My First Giant Blog Blurb. I am in Thailand!!

Sawatdee Kha !

(Hello!)

Ok I am finally starting this much delayed blog. I have been in Thailand exactly 2 weeks now and am finally starting to get acclimated and have the time to sit down and write out my experiences thus far. This first post might be all over the place as Its going to be tooons of jumbled thoughts and things I’ve learned but bare with me once I start to keep this up hopefully it will be a little more organized.

As I said I got to Thailand two weeks ago. I am staying in Phuket for my teacher training which I am in my last week of now! I’m staying by Nai Harn beach and the “resort” is made up of many 20 villas. There are 4 people to a house and we each get our own room so its actually very nice. There is a pool that we get in almost every day after class and we are on a street with tooons of restaurants to eat at and massage parolors/internet cafes etc. Sidenote every “shop” here is almost a combination of atleast 3 of the following: massage parlor/ internet café/laundry/bar/restaurant and probably more I can’t think of. All the restaurants are open air with a covered roof I don’t think I have ever seen one indoors. The Thai’s stand outside and try to get you to come in espppppecially in the massage parlors where you can’t walk by without them all happily yelling hello to you and ‘you want massaaage’! Oh yeah also the bars at night its all gleeful screaming thai women which sometimes the bars are literally just 3 stools under a hut and a table or two I don’t know how we would fit in if we wanted to. Anyways, the people are all really really nice though. Where we have class in the day time is another hotel that they take us to a bus about 5 minutes down the road. It is right on the beach which is amazing! We spend almost every lunch break laying on the beach and swimming for about an hour Usually everyday for lunch I get chicken and sticky rice from the street vendor and can get a whole fresh pinapple chopped up for me for about $2.50 U.S dollars. And I am in the most expensive place in Thailand apparently other places are muuuch cheaper. You can have 3 full delicious meals for $2 or less I splurged today and had a GREAT meal at one of the restaurants of a full plate of fried rice with egg and a huge banana pancake with fresh bananas and honey for 80 baht (less than 3 dollars). There is American food here too but half the time it doesn’t actually taste that good and is about 3x’s more expensive. Lots of German restaurants too! I didn’t really think about how many foreigners and NON-AMERICAN travelers would be here, rarely do you find a tourist who speaks English unless they are Australian.

CLASS!

Our classes have been much different than I would have thought. We go everyday from about 9am-3 with a long lunch break and a few short breaks. We play toooons of getting to know each other games and activities the class is definitely not for someone who is shy about getting in front of a class. Our first week we filled with learning how to teach. The lessons are not hard but I was surprised about how many things I had not though of that would be useful to know in teaching students a foreign language. Opposite to what I though we are not to speak or try to speak ANY thai to them only English! Our teacher always asks us questions/situation and “what would you do in this situation when having to teach a foreign language student” and there were so many situations I had no idea so it has been very helpful to have someone to give us the heads up on what to do. A large part that comes in to play in the classroom is not only that we will be teaching them a totally foreign language that they don’t know but also we have to be aware of the cultural differences. A huge example is that Thailand is a “saving face” culture. This basically means you never want to embarrass a student. If they are talking or being disruptive you would never punish or yell at them but turn to other techniques to get them to stop. Students will do anything to not be embarrassed in class and you never use confrontation or put them in situations where they could possibly “lose face”. If you a playing a game and have teams in the class and one team is losing, the other team will yell the answers at them to help their friends save face instead of trying to win themselves. There are other things such as we are never to touch their heads as this is the “highest” part of the body and therefore the most important and feet are considered very dirty so we are never to point them at people or move things with our feet. Which is actually much harder than you would think us silly foreigners are messing with our feet all the time! It is interesting to learn this all though! Teaching the students when they don’t know the language ends up relying mostly on using tons of gestures, repetition of everything, and using picture cards. We play lots of games with them to to help connect the vocab words to what we are trying to communicate! Our class IS meant to teach them English but also is to give them kind of a break from their strict thai classes. Students are insanely respectful here and well behaved but at the same time our class is a big release of energy and every lesson we plan lots of games to play to help them have a break.

