various life updates

i realized that some things have happened in my life that i haven't told you about. they don't have much to do with each other other* than the fact that they've all happened, and they've all been in my life.


hopefully the rest of the post won't be as repetitive as that last sentence. i broke stuff up into sections so you have some kind of clue as to when i'm changing subjects completely.


no, i don't get any time off.


a lot of people back home have been asking me what i'm doing for christmas and how many days i have off. the answer is zero. i have zero days off for christmas. i live in a buddhist country, and i get days off for things like the king's birthday, not the day when jesus christ was born.


BUT of course we're doing some celebrating. tash, maddy, and i are going to bangkok with the m4/m5/m6 students (those are sophomores, juniors, and seniors), mainly to give them a lesson on christmas on the bus ride there. maddy and i are planning to sing perform "baby it's cold outside" (i'm the girl part. amber and i have been dueting this song for four years and i've always been the girl, so i've got this down).


we'll get back from bkk around 6 pm (hopefully, depending on traffic...), when we'll promptly go to the thai-farang dinner place across the street, where they're giving us a free (!) christmas dinner. paul, the guy who owns the place, is dutch, so he's making us all a dutch dinner for the special occasion. there've been rumors of mashed potatoes. we'll be with around 15 of us foreign teachers, plus the older farang guys who normally hang out at the thai-farang place. i'll have to put on bug spray and i'll be sitting outside and i'll probably be sweating a little bit. it'll be the weirdest christmas dinner ever. i can't wait.


after that, i'll come upstairs, skype with the fam on their christmas morning, then probably drink some wine and talk christmas with everyone here.


bangkok traffic makes me want to slit my own throat


this past friday, ciee put on a holiday dinner in bangkok for everyone in the program (or all those who teach close to bkk and wanted to come). teaching discussions would start at 4 pm (ha, yeah right, we don't give a crap about that), and dinner would be served at 6 pm. great, we thought. free dinner, and we don't have plans for the weekend anyway. so tash, maddy, and i hopped on a van from suphanburi at 4 pm. we figured we'd get to bangkok around 5:30, then we'd get in a taxi and get to the dinner just after 6 pm. 


5:45 pm rolled around and we were still only on the edge of the city--stuck in some TERRIBLE traffic. it was the worst bangkok traffic i've ever been in. we moved one mile in probably 20 minutes. maddy and i talked about ways we wanted to kill ourselves. we talked about what we were doing exactly five years ago at that time. we talked about where we'd be exactly two weeks from that time (on a beach on koh phi phi for new years...mmm). we talked about how bored we were. we talked about why bangkok SUCKS BALLS cuz of the traffic alone. 


finally, at like 6:30 pm, the van dropped us off and we rejoiced in stretching and standing up. we motioned to a taxi driver and showed him the name of the place we were supposed to have dinner (phil, the moron in charge of the teach in thailand program, was nice enough to write directions to the restaurant in thai so taxi drivers could find the place, which was in podunk nowhere, just like our orientation hotel). the taxi driver nodded, told us he'd put the meter on, and we got in. he started asking us about seafood, and we assumed he was just making conversation. "seafood? you like? tom yum?" yeah, sure, we like seafood. just take us to the restaurant on the map, man.


turns out the seafood question wasn't just conversational banter. he had NO IDEA where the restaurant was, so he took us to some random seafood market/restaurant. for no apparent reason. we're fairly certain he just stole his dad's taxi (he looked nothing like the guy on the license taped to the dashboard of the car) and thought it'd be funny to play a trick on these farang girls.


so at this point, it's 7-something, we're hungry, we need to pee, and we're at some random location in bangkok. SCREW YOU, PHIL. it's all phil's fault. he's the one who organized a dinner at 6 pm on a school day, and he's the one who put it at a restaurant so far outside the city center that even taxi drivers don't know where it is. (phil, if you're reading this, sorry. i shouldn't be so mean. it was very nice of you to organize and give us a free dinner. but seriously, you couldn't pick something near the grand palace on a saturday evening?) 


we got on the skytrain, took it to the stop closest to this stupid, far away restaurant, and grabbed a cab to take us the rest of the way. he sounded like he confidently knew where he was going, but so did the last guy. without other options, we just got in the taxi and hoped he'd take us to the right place. or any place that served food and had a bathroom.

