I'm here!

We made it!

After many hours on several planes, we have safely arrived in Chiang Mai, Thailand. We arrived in Bangkok late last night, where we met up with our teammates and spent the night at the church there, and then caught a flight up to Chiang Mai this afternoon. I must say again here how thankful I am for your prayers and support. I was reminded by every flight the expense of traveling, and I am grateful for I know none of this would be possible without so many of you.

We have been in Thailand for less than 24 hours, yet there are already so many things that I could fill this blog with. In just the little time I've been here, there has already been so much to soak in! We will start tomorrow with our "equipping time," which is when the mission team here spends time teaching and mentoring us. Then we are going out on a boat for some time to talk, get to know each other, ask questions, and just enjoy each other's company as we prepare to serve together.

We already have had one of those "we can tell they're not from around here" moments - Robert took us to a Wal-Mart type of store (I'd tell you the name if I knew how to spell it!) today so that we could pick up some necessities. As we are checking out, everyone in the entire store suddenly stops what they are doing and stands very still, hands at their sides. We don't realize this right away, so we're carrying on, talking as normal. We finally see what's going on and remember what we've been told about the King: he is highly respected and well loved by the people here. The King's song is played every day at 8am and 6pm anywhere there is a radio, and everyone stops everything to listen. Needless to say, we got some odd looks when we were talking during the King's song!

I am still recovering from jet lag, so I'll be off to bed early tonight. Please feel free to post a comment on the blog or email me at melaniesmith86@gmail.com. If you have a question about something in particular, I'd love to try to answer that for you.

A few points of interest...

• The currency here is the Baht. One American dollar equals about 30 baht. We are getting used to the change and have to stop frequently to try to calculate what we're spending in dollars so that it makes sense to us! I try to keep the equation in my head that 100 baht equals 3 dollars, which helps a little bit.
• The time difference is exactly 12 hours, which is the easiest it could be. When it's 3:00 in Chiang Mai, it's 3:00 in Texas - just switch the AM and PM.
• My teammate Katie accidentally ate an extremely hot pepper at dinner tonight. We have been advised to say "my pet" (obviously, that's just how it sounds to us in English - I have no idea how it's actually written) after ordering all of our food, which means "not hot." After Katie's surprised look and red face tonight, I think we'll all remember that!
• In Bangkok, almost every sign I saw had the English translation directly under. We're not so lucky in Chiang Mai. The Thai language doesn't even use the same letters that we do, so it really looks like squiggly lines to us. One very good thing is that the numbers are the same, so we can see and understand how much something costs.
• After a 14.5 hour flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong, I think I have developed a little bit of claustrophobia.