inside thai life in my town

this might be a long entry. fair warning. its wednesday which means i dont teach, i just hang out at the school all day. so i have ample time.

a week ago i was exercising in the park and a thai girl came up to me and introduced herself in english and said she wanted to practice english with me, so we did and kept bumping into eachother at the park and talking. then she invited me to play Takraw (thai traditional sport which is like volleyball only u cant use your hands) with her and her friends yesterday. so i met them and played, and they were surprised it was my first time playing and told me i was really good at it, but its a lot like juggling a soccer ball so i was used to it. there were a lot of people playing Takraw at the park so i felt like a local. we were speaking in thai and in english. then we stopped at a stand and got fresh coconut juice.

then they invited me to dinner with them- thai style, where you share everything like at thanksgiving dinner. so we sat outside on the sidewalk at a restaurant and ate the usual grilled fish, spicy papaya salad, sticky rice, tom-yam-kung soup, but then they had other different stuff that i hadnt ate before they had a squid salad, and some part of a cow, and liver, and pig intestines- i didnt know what it was until after i ate it- there was a language barrier and then they pointed to the part of their body and i knew it was intestines. yuck. but everything was super spicy- even for the thai people. and the only thing they bought to drink was heineken. (the way they drink beer here is with ice in it and a straw p.s.) and so i kept drinking and drinking the heineken trying to get the spicy burning out of my mouth. and as usual with thai style dinners, the oldest person always pays for the whole meal- and i was by far the youngest one there, plus i was a guest. but i always feel like a mooch when they pay for the whole meal. but thats the thai way.

then they invited me to go to karaoke with them at a bar nearby, because the thai people love their karaoke. so i decided why not. i told them i wasnt going to sing, but they made me sing anyways. i was quite the spectacle, singing in a tiny karaoke bar in a small town. all the thais wanted to practice their english with me and have me sing every english song- mostly oldies music. so i finally agreed to sing a maroon 5 song, because they are quite popular there. then i was singing some thai songs with my new friends as the night went on- they were impressed that i could sing some songs in thai. but at the karaoke bar again it was more heineken, and every time a glass would be half full, the waitress or one of my new friends would fill it up again with more beer and more ice. it was an expensive night but again i didnt have to pay for anything because the eldest always pays, which is crazy. the beer bill alone for the karaoke was 960 baht!

then we left the karaoke bar together and they all walked me back to my apartment and told me i had to come play takraw every day at 6pm with them from now on so we can practice thai and english and takraw. haha. it was a fun night.