6/30 I am a circus animal

Sa wa deet ka!

That is Thai for "hello" and "goodbye", which you must say while "wai-ing", or bowing and putting your hands together over your heart to literally, everyone. Thai's are all about hierarchy, so you have to do it to everyone you meet who is older than you, and everyone who meets you and is younger than you has to do it to you. I'm getting really good at it. The little tyrant in me loves having the younger kids do it to me, it's great for my inflated ego.

I am finally home after 2 long days at the school where I will be teaching. Of course, my schedule was wrong so it has taken 2 long, frustrating days to get it fixed. The first day, we showed up and were literally just pushed through the door into random 9th grade classes. 14 year olds-let me tell you. I am officially sending my children to boarding school between the ages of 12 and 18. They were a HANDFUL. So rowdy, talking non-stop, mocking me (awesome...) and refusing to answer any questions or listen to a word I said. After 3 hours with 3 different 9th grade classes, I was about to drop dead from exhaustion. Not to mention I was sweating more than I think I have ever sweat in my life. I know it's gross, but I was just dripping-I could feel all of the sweat rolling down my legs while I was standing in the classroom. So attractive. Ikkk.

Everyone at school stares, open-mouthed at Crystal and I. "Falang" means foreigner, so naturally everyone feels the need to shout "FA-LANG!" and point at us. Yes, I know. I'm white. It does happen. The 14 yr old boys are the absolute worst-they either scream " I LOVE YOU!", make cat-calling noises, or crude gestures. Sigh.

One of the head teachers is in charge of us, and she has been showing us around to- I'm pretty sure everyone she knows (thus the circus animal emotions). Today, she put us in her car, drove us to some random building, and made us introduce ourselves to a group of random people. Still not entirely sure who they were. I am so excited to start teaching, but having to trek around and meet a million random people is not really my style. Constantly smililng and agreeing to do everything is exhausting. Somehow-don't ask me how-we got signed up to teach at a random "English camp" this weekend in some town, somewhere in our province. It is so difficult to communicate, but before I knew it the teacher had my host mom on the phone and proceeded to tell me we would be spending the night at the camp and teaching. I must repeat my mantra ,"go with the flow", about every 5 seconds. Luckily, I am going to go hiking on Sunday afternoon with my host family, and Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday are off for some government holiday. That will give me plenty of time to plan some lessons, because...

I GOT A REAL SCHEDULE!

Can you believe it? I am pumped. It is a lot, but I will be teaching 7 different 11th grade classes, 3 times a week each. I teach 4 classes everyday, but luckily I can use the same lessons for each different class. I met a class of 11th grade (or Level 5 as they call it) today and they were SO much better than the 9th graders. They were attentive, mostly polite and their English was much better. I am excited about all of the stuff we can do with them. Their reading and writing is quite good, but their speaking needs a lot of work, so I am going to focus on listening and speaking as much as possible. It will be so much more fun than plain grammar-we can listen to songs, act out plays, give presentations (all on a very limited level, but still!).

In other news, I also attended my third aerobic dance session this evening. Still hilarious and a great workout-I'm serious about doing it all summer. Something to counter-act the wonderful food.

All for today,
xoxoxo