Loy gratong and tashis first car accident

hey everyone... the few people still reading this thing, which, by the lack of comments is very few. tell your friends about me!

this past week has been interesting. Wednesday was my first real thai festival, loy gratong. in the morning we made gratongs, which are peices of wood covered in folded banana leaves and orchids. then you put a candle and inscents in the middle. at night, we went with our teachers to a hotel for an amazing dinner. next came the loy gratong ceremony, which consists of lighting the candle and incents and releasing your gratong into a body of water. traditionally it would be in a river, but tonight it was a hotel swimming pool. while you put it in the water you say a prayer, ant the act of (traditionally) letting the gratong float away down the river is to signify your sins and problems being washed away as well. its sort of a cleansing ceremony that happens once a year.

the following weekend i went camping with my family and one of my friends tashi. we ended up sitting on a bridge talking with a bunch of thai kids and one or two falang the whole night. the next day we went to a waterfall. it was freaking COLD! water isnt supposed to get that cold in thailand!! next we had the option of going to choke chai farm or seeing another waterfall, so obviously we chose choke chai (how many waterfalls do you really need to see in one day?) that turned out to be a bust becuase you HAVE to go on a tour, and to do that we would have had to wait for 2 hours. the farm was a traditional american farm anyways, which both tashi and i can do in our countries. we had spotted a huge outlet strip mall a couple minutes back down the highway and asked to go there instead.

on the way we spotted a place to rent ATV's. Being exchange students, and looking for any chance to break more D's (just kidding, Rotary, if your reading, I don't actually break D's) we asked if we could do that instead. we stopped a bit long of the turnoff, and hence had to backup down a thai highway for about 5 minutes. 5 minutes of absolute terror!

tashi had never driven anything in her life before so she and i opted to go for the two person off roader, much like a car. there is a track you follow in these things, so i was to do the first one and tashi the second. so after my run tashi and i switch, her in the drivers seat and i in the passengers. so tashi starts driving and we come to this bridge and tashi starts screaming "no i cont do it! i cant do it!" so i tell her "No, its okay just accelerate and get over the bridge, your fine!" so tashi guns it up this bridge. we're heading towards solid ground again and i nitoice that were supposed to turn, only tashi doesnt and keeps drving straight, still gunning in, right into the middle of this field. and all of a sudden were in grass taller than our heads all around us.

finally one of the managers finds us, puts the beast into reverse and nvigates us out of there. tashi drives the thing back to the starting point, and right to a group of about 10 people, employees and my family pissing themselves laughing, because they can see and hear the whole thing. deffinitely the highlight of the weekend.

i switched host families on monday. a bit of a gong show at first but everything has settled down since. tomorrow the other exchangers and i are going to a school to either teach kids english, or speak to them in english or something, no ones entirely sure.

Other than that nothing interesting is happening. my new host family has wireless, but ive become incredibly bored with the internet so i dont think i'll be on anymore than usual. will try to catch up on my emailing though.

love.

Ashley