Land of the hidden weener...

Sawatdeeeee Ka! Sorry it’s taken me so long to start posting...it has been a crazy seven days and I think I’m still mentally catching up-So I have officially been here for one week, most of which was spent in Bangkok, in a conference room in my hotel, sitting through eight to nine hours of classroom/language/culture training from Sunday to Thursday. The first perk? I fell in LOVE with my orientation room mate, which came as a relief grande given my history of kill-yourself luck where random room assignments are concerned (everyone remember the Amanda Carl debacle first semester at Delaware? Ask me about her sometime). The second perk? They could not stop feeding us. Literally. The hotel was really nice (check out the website here) and so we would have a breakfast buffet every morning and lunch buffet every afternoon, assortments of food that covered the gamut of Thai culinary delights. As if the all-you-can-eat nature of the first two meals was not enough, we also had two 15 minute “tea-times” as breaks during lessons. Tea was served alongside two small snacks, which differed everyday. My favorite snacks usually had some kind of sticky rice in them (and no, I don’t care to know exactly what makes it sticky, I just like it because it reminds me of rice pudding) and my least favorite were the rolls with wieners hidden in them. Yes. This is the land of the hidden weener-Thai people evidently can’t get enough of hot-dog-esque looking meat products, and aside from serving them on sticks on the street, they also hid them inside innocent looking rolls next to my cup of tea. Not pleased with that surprise. I tried almost everything once, and then I mentally decided that I’m not going to eat any kind of red meat or pork while I’m here: too difficult to know exactly what it is and I love my puppy too much to chance consuming one of her kin, so fish and vegetables fo me. Thai mystery meat, no thank you.


Surplus of calories consumed and ass-numbing hours spent in the same seat aside, orientation was useful in giving me the confidence I need to rock in the classroom here. To teach English as a second language (in a country where I am veryyy slowly learning the native language for the first time) is really intimidating. My reflex when I don’t know how to say something here is to resort to Spanish…smart, I know, but the ball-kicker when I try to think about how I learned to speak Spanish in high school is that English and Spanish are both Romance languages…in many cases, the root words for meaning are the same. There’s no parallel for a tonal character language like Thai-The sound and writing of it is as different from English as possible. One of our orientation teachers, Mike, did this great demonstration where he spoke nothing but German to us for a full forty minutes. He wrote sentences in German on the board and taught us how to introduce ourselves and count to ten. Again, German and English have a similar root language so in some cases that made it a little easier to discern what he was saying, but the point of the exercise was to show the importance of energy as a foreign language teacher. You have to be able to exaggerate your words and actions-movement and gestures are paramount in communication when there is a language barrier (minus the visual faux pas I’m pretty sure I committed when I asked for drinking straws in the grocery store this morning and mimed something that was probably a little more questionable). So boo-ya-I finally have somewhere positive to channel all of my crazy gestures and inability to sit still. My first official day of teaching is Tuesday, so I’ll keep you posted on how that goes.