It has been almost a week since arriving at Tai-Kadai’s tiny airport at 10 pm. There Michele and I first met one of our teammates, Alice, and leaders, Mrs. James, who came to pick us up in the church’s songteo, think of a covered truck with benches in the bed. It was Alice’s idea, to give us a taste of the Tai-Kadai experience so she drove us back to The Language Institute (TLI).

I must say the living situation is quite nice. I feel slightly spoiled. The school has three houses for their Short-Term Missionaries (SMs), which this year they only have 6. With two teachers per house, it is quite roomy. However, they usually pray for at least 8, meaning we are actually understaffed.

The houses are literally right next to the school. Each house has three floors, a kitchen, a washer, showers with hot water. I lucked out, as it seems they just recently installed AC units. Hopefully entries will not be as long as this one, as I’m laying the background and context for future entries.

Day 1.

We were greeted with mangosteens, longans, granola and soymilk for breakfast. Yesssss. The evidence of a wonderful preparation set up by Alice,

previously a hair stylist with her own business for 10 years, until she made the decision to come to Tai-Kadai. This year is actually her second year. Apparently, the larger majority of SMs tend to stay for more than a year, and in that time, they tend to get a motorbike. Majorly convenient, as Alice has been showing us the ropes and getting around on her motorbike sure makes things faster. Otherwise, we pretty much are going to expect to bike everywhere.

We also met Adara, who is in her 4th year here. The most seasoned of the SMs, she is the academic advisor and the go-to for local language communication – and that makes for very ironic situations.

Take for example, when we went to get fitted for our traditional Tai-Kadai skirts which we will be wearing as uniforms while teaching. If a blonde, a redhead, and two Asians came into your TK store, who would you expect to communicate with about the length of the skirt? The redhead of course! And who would you expect to be next in line for responding back to you in TK? The blonde.

After our fitting, we went to the church-owned vegetarian restaurtant, Spring Garden. Love it. (That’s the dream, make a veggie church-owned one in VN. Guess we’ll see). Food was simple, tasted good, cheap, and in each basket on the table you’ll find a church bulletin. Awesome!

The Singh’s joined us for the meal, a young couple also serving with ISO (our organization back in Michigan). They handle a tourism business in India, and if I’m not mistaken in their 4th year. They had to do a visa run, which is every so many months they have to go back to Thailand to renew it. They decided to stop by our project and visit other ISO teammates in the process.

After the meal, we needed to head out to one of the homes of the staff, Mr. Lieben for vespers. However, before we did, we had to make a market run to bring our part for the evening meal.

Wow, it’s like Seafood City, but TK style. You can go down some sections and find the produce, the herbs, the veggies, the fruits. Down another row, you’ll find the spices, the soy sauce, the mushroom seasonings, the dried noodles. And just like Seafood City, you have the meat section – with the live fish, frogs, turtles, eels, and other things that flop around in their tubs. Or the bloody slabs of pork, chicken, fish. I don’t think I would mind, but when it’s hot, humid, and the meats are in the open air – it’s pretty rough going through that section of the market.

Unless maybe you’re a cat…

We quickly went through to get our ingredients for breakfast burritos to make the next day, and on our way back stopped to buy fruits to bring. Yes, we did buy more mangosteens.

Oh the fruits – my happy highlight. And oh, how the dopamine was pumping when we were treated to a sticky rice feast for supper at the Lieben’s home before vespers. How does it work? Grab your sticky rice, pour the fresh home-made coconut milk (one of Lieben girls proudly told me she scraped it out from the shell herself), and pile on the mango, the dragon fruit, the pineapple, mangosteen, etc. I can actually say, I like bananas over here. They’re really good. Even papaya is even edible for my palate.

———————————————————————————————
Day 3
The Amazing Tai-Kadai Race Tour

What’s the best way to get a couple of newbies familiar with the life and times of Tai-Kadai? Have them race against each other without a translator through the capital city and make them figure it out on their own of course! It didn’t quite play out like that, unfortunately. Instead, Michele and I went around together with many guided instructions. Although a nice taste of the TK experience regardless.

