Women Who Travel Podcast: A Life Changing Move to Rural Thailand
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Charissa Enget needed to find an engineering course she could afford. She found one in rural Thailand, where she got a scholarship and living costs were low. It took her six months to learn the language so she could communicate with fellow students, make friends, and travel round the country at weekends. After two years, she decided that Thailand would always be a part of her life. Today, she leads trips to share her adventures and introduce American women to her friends and local families.
Lale Arikoglu: Hi there. It's me, Lale Arikoglu, with an episode of Women Who Travel, where we hear another of our regular listener dispatchers.
Charissa Enget: My name is Charissa Enget. I applied to a bunch of universities for master's programs, and decided to move to Thailand without knowing anyone there and without speaking the language, just to have the adventure of a lifetime. In engineering courses in the US, I had a lot of foreign teachers, that's just the nature of engineering, they were from all over the world. I knew that whatever courses came my way, I could handle them. I was just more afraid of making friends and not being lonely, and being able to learn the language, and making sure I had fun while I was there.
LA: Many American college students take a study abroad program that's set up and regulated by that alma mater, and it often costs quite a bit of money. Charissa Enget wanted to find a cheap opportunity to study in a different country for her whole degree.
CE: I didn't do it through my old university, I just enrolled and applied for an English speaker scholarship. I didn't have to pay for my university at all, it was completely covered. I also got a graduate salary, so my housing, my food, it was all covered. The cost of living there is super inexpensive, so I was able to afford to go to islands on the weekends or go on weekend trips.
LA: This is her story of her move from Texas to Thailand with very little solo travel experience behind her, and she had her fair share of hiccups, so she's here to share learnings on how to live and study overseas.
CE: I think living abroad is a lot different from traveling abroad, just because you really get to know the people and experience the culture, and it changes your way of thinking a lot more. Thailand changed the way I interact with people in a lot of ways, and I feel bonded to Thailand for the rest of my life. It really changed the way I want to live my life, and I'll never stop loving Thailand or traveling back there as much as I can.
I wasn't planning to go that far originally. My family was super nervous. My mom was like, "That's two years away from your family across the world," and she was really freaking out, and I think a month before, both my parents were like, "We really don't want you to go to Thailand." I think they thought I'd maybe stop or drop out or decide not to go and get scared. But a month before, they realized I was super serious, I bought all my flights and everything like that. And my mom was just silent a week before because she was so sad I was leaving, and I felt really guilty. And actually, in the airport, on the way there, I was like, if my mom asked me not to go again, I won't go. But before I got out of the car to leave to Thailand, she was like, "I think you're going to have a great time and I'm excited for you," and it was such a switch up, I was shocked, because I was ready to just quit the whole thing and not even go.
I researched a lot, because after my parents started freaking out, I was kind of freaking out too. I was like, what if it's dangerous? So I researched all about Thailand, how safe it was for women, whether there was going to be foreign exchange students at my school so I would be able to make friends. But I didn't research well enough, because I accidentally applied for the wrong campus, which sounds silly, but all the campuses had Thai words, and so I couldn't really remember that there was four different campuses because it was a foreign language.
My new advisor told me he was going to send two former graduate students to pick me up from the airport, and so I was like, what if I get kidnapped? What if I signed up for a bad thing where they want to scam me? So I was going to scope them out and see if they seemed like kind, good people before I told them I showed up. But I didn't really think it through, because I stood out a lot, and they picked me out immediately, obviously. But they seemed nice enough, and I had pepper spray, so I got in the car with them, and they were like, "You can take a nap if you want because the university's two hours away."
And I was really confused, because I'd looked it up on Google Maps and I was like, "The university's only 20 minutes away, what do you mean two hours?" And these alarm bells went off, like maybe I got myself in a bad situation, and they just laughed at me. They were like, "That's the Bangkok campus. You're going to the Kamphaeng Saen campus." And I was like, "What?" And they were like, "You're in for a big surprise. This place is in the middle of nowhere."
I arrived, and it's in this part called Nakhon Pathom, it's southwest of Bangkok like two hours, and actually means agriculture in Thai, it started out as an agricultural university, and then eventually expanded to engineering and some other subjects. It is the widest, largest campus in Thailand because there's so many rice fields in it. My lab was super messy, my new advisor was kind of a hoarder, and that scared me because there was mechanical parts all over this lab I was supposed to work in. I was like, how am I supposed to work in this? It's so messy I have to clear off a space on any desk to even set my computer down. But everyone was super nice and they were all super excited I was there.
