My First Trip Abroad!!!


Um, yeah, so this is my first attempt at a blog so I'm not sure how it's going to come out. For the time being this is going to be a sort of post-dated diary of my ten-day trip to Thailand. My friends Tanya and Chris are currently living in Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand and this was an opportunity to visit them, and more significantly, it was my first real trip abroad...yay!!! I say "real" because driving through southern Ontario shouldn't really count as a trip abroad for Americans--heck, during my few trips there in the past I hadn't even officially needed a passport. No, I wanted a stamp in my passport so I could actually prove I've been out of the States.

Okay, yeah, visiting a foreign country is hardly a revolutionary concept, but you have to understand that for people that grow up in communities surrounded by corn and soybeans, even something as simple as going to "The Big City" is a life-changing event. Oh, I've been around a bit--much of north-suburban Chicago, metro Philly, and the New York City area--but I was born and lived for almost half my life in one of those wholesome Midwest towns where everybody knows everybody else, three generations of your family live within two miles of each other, and your elementary school field trips were to farms to watch cows being milked (seriously). So a trip to Thailand might not sound all that special on an absolute scale, but it was very special to me, so now you can read about it. :-D