Our first task of the morning? Head out to the tuk-tuk station and have it bring us to Mrs. James’s home for breakfast. Since we were told to take a tuk-tuk, we would have to walk. A tuk-tuk is a trailer pulled long by a motorbike. You could almost consider it a 21st century Asian buggy. hahah.
The distance to the station was quite a distance, so we started the morning early. Fortunately, as we were walking, a tuk-tuk decided to offer us a ride, AND for a cheaper rate than what we were told to bargain down to. Yes! It was a nice surprise to Mrs. James, “This is the first time any SMs have come early.” 😊

After enjoying waffles, we were set to go on our next task. Get a tuk-tuk to the bus station, take it to Friendship Bridge, find a songteo, and go to Khong Park.

No guide, minimum to zero Tai-Kadai language, a city map, and a pocket TK-English phrase book. We managed to get a good price on the tuk-tuk, but most likely got ripped off on the songteo. Win some, lose some, live and learn. Although, I guess it is hard to be upset when the songteo’s truck bed is so rusted, you wonder if the floor will give way. You figure, “The guy needs it more than I do for at least the luxury of duct tape or something.”

The road to Khong Park is notorious for being a terrible road and it was incredibly obvious in the songteo we rode in. I don’t know how to describe the experience other than, imagine riding a steel washing machine for 30-40 mins. I wanted to laugh uncontrollably as Michele and I were jolted left, right, up, back. People pay for this on Indiana Jones at Disneyland, yet this is the life of people here. The drive took so long Alice began to worry if we were being taken to the wrong place. Of course, my imagination began to run wild, “What if we were being kidnapped and taken!?” I reigned in my imagination a bit. It is highly unlikely, for if we were, the road is so bad and the songteo is barely keeping itself together, we could probably outrun the songteo on foot.

We finally arrived at Khong Park. WOW! It is a fascinating place with incredibly large stone statues.

It really was beginning to feel like an Indiana Jones movie come to life! We entered into this “pumpkin,” which has three levels, to represent heaven, earth and hell.

Where the tree connects to the pumpkin, there is a hole that comes out to check out the view of Khong Park from a more aerial view.

All around were pieces of Buddhist mythology put into stone.

This stone army is protecting the “invisible” city. You can’t see the city, though, because it’s invisible…

I have wondered at times when artist’s create their works, if they ever imagine the various ways people would…demonstrate their appreciation of it. (:

We were picked up by Mr. Lieben to learn to how help prepare a Tai-Kadai meal. My job? Papaya salad! yumm. Michele was in charge of the eggplant.

A nice banana leaf table cloth for the Tai-Kadai meal we helped prep.

Meet Lee, he has a smile that says, “I’m the archetypical poster child for service organizations.”

Our last event for the night, was to separately spend the night at a local church member’s home to get a feel of life in a TK home. Sweet and homey, I was treated to dinner, and enjoyed chatting with the father, an elder of the local church, as well as their youngest daughter. In the morning, one of their daughter’s friends made breakfast — not too out of the ordinary, unless you count the fried meal worms. D8 I passed, mentioning that I was vegetarian.

Our next destination? Ride our bikes to TK version of the Arc de Triomphe and climb to the top: 192 steps. 

Here was our reward.

And the ending of our Tai-Kadai Tour? A stop at the market to purchase the food for lunch at GEI. We have also been introduced to “The Smoothie Lady.” This place has become essential for living.

Best avocado – coconut smoothies ever. :d Actually, you can create anything and she will throw it and make it for you. My best creation ever is my alternative to an Orange Dream Machine: passion fruit, mango, pineapple, and coconut. All of that for a whopping $8,000 kip (the currency exchange is $1 USD = 8,000k) 8D I will be drinking this as much as possible, because once the fruits are out of season, I am out of luck.

It is soo good. If I could, I would patent this stuff. One day, maybe it’ll be a menu item on that future health food restaurant I’ve been dreaming about.

• Twitter