Four Reigns, by Kukrit Pramoj Four Reigns, written by Kukrit Pramoj, depicts the lives of a few people living within Thailand from the time of King Rama V to King Rama VIII. Through the eyes of normal Thai citizens, we are able to see how people may have felt and responded to some of the…

Early Monday morning we took a flight to Bangkok and said our final good-bye to Chiang Mai. This was our last week of the program before everyone went home, and for the most part we were given a lot of unstructured time to just explore. First impression of Bangkok: yeah, much bigger than Chiang Mai….

This week was pretty laid back as far as just staying in Chiang Mai and finishing up with classes. We had our final, but now that it’s done classes here are pretty much over! We also got the results back from our pilot survey and started analyzing them. This first set of surveys was sent…

This week started out a little more laid back as things are starting to wind down a bit. Among the things that we did, we had our final history class and also watched a Thai film called “The Overture.” I don’t want to brag or anything but my Thai has reached the point where I…

This week in our history classes we learned more about the ancient kingdoms that existed before modern-day Thailand. Political culture is in many cases closely related to ethnicity and cultural heritage which, due to the mixing of cultures and kingdoms in its early history, has made learning about Thailand especially interesting. Jumping back to 1200…

This week featured yet another lovely van ride (I’ve lost count of how many this has been) and headed up north to visit what is called the Golden Triangle. You can kind of think about it as similar to the four corners in America, but instead of it being the intersection of states, it is…

This past week we learned more about the early Thai history and some of the themes that you see repeated throughout it. I know that I’ve talked about Buddhism a little in past blogs, but it really has had a huge impact on the culture here in Thailand. This is of course a huge question…

Just wrapping up here on what was a long but very productive week! As part of the research that we’re doing here this summer, one of our main goals is to create and send out a survey which we can then analyze the results of this fall. We’ve got a good draft of it going…

Hey again! As for exciting things that have taken place within the past week or so, last weekend we got to to a Young Single Adult conference for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Now you may be thinking that that doesn’t sound like anything too exciting, but what was different about this…

If you haven’t already noticed a theme in my blog posts,  I am very intrigued by the contrast between the old and the new of Thailand, especially made evident when looking at the temples around here. We took a weekend excursion to Sukhotai which is located a few hours south of Chiangmai (I can only…