railway market.

This past weekend was filled with excitement!  Friday night, the Kindergarten hosted a party for all the teachers at the school and at the primary/secondary school.  It was a new years celebration for everyone and also a celebration for the owner, kwanthip, for her birthday.  We were told earlier in the week that each department would have to put on a performance at the party……..so Bradley, Johnson, jamshed and I had to come up with some sort of performance to do at the party.  We procrastinated all week and on Thursday we couldn’t put it off anymore and finally decided to do a dance.  Johnson suggested we dance to Celine Dion’s “I’m Alive” song so Bradley set to work choreographing a dance for us.  We ran through it a few times and figured we would just wing it and do the best we could Friday night.

The school had the event catered and there was tons of food set up on tables for all of us.  It was kinda weird Chinese food, but it was fun to hang out with all the other teachers and to watch everyone perform.  Our dance was ridiculous, but we powered through it without a hitch and all our friends cheered us on.  All in all it was a really fun night.

Saturday was spent sleeping in and just relaxing.  That night the girls and I headed into Bangkok to get some Mexican food.  We went to a place called Charley Brown’s….no where near as good as the Mexican food I had on christmas night, but it was ok.  Bradley and I called it a night after dinner since we had plans to wake up early and head to the railway market!

Sunday morning Bradley and I woke up early and headed off to the market!  We had gotten directions to the place from another English teacher at the school.  We picked up a songtell (aka riding in the back of a pickup truck, which cost 12 baht or 45cents) which dropped up off in Mahachai, where we took a ferry (3 baht…or 10 cents) across the river.  From there we walked 10 minutes to the railroad station where we hopped on the train (10 baht…35 cents).  An hour later we were at our destination…the Maeklong Railway Market.  The unique thing this market is that a trail literally runs through the market about 8 times a day.  When the horn of the train sounds, market vendors have to quickly fold down the awnings of their stalls, pull back the tables to allow juuuuust enough room for the train to pass.  The train runs right over trays of produce that lay on the ground and within seconds after the train passes, the market is laid back our and business continues on!  It was really crazy to see and kinda scary how close the train came to us while we were on the side of the market!  

So we spent the afternoon checking out the market and the town.  We had a few hours to kill before the train would return to take us back, so we wandered the streets and found a place to get thai massages!  So it took me 3 months, but I finally had my first thai massage, and let me say…..they’re AMAZING and CHEAP!  I got an hour long body massage for 100 baht…..or about 3ish dollars.  It’s supposed to be 200baht, but the lady only charged me 100, lucky day for me!  Of course I had to take photos with her and 2 of her friends once my massage was done, but what did I care, she gave me a massage for ½ the price!  So we got our massages and headed back to the train station, to catch our train, to take the ferry, and to catch our sontell back to the dorm!  All in all a very successful day!

Missing everyone back home! Love you all!

 me, jimmy, and bill at the teacher's party.

 at the railroad station about to board!

 maeklong railway station.

 market on both sides of the tracks.

sports day.

Alright so now that I’ve finally gotten all updated on my winter break I can finally talk about what I’ve been doing since I got back.  So besides my little trip to the hospital, life at sunflower has been pretty quite ever since I got back.  I haven’t been traveling except for some day trips into Bangkok…I’m trying to save my money for summer break!  There hasn’t been too much teaching going on…last week was sports week.  The school was broken up into different teams (I was on the blue team) and the kids were to compete in different activities on Friday.  On the days leading up to Friday the students practiced chants and cheers and dances and what not….so that meant no teaching for me!  On Friday the school broke up into its teams and the games were on!  There were all sorts of relay races that involved both the students and their parents.  It was cute to see all the kids perform and race against one another.  After the kids were done competing, the school held a competition between the parents and the teachers!  So we got to join in on the fun too!  We had a relay running race (which we won!) and then there was the tug of war!  We lost this competition since the majority of all the kindergarten teachers are small women and we had to compete against the moms and the dads!  A little unfair, but fun nonetheless.

 one of my N3 kids in my afternoon class

 afternoon class

 team blue!

 butter, a K1 student, and i trying to decided who's stronger

 my troublemaker, DJ

 team blue cheerleaders

 chinese teachers, jamshed, and i showing off our medals for winning the relay race

This week I had to travel to immigration to finally get my work permit and to extend my visa.  I literally got it on the last day possible…day 90, but mai pen rai, its done and I can legally teach/live here now!  On Friday both the kindergarten and the trilingual school are joining up for a dinner together which should make for an interesting night.  Hope everyone at home is doing well!

