Weeks 1 & 2 - Chiang Mai, Thailand

so, I flew into Chiang Mai after a 17+ hour flight from LA to Bangkok, then directly to Chiang Mai, Thailand's second largest city that is in the North. I had a couple of days to hang out, but we quickly had orientation meetings that would occupy my days for the next two weeks.

I am interning with an organization called Bridges Across Borders. This NGO focuses upon community-based legal education and much of the orientation involved developing lesson plans for ESL or legal training in different settings and in different countries.

There are forty total interns in the program and I quickly made friendships with a lot of them. We are almost all in law school and because we have chosen to do this type of work for our summer, you can imagine that there are a lot of commonalities between us. I had a couple great nights having drinks and doing some dancing, or just nice dinners in different parts of Chiang Mai.

Things in Thailand are very, very cheap. There are different reasons for this but most meals (and this is good, good food) will cost you from $1-4. And other goods or services are also very inexpensive. [ if you compare this to other countries in southeast asia, Thailand is much cheaper even though it is much nicer. this has to do with import/export production, Thailand's middle class, etc. ]

The first picture is of me and my friend Kelly (Canadian) who I became close with and even though it was early, we knew that it was going to be a great night. The restaurant had good food, another intern, Davis, ended up taking over the sound system and after moving some tables we turned the place into a dance party.

The second picture is of a Buddhist temple, known as a "wat". The wats in Chiang Mai are very ornate and are highly valued in Thai culture. Buddhist monks are a constant presence on the streets, especially early in the morning, and foreigners are generally welcome to explore the wats and can often talk with monks if they wish.

After kind of a rough April and May in the States, it was nice to relax and have a good time these two weeks. I was quite uptight over this last spring and I'm happy to see that I can actually relax again.