a big group hug

sports day (which is actually a week and a half of sports playing and about two months of preparation) is officially over. if i know high school kids, at least half of'em are out finding beer/wine coolers/cheap thai whiskey to imbibe this evening. well deserved, kids.

at the end of the two days of solid competition, there was a huge awards ceremony to give out trophies to all the winners--the football champs (boys/girls, m1-3/m4-5), the volleyball champs, the netball champs, the basketball champs, the overall sports champs, and the dance champs. an unusual silence fell over the crowd when they announced the winners for that one.

right as they announced the dance champs, the monsoon season came in with full force. pouring rain, all over all the kids who were sitting all over a dirty, soon-to-be-extremely-muddy field. at first everyone ducked for cover. but then a couple boys came out into the rain on the field. they were joined by a few other boys, who all motioned for everyone to come out on the field. soon enough, everyone was back on the field, in the pouring rain.

they started singing and holding hands, grinch-style. and magically, the rain stopped. the song went on for a few minutes, all these kids from all these different teams, holding hands and belting out the words. as soon as the song ended, the rain came back. FREAKY MAGICAL SPORTS DAY COINCIDENCE? i think not.

the whole thing gave me chills. that they could have all these weeks of being on separate teams, competing against each other, losing to each other only minutes before, and now they were all singing and dancing in the rain together. no bitterness, no grudges, no complaining about how unfair the judging was.

these kids are amazing.

SPORTS DAY.

before i launch into my gushing over the gloriousness of sports day, i wanted to tell you i just had my first day tutoring The Man. it was great. he's studying to get a degree of some sort in vocational education even though he already has his phd in industrial engineering (i think...maybe it's his masters) and has already studying methods of industrial education in a bunch of other countries. in order to get this degree, he has to pass an english test. this is where maddy and i come in (she sees him tuesdays, me on thursday). his english isn't very good, but i think his biggest problem is his fear of saying things wrong. us grown ups have such a problem being wrong. this is why kids pwn at learning languages (plus some other stuff, but i think this ability to be wrong and ask questions is one of the biggest things kids have going for them).

ok ok sports day time. this day is phenomenal. it's like homecoming plus lip sync plus dancing plus speed. the kids have been working on this pretty much since the beginning of school. during 9th period--from 3:10 to 4, when nobody has class but nobody can leave school--they've been grouping according to their colors, either yellow, red, pink, green, blue, or pink. i'm pretty sure the school assigned these colors. they've been banging on drums, clapping their hands and chanting for no discernible reason.

today, we found out why. (go watch the video at the end. i know i'm demanding and i should really embed the video right here in the middle, but i didn't so you can just scroll and check it out a little ways down.)

each team has its own chant and a set of girls dance in the middle of the field in front of the whole school to their team's chant. their make up was INSANE. these girls are 16 years old--18 at best! most of these made up girls are my students and i spent half the morning trying to figure out who was whom. my favorite lady boy was dressed in his lady get up today. he was gorgeous, of course.

one of the biggest downsides to only seeing my kids once a week for an hour is that i never get to know them. it was awesome seeing'em outside the classroom today, absolutely rockin' it. a bunch of my boys who can't speak english for crap are excellent atheletes. go figure, eh?

seriously, watch the video. sorry for the butt shots.

on working in thailand

i don't do much of it.

this morning the former prime minister (not that one...this other one who's from suphan and friggin loves this place) came to school to give some kids some scholarships and speak and stuff. we were supposed to teach periods 4, 5, and 6 afterward, but after the prime minister guy left the school director was just like, "heyyyy you guys, don't worry about class today!" WOOOOO.

tomorrow and friday are sports day, which in terms of importance to high school students is like homecoming. of course we don't have class.

this means that I'M DONE FOR THE WEEK, BABY!

tattoo virginity

my body's still a clean canvas right now, but for a long time now i've been thinking about getting a tattoo. i wanna get one for every place i've lived: san ramon, isla vista, paris, thailand (to be continued). thailand's up first just because i'm here now, and i dunno when i'll be back so i better get it while the gettin's good.

i had no idea what to get when i first came here. something buddhism related might be pretty, but i'm not buddhist whatsoever so that's not really significant to me. the thai language isn't really that important to me (i know, i know, judge as you will), so getting something in thai script would be silly. also, i'm not a big fan of word tattoos on my body.

but when i saw how incredibly talented my students are at drawing, it dawned on me--why not have a student design the tattoo?

today i asked some kids in my favorite class if they could draw flowers. they said no but called up The Artist of the class. and this is what i got:

perfect

i slept for about a zillion hours today

woke up late, laid in bed for a long time, walked about 30 feet, laid down again and took a nap. then i woke up and laid around some more.

it's been a really big day, you guys.

the porch is now for humans

good news, dedicated readers! remember how much i f$(*%king hated those pigeons? how they kept having stupid babies and dumb little pigeons babies kept filling up my porch with feathers and poop and nest shit?

