6/6/08

The last couple days have been spent mapping the street we’re staying off of, Rang Nam. This means I have walked up and down both sides of the street a few times taking pictures and making notes so that in the end I have a map with each establishment and what it is and any other significant information. It was kind of a fun little exercise, but if I shared my notes they would most definitely bore you. And the pictures are just random pictures of buildings, also not too interesting. But this is an exercise that every Anthropologist does when he first arrives in the area he is going to study. So I now know my street better than I ever wanted to and know the exact location of our many 7-11's. People definatly were wondering what the hell I was doing! I saw a guy with a pomeranian that looked like Elisa's dog Penny. I happened to have a pic of her on my camera so I showed it to him and he said, "Same, same!" It was really cute. Other than that, nothing all that interesting has been going on. My map is finished and we are not meeting today so I’m planning to go to one of the temples. Hopefully to Wat Phra Kaeo, the temple of the Emerald Buddha, which is situated on the same site as the Grand Palace which was the king’s residence from 1782 to 1946. But we’ll see if I can get anyone else to do that with me or if they’re all stuck on something else for today.

I’m having a little trouble with the group dynamic here. I’m 10+ years older than everyone else in the group, so I’m having a hard time feeling like I fit in anywhere. That on top of the fact that I’m not really a group person. I’d be fine going around in a group of 2 or 3 but trying to organize 5-6 people is a lesson in patience at the least. We don’t have to do anything in groups but it seems like the other girls want to do it that way. It’s very frustrating to me because I want to just get on and do whatever it is we’re going to do, but there’s always 1 or 2 people that hold things up. No one else seems to care. I learned a lot of patience in Uganda, but patience with the people in the culture you’re visiting and learning about and patience with a group of American strangers are proving to be two different things. And these girls are young and I definitely feel my age around them.