Today, we got to sleep in! Our morning meeting time was at 9:45, so I woke up at 8 to a leisurely breakfast of rice soup with chicken. Ryan (the prof) and Lori (the guest who is also the administrative assistant) decided to buy a lot of fruit and cereal and milk for us, so I also had pineapple, papaya and cornflakes with breakfast. Yum yum!
We started by going to a lecture at ISDSI with a man from the government who works in the branch that deals with highlander issues. His lecture was … interesting. We have read many articles that share how 60% of highlanders in Thailand do not have citizenship to Thailand, or any country, because they have not been considered “real Thais.” The government has started to fix this, but it's slow going because the highlanders do not have a lot of taxable income, but they would demand a lot from the government in terms of services. By a lot, I mean schools, hospitals, public sanitation, etc. Necessities. Anyway, this lecturer basically said that everything is perfect with these quaint indigenous ethnic tribes. All of them are citizens, and they're assimilating famously. He irritated a lot of people in our class.
We at lunch at ISDSI and headed up the mountain to visit two Hmong villages. Three of the students on our trip are Hmong American, so they helped translate for us. The first village is the village closest to Chiang Mai, and is a tourist trap now. I had to walk about 5 minutes through sellers booths before I exited the market and walked around their neighborhood. The houses were mostly wood, but not very high quality. A few of the houses had glass windows and were made with cement. Pretty ritzy as far as highlander villages go.
The other village was made all out of wood. When we got there, we split into 3 teams, one with each Hmong American. The first people we talked to were a couple of boys, about age 8 or 9, who were cockfighting. Others were playing with spinning tops, and others were playing with action figures or sticks. Apparently Hmong new year ended yesterday, so the people had to go back to work in the fields. Overall it was a very cool place. Several places sold Ovaltine and coffee. Everywhere in Thailand sells Ovaltine.
Anyway, we then headed back down the mountain. At this point, very few people weren't nauseous from the altitude (we were on top of a mountain after all), the winding drive around the mountain, and the fumes from the seelaws exhaust that drifted into the back of the seelaws.
When we got back, we had 30 minutes before a language lesson. We split into 3 groups with Charlie, an Ole alum/expat, Surat and another former exchange student from St. Olaf. I was in Charlie's group, and we covered how to bargain with shopkeepers.
After, a few of us went to The Salad Express, which serves salad. Big big salads. It was a “build your own” salad place. You pick 5 toppings and they bring you a giant salad. I could only finish ¾ of mine. I also got a smoothie called a Relax Smoothie! It was good, filling healthy dinner. Expensive, though. It came to 125 baht, which is about 4 times the amount I usually pay for dinner. Probably because it was a Farang restaurant, not a local restaurant. Farang = foreign, colloquially. Farang literally translates to a kind of fruit, but farang sounds like foreign.
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