Serving Agape: Elephants!

In Thailand there is something considered "Thai time". People here are relaxed and not extremely focused on time. This is an adjustment for us, but very refreshing! We have experienced Thai time a lot in the past few days. We have been blessed to get to do some really fun things the past two days. Orientation was scheduled for today, but our volunteer coordinator needed to help the Agape kids go on a field trip early this morning. It is now moved to tomorrow, which is great! She wants us to have orientation with her to discuss HIV/AIDS and basic instructions for our job before we see the kids. It has been rough waiting around to meet them, because we are SO eager. So...today we sneakily rode our bikes over to the orphanage and took a look! WOW, we were speechless. We will add some pictures tomorrow, but it is absolutely beautiful. So since we were given a few days of time off, we have used it to explore and try to navigate around our new home!

Since our morning was free and we are still waking up at 5am, we decided to go find some elephants! In order to get to them, we had a sungtao driver take us. These are trucks that are converted into mini buses. This is one of the main forms of transportation and very easy for tourists like ourselves. We felt like real Thai people, so it was a fun ride out there. Our driver was a sweet little man who would secretly follow us around and then help us when we were lost.

The Maesa Elephant Camp is in the mountains around Chiang Mai. This camp is full of the most beautiful, talented, and huge elephants! The elephants here have broken a world record for "the largest painting by a group of elephants". We went early and expected there to be a crowd to see these cuties! Well...

Turns out we were out numbered people to elephants at about 1/5!! We were the only people at the show, which was pretty funny. We watched the elephants bathe, play soccer, paint, play the harmonica, lay down, throw darts, and bow! Here are some highlight pictures.

The best part of the entire day was not the best at the time. After the show, 3 elephants came to greet us. This meant that they basically attacked us with their trunks! We laughed harder during this 2 minutes more than we have the whole trip. The pictures of us are priceless.

Here are the best pictures. Please understand the horror in our faces is not made up or fake. It is real and it is scary.