in the land of smiles.: photo shoots and beaches.

So I finished my first week of teaching, and it was hard. It got better with each day…but that was mostly because as the week continued, more of my classes got cancelled. On Thursday and Friday all we did was take photos. Lots and lots of photos. In the room outside of the foreign teacher’s area, they had set up backdrops so the students could take pictures. Now this isn’t your average photo day at school, cause I remember those and taking those pictures only took about 10 minutes. No, sunflower school does it a little differently. First, there were several backdrops that the kids could sit at. Which included: an African safari…complete with giraffes in the background and the students got to hold binoculars. They could take their photo while holding huge stuffed animals, while standing next to a saxophone, or they could be boring and just sit in front of a plain backdrop and take photos. This was highly amusing to watch (especially when the kids chose the safari background). Then the photographers came into the teacher’s room and had us come and pose for pictures as well! So hopefully soon I’ll be able to post a picture of me in the African safari with my binoculars.

They also had classroom photos…these made me a little upset. They had Bradley and I pose with students (none of my own students, but kids from other classes/grades) and pretend to be reading to them, or teaching them about fruits. It was all very staged and I felt like the token blonde teacher that they wanted in their pictures to show parents that they have real foreigners teaching their kids English. Oh well. Mai pen rai.

Friday after school the other girls and I went down to the bar/shop with some of the other English teachers. So a little info on the other English teachers at sunflower: Pete, who is the English coordinator at the school (he’s been at sunflower for about 6 years…he’s originally from the Midwest), Bill (been here for I think 2ish years, from the Midwest as well), Brad (from Canada), and Jimmy (he’s from some place in Africa I believe). They’re all in their 30s and 40s (except for pete who’s in like his 60s I think…). Anyways most Fridays (and most weekdays too) we all go down there and grab beers after school and talk about the kids, traveling, life, all that fun stuff.

Saturday morning, we woke up early and the girls and I decided we wanted to try to go to a beach. We had asked Brad the night before if there was any place close by that we could go for the day and he suggested we check out cha-am. Cha-am is a little beach town about 2 hours south west of our town. So with vague directions about how to get there we set off. It only took 2 taxis and a minivan ride and about 2 hours to reach Cha-am! Super easy! Once we got there we found a cheap hotel (only 150baht…or $5) that we could stay the night in. We immediately dropped off our stuff and headed for the beach!

We hadn’t been walking on the beach for more than 5 minutes when all of a sudden we see some familiar faces in front of us! Liz, Olivia, and their friend Ciana were in Cha-am for the weekend too! So we laid on the beach for a few hours and enjoyed just being in the sun and the ocean. As the sun began to sink a little lower, we decided to head to the other girls hotel because they had a POOL! So we crashed in their pool for a while, probably annoying the other people trying to relax at the pool, but oh well. After a while we decided to retreat to our own hotel and get cleaned up before meeting back up for dinner.

After washing up at our hotel, we headed to our “go-to place” in Thailand…..7/11….and grabbed some leos. We found some chairs on the beach and had leo time on the beach…it was perfect. Some nice thai guys that were sitting a few seats over came and gave us a few candles so we wouldn’t be sitting in complete darkness. Olivia and I decided to go on a food run for everyone and so we brought back some street vendor food for the group and had a delightful picnic dinner on the beach. We spent the next few hours there just hanging out, eating and drinking our leos. It was perfect.

The next morning we woke up early and headed back out to the beach to enjoy some sun time before we had to all head back to our schools. Soon it was time for us to all head out and get back to our schools. The other girls hotel had told them where to catch a minivan back to their town, so we decided to follow them and hope that they had a van to samut sakhon as well. So we hopped in the van and headed back to school. Now….this is when things got a little odd. So we saw the sign for samut sakhon, and so we pointed the sign out to the driver and he smiled and nodded….and then proceeded to pull over to the side of the highway and motion for us to get out….on the side of the highway….while cars were rushing by. Ummmm huh? We’re just supposed to get out? I guess so. So we hopped out and stood on the side of the road watching our van drive away. So we ran across the road and hopped over rails and made it to a side street where we hailed a cab. But this wasn’t just any cab. This was a cab driven by a thai version of morgan freeman….who only played classical music, and only drove about 25 mph on the freeway. So after about a million years we finally made it back to our home sweet home.

Up for this week: teaching transportation to my little pre-schoolers. Trying to plan for new years and hopefully planning another trip to an island for the beginning of December.

Love you all!