Love you all!

koh phi phi don.

Ok so the final (and best) installment of my week of traveling!

So Chelsea and I got into the train station in Bangkok and made our way up to khao san road, where our bus would be leaving from that evening.  We got in around noon, but our bus didn’t leave until 6pm, so we spent the afternoon wandering around and relaxing in one of the coffee shops.  A little before our bus was supposed to leave we stopped by 7-11 to stock up on some snacks and went to subway and got some delish sandwiches since we were going to be on the bus for 12 hours!  We got to the travel agency I had booked through and waited for our bus to be called.  There were tons of other people there heading off to various destinations.  When they called our bus we went up to the guy and showed him our tickets...he said that we weren’t on the list!  Oh geeze, this was the last thing I wanted to hear!  He took our tickets and went up to the counter.  I guess our ticket numbers weren’t put on the sheet and our spots hadn’t been reserved on the bus.  I got really nervous that we were going to have no way to get down to our island for new years!  Fortunately the guy who was helping us, a really nice thai guy whose name I forgot, was suuuuuper helpful and told us to wait at the shop and he would be back in 2 hours to get us and would put us on a bus to koh phi phi.  I was super skeptical to say the least, but what other option did we have?  I made the guy pinky promise me that he would be back.  So we sat and waited.  2 hours later our little thai man was back and took us down the street to catch our bus!  I was so relieved and super excited that we were finally on our way to our tropical island!

bags all packed and ready to go!

 The bus was long and uneventful.  Trying to sleep was virtually impossible because the seats were so tiny, but 11 hours later we were in surrathani.  So at around 7am the driver ushered us off the bus onto the side of the road where there were dozens of other travelers sitting around and waiting.  Another thai guy came around and asked everyone where their end destination was and put stickers on us accordingly.  So we got out stickers and plopped down on the curb.  20 minutes later a guy called out “phi phi” and Chelsea and I jumped up and grabbed our bags!  The guy put us all into a minivan and we were off to the port town of krabi where we would grab a ferry to phi phi!  So after a 2 hour van ride we were in krabi!  The guy handed us our ferry tickets and told us that we needed to run to make it to the ferry on time!  So we ran!  We made it to the ferry, dropped our bags and planted ourselves in two seats.  We were exhausted to say the least.  The ferry ride was about 1 ½ hours long, and to make the time pass a little faster, I bought Chelsea and I some chang beers from the little drink stall on the ferry.  11am changes seemed very necessary after our very very long night/morning.  We cheersed to almost being to our destination and to our exciting adventures ahead!

11am changs on the ferry.

 When the ferry landed in phi phi we though we were in the wrong place….we were expecting the most beautiful sunny island we had ever seen.  Instead we were on a gloomy, cloudy, rainy beautiful island.  We were a little disappointed, but decided that a little rain wasn’t going to put a damper on our amazing time!  We were staying at the Tropical Gardens Hotel and so we made the 10 minute trek up to our place and unpacked.  It was nice to know that we could unpack a little since we were going to be staying there for a few days!  We put on our suits and headed out to explore the area!  We were staying in Tonsai village, which is this little strip in the middle of the island.  A little information about koh phi phi.  Technically, we were staying on koh phi phi don, which is the most popular and biggest of the phi phi islands.  There are 6 other islands that are part of the phi phi islands, but most are inhabited and are only visited by tour groups during the daylight hours.  The strip where we were staying is probably the most touristy area of phi phi..it reminded me of Waikiki beach in Hawaii….very touristy, lots of westerners, and not a whole lot of Thailand.

