Here is Chiang Mai in the north of Thailand. More specifically, Thanon Suan Dok, soi 6. Even more specifically, somewhere near the back of the office, on the right, directly under the air con. This office belongs to Bridges Across Borders Southeast Asia (BABSEA), who I'm doing an internship with this summer.
I just arrived on Monday and since then I've read a lot about AIDS and drank a lot of sangsom. I've been trying to get my head round all the different projects, the Americans have been here about five weeks now so I've kind of been thrown in at the deep end a bit. Some of the stuff I've been doing has been editing lesson plans for a UNAIDS project in Viet nam, teaching about employment at a women's refuge, reading up on how intellectual property law affects access to medicines and getting eaten alive by mosquitos.
Life at babsea isn't all work and no play though. The Americans (they don't get individual names yet) have kindly provided me with much entertainment, mostly involving sangsom. We've had sangsom and texas hold'em last night, sangsom and clubbing the night before, and sangsom and vomiting the night before that. But for a bit of variation, on Tuesday night, we drank beer. We were hanging out at a coffee shop where Don, the office manager at babsea, was throwing a party, and then a casual elephant turned up in the garden. So we went to say hello and fed him pineapple, but unfortunately this was traumatic for Vanessa, one of The Americans, who was rather concerned for the elephant's welfare. She and some of the other interns have dealt with their worries by spending today volunteering at a sanctuary for orphan elephants, where they taught law workshops for ESE (Elephants who have sex with Elephants).
While the others empowered elephants to access their legal rights (or just washed and fed them perhaps, I'm not quite sure which...), I had a bit of a wander with the new interns from Malaysia, and took them to our favourite veggie restaurant at the temple down the road. Then this afternoon me and Ellie and Jen, two of the other interns, went to a delightful café that looked like the inside of a macbook where I drank a delicious coffee-chocolate-ice-cream-sauce concoction. I'm developing an obsession with the iced drinks here which is clearly going to mean that I'll be the size of a thai elephant, rather than a thai person, by the time I return home. That's before we even get started on the food... I think I'll save that for another day though, because just the thought of it has made me hungry, so it's clearly supper time.
so, Ta ta for now
Carla
x
