My research has also sped up recently, and we’ve only got five interviews left before we’re finished! My boss, a fellow coworker, and I have begun planning what we will do with the results. We will likely be incorporating the findings into educational material targeted at parents, teachers, and students at the primary school level. This will include a take-home game that an awesome gamer at Dartmouth’s Games Laboratory is helping me put together. Right now, we’re envisioning that the setting of the game will be a playground at a primary school, and the mission will be to get as many friends as possible. Some of the friends will have HIV, and others will not. Yet if a player only tries to be friends with the people without HIV, he or she will lose the game. We’re still working out the details, but the main purpose will be to teach players that children living with HIV are no different than those without the illness, and they can and should be your friend too.
In other, non-work related news, my roommate and I along with his friend Dre just took a visit to Thailand, a beautiful country that is so different from Vietnam despite the fact that they’re practically neighbors. For starters, everyone bows which was a blast (upon my return to Hanoi I’ve tried to bring the bow with me but it has only resulted in strange looks). There are fast food restaurants and 7-11s EVERYWHERE. I had heard about all of the McDonalds and Burger Kings and Subways before, but hadn’t expected that they would be so prevalent. It’s very strange walking into one of them, though, because to me they are marks of a highly developed nation, but when you walk into the store from the busy, bustling, dirty city streets of Bangkok, it almost feels like you’ve entered a completely different country for a short period of time. The people in Thailand are also more heavyset than those in Vietnam, and we saw a lot more beggars on the streets. The whole experience was very eye-opening.
I spent a little over five days on the trip. When I arrived late Thursday night, I went to a street called Sam Sen in the heart of Bangkok. Chaz (my roommate) and Dre had already been in the city for a few days and were staying at a fantastic hotel called Sam Sen Place (on Sam Sen 3 for anyone planning a trip). I managed to get the presidential suite at the hotel for only 1,000 baht (about $30) because all the other rooms were booked and I arrived so late that I got a discount. The room was BALLER, I felt like a queen!
I dropped my bags off, and Chaz and I went on a short walk over to Khao San Road, one of the busiest and most touristy streets I had ever seen in my life. Every two seconds, you pass by another outdoor bar or café blasting some sort of music, massage parlors, people offering you a ride in their Tuc-Tuc (their open-air form of transportation, see this link for a picture: http://i.pbase.com/u39/dougj/upload/25831303.219_1943CS.jpg) – all this in addition to the street food stands featuring pad thai, fruit drinks, kebabs, crepes… pretty much anything one could imagine. There were also stands selling t-shirts, purses, jewelry, knock-off make-up, hats, shoes, dresses, etc. The people working these stands seemed much more money-hungry than their Hanoian equivalents: if a storekeeper did not think that you were planning on buying something, he or she would kick you out. I couldn’t believe it!
The next morning, I got up early and went on a walk near our hotel where I met some great storeowners. One guy ran a delicious bar/restaurant that Chaz, Dre and I ended up eating at the last night (he made the most amazing green curry with shrimp and fish and chips). I also met a group of Indian guys who ran an Indian restaurant not too far up the street from our place. There were tons of Indian restaurants all over Bangkok. Then I went back and met up with Dre and Chaz, and we walked up to the road right before Khao San, where the restaurants are quieter and the food is delicious. After feasting on green and red curry and pad thai, we walked around the city and tried to go to Glenn Palace (http://waheedaharris.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/b-2.jpg?w=500&h=667) but unfortunately it was closed. That night, we went to Khao San once again and the next morning we were off to the beach for 48 hours in the sun.
The south of Thailand was all flooded, which I was informed of at the airport upon arrival in Bangkok, so we had to go eastward to hit the beaches. This meant foregoing the cheaper and less touristy beaches for ones that were just as pretty but more expensive and crowded with vacationers. We were told by the people who run Sam Sen Place to check out Koh Samet and we found a bus/ferry ride for 350 baht. Yet when we went to the stand to book our tickets, we were told the bus rides to Koh Samet for the rest of the day were not in service. So we asked the woman at the ticket stand what a cheap, close, and fun option was, and she told us about Pattaya. Little did we know, however, that we would find ourselves in the tourist capital of the sex industry. Upon opening our lonely planet we saw two haunting words: “Backpackers Beware.” Indeed, the guidebook’s description of the place was all too accurate, but we still had a good time!
The beach itself was absolutely beautiful, and there were tons of huts where you could sit (although every five minutes people would come up to sell you corn on the kob, fried shrimp and chicken, hologram pictures, jewelery, ice crema, you name it). I also stumbled upon some volunteer work the second night: Heart-to-Heart was putting on a concert in the center of town with some famous musicians from Bangkok to raise money for flood victims in the south, so I grabbed a box and asked for donations the whole night and made a few speeches on stage encouraging other people, specifically the English-speaking Westerners, to donate money. Apparently the guys playing were some of the most famous in Thailand, so it was cool to get to do some work alongside them! After two days, Chaz, Dre, and I traveled back to Bangkok where we spent one more night at Sam Sen place and then I bid adieu to the country and headed back to Hanoi. I hope to make it back soon to go to the south and see the beaches there, though I can’t imagine they’d promise more adventure than Pattaya did.
Below are some pictures from the trip to Thailand:
^A friend from Australia that I met on the plane who had spent two weeks backpacking around Vietnam and was going through Thailand to head home.
^Bangkok!
^One of the storeowners I met.
^The street food in Bangkok is even more out of control than in Hanoi.
^The place that Chaz, Dre, and I went for lunch like every day in Bangkok.
^On our walk to Glenn Palace. You can see it in the distance.
^Not Glenn Palace, but another cool palace we stopped by on the way.
^We think this building was some sort of Ministry of Defense headquarters
^Khao San, the biggest tourist attraction in Bangkok.
^Chaz in some baller massage pants he wore when we all got Thai massages.
^Beach at Pattaya!
^Chaz and Dre on Walking Street in Pattaya.
^Delicious pad thai I had my last in Bangkok.
