So I stayed in Pai till Sunday, it was really laid back, a group of us went out on Friday night to a few bars where they played live music which was pretty cool, one of the lead singers has the biggest hair i have ever seen. Saturday we just wondered around the food market, went to the shops and to the river. We (me, Pam and Andrew who I met on the trek) got the bus back to Chiang Mai on Sunday and spent the afternoon by the pool before going to the Sunday night market which was immense. Its huge and there`s loads of stalls selling all sorts of stuff from, the regular tourist souvenirs to clothes, paintings, street food, pets, everything! It started to tip it down with rain but that didn`t stop us looking at all the stalls, I got some Thai trousers and an umbrella.

On monday morning I got my flight to Chiang Rai which was awesome, it was a 9 seater plane and you could see all the pilots controls and see the mountains and lakes below the whole way there ( 50 minute journey). I arrived at the airport where Thellie, one of the Mirror Foundation leaders met me to take me to my home for the next 3 weeks. He`s from Ipswich which was quite random as I keep meeting people from Essex, he moved here 2 years ago and is now building a house here! Mirror Foundation is amazing, its like a mini campus or village with a girls dorm, boys dorm, laundry, kitchen , office, shop that sells hill tribe crafts and eating area and we are surrounded by hills, its beautiful, there`s lots of dogs n cats (all very well looked after), the rooms are all made from bamboo. There`s lots of other volunteers from USA, Canada, Australia, England and Japan and people from the hill tribes work here so that they earn an honest living. It doesn`t just teach the children English but also does community development such as building water tanks and helps hill tribe members get Thai citizenship which can take up to 10 years.

Last week I did childcare at a hospital where we basically played with the children for the afternoon which was great cos some were really poorly so it was great to see them happy and having fun with us, the hospital was really clean which was good to see. I then did 2 days teaching in a primary school which was so much fun, we had to plan the lessons and teach them set things from the curriculum - pronouns and possessives. so we used games and pictures, it worked really well :-D.

We did a home stay at the weekend in the Akha tribe village where we were meant to be helping build a water tank but there wasn`t much for us to do so we worked for about an hour and spent the rest of the time playing with the children. They put a show on for us on Sunday night with their traditional dancing and costumes. They are also christian so they have a big church and the performance was done in front of it and its also where all the young people meet to play in the evenings. Me, Laura and Jess stayed with a family whos 16 year old daughter - Oin is amazing at English and has got a scholarship to go to high school so that she can continue learning languages, it was really interesting seeing how they live and helping them cook and eating with the family.

Today we went on an elephant ride which took us along the river and then we held a huge Goa Snake - it was really heavy and its face kept coming towards mine which was scary despite the woman saying `no bite no bite, is ok`! We then went to a waterfall which was amazing - so refreshing in this heat. It was huge and really hard to swim under, I climbed the rocks and jumped in cos it was so deep, it was so much fun, we didn`t want to leave. We ate our lunch out of banana tree leaves today which was quite cool. Then came back to Mirror and planned whose doing what for this week. I`ve got childcare and teaching tomorrow and teaching on Thursday and Friday, really looking forward to more teaching, i love it!
no photos yet as I don`t have a way of uploading them on Mirror`s computers yet but will sort that out soon.
xxx