Picture update!

Here are some of Ashley's pcitures from Khao Yai National Park

Inside the bat cave!

Playing with a snake

Thousands of bats streaming across the sky as they go out for the night

A giant centipede!

And here are some pictures from the weekend.  Tiffany came to visit and we actually played with some of the monkeys that we usually try to avoid.

Holly and a baby monkey

Once they started climbing on us we left, haha

Still in Thailand!

Sorry it has been so long since my last post!  About a month ago I went to Kanchanaburi, about 5 hours west of Lopburi.  It's known for beautiful national parks, waterfalls, and the Bridge of the River Kwai.  It was a really good weekend; we hiked the 7-tiered Erawan Waterfalls and walked to the bridge.  Unfortunately somewhere between the fourth and the fifth tier something happened to my camera (I'm thinking I got water on it).  Without any pictures to post, my blogging has suffered..
Here are some of the pictures I did get while in Kanchanaburi.

One of the military cemetaries in Kanchanaburi

 Tier 2 of Erawan Waterfalls

 Tier 4: used as a waterslide, which I definitely went down

Let's see.. there was also a trip to Khao Yai.  Another national park, but two hours to the east of Lopburi.  We stayed at a really cheap, nice guesthouse and had a halfday tour that went to two bat caves and a natural spring.  The guide was awesome and he kept finding all sorts of snakes, spiders, and giant insects to scare everyone with.  The first bat cave we actually got to go into and we could see hundred of bats hanging from the ceiling.  It was a really cool experience.  The second bat cave we went to we didn't go in; it's one of the biggest in the area and has 1-2 million bats inside!  We just stood in a field and watched as thousands upon thousands of bats flew from the cave at dusk.  It was one amazing to see this thin line trail across the sky, continuously for over 20 minutes.  And it was so quiet that you could hear the sound of the bat wings flying into the sky.  Khao Yai was green and jungley and reminded me of the Thailand I was expecting to see before I came here.
Those are the major things that have happened in the last month.  The theme of September is saving money for October!  My last day at Anuban is October 5th and then I have the rest of the month for vacation and most schools don't start again until the first week of November.  I've been starting to plan for the month with a few of my girl friends who also want to go to the south of Thailand.  As of now the rough plan is to take an overnight bus down to the south and then a ferry to Koh Tao (around a 15 hour total journey), then to Koh Pha-ngan and Koh Samui, then to the other coast and go to Phuket and Koh Phi Phi!  We'll see if we can fit it all in or if we just find paradise on the first island and decide to stay!

Lopburi

Last Friday we had a work party to celebrate Luke and Anna's birthdays.  Complete with kareoke, thai food, and presents!  A successful party.  This past weekend our friend Brie came to visit Lopburi.  Ashley and I used it as an excuse to actually see some of the tourist sights in town!  Well, first we went for massages of course!  And Brie was able to get a close up experience with one of Lopburi's many monkeys.  This guy was right outside the door to the massage shop.

Then we went to the palace which had lots of ruins and a small museum.



This week at school was Association of South East Asian Nations week, ASEAN.  On Monday almost all the students and teachers dressed up in traditional dress from various asian nations, it was a lot of fun to see everyone dressed up!

And this was in our front yard :-)





Weekend Trips

It's been a while since my last post, but I've been pretty busy!  Three weekends ago Ashley and I went to Ratchaburi for a night to visit some of our friends from training who are working there.  Ratchaburi is about an hour and a half west of Bangkok.  There aren't too many foreigners who go there, but it is known for having good floating markets.  When we arrived on Saturday our friend Melinda had been invited to lunch and a trip to a floating market with some of her students and we were able to tag along!  We were taken to an amazing seafood restaurant and feasted on some small lobster-type things, a fried fish, a crab salad, mussels, squid, tom yam shrimp, and of course sticky rice.  It was delicious!  Then we headed to the floating market in Amphawa.  Unfortunately we were reminded that we are in Thailand during the rainy season and it wasn't the best weather for the market.  It was still a lot of fun though, nothing some ponchos couldn't take care of!

Melinda's students and our hostesses for the day!

The river is lined with food stalls and vendors and then
 there are boats in the river which sell food as well.

 Last weekend Ashley, Luke, Olivia and I decided to take a daytrip to Ayuttaya. It's about an hour and a half from Lopburi and was the ancient capital of Thailand before Bangkok. We rented bicycles and rode around the town for a few hours. There are lots of ancient ruins and nice parks, which made it a very pretty town to bike around in.

This past weekend we were lucky enough to have Friday and Monday off due to a Buddhist holiday.  We took advantage of the long weekend and a group of us from Lopburi went to Koh Samet, a small island off the coast of Bangkok.  It took us quite a while to get there; two hours to Bangkok, three hours to Ban Phe, and a 30 minute ferry ride.  When we got there it was actually raining a little bit and we had trouble finding a plce to stay due to it being a holiday weekend.  We ended up finding a bungalow that we could fit five of us into so we only had to pay 200 baht each (less than $10!).  We met up with some other friends from our training course and had a great time on the island despite some cloudy weather.  We decided to leave on Sunday and spend a night in Bangkok.  We had some really good Indian food and then saw the new Harry Potter movie at a theater in Bangkok!  It was only 220 baht for a ticket and the theater was nicer than most I've been to in the states.  We indulged once more and had some Mexican food for dinner the next night and made our way back to Lopburi.  It was a great weekend, but now it's time to get back into teaching mode!



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.