 

rainy phi phi...but still beautiful.

Chelsea and I walked through the village and checked out all the little shops and restaurants and just took it all in.  We headed to the beach and even though it was overcast and cloudy, we couldn’t believe how beautiful this place was.  We spent the rest of the day just relaxing and checking out our surroundings.  Jess, another girl from the program who lives in khon kaen with Chelsea, and her sister were also in phi phi so met up with them that evening and spent the night catching up and checking out the night scene.

The next morning, the 30^th, we decided to sleep in and catch up on some much needed rest.  We did pretty much nothing the entire day.  In the morning it was a little sunny so we lounged on the beach for a bit, but then it started to rain so we retreated back to the village and posted up and ate some delicious food, people watched, and read our books.  We decided to sign up for a snorkeling tour to take the next day, we figured that it wouldn’t matter if it was raining or not during the trip since we’d be in the water the entire day.  We signed up for a full day of snorkeling that would take us around to about 10 different spots all around the islands.

On New Years Eve morning Chelsea and I woke up suuuuuper early and trekked it up the stairs/path to the viewpoint.  The viewpoint is 186 meters above sea level and you can get an amazing view of the entire island from there.  We had heard that it was gorgeous at sunrise…unfortunately the clouds were still hanging around and we weren’t able to see the sun rise, but it we still got to enjoy a beautiful view of the island.  

 

chelsea and i at phi phi viewpoint

 

picture taken from the viewpoint after 2004 tsunami

We met up with our snorkeling tour at 9:30!  They set us up with fins and snorkels and goggles and we were off!  There was about 20 people on the tour with us and we made some friends and spent the day touring the island and doing some amazing snorkeling!  We saw some amazing fish and had an amazing day checking out all the other islands.  My favorite spots were Monkey beach, where we saw wild monkeys hanging out and stealing visitors food (I saw one monkey munching on some pringle chips!), koh phi phi leh was BEAUTIFUL.  This the second larges of the phi phi islands.  Phi phi leh is home to Maya Bay which was the location for the movie “The Beach”.  Although the beach was crawling with people, it was seriously one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been.  As we made our final stop we could see these huge rain clouds rolling in.  A few minutes later we were caught in a MASSIVE downpour!  The boat driver yelled for us all to get back on the boat and we were on our way back to tonsai.  We made it back to the village and the rain stopped.  We had such a great day and were super excited to celebrate new years that night!

 

on the boat for our snorkeling trip

 

 

 

maya bay, phi phi leh

 

 

the beach, from "the beach"

 

 

rain clouds coming in...

New Years eve was amazing!  The girls and I spent the night hanging out with new friends from the snorkeling trip, watching muy thai fighting matches, buckets, dancing on the beach, and watching fireworks.  It was definitely unlike any new years eve I’ve ever had, but I had an amazing time.

The next morning Chelsea and I woke up to an unexpected surprise…the SUN!  We immediately grabbed our suits and towels and posted up on the beach.  We spend the next two days lying on the beach, drinking pineapple smoothies, and soaking in the sweet sweet sunshine that we had been looking forward to ever since we arrived.  But all good things must come to an end, and on Sunday I unfortunately had to catch a bus back to Bangkok.  Chelsea still had another week of break so she was going to stay on the beach for a few more days, but I had to make my way back so I could be at school to teach on Tuesday.  I stayed on the beach as long as possible, before having to catch the ferry and get on my bus back to my school.  Phi phi was amazing and I was sad to leave such a beautiful place.  The bus ride back was long and once I got to Bangkok it took a tuk-tuk, a skytrain and a cab ride, but by 8am I was back in my dorm room, in my bed, ready to sleep most of the day away to get myself back into the groove for teaching.

It was a great break and made me suuuuper excited for summer break when I’ll get to do even more traveling!  I know there are many more adventures to come and I cant wait to get back out and start traveling as soon as possible!

Love you all!

 new years eve on the beach

 buckets and thai fighting

 SUN!

 dear koh phi phi....we will be back!

ruins, monkeys and sunflowers.