at 7:45 pm, the guy turns to tash (who's sitting in the front seat), and says he needs to get some gas. oh, yeah, fine, let's get gas. great. awesome. we pulled off at the gas station and the gas people made all of us get out of the car for god knows what reason. so there we were, standing in a gas station on the outskirts of bangkok, overnight bags and all, starving, and needing to pee real bad. low point. fill-up done, we got back in the car and he drove literally TWO MORE MINUTES and we were at the restaurant. finally. 8 pm. we peed (the bathroom was gorgeous, btw, and had coy fish in a tank...made things a little better) and ate the food that was a little cold by that point, because we were two hours late.

thai time. psh.

we spent a lot of time in traffic in the last 36 hours, actually. our van ride back to suphan took almost two hours. i think i've said about a thousand times that this drive should only take an hour and a half, at most. on the ride home, the driver decided to blast some stupid thai music, a guy who smelled like cheap women's perfume sat next to me, and my leg was touching his for the whole ride cuz the van was completely full.


ughhhhhhh. traffic is the sole reason i HATE bangkok.


bagels


i had one this morning at au bon pain. onion. it was delicious, so i had another. cinnamon raisin this time. had to have one boy and one girl flavor, of course. it's things like bagels that make me love bangkok. 


also, last night, i went out with a bunch of people who i don't normally get to see/talk to and went dancing (ohhhh going out, how i've missed you!). it's things like that that make me love that stupid city, too. 


love-hate relationships are hard to manage.


working legally


we got our work permits last week. look how cool they are.

oooh! a work permit! (i know, i know, it's backwards. damn photobooth.) 

almost two months after i've been showing up to school every day, i'm cleared to work here. woohoo!

*i love when double-word sentences happen. they're not really pretty when they're written, but whatever. i ditched pretty writing like 20 years ago.

nicki helps ogee go to college

tash, maddy, and i tutor this boy, ogee, three times a week. we switch off, so tash takes mondays, i'm on tuesdays, and maddy's on thursdays. we started two weeks ago, but cuz of miscommunication and his fancy trip to europe, i just started today. when we got back from school at 5:20 (tuesday and wednesday we teach an extra smart class after school), he was already sitting outside yoo dee mee sook on his motorbike, ready to whisk me away to get some english learnin' in him.

"oh...i've never been on a motorbike before," i said a bit nervously before i climbed on.
"oh, haha. it's fun."

i awkwardly grabbed his sides and away we went. it was a jerky ride and that, paired with the fact that i didn't have a solid grip on him (no way was i gonna hug this high school kid's stomach upon first introduction), probably made me look like a fool. when we came up on the intersection, who do we see on the motorbike next to us but kanchana (my coordinator at school) and her husband.

i laughed because hey, there's my boss and here i am on the back of a motorbike with a 17-year-old boy and i'm not wearing a helmet and there kanachana is laughing at me and ogee together, so why not join in.

just when i got used to being passenger (i was just mastering the leaning techniques), we got to his house. it's HUGE. i'm used to the houses around here being more like modest townhouses that look a little weathered from the storm and well loved. but this house...i kicked off my shoes, entered through a sliding glass door, walked between leather couches and a big flat-screen tv, and sat down in a room that overlooked a porch with a pond on one side and maybe a fountain of some kind on the other.

these people must be loaded.

ogee's a tight kid. he's a senior in high school, looking to go to university to become a civil engineer. he wants to design houses. he's a master at math and physics, but can't get english down (when he told me this, i reassured him that he wasn't alone--math/science people are notoriously bad at english. no offense, math friends). but he knows that if he wants to pass the standardized test to get into university (think SAT, thai-style), he needs to understand a lot more english then he does now. he really wants to go to university. REALLY wants to. i told him that if he really wants to and really tries, he'll get there.

we chatted about the collectivist nature of thais vs the individualism all over america, about whether he wants to get married or not (one of the first questions he asked me was if i was single, not because he wants to date me, but because in thailand that's a normal introductory question), if he wants to have kids (he doesn't--like i said, he just wants to build houses), and he wants to live in suphanburi forever.

