So in this blog post I passed me 2 month point and according to my Rotary consoler my honeymoon period is now over!

On the 9th of February I went with my host parents to the former deputy prime minister’s birthday, normally this is a very big event at his house but because of the political issues he had a celebration in a huge temple and only invited the press and a group of close friends and colleges. I met an immense amount of important people and I felt very blessed and privileged to attend such an event! It was mainly a Buddhist ceremony performed by some of the highest ranking monks in Thailand to wish him good luck in the next year of his life and I learnt a lot about Buddhist traditions. I met him and he was actually a very funny man and I was very thankful. The temple has a very big solid gold statue of Buddha and the hall witch the statue is kept in has the most beautiful interior I have ever seen in a temple, the whole temple really is out of another world and I got a front row seat to it all.

13th of February, Valentine’s Day at school. My school was not open on Valentine’s Day so we celebrated on the 13th. . Valentine’s day here is nothing like Valentine’s day in South Africa because it is highly inappropriate to have a serious relationship at a school level so nobody is all that worried about Valentine’s day and everyone bring their friends chocolates and get decorated with heart stickers and maybe if you’re lucky you get a pink rose from one of your friends. This day is really a day of appreciation instead of a day of love and that was quite nice because I had random girls I don’t even know in my school come up to me and give me roses giggle and run away witch a found really cute and really appreciated!  14th of February aka Valentine’s day. I thought my day would be pretty boring but I met up with some of my exchange student friends and we had a really great day! That night me and Momo celebrated Makha Bucha Day with my host family witch is the first day Buddha began teaching his religion. We were supposed to walk around the temple 3 times and wish and pray and be in silence with our thoughts while monks chanted over the speakers. We ended up walking around once and then just faded onto the side lines and taking funny pictures and observing because neither of us really liked it and we had already had a long day. Still it was a great thing to see and experience even if it meant I sneezed for the next two days because of all the incense that they burnt.

On the 15th of February I went to a beautiful Chinese tiger temple with my host family that was so colourful and loud and traditional that it was almost scary. It had so many colours and paintings and statues and chimes and wind chimes and flames and candles and alters that I was in awe of everything around me and had to take a moment to take it all in. My host sister explained that every year or couple of years are represented by an animal and that every year one of those animals has a year of bad luck. So going to the temple and offering prayers for those people might lessen the bad luck. So you start with a whole hand of very big incense sticks and u light them at a big flame. Then you go around to all the different alters and offer your prayers and then leave a certain amount of burning incense sticks in a bowl of sand on the alter. An old Chinese man stopped us and explained that I am still young and should try and put the sticks as close to the middle of the bowl as possible because if you put them in the middle you will be an owner and if you put them to the sides you will be a worker so at the next alters I made sure mine were pretty much in the middle! After all the alters my host dad bought a strange looking mirror but explained that it is used to protect your home against bad spirits. Once again not a single day goes by in Thailand that I don’t learn something new!

On the 17th of February we had a arts day at school were everybody goes to school on a Sunday morning and each class gets a theme and they only have Saturday to complete a whole booth with that theme and get 3 people to dress up according to the theme to attract students to your booth because every student that goes into your booth signs a paper and the class with the most names wins the arts day.  My class got Roman era for our theme and I was dressed up to look like a Roman goddess and hand out sweets and thank everybody for coming to see our booth. Needless to say we had a unfair advantage because my class mates just started screaming: “ come to our booth we have a blond girl” and it worked we ended up with over 500 names on our list and won by a landslide but despite my exploitation to win I had a great day with all my classmates !