So onto part 2 of my week of travels!

On Sunday morning, Chelsea and I woke up early to head on and begin our travels.  We took the sky train to victory monument and searched around for a minivan to take us to Ayutthaya, the old capital of Thailand.  In Thailand in addition to buses and trains to take you to far away places, there are also minivans that you can hire to travel…they are a lot quicker than buses, but a little bit more expensive.  But the quick trip to Ayutthaya, about 1 ½ hours away, only costs 60 baht (about $2).  After the quick van ride there, we found a little place to stay for the night, dropped off our stuff, and rented bicycles so we could cruise around and check out all the ruins in the town.  It felt good to be back on a bike, kinda like I was back in isla vista…except I was surrounded by huge ancient ruins.  Chelsea and I bought a ticket that would get us into all of the ruins that we wanted to see so we could cruise around at our leisure and take in all the sights.  The ruins were amazing and each one had cool details and a different set up.  I tried to imagine each of the ruins as they had been originally, before they got destroyed by the Burmese army in the 1700’s.  in addition to the ruins, we also made a stop by a temple that held a MASSIVE Buddha....pretty impressive.  We went back to the street we were staying on and grabbed some dinner from a little restaurant.  After dinner, we talked a bike shop owner to let us borrow the bikes for another hour so we could check out the ruins again at night.  Ayutthaya has lights that illuminate the ruins till about 9pm every night, so we figured we might as well check them out.  It was great to see them at night and to see them in a totally different light.  After our night bike ride, we called it a night and headed back to our hotel to pass out.

We woke up early the next morning and walked over to the train station.  The lady running our hotel had told us that the train was a much easier way to get to lopburi, our next destination of choice.  When we arrived at the train station there was a train there that was about to pull out of the station.  One of the attendants asked us where we were going and when we told him, he shouted that the train that was about to leave was the one we needed to be on!  they rushed us around and let us cut to the front of the line to buy our tickets, and were so so helpful in trying to stop the train so we could catch it.  Unfortunately we weren’t quick enough and the train left literally 5 seconds before we were all set.  Oh well.  The next train to take us to lopburi wouldn’t be there for another 2 hours.  So we bought new tickets and posted up at the train station and people watched and read for the next two hours.  Lopburi was about 2 hour train ride away from Ayutthaya and the ticket only cost 13 baht (less than 50cents…!).  We hopped on the train and we couldn’t believe how crowded it was!  We had to stand up for the first part of the ride until more people got off and there was room for us to sit.  The most annoying thing about the train was that there were people who would walk up and down the aisles every 30 seconds trying to sell different food and drinks.  This was difficult because we had to stand in the middle of the aisle because that was the only place to stand, and it was hard trying to let them pass by and get around us.

2 hours later we arrived in lopburi and made our way to a hostel that our friend Olivia had recommended to us.  The hostel was super cute and run by an adorable couple who had one of the cutest toddlers I’ve ever seen!  A note about lopburi….the city is taken over by monkeys.  Literally there are monkeys EVERYWHERE…hanging from the wires, running all over the streets and trying to snatch up any food they can get their grubby little hands on!  The monkeys seem really cute at first, but man they are vicious!  If you don’t fork over your food when they come near you they hiss at you!  We made sure to have all our snacks packed away and out of sight so we would be safe from vicious monkeys.  It was kinda cool that there just monkeys everywhere, but I made sure not to get too close!

