Last week for sure was a long one! We just finished one of two weeks of praticum teaching. My group started with teaching primary school and I absolutely loved teaching and playing games with the kids. They were super eager to learn and were excited for what was planned. We moved on to teaching high school after that and it was for sure a change, especially with teaching a lot more grammar (but the kids were super receptive to the information).
Finally came Sunday and the day of rest (or so I thought!) I had pre-planned to go on a bike ride at 10am with some friends, and so before that I slept in (until 7:30 on Sunday) and then did laundry. Kaylee's host brother brought her to my house out of the blue and at 9:00 we went on a bike ride around the rice fields. Before that, we both learned that we actually were going somewhere that day. My host sister kept saying that we were going to the "place of many Buddhas" and so Kaylee and I thought it would be close. They said we would leave at 11 and so all
was good. When we called the site coordinator to tell us where we were going he said "you leave at 11 and they said you will be back before sundown". Kaylee and I looked at each other and were like "oh ok so we are now going to be gone the whole day". (I was super grateful for this trip and it was incredible but this threw my lesson planning day out of the window). Now that we knew the plan, we went on a bike ride through the rice fields. We started the rice field loop but it was nearing 10 o'clock. We had to try and go home to meet Kyle at my house to go back to the rice fields, but my host sister still wanted to take one lap in the fields. So Kyle ended up finding us out there. We met Alia and her host sister out in the rice fields and took a little bike around before my host sister and I had to go home and change to leave for our adventure.
We packed into the car, not knowing how long we would be there. We were guessing 30 minutes. Kaylee and I were in the car for two hours. The whole time, we were giggling because we had absolutely no idea where we were going. In the car was my mom, dad, sister, Kaylee, and her host brother. Finally when we got to the destination, it turns out we ended up at a resort with many mini pateahs to eat at while looking at the beautiful water. My host family packed a great picnic and we sat and ate while looking at the pretty scenery of the mountains. We then walked around near the water and through a path that was
on the side of the road. There were all these statues of animals so you could take pictures with them. Finally, we got to the end with more beautiful shrubs and a lake. Oh also there was fresh cut grass (something that I don't see very much here and it was so great). The whole time, I had no cell service. So when we got to the end, we had no way of texting my puk (who was still where we had the picnic hanging out with his friend) that we needed to get picked up. So my mai went to ask someone if she could catch a ride back with them to have puk come pick us up. She caught the ride back and then about 5 minutes later puk pulls up. We thought that was really fast because mai just left. He rolls down the window and mai is not in the car! So we got in the car and then started to drive back to pick up mai, but then we saw her on the back of the motorcyle of a woman selling peanuts. Mai stopped and bought some peanuts from the lady to say thank you and we started to cheer when we had found mai.
After all of that time at the resort (which was a couple of hours) we drove to the "place of many Buddhas". We pulled over on the road a couple of times and asked passing cars for directions, but we finally found the place (which was off of the main road, but crazy to think how it ended up where it did). We pull up to this temple that has,
THOUSANDS of Buddha statues on the hill. I mean thousands. We walked up to the top (and took our shoes off of course). All around us were the Buddha statues, it was incredible! We walked around some more and then started our journey back home (also known as the 2 hour journey). When we got home, I had to hang up my clothes to dry because I accidentally left them in the machine all day (I mean we were gone so I couldn't do anything about it) and then we had some quick noodles for dinner!
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