Hello friends!
I can hardly believe I am sitting here now. Mostly because up until two weeks ago today, I and everyone around me thought that I would be in Kolkata, India right now, starting my semester abroad through service-learning organization IPSL.
Not the case. On that fateful Friday, two weeks ago, in an airport not so very different from this one (Newark), I received an email stating that due to circumstances of a personal and emergent nature, the director in Kolkata would be unable to lead the fall program.
I had been dreaming of going to India for years and thought that fall of my junior year in college would be the perfect time to go. I contemplated several India programs before deciding on IPSL, cleared out my semester, applied for the visa, etc. Naturally, upon receiving the ill news I was utterly disappointed. My dream momentarily crushed, my sixteen-year-old sister, with the wisdom and perspective only a middle child could offer, told me to buck up. "Now you can find a new dream!" she paraphrased from the Disney movie Tangled. Indeed, she was right, as IPSL offered to put me on a different program of my choosing. I had roughly 48 hours to decide.
Her cinematic insight turned out to be a premonition, as the thing that swayed me in the direction of Chiang Mai, Thailand was influenced by Tangled. For those who are not familiar, a key element of the re-imagined Rapunzel story is the releasing of thousands of floating paper lanterns into the night sky once a year. As only Disney computer animation can deliver, the lantern scene in the movie is spectacular to behold, practically unbelievable.
Imagine my surprise and delight then, when researching Chiang Mai, to find that the lantern festival is real and takes place in the Northern Thailand city in November (during a potential fall abroad!). No literature on my program made any mention of the lantern festival, so there is a chance that I may not be directly involved with it. But from what I've seen, this event can't be missed (both in the sense that it is a once-in-a-lifetime sort of happening and that it would be pretty hard to miss thousands of lanterns in the sky over the city where one lives and goes to school).
So that's my tell-it-at-parties version of how I ended up choosing Thailand. There are a whole bunch of other reasons, too, of course, such as interest in the country in general, being a university student, service work opportunities, etc. I'm sure that all those will fully come to light in later posts, so stay tuned!
For now, here I sit waiting to board a plane that will take me from my beloved Colorado to San Francisco, where I will board another plane that takes me to Bangkok with a stop in Tokyo, then spend the night in the Bangkok airport with a four-hour stay in some kind of in-airport hotel as my only diversion, and finally take yet another plant to Chiang Mai where apparently I will hit the ground running with university orientations and the like.
Due to quickly made travel plans and my difficulty with picking up major language skills, I cannot leave you will any kind of Thai farewell at this time. Allow me instead to bid you a good morning (it's 5:20 am) and implore you to keep reading this blog as I imagine things to get far more interesting for me!
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