Unlike in Mae La Oop, our homestay in Mae Chaem was set up as a business. A sign in front of the house with Thai lettering marked the Pa Daed Homestay.
When we arrived our host, Mae Pa, had a cold drink waiting for us. She ladled blue liquid into glasses and gestured that we should squeeze lime into the drink. After we did, she held up the glass and showed us how the lime was turning the blue liquid purple. Continue reading
We left Mae La Oop and the students staying for their internships on a rainy Friday morning. After saying our goodbyes to our homestay family, our host drove us in the back of his truck the 11km down the mountain to the closest town. As we reached the town we came upon a songtheow Continue reading
Our favorite part of the day in Mae La Oop was the evenings. After teaching English in the morning, we would relax on our mats in the main house. At 6pm Oon, the nine year old daughter in our homestay family, would walk in and announce, “Dinner time” in accented English.
After spending several days in Mae La Oop, I needed to do some laundry. I had noticed clothes hanging on lines in front of houses all over the village, but I wasn’t sure if there were washing machines. I wonder/worried that I might have to hand wash all of our dirty clothes. I asked one of the students if she had figured out what the laundry situation was and she said there was a washing machine at her homestay. I peeked around the back of the family’s raised hut and found that, yes, they also had a washing machine.
So I asked our host if it would be all right if I did some laundry. He said that his wife could do our laundry, but I said, no, that was OK, I could do it myself. I mean, I have done thousands of loads of laundry in my lifetime. I could certainly do my own laundry in rural northern Thailand. Or so I thought…
I didn’t think the girls and I would have much to do in the little village of Mae La Oop while Rand’s students were doing their internship. The whole town consisted of a couple dozen wooden houses on the side of a hill, a church, a Buddhist temple, a school, and a hospital. No restaurants. No stores (unless you count a few little shops run out of people’s homes that sold an assortment of snacks). And the wifi was sporadic at best. So we were excited when we were not only invited to go to the school with the students to help teach English, we were also asked to teach our host’s family in the evenings.
Any Direction We Choose 