The first thing I did when I found out the location of my site (way back during training) was to look it up in one of the travel guides that one of the other volunteers had with them. There were only a couple of pages about Nan, but it did mention the longboat races they have every September/October. It seemed like such a long ways away at the time, but the longboat races just started this last weekend.
You may be asking yourself…”What exactly is a longboat?” A longboat is just what the name implies…a really long boat. They remind me a bit of the crew boats back in the States, but they cram a lot more people in the boats (about 30).
So on Saturday I took the songtao into Nan to meet up with Sarah & Tara (the volunteers also in Nan) and Tara’s counterpart. We met up at 1ish and went to an Italian restaurant…yes, I was pretty surprised that they had an Italian restaurant in Nan but I’m not going to complain. So the three of us shared plates of Caesar salad, spaghetti with beef sauce (it has been so long since I have had beef), and pizza…and it was all delicious!
We then headed over to the river to watch the races. It was absolutely crazy! They had set up vender booths along the street and all along the river. And there were people everywhere. We went to watch up on the bridge (excellent aerial view).
We then spent some time walking through all the booths…it really reminded me of the fair back home. I even saw someone making cotton candy!
I took the 6:00pm songtao back home (it was the last one for the day). Now I had gotten to the songtao stop a bit early (I had just missed the 5:00 songtao). So when the songtao showed up at 5:45 I piled all my stuff into the back and decided to just wait there (I had already walked through the market that is just across the street). Now I wasn’t too surprised when the driver got in the back with me…Thais love to talk to foreigners and I have had many an awkward conversation with complete strangers while I have been here. What did surprise me though was the fact that he had some food in one hand and a can of beer in the other!
I find myself saying this a lot here…but this would never have flown in the States! I would have been out of that vehicle in a second and that driver would have been fired right after my phone call to his employers. But I have to keep reminding myself that I’m not in the States. So what do I do? This is the last songtao of the day so if I stay in Nan I would have to pay for a hotel room, food, and I would have to call Peace Corps to let them know what happened. On the other hand it was only a can of beer and he was eating food as well.
This sort of “reasoning” makes me think that I have been in Thailand too long. You see, it is normal here for a group of four guys to drink an entire bottle of whisky and then all get on their motorcycles and drive back home. I have been to events here where we drove from house to house and everyone had to drink at least one shot of whiskey at each house before we went on to another house and we did that all day long. I have seen guys trying to drive a motorcycle but they are so drunk that they can’t even make it up the hill because they keep tipping over (luckily they weren’t going that fast). Drinking and driving is completely normal here…in fact they are shocked when you tell them that it is illegal in the States. So running through my head when I saw the can of beer was “at least it’s not a bottle of whisky.”
You may be asking yourself…”What exactly is a longboat?” A longboat is just what the name implies…a really long boat. They remind me a bit of the crew boats back in the States, but they cram a lot more people in the boats (about 30).
So on Saturday I took the songtao into Nan to meet up with Sarah & Tara (the volunteers also in Nan) and Tara’s counterpart. We met up at 1ish and went to an Italian restaurant…yes, I was pretty surprised that they had an Italian restaurant in Nan but I’m not going to complain. So the three of us shared plates of Caesar salad, spaghetti with beef sauce (it has been so long since I have had beef), and pizza…and it was all delicious!
We then headed over to the river to watch the races. It was absolutely crazy! They had set up vender booths along the street and all along the river. And there were people everywhere. We went to watch up on the bridge (excellent aerial view).
We then spent some time walking through all the booths…it really reminded me of the fair back home. I even saw someone making cotton candy!
I took the 6:00pm songtao back home (it was the last one for the day). Now I had gotten to the songtao stop a bit early (I had just missed the 5:00 songtao). So when the songtao showed up at 5:45 I piled all my stuff into the back and decided to just wait there (I had already walked through the market that is just across the street). Now I wasn’t too surprised when the driver got in the back with me…Thais love to talk to foreigners and I have had many an awkward conversation with complete strangers while I have been here. What did surprise me though was the fact that he had some food in one hand and a can of beer in the other!
I find myself saying this a lot here…but this would never have flown in the States! I would have been out of that vehicle in a second and that driver would have been fired right after my phone call to his employers. But I have to keep reminding myself that I’m not in the States. So what do I do? This is the last songtao of the day so if I stay in Nan I would have to pay for a hotel room, food, and I would have to call Peace Corps to let them know what happened. On the other hand it was only a can of beer and he was eating food as well.
This sort of “reasoning” makes me think that I have been in Thailand too long. You see, it is normal here for a group of four guys to drink an entire bottle of whisky and then all get on their motorcycles and drive back home. I have been to events here where we drove from house to house and everyone had to drink at least one shot of whiskey at each house before we went on to another house and we did that all day long. I have seen guys trying to drive a motorcycle but they are so drunk that they can’t even make it up the hill because they keep tipping over (luckily they weren’t going that fast). Drinking and driving is completely normal here…in fact they are shocked when you tell them that it is illegal in the States. So running through my head when I saw the can of beer was “at least it’s not a bottle of whisky.”
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