pictures

the Doi Boy Cabaret in Hua Hin...yes, these are/were all men, the one on the left looks exactly like Celine Dion

My kids in the ballroom at school, definitely my favourite place!

wow my kids are cute!

broken down

I spent an hour and a half on the side of a busy highway on Sunday night. We had spent the weekend at Hua Hin and were on our way back to Bangkok when the bus pulled over to the side of the road. I was half sleeping, so I didn’t really know what was going on, when the bus driver started yelling something in Thai. Immediately, all of the Thai people on the bus jumped up and started to get off the bus. We had no idea what was going on, but then noticed that smoke was billowing from the front dash, and started to clue in. We all ran off the bus and watched as the bus smoked and the driver stood ready with his fire extinguisher. The bus didn’t actually start on fire, we think that it just overheated, but there was definitely a lot of smoke. So we proceeded to wait for our replacement bus, which ended up taking an hour and a half! It was horrible and quite annoying. Other than that, it was a really good weekend. The weather was perfect, the people that we went with were fun, and the food was really good. We even ended up going to the Doi Boy Cabaret, which is a lady boy show where they wear elaborate costumes and where they did a particularly good Tina Turner impersonation. It’s really too bad that the smoking bus is how we ended the weekend, because other than that, it was a really great two days.

On a completely different note, I have a new favourite fruit. I first tried it at our cooking class in Chiang Mai and have been hooked ever since—it is called the mangosteen. Although the name is similar, it does not look or taste at all like a mango. The outside is a hard dark purple and the inside looks like soft garlic. I have been told that you can find it at Superstore, and it just came in season here, so you should go see if they have them because they are delicious!

Right now at school we are finishing up exams and starting to prepare for our year end concert. My class is doing “In the Jungle,” and “I like to Move it” and are all going to be dressed up as jungle animals. It has the potential to be really cute, and so far they are doing really well at learning the dance (I am working with another teacher and her class, and at one point in the song we have our kids doing the robot…it is the cutest thing that I have ever seen, we’ll see if they actually do it on stage!). Yesterday we didn’t teach any classes because our students were doing Thai testing. I went into the classroom during the test to pick up some papers, and the students were all sitting at separated tables doing exams that had come out of sealed grey envelopes, it was intense. These kids are three, I have no idea what they were possibly doing, seeing as they cannot read yet, but they were doing something because the test was at least five pages long. They did this testing all day long, I have no idea how they managed to keep them sitting for hours on end. I am definitely taking them to the playground for a long time today as a reward.

We were watching some skiing on our hotel TV this weekend and it made us really glad that we were heading to the beach! I’ve never been a winter sports person, so I’m not really missing the snow at all, I don’t know how I’m going to survive next winter!

Here are some other pictures that I tried to post, but weren't working at the time:

making Spring rolls

my beautiful ton yum and spring rolls

Freezing at the highest point in Thailand

no peeing on the mountain!

Three years old!

my kids

So much has happened in the past few days! First of all, on Thursday and Friday of last week, we had Sports Day at Lertlah, which is basically like track and field with cheerleaders. The cheerleading was by far the most important part too, and some of my kindergarten kids have been missing naps for weeks in order to practice. I had been told that the kids would be dressed up, but I was definitely not prepared for what I saw. There were little Jean-Bennets running around everywhere, little three and four year olds in fishnet stockings, boots with heels, heavy eyeliner, the works. It was crazy. This is a picture of my three year olds doing their routine. I still can't belive how decked out they were, it was unreal.

On Friday, we left Bangkok to spend our long weekend in Chiang Mai. My parents went there when they were here and absolutely loved it, as does everyone who goes there, so we were quite excited. We had a completely packed weeekend, and had a ton of fun. On the first day, we toured the city in the morning, and went touring factories around the area in the afternoon (we went to umbrella, silver, gem, Thai silk, and laquerware factories). That night we went shopping in the amazing market. The next day we took an absolutely amazing Thai cooking class. We learned how to cook all of our favourite Thai dishes...and they actually tasted really good! The best part was making chicken cashew and lighting our onions on fire, which is what I am doing in the picture. It was terrifying, but really fun. We also learned how to make pad thai, green curry, tom yum khun (hot and sour thai soup), spring rolls, and mango sticky rice. They also took us on a guided tour of the market, let us taste the different kinds of Thai curries and showed us all of the different Thai vegetables and herbs. At the school, they let us taste all of the Thai fruits that we had always wondered about in the markets, which was very interesting as well. The best part is that they are sending us a cook book with easy recipes for all of the dishes that we made, so if you're nice to me, I can make you good Thai food when I get back!

That night we went to the Sunday market, which is the most famous market in Chiang Mai. Things were ridiculously cheap and we bought far too much, but my apartment is going to be so beautiful next year with all of the decorations, wall hangings and pieces of art that I have bought so far, I can't wait to decorate!

On our last day in Chiang Mai, we took a tour that took us to the highest point in Thailand. It was 8 degrees at the top of the mountain and we were absolutely freezing. I actually took a picture of the thermometer because we were so cold. The coldest temperature on record there is -1, I didn't think that it got that cold in Thailand! The tour was good, but we were all super tired, so we were very happy that we spent a lot of our time in transit so we could sleep in the van! That night we went back to the night market, and bought even more stuff that we probably didn't need, but it was all so cheap that we couldn't help it. We got all of our stuff packed up and headed to the airport to find that our flight had been delayed! It was really annoying and the flight that was supposed to leave at 10:15 pm only ended up leaving at 12:45 am, which meant that we got to bed at about 3:30 last night, only to get up 3 1/2 hours later to come to school. So we are all pretty tired today, but it was worth it because of the great weekend that we had!