Food

If the bathroom business took a while to get used to, the exact opposite applied to the food. Everyone who's been to Thailand knows about the great, really cheap food you can get there. We would go out every night to one of the many street restaurants (some tables and chairs on the sidewalk), get a good meal, and then move on for banana pancakes or something else...


Usually the food wouldn't be spicier than what I could handle, but one of the favorite pranks the teachers at my school liked to play on me was; "let's see how much spices the foreign guy can handle". It must have been the highlight of their day standing around laughing at me crying and sweating like crazy while I tried to keep a straight face. Once a week we would also have cooking class at Meechai dorm, and we'd first get a demonstration of how to cook whatever was on the menu that day, and after that we'd pair up and make our own dinner.

We also had bugs one day, I mean, if people can eat lobster which I think is a pretty ugly thing to put on your plate...then why should bugs be a problem? I wasn't as brave as Martin though, I just ate the little yellow worms. Tasted kind of like burned french fries.

Introduction to Thai culture

The first thing that freaked me out were obviously the toilets*, or lack thereof. Our dorm as well as the Green Dorm were however equipped with both thai-and western toilets, so there was no need for unwanted bathroom adventures if one did not feel like it. As time went by you get used to it though, even if I still much rather stick to the familiarity of a western toilet. It wasn't until much later that I found out the secret trick that will save you a lot of trouble (at least for girls) when going to the bathroom thai-style. All I can say is that it's a matter of turning, depending on your business in there...

*It is not the toilet in the picture that is mentioned in the blogpost.

The first week

Teachers go clubbing!

After having been thrown into teaching pretty much right away, I was hoping to get some time to myself during the weekend to be able to go through the teaching material that I had received upon my arrival and orientation in Nong Khai. Instead I found myself at a going away party for a couple of volunteers that had finished their programs and were off to their home countries. Going out in Nong Khai proved to be a different experience than I'd had in any other country...very different. It started out at local bar, and after a couple of beers and some games of pool we we're all off to...karaoke! Those of you who know me and my endless love (not) for this very strange phenomenon can imagine the chills down my spine as I heard where we were going. But when in Rome... It wasn't that bad though, but I would rather have played another game of pool than listening to various interpretations of Sinatra's " My Way" and other classics. After about an hour or so of watching people fight each other over the microphone (I actually sang a couple of lines myself) we were off again to the nightclub next door. That was quite different as well, but a whole other story. After the police came and closed the place (they do that sometimes if you don't bribe them) we decided to make a final stop at Nong Khai's second nightlub worth visiting, before I could finally go back home and try to cure my jetlag.


Apart from teaching at one school, volunteering in Nong Khai also meant projects in the afternoons and evenings. That included teaching buddhist monks, university students and helping out at an orphanage. We would get a new schedule on a weekly basis where we were assigned to all of the different projects at least once a week. Teaching the university students was by far the easiest, because their level of english was already pretty good, and teaching the monks was both the most challenging but also the most rewarding. How often do you get the chance to sit down and talk to a buddhist monk for an hour or more with no distractions and the ability to ask them any questions you want? They were equally interested in us though, and topics could vary from anything from traveling, sports, buddhism, to social difference between countries or what kind of thai beer we (the volunteers) liked the most.

Shit happens

The orphanage meant playing with the kids, and feeding them (at least try to) since they were too little to talk in the first place. My first encounter with the (cute) little hell-raisers resulted in one of them taking a crap on me. I guess he saw a farang coming and took his chance. We have since made up and there are no hard feelings between us.

The downside of procrastination

I've never been a big fan of keeping a diary when I travel (or at home), instead I've convinced myself that what I don't remember isn't worth remembering either. That strategy works just fine if your ten years old and don't have a lot of stuff on your mind, or if you're overly self-confident when it comes to your own memory capabilities. This time however, I was at least smart enough to scribble some random notes down each day to help me keep track of things. I've come to realize that it was a pretty smart move when I'm now trying to backtrack two months of experiences in Thailand. The challenge of translating them into something worth reading still remains however...

