Midterms

     It is midterm week here in Thailand. This is a much bigger deal than in America where I often don't have midterms. At MUIC the midterm exam is 40% of my grade! So the pressure is on! It doesn't really help that it is super hard to focus over here. All of the exchange students agree that it is much harder to get school work done here than at our home institutions. That being said I probably will not update the blog much for the next week since I will mostly be attempting to do research and studying. On a different note I am loving working with the kids at the hospital! Here are some pictures of the OT room I am in most of the time.






     There is even a sensory room just like the one at the camp I work at in America! I wasn't able to get any pictures of it yet because there were always patients in it. Although hospitals in Thailand do not have any rules regarding patient confidentiality the way America does it still seems wrong to post pictures of patients. The lack of regulation over here may be a disadvantage for the patients but it has helped to make this an amazing internship for me. I would not be able to do half of the stuff that I do in Thailand back home.
     Over a month into my stay here and there are still a few things that I have not gotten used to. Crossings guards for example confuse me. I always seen to do the opposite of what they want me to do, which is a pretty bad thing when crossing the street. They are rather intense and I don't understand their motions so I get stressed out and panic. One would think that the motion to come and go would be universal, it's not. Most of the time when they want me to come it looks like they are shooing me away.
     Everything I heard about Asian food in America made it out to be very different from the way it really is. Before coming here I was under the impression that Asians (Chinese, Japanese, and Thai) ate very healthy food. Meaning not a lot of sugar/fried food, and eating meat only a few times a week. From what I have seen so far that could not be less true. Ninety percent of food has meat, is fried, and is loaded with sugar. I have been to a few authentic Chinese restaurants and this has also been the case there. Another major cultural difference is the acceptance of gay people and cross dressers. One of my teachers said that Bangkok is so gay it makes San Francisco look like rural Texas. After spending some time here I would definitely agree with that statement. Cross dressing is the norm and "lady boys" are everywhere. I am just now learning to recognize them and am astonished to see how many of them I didn't notice previously. I am really interested in what dating culture is like here. The guys are so much more coy here than in America. There are no crude shout outs, "sup girls," or whistles to be spoken of. The most you might get is a car honk. Older guys (30's and up) sometimes try to start up a conversation or make comments about your beauty, but it never comes off as sleezy or creepy. There is also no PDA to be spoken of, with the exception of the occasional scandalous couple holding hands. Despite the fact that Thai college guys seem so shy and socially awkward compared to Americans Thailand has the second highest teen pregnancy rate in the world. There is obviously more going on than meets the eye.
    I thought that with Thailand being an agricultural country it would be easy to find whole fresh food here. Wrong again, everything is chalked full of additives and preservatives. Even if I could read the Thai labels on food it is not required that manufacturers list their ingredients on the products, so most of them don't. Today I learned how to tell people in restaurants not to add MSG to my food (which is also in everything) so hopefully that will help with the negative reactions to much of the food.

Location:บรมราชชนนี,Phutthamonthon,Thailand