clean as a bird

btw, these blog titles are just examples of wendy's supreme knowledge of english sayings.

friend, i'm glad you've decided to join me for round two of the k&w trip wrap-up. i'm in an internet cafe now cuz kate took my computer last night...i didn't wanna lug it around to various countries. good news for my computer, bad news for my present sanity.

anyway, on with the story. we left koh tao without a hitch. the catamaran back to the mainland didn't break. i decided we'd take the train back because i generally like trains better than buses and i kinda wanted k&w to see all the kinds of transport in thailand (which i'm pretty sure we did). the train ride back was pretty sucky, though, cuz the train stopped a bunch and was rockier than usual and we were right next to a smoking car and the door kept opening. not a great sleep, but traveling isn't exactly the most glamourous thing anyway.

SUPHAN TIMES
(ok, everyone, i'm bored with chronology. time for highlights only.)
kate and wendy joined me for 5/8, 5/9, and 6/2 on wednesday. the two m5 classes are brilliant and wonderful (5/9 is the honors class, 5/8 is the second highest level); 6/2, on the other hand, is...not. after some intense lesson planning (read: asking kate what games she liked in her spanish classes on the beach on tuesday) i settled for playing 20 questions, kate and wendy being the knowers, the students being the guessers.

5/9, as usual, had their own ideas. after two rounds, pla, the smartest and most outspoken girl in the class, decided that it was her turn to be the knower. she took the white board marker from me and stood at the white board in the typical teacher position; k&w and i made our own team. pla's thing was a building...something in london...not big ben, not the london eye. we totally had it. it was buckingham palace. "WE KNOW IT. CALL ON US." (btw, i think it's funny to be sort of mean and mock my students.) "buckingham palace?" we guessed. NOOOOOO! *hung heads in shame*

that was sort of a lame story. i should prob delete it, but it's a special memory in my head so imma go ahead and keep it.

so anyway, while 5/9 and 5/8 listen to me and understand me and are generally good students, 6/2 is full of kids who a) don't know english and b) have no desire to acquire english skills. so i spend a lot of time talking to myself. it's a hilarious contrast and i'm so glad k&w got to see the extremes. despite their laughably bad reputation, i still love 6/2 and we had a good time playing hangman.

k&w were exhausted so they went home a little early and took a nap. there's a cute picture on fbook. after my m5 convo class (we turned the lights off and talked about ghosts again), we...crap, i have no idea what we did that night. OH i remember. we got some rice and veggies to go and ate dinner and watched grown ups on the bed. the movie really sucked, btw. we only watched about half an hour before we fell asleep but seriously, don't waste your time.

on thursday morning we woke up early to see people making merit to the monks (giving'em stuff in the morning) and get fruit. we came back and had a huge fruit shmorgasboard on my bed: mangosteen, rambutan, banana (which kate used to hate but now apparently likes, but maybe only in thailand), mango, longan, plus some 7-11 snacks. nom nom nom.

after a tesco run, we went out to kanchanaburi on the public bus with about a thousand (ehhhh hyperbole) school kids.

KANCHANABURI TIMES
some bullets:

• pong phen guesthouse is the most awesome guesthouse in kburi. i know this is probably a false statement but we had such a good time there. we ate almost every meal there and one time when we ventured out it was a mistake. they had a pool shaped like a penis (555 foresight?). we had air con AND cable tv and managed to watch the same episodes of the office three times.
• kate was sick on saturday, so we were "forced" to stay home all day. wendy and i ventured out once to get a massage. we spent the rest of the day eating, drinking fruit smoothies, and reading in the sunshine by the pool. wendy and i stayed up late talking and i had a really good time.
• i stepped on a nail. i cleaned and bandaged it asap and i had my tetanus booster before i came. it hurt and bled a lot at first, but it's getting better every day and doesn't look infected or anything. good job healing, body.
• we saw the death railway bridge, the war cemetery, a chinese cemetery, the JEATH museum, and rode elephants. we bought tourist shirts to top it off.
• riding bikes through town was one of my highlights of the trip.
• i wanna go back immediately.