around 7 pm, his sister brought a plate of fried rice to me. i asked ogee if i should eat with them at the table (his sister and mom had just sat down to dinner at the table in the dining room), and he gave me this non-answer--of course, he's thai--so i just sort of said i wanted to eat with them, carried my plate to the table, and ate a fairly quiet meal with the three of them.

after dinner was through, he drove me home in his family's bmw. at least that's what it smelled like. that, or a cadillac. something grandparents own. thailand has imported that exact smell.

dreamworld: thailand's ripoff disneyland (or that time i turned 23)

(warning: this will be a long post. i broke it up with some subheads for you. but not for this first part. it's just the intro.)

i didn't have plans for my birthday originally. i'm not a huge birthday person (i hate people cooing over me, coddling me and asking me what i wanna do and making sure i have a good time and blah blah blah crap), but i knew i wanted to get out of suphan. a few weeks ago, a brilliant thought hit me: DREAMWORLD. the amusement park's tag line is literally "the world of happiness." their little mascot wears some of the exact same outfits as mickey. i think i saw minnie walking around the park. the amount of copyright infringement was baffling. but hey, it's thailand. as we've been told before, the rules are up to you.

the plan was to leave suphan on the 8 am bus to bangkok. we'd decided to take the public bus over the personal minivan we usually take because, even though the bus would take longer, it would be cheaper and it would take us right to the morchit bus station, where we'd catch the city bus straight to dreamworld. the park opened at 10 am, and we figured we'd get into the park sometime before 11 am. perfect.

here's what actually happened.

getting to dreamworld 

6:15 am -- alarm goes off. i think i hit snooze, but i really hit off. nancy (who teaches up north but came down for some suphan fun times) asked me at 6:30 am what time it was.

7:15 am -- got delicious coffee at this adorable coffe house down the street.

7:45 am -- reached the bus station, where about five different thai bus station guys asked us (me, maddy, nancy, tash, ally, sam) where we wanted to go. "bangkok," we all repeated. one guy claimed us ("oohh, look at the farang i scored!") and lead us toward a bus that said "bangkok suphanburi" on the side. the bus was empty, but i attributed that to the early morning and the fact that it was saturday.

8 am -- the bus leaves right on time. EFF YEAH.

8:10 am -- sam makes a comment about how the bus is going some crazy direction to bangkok, but i give him what i'm pretty sure was a "yeah right, sam" look/comment, and we all resumed conversation.

8:55 am -- we start noticing the sun is on our right. the sun rises in the east. that means we're going north. bangkok is south of suphanburi. then we see the giant buddha--the same one we saw when we were on our way back from lopburi, which is to the north of suphanburi. we pretty much confirm within the group that we are, indeed, going the wrong way.

9:00 am -- we stop in some podunk nowhere town for about 20 minutes, during which time we debate about what we're going to do. sam goes to ask the guy what time we'll get to bangkok, and he hears something like 11:30. that's three and a half hours after we left. it should only take 1-2 hours to get to bangkok from suphan. it says bangkok on the side of our bus, right? still incredulous, i go and ask the bus driver about arrival in bkk myself. he points to the 11 on the clock. indeed.

9:15 am -- we decide we're never taking the bus to bangkok again.

11 am (actually, probably a little after that) -- OH MY GOD, IT'S THE MORCHIT STATION! WE'RE IN BANGKOK!

11:30 ish -- we ask the info desk where we hop on bus 538 to get to dreamworld. she tells us we take bus 77 from the bus terminal to the morchit station (which, it turns out, is not different than the bus terminal. of course). at this point, we did a big "screwwwww that" and hopped in a taxi.

some time just after noon: ARRIVE IN DREAMWORLD! FINALLYYYYY! after only four hours of travel! perfect!


inside the park



really, though, we were in a surprisingly great mood. we played MASH on the bus, then listened to some bumpin' tunes on the van ride to the park, and we were just so damn excited to finally be in the park that we didn't have it in us to lament about the ridiculous travel time. thai time.


our van driver pulled up to the park entrance, we grabbed our stuff, paid him, and walked away toward the ticket buying station when the van driver said something in thai and started leading the way. "you farang clearly don't know what you're doing. let me help you." he took us past the regular entrance to a special VIP area where we could buy tickets. a woman looked at us and told us the ticket price would be 550 baht. sam whipped out his work permit to ask if there was a teacher's discount. "oohhh, you live in thailand? well then, the price is only 440 baht!" SCORE.


