sports day

Her bright orange tutu flounced up and down as she ran across the finish line and claimed the victory in the race. Dejected, the other runners returned to the bleachers to shimmy and shout for their own teams in the coming heats. true story.
- Teacher Lita









Yesterday was Sports Day. It's actually been more like Sports Month, though. The Pink, Orange, Green, and Purple Teams have been competing in various events since the end of December for glory, fame, and plastic medals.

Thai cheerleading looks nothing like American cheerleading, we learned. It's more like Halloween crossed with a dance recital. Like American cheerleading, it has little or no effect on the athletes' performances or the crowd's enthusiasm.

I was supposed to run the 100-meter dash for the Pink team, but I got sacked immediately before my race. As in, a Thai teacher ran up to me and said, breathless, "They want me to run instead of you. Can you do the rice sack race in my place?" To which, of course, the only correct answer is, "Yes! I would love to hop around in a giant rice bag!"

The sack races were cancelled in the end, so it all worked to my advantage.

Overall, Sports Day was hot, sticky, and kinda miserable. We did get a half-day out of the deal, which gave us a chance to rest up for Christy's birthday celebration that night -- free BBQ at a restaurant on Sukhumvit. Bliss! The place does free food the last Friday of every month, and we were all wondering why we haven't been attending for the last seven months.

"it puts a rose in every cheek"

We had a mini Australia Day celebration at my Wednesday small group when a couple of Aussie girls were nice enough to bring us some of their national cuisine.

Cuisine may be the wrong word when you're talking about a tube of Vegemite, but nevertheless...

I had heard the 1954 jingle for Vegemite years ago. My friend Alyssa played it for me on her parents' computer... I'm not sure why we were listening to it, actually. I remember little kids who sounded like they'd been sucking on helium, singing their love for the stuff.

Bernice made Vegemite grilled cheese sandwiches, but not before making me and Mariela try some Vegemite by itself. She squeezed the dark, tarlike paste onto our fingertips. We looked at it. We sniffed it. Gingerly, we tasted it.

She told us some people squeeze it straight into their mouths, the way some people in the U.S. do with Easy Cheese. (Coincidentally, both of these horrifying substances are made by Kraft. Hmm.)

Anyway, it tasted like a concentrated paste of salt, yeast, beer, and bread. But on a grilled cheese sandwich it was OK.

I also had Weet-Bix for the second time. It's a cereal bar with the look and consistency of plywood. It's a delight, however, when mixed with fruit and yogurt.

a friend

It took eight months, but I finally made a Thai friend. His name is Bright (oh-so-fitting, as he's one of the most cheerful people I've ever met), and he owns the smoothie shop at the end of our street.

We discovered his shop shortly after arriving. I've been visiting it for months now, but it didn't occur to me to strike up a conversation with him until that fateful day a few weeks ago when I broke out my Lonely Planet Thai phrasebook. I turned to the Meeting People section and asked, "What do you like to do in your free time?"

"My friends and I shoot BB guns."
Oh, at targets?
"No. At each other!"
Well, huh. Isn't that something?

Our friendship has progressed a lot in the last two weeks. I've started teaching him some English and he's teaching me a little Thai.

I'm also one of the official taste testers for his sister's dessert-baking experiments. They're adding a bakery to their shop next month.

He taught me to say, "I'm full" the other night. That didn't stop me from stuffing my face with sticky rice and mango, a 20-ounce smoothie, and a thick slab of his sister's dark chocolate brownies drizzled with hot fudge and cashews.

Next lesson: "I can't; I'm on a diet."

the finished product

Yeah. I know what you're thinking.

"Man, I would totally hire this young woman and give her health insurance and vacation time!"

a gift

My friends and I were standing near a fruit stand waiting to get a cab tonight when a young guy walked up to buy some papaya. The vendor sliced it up and put it in a plastic bag.

The guy asked for some extra wooden skewers and gave each of us a piece of the fruit, indicating that we were too thin and should eat more. And that was the end of it.

When we got in the cab, both Alyssa and I noted our appreciation of how a guy managed to give four young women papaya in a non-hitting-on-us kind of way.

Way to not be creepy, papaya guy. We affirm you!

expelliarmus!

There's a kid in my second period class named Petan who's fluent in English. A few weeks ago, he was reading the Harry Potter series before class. I watched his wee heart sink as he read the ending of book six.

Petan was absent for the speaking quiz last week over "there was/were" and "could/couldn't." I almost gave him a 10 anyway, because the quizzes are mindnumbingly easy for him.

I reconsidered, deciding to have some fun instead.

Today I called him to my desk to make up the quiz.

Number one: Name three magical creatures Hagrid takes care of.
He put his hand on his head and started pacing.
"Buckbeak... Wait, really?"
Yes! Three creatures. Go.
"Buckbeak... Fluffy... and... I can't remember."
That's OK. Question two: make a sentence using "there was" or "there were" and quaffles.
"There were waffles at breakfast this morning."
Quaffles?! At breakfast?
"OH! There were two quaffles in the Quidditch match."
That's better. Four dragons.
"There were four dragons at the Triwizard Cup last month."
OK. Now, could and couldn't. Could you be a seeker if you played Quidditch?
"Yes, I could."
Could you do magic when you were three years old?
"No, I couldn't."


