Morning Glory School Photos

This are the photos of our lovely playground. We have a sandbox, a see-saw, a tree house, a bridge, a slide and around back where you can't see in the photos a swing set. The round structure where the slide comes from is made out of unused sewage pipes. The tires are keeping in the sand in the sandbox and used to keep a lot of the other structures together.

It was actually pretty interesting to have the slide made by a welder because he had never seen a slide before and was not really clear about what it was going to be used for so it was quite interesting describing what we wanted to him. Needless to say he did not get it right on the first try!

Also all of the sand in the play ground needed to be imported from the beaches down south and shoved in. That was quite a project!

But as you can see the kids really loved it and took to playing on it very quickly. Hopefully the school will be able to keep up the maintenance of it, because the weather out here is pretty brutal and even with all of the hard work and extra though put into it, it could easily fall apart in 6 months! But it isn't too bad. This one cost 40,000 baht to make the maintenance is only 2,000 baht a year.

Morning Glory School

Today I helped finish Hands On Learning’s 4th playground in the Mae Sot area. I must say that the first time that I looked at it I thought that it was pretty ugly looking, but the more time that I spent with it and the more finishing touches we put on it the better it started to look.

The whole point behind them is creating playgrounds for free for migrant children, usually from Burma, out of recycled materials. So we use lots of old tires and logs. We also use concrete pipe barrels for the round play houses. And lots of bamboo. It is pretty inventive if I do say so myself.
I came in at the very end of this one so I mainly did a lot of the painting, which is fine by me because doing work out here is killer! It is so hot and humid that even sitting around outside you break into a sweat let alone digging a hole or cutting tires (which is really hard, because evidently they have steel right in the middle of the rubber going all the way around- who knew?). I am so tan right now, even though I wear a hat and lots of sunscreen. It is pretty neat because I get to do a lot, and I mean A LOT, of hands on work. I get to use concrete cutting drills, diamond edge hand saws, all sorts of drill bits, and of course the regular hammer, nails and screws. After this whole thing I over I think that I will be super handy, and probably really quite buff!

Hopefully in the next play ground I will have a larger role in the creation aspects; we start that one on Monday! I am pretty excited to start a play ground from start to finish even although right now I am pretty exhausted about this whole working out in the deadly sun from 9 to 6 pm!
Below I am posting lots of photos with the kids enjoying our finished product. It is really rewarding to see them so happy about something that is really so simple!

On a totally other note, the bathroom tiling is almost done! yay!!! I am giving the guy the final amount or money tomorrow and it should be all done by 9 am! I am so excited to not have to deal with this tile guy any more. He is a really good tiler, but it is just little things that a tile guy might automatically do in the States, he needs to ask me first about so that means setting up a meeting time with him after work, taking Thawa (my roommate and translator) with me and chatting with him through Thawa every time! I gets really tedious after a while! We are still trying to find a mosquito netting guy, hopefully that will get pulled together by the end of this week! But the house is starting to look good and we are going to buy furniture this weekend and do lots of room painting!

House Photos!

So here are some photos of my house. This is the initial state that we got it in - unrented for months and home to SO many spiders it was scary. We are planning lots of renovations. The main ones are tiling the bathrooms and putting up full mosquito nets. We also have to buy a sink, stove and electric shower, which sound expensive and like a lots of work but aren't. Here shower, stoves and sinks aren't quite like what they are back in the States. I will plan to show you all when we are done. I hope to post a photo of the out side, next time I go there.

I am pretty excited about the whole thing. Since Saturday we have tiled the bathrooms and are now working (cross your fingers!) and that means buying furniture! YAY.

Luckily the guy that I am working for and building playgrounds is also an expat from Australia. So he has all these great tips on getting a house in order here and where to go for labor, furniture and the like!

The first photo is of our entery way and the staircase up to my room with Andrew. The second is our totally empty kitchen. The third is our upstairs common space and the last is a photo from Andrew and mine's room on to our balcony and the view that we have of our neighbors and the road.

A New York Minute?

People talk about all the things that can happen in a New York Minute, but is nothing compared to what can happen in a Thai Day!

In one Thai Day I accomplished:
A. finding an organization to work with
B. find two new roommates
C. find a house to live in
D. putting the money down for the house
E. getting a mosquito netter, tiler and gardener to come and fix the house
F. buying a bike

All in one day!

So it all started early in the morning (thank you jet lag) when I sat down next to this guy, Rob, in our hostel’s common space, we start chatting and it turns out he is here using sustainable and recycled materials to build playgrounds for local schools. And it just so happens that they are looking for people to help out. Not only that but Marcus, the guy who heads up the project, is very keen on the idea of having an architect help them out! So not only will it get to build structures using eco friendly methods, but I will also be able to design some of them my self! Very cool! I never envisioned that I would be telling people that I build playgrounds in Thailand!

