cambodia soon

update: thursday morning i am leaving for cambodia because i have to go do a visa run so that i can stay in thailand for sixty more days. i will bus it from bangkok to aranyaprathet, and then cross the border to cambodia in the town called Poi Pet. then i think i will travel to Battambang and stay a few nights there and then go to Koh Samed island with the school teachers and boss on sunday.

if you dont have facebook, here are public links to my photo albums from thailand:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2025605&id=165401361&l=ccac1

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2024618&id=165401361&l=5bb76

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2024104&id=165401361&l=392e1

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2023658&id=165401361&l=383af

Coming soon

Well nothing new around here really. Just hanging out at school during the day and trying to pass the time by- reading and using the internet, and learning thai (mostly practicing writing) and spanish (online). (I've been finished with all of my work for the semester but i still have to physically be at the school for the next week).

Then on next thursday or friday i have to go to cambodia to do a visa run- probably take the train. go there and come back right away, because i will be by myself and have already traveled for a week there to the hot spots.

then on sunday our head of school is taking us teachers to Ko Samet island to stay at a resort for a couple days (someone she knows owns it). so we are meeting at the school sunday morning and someone is driving a van there full of us i think. that should be fun. and i was looking up the beach and area we will be staying and it says

"One of the only beaches on Ko Samet's west coast, Ao Phrao is a scenic bay with a sweeping shallow beach. It's also the most luxurious beach on Ko Samet, with just three top-end resorts."

It's supposed to be an exclusive beach with a great view of the sunset. i love islands. im excited for this. we will all actually get to mingle for a chance, because throughout the school days we are all so busy-mostly the thai teachers chasing kids around.

this weekend: going to a movie, thai boxing, playing frisbee and doing some shopping maybe at Chatuchak.

Racing in the BKK

This last weekend I ran a “mini-marathon”, 10.5 km, in Bangkok at Suan Luang Rama 9 Park. The race started at 6am, which meant that me and one of my thai friends had to get a taxi at 3am so that we could make it there at 4:30am to warm up and get our racing stuff. So I had to wake up at 2:45am to get ready for the race, which is crazy. When I left my apartment complex at 3am, the security guard asked me in thai where I was going, cuz im sure I looked funny leaving at 3am in skimpy (in thai standards) running clothes. I went with one of my thai friends from my town and met a couple of my other English teacher friends there at the race too.
The Prime Minister came to the race and made a speech and then he came to the front of the runners at the start line and got his picture taken- I was in the front so I am probably in some of the pictures of him at the race- wherever those pictures went- but I was inches from him, it was crazy. He had body guards all around him though. Fun politics in Thailand.

The race started at 6:15… Thai time I suppose (it was supposed to start at 6am), and the starting gun was a fog horn. It was still dark out for most of the race, the sun started coming up around 6:30am. The park was nice to run through, and 10.5k went pretty fast. It wasn’t too hot out yet either, but still humid. I finished 1st in my age category and 2nd overall- but 1st place was only 200 meters ahead of me- I probably could have got 1st place but I didn’t sleep much and I went thai boxing the day before- excuses. I was happy with 1st in my group though. I got a trophy. One of my English teaching friends, Claire, got 2nd place in our age group. She wants to start training with me, so maybe we’ll start doing that.

After the race it was awesome because there was so much free food. At Lincoln races it is just a few bagels, a pop, water and a banana, maybe a cookie. But here it was soymilk, milk, donuts, thai rice dish, thai noodle dish, seaweed snacks, tuna sandwiches, pop, water, Gatorade, cereal, oranges, and bananas (and you could take whole bundles home with you.) And it was free for participants as well as spectators- then I understood why so many people were there to watch!
It was also interesting/weird that one of the only stands that they had at the race that was selling stuff was a sauce stand selling stuff like fish sauce, so it smelled like fish sauce after the race- gross. They love that stuff here though and its in everything. Yesterday at my school they were eating raw mango dipped in a spicy fish sauce thing- it smelled horrible and tasted worse. Yuck. I told them I like my mangoes sweet and ripe.

