Culture Shock

As a freshman in high school I decided I wanted to study abroad. I really didn't care where, I just wanted to leave the country. I was 14 so my mom helped me do research on possible programs. She found the Global Youth Academy on Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz, a traveling school that toured the world during the school year and took shorter journeys during the summer. It was 1993 and they were going to Thailand and Indonesia that summer. I don't know if I had ever heard of Thailand before. I looked at a map of South America expecting to find it next to Brazil.


I fundraised money and joined the trip of 7 students and one teacher. When I stepped off the airplane in Chiang Mai, the second largest city in Thailand, my host family met me and drove me directly to their home. The next day they brought me to the uniform shop to get me outfitted for school and soon I was the tallest palest student at Wattanothaipayap school. I experienced major culture shock and home sickness. It was serious. I hadn't expected when I signed up that Thailand would be like Mexico (my only foreign point of reference at that time for places with spotty trash service and no hot water)! I hadn't realized many things, like there would be shanty towns built at the end of roads in my neighborhood, and we would eat fried chicken for breakfast with something I'd never heard of called sticky rice, or that each of us 7 students would be attending different schools across the city, so there would be absolutely no buffer between me and the Thai culture and students. Oh, and I hadn't realized that, at the age of 15, I would be a head taller than most of the teachers in my school and that it was disrespectful to have your head higher than a teacher, so I would bow down to avoid towering over them each time we passed in the hallway or a classroom.


I had an epiphany a few days into my stay. I sat down to lunch in the canteen at school and was introduced to a Thai girl who had lived in Los Angeles until she started high school. She complained bitterly about Thailand and lamented how much she missed California. She was unhappy. Our conversation cured my home sickness. Her attitude was so drastically different from everyone else I had met in Thailand. She was negative. She reminded me of my classmates in Santa Cruz, who had "everything" compared to Thais, but did not appreciate any of it and chose to focus on the negative in their lives. This had been me one week before when I left California. I decided right then and there at the lunch table that I would savor every minute of my time in Thailand because it was absolutely refreshing to be surrounded by people that smiled a lot, did not complain, and focused on the positive. Plus I was amazed by the orange robed monks wandering the streets, the incredibly ornate temples, and the armies of scooters in the streets. Thai pop was pretty awesome too.



Fast forward to 2011, my best friend Sarah and I took a trip to Chiang Mai and I met a bunch of students who weren't even born when I attended the school, but they look just like I remember them!


In my journal from high school I wrote that I had been worried that there would be no ice cream in Thailand. I was delighted when I found that they offered freshly scooped ice cream at my school. On my recent trip I was happy to see that the canteen still offers many ice cream options!