yet another random Thailand anecdote

Everytime I feel as though life here is becoming normal or boring, something completely random, strange, and/or interesting seems to happen. I taught Saturday class last weekend, which is a horrible "conversational" class in which the students basically do worksheets because the parents want their students to speak more, but they also want to be able to see the work that they're doing, which is basically impossible, so they end up sending them to useless Saturday classes with the premise of having their students speak, but also with the desire to see paperwork...see the problem here? Anyway, that's a rant for a different day. So I taught Saturday class last weekend, and I'm teaching it again this Saturday. We get paid for teaching Saturday class, and I wanted some extra money for this month, so I picked up an extra class for this weekend. It's good for the money, but it also means that you have to stay in the city for the weekend, which can be a bit dull. Anyway, the premise of that long beginning is that life was beginning to feel a little dull.

So we went to the soi (side street by our school) today to eat some Tom Yum Guy (hot and sour soup, so good!), like we do every single day. The soi is generally deserted, with maybe one or two people walking or driving down on motorcycles. Today, we walked out of the gates at the school and there were people EVERYWHERE wearing yellow shirts with dragons on them. They were mostly men who were all saying "hello" in the creepy way that Thai men talk to foreign women when they don't actually know English (they all say, "hi, how are you today?" and if you respond in any way, they have no idea what to do because they didn't actually get that far in their English lessons, so they basically laugh at you and talk about you in Thai with their friends. Then we say, "falang cow jai", which roughly means "the foreigner understands what you're saying", and they get very quiet and nervous, and think that we know exactly what they just said in Thai, even though we have no clue, it's really quite a fun game). Anyway, we finally made it through the crowd and to the little soi restaurant when the drums and cymbals began. We looked out, and there were people all decked out in ornate costumes and men carrying elaborate Chinese dragons. It was crazy, there was a huge parade on this little soi that is generally deserted. It was fairly obvious that we were clueless as to what was going on, and the Thai people were basically laughing at us, but unable to actually explain the purpose of this parade because of the language barrier. When I got back to school, I asked one of the Thai teachers, and she said that there is a Chinese temple behind our school somewhere, and this must have been some kind of Chinese holiday or celebration, but she didn't really know what was going on either.

Seriously, if I had been in Canada, I would have thought that this was really strange, but in Thailand, nothing is ever really out of the ordinary because weird things like this happen all the time. There is always some kind of celebration, festival or holiday going on. Next week is father's day, which is the King's birthday, and it is going to be really interesting because monks are going to come to our school and take a collection. Apparently it is crazy and there is an amazing amount of food and offerings for the monks...I have been told to bring my camera because it is apparently unreal (all of our kids are rich, and most are Buddhists, so they all bring a ton for the monks).

Alright, time to go to bed so that I can be well rested for my useless Saturday class in the morning!

cheap cheap for you

I think that I will have a really hard time going back to Canada and buying clothes, shoes, bags, make-up, and food, and it will definitely be hard to pay for an apartment. Everything here is ridiculously cheap, I don't think I'll ever get over it. An expensive cab ride for us here is about $6, seriously.

We were talking about this in the staff room the other day, about how living here really makes you think differently about working conditions and what we would consider to be sweat shops. Someone said that the minimum wage in Thailand is something like 22 THB per hour, which is about 60 cent Canadian. Walking down the street, you see people begging, selling toys and fruit for next to nothing, and it just makes you think about the people working in factories. Working in a factory here is actually not a bad job, especially considering the active sex trade industry in this country! When we hear in Canada how much these people make, we are outraged because it seems so low, and it is, but so is the cost of living, and compared with other jobs, it's actually not a bad wage. Now, I am definitely not condoning sweatshops, or saying that Nike should be making billions of dollars and paying people 60 cents an hour, but I also don't think that the answer is to boycott and only buy clothing or merchandise that is manufactured in Canada or the States. Sure, we know that those workers are being paid and treated better, but what happens to the workers here if the factories are closed and moved to North America? There are so many people here who already don't have work, and those people who were making next to nothing are now actually making nothing, as are the people who work in the shipyards and on the ships that are taking those clothes over to North America.

The obvious and easy solution to dealing with sweatshops is to just buy everything from American Apparel or other companies that manufacture their things in the States, and I have nothing wrong with these companies, but that really is just ignoring the issue and not helping things in any way.

Obviously, we didn't actually come up with any solutions as we were talking, but it was a really interesting conversation, and I just thought I'd share!

Kanchinaburi

We just got back from a really great weekend in Kanchinaburi. It was Krista's birthday on Sunday, and she is the biggest animal lover that you will ever meet, so Kanchinaburi was the obvious choice. We started the day on Saturday by going to the safari, which was really cool. We saw zebras, giraffes, camels, lots of deer (which they kept on stopping at...we finally told them to keep driving when they saw deer because we saw them all the time in Canada), bears, tigers, lions, crocodiles and elephants.

Before we left they were selling bananas to feed to the animals, so we bought some and I am so glad that we did! When we got to the giraffes, the driver told us to open our windows and feed them. As soon as we opened the windows, they stuck their heads right in and ate from our hands. In fact, we were trying to save some bananas for the animals that came later, but we couldn't because the giraffes could bend their necks in all kinds of weird directions and could always find the hidden bananas. After we drove through the safari, we went to watch a crocodile wrestling show and then got to go touch and sit on the crocodiles. After that we went to an elephant show, where they did all kinds of tricks and let us sit on the elephant trunks and touch the elephants.

After the safari, we went to the tiger temple, where apparently monks have trained a number of tigers and where you can go to pet the tigers and get pictures with them. It was really strange because I thought we would get to pet them and look at them a bit, but it was totally just for taking pictures. You went in with two guides, one who took your pictures and one who held your hand. They basically led you around told you when to sit, where to stand, took your picture, and then moved you along. It was a long line of people and it just felt really strange and really fake. It was still cool, though, to see the tigers up close and actually pet them.

The next day was Loi Krathong here in Thailand, which is a day where people make small boats out of flowers, candles and banana leaves and float them down the river as offerings to the water gods, sort of as an apology for polluting the water all year (so they throw even more garbage into the river! It's supposed to be biodegradable, but some of it totally isn't). It was really cool, we had dinner on a river cruise and got to float our own boats down the river (mine didn't tip over and my candle didn't blow out for a long time, which means that I have good luck and that my wish will come true!) We also got to seee everyone on the shores of the river putting out their boats, it was really gorgeous to see all of these candles floating down the river. They also had lanterns attached to helium balloons which they were releasing, so there were candles floating through the air as well as down the river. It was really peaceful and beautiful. We only ended up getting back to Bangkok at 1 am (and had to teach the next day!) but it was completely worth it!

Now it's back to work for another week and probably off to Ko Samet for next weekend! I uploaded more pictures of this past weekend onto Yahoo if you want to look at them.