Arrived Safe

Just a quick first post to say I've made it safe and sound in Thailand. We arrived at Bangkok airport on Thursday about 5pm, and me and the other 17 volunteers were met by Project Trust staff Lucie and Peter.  Lucie and Peter are both ex PT volunteers from years ago, and they both now live and work in Thailand. Peter owns a rehab centre (that apparently Pete Doherty was chucked out of last year) in Chang Mai, and Lucie is a teacher and owns a British cake shop in the city of Ubon.  They're both really interesting people and should be of great use to me and my partner Beth if we get stuck with anything over the next year.  

We spent two nights in Bangkok with the other volunteers, the first of which we saw a bit of Bangkok's very seedy red light district, and the second we ventured up Khao San Road, trying street food and talking to some other travelers in the bars and clubs. We spent Thursday day shopping at Bangkok's MBK shopping centre, picking up essentials like a Thai sim card (my Thai number is +66833072475) and then ate our last McDonalds for however long. Then this morning, feeling tired after our late night on Khao San Road, me and Beth got on a very rickety and loud train to our new home of Nakhon Sawan.  5 hours later we arrived at the train station, greeted with big bunches of flowers by our new Thai family. We'll be staying with them for two weeks while our apartment is sorted out. They took us home for dinner, and we met all the aunties and cousins, some of our Thai mum's colleagues from her school,  their pet bird Tom who can actually say his own name, and for some reason the electrician. We also have two little really cute and chubby Thai brothers, Time (8) and Tame (12).  They're going to try and teach us Thai over the next two weeks and we're to teach them some more English.  Nobody in the family can speak perfect English so we're getting a little lost in translation but we're getting by.  They've also got WiFi in the house and they've given us a laptop for the time we're staying with them, so I should be able to post a fair bit, I'm going to try and abstain from Facebook as much as possible though.  

We also met another guy called Peter who pays our wages (equivalent of 90 quid a month.. eek) and a boy called Dong who from what I've gathered is here to introduce us to some other young people in Thailand and show us Nakhon Sawan's best places to go out. I was initially worried about staying with a Thai family for a bit, thinking I was just gonna walk in a do and say all the wrong things, but now we're here I'm so glad we are. It'll be cool to see how a typical Thai family works, and I imagine it'll be a lot more of a calmer two weeks than our two nights in Bangkok.  We start properly teaching on the 10th of September, but on Monday we're going to start observing lessons and be introduced us to the schools we'll be working in which is exciting.  We're also meeting the Lord Mayor of Nakhon Sawan on Sunday which will be interesting. Anyway its coming up for midnight and I've got a day of playing badminton with my new brothers tomorrow, plus Beth is already snoring beside me. Night x