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.

I'm a Teacher!

Well, I'm officially a teacher now and I'm exhausted!  We get to school at 7:45 everyday and stand outside for the flag ceremony, which lasts about 30 minutes.  Some mornings I have a class at 8:30 and some mornings I can relax a bit.  My homeroom is grade 5, so that's where my desk is (and where I'm currently writing this post from!).  Mondays and Tuesdays I only have 2 classes, but Wednesdays and Fridays I have 4!  Thursday I don't have any classes, except for a conversation class which I have everyday from 4:30-5:30.  Classes have been good and bad so far.  The older kids all have a relatively high level of English since they've been in this Mini-English Program for a few years.  In those classes I'm teaching things like the stages of human development, the digestive system, and the circulatory system!  (How was a 3 week TEFL course going to prepare me for this??)  The younger kids are harder; not only because they have a lower level of English, but also because they have so much energy and it's hard to get 35 eight year olds to pay attention!  Luckily we have workbooks that all the students were given and a general curriculum that the school wants us to follow, so at least I know what I'm expected to teach them.  The conversation class is a small group of seven and eight year olds that I meet with everyday.  So far, I've just been playing games with them because it has been a long day for both of us and they don't want to sit in one place any more than I want to lecture them.  There are classes when I feel like I'm shouting over everyone to just get them to sit down and classes where I actually have fun!  I know that it will only get easier with time as I settle into the routine.  Yesterday our director brought us to a bank and helped us all open up our own Thai bank accounts; hopefully getting paid on Tuesday will take away a little of the exhaustion!  Back to lesson planning...tomorrow I'm going to teach grade 3 to play dodgeball! :-)

Settling In

Well we finally made it to Lopburi!  And yes, there are in fact monkeys roaming around the street at will.  They mostly stick to the downtown area and some of the popular ruins, but they have no qualms about running up and stealing any food you may have hiding in a plastic bag.  Luckily, the four of us found an awesome house that is in a monkey free part of town.  We each have to pay less 3000 baht/month, which is about $100!  I could get used to this.  Here's a picture of Nermal and Lisa doing some lesson planning in our new house.



We met with the director at our school on Wednesday.  We're working with the mini-English program at Anuban Lopburi School, which has students from kindergarten to grade 6.  I am the new Physical Education and Health teacher for grades 1-6!  Haha, I'm not sure that I'm the most qualified for the job, but I think it will be fun!  The students are in Thai classes half the time and English classes half the time, so I'm hoping that their English will be pretty decent.  We're only actually teaching for about 17 hours a week and the rest of the time we can work on lesson planning or helping out with other school activities.  School starts this Wednesday, so wish me luck! 

Ashley and I took advantage of the long weekend and met up with some friends down in Hua Hin, a beach town in the southern part of Thailand.  We were able to get a minivan down to Bangkok and then another minivan from Bangkok to Hua Hin, it took about 6 hours total, but only cost around $10 to get there.  It was nice to be near the water again!  There wasn't any good snorkeling, but I enjoyed being on the beach and floating in the saltwater.  There was even a Subway in town and I indulged in a sandwich, something I've been missing since I've been here!  It was a great weekend get-away, but I'm anxious for the first day of school!

Outside the McDonalds in Hua Hin

Goodbye Chiang Mai

This was our last week in Chiang Mai.  Sunday a group of 9 of us did a cooking class.  It was a lot of fun and while I might not be able to replicate the meals exactly, I definitely learned some good techniques.  We started by going to a traditional market and our tourguide, "Cook", showed us all the ingredients that are important in Thai cooking.  They had everything from pig heads to bags of MSG!  (Cook assured us that we would not be using any MSG in our cooking.)  Then we went to an organic farm and got to see some of the Thai vegetables we were using.  I got to make five dishes; Thai vegetable soup, green curry, papaya salad, pad thai, and mango sticky rice.  It all tasted great and I was stuffed by the end of the day.
On Tuesday I visited a Thai dentist and had my teeth cleaned for 600 baht, about $20!  Since I haven't had dental insurance for the last year, it felt really nice to get them cleaned.  They were very thorough and knew pretty good English, "You floss everyday?". 
We had our last two days of teaching practice at a school in Chiang Mai.  This time we were teaching 16-18 year olds and the classes went much smoother than the previous week.  Their English levels were quite good, so classes went well and they behaved much better than the 6 year olds too!  Originally I thought I definitely wanted to work with younger kids, but the teaching practices made me realize how much harder it is to teach them when you don't speak any Thai!  I'm still not completely sure what age I'll be teaching, but I think learning some Thai will be very helpful no matter what.
Tomorrow I'm heading to Lopburi with my roommate Ashley and two other girls from the program.  We're supposedly all teaching at a primary school in Lopburi, but we haven't really gotten much more information than that.  Most Thai schools are on break right now and I guess the Headmistress doesn't get back until tomorrow.  Lopburi is the part of Thailand that is famous for monkeys!  Apparently they roam the streets at will and can be somewhat of a nuisance, I guess I'll find out soon enough!