All the hallways are open to the outside, there's no air conditioning, but when you went into individual classrooms, they would turn on the air conditioning for those. The resources were definitely less, and so I learned a lot more basic engineering, like I learned how to program a scoreboard or how to recreate something that was already done and code it myself. At Thai universities, you learn the ground up for everything so that you could build that for the future company you worked in, assuming it wouldn't have as many resources as an American engineering company would.
I remember when trying to make my thesis, I would try to come up with innovative new solutions because I thought that was the point, and my professor was like, "No, we don't have the money to try new solutions. We've got to use whatever is tried and true," but still make a new spin on a science experiment that way for my thesis. They have an interesting hierarchy where no one can challenge the professor, and so that was very interesting for me. Our professor told us this specific question wouldn't be on the test, and then we took the test, it was on there, and I was upset afterwards, and I was like, I'm going to tell the teacher she said specifically this question shouldn't be on the test, and all the students were like, "No, you can't challenge the teacher."
LA: After the break, Charissa chases giant lizards and brushes away her professor's jibes about her appearance, and she makes friends with the woman who cuts her hair in the village.
We're back with this Women Who Travel dispatch from Thailand with Charissa.
CE: There was little shops all over campus, it was very beautifully manicured, and there were several cafeterias on campus, they were all individual owners, like mom-and-pop shops, so they would make fresh Thai food, and it was super cheap, maybe $1 per meal, and all the students ate there. My little dorm was right next to a Thai market that I would walk to every night and get dinner.
My professor told me to get my own apartment, but he agreed to get me one, because I couldn't decide, and he chose an off-campus dorm. The off-campus dorms were about $160 a month furnished, they had a mini fridge. I didn't have any cooking utensils in my dorm, but I did take cooking classes while I was there. I loved to make [foreign language 00:08:54] it's like Thai barbecue, it's like shabu hot pot plus Korean barbecue is how I explain it, and that's my signature dish. Otherwise, I love to make Pad Kra Pao, which is stir-fried holy basil, and I usually make it with beef or chicken, and I just love that dish.
They had two beds that were pushed together and two desks. Usually, roommates sleep in the same bed, which was kind of interesting. And then, they always had a bathroom, and the shower and toilet were connected, there's nothing separate, your toilet would get wet while you showered. And each of them had a balcony where you could hang dry your clothes. I didn't have a roommate. I honestly would've liked one, but I didn't know anyone to room with. There weren't any engineering girl grad students, so I didn't have any options, I was the only engineering girl grad student there.
At that time, I didn't have a moped, and my professor was forbidding me from driving one. So he said the off-campus one would be better because I could walk to the van station or walk to get a motorcycle taxi there. Where the on-campus dorms were in the middle of a bunch of rice fields and I would be a lot less able to travel by myself, I just decided to stay there because it was easier than looking for a different dorm. There were giant Asian water monitors all over campus that my professor told me to not walk alone because they could bite my arm off or something. It's like a less dangerous Komodo dragon, but still dangerous.
They're these giant lizards, and if you get close to one, they can break your arm, but they're not poisonous, so they probably won't kill you. If you go to Thailand, you'll probably definitely see some, they're everywhere. They're huge, they're probably the same size as me. Thailand has a lot of animals. I actually decided to do bird watching while I had no friends. They have Chinese pond herons, they have these Asian anhingas. Thailand has amazing birds and lizards and elephants, of course.
When I first got there, I didn't have any friends, so I would just go around to markets and I would go eat after school. When I finally got a moped, sometimes I'd just take a joyride because I had nothing else to do. There was two gyms on campus, and Thailand hasn't really gotten into working out yet, like lifting weights, but I would get to use those weight rooms because it was in two of their athletic buildings. It's really hard to be friends with someone with a language barrier, and people would actually freak out to talk to me because they were so nervous to speak English and basically be judged and try to use this language they've used their whole life that it was a big barrier to making friends with me.
I just bought some courses online. The first time I bought a course, I bought the cheapest one I could find because I had no money at that point, but it turned out to be a bust. I should have researched more, because Thai has 32 vowels and 44 consonants, and if you don't pronounce those vowels perfectly and pronounce the tones perfectly, you won't get understood, and so this specific course didn't differentiate between the 32 vowels, because it's that specific, which an English-speaking ear couldn't interpret very well, and so no one understood me the first two months. So finally, I researched really hard the best way to learn Thai, and I found this course called ThaiPod101, and I just became obsessed. I would probably study for two hours a day, because I was really lonely at that point, and I would listen to these audio tracks and learn new vocab and do them congruently every day, until after around six months, I could speak pretty well.
