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!