Nong Khai

The seven-headed snake Naga, a buddhist mythological creature, is the protector of Buddha and also the symbol of Nong Khai.


After having dropped of my stuff at the Meechai Dorm, one of two places housing volunteers in Nong Khai, I got a quick tour of the city and some general information before it was time for the weekly meeting at the Green Dorm with the rest of the volunteers, new and old.

The city turned out to be a bit bigger than I had expected, but then again I didn't really have any expectations since I hadn't done much research before I left. Normally I would have, but this time it felt more exiting just getting on a plane without knowing where I'd end up.

With a population of about 60.000, located by the Mekong River, Nong Khai is the border town to Laos and is made up by three major streets running parallel to the river which makes it almost impossible to get lost. Biking was the way of transportation I quickly found out, and with my newly rented travel-to-teach bike (that later got stolen) I set out to explore my new home. My first adventure on my own took me all the way to 7-eleven and then back again, since I had just found out that I was being picked up at 07.35 the following day to start teaching at the school I'd been placed at (or is it in?) A good nights sleep seemed like a good idea but before that could happen I was introduced to the local street food along with the other new volunteers. Two months later, I'm surprisingly still not sick of rice...

Better late than never 2...

I left Sweden on January 15, and arrived in Nong Khai sometime later that week. On a thursday I think. Almost 4 days of traveling and an endless amount of waiting around in airports and bus stations took its toll, and with a serious lack of sleep and general feeling of confusion I was pretty much ready for bed as soon as I arrived. There wasn't any time for that though, first I had about 12 hours in Bangkok to kill before my final bus ride up to Nong Khai , and I realized as soon as I landed that I somehow had managed to forget/misplace my cellphone charger somewhere along the way. Good job!

I've had more fun than running around Bangkok suffering from serious sleep-deprivation trying to find stuff for my cellphone, but as far as I knew Nong Khai could be two huts in the jungle next to a Travel-to-Teach sign with no Sony Ericsson stores to be found. So I figured I might as well get it done right away. It took a while, and I got lost in Chinatown for some time (it smelled really bad there) but I managed to get what I needed and decided to do some well deserved sightseeing, since I still had about 6-7 hours left in Bangkok.


You often hear that thai people are very friendly and welcoming, but I didn't expect to stand on a street corner with a map of Bangkok in my hand, and one hour later having a beer in that same hand trying to explain what Malmo ( a swedish city) was like to a 60-something man who worked in the telecommunications industry and was about to go to Sweden in a couple of weeks on a business trip. Since I hadn't been to Thailand before and he had never been anywhere, we both tried to share as much useful information about our countries as possible. He must have either been very pleased with the information about Sweden he got, or it was all the beer we (he) drank, because he later took me around the city including the old parts of bangkok and some of the temples, and even though I insisted on paying for my beer and at least one taxi ride, I left Bangkok that evening with a new cellphone charger as my only expense*.


*Except for a quick stop at Pizza Hut.

Grin·go (grĭng'gō) n. Offensive Slang., pl. -gos.
Used as a disparaging term for a foreigner in Latin America, especially an American or English person.

Farang (in Thai: ฝรั่ง), sometimes pronounced falang, is the generic Thai word for a white foreigner. It is closely related to the Khmer word Barang. Blacks will be occasionally referred to as farang dam (black farang, in Thai: ฝรั่งดำ). While generally farang is a neutral word, it can be used as an insult depending on its context. For instance, the expression "farang ta nam khao" (in Thai: ฝรั่งตาน้ำข้าว, which literally means farang with rice-milk-colored iris) would be considered an insult.

Yep, that's me.


Maybe I'm not really a gringo, but that's what they sometimes call me anyway, american or not, but I'm definitely a farang. Or was.