Thailand - The Land of Smiles

Sa-wat-dii khrap (Hello). I have been extremely busy as you can imagine, so my apologies for starting my blog late. To give everyone a good understanding let me introduce everything.

I will be studying at Payap University in Chiang Mai, Thailand for 4 months (August 13th - December 17th). I am specially part of the South East Asian Institute for Global Studies (SEAIGS). I am taking five classes over the course of my time here; 1) Buddhism & Thai Society 2) Politics & Gov't of Thailand 3) Gender Identity, Sexuality and Transformation in Thai Society 4) Cultural Foundations of Thai Society and 5) Thai Language. Each class seems very intriguing and I cant express how excited I am for them to official start. Most of my classes are taught by a Thai teacher, however two of my teachers are American (which is nice because it is much, much easier to follow them). To add on, SEAIGS requires its students to partake in three excursions over the course of the school year. The first excursion will be to a remote village in Northern Thailand called Mae Chaem. We will be there from monday August 23rd to saturday August 28th. Each student stays with a host family (I will explain go into more depth with this excursion when I get back next saturday). I am extremely excited and also nervous, what am I going to see? How will my living conditions be? My second excursion is to the Thai Kingdoms Sukhothai and Ayutthaya. This excursion occurs on wednesday september 29th to sunday october 3rd. Once again, I am just explaining everything in the broadest sense, I will go into more depth once the excursions end. My last excursion is to a Highland Ethnic Minority Village in Chiang Rai; this excursion is the same as my first one. The dates are november the 24th to the 28th. And all this is just for school, outside of my academic studies and excursions I plan to travel as much as possible. Of course I will keep everyone posted! So there you have it. I am on a journey that will change my life forever and I am glad you are coming along for the ride!