Who you gonna call?? ... Design-busters!

Did someone call for a graphic design hero? While cheesy...its officially time to celebrate! I'm done with Health Expo banners...I think? Haha. Or project one down...5 million others to go. We got this!
Ps. This is also my halloween costume...

Klongtan

So today was a semi-productive day. As much as I love Thai class its so much easier to be productive on Fridays when we don't have it because I have the entire morning to work. I had to finish the Health Expo banners today, woot woot! Home stretch!
I got home late however and was just hanging out with Goi in the room when we got a phone call at 5:30. Two weeks ago we went to the church plant at Klongtan because some teachers werent able to be there, basically on Friday evenings they give Bible studies to some of the local kids that all come because the teachers play games and give out candy ;) They also teach a little bit of english which always pleases the parents to know their kids are learning. I would never have found this place if Goi hadn't showed me, its like Narnia. You seriously have to go through several tight alleys and doorways to find it. Goi and me last time went and prepared a lesson and had fun teaching for about an hour. (This was all 2 weeks ago) The next week we get a phone call, "Hey are you coming today?" and so we jumped on a song-tao and headed over. Today we got the phone call, same thing..."Where are you guys?!" haha. We showed up late not just because we forgot but because we picked the one bus headed to Klongtan that happened to be breaking down, its only like 4 blocks away but we grabbed a bus thinking it would be quicker. Of course not right...? To easy. The bus BARELY made it over the bridge and sounded awful the whole way. When we finally got over the bridge we got stuck in traffic again and Goi and me got out and ran the rest of the way. Andrew almost beat us there walking but we were in the door first! Ha! After the students leave every Friday its great because the pastor there always buys pizza for the teachers and gives us the rest of the chocolate milk juice boxes. The pizza surprised me the first time, here they always serve ketchup packets with pizza (Thai's like to add it on top along with hot-sauce) and if you get vegetarian it has corn! Everything is also Thai size, so when they order a "family size pizza" its like the size of an American Small. Amazingly there's always enough to go round.

Wan Sowe lae Wan A-Tid

Contrary to popular belief I'm standing on a turtle, not a rock.

 

Welcome to the weekly-weekend post! I figured it was time to check in again. Yesterday was a fairly spectacular day. Mouewan sanuk sanuk! (Yesterday fun fun!) After church I was invited to Jair Parada and family's house for lunch along with Andrew and Bronsen. Apparently he was good friends with Tim Wolfer in Mozambique and we chatted on Facebook before I came here but never officially met in person until this Sabbath. It was great to finally see him and his family and get to know them better. Turns out he is Bolivian and speaks Spanish but studied English in South Africa where he met his wife. His two children speak Africanse and Spanish to their parents but Jair and his wife only speak English to each other. It was fascinating just to watch the sort of language-ping-pong going on.
After lunch we all went to Lumpini park so their kids could play with another families kids and the boys and me took a crazy walk around where we befriended some people from India, watched the regular 5 o'clock aerobic routine, found giant swimming lizards and I petted a turtle!
**Side note: I've just witnessed a cockroach at my coffee shop. It's official, no where is safe O.O**
After the park I had to take off because I was meeting Goi at Tomburi about an hour away by BTS for dinner and shopping with some of her friends. It was really fun to experience their dynamic and just kind of join in on a typical Thai fun day to see what they would do. The day would have been almost perfect but I was reminded on our way home that I am still NOT Thai. We took a ride on a tuk-tuk back "home" to drop her friends off and as we were hopping off I smashed my knee into the rail because I'm not Goi-size and my legs are a little longer hahahaha. Man I was in so much pain I fell off the tuk-tuk and the driver felt so bad he wai'd me (the traditional greeting not really exchanged unless its an officially meeting or apology). You know when something instantly bruises that its gonna look blue the next day...so this morning I have a rather colorful knee. 

They say pictures say a thousand words, this one should say 2,000 haha.

Suk san wan Sabato!

Yesterday was pretty amazing...I'm not gonna lie. I got to sleep in a wee bit, skype the padres and some friends *you know who you are ;)* all before heading to church! After the service some friends were headed out to a potluck so another group of us decided to go get lunch somewhere else, but on our way out the door we got invited to a different potluck (or so we thought). When we opened the door tho, we realized that the couple hosting had asked different people, the wife had invited our friends earlier, her husband had grabbed us on his way out the door. Politics aside, we had AMERICAN FOOD! We pretty much chatted and hung out all afternoon, by the time we left it was 6pm.
Later that evening we went out to get ka-bobs and went swimming this apartment complex's pool after. I don't know WHY I expected the water to be heated...I totally walked the whole way there thinking "heated pool" possibly hot tub. Lies! Its like AZ no one needs to heat the pools, you want it cooler if you swim at normal times of the day and not at 10 at night, hahaha. Needless to say we froze so made it a quick half hour swim. We headed back to Bronsen's apartment and Andrew J. decided to bake bread! We realized it was gonna take until midnight to finish though, so decided to pass the time watching Hot Rod (hahahahahaha, wow...just wow.)

