...Pattaya

After leaving Sihanoukville with a heavy heart and a sunburned body (mom I reapplied so many times I swear) we were off to Thailand to finish our last two weeks of training!!! We got to the border and it was so casual but so not casual...I felt like I was smuggling illegal things across the border...but legally? It was weird. Anyway.

After legally crossing into Thailand (but was it legal?!?!) we settled into our hotel in Pattaya. First of all, something about Thailand.

You can NEVER. EVER. say anything bad about the King. EVER. I'm nervous even writing the word King, so from now on we will refer to him as K. We were told to just not even talk about him, because you don't want whatever you are saying to be taken the wrong way (not that it ever would...we love the King). Our Language Corps directors told us that one time, one of their students was trying to pay for a beer and accidentally dropped a coin on the ground. Having had one or two beers prior, he accidentally stepped on the coin before picking it up. And guess whose face is on all of the coins and money? The K's. HE GOT DEPORTED. DEPORTED. HE WAS DEPORTED. I hope you are reading this as though I am screaming because I AM. HE WAS DEPORTED. Another woman (not a part of Language Corps) was arrested because she didn't stand up from her movie theater seat during the K's anthem that plays before every movie. I'm not making this shit up people. I'm trying to insert the article link that I read in America before coming here about the woman, but I'm assuming it is blocked because this comes up now...

Now, something on Pattaya.

Pattaya is fucking weird. Not like ~*Keep Portland Weird*~ cool kind of weird (okay I know it was Keep Austin Weird first, but whatever). Old white men, with Hawaiian shirts unbuttoned to their hairy navel, sitting at the bar with their newborn baby Thai wives kind of weird.

Pattaya is also EXPENSIVE. And by expensive I mean going from Cambodia, where we would pay 75 cents to a dollar for a meal, to TWO DOLLARS FOR A MEAL. TWO DOLLARS. Do you know how many iced coffees that could get me in Cambodia?! Four. It could get me four.

A diva is a female version of a hustler.

Pattaya also apparently isn't real Thailand, according to our Thai teacher, Jam. I think the first words out of Jam's mouth were, "We not in real Thailand. Thailand is land of smiles, but only because we have to smile to speak our language." Jam don't play no games. At least we only have two weeks here...?