I think he got a kick out of it. I sure did.

shocking!

I'm already bracing myself for the severe reverse culture shock I expect to experience when I go home to my tiny, northeast Texas hometown in a couple of months. I actually get a sort of panicked feeling in my chest when I think about it.

In a nutshell, and at the risk of sounding like a cosmopolitan snob, I'm worried that Greenville won't be nearly stimulating enough. You can find anything and everything you want here in Bangkok.

Amazing international cuisine? Check.
Movies, bowling alleys, and bookshops? Check.
Coffee shops, symphony concerts, public parks, cultural events, festivals, sky bars, ice skating rinks, amusement parks, shopping, historical sites, easy access to beaches, bars with nightly live music...

And I mustn't leave out the incessant confusion, the thrill of being able to read a Thai word written in the few characters I know, the stares, and the adventures in navigating various modes of transportation including, but not limited to, the skytrain, taxis, public buses, tuk-tuks, and canal boats.

Will someone please remind me why I'm leaving?

In the meantime, I'm trying to drum up a bout of homesickness with -- what else? -- a country music binge.

crime and punishment

I finished giving the speaking quizzes a few minutes early in my second period, and had nothing to do but mill about and watch Nummon teach.

Suddenly, she stopped and walked over to one of the boys. Standing over his desk, she reached for his backpack and proceeded to calmly shake its contents out all over the floor.

I watched, mouth agape.

Even more surprising -- the student didn't bat an eye. No tears. No pouting. His books, papers, and pencils lay in a heap on the floor for the rest of the period.

She came up to me after class and told me the student never turns in his homework or brings his books to class. She decided to "look for his homework."

supervisor meeting

Nummon called a meeting this morning with me and Pear, the student teacher. She had lots of questions for me that probably should have been asked months ago, such as:

Which students are misbehaving or giving you trouble in class?
Which students are helpful in class?
and
How are they doing on their worksheets?

She asked how I normally operate the class. I told her I explain the lesson, give them a few examples, let them do the worksheets on their own, and circulate through the room to help. I told her I grade their work as they finish so they can see what they did wrong.

What do the students do while they wait for you to grade?

"Oh, they wait in line, naturally." (Lies! They run all over the place like the little miscreants they are.)



She told us the students have had trouble with the writing sections on the tests. Specifically, writing paragraphs.

I'm not positive, but I think it might have something to do with the fact that we never have them practice writing paragraphs in class. I told her as much.

She said the students should be able to apply everything they've heard and learned, putting it together in the form of a paragraph. She doesn't want students to write paragraphs in class because "if the test is exactly the same as what they do in class, they don't learn anything." She said they'd memorize the paragraph and copy it. Never mind that whole notion of changing the writing prompt...



The next item of business was equally baffling:

How many words do the students know?

"How many words do the students know?!"

Yeah. What you think? 100? 1,000?

I couldn't say how many words I know in Spanish, much less give an estimate for another person's knowledge of their foreign language.

"Um... I'm not really sure. I mean, they should know quite a lot of words," I stammered. "They know foods, jobs, clothes, verbs, sports..."

She wanted us to devise ways to test the students' vocabularies.

I suggested we give them all a sheet of paper and say, "OK; you have five minutes. Write all the foods you know. Next, you have five minutes to write all the verbs you know..." and so forth.

That method was far too rational. We have to quiz the class (individually?) using flashcards and make a worksheet asking them to translate a bunch of Thai words into their English equivalents.

I'm glad I could give my input. Meeting adjourned.

Wednesdays are monk days at school. I don't like monk days.

Monk day means a monk takes the air-conditioned classroom (the dancing room) I normally use on small group days. I, in turn, have to teach in the sixth grade non-aircon classrooms with chalkboards for the first and second periods.
The dancing room is free during third period while the monks eat lunch. But more often than not, the desks and chairs aren't set up. When the monk teaches there, the kids sit on the floor.

Dragging 20 clunky desks and chairs in from the balcony is an annoying and unneccessary waste of class time. I didn't want to deal with the hassle today. I asked Nummon if it would be OK to stay in the non-aircon classrooms for all three periods.

We crossed wires somewhere, because Sukjai came to my third period class, visibly annoyed, and asked where I normally teach. I explained the desk problem and he told me the sixth grade needed the classroom I was in. I'm not sure why he waited until I was 10 minutes into the lesson to boot me out, but I guess that's beside the point.

I apologized and told the kids to stand up, grab their books, and go to the dancing room.

I followed my students downstairs and Sukjai appeared again to tell me we could use the meeting room. He waited until half the class had run to the other building to tell me this, naturally.

I shook my head and walked into the meeting room. There were no desks set up there, either, so I told him the kids could sit on the floor. I just wanted to get on with the lesson.

He asked how many students I had. I told him I didn't know (Another golden opportunity to display my incompetence. Goodie!). He recruited some kids to help him haul plastic desks and chairs in from next door. Again, an unneccessary drain on time.

