6 Weeks In

It's crazy that I've been teaching here for six weeks now!  The days seem long, but all of a sudden it's Thursday and there's only one more day til the weekend and I ask myself where the week went?  I've settled into the routine and I am really enjoying being a teacher, at least 80% of the time haha.  Our school took a picture of all the foreign teachers and the next day it was a gigantic sign in the front of the school!

We get fed pretty much all day long at school.  There's always a snack in the morning: various rolls or croissants or something wrapped in banana leaves.  We also get free lunch everyday.  Most days I really enjoy it, it gives me a chance to try lots of different Thai food (even though I usually don't know what it is I'm eating).  In the afternoon there's yet another snack: more rolls, doughnuts, or sometimes fruit.  This is a picture of my school lunch from yesterday.  There's pretty much always white rice, then some sort of soup with cabbage, the top is a type of curry, and to the left is a spicy meat and green bean dish.  The small dish is fish sauce and chili peppers, which is added to the rice for some flavor.

Last Thursday our school celebrated Wai Kru, which is Teacher's Appreciation Day.  I had really been looking forward to it because I had heard stories of teachers getting flowers and food all day long and that it was a really big deal.  While I did get a couple flowers from students, Wai Kru was a bit disappointing.  The foreign teachers just sat off to the side while the Thai teachers received beautiful flower arrangements.  The whole ceremony was in Thai too, so we pretty much just had to sit around for 3 hours not knowing what was going on.  It was still a good experience, but I did not feel very appreciated.  Here are a couple pictures from Wai Kru.  There were two ceremonies because the whole school couldn't fit in the assembly hall.

A couple weeks ago there was a kitten roaming around at school.  I tried to figure out if it belonged to anyone, but everyone said it was probably a stray.  So I decided to take her home!  We now have a Thai kitten around our house.  This is Loki  :-)

School Days

This past weekend Ashley and I bought ourselves bicycles in town!  This way we can bike to school everyday and it takes less than ten minutes.  It also makes getting around town much more manageable and is good exercise to boot!  There aren't too many bikes around here, and even fewer people walking places, because it's just so hot!  Most people have motobikes, scooters, a car, or hop on a bus or song-thaew.  When we told one of the Thai teachers that we walked to school sometimes, he laughed! Haha
There are days that I show up for the flagpole ceremony and there's something new going on!  Of course the rest of the teachers and all the students know what's happening, but the other English teachers and I stand around looking at each other and smiling.  Last week there was a No Smoking campaign which consisted of the whole school walking around like a parade with the school band and some students even wearing monkey masks!  We all joined in and waved to the younger students who were watching; it was pretty fun!  Yesterday morning and this morning after the flagpole ceremony, a group of girl students stand at the front and lead the entire school in synchronized dancing!  They played two songs, both of which are by popular Thai pop singers.  It was quite amusing.

Visa Run

This past Wednesday I had to go to Laos for my visa run.  I came to Thailand with a tourist visa and I'm technically not supposed to be working in the country with that, so I had to go to Laos to get a Non-Immigrant B visa.  I went with Ashley and another teacher from our school, Luke.  We took the night train Wednesday night and arrived in Nong Khai, a city on the border of Thailand early in the morning on Thursday.  We had to get Laos visas, even though we were only staying for a night and it cost about $50!  If I had known it would be so expensive, I think I would have tried to stay there for more than a night and actually see some parts of the country.  But we went straight to Vientiane, the capital of Laos which is only about 30 minutes from the border, and then straight to the Thai Embassy.  The school had given us all the paperwork we needed to get our NIB visas, so we just had to wait in line to turn in our paperwork and passports and then we could pick them up again the next afternoon.  We found a really nice guesthouse and rented bicycles for the day.  Vientiane is a pretty city with good food and a fun backpacker atmosphere.  I really enjoyed Laos, at least the little bit that I saw, and definitely want to go back when I have some more time to travel.  It was colonized by France and still has a French influence, so there were lots of bakeries and bread shops.  Friday morning I even had a bagel with cream cheese!  Something I haven't seen at all in Thailand.  After we picked up our passports, complete with new visas, we got a bus across the border to Udon thani, another city in Thailand.  From there we decided to take a bus back to Lopburi instead of the train because it usually gets there faster and would be cheaper.  We got on the cheapest bus there and left around 9pm.  At 1am we were awoken with flashlights and people telling us in Thai to get off the bus.  We were all pretty confused; Luke speaks some Thai and I guess they were saying that a light broke on the bus or something?  So we all had to get onto another bus, but this bus was already pretty full and I ended up having to sit on a stool in the aisle for the next three hours!  It was an interesting experience and I think it will be worth paying for a nicer bus next time, haha.