back to school

first day back to school. no teaching today, but everyone was around in the office...i dunno, i think we were supposed to clean our desks and i guess the kids were cleaning the classrooms. it was like a warm up day. this is a brilliant idea, because the kids are clearly not in school mode yet.

students look excitedly at me and wave.
me: "hi! how are you?"
students: (scared, confused faces turn to smiles and nods)

no english. maddy and i ran into some of the girls we went to phuket with and we were like, "when's the last time you spoke english?" "two months ago!" they said. like it wasn't obvious.

anyway, so it was a warm up day today. we got our schedules in the morning and maddy and i felt like high schoolers ourselves. we studied up and compared. i think i have the suckier schedule this quarter (FOUR 8:30 am classes. blasted early class), but it's only fair cuz maddy's was def worse last quarter. we were all giddy walking into school this morning and walking past the hordes of students waiting to go to morning assembly. the first time we did this walk last semester, i was nervous and intimidated. this time, i felt like jumping up and down and going, "STUDENTS! we're back! aren't you thrilled?! I AM!" alright, maybe less cheesy and enthusiastic, but i was feeling somewhere along those lines.

it's like i forgot how much i actually really love this job. these kids rule.

kanchana came in, so we chatted with her for a bit.

"kanchana, do we have to teach today?"
"yes...no...i'm not ready, i'm not teaching today...up to you."
555. working in thailand. maddy and i looked at each other and decided we totally weren't either. i was really settling into the warm up idea.

sooooo we cleaned our desks and we were just hanging out, catching up with all the teachers, when noon goes, "nicki, you have a visitor. you want her to come up?" um...ok. i don't really understand who my visitor could be....

......OH WAIT. pause for a minute. when i was on the song tau through town the other day, this woman from amway sat down next to me and tried to talk to me for 10 minutes. she didn't know any english and my thai doesn't really extend beyond "i'm a teacher at sa-nguan ying," so we were sort of at a loss. but cuz it was a thai interaction, we were laughing a lot and being nice and having fun. she was like "thursday night...6:30...sa-nguan ying..." plus some thai words and i was like ummmm ok, thursday night at 6:30, i'll meet you in front of school, yeah, sure, here's my phone number.  thursday night rolled around and i completely forgot about it. i figured it didn't matter--i had no idea what she wanted to meet for, anyway, so who gives a crap.

then she called me this morning--friday morning--and i could only tell it was her cuz she said like two english words and mostly unintelligible thai and "sa-nguan ying." i apologized to her and told her in thai that i forgot about last night, and sorry, ok bye!

what if this crazy woman from amway is my visitor?! so they said that she was coming up, but when she hadn't come up after 15 minutes or so maddy and i was like "we're hungry, let's go eat."

we come back from lunch and coffee about an hour later, and THERE SHE IS. the crazy amway woman who speaks a different language is sitting there at the desk behind mine. she started speaking and i looked at maddy desperately and i was like "oh my goddddd do you understand what's going on?" maddy tried to ask what she was doing...did she wanna do tutoring? learning? finally maddy was like "does she wanna sell you something?" yessss, that's what she wants. "ohhhh mai ow, kaaa." i don't want what you're selling.

"no sell. no sell. good produc!"

finally suriya came over to help translate the situation. "she wants to tell you about a product," suriya deduced. "i don't care about the product," i said. eventually the woman got the point, packed up her stuff, and left the office.

she came to my place of work to try to sell my amway beauty products. who does that? HONESTLY.

welcome back to work.