ok this internet cafe is closing so i better go. that's pretty much the end of my k&w story anyway, so good. but now they're playing a country radio station in here (streaming online?) and i'm freaking loving it. it's making me a really happy girl.

btw, kate and wendy are still currently in the air from japan to america. send good thoughts to their plane :-)

eat it and weep

KATE AND WENDY TRIP! as usual, i can't decide how to write this. go day by day so as not to forget everything, but risk boring the reader? group everything by subject--food, adventures, relaxation, mishaps--and maybe miss something hilarious?

i'm going with the daily approach.

day 1: sept 2--kate and wendy arrive
kate and wendy (from here on out to be referred to as k&w) arrived at 11:20 pm on thursday night. after tutoring The Man at 7 pm, i hopped on a van into bangkok. i got into the city, hopped on to the bts at victory monument, rode one stop to phaya thai, and walked to the airport rail link.

did you hear/read that? YOU CAN GET TO THE AIRPORT VIA PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION! i got all the way from suphan to bkk in under three hours and for less than 200 baht. only people who live here will fully appreciate this.

anyway, i kicked it at the airport for a while and went downstairs to wait for them at 11:10. i saw that their plane had already landed, which sent me into a minor frenzy--OHMYGODTHEYTOTALLYALREADYCAMEOUTANDIMISSEDTHEMANDTHEY'RELOSTINBANGKOKFOREVER--
which of course was unnecessary. they showed up after midnight. we hopped in a cab and made it to the stable lodge in bangkok, which does indeed have a western theme. the cab driver didn't know where he was going (typical bangkok), but once we finally found it the woman was still waiting at the front desk, just for us. love thailand.

day 2: sept 3: bangkok
maddy and i had to add pages to my passport and apply for an indian visa in bangkok, so i woke up early on friday morning to get those errands done. i left kate and wendy with my cell phone, lonely planet, and vague directions on what they could do. i didn't know when we'd be done with that passport stuff, but we ended up finishing way earlier than i thought, which meant i could spent most the day with kate and wendy.

after we said bye to maddy--she was off on a day of shopping for cold weather clothes, something we were woefully unprepared for-- the three of us went to the grand palace. i sat outside while k&w wandered the sparkly madness. a group of college girls came over to interview me in typical thai fashion. this seems to be a very popular assignment for english students in thailand: "find a foreigner and interview them!" it's what we did when i went to phuket for english camp, and i've seen it happen elsewhere in the country.

in fact, when we were in the train station just a few hours later, a group of students came up to us to ask if we had a minute for an interview. OH HELL YEAH we'll be your token foreigners.

after the grand palace, we sat down in an au bon pain for a while cooling off and chilling out. i think this is where i first realized k&w were really serious when they said they just wanted to hang out (least this is what kate said and i can only assume she spoke for both). we had a good time just sitting.

anyway, we eventually made our way back to the hotel to gather our stuff to get over to khao san road, where our overnight bus was set to leave from. i figured it'd be easiest to get in a taxi. it might take us a while (an hour from sukhumvit, i guessed) and be a little expensive, but whatever.

TWO HOURS. it took two hours. we were stuck in such bad traffic that our taxi driver fell asleep. i had to poke him to remind him to move.

whatever. we finally made it to stupid khaosan road and were so exhausted by a day in bangkok (what a terrible, unavoidable place to start a trip in thailand) that we just ate food and waited for the bus. kate thought she might throw up so i was worried for that.

day 3: sept 4: getting to koh tao
before the bus ride i had warned k&w that we'd probably stop in the middle of the night for seemingly no reason (peeing, eating, smoking, i guess...but those aren't really reasons, especially when there's a potty on the bus). so at 3 am, when the bus pulled in to a parking lot and the fluorescent lights blinked on, k&w weren't even surprised.

when i asked kate how she felt, she responded with an overly perky "GREAT! i love this bus ride!" she said it was rejuvenating. moving vehicles are kate's cure-all.

