Phrae (pronounced "pray," sorta)

So, me and the rest of my teammates are starting to get into the swing of this Rotary Group Study Exchange thing. Basically, in every town we're expected to give a short presentation on ourselves but even more important we're expected to sing songs! Who knew?

Thus, several of my teammates, Jamie and Wendy, who have absolutely lovely singing voices now have a few standard tunes that are found on Thai karaoke machines--including "Walking on Sunshine" and "Proud Mary," which I joined in on once. Once. (name that movie) I also have joined on "Piano Man," which wasn't my choice of tunes either but so it goes. However, when we wanted to have the Thai peeps singing the non-verbal chorus (la da da, la da stuff), we later discovered that they confused it for the Thai word, "la korn," meaning goodbye. Holy linguistic disconnect, Batman!

We've also learned--um, kinda--a Thai children's song to welcome people. Basically, Thai is so hard and apparently so few "farang" (foreigners) try very hard to learn/speak Thai that they're thrilled at our lame attempts, which get a bit less lame each day. I might have 20 Thai words in my quiver, including the key ones for: hello, thanks, goodbye, bathroom, spicy, "my name is Peter," a few others...

This morn, I got up early (haven't slept well for the most part) and went for a quasi-jog; we're so not exercising and eating so much I'm feeling like a slug, a slightly fatter slug (sorry, Heather). Sit-ups and a half-dozen Sun Salutations ain't doing it! Well, my jog on the paved road turned into a walk pretty quickly (knees!) and I had my trusty i-Podius with me. While "running," I gazed at two orange robed Buddhist monks doing the whole beg for food thing. Monks must beg for food and can't eat after noontime--talk about humbling and disciplined.

But my host "dad," Deecha (day-chah) and I might play badminton later...la korn