Hello from Thailand!!

Hello friends! It's about 5:30pm Saturday over here on the other side!! It has been a crazy few days! We flew about 32 hours  (about 48 hours total with layovers), lost a night a sleep, ate 7 meals of airplane food, and lost 6 bags, but we have finally made it!! We arrived in Bangkok on Friday morning and were feeling good--Matt and I finally slept on the flights from frankfurt and singapore, so we weren't too jetlagged.  We unfortunately found that 6 bags didnt make it from JFK, but we got a nice little compensation from he airline. The students were very gracious about their lost luggage, so we carried on :) We were greeted by Guy, (the campus director at NEU) and he gave us some thai money (bath--pronounced "bot") to eat with. All the girls decided to get American cheeseburgers although we had no idea what was actually in them.  It took us about ten minutes to figure out how to pay and how much to tip, but just ended up giving her the rest of our money. When we told Guy that we tipped the woman 125 bath (equivalent to about $3.25) he laughed and exclaimed "WHAT? You don't have to tip that much!! You don't have to tip at all!! That is a lot of money here!!" So funny. Stupid Americans--I am sure that that woman tried to solicit us to eat there because she knew we had no idea what we were doing. After lunch, since we had another 3 hour layover, we got on the express airtrain (comparable to L in chicago) and went into downtown Bangkok to this crazy mall.  I have never seen so much stuff in one place. It was mostly American names, but more expensive than at home.  They also had lines and lines at KFC and Krispy Kreme. haha.  We spent about  50 minutes there and headed back to the airport only to find that the train was delayed. When it finally got moving, we had about a half hour until our plane left. HA! We got to the airport and started sprinting! What a sight I'm sure we were! What was so crazy is that we HAD NO IDEA where we were supposed to go or for how long so it was just an endless sprint of following behind Guy. We made it on with 5 minutes to spare :) The flight was short--only 45 minutes-and we finally arrived in Khon Kaen!! We were greeted by a bunch of people on staff and about 10 students and a huge welcome sign!! So many hugs! It was so sweet and we felt so loved!! It was amazing to see so many people that were so excited to see us. I looked disgusting from all the travel so of course I was so apologetic to everyone I hugged haha. The craziest thing about the whole day though was the ride home to our apartment! We got in the back of a toyota truck with all of our luggage and all of the thai students and rode about 20 minutes. The truck is called a tsing touw and has benches on both sides and a metal cover--it's basically like their bus system. It was wild--the Thai students were so so nice, but we could not understand a word they were saying. They've been so patient with us trying to say  thai words and there have been lots of laughs already at the messups! So many fun crazy things already and it's only been a day! It's almost surreal--I keep saying that I can't believe that this is my life right now. We're going to dinner with all the staff in about 5 minutes, so i'll post pictures later! Love and miss you all!! Courtney