we got to the ferry place on chumporn around 5 am, right on time--two hours before the ferry was supposed to leave. i fell asleep on a chair. k&w did some other stuff while i was sleeping.

i had reassured them that this would be the hardest travel day. a big negative on koh tao is that it takes SO FRIGGIN LONG to get to. you could fly to koh samui, but it's expensive and you're still a long ferry ride away. you could fly to suratthani, but more buses/ferries...blah blah blah. it's hard to get to, but i figured k&w were tough travelers and could make it.

so after this already difficult journey, we walked on a long, not-so-sturdy pier to our ferry/catamaran. it was a solid ferry (even if the a/c was too cold), but nonetheless, it broke down--in the middle of the ocean. we could barely see land. we motored along at quarter speed. it seemed like our ferry was broken, but nobody was doing anything--not the foreigners, not the thai people running the boat, nobody. but we determined that yes the boat must be broken, because we all got off at the first of three stops to switch catamarans.

we were 10 minutes away from our stop on koh tao. we could see our beach from this broken catamaran spot. I JUST WANTED TO PUT MY STUFF DOWN SO BAD.

we got on a new boat and finally got to koh tao. by 11 am, we were checked in to our first bungalow. starved and just wanting the beach, we went to a restaurant overlooking the ocean and ordered lunch. our table was on the sand and about 40 feet up from the ocean. we all ordered sandwiches and fruit smoothies. then kate said something that was pretty true but also hilarious:

"i thought only people on the price is right got this kind of stuff."

i have no idea how we all got so lucky, but these few days in koh tao were definitely some of the most perfect days i could've conjured up in any dream. that sounds epically cheesy, but it's pretty true.

days 3-6: sept 4-sept 7: koh tao
the days on koh tao pretty much blend into each other (and, as usual, i'm getting tired of this chronological nonsense) so i'm just gonna group'em together. we spent the first two nights in this one bungalow that was kind of crappy. we swore we had fleas or bed bugs or something after the first night but when we asked the owner people about switching, this guy soe insisted they were just "tiny...tiny ants" that we picked up in the sand and brought to bed with us. so we tried showering and going to bed extra clean and all these other precautions, but there were still bugs so we moved to a bungalow down the road. big upgrade.

we laid around on the white sand, shopped, waited around for meal times to come, played card games, played in the ocean even when the monsoon rains came through, ate roti and 7-11 snacks, and got tons of sleep. we found our favorite eating place--chaba bar, right on the beach--and spent a lot of time sitting in their chairs, eating their breakfast and drinking their iced coffee. we listened to a lot of jack johnson. it was an awesome way to live. leaving sucked, but i think that's how you know you've found a phenomenal place.


i have more to tell you but it's 2 in the morning and even though i don't really feel like sleeping, i think maybe i should make an attempt at it. i've gotta give some finals tomorrow.

ghost stories

today in m5 conversation class, a handful of us were sitting on the floor.

"nicki, have you ever met a ghost?"
"have i ever seen a ghost? ohhhhh...well..."

you know me. i friggin LOVE ghost stuff. anytime there's a ghost-related show on tv, i watch. i've spent many a night seeking out haunted places around the bay area. the ghost of niles canyon story is one of my favorites. gravity hills are my thing. there's an especially creepy one off 580 as you're going toward stockton, off vasco road. you have to drive pretty far along this country road in the complete darkness before you get to this bend in the road. if you put your car in neutral at the beginning of the turn, it goes around the turn completely by itself.

rumor has it that a school bus full of children crashed off the side of the road at that exact turn many years ago. the accident killed all the school kids and the driver. ever since then, the kids have stayed around as ghosts, helping cars around the bend. they say if you put flour on the back bumper of your car, you can see little hand prints left behind.

i told the kids this story, which inspired their own. our school is supposedly haunted. someone died on the second floor of building 11 (the foreign language building, aka ours). there's also one over by building three, next to the basketball court. the boy in the group told us how one time, he was playing basketball and the ball rolled away. he went to get it and when he looked up, he saw a woman in white standing there...headless. he looked away for a second and when he looked back, she wasn't there anymore.

when maddy and i (oh, yeah, maddy was there, too...combined convo class today) suggested hey, maybe we should all go ghost hunting at night, the kids sort of freaked out and told us helllllllll no (in so many words).

the students went on to tell us about thai folklore that says no building is truly complete until someone dies during construction.

