Another incredible day...

Wow! Today was another great day in the land of Thailand. We started off the day with long meetings about rules and regulations and registration at the university. Then the dean of students came and we had tea with him while he welcomed us to the university. We had more introduction things and then we took a tour of the campus on an electric train that runs around campus. After that we had lunch at the canteen which is sort of like a private street market. The food is amazing. I got a huge bowl of some sort of soup with Thai meatballs and chili, it was very delicious.
We walked to meet the vice president of the university of chiang mai in his office area. I had no idea how official this was going to be. Apparently this university has a lot of prestige in the country and in all of Asia. Mike our program director, or we call him Ajan mike, told us that this university is like a harvard or yale in all of Asia. It is also nationally ranked. Meeting the vice president was really interesting. We had to stand in his presence and wai him. Wai is a sign of respect when greeting an elder, teacher or someone of great respect where you bow your head to your hands coming together at your face. Get it? They served us fancy juices out of chiang mai glasses and we asked questions to this man.
We had our first lecture mostly about Thai customs in general. We learned about the internships that we will be at and which ones we will all visit and some point. The one that I want is at the Buddhist university teaching the monks English. I really want to be friends with some monks because I hear you learn a lot more from them than they learn from you haha.
We then went back to the hotel to lounge before dinner. My roommate waverly has her best friend here too and the four of us get along super well! The four of us decided that we wanted to break away from the big group to see if we could survive and get dinner. We walked down the main street near our hotel and nothing looked good so we wanted to head back to the university canteen. The university is the largest campus I have ever been on. It is crazy huge! We used our good memory to walk a half hour through the university to see that the canteen was closed. We then wanted to head back to the main street to eat but we tried to use some of the Thai we have learned to talk to this girl at the team stop. She told us to go to tv university market. We decided to go with her. The food at the university market was really good and even though no one spoke English we still got what we asked for. We then got some fruits a vendor in the city to try and headed back to the long maw which is the back gate of the university in Thai. We got back to the hotel no problem even with this being the first day of using Thai language.
It was a really fun experience trying to use the little Thai that we know to get around and do our thing as university students. All four of us had a blast and learned a lot about patience and the helpfulness of the Thai people. They really as a country full of smiling happy people. I can tell that although our classes are only during the day, we will be learning well into the night. I am so excited to see what tomorrow will bring!
From the wonderful university of chiang mai
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