A Weekend to Remember

So our first weekend was another overwhelming introduction to Thailand. It started with the four hour train trip down south from Bangkok. I had not had more than two or three hours of sleep the night before, so as I got on the train I was ready to hit the hay; sadly a hot crowded bus isn’t the most conducive to sleeping. Even worse was that the four hour trip turned to a four and a half hour trip which in turn became a five hour and twenty minute trip. We got there in a little over six hours. It was right around midnight by Thai time, too dark to really get an idea of our surroundings, and I didn’t really care at that point. I just wanted to sleep.
The next morning I would find that we were right by the beach surrounded by miles and miles of coconut groves. Up the beach a mile or two was a gentle hill crowned by a Buddhist temple. I won’t waste words recounting the whole weekend, pics and eventually video will do that a thousand times better than I can. But I will say that Cory, Brandon and I lucked out because we got to do things our first weekend that other SMs had been waiting six months for. We swam in the ocean, visited a Buddhist temple, saw monkeys, rented motor bikes and cruised around, watched muay thai matches (Thai kickboxing, Thailand’s national sport) and a myriad of other stuff. And in between all this we would get Thai food and the more experienced SMs would share with us the wisdom they had acquired while being in Thailand.
I think it was Sunday night, after grabbing some sticky rice from a vender at the fair, I was driving myself along the beach on a motorcycle/moped on the left side of the road (not the right) that it struck me how weird this all was. And it was weird because driving a motorcycle on the left side of the road in a foreign country felt so normal. Los Angeles seemed like another lifetime ago even though I had only been in Thailand three days. So much had happened that it just felt like long, long ago. I got to wondering if these months I’ll spend in Thailand will fly by or feel like an eternity. Time will tell.