A Day in the Life

When I wake up I am usually faced with this...

What happened to the mountain?

Over the past few weeks I've noticed some pretty hilarious signs around schools in Phang-nga...

"The important place in Canada is Niagra Falls."

"Sooh ripe, sooh rotten"

After a day of trying to convey to the kids that it is appropriate neither to draw on the wall of the classroom in indelible pen nor to not bring a notebook or pen to class, I head home. And this is what my walk from school looks like...

Speaking of cows...this is the view from  my garage door on my way to work every morning. This cow is my new best friend. I like to think that he's protecting me from the snakes that frequent the street.

By the time I'm home from work, the daily afternoon weather of sunny-skies-suddenly-turned-into-thunderstorms begins.

After a quick break (usually involving a piece of delicious tropical fruit and one of the sacred Diet Cokes that I've managed to find), I head to the Genius School where I tutor (pretentious name, but it actually does great work). The kids at Genius are, as the name implies, very smart and very motivated. Not only are they intelligent, but they're also significantly more linguistically creative than the other Thai students with whom I've interacted. "Creativity" is a strange thing in Thailand. As evidenced by Thai students' outstanding skills when armed with crayons, artistic creativity is certainly not laking when it comes to drawings and paintings and collages of the King made from pieces of grain...

On the other hand, creativity with words is utterly non existent among most of the Thai students. Ask them to list their favorite things to do when it is hot and they will all copy from one another and have the same three things: "I like to swim, I like to drink cold, I like to beach." I have literally had classes of 40+ kids where every single student (except for the three or four that sit in the front row and actually pay attention to and understand what I'm saying) hands in the exact same three things in the exact same order with the exact same mistakes. This is not the case at Genius.

Each of the students drew his/her own robot, and created an "ID" for it (name, age, what it's made out of, favorite color, favorite foods, where it lives). Then, they drew their robots on the board and read out paragraphs they'd written about their robots. 

 When I had a class on "likes" and "dislikes," I asked each student to create a creature and list its likes and dislikes. This is an example.

After Genius, I head home and cook up some dinner. I got pretty ambitious last week and made my own wontons and broth. The wontons were filled with a pumpkin, soy sauce, sesame, ginger and garlic mixture. 

This was my Thanksgiving "feast," for those of you who wanted to know what I cooked. Butternut squash risotto and my attempt at roasted Japanese sweet potato/Thai pumpkin/cauliflower mix.

During dinner on my porch I am usually greeted by a friendly insect such as this enormous beetle.

These are the enormous red, biting ants that populate pretty much every tree and phone line. They also frequent my house.

Since it's Thailand and people here pretty much take every royal birthday/tradition/commemoration as an excuse to throw a festival, there have been quite a few festivals in the past weeks. These festivals usually involve dance performers (aka 12  year old girls and lady boys dressed in more glittery versions of Liza Minnelli's get-ups in Cabaret) and many stands selling various food items. Some are good (mango with sticky rice has given new meaning to the word "delectable") and some are really, really egregiously horrifying (entire stands of fried worms, not even little bugs or ants that one could possibly construe as potentially crunchy and salty and therefore edible but large, juicy, Timon and Pumba-style insects). Last week was Loi Krathong. This festival's tradition is that it takes place on the evening of the full moon in November and its purpose is to pay respects to the water spirits. This respect is issued in the form of the "krathong," which is a float made of banana leaves, bread, incenses, flowers, and a candle. The bread apparently disintegrates so it's "good for the water"...not sure about the incense and candle. Basically you buy one of these miniature floating gardens, light the candle from one of the many large torches along the edge of the river and send it on its way. If you're lucky (ie. not me), you manage to construct some sort of bubble case around the candle so it stays lit for more than 0.5 seconds. 

The other two great things about the festival (besides when the fear of sinking into the river because that wooden plank you see above = not stable) were the cars blasting Thai techno music...

and the roasted chestnuts sold at some of the stands. They were the most holiday spirit thing I've seen in Phang-nga aside from the scandalous Santa Claus skirts worn by the ladies who work at the new KFC.

Speaking of holiday spirit, I just recently fully acknowledged that it is the first week of December. Perhaps I can attribute that to the non-pasty color of my skin that usually marks New England Winter in my mind and the fact that I haven't worn socks or long pants since August. For the past four years, the first week of December marked the beginning of the many holiday parties and "balls" (although whether "ball" was ever the appropriate term for a dance in a gym is questionable) that constituted the bitterly cold weeks before winter break began. As of Halloween, I'm used to looking out the window of my over-heated dorm room and seeing mountains of snow. I guess the lacking holiday cheer on this side of the world (or because I'm seriously craving some delicious hazelnut coffee from a certain store in Brunswick, Maine or because I miss walking around NYC on winter afternoons) is what's caused this nostalgic monologue, but I felt it necessary to send glad tidings to everyone who takes the time to read this; I hope all of your Decembers are filled with merry sentiments and sing-a-longs. Whoever figures out how to send me a snowball wins my eternal love and a life-time supply of fried worms.