Wednesday

Wednesday

Today seemed like the longest day ever as it was our first day teaching the sea gypsies. We began teaching at 8 am and finished at 6:30 pm, with a few small breaks. It is frustrating as the days are not hard but when students do not show up we still wait as many times they are just late. This means that a lot of our time is spent waiting for a class, then waiting for the students to show up, and in the cases that they don’t waiting for the next class.

As I said in yesterday’s blog, the weather is getting a lot warmer. It is hard because we often feel very lazy. I think we learned our lesson on our first day teaching at the preschool when we danced for most of the hour. In Thailand, everything moves slow. The reason for this is because it is so “damn hot” that you need to prevent yourself from breaking into a sweat. It is crazy to see several of the women who clean the streets wear long pants, long sleeve shirts and hats. They move incredibly slow, but it is not because they are lazy. Once you break into a sweat you are done for. I am not joking, Thai people have warned us about this!

When we were about half way to Mercy on our walk this morning it started raining. It was not just sprinkling but full out rain. It was not too exciting as we still had to walk a good 10 minutes, and there was no real place to run for cover. It was intense to stand in the middle of four lanes of traffic in the downpour, waiting for a break so we could finish crossing. Needless to say we made it to Mercy and dried off fairly quickly when we got out of the rain.

As you can see from my previous post, Misty and I booked our flight to Chiang Mai! This is in the northern part of Thailand and is famous for all of the hill tribes that live there. There are also a lot of elephants! All of Thailand shuts down during the Thai New Year (Songkran) so we have a 3 day holiday after the weekend. This is one of our longest breaks so we decided to go a little farther than just a weekend trip. We are shifting our classes around with the other volunteers as we have done when they have gone away. This will allow us to take the last two days of the week off so we can go away for a total of 11 days. We will leave on April 10th. Flights are fairly expensive because of the celebrations, and we have been told to expect other prices to go up as well. When we called to book a room they only raised their price to 50 baht more than listed in the lonely planet guide for the festival. We chose to spend a little more money and fly instead of take the train or bus because the ride is 10 hours long at the least. We do not want to waste two days traveling, even though we know it would be a fantastic view of the country.

We also have plans to take the boat up the river to Laos. We have been recommended this by several people. The boat ride takes 2 days but stops over night. It takes you right to the capital of Laos.

We are also going to do some more research on Burma as it would be nice to spend some time there, however if this is not possible we will live with it. We planned on doing most of this traveling in our last few weeks here as we added more time on after teaching, however we have been given this opportunity now. Plus we are spending so much money to get to the Northern Part of Thailand, that it would be a shame not to continue on up a little further and see some of Thailand’s neighbors.

We taught the sea gypsies today. There are about 17 of them from the ages of 12 all the way up to age 17 or 18 years. Most of them have some English experience so class was a lot of fun. We did a lot of ice breaker type of games and pictionary, just to see where their English level was at. They seemed really excited to learn which is a nice change. Hopefully their optimistic attitude carries throughout their time here.

Tonight was not really that exciting of an evening. After teaching we walked to Carrefour and Tesco to pick up some groceries, and had supper at the food court. The food court serves Thai food. You purchase a cash card and then chose what you want at one of the many vendors. They prepare your food in front of you. Many of the shops also have an English translation on the menu or plates of fake food prepared for you to see. You order your food and then they swipe the card to take off how much it was. When you are finished eating you bring your card back to where you purchased it and you get the rest of your money back. It is a nice way to avoid the transfer of cash between hands.

I wish I had some kind of exciting story to tell you but I am drained out of energy. I think it is time I check over my lessons for tomorrow and then get some shut eye. Night!