Next week is my final week of teacher training. Starting on Monday we are going to schools to practice teaching and each have to do a whole lesson on our own each day. We will be going to an orphanage for young kids, a regular school, a juvenile detention center, and a football orphanage for boys and these boys who live here travel around the world playing football (American soccer) and are apparently very good so that will be fun. I’ve pretty much got a good heads up on everything I am doing from Felix. He came here in the session before me so was here staying at the same villas and everything 2 weeks before I arrived. Our groups were here the same time for about 10 days so while I was first arriving he was already in this last week of teaching at the schools! It helps a lot because I pretty much know everything to expect and not to be nervous at all. I’ve heard the kids are wild and will mostly just want to play games, and us coming there as foreign teachers they go crazy and are excited. They were very enthralled by Felix’s height (he even had a picture card that said “The Tree is Tall..and they all repeated after“teacher is tall!” and then he touched the ceiling and they all freaked out haha). Thai girls apparently also often get crushes on teachers and will give them a million love notes and you are supposed to reject them or they will never stop but I think Felix will be in for it. They love blodes too

My GROUP!

It was a bit overwhelming coming here at first. Felix and my programs overlapped as I said so I met all of his friends that he had become very close with PLUS my new group of 30 people. It is great getting to meet more people but just overwhelming in the sense that it was hard getting to know people that he was already close with and then my group which at first I did not get to spend as much time with as I was meeing his friends too! It has all turned out wonderfully though and as I said I am thankful to have met so many people who are so different from me. While Felix’s group was almost all Americans mine was much more diverse..we have about 8 people from England, 2 from New Zealand, and 3 from Canada. All different ages too although I think the oldest is only 32 or 33? Everyone is very young spirited though. Again and these are people I would have never in my daily life expected to get close with so it’s very nice we can all be here together experiencing this. I have become close with a girl from England who is great and another from Canada and a few others. We now have friends placed at every corner and rural nok of Thailand so its going to be awesome going all around and planning trips to visit them and see their neck of the jungle.

Where I will teach!!!

Felix and I will be living in SINGBURI, Thailand! It is about 2 hours north of Bangkok and one of the many “buri” named placed along the river. We have not been there yet but think it will be insanely rural. Felix is in Bangkok now finding out about our placement and they keep joking to him “You will ride water buffalo to work!” expect I don’t think it’s a joke. I am excited though it will be nice to have a change of pace and since we are not far from Bangkok it will be easy to travel around. I expect many weekend trips and visiting our friends who are placed all over Thailand so that will be awesome. We will be living in a homestay which was also pretty unexpected as most people got their own apartments. Apparanlty there aren’t much other places in Singburi though! The website for the homestay is if you want to check it out:

http://202.142.221.142/~tukhome/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1

We will find out soon enough but the homestay looks like it will be a good deal. It is a large house and we apparently will have a large bedroom and our own bathroom. The site has lots of info but it says it is about 10 minutes from the market on bike and presuming we can use one of their 6 bikes that will be perfect! Close to the river which is supposed to be pretty as well. It will be nice moving in somewhere where everything is already taken care of also. It’s furnished obviously and we don’t have to pay utilities..just keeping our fingers crossed that we can internet there as well. We actually get PAID to live there ..400 baht a month..which is only $16 U.S dollars but that goes a long way in Thailand. I guess they rent the other rooms out to travelers so may we can meet some interesting people too and it says the lady cooks so maybe we will get many delicious meals as well. So it’s all up in the air but we think it will work out good!

Traveling around PHUKET (POO-KET)