goal number one once we were in the park was food (well, first was a toilet, but food was a close second). the food situation was apparently semi-complicated, so as we were staring at the menu options, a friendly dreamworld worker came up, took our order, and told us to sit down (this is at a place where everybody else clearly buses themselves). thai people must look at us and go, "aw...how pathetic. i'll help them."


fed and peed, we were ready to hit the rides. goal number one: sky coaster, a ride where your feet dangle and you spin round and round, much like top gun. HELL YEAH. after a maybe 30-minute wait, we hopped on, strapped in, and went on a ride that felt like maybe it needed a little servicing. but no matter. we were so pumped after our first thai roller coaster that we didn't even notice.


after that, we (sans ally and tash) went on the viking, which is one of those boats that spins around in a circle. once you sat down, a bar came down--and that was it. no seatbelts, and i couldn't fairly easily slipped out of the seat. but heyyyy, it's thailand. safety, up to you. so you know how this ride is sort of scary, but after the first few big swings you kind of get in to it and start enjoying things? not these thai people. about half of the four rows we were facing spent the entire time either with their faces dug into their neighbors' shoulders, or with a permanent scream attached to their face. they were scared shitless. then there was the guy who was taking pictures of us four white people the whole time.


we also went on space mountain (EXCELLENT ripoff), walked through the haunted mansion (thai people are really graphic in their representation of scary things), went on a spinny thing that was kind of like that spinning circle ride at the fair that spins you so hard you stick to the wall (centrifugal force!), ate some waffles/ice cream/BOBA!/other delicious amusement park food, watched a 3d show like "honey, i shrunk the kids" (it only occurred to us thirty seconds before showtime that it'd all be in thai), and walked through the creepiest fairytale land ever (a robot threw up into a trash can and hansel and gretel were trapped in a morbidly real-looking jail cell). i apologize for that long sentence.


oh, then we played in the snow.


snowtown
 

this is a serious sentence. i'm not talking about the "snow" that's actually bubbles at disneyland either. i mean we paid some extra baht to go inside a freezing room with actual snow on the ground, a hill to sled down, a snowman, some snowy creatures, an igloo, santa claus, and a christmas tree. we walked in to the building, traded our flip flops for galoshes, and grabbed some snow jackets. i thought the thais were probably just wimpy about the cold; after all, they wear jackets when it's 75 F in suphan.


but no. we entered the snowy heaven and were instantly thrust into regular mid-winter conditions. we were so giddy and i think that moment was my happiest of the whole day.


we raced down the hill three times and nancy (illegally) climbed on top of a mammoth-sized mammoth. we took a thousand pictures, including an adorable christmas photo in santa's sleigh and everything. we spent probably an hour inside snowtown and only left because we were too cold to possibly stay in any longer.

the end of the day

the parked closed at 7, and even though we all agreed we'd done everything we wanted to do at dreamworld, i think i could've spent a few more hours there just soaking it all in. we hopped in a taxi (all 6 of us in one because we're cheap and don't give a crap about comfort), and after an hour and a half of driving around bangkok (i hate bangkok), we finally made it to khaosan road, where we'd be staying for the night. i decided on the very fancy mcdonalds for my birthday dinner, and holy crap that was a delicious choice (mmmmm big mac). full of american saturated fats, we wandered down to our hostel, set our stuff down, and found a place to get a couple drinks and people watch. exhausted in the way that only amusement parks can make you, we didn't say much, but were perfectly content to stare and make silent judgments on the passersby.

frozen margarita and tequila sunrise in my belly, i was sleepy and ready to hit the hay. as soon as my body hit the fairly uncomfortable hostel bed, i was out. first day as a 23-year-old was a success.

my first hot birthday = everything i wanted. thank you, friends :-D

a few semi-delayed stories from koh si chang

sorry i suck and didn't write about si chang until just now, four days after we returned from little koh si chang. nicki fail.

