where to start??????

ok.... so this one is gonna be a tough one to exp,ain, cause well to be honest, its really all a blur now, so i think what im gonna do is just make a bulleted list of what i remember,
so to start out i should atleast freashen you memories, last post i was right a bout to leave o a trip with all of the exchange students again for ten days, and we were gonna travel all over the northeast of thailand in a big bus, and basically stop at a new hotel every other night!

sooo

hm i dont even know where to begin...


well to start off, we went to go a nd ride elephants again, every time i do it, its awesme, the one we went to that day was a pretty sweet it was an elephant sanctuarry, it had a hospital with newborns and every thing, and the elephant that i rode was someting like 50 years old!!
and on the way back the handler said the elephant was really tierd, and asked if it would be cool if he let the old guy ford the river on his way back so it could cool off, uumm let me think, yes!!!
so here i am having to pull up my feet so i wont get wet while this 20ft beast takes a bath with me on his back!!


hmm what else, oh yeah, so one day we go to this place called the "white temple" and it suposedly really famous, so we go there and, surprise surprise the palce is white and silver, so it would glitter in the sun, it was beautiful and all, but when we went to enter the plce it got pretty fraky, first there was athis little walkway over a sculpture, but the sculpture was just tons of white hands reaching up to grab the people on the walk way, some were deformed, others had claws, ans even others had eyeson the palms, ad let me tell you this was one of the scariest pieces of art ive ever seen(second to what was inside the temple) it just looked so realistic, don right to the lines on thier palms!
but so i moved on(quickly) and when i got inside it seemed everyone was looking through the door i had just came through, i turned around o see a massive mural that took up the entire wall, on the top was buddha looking dwn on everything, but underneath it was pictures of pain and suffering, there were sillouettes of guns and ammo painted in evey where, the wolrd trade center in flames, people dying, rape, and just terrible images all over the wall, and spread through out the entire painting were scenes from western cultere, movies, and such, but one of the most disturbing things was that below buddhas face wasa massive demon(eveything else was painted ontop of that) inside the left and right eyes were two figures, at first we couldent make them out, but once we stepped back we realized that it was osama bin laden, and george bush, it was an incradibly beautiful, yet terrifying painting, and it wasnt even finished yt the artist still had two walls to go, from my understanding the mural was all about how buddha is above all of the suffering and pain in the world, it was just a vrey intresting temple, and it made us all wonder what the thai people really thought about western cultre..

oh how could i forget!!
so theres this girl there named megan, she also plays guitar,, weve started up a two person band called "sex in the rain" umm its kind of an inside joke that none of us get, but its catchy and bold, so dont ask questions,
so any ways we were talking, on the bus about how cool it would be to sit on the side of the road and try to get money by palying music, so that day as soon as we got off the buss we snagged our guitars, and walked don the marketplace in chang rai, found a stoop, sat down with my case open and started to paly, an something cool happened....poeple started throwing money in!!!
one fun thing was(megan plays for her church back home, so we both know alot of christian songs)while we were palying blessed be your name, a family from canada ran from around the corner, literally ran! to come and sing with us!
at the end of our hour or so of playing we headed back to the hotel tosnag some dinner and count our money, to find out that we got
370 baht!!!
which is like 12 bucks or so american, butin thailand where meals are like maybe 30 baht, 370 is a very nice amount of cash! we were sooo pumped!!!


oh another place we visited which was very cool was this village up in the mountains, a long neck tribe, and yes, they were the peole who put the brass rings around thier necks and calves to steatch them out!
IT WAS WILD!
im not exagerating here, but the wemons necks were atleast a foot long and they would just be chillin there making blankets, like nothing was wierd at all
what i gather from one of my friends is that the tribe isnt actually accepted but the thai gov, so thier forced to stay in thier villages on the mountzins, and the only way for them to earn money is to sell things theve made, and its kinda sad, cause whenever farangs come its like the circus is in town, but overall meeting those people was incradible, i mean ive only seen them on national geographnc you know!


oh we also went to a thai zoo, it was perty cool, i mean they had animals there that i didnt even know what they were, the only was i can describe one of them was ber-cat, at first i thought i was a really hairy thai dude hanging from the trees, so i fraked, and of course all of the descriptions are in thai, so i still have no idea wat it was,,,
oh another funny thing, you know how in america we have all those fences and stuff to keep stupid people out of the cages, well there arent any in thailand, i mean the only thing stopping me from riding a giraffe, was a four foot gap made to look like a river, in thailand, if you can jump four feet, you could kidnap an ostrich!

hmm oh we wentto aother palce called the golden triangle, where a river seperates bruma, laos and thailnad, that was sweet, i wasnt ble to head over thoug which was lame!

oh i also found out that bangkok ist the THE capitol of thaiand, thaind actually has three, we visited the first one which is a ruin city, called i think(the names kinda blend to gether lay off me!)sukhothai, the second city is ayuttya and third is bangkok, and our leader was telling us that in a hundred years orso thiell change it again!



well im sorry but thts all i can remember right now, but its not the end of my blog, because as soon as i got back i was blown away!, i had a ridiculous amout of gifts and cards waiting for me at my house!!!
THANKYOU SOOOOO MUCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!
thank you to everyone who sent me cards and gifts, especially to everyone at revoultion youth group!!!
i loved them, here i am opening up a pkg only to find it has over 30 cards stuffed into it from all of my friends, it was soo awesome! ilove you guys!!!(oh and whoever put thier finger print in a card as a signature... im sorry i have no idea who you are!)

oh today i played at a concert at school, i played bubble toes by jack johnson, and collide by howie day, but..... i played it on my brand new guitar, so ive been saving for a while, also with my parents help i was able to aford an acoustic/electreic guitar, it beautiful! its got the cutaway, abalone and pear inlay and sound increadible, i named her, just like my old one, but i had to give her a thai name, so i went with
tep lek-lek
it literally means "tiny angel"


hmm well i think that covers it for now, this is my last bog of the year you know....
tommorow ive gotta get up bright and earyl to meet my friend in khon kaen at 7, then well take a 5hr bus ride to ubon ratchatani,to see a band called bodyslam on newyears eve!!!
look at my youtube profile, and in my favories, you see two music videos! thier awesome!!!
so that about does it fr now, merry christ mass and happy new year!!!