I WASN'T JUST surprised, I was shocked. Down in the school yard teachers were cutting the hair of their students, leading most of them back to the classroom crying. "Their hair was too long!", my school counsellor explained, smiling and leading me to my room.

Coming to Thailand hadn't been my first choice when I was thinking about spending one year abroad with the American Field Service (AFS), a worldwide student exchange organization. When I got the news that I was going to go to Thailand, I hardly knew anything about this country. So I tried to prepare myself the best I could, read books, got to know Thai people living in Germany and German people who had been in Thailand. But as soon as I arrived at the airport in Bangkok I realized that I might have thought I prepared myself a lot but actually I didn't know a thing.

" This is your new class," my counsellor continued and introduced me to my fellow classmates. Although I wore the same school uniform as everyone else in the room, I felt that there was something about me that made the Thai students either laugh, run away or seldom come forward to ask a simple question. However, before long I felt the whole school population seemed to know me and everyone was willing to greet me when I was walking around in the school building. And I experienced such a friendly atmosphere. For the first time in my life English teachers giving me private extra lessons, the teachers in all subjects trying to make me understand as much as possible and students starting to make friends as soon as they got over their initial shyness.

And family life was an adjustment, of course. As an AFS student one is kind of thrown into a completely new culture, language, neighborhood, and perhaps the most important part is the host family. After about three weeks I was sure that I already understood Thai culture just to realize after three months that I hadn't understood anything. That was also the time when I realized that I probably should change families. I wasn't able to make the early curfew every night just because my host-grandparents were over protective, and that my quite Western point of view really differed from their quite conservative Thai point of view. It wasn't easy to leave but I felt much happier living with the new family and still going to visit my old family.

I don't know when I really started to understand Thai conversation, it's a kind of process, you can't really tell the start or the end, I just know that after having lived here in Thailand for ten months, I can speak fluently, read most things and write with the help of a dictionary. Thais really appreciate foreigners trying to speak their language and are always keen on teaching their language. I also had the chance to learn a lot of cultural subjects taught at school, such as Thai cooking, drawing and dancing.... But for normal subjects school life was mostly boring. It's not like in Germany, where we have discussions and the students are asked to participate in the lessons. Here, the teacher talks or writes on the blackboard and he is the one who decides when and what a student has to say. The students are divided by numbers and sit and write the lesson most of their time. And when the time for exams draws near, they cram through the nights to get all the knowledge they need to know by heart into their heads. The testing system is, even in Math, based on multiple choice. Of course, the students don't really grasp any English, French or German conversation in this way. I was always trying to help by tutoring German and English. I participated in several English and French Camps for students and I also was the main person to organize the first German Camp in Chiangmai. Every year more than 100 exchange students from all over the world get the chance to spend a year in Thailand. There are special camps organized for them to meet each other where they especially talk about problems that are often similar to those of other students. About the same number of Thai students are sent to countries all over the world every year, but because of the economic crisis at the moment many students aren't able to participate.

Now there are only two weeks left till my return to Germany. I don't know if I'm really looking forward to going back home, let's say I've got mixed feelings. I know that I've changed, but I don't know how exactly. There's the thing that I, for the first time, experienced my home country from outside, got to know so many interesting people, learned to live in another culture.... the list is endless. For most students it's harder to go back to their home country than to get along with a foreign culture. Well, I will try to gain as much as I can from this outstanding year I've spent in Chiangmai and will surely be back here again - as soon as possible...