that would make too much sense

"When hearing the alarm and the main office announces emergency messages, such as "This moment the school is having fire emergency without reason". The teachers have to lead students out of the building immediately. Everyone stops all activities to prepare to move out. If you stay far away from fire place you can take shoes for safety."

"If you see smoke notice sign or smoke from the smoke producer machine. You should to turn back other way if haven't other way to use, please tell children should to stoop down or crawl when smoke to lower."

These were just some of the instructions that they gave us for the fire drill the other day. I swear they just type these into one of those translating programs and print them without reading. They have an entire office of English teachers, but never ask us to edit. It is little things like this that make my day more enjoyable. There are hilarious signs like this one all over the school.

One of my favourite signs is the one in all of the bathroom stalls that says "no feet on the toilet." When I first got here, I was confused, but now I really appreciate that sign. I have probably mentioned before that Thai people use squatter style toilets. The school has mostly Western toilets, but most of the kids have squatters at home, so when they see a Western toilet they don't really know what to do. There have been a few times when I have gone to the bathroom and there have been dirty footprints on the toilet seat...so this sign actually makes a lot of sense, even though it is written in English, so most of the people can't read it anyway (I hadn't thought about that until right now, anyone who is reading the sign in English probably doesn't need to be told not to put their feet on the toilet seat...they don't really think these things through here).

Another thing that they haven't thought through in this country are the escalators. In Canada, when you get on an escalator on the first floor, you can usually just keep going up to the top because all of the escalators going up are beside each other...it just makes sense. In Thailand, they do not have this organisation. You never know which way an escalator is going to go. Often, you will be coming down, and the escalator right beside yours will be coming up...essentially both leading to the same place, which means that you have to continually get off of the escalator and look around for the next one going down. I know this sounds kind of whiney, but it is quite annoying when you are on the fourth floor and want to get down to the first, because you have to zig zag through the whole mall to get there...usually it is just easier to find an elevator, even if it is across the mall, and go down that way.

So this past weekend, we just hung around Bangkok and didn't really do much. On Sunday, we went to Ilda and Louis' and sat by their pool, which was fabulous. It was nice to have a weekend of nothing, I haven't had one of those in a long time. It's not like it's very stressful when we go away, in fact, it's quite relaxing, but sometimes it's nice to just stay home. Also, on Saturday, I bought 11 movies for 1000 THB, which is about $25. It's great, there is a mall right by our house where you can get really cheap movies, and you can return them if they don't work (which is key...you can get movies much cheaper at other places, but they often don't work, so you're just wasting your money).

Oh ya, I think my phone number will be changing soon because the phone companies are adding an extra "8" to the beginning of all numbers because they are running out of numbers or something like that...I never really know what's going on, because most of the information is in Thai, but that is what I've heard, so I'll let you know if it changes. Hope all is well at home!