  We put all our stuff in our room and asked the owner how to get to the sunflower fields!  Lopburi is known for their HUGE sunflower fields and we wanted to check them out for ourselves!  We took a city bus to the main terminal in lopburi and jumped on another bus that would drive past the fields.  We asked the driver to just drop us off on the side of the road, and we walked about 2km to the fields.  These fields were GORGEOUS.  Thousands of sunflowers everywhere…it was a bright sunny day and there were these gorgeous mountains that made the perfect backdrop to the endless rows of sunflowers.  Chelsea and I took tons of pictures and walked around taking in the beautiful day!  There were little stalls set up on the side next to the field that sold flavored sunflower seeds, so Chelsea and I got a little bag of each flavor…chocolate, strawberry and honey flavored..YUM.  One of the women working the stall offered to drive us back to the main road on the back of her motorbike and we gladly accepted!  They were super friendly and taking a motorbike sound waaaay better than making the trek back.  When we got to the end of the road the ladies on the motorbikes drove back, and we were just left there not really sure what to do next.  We had no idea when/if another bus would be passing by so that we could get back to the city…so we waited….and waited…and still no bus drove by.  I’m sure we looked ridiculous standing on the side of the road looking absolutely clueless…actually I know we looked ridiculous because a bus going the opposite direction filled with thai people stopped right in front of us for a good 2 minutes and the thais on the bus pointed at us and giggled.  Then they took grabbed their cameras and started taking pictures from the bus of the silly farang standing on the side of the road.  We knew we looked ridiculous so we just smiled and laughed and wondered if maybe someone from the bus would come out and help us.  Nope.  A minute later the bus zoomed off and left us standing there.  We were getting desperate and for a minute we even considered trying to hitchhike back into the city, but just as I was about to stick out my thumb and try to catch a ride a bus came around the corner and we were saved!  We waved down the bus and rode it back into town.

We got back to town and grabbed some food and drinks and called it a night.  We woke up the next morning to the sound of little monkeys climbing all over the roof of our hotel!  We looked out the window and there was a monkey sitting on our windowsill peering into our room!  We laughed and headed out down the stairs….where there were 2 monkeys just chilling on the stairs.  We didn’t want to get that close and personal with the monkeys so we yelled down to the owner and she came up and shot at the monkeys with her little BB gun.  The monkeys got scared off and jumped out the window.  Silly monkeys.  We packed our bags and headed for the train station; we decided that we would take the train into Bangkok, our next destination where we would catch our bus to koh phi phi.  We were able to score seats on the train and 28 baht (90 cents) and 3 hours later we were in Bangkok and ready to set out on our next destination…a tropical island!

Alright, that’s all for today, stay tuned for the last installment of my winter break and the epicness that was koh phi phi.

Love you all!

 in the van on our way to ayutthaya!

 ruins

 sunflower fields!

 vicious monkeys!

christmas time.

sawadee pii mai!  Happy new year!  It’s hard to believe that it’s 2011!  I have a feeling its going to be a good year.  I have tons of stories to share, but let me begin with what happened today…

I got back from my week of travelling early Monday morning.  I had been travelling to get back to the school for almost15 hours and was exhausted!   As soon as I got home I crashed in bed and slept most of the day away.  When I woke up my right eye was killing me and was super irritated.  When I looked in the mirror I noticed that it was suuuuper swollen!  Efffff, that was the last thing that I wanted to deal with.  I took some advil and hoped that somehow magically overnight it would go away.  When I woke up in the morning it was still swollen so I figured I should probably go to the doctor.  I called in sick to school and called the office asking if they could set up a van to take me to the hospital.  The office said they couldn’t set up a van and just called me a cab.  so I had to take a cab to the hospital by myself and had no idea what to expect once I got there.  Sitting in the cab I just froke out.  I got super upset and missed home and frustrated that I had to go to the hospital and that I had to deal with this.  But I gave myself a little pep talk and decided that this was just another adventure and experience and just needed to suck it up.  The cab driver dropped me off at the front entrance of the hospital and I was ushered inside.  The people at the counter spoke little English, but they were super nice and really helped me and took me from place to place to get my check up.  The doctor that examined my eye was super helpful and spoke English really well!  He checked out my eye and told me that I had a corneal abrasion…aka a scratch on my eye that had gotten infected.  He prescribed me some antibiotics and sent me on my way!  It was suuuper easy and I was in and out in no time!  The pharmacy was in the hospital too, so I made a quick stop there to pick up my medication and I was on my way back to the dorm!  I can now check being treated at a thai hospital off the list of life experiences....hopefully I won’t have to do that again, but now I know that it’s a pretty painless process!

