage from the political unrest earlier this year in May.  There was an entire building destroyed, with debris still everywhere around it (it was still fenced off).  Also, one of the malls we were in had also been partially burned.
     Finally, it was time to get back to the bus station to meet a couple more people from the group who had taken a bus down instead of a train, and get on the 5pm bus.  This bus took us overnight, all the way from Bangkok to Koh Samui (so including the ferry also).  This surely was much less comfortable to be overnight on, however, it was quicker, and less expensive than the train.  We then arrived in Koh Samui (after a sunrise ferry ride) at about 6am where we got a song taew to our beautiful simplistic hotel on the beach.

Marine National Park (near Koh Samui) at sunrise

sunrise from the ferry (looking at Koh Samui)

resort on Koh Samui

down the beach from our resort (Koh Pan Ngan in the distance)

While it was extremely tempting to not do anything except be a vegetable on the beach for the four days we would spend on Koh Samui, we only did that for two days.  For the other two days, we took day trips around the island.  On Tuesday, we drove over to one of the big waterfalls on the island.  Not sure what it's called, but it took us forever to actually get to it once we had gotten there by car.  What we didnt know about the waterfall before going there, was that it was about a 30 minute hike up a steep mountain to reach the good swimming spot.  Of course, literally none of us were wearing the correct shoes for hiking, mostly because I dont think anybody brought sneakers on our beach vacation.  When it came down to it, about half of the group stayed by the first small pool towards the bottom of the waterfall, before the hike got really steep.  The rest of us decided to keep going, and I'm certainly happy that I did, because after almost dying on the hike up, we were surprised with an awesome pool of water from the waterfall made by the rocks in the mountain. 

the pool near the top of the waterfall

view from about half way up--ocean is in the distance

     The next day, Parker organized a trip to do some snorkeling.  While Koh Samui isn't really known for great snorkeling, the entire day was fantastic.  We started off at about 10am meeting at the boat, and heading over to a snorkel spot.  The reef we were looking at was dead, and the water wasn't super super clear, but we still saw a whole bunch of fish which was really really cool.  After we spent a good amount of time there, we headed over across the way to a small island in the National Marine Park, where we could take a snorkel out and swim around, or just simply enjoy being on a fantastic beach with turquoise water all around us.  Basically all of us chose the option of enjoying the scenery.  Some layed out on the beach, and the bow of the boat, while some of us took a walk down the beach.  We found a lot of really huge washed up jellyfish which was sooo cool because I've never seen jellyfish before, ever. When we were finished on the small island, we were taken back near where we were snorkeling (only on shore this time) to eat lunch at a small Thai restaurant that was attached to the tiny resort on that island.  For lunch, I decided to splurge, and split a fish with Parker.  We got to go the back, near the kitchen, and pick the specific fish we wanted right out of the freezer.  Before we knew it, we were eating the very fish (literally, the entire fish) that we had picked out.  The fish was probably some of the best fish I've ever had.

on the small island

washed up jellyfish

 

the boat we were taken out on

delicious fish.

the pool at our resort on Koh Pan Ngan

On Thursday, Pope, Parker, Pete, Gina, Catherine,  Emma, and Myself headed over to Koh Pan Ngan to spend a couple days there before the full moon party.  The day we got there, we were in for a little bit of a rude awakening.  We picked a resort that was on the other side of the island from the full moon party beach.  I had already known that the resort was on the other side, but what we didn't know was that the terrain on Koh Pan Ngan is much more rough (mountainous, with poorly built roads) than on Koh Samui (which is very built up, and easy to get around on).  While it would have taken about 15 minutes to get the same distance on Koh Samui as the distance from our resort to the full moon party beach, it took us about an hour.  So those taxi rides ate up a lot of our money, which was very unfortunate.  In my opinion however, it was all worth it.  But yeah, the first day we got there, we took a taxi to our resort to check in, and then we hung out for a little while by the pool, and on the beach, before taking the hour taxi ride to get back to the full moon party beach.  We wouldn't have gone back there that night, but we really wanted to see what the beach was like on a day and night that wasn't something as crazy as the full moon party.  The beach turned out to be a lot smaller than we had anticipated for such a huge built up attraction of the full moon party.  We hung out at a bar on the hill side at one end of the beach for much of the night, and went swimming in the ocean at sunset.  Before much longer, we got a little food at a restaurant, and exploring the beach a little bit more. When it was time to go back to our hotel, we decided to take a taxi boat instead of the long land taxi over the ridiculous unpaved, pothole filled, under construction road.  It actually turned out that the boat was a much shorter mode of transportation.  The next day, we basically just took it easy, and tooled around the beach that our hotel was on.  We rented a few kayaks and took them out into the water to go exploring, but that was pretty much it.  After a light day, we decided that for the next day (saturday), we would head out to Sail Rock to do some snorkeling (and Pete did some diving).  Sail Rock is about half way between Koh Pan Ngan and Koh Tao (where we were originally planning on taking our vacation), and is an extremely popular destination for diving mostly, but also for snorkeling because the water is breathtakingly clear!!  So we spent the entire day out there, from late morning to mid-afternoon.  We saw some amazing fish, and even saw a little tiny orange jellyfish! I had no idea that jellyfish even came in other colors besides clear... it was pretty awesome.  After that we took the hour boat ride back to our beach, relaxed for a few hours, and then headed out to the Full Moon Party back at Haad Rin beach on the other side of the island.  (Below are a couple pictures of the beach that we stayed on while we were on Koh Pan Ngan, from our trip to Sail Rock)

