A crash course and lots of mental development

I hail from Bangkok (BKK) at 8:14am! We delegates keep running around nonstop ever since we got here in BKK. Actually, there are LOTS of stuff to see...it's impossible to complete the sightseeing of Bangkok in a week. It consumes a lot of our time. Like I said, I think the city is absoutely bigger than New York City. Our bodies are about to crash, because most of us had finals a few days before the trip. Plus, we had a long flight. Plus, we are only getting a few hours of sleep every night. AND plus, we are "working" during our spring break, while almost everyone else we know are out being a beach bum, bar-hopping, visiting a fancy destination/ desired spot for vacation, or whatever you can picture for spring break. We do not have adventures like these. Yet, we are really enjoying our spring break in a completely different way with what we have here in BKK, especially with it being outside of the United States. We are doing this for deaf children and we would do anything for them. We liked making our own workshops to educate them. I recommend that you all should do the same thing at least once in your lifetime! Join GRO!

Anyhoo, we went to the Floating market at Damnernsaduak yesterday - it was amazing! We, GRO delegates, saw the realism of Thailand's "farm" lifestyle outside of BKK. The city of Damnernsaduak apparentaly doesn't have cars. They have own boats instead as their transportation. When we got in Damnernsaduak, the first thing we did was hop into a motor boat and ride down the water to Floating market (their version of a "village"). There it consisted of the most beautiful scenery comprising of houses situated on both banks of the canal and boats floating to and fro for selling goods. You probably wouldn't see this sight anywhere except in Thailand.

After we went to the Floating market, we headed down to Erewan National Park, it was about another hour of a drive to get there. We all started crashing with our bodies after a long day at the market yet we managed to to keep our energy for the national park. When we got to the park, most of us tried to reach the 7th pool on the top of the trail of 2 miles. Unforunately, it was closed - Anthony, Greg, Peter, and I ran all the way up to the top until we were about a few feet away from the waterfall/7th pool, then a park ranger was right in our face as he was walking down to the base and said the park was about to close. We were totally bummed. However, we had a lot of fun swimming with the whole delegation in the 2nd pool with mini waterfalls.

Afterwards, we had to go back to Bangkok to prepare for our workshops the next morning. We had to ride in the van for another 3 hours. We stopped at Cabbages and Condoms, the most creative resturant that I have ever seen. There were condoms everywhere in the restaurant (no, I'm not joking). They even built sime objects with condoms, for instance, a superman (manniquin) decorated in full with condoms on it, including the colors of superman. Although, we had a good time with our dinner, and enjoyed decent conversation with all of the delegates as usual.

Late at night after our GRO dinner, we had to complete our workshops' projects before the big day that we have been waiting for for 3 months. We ended up staying up late doing some work with the team in the lobby/dinning room of the hotel. We totally crashed right there, some of us even fell asleep! However, we had to stay with it using our mental toughness in order to finish.

All of us are looking forward to to paying the Sethsenian Deaf school a visit today! We will have a few different deaf schools coming join us for our workshops.. It should be a FUN day! It'd be nice if you can afford to purchase a ticket to come visit us! :)

Wish us good luck! I will fill you in more later on how it goes.

Shabnam Marie Razmpour
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile