Finally… NAN! It is every bit as beautiful as we imagined: rolling hills, greenery everywhere, small city streets, delicious noodle stands, and hardly a word of English written anywhere. We boarded an 8am flight this morning from Chiang Mai to Nan, feeling a bit like the ugly Americans with all of our overweight luggage, but excited nonetheless, especially once we saw our Nok (“bird”) Air plane: painted like a yellow cartoon bird, it sat about 14 people…including the pilots. The views from the flight were amazing, and enough to quell some initial fears of crashing.
We were greeted in Nan by Aj. Prakop – our new boss, director of the English Program at the Bandon Sriserm School, and probably the most adorable woman I’ve ever met. She is tiny, about 5’2” with short black hair, speaks very good English and has so much energy that she generally seems to bounce when she walks. She had a van and driver waiting for us outside the airport (which is really just a two-roomed building with a small wooden platform off to one side reading “Baggage Claim”), and as we drove through Nan she excitedly pointed out gold-plated temples (“they are like Buddhist churches!”) and the school where we are going to be teaching come Monday.
Once we reached our apartment, she showed us the four rooms we’d be staying in and let us pick ours. Each room comes with a dresser, a desk, and its own bathroom (or toilet-shower room…they are almost one and the same in Thailand!). Oh, and a sink next to the bed…I will never have an excuse to not brush my teeth before falling asleep. The teachers from last year left a lot of stuff for us, including a fridge, pillows, blankets, cookery, books, shelves, and some pirated DVDs. Sweet! Emily and I picked rooms 3 and 4 (saam and sii) and started to unpack, slash figure out the air conditioner, how the toilet flushes, and where we might find toilet paper. Our apartment is located near what seems to be the "downtown" center of Nan, but it is still pretty quiet... out on the terrace/patio/walkway that connects each of our rooms, we hear roosters instead of street traffic.
A few minutes later, Prakop wanted to take us to lunch. She had our bikes delivered (the same ones that belonged to the Nan PiA-ers last year), and we rode them into town (Prakop on a bicycle = best thing ever). Emily and I quickly found that we are the new celebrities in Nan: people either stare, giggle, or smile big smiles and wave everywhere we go. Until Anna and Nicole arrive tomorrow, we are the ONLY white people in town.
After lunch, we visited Bandon, where a couple of Saturday school classes were being taught. Prakop showed us our office (we each will have our own desk in the office at school) and the English Resources Center… both rooms have TV sets, English books, movies, and other useful teaching materials. Some of the rooms even have air conditioning. For being located in a fairly small and remote town, this school is stocked. Next we went downstairs and stopped to say hello to a first-grade class. These kids are adorable, and were ECSTATIC once they saw us walk in. They waved and shouted “Hello! Hello!” in unison once Prakop introduced us, and every one wanted to shake our hand or give us a high five. We met a few of the other Thai English teachers, all of whom were very kind and welcoming.
Prakop dropped us back off at our apartment. Nan is very small, but our inability to read any of the street signs will surely mean that it will be a while before we can get around town on our own. We finished unpacking, and decided to take a nap before Prakop came back for us at 5.00 for dinner. The “nap” turned into a 4 hour slumber, followed by a somewhat embarrassing incident when Prakop knocked on our door and found us bleary-eyed and still wearing tiny pajama shorts…. not exactly how we wanted our boss to see us on the first day. We scrambled to put on clothes and were off again, this time to the “mall” for dinner.
Prakop took us to a Korean-style restaurant inside the mall, where we each picked out raw vegetables, seafood, and meats from a buffet and then cooked them in a hot-oil pot at the center of the table. Once cooked, we used a big spoon or chopsticks to remove the food and put in a bowl with noodles and sauce. I have no idea what half of the stuff I ate was, but it was mmm mmm good. After dinner, Prakop told us to do some shopping in the huge convenience-store-supermarket-department-store that were in. We bought a few necessities like toilet paper and and shampoo (and tissues that came in an awesome triangular box designed to look like an orange slice), paid the cashier, and were off to bike the streets of Nan again. On the way home, Prakop bought us "Indian pancakes" (basically fried dough with sugary syrup poured inside), but warned that we shouldn't eat them everyday because we'd get fat. After eating one, I'm certain that truer words were never spoken.
Back at the apartment, figuring our the internet was our next big adventure… after about an hour of trial-and-error, and a visit from the non-English speaking cleaning lady/landlord (?) who gave us a password but couldn’t show us which network we were supposed to use, Emily figured it out and…. Voila! I can finally put up these posts. We are all unpacked and settled in for our first night in Nan, and have made peace with the various geckos and spiders who co-inhabit the apartment with us. Time for sleep, and new adventures in Nan tomorrow.
PS – Pictures coming soon on Facebook!
PSS – I’m still wrapping my head around the time difference between the US and Nan, but I think it’s…
+ 11 hours from the east coast
+ 14 hours from California
love,
CP
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