the beach of the resort that we stayed at

Sail Rock with Koh Tao in the distance

some divers in the water -- you can kind of see how clear the water is

sail rock up close.. notice the spirit house on the very top towards the right

  
     So yeah, we went to the Full Moon Party... it was a little ridiculous.  Many people in our group had a really good time at the party.  I didn't think it was specifically anything specially except for the fact that it was just a spectacle.  I am definitely happy that I went, to say that I attended this extremely well known popular party in Thailand, but like I said, it wasn't anything special.  What was hilarious about it though, was that there was every kind of person you can ever imagine at this thing.  We just sat down on a section of the beach for quite a while, just looking at people who walked by, because all of a sudden we would just see people you wouldn't expect to see at this type of thing.  Anyway though, a few of us went back pretty early, around 2ish, but many people stayed at the beach until around 5 or 6am (it ends by mid-morning).

     The next morning after the Full Moon Party, we started our journey back to Chiang Mai by ferry, and bus.  We took a ferry back to Koh Samui, waited at the bus station for a few hours, before getting on the bus that would bring us to the ferry.  The ferry ride was about an 2 hours again, and then we were condemned to sitting on a bus for about a day straight, with the exception of the 3 or so hours we spent in the Bangkok bus terminal waiting for our next bus back up to Chiang Mai.  

     Overall, the trip was absolutely amazing.  I know that in my lifetime, its going to be pretty hard to top a vacation like this one.  The fact that we spent 10 days on the beaches of the Thailand Gulf is crazy to take in.  At this point, about a month later, its hard to even imagine that we had that experience to begin with.  I hate how so much of the time, time flies by so quickly that when you return from somewhere, it almost feels like you never left.

bye Thailand Islands :(

Thai dance class final performance

    

     Again, sorry for the gap between posts, i know its been forever since I've posted anything. But now that I have a little bit of time, I want to talk about my Thai dance class and give you all and idea of what I learned!!

     So to start out, I believe that I had written about each of my classes back in september.  I didn't say much about the dance class except what we were going to end up performing.  As a refresher, we learned two dances: the fingernail dance, and Rejang Dewa Dance (which is a Balinese dance from Indonesia).  Each of them were hard to learn in their own different ways.  The fingernail dance is one that every Thai child learns when they are young, and it is one of the long standing cultural traditions in Thailand.  Most of what was difficult about this dance was learning how to do all of the different hand movements at the same time as the feet (which were easier than the hands).  Pictured on the right is me dressed in full traditional Thai dress for this dance, including the crazy fingernails! (hense "fingernail" dance).  Our dance teacher is actually a professional dancer (google her! Waewdao Sirisook).  She's fantastic, so energetic, and so much fun.  Although she moves things along very quickly and it was really hard for me to learn the moves without getting very frustrated with myself because I was always feeling like i couldnt learn them quick enough.  There was really no other way to do it though, Waewdao had to push things along quickly because we only had a few weeks to learn the dance.  Surprisingly though, it all came together last minute, and I felt like I knew it (and still know it) extremely well!  I want to include a video of the performance, but it's currently having trouble uploading!  I will try to post the video in a later post just by itself. Along with the video though, I wanted to also include a couple of still photos (pictured below)

our hair was also done up in the traditional style

lined up ready to walk out!

 dressed for Rejang Dewa

     The fingernail dance was actually the second dance that we performed during the evening of our final performance.  The first dance we performed was Rejang Dewa, the Balinese dance.  This dance was much harder to learn pretty much just because there is a lot more to the dance, and a lot more moves to remember.  Waewdao told us that usually there is quite a lot of training, and back work to learn the techniques of the dance, but again, because we only had a few weeks to learn the dance, she taught us the basics.  While we may not have looked as pretty doing it without proper technique, I still think we did a hell of a job.  During the last week of rehearsing, we got a curve ball thrown at us.  Basically, all of us were having a lot more trouble learning this dance, and many of were kind of doing the whole pretend like you know what youre doing thing.  Once in the final week, we were all really starting to get it down, and then came this curve ball.  Waewdao decided to have us in such a formation that we would be rotating around in a circle while we were doing this dance.  Turned out in the end however, that it actually made the dance easier for most people because they felt more like they were moving in a rhythm that was helping them with the steps.  By the end of the course, in the last week, we were practicing both the fingernail dance and Rejang Dewa so that they were both fresh in our minds for the performance.  Much like the fingernail dance, Rejang Dewa came together extremely last minute, and we all ended up doing a fantastic job in the performance.  I also have a video of this performance, but again, blogspot isn't currently letting me upload them.  Please check back for a future post with these two performance videos in it though!!  Below are a few pictures from the performance of Rejang Dewa, and also some photos from the end of the evening when we were finished, group shots!

Waewdao, our dance teacher, in front, with us in the back

group shot after the performance

     In addition to the two videos I will be posting in another post of the fingernail dance, and the rejan de wah dance, look forward to a video I will post of our teacher, Waewdao, performing at Chiang Mai University at a music and art convention that we attended earlier in the semester!