Just a little more training...

For the past two weeks I have been in a town called Korat, about 3.5 hours northeast of Bangkok. I was put up in a hotel with the 50 other volunteers where we would train and go to useless sessions from 8-4 and then live like college students in our connecting dorms (hotel rooms) for the remaining time. When I say college I mean college. We not only drank obsene amounts of alcohol, stayed up late, went swimming at inappropriate times, we also had many games of beer pong going on throughout the hotel. It was a much needed break and so much fun to just hang out and be together with all of the other volunteers.
The Peace Corps tried to seclude us as much as possible from anything resembling civilization. For example, they picked a hotel that is on a university campus where it is illegal to purchase alcohol because it is a dry campus. The main town was about a 45 minute song-taew ride away which cost between 200 and 300 baht. Much to their surprise the determined volunteers did not let this hold us down, we still managed to have a fabulous time! We hung out, saw movies, went shopping at the mall, ate pizza and mexican food, went to a water park and ate our nightly dinners at a nearby night market. The song-taew would have been expensive with only a few people, that is precisely why I went on many 15-20 person trips into town :) All in all it was a great two weeks where we could do everything we had been deprived of for the past few months.
Before and after the two week training session I spent the weekend in Bangkok with a few other volunteers. The first weekend we spent the few days shopping and soaking in the forang sightings on Kao Son road. Forang means foreigner in Thai and Kao San road is a very popular street in Bangkok where you can find many tourists. Don't get me wrong, I am still loving Thailand and the people, but every once in a while it's nice to just be around foreigners. On Saturday before we went into Korat for training, everyone who was in Bangkok decided to go out and have a good time. But before I could make it out, the beer tower that I had previously shared with Kim, one of my closest friends here, caught up with me and prevented me from joining the party. I was politely escourted home with Kim and put to bed around 7 pm where she then continued to go out and have a fabulous time. Apparently she can handle her drinks better than I can, contrary to popular belief. The next morning I was rudely awoken by my host-brother from Chaibadan, where I stayed for the first 2 months in Thailand. He called me at 6:30 in the morning to say nothing but that he missed me. Mind you this boy is 8 years old and will go through spurts where he calls me every single day for a few weeks. Not only does he call me, he texts me as well, "sen loves haley" is usually his favorite one to use. I continue to wonder what his deal is as well as who the adult is that letting him call me so frequently. I have tried saving his number so I know it's him when he calls but he constantly calls from different numbers. He is a sweet kid but if this was happening to anyone I'm pretty sure they would eventually get a little irritated. After realizing how early it was I thought it was only appropriate to wake my roommate, Kim, and ask her how her night went. Apparently, her and Paul, another volunteer, went to a Ping-Pong show together. You might think that this would just be a fun sporting even watching Asians play ping-pong, well, you are wrong. A Thailand ping-pong show is one where women shoot ping-pong balls out of unusual orifices. Not only do they use ping-pong balls but they use razor blades, liquids and bottle caps as well. So you could imagine how disappointed I was to hear that I missed this amazing event...
After spending this last weekend in Bangkok to wrap up an amazing and extremely exhausting two weeks, I headed back to site on Sunday. I wanted to get home early so that I could take the day to unwind and relax at home, maybe even do some laundry. The van driver who took me from Bangkok to my town was nice enough to drive me all the way to my house and drop me off on my doorstep, I was relieved and excited to be home. After unlocking my house and dropping my stuff off I headed straight for my room to crash on my bed in my air-conditioned room. Before plopping down on my bed I realized that my sheets were strewn about, which was odd becuase I had made sure to clean my room and make my bed before I left. I then realized that my entire bedroom was torn apart. My clothes were ripped out of my wardrobe and every drawer was opened with the remains of what was not stolen laying on the floor. It was then that I realized that someone had broken into my house and robbed me. I quickly walked around my house to assess the situation and then went straight across the street to one of my neighbors who works at my office. I told him I needed help and to come to my house. About an hour later my counterpart, my boss and almost all of my neighbors were standing in my house talking about what had happened. We called the police and they came to take fingerprints and write up a report of the situation. I was so shaken up by what happened that I couldn't help but shed some tears about what had happened. I then learned that this was making things even more awkward because Thais don't usually cry unless someone dies so they didn't know what to do when I couldn't stop crying. It wasn't the fact that my stuff had been stolen, it was the fact that I live in a small community in a rural village where I am clearly the only foreigner for miles. Everyone knows who I am and I would go even further to bet that most people know exactly where I live. So this burglary had to have been planned by someone who knew me, my routine and my whereabouts. Also, the way that they broke in clearly showed that they had put in alot of effort to brake into my house specifically. They didn't come through the doors or windows like one would assume, they climbed the 10 foot cement wall behind my house onto the roof and ripped off a metal square of the roof and climbed in that way. No one wanted me to stay there last night so I will be staying with my homestay family until the owner of the house is able to replace the locks with heavy duty bolts as well as put bars in along the roof in the back of the house. I have realized that this is definitely not something anyone should go through in a foreign country without anyone that you know around for miles. Overall, it was an interesting situation but I am fine and lucky that I do have people in my community that care about me and helped me when I needed them.
So much for a relaxing day at home to unwind from a crazy two weeks, right?