anyway, we left suphanburi friday evening around 6 pm. since we couldn't make it to the island (koh=island in thai, btw. and you thought you'd never learn anything from this blog) on friday night cuz ferries don't run at 10 pm, we decided we'd stay on si racha, which lonely planet and other travel guides made seem like a small fishing town with nothing in it. i was expecting one or maybe two hostels/hotels/places for strangers to sleep, mostly for one night before they hop on the ferry (just like we were doing).

so when we pulled into a town that had a brightly lit town square, multiple bars/dance clubs, and more than a couple thai hookers, i thought for sure the driver had taken us to the wrong place. i was convinced he was in pattaya. he started to guide this huge 8-person van down a tiny road that i would've struggled to put the xa down. we were absolutely convinced he was going down the wrong road, but alas, there at the end of the alley was the siriwatana hotel, our home for the evening.

GROSS. that's what the siriwatana hotel was (that it even tried to parade itself around as a "hotel" is laughable). it was on stilts over water, which sounds really nice, and would be, if there wasn't pee and poop and trash directly below. the ocean was a trashcan mixed with salt water. soupy disgustingness. the rooms were small; the beds were not even double-sized; cockroaches were abound. but it was after 10 pm, and we were tired, so we paid a guy some money and went two to a room. we pissed into a hole in the ground, watched in go into the ocean, and fell asleep.

the next morning we were up and on the ferry by 10 am, on the island by 11 am. we made our way to our hostel for the weekend, which was a huge upgrade from that siriwatana crap. we stayed in a hostel/hotel that was actually boats-turned-rooms.

 

the rest of the long weekend was typical. we mostly hung out on the beach in some floppy beach chairs, drinking fresh fruit smoothies, eating delicious thai food, and lazing around in the water. we explored the tiny island (maybe 15, 20 minutes to drive around the whole thing) a bit, but really, we mostly just hung out at the beach. it was a perfect way to spend the king's birthday.

it's beginning to look a lot like christmas

i got a sunburn today and had a sweat river running down my back. my air conditioning is on. tomorrow's weather is supposed to be around 32 (which is celsius, not fahrenheit), so i plan on wearing a skirt and a short-sleeved shirt.

but with the help of elf, christmas lights, homemade no-bake cookies, and friends, it's sort of feeling like christmas around these parts.

how thai kids get on the naughty list

my m3s (9th graders) are doing comparative sentences with christmas vocabulary this week. both the vocab and comparative structure are review, so this shouldn't have been too hard. i gave them a worksheet to do, then walked around the class to make sure they were doing said comparative worksheet. from the back corner, i heard a loud, "teacher! teacher!"

me: "yes?"
student 1 (pointing to her friend): "stupid!"
me: "she is stupid?"
student 1: "yes, she is stupid!"
me: "NO! she is not stupid! are you stupid?"
student 2 (looks at me confused because she is sort of stupid): "no...uhh..." (says some stuff in thai)
me: "you are not stupid. this is hard. don't worry."

but the name calling continued, and after some debate about the stupidity of student 2 (who we determined was only a little crazy, but not stupid), student 2 pointed to student 1 and said, "she is bigger. her body is bigger. ugly."

i gasped and looked at her directly in the face. "NO! you are beautiful."

no wonder the thai teachers are so concerned with body image (in this office, anyway). they're terrible to each other from an early age. "you're bigger than me, so you're ugly." while i can appreciate some of the thais' frankness about image and learning ability, sometimes it's just too harsh (people are regularly described as "fat" or "dumb"). i used to parade around saying i hated political correctness and having to describe someone by every single other attribute they have other than "freaking huge," but really, i don't know how much of this harsh honesty is good for these poor pubescent kids.

blame it on genius

i meant to go to bed early tonight. i'm tired from a weekend in the sun on the beach, and i wanted to go to bed early so i could wake up early tomorrow to enjoy the morning and do some writing/picture uploading for you.

(side note: my flower lights just fell off my wall and scared the crap out of me.)

but now i'm here, 11 pm, still planning on showering and yoga-ing. aka i'm still an hour away from bed. itunes just made such a good genius playlist that i can't stop listening...every song has been flowing perfectly after the one before it, and it's put me in a great mood, and i just can't press pause.

oh well. if the nexus taught me nothing else (let's be real: it didn't), i learned there that sleep is for the weak.