Welcome to Thailand - Prepare to be sweaty!

On October 25th I boarded a plane in Boston and embarked on my journey to Thailand to teach English for 5+ months. This blog post is coming later than planned, but this past week and a half has been crazy busy! The constant, and often infuriating, lack of stable wifi has also contributed to this delayed post. But as I write this, I am finally settled into my new home in Saraburi, Thailand, and I can finally reflect on the beginning of this journey.

First, I'll explain how I got here. This past Spring I was working at a job that I didn't love and really wanted to try something different. I had studied abroad through CIEE back in 2015 during my Junior year of college, and ever since I had received emails saying "Come Back and Teach English Abroad in Spain!" I had always thought that would be cool...but I couldn't do that? Then one day, I read a LinkedIn article written by someone who decided that they didn't want to follow the path that society had set out for them, and instead chose to see the world, while also making money. He did this by teaching English in Madrid through CIEE. After reading the article I knew that I had to do it. After some research, I decided on Thailand, broke the news to my parents, applied, got accepted, quit my job, and a few months later - here we are.

Arriving in Thailand, the only expectations I had were that I was going to be the sweatiest human alive and I'd be eating mango and sticky rice every chance I got. Lucky me, my expectations were met. Orientation was about a week long, and truthfully most of the time was spent inside. Not going to lie, it wasn't my favorite experience, sitting in classes and Thai lessons from 9 am to 6 pm, but the information was definitely useful. We took courses on TEFL training and what to expect from Thai culture. I chose to take the full TEFL course through CIEE before coming to Thailand (irrational fear that I couldn't do this without it), but it wasn't focused specifically on Thailand ESL classrooms. Nevertheless, I was so glad that I completed it and I would highly recommend it to anyone who has no teaching background but thought that they should be an English teacher anyway (business major whoop whoop).

Orientation took place in Bangkok with 220 new English teachers. Generally within this program there are two orientations - one in Central Thailand in Bangkok and one in the North in Chiang Mai. Since the late King's funeral took place right before our orientation, OEG (CIEE's Thailand partner) only had one orientation, which meant everything was a bit chaotic. One good thing about it though was that we were all able to meet people that we wouldn't have if we had had two separate orientations. My absolute favorite part of it was when the OEG team had a traditional Thai welcome ceremony for us. We were given bracelets made out of white string that symbolized our new connection to Thailand. We're supposed to wear the bracelets until they fall off naturally, and we were instructed never to cut them off, as this would be symbolic of your time here. Check out me and my girl Kru Gai hugging it out at the ceremony.

After our classes were over, we got to spend our free time at night roaming the city and buying as many elephant pants as we could get our hands on. Aside from the classes and workshops, we also took a day trip to the Grand Palace and had dinner on a river cruise boat. On our second to last day of orientation, we took a 2.5 hour bus ride to Kanchanaburi where we stayed overnight at a "resort hotel." If you were wondering how many lizards there are in Thailand...I can't tell you, but I can guarantee that more than half of them were inside the hotel that we stayed at. It was an interesting night to say the least.

Finally, on Thursday November 2nd, we loaded back onto our buses and drove to Bangkok where we were picked up by our coordinators and brought to our new homes! I am placed in Saraburi, a province just an hour and a half north of Bangkok. Since there were people at our orientation that were placed in the very South, North or Northeast region of Thailand, several of them had 7-12 hours of travel ahead of them after arriving back in Bangkok (sorry if you're reading this and you had to suffer through that).

Now I'm home, sitting in bed enjoying my air conditioning/trying not to itch my bug bites, and really happy that I'm settling in to my new life. Stay tuned for more blog posts to come - I'm sure I'll have plenty to write about.