Happy New Year! (Take 2)

Yup, that’s right folks, Happy New Year! Chinese New Year that is, which is the one they celebrate in the lovely country of Thailand. So I got to start this year twice, double the resolutions and double the luck right?

Well, so far it’s been a pretty good year if I do say so myself. Those of you that have been following this blog got to read all about my amazing adventures in Japan and now we’re continuing the journey in Thailand.

So let’s start from the beginning shall we? This leg of the trip started with a flight into Bangkok and a brief (like 4-hour kind of brief) stay in one of the airport hotels before catching a cab to the bus station. Figuring out which bus to take was almost too much for my sleep deprived brain and I kept trying to speak Japanese to the poor woman at the information desk. But finally we figured it out and got me on a bus to the little beachside town of Ban Phe. The bus ride was about three hours and came complete with an onboard movie: The Fast and the Furious- Tokyo Drift in Thai. Talk about a somewhat surreal experience. I was just in most of the places where the movie was filmed, some of them less than 24 hours ago. The fact that it was entirely in Thai made it even more interesting because well, I don’t speak a word of Thai and it was so out of context with the movie. But it was good and at some point I’d like to see it again in English.

The scenery on the ride was pretty benign and after the movie was over I slept for a little while, waking up when we stopped and everyone got off. I got off the bus and got my first sight, and smell, of Ban Phe. First thing you notice are the prevailing scents of squid and fish, followed by the rows of shops selling squid in every state imaginable, from squid chips to jerky to squid powder and even sugared squid. Seriously, who comes up with sugared squid?

After a few minutes of taking in my first sight of the place where I’d be spending the next month, I started off with my luggage to find the school where I’d be spending the next month. I only had a rough idea of where the school was but the town only has one main road so I picked the direction I thought I was supposed to be going and started walking. I was sweating within about two minutes, my body trying to figure out what to do with hot weather again. It was a good twenty walk from the bus station and I was getting worried that I was going to run out of town before I found the school but a nice local gave me directions and I found it. Got myself checked in and spent a few minutes filling out various pieces of paperwork before getting to my room and passing out.

Luckily I’d remembered to set my alarm for I passed out and I had time to ’shower’ (there is no hot water here so showers are quick and involve as little time in the water as possible) and make it downstairs to the classroom for our little introduction session. Turns out there are ten students from all over the world, there are a couple Americans, two Brits, an Aussie, someone from Holland, someone from Belgium, and someone from India. Quite a diverse group but all really cool and we hit it off from the start, which was nice since we were going to be living with each other for the next four weeks.

After some basic introduction exercises and a course overview from our teacher Dave, we all went out for dinner, my first experience with Thai food in Thailand. It was good and the waitress directed me to the less-spicy items on the menu (I’m not the biggest fan of spicy food). It was nice to sit by the ocean and get to know my fellow students.

9 am the next morning was our first class and we all arrived bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, more-or-less. Textbooks and work books got handed out, syllabi were gone over, and course expectations were laid out. It was a pretty long day but another dinner on the beach was a good way to end it. It was nice but I was having a hard time with the switch from Tokyo life to the small, run-down beach-town of Ban Phe. It was pretty serious culture shock and it didn’t help that this part of Thailand was nothing like what I expected, in my mind Thailand was green and mountainous with thick jungles and bright architecture. Ban Phe is dusty and flat with drab concrete buildings and lots of wood/bamboo huts. But I was determined to give the place a chance; at least my classmates were a good group and who can complain about eating dinner on the beach every night?

The first week of classes went well and I slipped pretty easily back into the school mindset. The school had arranged a couple of after-class activities for us, including dinner at a Korean BBQ restaurant (which was like no Korean BBQ I’ve ever had and quite an interesting experience) and a trip to the night market in the next city over.

The Rayong night market was a blast. There were a ton of little food stalls and fruit dealers. Most of the stuff I didn’t recognize but Abhi, one of my fellow students, had been to Thailand before and was able to explain most of the stuff to us. Probably the weirdest thing there was the fried bug cart, piled high with a variety of different bugs all fried to a crispy golden brown. So of course Pete, a 29-year old from Miami, had to try one. He said it tasted pretty much like you’d expect a bug to taste like.

The rest of us acquired slightly more normal food and continued wandering around the market before heading over to Tesco, the big grocery store that was more Wal-mart than Safeway, to attempt to acquire dress clothes that were appropriate to teach in (I brought nothing beyond shorts and t-shirts). Basic clothes were acquired along with two 6-liter jugs of water each (much easier to buy it here where we had a car than haul it back from the Tesco in Ban Phe on foot) and some other odds and ends.

Thursday was our first interaction with Thai students and everyone was grinning ear to ear by the time we finished. We did basic one-on-one interviews aimed at finding out basic information about our student (name, age, family, hobbies, etc.) and the students were amazing. We got to work with the same students on Friday to continue the interview and to get a better feel for their grasp of English. It was an amazing way to get started in a classroom setting and we were all looking forward to our first actual teaching experience the next week.

The weekend was spent relaxing and exploring Ban Phe (there’s not a whole lot to explore). I did get a massage on Sunday which was amazing and cheap (roughly $6 for an hour) and I got back to the school very relaxed to hang out with some of my fellow students before calling it an early night.

