(Ntais, the Hmong girl I met randomly today)
(View from our hotel room)
(Watermelon smoothie - so amazingly refreshing!)
(Seven Eleven with a variety of tamarind candy -eek! :)
(My favorite restaurant in town currently)
Sorry for some not so great quality pictures from my phone. I didn't want to lug around my heavy dslr camera so this is what you have to put up with. We started our morning with our last breakfast in Bangkok and headed to Chiang Mai and from there we took a tiny plane and flew into Mae Hong Son. Mae Hong Son is in northern Thailand and is close to the Thai-Burmese border. We are stationed here for the week while we are making daily trips into one of the Karenni refugee camps. I am so excited and yet so nervous to head over there tomorrow. Everything has already been so different, except for the corn flakes and milk that Ryan ordered for dinner today. I am especially nervous that presentation that I have planned out. Who knows how that will go! Well, I'm sure it'll all work out and be okay. Also, we had a great day starting out with a walk in the afternoon around this small town and we found many fun things here, including a shop with school supplies and toys, which will work great with my presentation. Anyways, we decided to walk around again through an area that we had already gone through and I noticed some ethnic stuff I wanted to look at and the shop had little Hmong designs and cartoon Hmong magnets and stuff. I decided to get a shirt and post card and I'm checking out at the counter where these two girls are working and Ryan asks the girls if there are any Hmong villages around. The girl who was on the register clearly didn't understand him so Ryan repeats himself and says she's Hmong, while pointing to me. Then the other girl says that she's Hmong! We get to talking, which was a bit difficult at first, because she kept on switching into Thai like how I sometimes switch into English so I had to let her know that I didn't know any Thai. She was also Green Hmong, which has a different dialect than White Hmong so I had to listen closely to make sure I was understanding everything she had to say. I'm sure she had a hard time at points understanding Ryan and I. It was seriously a great experience meeting a Hmong person in the random city of Mae Hong Son, population 248,178 (according to Google). I was so excited to finally be able to having a flowing conversation with someone that didn't consist of me repeating the words sawadee ka, meter, and sabaidee over and over again, although that was fun, too. We are here for the rest so we will probably drop by the store again to talk to Ntais (that's her name) again, but until then we will are getting started with refugee camp work, which I'll update the blog on once we get started.
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