Sawat di Ka!

Days 2-4 in Bangkok, Thailand

Well, it is now Sunday and we leave Bangkok tomorrow to go to Kohn Kaen, Thailand. We have had so much fun here and are sad to leave but we are really excited to see more places and have more fun experiences.

 Here you are looking at our dressing room for our first performance in Pattaya, THailand. Pretty sketchy, but that's not the worst of it, this dressing room belongs to the transvestites who perform in this theater daily. The room had tons of huge womens shoes (in order to fit male feet) and lots of gaudy dresses and head pieces. This show is called Alcazar and is well accepted and admired in Thailand. Thai cultures holds that if you are an effeminate man that you must become a "lady boy" as they are called here. It is very normal to them. We were pretty freaked out, especially because these transvestites kept walking through our dressing room and we weren't sure if we should feel uncomfortable or not. We were, regardless. They are very nice though. This performance was for an orphanage of children with disabilities. The children were so cute and loved the show.

 Following the show we had a lovely seafood lunch on the beach :o/ I love seafood but I have not had so much seafood in my life as I have the past few days and its not the kind I'm used to. However, I have been trying everything. Even squid!

 Here's the beach!

 We then visited a museum full of CHinese artifacts. Here is Jer in front of some sculptures that actually depict the characters from one of the books he was reading for a CHinese class this past semester. He was pretty excited about this!

 Here are some young monks! They are so cute! They practically posed while we took tons of pictures of them. These kids can't be more than 6-8 years old some of them.

 After the museum they took us to a vineyard where we had some AMAZING fresh grape juice and tried lots of new fruits. This one I'm holding, I can't remember its name, mango seed and a few other things. We also got fresh papaya and pineapple from a vendor on the side of the road. SO GOOD! I have been eating fruit to my heart's content. Lucky for me, its fruit season!

 The next day we had some free time in the morning. Alissa, Trevor, Jer and I decided to go get a traditional Thai massage. We took a little TukTuk and had a 2 hour massage. They used a stretching/massaging/bending technique that was amazing. They even used their feet! This only cost about $20 U.S. dollars each.

 After our fun free morning we headed to our show site. Here I am with a poster of a picture of me they had displayed outside the theater! Kinda fun.

 At the end of the shows here they have lots of formalities. One thing they like to do is present flowers. I was the representative of "the beautiful young lady dancers" for this show so I was presented with this beautiful boquet at the end of the show.

One thing that is funny about Thailand is that it is SO HOT outside but FREEZING indoors because they are very good about their air conditioning. I didn't prepare very well for this so here I am in one of my costumes trying to keep warm before a show. :o) Jer thought this was pretty funny.

 A little out of order but today we had the opportunity to join the saints here for their church meetings. Here we are with Chase and Carly outside the church. They had translators and head sets for all of us. After the meetings they fed us a wonderful meal and we held a fireside for the members of the stake. I love how universal the gospel is. I could feel the spirit so strongly today among the saints of Bangkok.

The people here LOVE pictures! After shows we all spend at least 15-20 minutes just taking pictures with the audience memebers. They all line up and we take pictures one after the other. These people are great, so humble and kind. We are loving our time here and hope to be able to update you as often as possible! More adventures to come!