First Impressions...

So I have been here in Phanom Sarakham for five days, long enough to establish a routine that I can tell you about here. I wake up every morning between 5:30 and 6:00...I do some crunches, yoga, all that good soul-cleansing jazz-mentally prepare myself for the day-and then I eat a bowl of cereal and a piece of fruit. I get dressed, brush my teef, and head out the door for the trek that is my walk to school. (Sidenote-one of the perks of teaching in a tropical country is that no one expects me to look that good-I ask you to approach the pictures I show you with the same reduced judgment..I'm clean and all, and my clothes are nice, but I don't worry about makeup or anything intense with my hair because the heat and humidity=massive perspiration, which makes any kind of effort in that regard pretty pointless, which is sweeeet by me).


The walk to my school takes about thirty minutes, and they are the most eventful thirty minutes that a pedestrian could ever hope to have. You know in the movie Dodgeball where Patches O'Houlihan makes the guys run in and out of traffic and he says,"If you can dodge a car, you can dodge a ball?" Well, by those standards, I will be an Olympic level dodgeball competitor by the time my stint in this great country comes to a close. The preferred form of transportation here is motorbike (even my crazy Thai coordinator has one, and yes, I have ridden on the back ONCE all the while praying to whatever being is in charge of keeping people safe on motorbikes that if I could just live through that experience I would never do it again-i escaped with a burn on my leg and considered myself lucky...) Cars also flood the street..so my walk to school takes place down the main road of our town....there are no lanes and traffic goes in both directions...it is a relatively undeveloped street, so potholes and cracks abound, and if I were to take a break from paying extreme attention like i sometimes do in my american life, i would certainly end up roadkill. This is not even the most interesting element of the journey.


Amid all the engine chaos, this street is home to a huge market set up every morning from 4 am til about 9am. Every kind of fruit and vegetable is set up for sale, in addition to every kind of seafood and meat from all parts of every kind of animal a carnivore could think to ingest. I can't wait to show you the pictures I've taken of the stand with the two giant pigs' heads for sale every morning. I'm not sure the FDA would approve. I know that i am slowly adjusting, however, because the first morning or two that I smelled the variety of smells i was nauseated but now they are starting to smell a little more appealing. Despite the pandemonium around me, the thirty minute walk is a great way to start my day...by the time I get to school, I am wide awake and ready to kick ass, and teaching English to these kids requires a high level of kickass.


I will be honest...this morning was a bit of a breakdown morning for me. The adjustment to life in a country like this one was not as easy as little miss sunshine over here thought it would be...I was in such a happy, relaxed, comfortable place at home before i left, and i just assumed that the mood would follow me around the world. That was not the case...but the point of being happy, when you are, isnt just to bask in the glow of your yellow chi or whatever, but to remember what it took to get to that point, because im finding that happiness doesnt always come easy-if it did, maybe life wouldnt be so rewarding...sometimes it's work to get to the happy place, and it means deliberately paying attention to the right things and tuning out the rest, so i am moving toward there steadily.


I have been feeling really homesick, combined with the reality of living standards in a non-western, tropical country (the MISfit this morning was caused by waking up and putting my foot down next to a cockroach the size of a baseball glove...i was ready to pack my shit up and sleep at the airport in bangkok until i could get a flight home...but that would have been a MIStake....god the negative possibilities with my name are endless) so what that makes for is a previously unprecedented necessity for rolling with it, and I've always prided myself on my ability to do just that, so here we go, this is me rolling with it.


This morning after i calmed down, i told myself that i would come to school and really evaluate the way that I felt all day, to see which i would hate more...myself for leaving now or everyday of the next four months living in a roach villa. Today I realized ...I absolutely love the shit out of teaching. It helps that the students have taken a liking to me, definitely, but today was especially great. So this week, all of my classes have mostly been just me getting to know the kids. The school is a public school but it is very prestigious, so kids need to apply... the English program itself is a government program, which means that it gets government funding AND parents pay tuition for their kids to be in the English program, so theclassrooms that I teach in are all air-conditioned and fully stocked with supplies.



I teach M1,M2,M3,M4,M5,andM6 level kids...the M stands for Matayom, the Thai word that roughly translates to grade. Ages range from about 12 to 18...while it is overwhelming to design that many lesson plans every week, I love the challenge of having to tailor my approach to teaching English according to each skill level. While it seems as though the older kids should be better, there is a pretty uiniversal change that occurs in the willingness of an adolescent to look sillyin front of their friends, so kids become more self-conscious aroundthe age of 15, I would say, which means that the most fun class is probably M1 or M2...those kids are young enough to just want to please me, and they are incredibly smart and cooperative. The older kids are a little more difficult to control, but I've already mastercrafted my evil eye-In my first class with each level, we had a discussion about the word respect...what it means in Thai culture (the kids understood when I compared it to the wai, or head bow with hands clasped, that they give their teachers every time they pass....and yeahhh im one of those teachers, how sweet is that?! Wai me!)


All in all, I LOVELOVELOVE every single one of my classes...they almost cancel out the roaches in my house....almost. But it really does feel like i was made for this sort of thing-they love my energy, my crazy gestures, my loud voice. It is a dream job, I guess, although it would be a little more dreamy if I could transport it to my half of the world...but something to work toward when I get home. For now, my job is making me really happy and everything else will fall into place.



One funny little something...So i dyed my hair brown before i came here hoping to be more inconspicuous, less privy to induction into a Thai prostitution ring. Well, last week at my orientation in Bangkok, we had a huge dinner in the hotel restaurant with all of our school coordinators, plus some other guests they brought from the school...total, I would say there were probably about 150 people there. During dinner, the orientation coordinator Phil asked me if i would give a speech on behalf of the orientation group,thanking the coordinators....with no time to prepare-maybe five minutes. I know i talk a big game and all about being wordy and awesome but this was a daunting task....BUT it was actually great-public speaking is all about mind over matter, same as being at the front of a classroom. If you can hide your shaking and overcome that poop feeling in your stomach then no one will know youre nervous.


So after i gave my speech and could actually eat again, this coordinator from another school ran over to me and asked me if i would take a picture with him because he wanted to tell all his friends and family in malaysia that he met lindsey lohan-no joke. Then, yesterdayI had my first club meeting (all the teachers get to have a club at school for one period on wednesday...mine is music and poetry and itis going to be SWEET-jim,i might want your input slash itunes for some of the music stuff) and because it was the first meeting, we all just hung out and talked. The English level of these kids is astounding. They said they like me because Im funny and I look like Lindsey Lohan...So I said uh-oh,I better not act like her or ill get sent back to america, and i pantomimed lifting up my dress, and they thought that was the funniest thing in the world. These kids are going to be awesome when im done with them, and i dont just mean in English.