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!