So yeah all in all the race was a lot of fun and I will do it again. Everyone was asking me where I was from and stuff, and we had to put something down for our “team” we run on, so we put Team USA. We were representing the USA at the Don Bosco Mini-Marathon in Bangkok on February 22nd 2009. Yep. 1st and 2nd place.

Koh Chang

Okay, so I haven’t written in here in a while, and uncle mark called me while I was on an island and reminded me of that. Here’s for you uncle mark! J I’ve been keeping busy with writing up assessments for the 100 kids, then testing all of the kids individually, and then grading them all and typing up written English Assessments for each kid. It’s been keeping me pretty busy. But as of today, I am probably going to be finished with it all by next Tuesday at the latest. Which means I will have 2 weeks of “nothing” really to do at school- I just have to physically be here from 7:30am-4:30pm everyday. I still have to teach my after school English clubs, but that isn’t much work. The last week of the month is parent teacher conferences, so that will be interesting too.

This last weekend I decided that I needed a break and that I needed to get out of the Bangkok area. So me and my friend Lindsey went to an island called Koh Chang with 11 other “farangs” (foreigners) working in Thailand- mostly English teachers. It was a very fun time. We stayed in bungalows on the beach and spent our days relaxing- swimming in the ocean, playing Frisbee, tennis, running on the beach, getting thai massages on the beach, and hiking to waterfalls. I found one of my new favorite dishes too on the island at a really good restaurant/bar- fried rice with chicken with yellow curry powder and raisins- it was so good!

I’m also glad I went on the trip because I got to meet 11 other really cool people (they were Lindsey’s friends). They all play ultimate Frisbee on Sundays on a team and invited me to come play with them. A couple of the girls are also runners, which is fun, and they told me about some cool races coming up. So this Sunday I am running a 10k in Bangkok with them, and then in march there is a duathlon in Koh Phagnan that I am going to run. The other duathlon is in northern Thailand and I might still do that too.

That’s what I’ve been up to. I’m not thinking I will be a superstar at this race on Sunday, but it will be fun. I’m going to thai boxing practice on Saturday, which isn’t something I would normally do before a race, but I don’t care, I need to get my thai boxing fix in while I’m here. More later! Take care everyone!

assessment week. surprise!

This Monday when I arrived at school at 7am the principal informed me that this week is assessment week- last Thursday she told me it was review week and assessment week was in 2 weeks. The syllabus also said I had 2 weeks until assessment week- I had not made tests yet and I had full lesson plans made up for a review week.

Apparently the Thai teachers decided to make assessment week a week earlier, and no one told me until that week. So I made 2 days be packed with review and wrote up tests for all 6 classes overnight and today I started testing the kids- which to me sounds silly almost to test 3-6 year olds- they’re so little!

So far its been a headache and it is really tiring. I pull the kids out of their Thai classes and do their tests with them one-on-one, and I have 100 KIDS to test! Today I got through about 33 kids. The nursery kids were the hardest because they just wanted to play, 3 year olds aren’t meant to take tests of any sort. Normally I have a Thai teacher with me, but they didn’t accompany me today, so I was all alone with 5 nursery kids at a time trying to test them.

In my kindergarten 3 class the bully kid was beating up on another kid and totally punched him really hard against the wall. It was bad, but the kid was alright. The bully kid (his name is First) started freaking out and crying as I carried him to his teacher’s room, and he was telling me in Thai that he didn’t want to go to the teacher, so I made him go back once he calmed down and apologize, so he did. It went very well. I was very surprised. Then I got them both to do their tests even after that.

Well, 70 tests left to go in the next two days, wish me luck!

p.s. I’m probably really tired today also because I woke up at 4:30am and went on a 5 mile run at 5am. I was woken up by mosquitoes eating me. I need to find a mosquito net because I sleep with my window open, and my window has a screen on it, but it doesn’t seal, so mosquitoes get in and love to suck my blood while I sleep, then I wake up to buzzing in my ear and itching all over. It is really annoying. Sometimes I wake up and spray bug spray all over myself, but then I just wake up in the morning feeling really gross from inhaling all the bug spray and having it all over me.