Hello and welcome to another thrilling blog entry from Chiang Mai.
More photographs from Chiang Mai are on Facebook at .
Before today's blog entry here is one last photograph from Bangkok, showing a beautiful double rainbow taken on the last day in Bangkok.
More photographs from Chiang Mai are on Facebook at .
Before today's blog entry here is one last photograph from Bangkok, showing a beautiful double rainbow taken on the last day in Bangkok.
Friday 1st June 2007: Ban Naam Sum (Hmong Thai Village) & Night Safari Village
The start of a brand new month, and Field Studies continued at its blistering pace. In the morning we went to Ban Naam Sum Village about 45minutes away from Chiang Mai. This is a village of the Hmong people, who have assimilated well into Thai culture. The village was interesting because many of the people have moved away from subsistence agriculture into making clothe materials such as bags, many of which we saw being sold in the markets of Bangkok. This hill tribe is actually quite developed, which was shown by the fact that they had electricity and satellite television. The area has and remains Buddhist despite the fact that Korean missionaries have tried to convert the area into Christianity. They built a church in the village, but this remains underused. The hill tribes are often negatively stereotyped in Thai society, but from our exploration of the village, this seems unfair. We then drove to Chiang Mai University where we had lunch.
The start of a brand new month, and Field Studies continued at its blistering pace. In the morning we went to Ban Naam Sum Village about 45minutes away from Chiang Mai. This is a village of the Hmong people, who have assimilated well into Thai culture. The village was interesting because many of the people have moved away from subsistence agriculture into making clothe materials such as bags, many of which we saw being sold in the markets of Bangkok. This hill tribe is actually quite developed, which was shown by the fact that they had electricity and satellite television. The area has and remains Buddhist despite the fact that Korean missionaries have tried to convert the area into Christianity. They built a church in the village, but this remains underused. The hill tribes are often negatively stereotyped in Thai society, but from our exploration of the village, this seems unfair. We then drove to Chiang Mai University where we had lunch.
The schedule for the afternoon has Night Safari Village, written down on it. We were all very excited because we thought that the afternoon we were going to the zoo. However, this is a Geography field trip, so it was not the case. In fact we went to a village that was affected by the development of the Night Safari and not to the Night Safari itself. The afternoon did not go exactly go to plan, because we were unable to interview the locals as we had wanted to because officials for the 'Royal Forestry Department' were present. Therefore we couldn't talk about the controversial issues that we wanted to discuss with them. However, instead we went on a walk through the forest up to a waterfall, which was nice. For dinner we went to some roadside stalls near the hotel and had Beef Noodles.
Saturday 2nd June 2007: Environmental Workshop
Today was a weird day for Field Studies because we spent the whole day in a classroom at the Chiang Mai University. We had two interesting lectures about the Mekong River Delta which stretches from China through Thailand and eventually to Vietnam. The second lecture was all about cultural/social issues facing the people of Northern Thailand. We then watched a video and then we split into groups to discuss various different environmental scenarios and decide as a group what we would do to solve the environmental problem we were faced with.
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