raise your hand when i call your name

here are some student nicknames on my rosters this year:

• beer
• boss
• raining
• tom (dad shout out!)*
• kate (sister shout out!)*
• stamp (this is a standard name)
• porn 
• golf

*sorry mom. no donnas. 

this is the year i'm gonna do it!

i've got lots of tutoring after school this semester. this is excellent news for me because one of my laments about my life in suphan last quarter was that i wasn't busy enough. you guys know me--i like to be busy with tons of stuff all the time. i like when i think that one free hour in the day is a lot.

i get the feeling the students have been bitten by that ambitious bug that always comes around at the beginning of the year. "this year i'm finally gonna learn english! i better get a tutor!" lol. we'll see how long they stay interested for.

btw, i'm teaching the most beautiful lady boy this quarter. he's adorable. he lingered after class today to ask how my summer was. awwwww.

oh, and a bangkok/thailand protest update: the red shirts threw up the white flag last night. the government imposed a curfew from 8 pm last night to 6 am this morning, which essentially means anyone on the street can be arrested/turns the streets into a war zone. red shirts (i think it's mostly all red shirts) are setting a lot of stuff on fire around the city, including central world, which is one of bangkok's hugest malls. the mall's partially collapsed now. i have no idea when the city'll be back to normal and all of this stuff will be over...i would've thought that the surrender last night would've indicated some sort of pathway to peace, but apparently not. there've been some protests and arsonists in the north and in the east, but suphan's still thankfully violence-free.

teachaaaaaa

i've been wearing my teacher nicki hat for two days now and i'm already relishing in the joy/hilarity/excellentness of teaching again. i'm teaching the 11th and 12th graders this semester (i had 9th and 10th graders last semester, but of course you remembered that, attentive reader), so since the kids have moved up a grade since we last saw them--this was, after all, summer vacation we were just on--i still have my former 10th graders, now as 11th graders. when i walked into a couple of my favorite classes, we all squealed in excitement to see each other again. "nickiiiii!!!" some of them shouted.

i don't think everyone's excited to see teacher nicki again, though. i also heard a couple of the "oh, nicki..." utterances, too. lol. too bad, so sad.

ANYWAY, of course i have some hilarious stories for you.

so in the class of smart 12th graders, instead of the typical "what did you do over summer?" activity, i decided i'd make a legit effort to learn these kids' names. i asked them to write their name and one word that described them on the board, and i took a picture of the student with the self-made label. welllll, since they're the ambitious nerdy types, they weren't satisfied with the standard quiet/funny/friendly/lazy...they got out their dictionaries and got creative.

one boy wrote "sexy" for his word, which sent the class into riotous laughter. another girl came up and wrote "chocolate." "what does it mean to be chocolate?" i asked. "my skin," she said, and pointed to her incredibly-not-chocolate skin. the class laughed. "excuse me," i said, hands on my hips, "but you had teacher tash [who is actually black] last quarter. you know what chocolate skin is."

i was paying attention to another kid when i hear a girl in the front row spelling a word for her friend. "H-I-T-L-E-R."

"ARE YOU SPELLING HITLER?!" she and her friends giggle and say yeah, is it right?

"you mean hitler, like SIT DOWNNNNNN!!!!!" i shout at the class, heiling and demanding everyone to put their asses in their seats. this girl at the front, the one who's "like hitler," just starts cracking up and hunches her shoulders in that geeky, sort of shy way. totally un-hitler-like. "well, if you're gonna write hitler, you have to heil."

running along the river

i always see the same old man running along the river when i go in the evening. he's tall and lanky, always wearing a white shirt and some black swishy pants. he salutes me with a big grin, like "hey, white girl, nice to see you running again!" today an old woman clapped enthusiastically and gave me a big thumbs up. another pair of guys smoking cigarettes and looking weathered gave me a couple thumbs up, too.

ALSO, i bought something that has improved my running ten fold: a headband. like from the 80s. look at it!

yes, i've legitimately worn this every day since i got it five days ago. HOW MUCH DO I RULE?!

violent protests, thai style

[5/15/10 10:32:44 AM] Nicki Arnold: so i'm reading about the protests in the ny times
[5/15/10 10:32:45 AM] Nicki Arnold: and listen to what some of the protesters are doing
[5/15/10 10:32:48 AM] Nicki Arnold: "Some prepared to fling plastic bags filled with pungent fish sauce and hot chilies at soldiers. "
[5/15/10 10:32:51 AM] Nicki Arnold: FISH SAUCE BOMBS
[5/15/10 10:33:18 AM] Madeline Armstrong: WHAT! hahaha
[5/15/10 10:33:23 AM] Madeline Armstrong: thailand
[5/15/10 10:33:24 AM] Madeline Armstrong: that's insane
[5/15/10 10:33:32 AM] Nicki Arnold: 555
[5/15/10 10:33:35 AM] Nicki Arnold: of course

also, maddy and i regularly talk to each other on skype when we're 20 feet away from each other in our rooms.

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.

april was supposed to be the hottest month

that's what everyone said--the internet, the teachers in the office, people who have read lonely planet, everyone. "get out of thailand in april," thai people warned us.

rocking, so april was indeed pretty friggin  hot and now it's may, but IT'S STILL SO HOT. there's a story in the bangkok post today about how it's almost a heat wave and there's a nearly fatal threat of exhaustion throughout the country.

"Health officials fear there will be heat stroke fatalities if the high temperatures continue for several more days."
"Department records showed the maximum temperature in Bangkok hit 39.7C on Monday, three degrees above the hottest day on April 27 when the temperature reached 36.7C."
"'The extremely hot weather will stay for another few days,' Mr Maytee said."


another few days. awesome.