**Again, no pictures yet but in the next post or so**
A couple days ago we went to an area of Nakhon Phanom called Renu Nakhon and it's supposedly known for it's beautiful women. The secretariet of the Senate in Bangkok is from this area and so he greeted us and welcomed to the school we were spending the day at. He mentioned that much of what he is doing in the Senate is helping to get English out in the rural area's and he was so happy that we were there, but that he had to leave because he had another meeting. It was a very short and blunt message as seems to be the Thai way. But it was still a wonderful introduction and great to know how appreciative he was of what we will be doing. He also told us to call if we ever have any problems or want a tour guide around Bangkok. We seem to be getting a lot of invitations from people to stay with them or to go to their province/ town. I'm never quite sure how serious these invites are or if it's Thai custom to be polite and invite us since we're new to town.
The day was fantastic and we got to participate in a traditional Thai dance! First they put on a show for us and everyone (Thai) was involved - grandmothers and grandfathers, two little 8 or 9 year old children and a bunch of university students who were home for break (it's their mid year break for another week or so....classes begin again in November). Afterwards they invited us to dance too and we got to wear traditional dresses and everything! It was very possibly the hottest day here though and I was just sweating constantly (I know you all wanted to know that). But we had to put the costumes on over our clothes and air conditioning is a rare thing in our villages. Then we basically did the show again, which consisted of different classical Thai dance moves that we hadn't learned yet. We ended up just copying the Thai dancers as best we could. It worked well enough, among a lot of laughter. Most of us were paired with another Thai. I had an older woman who made sure I knew what I was doing and it was great. She mostly laughed at me but I sometimes got it right! We just walked around in circles in the dancing area (as is custom I think) and then we sat down in one huge circle. I'm sure there are cues to the music but I wasn't paying attention/ couldn't tell. Next, a guy would get up and dance around in the middle of the circle of people and "pick" a girl to dance with. There were three brothers dancing with us and the youngest got up and attempted to ''pick'' his older brothers girlfriend and everyone got a laugh out of that. It was very interpretive and a lot of fun.
I was the first person from our group 'picked' to dance which was a little nerve-wracking as I had no idea what to do and most of you know that I hate being the center of attention! So luckily a couple other people got into the circle at that time and showed me what to do...I just sorta stepped and moved my hands around and waited until someone told me to sit down. It was an experience and I'm so glad we got to do it! There is a festival here on November 2nd and we've been invited to dance FOR a whole community so at least we got some practice. We have also been taking classical dance lessons!
After the dance they asked us if we wanted to "see the elephant" which confused us all. I thought it was an actual elephant, other's thought it was drugs as we're located in the Golden Triangle. It turned out to be this rice whiskey that they make specially in Renu Nakhon and the female gets the longer straw and the male gets the shorter straw and you drink out of this rice whiskey jug at the same time for like 20 seconds. They also do some sort of chant or song and throughout the whole thing we could hear them commenting on "farangs". So, no idea what they were saying. We were told it was nothing negative however.
During the whole ceremony, somewhat in the beginning, the district head asked us to bring our chairs into the middle around a table that had been set up. The table had a nice tablecloth, some eggs, and custard cakes in these urn type things. It's a bit hard to describe so I will post a picture soon. The district head then gave a little speech (in Thai of course). Next, all of the teachers and some of the students grabbed some of the pieces of string hanging on the tree and tied them around our wrist. It's a sort of ceremony - it was described as a love ceremony but I think it was closer to a welcoming ceremony meaning that it was lovely to meet us. That's about all I picked up. So we had about 20 pieces of string tied to our wrists and this is actually the second time we've had this ceremony in our honor. The first time we left all of the strings on our wrists because we thought it would be disrespectful to take them off. Turns out, if you leave them on longer than overnight it means you are married! So we got it right this time and left them on only for a day - they are supposed to bring us good fortune and luck.
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