Another two weeks have gone by since I last wrote a blog, and those two weeks were filled with fun, and of course, school… but school is fun also. Most of my classes are interesting and I enjoy them a lot. The weekdays go by as usual – school and schoolwork consumes most of my day and at night we play sports.

The weekends, however, are super interesting and there is always something to do or somewhere to go on Saturday. Last Saturday we went paint balling in Pattaya. The boarders that went were split up into four groups of nine or ten players, then we each got a gun with twenty rounds each. The game was Capture the Flag. After watching the red team and the yellow team battle it out, it was us, the green team, versus the blue team. After a long fifteen minutes, my team finally won. My team ended up advancing to the finals, where sadly, we lost. I still think the play was suspicious though.

This Saturday we went elephant riding at the Pattaya Elephant Village! The people there that save the elephants from animal mistreatment in their old home bring them here. There are about thirty adult elephants and a few children. We fed them bananas. The workers there get to ride elephants all day, so I’m sure that they might get bored after a while, but for me, this is a cool job. We were two per elephant and we rode it for about five kilometers, which took about an hour. Near the end, we started feeling more secure about being on a twenty-foot high animal, so we started racing! Imagine driving down a road and seeing elephants charging towards you. It must’ve been scary for those people. This is for sure one of the highlights of my trip.

This weekend, I get to be hosted by Osman and his family. I can’t wait to visit different parts of Thailand.

I am about halfway through my trip to Thailand, and I love it here. It is still high thirties here and the bugs are starting to come out, but it is still better than freezing in Canada. Eli Samuel ’17, Exchange Student at Regents International School Pattaya