One of the desks was full of water (?!), which sloshed all over the floor as a kid struggled to set it upright. All I wanted was to finish going through the can/could worksheet, but I stood there, helpless, as students trickled in and Sukjai went to find the mop.

thanks, but no thanks.

I mean, I guess monks are regular people, just like everybody else. Some are with it, some aren't.

- Amy

Approaching my favorite smoothie place last night, I saw my coworker, Amy, sitting on a stool out front, chatting with a monk.

I sat down and caught snippets of their conversation. From what I could tell, the monk was trying to invite Amy to go to Las Vegas with him next week.

It was weird on a few levels. 1: Monks generally pay us little or no attention. They aren't allowed to touch or be touched by women. They can't even accept something from a woman's hand. 2: What the heck is a Thai monk going to do in Vegas?

I made a face at her and hummed the Twilight Zone theme song. Then the monk asked me to go to Vegas.

life is like a stick of fish balls...

I don't know when it happened. Perhaps it was all in a moment. Perhaps it was a gradual desensitization. I realized yesterday that the absurd has become so commonplace in my life, I often forget to write about it here. I see it, I process it, and I carry on, unfazed.

Today, I let Bangkok happen to me anew, experiencing it with the help of an Australian friend I met on New Year's Eve.

On our way to meet Mariela for a symphony concert in Lumphini Park, we were approached by a Thai jogger who struck up a conversation with the usual, "Where you come from?"

Hearing I was American, he decided to show off his knowledge of U.S. geography by naming every state and city he could.

Ohhhh... Chicago, Illinois, Utah, Vermont, Minnesota.
Wow, you've seen a lot more of the U.S. than I have...
New Jersey, Connecticut, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas.
Hey, I'm from Texas.
Houston, Dallas, Austin... Nevada, California, San Francisco.

My radar was already set to Ignore, but my friend was amused. After naming the 48 contiguous states, the man started on Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, and... I don't know what else. I stopped listening.

Things like this happen to me all the time. My coworker Amy calls it "The Twilight Zone," which is all too fitting at times.

I forget that tourists don't see this side of Bangkok -- probably because they zip from one place to the next in taxis. They miss out on the abundance of crazy moments to be had by being out there, sweaty and walking with everyone else.

Another quintessential Thailand incident I forgot to mention last week: On Friday at work, Mariela and I found ourselves sitting in a copy room singing "Puff, the Magic Dragon" while the mailman accompanied us on his acoustic guitar. Our next song was "Amazing Grace." He liked my harmonies.

Yes, this is my life.

fitted out

I've begun my second foray into the tailoring world.

The first -- the little black dress attempt -- was only about halfway successful. I did end up with a dress, but A) it cost way too much and B) there is an all-too-noticeable rumple in the lining near the neck. They didn't fix it after asking them two or three times. I gave up.

I found a different tailor shop on the recommendation of a young Thai teacher. I played it safe and ordered a simple button-down shirt. It was inexpensive, turned out pretty well, and the fabric feels great, so I went back to be measured for a suit.

That's right: my first, grown-up business suit. (Or monkey suit, as my brother used to call them when he was a wee small child forced to wear them to church for special occasions. E.g. "Get me outta this monkey suit, Mom!")

I am 23 years old now, after all. It's time to look like an adult. Plus, in the event that I snag a job interview or two when I go home, I want to be properly attired.

I'll post pictures when it's finished.



On an unrelated note, I apologize for the curse word in my last post. I was all riled up about corruption and whatnot. Didn't mean to offend.

if you want a thing done right, you've gotta strongarm someone else into doing it for you

I was greeted at work today by a completely unexpected, completely inappropriate request.

From what I understand (and it's still kind of fuzzy, due to the language barrier), Nummon wanted me to write a paper for the niece of the head of Prathom. This girl is an English major.

Nummon handed me a packet of papers the girl had put together. There was an outline on the first page.

The paper was on intermarriage between Buddhists and Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims, and Catholics and Protestants. Her plan was to include "case studies" for each religious combo.

I leafed through her notes and found that by "case studies," she meant postings from random people on online discussion boards - complete with copied and pasted excerpts of poorly written rants from people struggling with their own mixed-faith marriages.

WTF?

She also had notes on religious beliefs. Among the things Catholicism and Protestantism share are the ideas "That wicked people go to hell" and "That good people go to heaven."

She didn't have one scholarly source. Not a book or a single journal article. I couldn't believe it.

I asked Nummon what kind of work this girl was actually doing herself, since the paper had been delegated to Nummon and, subsequently, to me. She made an excuse about how the girl is still young and sometimes young students need help. It was due tomorrow.

I have this crazy notion that language learners need to do their own damn homework if they want to achieve any level of proficiency.

I attempted to correct some doctrinal errors (e.g. Catholics do not worship Mary) and gave the girl some feedback, telling her to go to the library (I even suggested some books to look up!) and to talk to sociology professors for more resources on interfaith marriages. I left everything else alone and decided to let Nummon deal with the mess her boss had forced upon her.

I also told her I'd be happy to edit a written paper any time.

The educational system here is ridiculous if this is not an isolated case. Especially at the university level! I'm disgusted. Truly.