So now onto my winter break…i don’t even know where to begin with this blog!  The past 2 weeks have been a whirlwind and I’ve had so much going on and was able to do so many things over break!  I guess I’ll begin with Christmas eve…

so I had to “work” on Christmas eve….but  it wasn’t really work because most of the students didn’t come to school that day because they were all at home getting dolled up for our Christmas show that was going to be that evening.  So I just got to hang out, skype with my family, and walk around the school checking out all the decorations.  We had to stay at school all day and until the performance started that night at 5 and I was planning on leaving straight after the performance to meet up with the girls in Bangkok, so I had to bring my huge backpack with me since I wouldn’t be back to the dorms until the end of break….no bueno, but oh well. 

So at 5 all the parents and students started arriving.  The school had set up dozens of food stalls with tons of different food for everyone to stuff themselves with before the performances began.  At about 6ish the performances finally began.  There were 18 performances in total…each class had a dance that they performed, and then there were also special ballet performances from some of the students, karate performance, and performances by each of the language deparments.  I got to watch some of my classes perform and they were adorable…none of them danced to Christmas music though, they danced to like recent thai songs which was a little odd, but whatever.  Finally it was time for the English department’s performance, we had been practicing for 2 weeks and the kids really seemed to have it down……but of course it turned into a disaster!  The microphones went out  mid way through the performance which confused the kids and made them get all mixed up and then the CD didn’t play the song for the kids to do their dance/sing (the dance that I choreographed!) so they stood awkwardly on stage just waiting….all in all it was a disaster.  We were a little embarrassed that it went so badly, but theres nothing we could do about it, so oh well.  After the english performance I booked it out of there and made my way into the city to meet up with the girls!

I dropped my stuff off at the hostel we had booked and made my way to meet the girls who were out having drinks.  It was great to see everyone and to be with friends for the Christmas holiday.  We went out that night to the RCA area of Bangkok (where a lot of the clubs are) and danced the night away.  It was definitely  not your typical Christmas eve, but I had a great time with the girls. 

On Christmas morning we slept in then headed to starbucks to drink some delicious holiday lattes.  Next we headed back to the hostel and did our gift exchange!  We had set up a secret santa gift exchange and it was a lot of fun opening our gifts and finding out who had who.  Liz had picked me and she got me a cute framed pic of the two of us and had printed out a few other pictures of us for me to have!  I loved it!  After our gift exchange we headed out to dinner and went to this Mexican food place that we had read about on CNN…it was supposed to have the best burritos in all of Bangkok so we HAD to check it out!  I have been craving Mexican food for a really long time so it really hit the spot!  I had a delicious steak quesadilla and a margarita. Yum.  We met the owner of the restaurant and it turns out that he was from California!  He was from Oakland and had graduated from CAL with a degree in chemistry.  Super random that he ended up owning a Mexican food place in Bangkok!  He chatted with us for a while and then gave us a round of tequila shots on the house.  Even though I couldn’t be with my family on Christmas, I was really glad that I was surrounded by a great group of girls and we were able to spend the day together celebrating.  After dinner we headed to Siam square to check out some of the Christmas lights and decorations,…the place was suuuuuper crowded and we could barely move, so we just stayed for a little while before we became exhausted and decided to just head back to our hostel.  All in all it was a pretty great day.

Alright, that’s about all I have time to write today, stay tuned in the next entry will be filled with ruins, monkeys, trains, buses, and sunflower fields!

love you all!

p.s. i wrote all of this yesterday (tues, jan 4th, but didnt have internet to post it till today!) 

 some of my afternoon class kids performing their dance

 teacher jamshed and i at the christmas performance

 my english coordinator at the kindergarten, teacher kim, and i

 my N1 class

 one of my N3 babies :)

 with the girls about to go out on xmas eve

 christmas dinner at the mexican restaurant! nothing says christmas like shots of tequila

 liz and i outside of siam paragon

crazy bangkok traffic on christmas night