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
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Our first night, we went out to eat at Sawsdee Inn Cafe (our first meal in Bangkok at 3 in the morning), we had to meet at 7:45am for our first group activity-The Amazing Race. We roamed around Bangkok to find our clues before we moved onto a different task. We also got a taste of Bangkok's transportation system (ferry, train, tuk tuk, and the motorcycle taxi) over the entire day. It was hell! I think, believe it or not, Bangkok is probably bigger than New York City.

Later at night, we finally ended the Amazing race at approximately 7 o'clock by meeting at Mango Trees restaurant on Soi Tantawan, Surawongse Road. We all were happy to see each other again as a family and we really enjoyed hearing each other's stories about the day. Even though we all were extremely exhausted, we managed it well, and we felt that we had well earn our meal which we ate in a private room where there was full size glass windows. People could see us eating on any one of the two floors. One of our delegates had the guts to eat Serpent head fish soup and he actually ate the whole thing!

After getting together for GRO's dinner at Mango Trees, some of us went to Patpong Market and the rest went back to Khao San Road. Actually we all got body/foot massages afterwards but at different places! We definitely needed it as it was already our 2nd day in Bangkok. I gave one of GRO's beach balls to a homeless girl that I would guess was maybe one year old. I saw her lying on the sidewalk with her mom begging for some money. It did not impact me until about a few hours later when Alim, Anthony, Erin and I was about to go back to our hostel. We were about to hop into a tuk tuk, and all of a sudden, I saw the same little girl and the mother across the street from the market. I was puzzled because I saw that the mother was making a "bed" on the cement with a mini baby blanket then had her to sit on it and walked back to the market as she left her baby daughter. My heart was aching, because I did not like the idea of a mother leaving a baby on the street. She was very innocent so I thought she deserved to be happy. So I went up to give her a beach ball and she was really happy. Her eyes were wide open with excitement. Too bad her mom didn't see the reaction she had. Anthony was like "well, the beach ball is currently her mom." I felt soo much better after he said that.

Day 3 - we are glad that we got our energy back after a long day of doing the Amazing race...our massages sure helped a lot! Right now, we are on the road to Floating Market and then Erewan National Park, which is about 2 hours away from Bangkok, we will have about 2 miles of hiking to do before we reach the top of 7 waterfalls which has a pool of water. I haven't seen it before, I will give more details later when we done checking it out.

Oh and one more thing I forgot to mention is that we have a water hose in every toilet room here in Thailand. I am really thankful to have it for a while! :) I think that we in the U.S. should have it to clean ourselves after peeing or whatever.

Come back again soon!

Shabnam the shabbyyy
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