"wait...you mean that every time they make a building, someone dies?"
"yep."

DO YOU GUYS KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON RIGHT OUTSIDE MY WINDOW RIGHT NOW?

the adults always ruin everything

back in the day, i was an umpire. i loved it. i got to hang out in the sunshine (sometimes the pouring rain, sometimes the terrible wind, sometimes the bitter cold, but in my brain i like to think it was always pleasantly sunny), watch some kids play one of my favorite sports, and i got paid $20 an hour, which is a better wage than i ever expect to be paid in the future. i was understanding of the girls and they were understanding of me. i wasn't too hard on them, so they weren't too hard on me.

the worst thing, though--easily the most terrible part of the job, hands down--was the parents. "OH UMP HOW CAN YOU CALL THAT A STRIKE!" "WHAT?! FAIR?!" "THAT'S AN INFIELD FLY IF I'VE EVER SEEN ONE, UMP!"

i was 16-18 years old. these were grown adults. oddly, although they had the years and the potential for wisdom with them, they lost perspective on the game way more often than the girls. the parents got so invested and acted like everything was so serious. yeah, i had some overly invested girls, but for the most part, they knew what they were in for, they knew when they messed up, they knew when i messed up, and we never got in huge fights. a lot of the umpires for that league--me included--will say they did it entirely because the girls were great and entirely in spite of the sometimes horrid parents.


my students here in thailand are phenomenal. some of them have way more potential and drive than i ever have, and some of them are way smarter than me, a lot of them far more charismatic, and about three quarters of them are genuinely good people. (you can't win'em all and i think 75 percent is a pretty good chunk.) they are the reason i absolutely love teaching here.

let's see if you can connect the dots and see where i'm going right now.

two of my students got squirrels for pets

they're three and a half weeks old. they joined us for tutoring on wednesday night. they drink milk and sleep with the girls at night.

me plus an ADORABLE RODENT. yes, it's wearing a collar and a bell.

UPDATE: these squirrels died one week later.

notes on thailand

• hula hooping seems to be very popular right now. i'm waiting for skip it to make its thai debut.
• sweetened condensed milk is a regular and extremely popular condiment. you have an iced coffee? let's put some scm in it. you have a pancake (roti, which is really more crepe-like than pancake-like)? i bet it'd taste good with some scm. i see you have a mango there--what do you think about pouring some scm on it? 
• i still have 700+ students. this is normal.
  
• breakfast, lunch, and dinner can all be the same meal--some form of noodles and rice. there's no such thing as "breakfast food."
• robert pattinson is known as RPattz to my girls.
• slapstick comedy reigns supreme.
• the conversational equivalent of "hey, how are you?" is "hey, have you eaten yet?" the question literally translates to "have you had rice yet?"
• having a huge nose with a monstrous bridge is incredibly sexy. some of my students stare at my nose in awe and touch theirs with a bit of sadness. rumor has it thais don't like to wear sunglasses because they don't rest on their noses well.
  

it's the final countdownnnnnnnnnn

this post is probably best viewed while listening to europe's "the final countdown." you know, that's pretty ballsy for a rock band to name itself after a whole continent.

also, this won't be the final countdown. i'm being dramatic, but i think life's more fun that way.

days until...
...kate and wendy come: 12
...my final grades are due: 32
...i leave for laos and vietnam: 34
...maddy and i land in mumbai: 46
...we look at the pyramids: 54
...i once again see western society (in vienna): 64
...we walk on the swiss alps: 71
...aj rawls welcomes us to paris with open arms: 77
...i step back on american soil: 83