Some people just pitied me. My hairdresser would see me walk alone, and once I started learning a little Thai, she'd tell people, "She was so alone and I took her in," and she'd invite me to her New Year's celebration if I was alone on New Year's and start taking me out, even before I could speak Thai very well. And then, other people were kind of forced to be friends with me. I took a Muay Thai class, and all of the girls would refuse to be partners with me because I'm six feet tall and they'd be five feet, they were legitimately scared of sparring with me. And there were only two girls who were willing to spar with me, and that's how I became friends with them, and they became really good friends of mine.
Once I made friends, they would also go to markets, they liked to listen to live music, and so sometimes the night markets would have live music and we'd just eat food and sit there. We'd go to 7/11 together. There were two bars that were 20-plus, that's their age of drinking, so they would go to bars on the weekends called XO and Bumler, and they always had live music, and everyone would sit at their individual tables and order beer towers, and then once they had some drinks, they might dance on the table at the end of the night. So that was really fun hanging out with them that way. And on the weekends, we'd go to temples or just travel around, because Thai people love to travel and they love to go to coffee shops and take pictures and have really curated Instagrams, so that was another hobby I did with them.
When bad things happen, I always think they're funny. My professor would tell me I gained weight or say these outlandish things, and they'd make me mad at first, but later I could laugh at them with my mom, and I think I was able to show those funny moments that are so different or so outlandish to us who've grown up in a different culture.
LA: After the break, by the end of Charissa's two years, she's explored much of unspoilt Thailand and considers it her second home.
Back with this Women Who Travel dispatch from Thailand.
CE: I went on a date with a guy named Ton, and he took me to his hometown, and he was like, "In my hometown, we have the seventh-largest Buddha in the world," and he took me there, and he had a drone, and he focused the drone on me and he moved back and this Buddha was massive and it's just surrounded by rice fields, and that's a big visual I have in Thailand is the drone going back and just this Buddha getting bigger and bigger and bigger in the middle of these thousands of rice fields.
They're very patriotic over there. One cool thing is they have the Thai national anthem before every movie, so you have to stand up in the theater and stand for the national anthem as it plays. I saw Thai dancing, I got to experience that during the Songkran Festival. The most art I saw was during their festivals. They have Loy Krathong, where they make these little lanterns and they set them into lakes and they always have a bunch of lights everywhere, and every festival's celebrated with a bunch of markets and lots of yummy food and sometimes art. Songkran would have these beautiful women that would represent everything. I got to be one my first year I was there, they dressed me up and I got to represent the mechanical engineering department with couple of other girls, and we'd throw rose petals or people would splash water at us. I think their festivals are their coolest form of art, because it really shows their religion and culture and how food is central to all celebrations and get-togethers.
I'd say Thailand has some of the best, kindest people I've ever met. It doesn't matter if it's 3:00 AM, you can walk out on the street and someone will be cooking grilled bananas or they'll be cooking pad Thai on the side of the street. They'll call out to you, and if you speak a little bit of Thai, just knowing how to say hello, people will ask you to sit down and eat with them. And if you're just craving some human connection, then Thailand's the best place to go. I think it's really well-known for some not so good things, but I wish people knew more about how amazing the people are over there.
Lots of people go to Thailand, and I don't think they see the real Thailand, the real culture, the people, and one way when I go to travel anywhere to get to know the people is I like to do home stays. You can find a lot of those. I've done Hill Tribe stays, where I got to stay with Hill Tribes and they showed me how they make clothes, let me hike in the forest with them, and those were the most memorable and special experiences I had in Thailand.
My dream is to one day move back to Thailand for six months of the year and live six months in the US, because I love spending time with my family, but I left a part of me in Thailand and I need to go back and experience that part of me. The past couple of years, I've been going back quite frequently to Thailand. I started running group trips there, we do lots of adventures. We go to the north of Thailand, like I'm doing this November, and there's food tours, and I just try to show people, I try to make people love Thailand as much as I do, and I like to host people and teach them the language while we're there. I just like to show people the experience and try to get them to love Thailand the way I did within these week-long trips.
You can follow me @LifeOfCharissaE. Charissa is spelled with a C-H. And I host these trips several times a year, and if you'd like to experience Thailand with a host who's lived there two years and has lots of friends there, and you just want to have a friend who really loves Thailand and will show you all her favorite parts of it, then I'd love if you'd come with me.
LA: Next week, I'll be walking around the British Museum with New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead. She'll talk about how to visit a world-famous museum and actually make it a personal experience. See you then. Thank you for listening to Women Who Travel. I'm Lale Arikoglu, and you can find me on Instagram @LaleHannah. Our engineers are Jake Lummus, James Yost, Vince Fairchild, and Pran Bandi. The show is mixed by Amar Lal at Macro Sound. Jude Kampfner of Corporation for Independent Media is our producer. Stephanie Kariuki is our executive producer, and Chris Bannon is Conde Nast's head of Global Audio.
Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler
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