in the land of smiles.: 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