10%

I didn’t get the best perspective of Bangkok during my week-long orientation. There was no time during the day to explore, and by the time I ate dinner and hung out a little after classes were done, I was exhausted. There were 64 teachers total being trained during orientation, and while I like to think I’m a lover of life and people in general, every group situation I’ve been in in the last few years has led me to the 10% rule. For me, it’s a given that I will love the shit out of 10% of the people present in a group population, which means, usually, the other 90% I could do without. My first day of orientation, I felt like the bumblebee girl at the end of the video—Sweeeeeet, here is a room full of people that love to read and travel and talk, people that are open-minded and funny and self-secure. I was ready to take back the 10% rule! Not so fast, big girl. After the first few days, once people got over the shock of a new place, default personalities emerged and bam, the rule was back. Most of the people training to be teachers are fresh out of college and it seemed a little like some of them hadn’t left, and by that I mean some of the folks with whom I interacted seemed more like the idiots you would find on Real World Thailand than people that actually care about why we’re actually here. Preachy preachy, I know, but my problem wasn’t that these fools EXISTED, I’m prepared to meet douchebags everywhere I go for the rest of my life-my problem was that I had to spend every structured hour with them for a week straight. The upside of the ten percent rule is that, true to the numbers, I fell in with a group of sweet-ass ladies that will most likely keep me sane during the week and will be travel friends for weekend trips. So Bangkok orientation, not a total bust.