After Rob leaves to go off to work Andrew and I start looking for apartments to hopefully move into in the next couple of weeks. The hostel is supernice, but we want to be able o cook for ourselves and have a little bit of privacy. Than, the Ban Thai Guesthouse manager, takes us to view a few of the ones that are also owned by Ban Thai. The first one is like living in an apartment in the States- only nicer! Some of the perks I wouldn’t be able to afford back home. It had full wireless, a maid, someone to do your laundry, mosquito nets every where, air conditioning (which is almost unheard of here) all western furniture and amenities – but it just wasn’t like we were living in Thailand. It was too weird to have a maid come and clean up after us and to do our laundry. Plus it was a bit expensive, 6,000 Baht a month (which I know translates to like 200 dollars a month, nothing in comparison to what I used to pay!). I guess that I wanted a bit more realistic of an experience, I didn’t come here to be pampered! The next place he showed us was the complete opposite, a total dump. No stove, no sink in the kitchen, no mosquito nets and NO privacy. We are starting to worry- Rob had already told me how he had been looking for a place to rent for the past two months!

Being a bit disheartened by our lack of apartments we decided to go look for a bike to buy. We first tried the Chinese bike store, which was like being back in downtown Chinatown. Her store was filled with completely new bikes that looked like they had just come from the factory. I am still not quite sure who buys her bikes because no one in Mae Sot rides new bikes, they are all old 1950’s cruiser bikes, but none the less we are going to try and give some a go. But even the tallest one was way to small for even me, let a lone Andrew! (Have I mentioned yet that we are on the tall side here?) So we decide to go and try the other more expensive bike shop. There the bikes were ridiculously priced. Once again we were completely defeated in finding what we were looking for.

Andrew eventually had to run off to work and I decided to go around town a bit a see what things were like at the heart of Mae Sot. I was still on the hunt for a bike, since you really needed one to get around town on, and I was stopping at random stores that had a few used ones out front for sale. None of them were nice and too expensive- everyone just wanted to take advantage of the farang (read foreigner). When on the very last block I notice a little wheel poking out of the side of a shop. I stop in and somehow explain to the owner (no one really speaks any English here) that I want to look at her bike and once she realizes what I am talking about she opens up the whole side of her shop and there are about 20 perfect 1950’s cruisers sitting there. So that was where all of the locals bought their bikes! And at great prices, I end up getting a really cute red one –with a bell- for only 1,900 baht ($55). In New York this bike could have cost me like 200 bucks! I was so happy with my bike that I later took Andrew back there for him to buy one too!

After riding back to the guest house on my new bike, Andrew comes back after a few hours saying that one of his coworkers, Jade, had found a house to move into that she really liked but her old roommate didn’t want to move there and if she wanted to see it. She prepped us by saying that it hadn’t been lived in in a very long time and needed to have a bit of work done to it, but all in all it was a great house. So off we go to see it… and it is totally amazing! A 5 bedroom house with a huge kitchen, 2 bathrooms, 2 balconies and 2 large common areas! This is a home improvement-doers dream (i.e. MY dream). So excited that Andrew and I have finally found a place to live we put half of the money down right then.

Later back at the hostel I am telling this story to Rob and he says “oh ya I have a Thai friend who is looking for a place to stay for really cheap” and it just so happens that this “Thai guy” that Rob know Jade also knows and now he is our new roommate. And because he speaks 5 languages he was able to broker all of the deals for the construction that we needed to have done on the house. Which is pretty considerable. Right now our kitchen is all concrete. So we need to have the two bathrooms tiled, the weeds all around the house dug up and the whole house needs mosquito netting! But hopefully we will be moved in by the end of this week! So currently I am running back and forth to the house trying to make sure that everything gets done, cause I am sort of in charge of that. Also next weekend we’ll be able to hopefully furnish the place- yay for furniture buying!

All of that happened in one day! Amazing huh? Craziness sure can ensue here.

An A Type Lost in the Jungle

It is definitely hard telling people why I quit my job in Manhattan and left my apartment in Brooklyn to move to Thailand; without a plan or idea about what it will be like when I finally arrive. It is not really in my nature to make such a change – but I guess that at the core that is the real reason why I chose to leave. Because it is just something that I naturally wouldn’t do.

After graduating NYU and working full time in a lucrative art gallery in Manhattan I still wasn’t completely fulfilled, and if anything more neurotic. Manhattan has a unique ability of turning each persons’ little flaws into huge neurotic tendencies. I worried about the future, worried about my clothes, worried about working out – just about anything I could worry about I did. But most obsessively of all I worried about money. Did I have enough of it, was I spend little enough of it, did I have enough of it for the future, was I investing what I had properly…. on and on and on. Towards the end of 2007 it got so bad that I was having money anxiety dreams where I would wake up and my arms would be numb from stress. To cut to the chase it was stupid; I was saving and making more than enough of it. So then why was I so god damn stressed about it? Like I said, Manhattan is just a greedy little monster that feeds off of your anxieties, making them worse for its own benefit. So what I needed was a reality check and a change in scenery. If money, relative success for my age and living in “the greatest city in the world” wasn’t going to do it I needed to go some where that would. And for the most part that’s how I ended up in Thailand.
Sadly, I guess that my motives are no different than any American that goes to Thailand to “find themselves” – if it is even possible to do that! But while my motives might not be original I am really hoping that in the mean while I end up doing something meaningful for the people that live here and contributing to the community.

We’ll see how it goes. I just finally got to Mae Sot after 2 long days of traveling and tomorrow is a new day. Hopefully I’ll find A. an apartment to rent and B. an NGO to work with. This should be a whole new exciting adventure!