Khon like Genghis, Kaen like Barbie

Y’all. I’m HERE. And I’m LOVING it.  No, loving is an understatement. Picture me jumping up and down with a goofy grin on my face and using some form of “This is literally the best thing everrrrrr." That’s more like it.

First of all, finally solved the mystery of how to pronounce the place I will call home for the next 4 months- Khon Kaen, Thailand. Just think, Khon prounced like Genghis Khan, Kaen pronounced like Barbie & Ken. Easy enough!

The past 72 hours feel like years and I mean that in the best way possible. My overall trip here took over 24 hours: 1 hour to Chicago, 12 hours to Tokyo, and 7 hours to Bangkok. I have two confessions to make:

1)   My favorite part of flying internationally is all the precious international babies you get to see.

2)   I LOVE airplane food on international flights. Pizza, kiwi, and Milano cookies? Please and thank you.

Our first night in Bangkok, we were already going out to get drinks together and sitting and talking until 4 am. Not a bad way to start off with folks you just met. Everyone is SO different from my friends at TCU and I'm already learning a lot from listening to everyone's life stories. Some of the other students range from a girl whose parents work for the UN and she grew up moving to a different country every three years, to my roommate at the hotel who studied abroad in Senegal last semester, to a guy who is from Finland but spent the last five months living in Indonesia working in a children's home. Pretty freakin sa-weet.

Yesterday, we officially started orientation through CIEE. Shout out to all you Frog Camp people out there, we did an activity almost identical to Place in the Circle, even got some new ideas for questions I think it would be good to add. That activity right there was a good sign. First day in and my program already resembles Frog Camp?!? Doesn’t get better than that.

This morning, we went on a tour of the Grand Palace and it was STUNNING! These pictures are just some of the shenanigans we got into, and these are some of my new friends. It already feels like we've known each other forever and I can't wait to share more stories down the road about all these awesome Northern folk. The word "y'all" is pretty foreign to them, but they've all said they love that I say it, so the Texas in me continues to live on.

Bangkok is loud, packed, messy, bright, loud, and just plain great. You have to watch your feet walking down the street because the only way a car can fit is if everyone smooshes to the side of the road and I swear one of us will lose a foot here pretty soon... The reason this picture is so off-center is because I was almost run down by a moped. For example. We've eaten noodles, shrimp, and more noodles at almost every meal and surprisingly I am yet to get a hankering for Zoe's Kitchen steak roll-ups, so it's safe to say I'm loving the cuisine as well.

We leave at 6:15 am tomorrow for a week-long group retreat without phones or internet and I can't wait for how close we are all going to get through the process. It'll be a while before I'm able to update again, but thank you to all of you who have e-mailed or FB-ed me already. I really appreciate it. Also, it's pretty weird to read an e-mail about changes to the 1873 menu while sitting in an internet cafe in Bangkok. TCU friends, have fun at the, uh, Chicken Shack?? Let me know how it is. I'll be looking forward to hearing from DeAnn Jones in the meantime...