A taste of Thailand

What follows are the musings of a student who was thoroughly entranced by his experiences during the Miami group's first full day in Bangkok, Thailand. It comes from a journal entry written last summer. The student who wrote the entry was in New Delhi at the YMCA Tourist Hostel when he transcribed his thoughts. His prose takes a spur of the moment, rapid fire personality:


Sitting on the balcony of a musty hotel room in New Delhi, India, putting together my thoughts from the last couple of days. The Hong Kong and Thailand airports were ultra cosmopolitan and modern. Shops catered to upper class.


Bangkok is huge. 5 star hotel, biggest breakfast buffet ever. Breads, muffins, danishes, donuts, 10 different fruits. Juices include guava, kiwi, orange, and others. Restaurant was on the fourth floor. Great view of the city. Skyscrapers everywhere. All streets lined with vendors selling knockoff souvenirs. Advertisements in Thai and English for domestic products and KFC, McDonald's, etc. 


Started out May 12th at the holiest place in Thailand: Wat Phra Kaew, or the temple of the emerald Buddha. Crowds mostly oriental -- Whites the minority. Beautiful murals lined the inner walls of the square compound. All painted by hand -- took two years. Depicting scenes of nature, battles between fiends and monks, giant demonic tusked gods rising from the sea and eating people. A shrine at the entrance shows people in prayer kneeling, bowing repeatedly, chanting, praying, sticking incense in sand and in hard boiled egg offerings to statues of Buddha statues and the ox. Everything is played with golden squares, hand built. Shoes off to enter the actual temple. Took 3 years to make. Again, paintings line the inner walls. Scenes of fortified compounds, palaces, battles, agriculture, death, and birth. A monk sits in front of the rail chanting in the lotus position, reading scripture, checking his cell phone and bowing to ornately attired, in golden summer garb, the famous Emerald Buddha. He sits on top of a tower of gold plated majesty, and is about 3 feet tall in sitting position. Many people are sitting on their knees and praying. No pictures allowed inside. Offerings of the lotus flower and other symbols rest in collection plates at the front. The tour guide pays his respects, as do I. Might as well say yes to everything while I'm here. Might not ever come back and want to get the fullest experience. 

After leaving the temple we go through a dense market. Tourist hunters fry and sell cheap threaded murals as a million smells of fresh meat being cooked and curry dishes steamed waft through the air. You can see inside the houses and into these peoples' seemingly poor, and to our eyes unorganized living spaces. Clothes hung up, pots and pans, people eating at dusty old tables or lazing on the ground or in chairs. Every now and then we see a big TV amongst the clutter. Very stark contrast. 

Despite an obviously rigorous daily lifestyle, the Thai we have run into smile and are friendly. The market was one of the highlights of the day, even though it only took two minutes to walk through! This is because it was such an intense example of life.

We proceeded to a dock where we took a very long and thin boat to a narrow tributary off of the main river channel. Traffic decreased significantly and we were able to view more clearly what appeared to be the daily lives of the Thai. The riverside shanties looked to be of poor quality, but TVs, smiles, and waves from their occupants indicated that perhaps more value was placed on different facets of life, rather than on having things like cabinets stacked with matching plate sets and matching wallpaper schemes. The quality of life seems VERY rich here. 


Some houses only have three walls and most are covered in a large drape that acts as a fourth. These fourth walls look like colored tapestries and probably provide just as much protection from rain and wandering eyes as they need to. Saw numerous monitor lizards, the biggest being about 6-7 feet long. They were just dozing in the sun, and children sat or played at water level almost beside them. Next to the shabbiest of shacks were 22 million (I asked) dollar houses made of beautiful brown wood, and constructed on stilts. Plant life is abundant. All residencies have numerous house plants on decks for aesthetic appeal and privacy. We passed vendors selling fresh greens, repairing houses, fishing, and sitting. Saw a couple cell phones. Almost everyone was waving. 


That concludes this excerpt. I hope you enjoyed the delightful pictures and descriptive writing. More to come, thanks for reading,
all the best,
Zack

So it begins...

Everyone is busy getting ready to depart. We all fly into San Fransisco from different airports around the country and then take off to Hong Kong as a group. There will be plenty of time en route for the students to brush up on their Hindi, decompress from the mad rush that is packing before a three month excursion, and to get to know each other. I am personally looking forward to the 15 hour flight for all of these reasons, most of all the third. Each and every one of the individuals attending the Tibetan studies program has something unique to offer to the group dynamics. I look forward to becoming well-acquainted with everyone and watching inevitable friendships form. Some of the greatest things we will all take from this experience when it is over are the relationships we form with each other along the way. We are coming together for the first time, some as friends, some as minor acquaintances, and some as complete strangers to conduct research, explore different cultures, learn about ourselves, expose ourselves to our fears, take chances, get into graduate school, make a difference, have fun, and the list goes on.

This program can be likened to a really good book in that once you pick it up you never want to put it down, and when you've turned the last page and finally finished it stays with you for a long time to come. If you're like me, you just might want to read it again.

There are so many fascinating connections that have been made over the course of a few years that the students draw upon for research and inspiration. Speakers from the Central Tibetan Administration (Parliment, Department of Information and International Relations, Supreme Justice Commission), Tibetan Children's Village, the Norbulingka Intitute for preservation of Tibetan culture, various NGO's (Tibetan Youth Congress, Tibetan Women's Association, Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, Tesi Environmental Awareness Movement), as well as experts in the fields of Tibetan medicine, Buddhist philosophy, Tibetan art, and many others. Each student's level of engagement can be as broad or as well-defined as he or she needs it to be.

The experience gained reaches well beyond classroom-style learning about the politics of an exiled government and powerful meditation techniques. While students will learn about and benefit from these types of situations they will also get hands on practice at conducting field research. During this process they will discover the intricacies of the interview, how to adapt to sensitive interview situations, new note-taking strategies, and how to be an assertive member of the academic and social community amongst their peers; Experiences that are crucial to one's success at higher levels of academia.

That's all for now. There will be more to come. Thanks for reading.
all the best,
Zack