Another somewhat boring day. Starting to realized that the mornings will be rather bland in comparison for the spiciness of the afternoon. Had class with a terrible teacher today, he lost all of us by the end. It really doesn't help he speaks 99% of the time in Thai and used words we did not know that he expected us to. They were not even in the text book. He is an auditory type teacher who simply read out of the book. Compared to the other two amazing teachers we've had the ball was dropped into a pit where it was eaten by badgers. Basically, it was a stressful and confusing two hours. Not looking forward to him next week.
After lunch we were given a lecture on Zen Buddhism, which is Buddhism without any supernatural ideas (like ghosts or reincarnation). The speaker was a former Chinese Buddhist monk for eight years. It was a very long two hours as we did not get a break. It was a very interesting lecture, I even ended up taking four full pages of notes. It opened up quite a few questions, such as why do Americans think that Buddhists believe in reincarnation when he so strongly stressed that they did not and why was the Naga, a Hindu dragon, so strongly featured on temples and Buddha statues around Chiang Mai??
Because we had not had enough Buddhism today, four of us tried out the Monk Chat again. Today we got a monk from Cambodia who talked about Buddhism. And nothing else. For an hour. Three hours of Buddhism today. The worst part was that I did not sleep well last night so all I wanted to do was go back to my room and sleep, so my body decided to skip the first part and pass out right in front of the monk!! Who did not notice and just kept going on and on and on. I honestly have no clue what he was talking about, mainly since we had asked him about Cambodia (since we're going there) and he wanted to talk Buddhism, so that's what he did. His story was interesting, but it did not make sense. He said he had visited the My savior was the dog from the last visit coming up and demanding I pay attention to her. She truly wins for best puppy dog eyes. Our first attempt to leave the monk failed. We tried to make it seem like we had somewhere to be, so he decided to answer our question about Cambodia. Which took another fifteen minutes. At one of his longer pauses we stood up and said we had to leave. He let us go after giving us his e-mail address in case we had anymore questions about Buddhism. We do not.
We headed to our favorite pad thai and fried rice place, a vendor across the street from our guesthouse. Upon arriving we made one stupid mistake: we sat by the gutter. Which has rats. Which terrifies Karen, but terrify does not begin to describe it. She noticed them before anyone else did and soon was squatting in her chair because she was too afraid to put her feet on the ground. She maintained her balance by wrapping her arm around my neck (since I was sitting next to her) and holding on to me so tightly I had trouble breathing at one point. I felt like I was being taken hostage to protect her against the rats. She then alternated between grabbing my hair and holding my hand. The worst part was that the rats wouldn't go away. The little rascals kept coming back and it got so bad the people who worked at the stand finally figured out what was going on and began to splash water around to keep them away. It was one of those situations that should not be funny but even Karen was laughing at herself through the tears. But she was brave and stood her squatting ground until she had finished her meal and paid, then took off like a rocket.
As I was getting ready for bed, the lights suddenly went out but you could hear a siren in the distance. Donna then said "It's coming to get you." This made me hop on the bed where I crouched waiting for something. What I got was the lights coming back on. I have since realized that what truly freaked me out was the siren and the lights, which is something that happens in Silent Hill, a horror video game I have been getting into recently. Whenever it switches between the 'normal' world and the world of nightmares you can hear a siren and sometimes the lights flicker. I feel justified in my bunny movement.
Lizard Count: 4
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