The Most Epic 5 Months Ever.

Studying abroad in Thailand was the best experience I could have ever dreamed of. We lived in Chiang Mai, which is the second biggest city in Thailand, nestled in the northern hills. The city has everything you'd want- the true traditional Thai culture of monks walking on the streets collecting alms at 6 am, food stalls lining the roads, temples interspersed with restaurants and stores, markets everywhere but also a lively social scene with backpackers and westerners alike. The food is amazing and ridiculously cheap (an average meal is $1-$5, 5 being on the very expensive side when you want to splurge on western food). The city is surrounded by a beautiful countryside where you can easily escape the bustling madness to waterfalls and rice fields. There's no denying this is "the land of smiles." The local people are some of the sweetest, generous and all around happy people I have ever met. TEAN provided us with housing at Uniloft, which is an apartment/dorm style complex about a mile from the University. It's very nice place to live, equipped with a gym, a pool, laundry services, cleaning services and round the clock security. Within TEAN's program, we also got paired with a Thai roommate (which was one of my favorite parts of my experience). Living with a Thai roommate helped immerse us in the culture even more. We adopted their traditions (taking shoes off before entering rooms, gift giving) and also got to share some of our culture with them. Though we learned Thai in school and tried to practice as much as possible with the locals, having Thai friends to help get us out of situations where our Thai failed us was awesome (for example, we needed to call a bus company to get tickets to Bangkok and one of our Thai friends planned the entire trip for us and got us a better deal!). TEAN also provided us with awesome excursions. We spent a week in a rural village with host families and got to experience first hand how a culture, so vastly different from western society, lives. We also spent the weekend in the beautiful southern island of Krabi. TEAN hooked us up with rock climbing and a boat tour of all the surrounding islands. One of my major concerns was not being able to travel around Southeast Asia enough. I knew that my friends going to Europe would visit a plethora of other countries but I didn't know how easy it would be to travel around. I ended up going to Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia as well as traveling all throughout Thailand. It is definitely a bit of a struggle but so worth it. Not only is Thailand a beautiful country, Southeast Asia as a whole has so much to offer.