FYI

For all of you trying to click that link to my website...dont!! The website's undergoing some serious overhaul every spare minute I've got, soooooo in order for you not to think badly of my creative genius PLEASE ignore the link.

No news is good news...honestly.

I know this sounds like rather american/super-size-me thing to do...but I can think of no better way to describe my day than to tell you what I ate for breakfast lunch and dinner.
Goi woke me up this morning with the smell of home-cooked Thai food. She'd made rice and already had the wok simmering with some vegetables and told me that I had to "eat eat eat!" because we'd need strength today. We sat on the floor as always and she pretty much insisted I finish half a box of rice by myself before we headed out the door.
So the last two days I've put designing the Health Expo on hold and been helping the office clean out the downstairs warehouse. Basically the entire building quit work and has been working 9-5 cleaning the warehouse so our language school can expand soon. I've pretty much been up to my elbows in mildew, cockroach and termite carcasses, and rotten paper products. LOL. The bright side however, is we've gotten to know the office team a LOT better, even the Mission president goofs off and lends a hand.
The highpoint: LUNCH. Everyone had brought lunch to work...CRAZY! Potlucks here would be incredible, just fyi. Basically this guy brings out a basket of sticky rice and everyone just dips in, grabs a handful, rolls a ball and starts dipping in papaya salad, fish, peanut sauce and stuffs their face. It was fantastic.
After another 4 hours of dirty work we headed back to the apartment and Goi said she was "too hungry for restaurant food" and wanted to cook again. We made a feast and decided we needed Andrew to help us eat it. So we met at the office and put all our dishes across one of our co-workers desks (which will go anonymous) and watched a movie while eating, as luck would have it that co-worker decided to stop by the office on the way home aaaaaand caught us eating on his desk. Woops!
He laughed at catching us but luckily didn't do much.
**Oh! Dinner menu was: more rice *what a shock! jk* stir fry, fruit that I still cant translate from Thai, a soup from herbs I've never before seen, grape juice and cake O.O all for a grand total of 1$ each**

The Procrastination Station

I'm sitting in the little coffee shop I found yesterday called "Sometimes". True to its title, it is open only...sometimes, haha. I have to finish the health expo website tonight (deadline crunch!) aaand you cant get much better than a cozy couch & book covered place that serves coffee/chai yin, has free a/c and wifi. I wonder if they'd let me just MOVE in?

Normalcy?

My Fellow Americans,

Its been the first time I HAVEN'T had something interesting to report in a while. Who'd know that having a semi-normal week was possible here right?

I sat through a meeting yesterday which pretty much sucked the productivity out of my Thursday. It was great watching the dynamics of everyone trying to decide things and the Thai culture come out as everyone talked. Its just SO different here, being direct and to the point about anything is considered rude, so you have to go about discussing things in a very round about way. Asking for money from someone is considered rude, but asking how much someone makes is almost the second thing they always want to know. "Sa  wat dee ka (hello), coon chu ari? (whats your name?) coon ayu tow rai ka? (how old are you?)" being the first. The age one caught me off guard, apparently I can ask pretty much anyone that question and they wont get offended. Its not like in the states where if you ask a middle-aged looking woman how old she is, you get a look, a slap or "I'm not telling!"

Thai class is paying off a bit. Our teacher is Pee-Ma'am this week, next week is Pee-Oh. Pee-Ma'am is a sweetheart, she's really patient with us and never falls back on English. *Harder than you think! While most Thai's don't speak too much English, even if I ask a price in Thai, they want to respond in English because they know numbers or a couple phrases* So far its been easier to compare Thai to Spanish than English, the back of all my flash cards are mostly Spanish because of the similarities. I do run the risk of speaking Span-thai however…I keep saying "Si" instead of "Chi". The result of a third language is either going to be, I loose both, or create a new and fantastic hybrid that no one understands?

Boy I'm screwed. Haha.