Most my pictures document my travels but a quick summary…My first day here although I was insanely jetlagged (after being in a total of 4 countries in less than 2 days and ONE 20 hour flight on top of two others) but it was nevertheless great! We rented scooters (Which is main mode of transportation here) with a big group and traveled around our area. We went to a place called”Big Buddha” which is exactly what it sounds like…a giant Buddha statue at the top of the mountain. Oh it was also pouring the whole time but that made it interesting I suppose. There were monks up there who gave us bracelets for good fortune which was nice and once the clouds started clearing up we could see the whole side of the island which was beautiful. We also went to Kata beach that day..a nice beach and a few other places. Felix and I toured a crazy tourist town called PATONG the next day. We went in the day time but it is known for the things that go on at night. I don’t really know how to describe it. It’s just bars in rows outside and filled with games you play for drinks and clubs and ladyboys and just too much debauchery to get into. Next big thing we did over my 2^nd weekend was go to Phi Phi which were the islands in many of my pictures. THAT is a beautiful place. I think I could easily say the most beautiful place I have ever been to. One of the islands is where the movie “the Beach” with Leonard Dicaprio. We got to the main island early afternoon after about a 2 hour ferry ride which I proceeded to throw up on. BUT I still enjoyed it ..coming up you just seem MASSIVE rock formations coming out of the water with forests on the top and that’s it. Almost all of them seem deserted. The main island might honestly be one of the strangest towns I have ever been in. There are no roads or motor vehicles its all just narrow cobblestone streets CRAM packed with shops for tourists and the same kind of 5 in one places like internet/guesthouses/shops/restaurant/massage/bars etc. All of the people stand on the street and hustle you to come in and they stay there alllllll day and all night I just couldn’t get over the fact that these people live on this TINY island. You could probably walk around the whole thing. Anyways we stayed in a very cheap room waaaaay on the other side where the nice cobblestone streets turned into dirt roads and then mud puddles but it was still a nice room and did the trick! That morning we did a boat tour. We got back on a giant boat and they took us around the islands. We first went to Monkey Beach which is full of monkeys that run around. We were supposed to get to feed them but the tide was too low so we couldn’t come up but watched them swimming around and chasing each other. We then stopped at one place and sea kayaked, and snorkeled around one of the big rock islands. The snorkeling was amazing! I saw so many crazy fish and encountered my first shark. It was a leopard shark and Felix and I I think were the only ones who saw it in the giant group and apparently you don’t encounter them much. He just swam under us it was beautiful but kind of spooky. Other than that there were just lots of kinds of fish and beauuutiful coral. After that we got back on the boat and went to the island with MAYA beach which was the one in the movie. We had to swim for about 5 minutes to get to the island and then you climb up a giant latter to get over the rock and then have to hold on to roads for balance before you are on flat land. Maya beach is stunning. We just relaxed there for about an hour. Apparently some of the group who got in the water saw 2 baby sharks swimming around them too. We got back on the boat eventually and had a lovely thai dinner there and watched the sunset which I may come to take for granted eventually here because amazing sunsets are literally a dime a dozen. I almost don’t go a night without seeing one that is incredible. That night we were too tired to go out to enjoy the also crazy Phi Phi island nightlife but we walked around and watched firedancers on the beach for awhile. They were just guys with jump ropes, roads with balls, rings, anything really that was lit on fire and they danced to techno and just threw the fire around. It was pretty insane they were really good. Apparently my group that night all jump roped the firerope and some came back with burns across their ankles. In Phi Phi they give you BUCKETS of alcohol..like sandbuckets and you choose whatever liquor you want. Daanngerous!

Since then the only other big thing I have done is go to the Phuket Vegetarian Festival. It went on for 10 days in Phuket and was very interesting to see. The Thai’s take it very seriously and there are many rules about going (no drinking, no pregnant women or girls on their period?, must wear ALL white, no shoulders or knees showing, no eating meat). It basically though was hundreds of stands with food and you walk around dressed in white and try different things. We didn’t know what anything that we bought was because the signs were all in thais (We were probably the only white people) but everyone just got a bit of whatever and all shared it and I tried maaany strange things. It was so weird some things I ate you literally have never tried anything like it so you couldn’t even describe what you were tasting or if you thought it was good or bad. That is very rare that that happens I think. We didn’t get to see this but throughout the week there are self-torturers at the festival. Apparently people decide to become possessed and take on all the sins for the sake of everyone else for the 10 days and they torture themselves. There was a police officer who bathed himself in boiling oil this year, and the other I heard about was walking up ladders of blades. We missed all of this like I said but sounded interesting?

Besides that I have just had a few really fun nights out and adventures around Phuket. Myself and 5 other girls rented a jeep the other day and went all over so that was really fun/scary being in a jeep that had a hard time even getting up the mountain. It was 3 dollars per person to rent! I have met many ladyboys and they are great and many eager to be friends Thai bartenders. Oh yeah and Felix and I ate cockroaches one night in patong. They just had them in a bag at the bar and encouraged us to eat them so WHY NOT?! They tasted like nuts. Very salty and crunchy..not bad until I kept finding bits in my teeth.

That’s all Ican think of for now it has been a whirlllwind of two weeks for me. I am very busy so sorry I am slow to be in contact with everyone! Internet isn’t also available also.

WILL POST ABOUT TEACHING SOON!

ALLL my love to everyone. If you are reading this I can probably honestly say you are someone I miss very much. Thailand is wonderful and don’t worry about me!

Love,

Brienne