Happy “Thanksgiving”

Ok, so we are a little behind considering Thanksgiving was almost two weeks ago, but better late than never…and we experienced our most unusual Thanksgiving to date this year, which always makes for a good blog post! Thanksgiving Day happened to fall on one of two “Sports Days” at our school, which are similar to “Field Day” in America. Although in America, at least at our school, we only had a half day for such events, while in Thailand they apparently need two full days without classes to get all their sports in. Since we had no classes to teach and we didn’t serve much purpose at the event (although I did wear my sneakers and a sporty outfit hoping someone would let me join…didn’t happen...boo!), Pan decided we could take a half day and go on a “field trip” with her in the afternoon. The reason “field trip” is put in quotation marks is because, usually, a field trip indicates a trip with some sort of exciting destination… maybe a zoo, or a foreign food restaurant, or at least a decently interesting museum, but our Thanksgiving field trip was to, drum roll please…a Thai power plant!!! I know it sounds thrilling…our reaction exactly, but we didn’t ask any questions and just went along with it, because you never quite know what is going to happen on an adventure with Pan.

I should note that one of the members of the Hang Chat school board, Mr. Janewit, is also a head honcho at the power plant, so he had told us we should visit, so it wasn’t totally random that we were going…I guess. Anyway, the power plant is enormous, as it serves all of Central, North, and Northeast Thailand. It is located in the district over from us on acres and acres of land. The scenery surrounding the plant was actually very beautiful with green rolling hills and little lakes, which we found out later were all manmade…takes away from the beauty a little bit, but we took a lot of photos (with Pan’s camera) anyway. Janewit held a personal photo shoot with me and Emily, having us pose in front of various trees and halfway down hills, hiding between flowering plants…he had me and Emily cracking up with his dead serious instructions: “Ok, now go into the flowers…no, further in”.

After the photo shoot we were taken to the power plant museum where tours are given about the history of the plant and how power is made, etc. We jumped in on a tour that was leaving just as we arrived…unfortunately it was for a group of Thai nurses and therefore was conducted in Thai. After a few too many videos in Thai and getting shut down by the tour guide when we tried to watch an exhibit in English, we moved on to the engineering building…try to contain your excitement! Here, we had a bunch of nerdy (no offense) Thai engineers explain things to us that we wouldn’t have understood in English, and therefore definitely couldn’t understand in their broken English…for example, how water is heated and cooled in different machines to produce energy…? We visited a few “work stations” (think men resting and a suspect bottle of liquor spotted) and looked at a few boards with lots of switches and lights...you know, very important-looking things.

Surprisingly, or not so surprisingly, the best part of the day occurred after the power plant tour was over, on our “coffee break” at the golf course clubhouse. This “coffee break” turned into a whole lot more than drinking coffee, that’s for sure. I think the golf course just happened to be on the power plant’s land and isn’t necessarily associated, but Janewit said he was “boss” and we would could have anything we wanted at the golf course clubhouse…wait, did someone say KARAOKE? Of course, it was Pan! Pan is obsessed with karaoke but tries to play it cool and pretend that the reason she asks anywhere and everywhere we go if they have karaoke is because she knows Emily loves it…which is also true. Since day one, everyone here has known about Emily’s love for karaoke, and I always like to quote her: “Once, I even won a karaoke contest…I got 50 bucks!” It had been a month and she still hadn’t gotten to show her skills…but the time had finally come! So at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, on what happened to be Thanksgiving Day, at a Thai power plant, in a golf course clubhouse, we ate steak, french fries, and various other delectable treats while singing karaoke to an empty house with two 50 year olds (for anyone reading this that is at or above this age, you are not old, don't worry...just saying).

Most restaurants in Thailand have the same karaoke system which includes a computerized database full of many Thai and English songs…you just type the artist or song title and it pops up if they have it. Emily would probably like you to know that most of her go-to karaoke songs are not available, so she has to be creative…this sometimes forces her to pick songs out of her range, but she always makes it work, even in less than ideal karaoke settings…what a trooper! Once you find a song you like you can just press enter and it starts to play. Or if you are Pan you can find lots of songs you like and select them so they play one after the other. Emily thought Pan would sing one song and then she would go, and they would switch off…but just as Pan’s songs would end and Emily would go to take the mic, another of Pan’s songs would start to play and she would keep right on singing. At one point, I think she sang four songs in a row…it was too funny. I took many videos of both Pan and Emily singing, they put on a great show for their audience of two (Mr. Janewit and myself) with their dancing, hand motions, and facial expressions, but they were on Pan’s camera. Curiously, they were not included in the email she sent with all the pictures from the day…maybe she didn’t enjoy the fact that I was bursting out laughing in the background while taping her singing old American love songs?? I would also like to note that prim and proper businessman, Mr. Janewit, even grabbed the mic to croon for us. We thought he was just saving Pan from singing alone, but then he started singing solo ballads and we knew it was more that that. Yes, I also sang a couple songs, including a duet with Emily to “Summer Loving”, obviously necessary!

Just your typical Thanksgiving Day in Thailand…we hope everyone else’s was just as eventful!