MBK

The down-low on design here:

Day 1 - On the job here at Hope 4 Bangkok I was made aware of an upcoming health expo that needed design. The event is a giant health awareness seminar complete with booths activities and information taking place in MBK, one of the biggest malls in Thailand drawing crowds of over 150, 000 people daily.
Week 2 - I was told that the hospital PR department here in Bangok would be heading up everything but the website, they asked me to do that. I finished a prototype and got it approved.
Week 3 - Hospital sends S.O.S. distress call to Hope 4 Bangkok saying they have no design ideas. We met up and I brought some sketched out themes for possible poster design ideas. They liked one idea in particular and then decided I should do all the poster designs as well...yikes!
Week Now? - Hospital asks to meet again at the mall just to look at the site and get a better idea for event/stage layout and design. Turns out they were having a meeting with the actual staff administrators of the MBK mall! We showed up 40 minutes late due to traffic..sorta...and I'm wearing jeans and tennis-shoes. They tell us the meeting is on the 8th floor, we get in an elevator (which promptly goes down instead of up, making us even later) and arrive to a stunning office section of the building. MBK staff are milling around in their perfectly ironed outfits and heels and we're sent to a giant confrence room. After a meeting they tell us they're moving the health expo to a different side of the building, changing event layout and design. We meet for several hours more exploring the site and...ta da! You are now looking at the ONLY designer for the event....panic mode? O.O Not being able to speak Thai is a danger in the working community because they basically just vote that I do everything and I sit there until they translate that "Congratulations, you're now doing...." hahahaha.
The PR staff at the hospital is great and really nice, they're still doing tons of work for the event and will be helping with Thai translation and text in several areas later so I'm not completely on my own. Todays' meeting however was a bit overwhelming...*crosses fingers*
The bright side is that we have 3 weeks until the event, and none of the other projects I'm doing come due around that time...so this aint no Senior Year...yet.......! (Shout out to all you PUC design slave seniors...good luck! I love you guys!)

Ayer

The EIS Church in Bangkok **more pictures on Facebook**

So yesterday was pretty sweet, but will have to be crammed into one paragraph because I'm feeling pretty hungry. The smoothie lady wasnt at her usual station (its the weekend) and I missed breakfast on my way to mooch good internet at the office for a bit and skype some of you people...you know who you are ;)
Sabbath I decided to go to the "farang" church, (foreign) church, they speak english and its a very westernized church service. Really great actually, I'd love it in the states but it's nice to be a part of the thai culture and the church plants here around the city too. So when I walked in a missionary friend of mine, Bronsen (Spanish teacher here at the school) told me there was someone I needed to meet. He introduced me to Damaris, a girl from Spain. She spoke some English but we talked mostly in Spanish. Damaris told me that she had just gotten married and her and her husband had come to Thailand on her honeymoon and they had been separated at the airport when they landed. He was originally from Romania but lived in Spain, so needed a special visa. They had let her through customs though, so now SHE was stuck in Thailand and he was in Malaysia getting a visa to come to Thailand (with all their luggage). So she was luggage, and husbandless in Thailand for the last 3 days and had come to the church because she was Adventist.
We ended up spending all day together and a group of us went to the MBK mall here so she could make some international calls to her family (they didn't know about the honeymoon-disaster yet) and then we took her to dinner and a night market. Damaris said there was a tour guide taking her on an outing every day the rest of the week but she has my number just in case she needs a buddy ;) Amazingly she's only 21!!! I kinda flipped when I realized, Christine will be getting married at 21 too! I was standing there thinking, if this was my sister, stuck in like Fiji on her honeymoon alone and not able to speak ... fijian? or whatever language...I'd be so worried!!
It was really fun being able to speak Spanish in Thailand of all places though, "its a small world after all!" Terrible that she had to come meet us without her husband though :( She was super brave to have made it even to the church on her own, apparently the taxi driver helped her find it! Amazing considering the size of Bangkok and small amount of Christians.
Later after we dropped her off, Andrew, Toshi (a japanese student here at Mission College) and me went and did Cosmic Bowling and got ice cream. The bowling alleys here are FANTASTIC, its basically Cosmic Bowling only, all day long, black lights and stuff. They also had a DJ on staff who mixed English and Thai songs (she was super good).
Pretty much the end to a perfect Saturday...I'm definitely enjoying a weekend off just to figure stuff out on my own. Seems like there has always been a plan the last couple weeks (not a bad thing, I totally appreciate it) but it was really cool just to see how we survived on our own for a day in the city. I'm getting a bit more confident with my limited Thai and navigation skills. I may not be able to find new places but I know I could always make it back home...