Now, that Sunday was the Superbowl back home, so what does a non-sports fan in Thailand do? Gets up at 5:30 am to attend a Superbowl party at one of the ex-pat bars in town. Why not? It was fun and since you can’t have a Superbowl party without food there was ribs, lamb BBQ and fresh pita bread, all homemade and all amazing, though my stomach was a little confused as to why we were having BBQ at six thirty in the morning. I didn’t get to stay for the whole game because I had to go to class but I’m glad I went and I can now say that I watched the Superbowl in Thailand (though it was missing the best part, we didn’t get to see any of the commercials).

Week two started out with two full days of everyone’s favorite subject: Grammar. Seriously, who can pay attention through two 8-hour days of nothing but grammar? My brain shut down about halfway through day one and I’m just glad that most of it’s in the textbook so that I can reference it again later. Tuesday afternoon I decided to take my camera down to the beach to relax and see the scenery a little bit. The sunset that night was spectacular.

Wednesday was spent observing a class and preparing our lesson plans and materials for our first teaching experience the next day. I was in the first group to teach on Thursday and all I can say is wow, what a rush. The feeling I get from teaching is like nothing I’ve ever felt before, it’s amazing to see the student’s faces light up at they participate and use the target language. Totally worth the long hours of prep the night before. After my class I observed three other classes before we headed back to our school to begin our preparations for Friday’s classes. The next day was just as amazing, even though I didn’t feel that my lesson went quite as well as yesterday. I really love being in front of the class and watching the students engage with the lesson. The students here want to learn, they want to be here and it makes all the difference in the world.

Originally the plan for the weekend involved as visa run to Cambodia (which is about two hours away by bus) but we learned that if we did it this weekend we would only get a fifteen-day visa, which isn’t enough to get us through our stay here. So that got put off till next weekend when it would actually do us some good. That left me with only tentative plans for the weekend and so I decided at about 2:30 that I was going to go to Khao Yai National Park. Now, the park is about three hours northeast of Bangkok and the directions on how to get there in my Lonely Planet were less than clear. I managed to get tentative directions from one of my classmates and some of the locals and hopped a songtheaw (a pick-up truck with seats in the back) to Rayong, where I could theoretically catch a bus to Khao Yai. During the 45-minute songtheaw ride common sense started to sneak in and by the time I got to the bus station in Rayong I was pretty determined that my plan was crazy and that I should go back to Ban Phe before I got myself totally lost in Thailand. Still I tried to find out which bus I was supposed to take and when I never got a clear answer about how to get where I was trying to go and had a little breakdown in the Rayong bus station, I grabbed a songtheaw back to Ban Phe. Common sense prevails!

And boy am I glad it did. Friday night was closing night for Oliver’s bar, which had become our after-class hang-out joint since it was right on the water and the owner, a crazy frenchman named Oliver, was awesome. They threw a big party with food and music and pretty much our entire group, including most of the ex-pats who work at the school showed up to close the bar down right. It was a blast and when I finally made my weary way home t around 5am the party was still going. From what I heard from those who managed to stay till the end, things finally began to wind down around 8am. A right proper send off. Oliver’s still around and there’s talk of opening a little BYOB joint near the school as a place for the students and employees to hang out after class but I’m not sure of all the details.

Saturday saw me finally managing to get out of bed around two and I lounged around for a little while, had lunch and then headed into town with Jelena, another one of my classmates, for a massage. We get to the massage parlour to find that they’re closing up early and heading to Ko Samet, the island just off the coast, for the big party that night to celebrate Chinese New Year. We start walking back to the school but I’m still jonsing for a massage and the place I went to last weekend was still open so I said goodbye to Jelena at an internet cafe and went off to get a traditional Thai massage. Wow was that intense, and rather painful. She found muscles knots that I didn’t even know I had and that did not want to come out. I had to keep reminding myself that this was supposed to be relaxing and afterwards I did feel somewhat more relaxed, which was good.

Sunday, which was the true Chinese New Year, Pete, Sophia, Katherine, JB, and I got invited by some of the locals to go with them to Ko Samet for the day. So we all piled into two little fishing boats launched from the beach and sailed across to the island. It felt so good to be out on the ocean again in a small boat and where the water wasn’t freezing. Instead of going to the touristy area we ended up in this tiny little cove with a private beach and plenty of shade. True paradise. It was amazing.  The water was crystal clear and warm (I wish water that temperature would come out of my shower) and we wiled away the afternoon playing in the sea and lounging on the beach. The Thais we came with were amazing and we all managed to communicate despite the language barrier, picking someone up and throwing them in the water is the same in any language.

One of the locals enlisted JB’s help to collect clams and crabs, which got cooked on a little charcoal grill and served right out of the shell. Best crab I’ve ever had. I mean, I watched him take it out of the water, crack it’s shell, put it on the grill, and hand it to me. About as fresh as you can get.

On the way back to Ban Phe we stopped a ways off shore so one of the guys could go fishing for stingrays and the rest of us took advantage of the stop to get in some more swimming. He caught a ray and we all loaded back into the boats and returned to land in time for a drink while watching the sunset. Days don’t get a whole lot better.

But monday morning was a return to the real world, all of us nursing sunburns and Pete limping from the sea urchin spines he managed to get embedded in his foot. Luckily it was a pretty easy day of class and we didn’t have any homework so we all called it an early night to recover from the weekend. Today was another day of class observation and prep work for our own lessons tomorrow. I’m mostly done, just need to do another run through of everything before packing up and going to bed so I’m going to leave this here for now. Look for another post this weekend!