Nakhon Phanom

As I am writing this [draft], I am sitting between a person who's trying to sleep and a host mother who's pointing out that a piece of food somehow managed to lodge itself under my nose. How it got there, no one knows...

We're on our way back home from Nakhon Phanom, where we had a Rotary Conference for all inbounds and outbounds. We already stopped at a small market for all of 5 minutes and "Underwater World," which was actually closed, but we got to visit the place for free and alone anyway, mainly because "we knew a guy."

The conference was unfortunately not as insane as the Grand Rapids trip [which I will be returning to!], but it had its perks. I thought it was going to be a long weekend when I walked into the home-room with my friend Michelle, aka "Nam Fone," only to be silenced by weird signs with badly drawn lips and fingers with a line crossed through the entire picture. Double negative sign that's supposed to mean "Shush up," but rather picture-translated into "No fingers allowed between your lip outlines and your lips themselves."

The conference wasn't actually interactive at all, and even the Thai outbounders weren't enjoying the hour upon hour upon hour-long lectures [mainly in Thai] to the entire visiting Rotarians from other countries, outbounders and inbounders. Every now and then my friends and I snuck out of the lecture hall and just went roaming around the huge hotel, found a 7-11 and went to my hotel [about a Monmouth-block's walk away].

Oh, the evil little hotel I stayed at... Power went out when my friend and I went to my room to collect some more pins for trading. We thought it was just my room, but when we went to the elevator, the lights were off and we had to walk down the stairs. Thankfully we were on dark-and-creepy floor 5 instead of mass-mudering floor 13, or even floor 21 [as we were in Chiang Mai]. Yes, it was dark and creepy. The halls were dimly lit, even at night, and when you walked down them, there seemed to be a strange dark abyss at the end of the hall. Thankfully my room wasn't that far down the hall.

My "creepy" hotel also had a karaoke place, but that was full up, so Nam Fone and I went to do karaoke in the bar room, which was part of the hotel. We ordered some french fries [had to order something to do karaoke] and I got a Watermelon shake, she got some Sprite. We did this with older Rotarians until 1 AM. ...good times.

On the second day [after the first night spent], at about 1 or 2, I followed the Ubon kids [with Nam Fone] to a van. They all piled in and I decided to go along with, because I didn't want to sit and listen to lectures all alone. We all rode over to "Miracle Hair," a salon for them to get their hair and make-up done for the dances they were to perform that night. I watched them all get ready, then one of the hairdresses [who doesn't do make-up] was getting bored, so she offered to style my hair for free. I quickly pulled everything out of my hair, as my hair was looking off-kilter by now. She put it into a braid that started from behind my left ear and ended near my right ear, then straightened the back. It looked pretty fun. We took pictures, they gave us some cool shell keychains [I gave them some buttons I made] and left back to the hotel.

While we were waiting for them to get their hair and make-up done, though, we were rather bored, so Nam Fone and I went to look around Ubon. I found a 5-ft wide "crack" in the big metal door of a building, and saw some military uniforms hung up. I decided I wanted to go in and look. There were no windows to this store, just imagine a giant garage door on it's side, and only open part way. We walked in and looked at the cool uniforms, then turned around to find a glass case with official pins and patches, shoulder things and such for military/army uniforms. Guess what else? They were super cheap, especially compared to the patches that the Rotary shops were selling [and tieds and pins and stuff]. I got a nice little patch that represents the parachute army men, 3 mini-patches of the Thai numeral for 5 [inside Thai joke there], and a Korean flag. Sadly enough, they didn't have any Thai flags [weird] or American ones. That's alright, though.

Back at the hotel, some different groups of exchange students did some Thai dancing and we all ate. After eating, I met up with Nam Fone on a balcony type thing where we could still see the stage. It was a good view. We hung out with some Thai outbounders and talked a little bit, took pictures. After that was when we started looking for the Karaoke room, only to find out it was closed for renovation in that particular hotel.

Before heading over to my hotel, though, we decided to give ourselves a grand tour of the Rotary hotel. We tried getting to the roof, as usual with any Rotary function, but someone found a previous student wandering around up there earlier and locked the door soon after they left; now we couldn't access the roof. Instead, we found a service elevator, and decided to press the up button, to see if we could access the 8th floor from there (because the regular elevator has the 8th floor button, but it wasn't able to light up/be activated). That was our new mission.

We got in but couldn't access it from this elevator, either, so I hit "G" to go to the ground floor. We saw the kitchen, then closed the ele-doors and went back up. We switched to the regular elevator on the 7th floor, then proceeded to hit all of the buttons below the 7th floor to go to. Then after one would unlight, we would hit it again to make it light up.

Someone joined in on the 6th floor, realized this, shook his head and laughed. He got off on the 5th floor [where he was headed anyway]. We got off on the third, and went to Nam Fone's room, then headed over to my hotel [about a block down the road] to play karaoke.

That about sums everything up, sorry if it was a little boring of a story - it was kind of a boring trip. We definately made our own fun, though.

I'm going to Bangkok tomorrow [the 12th], woo!!! Meeting up with a friend who is a former exchange student to America. I'll be staying with his family and come home on the 17th. The 19th is my host mother's birthday, then I'm off again on the 21st. This time I'm going with the other exchange students on the Southern Thailand Tour, going to Phuket and such. We're taking the overnight bus. This should be interesting.

Also - at the conference, a little girl came up to me and gave me her squirrel pin. Her mom urged for me to accept it, too, so I gave her the choice of whatever pin she wanted from my blazer - and put the squirrel right under my nametag. They both seemed really happy, as the mom helped her put the pin on her shirt. I took a couple pictures with her - she really was an adorable girl. :)

Moni

Pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/gecko.on.the.wall/NakhonPhanom