Northern Thailand!

Okie! So looking back I realize I need to start from the beginning... I haven't talked about next year at all yet. About a year and a half ago I started considering going on a student exchange for a year after highschool. I can't remember if there was one thing that was the main initiator of this thought, but I know it was a combination of my Aunt Barbara (who went on an exchange when she was in highschool), talking with exchange students at school, and a love for plane food (ha). I guess it was after I came back from Brazil in the fall of 2007. So maybe it was longer ago than I thought when I started thinking about an exchnage! Wowie.


Anyways so I started filling out application papers last summer, and in the last four or five months I've been in closer touch with the exchange program. I was interviewed and accepted late last year and then told in January that I was going to Thailand! We more or less got to chose where we would go; we ranked a list of about forty countries in the order of our preference, and based on this and the number of spaces available in each country, we got placed. Thailand was in my top 5... they were: Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Brazil, Thailand. I was reaaally super happy to get put in Thailand. It was definetly a surprise, but the more I thought about it (and it only took a few minutes) the more I realized what an AWESOME place Thailand would be to live in for a year!


One thing I need to work on is the language. I was expecting to learn spanish or portuguese for my exchange, so I jumped the gun a bit and started studying before I knew where I was going. Well... that isn't completely true. I know some portuguese and spanish is similar... so I was assuming I was doing the right thing by continuing brazilian portuguese. Oh well. I'll use it one day! But ....Thai ....is a very different language (which I've recently come to discover). It would be cool to be in a Thai-speaking school, and not an english one, because I would probably catch on to the language so much faster! It sounds like it would be a really cool language to speak fluently.


Anyways, the most recent news is that I have a better idea of where I will be living! And I don't know much about Thailand, but this is the area I was hoping to go to :D The place I was hoping I wouldn't get placed was in a big city. The only one I know is Bangkok. There's gotta be more out there, though! I would definetly like to spend a day or a weekend in Bankok, but I was relieved not to be living there for a year. The clean air of Chiang Mai sounds delicious!