THEY'RE NOT HERE ANYMORE! (something unmentionable happened.)

the girls downstairs promised me a net as soon as there were no birds, so the day they flew away i made sure to alert the ladies so i could get my net. i came home from the weekend with the regans and the net was up! what a joyful day.

sort of. because there was still a lot of bird shit on my porch and that's gross.

so i had my room/bathroom/porch cleaned today (i even gave the cleaning lady a tip cuz i knew how friggin gross that bird crap was) and now the porch is fully ready for human usage.

now i'm sitting in my comfy blue chair on the porch, doors to my room wide open, an ice cold beer sitting next to me, and feeling the breeze cruise through my hair. it's moments like this that make me wonder what else i need in life.

there's lightning, too. did i mention that

laos stories

too hard to write about everything that happened last weekend in any sort of neat fashion. i'm just gonna give you some tidbits.

the prado


maddy and i got in to vientiane, laos, right on time around 10 am. we needed to buy a ticket to vang vieng, our ultimate tubing destination still more than 100 km away, so we asked a couple people and ended up buying tickets for the 2 pm bus (60,000 kip, which is about $7) from the front desk of a semi-fancy hotel. the guy told us the bus would pick us up from the lobby at 1:30 pm and we were welcome to leave our stuff there while we explored.

so we went off, had some coffee and read some books, then came back to the hotel right at 1:30. no bus. nbd, this is southeast asia, "on time" is at least 15 minutes late. then it was 1:45...2 pm...no bus. maddy got up to ask the guy who sold us tickets where the bus was, and he reassured us it was coming. maybe 15 minutes later, the hotel guy lead us to a song tau outside and introduced us to another guy, who motioned to us to put our stuff in the truck. he drove us about a block away, stopped, and got out.

this was not the bus station. this was just some corner in town. it was now edging on 2:30 pm and whatever bus we were supposed to be on has probably left by now. we were just sitting there, essentially helpless and feeling kind of screwed. then a THIRD guy drives up in a fancy toyota prado, talks to the song tau driver guy, then looks at us and goes, "vang vieng?"

yeah, that's where we wanna go...the song tau driver guy took our bus tickets from us and escorted us into this fancy car. then it was just the two of us girls and this driver guy who spoke ZERO english. and i swear to god he didn't understand thai at all even though lao is super incredibly similar to thai. we were sure we were gonna get kidnapped. we only paid for bus tickets and now, for no reason, we're being driven away in this fancy car. our thai phones didn't work in laos and i was feeling really helpless. my heart was beating in that nervous, i-don't-know-what-the-fuck to do way. we stopped to get gas and maddy and i hopped out to as a gas station attendant person if we could borrow a phone. no dice. we were getting pretty far outside town now. it looked like we were going toward vang vieng on the map...but their crazy kidnapping sex trade lair could be on that road. we were fucked. this is how you die.

so we asked the driver if we could borrow his phone, and he said yes, which was a great sign but not 100% relieving. we tried calling the hotel but both the regular and fax number were out of service--MORE BAD NEWS. well, if this is it, then this is it. we turned on our ipods, i opened my lonely planet to the page with the laos emergency number, and we tried to not think.

about two hours into the drive, maddy asked the guy to stop to pee. "five minute," he said (ok, i lied when i said zero english). he stopped at this shack in podunk nowhere...where our friend megan happens to be standing! HOLY SHIT OTHER WHITE PEOPLE WHAT A JOY! so megan knew where we were and would be able to report us missing. i was 50% relieved and able to relax a little bit more for hte rest of the journey.

we ended up making it to vang vieng safely and we had worried for no reason at all. we're still not sure why we got this fancy, personal vehicle, but maybe that's just something we leave unanswered.

tubing


vang vieng is famous for its tubing. you rent a tube and a truck drives you about 20 minutes up the river, where you hop off into the open arms of at least four different bars. we played beer pong and swung off a 10-foot-high platform into the river before leaping in with our tubes. cuz we're in the middle of monsoon season now, the river was flowing pretty fast and was actually kind of dangerous. but lots of other people were still tubing so it must be ok (drink the kool aidddddd).

we stopped at a couple bars along the journey and met some hilarious folks (donal, sinead, dreads, guy with ugly glasses, a fellow nicky). huge limestone mountains jutted up around us, covered in tropical trees and generally looking phenomenally gorgeous. the four of us girls (me, maddy, megan, and bethany) couldn't help but laugh and wonder aloud what the hell we'd done in our lives to land ourselves in such a place.

we had a great time, but it was mostly due to timing. behind us on the river, a lao guy had jumped off a platform into the river and never came back up. we heard the next day that he'd died, which is not that uncommon on the river. (but i wasn't gonna tell you any of that earlier because you never would've let me go.)

ok ok i have to go teach now, but i'll try to get you more stories/pictures later. ah crap, i also gotta finish the regan pictures...geez, nicki, so internet busy lately.