Café Con Monica

A Wednesday….

Maybe you had to leave in order to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was.” ― Jodi Picoult, Handle With Care


This week the homesick feeling finally hit me. Its hard to explain it, its more than just missing Chicago since I have been trying to move out there for as long as I can remember. Its missing my family, friends and The Boy like so much it makes my heart hurt a little everytime I think of them. I love Thailand, don’t get me wrong and I have a feeling I will love China just as much once I am there but its the fact that there is no immediate end date. You know when you go on vacation or away for a short time and you get to enjoy yourself immensely because you know the time is limited and you have to make the most of it. Here the time is not limited. A year or more is a long time. When I leave for China I am signing an 11 month contract. That means that on top of the 3 months I will have been in Thailand I will add another 11 months. That makes me happy and very sad at the same time. I am sure it will only get harder the longer I am away and when I have to miss holidays and birthdays I will probably cry but I know that I am going to keep having some insanely amazing experiences to look back at too. 
This past weekend my parents ran the Rock & Roll Chicago half marathon and I wasn’t there…I am ALWAYS there as many of my previous posts have shown. I saw the pictures and immediately cried, on the 4th of July I skyped with my family in all their fourth gear…afterwards I cried. Haha I am kind of a sissy, incase you weren’t sure! 

Its hard though…Being in another country doing what you would do at home getting up and going to work everyday and coming home and grading papers and lesson planning. BUT I am 12 hours ahead of Chicago so I can only really talk to friends/family early in the morning or in the evening. Only having about 17 English speaking people in town and 10 of them work with you and the rest are much older and just not interested in making friends. Things take forever to get done because of the language barrier. I have been here over a month we just finally got internet at our house last week.

OOk I think this post turned into a bitch fest…sorry! The whole point of this really was to say how much I miss my family and how I definitely didn’t think it would be as hard as it is! 

Hopefully tomorrow will be a happier post…..

Another weekend trip!

I might have mentioned before that I live about an hour outside of Bangkok so as soon as the weekend hits I am out of my small town and on the big dirty city! A couple weekends ago I was lucky enough to have 3 days instead of 2 since some of our students were doing a competition on Monday. Anyway! My roomie decided to head down to Bangkok for Friday night with me and then we would go our separate ways in the morning. I have soooo many pictures in Bangkok that I think I might just save those for another day…


I did decide to go to Koh Samet for 3 days alone since no one else was available to go and I want to make the most of my time here in Thailand. It is a 3 hour bus ride southeast and well worth the trip! Once I got off the bus and onto the pier I met another American girl traveling alone and once we were on the beach we met two more American girls traveling and so I had people to hang out with 🙂


The beaches are beautiful in Koh Samet and the island itself is a national park so you pay a fee to get in. The hotels were pretty booked up but I got lucky and found one on the good beach but not cheap at all 🙁 Which is what led me to decide maybe I only needed two days and one night there. Anyway there was tanning, swimming(a small amount), watching amazing fire shows and TONS of dancing and drinking! I love loved it and I am so glad that I went. It turned out to be the best weekend I have had here yet!


Ook enough…here are the pictures and a video of the fire show! 





And here are two of the videos for that awesome fire show the Thai guys with amazing bodies put on! haha 

I know that was a ton of pictures but hope you enjoyed them! 

Pattaya for the weekend!

Helloooo! I hope you all had a fantastic weekend! Mine was interesting to say the least but still a good one! After a very difficult first 2 weeks and things going oh so wrong I have decided to genuinely embrace everything as an experience. I will be moving to China sometime in mid-August as things did not work out at the school I am teaching at now. There was a lot wrong with the school and some with me as well. Most of it was out of my control but I have definitely learned a lot. I know now that if you do not have some of the requirements for something you should be ABSOLUTELY positive the job is secure and they are offering exactly what they say they are before you spend so much money on a flight. So here I find myself in Thailand, thousands of miles away from home and dealing with some not so good and some great! 



I taught all week with some of the similar problems discussed in my first post about being here. But some of the other teachers and my roomie Caligirl all decided we should go to Pattaya on Saturday. It is supposed to be about 2 hours away by train or bus. So we decided to hang out on Friday night and then get up early Saturday and take a train down. Unfortunately when we got to the train station we learned that they do not run to Pattaya on the weekends. So we took a bus instead. We arrived in Pattaya and went straight to the pier to take a ferry to the Island Kohlan so we could spend as much time on the beach as possible. It was amazing and beautiful! I know I love summers in Chicago but seriously…so freaking beautiful and its not even one of the prettiest islands there are here. We all managed to get sunburn just on the ferry ride to the island and not realize this until much later. I faced up to my fear of small boats and rode my first Longtail ever! I also got in the water which if you have been reading my blog for awhile you realize is NOT something I tend to do very often. 

After coming back from the island we got some Italian food that was SOOOOO good! Then everyone fell into a food coma and went back to the hotel to sleep. I stood up and had to check out the town. Pattaya is well known for its nightlife and I was not going to miss it! BUT, of course, by the time I ventured out (Alone) I found out that because of an election that day all of the bars/clubs were closing early and no alcohol was being sold after 5pm. What kind of luck do I have??? I went back to my hotel and sat down to people watch and ended up meeting some of the Pattaya United soccer players who asked me to walk around with them and we all ended up at a hookah place a bit away. It ended up being a great night and now I have 4 new friends in Thailand! So glad I didn’t go to bed early that night! 

Sunday’s attempt to get home quickly resulted in a almost 4 hour trip home. As with most things in Thailand doing anything takes forever and when Thai people do not know what you are saying or the answer to something instead of telling you they do not know they will tell you something else or say yes to save face.(I might have to write a whole post on this another time) So it took us ages to get home. Then it was relaxing and back to school on Monday! 

and now the fun part! Pictures!!! 
Some of us on the way 

On the Pier
on the ferry

Longtail boat 
Our beach for the day 

my view 
Smiles 

heading into the fun part of town 

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