Cross-dressing youngsters, all in the name of poetry, of course

This Tuesday was a holiday to celebrate a famous Thai poet.  Naturally, a three hour assembly followed.  Every grade performed a song or a dance or a skit of some sort, most of which involved some wild costumes.  Here is a personal fave:

 so glamorous right now.

Check out Dana’s blog for some ridiculous videos of the event, which was complete with first graders in tutus, voluptuous fifth grade boys, and tiny kindergardeners as what looked like characters from Toddlers in Tiaras. We only stayed for an hour or so, but what a show!

Aerobics, Thai s-tyle

This Monday was round two for Thai aerobics- what a show!  Everyday, about 30 Thais show up everyday to the park down the road from our house for 45 minutes of microphoned fitness.  Most of them are middle-aged women, but there is the occasional old man or high school student who comes along to move their feet.  I saw them groovin’ everyday in passing, so naturally it was something I had to try.  Last Monday was a doozy—joining in with the others really made me realize how uncoordinated I am (similar to me trying to do Zumba in America).  The instructor stands on a cement stage with a microphone and two side kicks on her left and right.  We got there a bit late the first time, which didn’t ease my learning curve.  But round two was slightly more successful. And everyone is dressed in color-coded polos to match the day of the week. On Tuesdays, we wear pink.

Suki Night

Last Tuesday, P’ Benz took us to the market and we bought the necessary supplies to have a hot pot suki dinner party at our house.  

This included: $6 worth of mushrooms, 2 heads of cabbage, cilantro, and a bunch of morning glory, rice noodles, nam cheem sauce, shrimp, chicken, chicken carcass for broth, pork, eggs, a whole durian, watermelon, mangoes.  A feast to say the least.  A whole crew came over and we cooked up soup in the electric wok. Sanuk mak!

Knees and Toes

The past few weeks have been filled with learning the body parts.  Or I guess, the students have been learning them, I have been teaching them.  We’ve sung songs galore, including the Jellyfish and the Hokey Pokey, and we have been exploring our artistic side with some monster drawings.  Here are some highlights:

 So this was drawn by a seven-year old crazy girl named Ben. Check out her artistic additions:

Nanthing to do but hobbies

This weekend was full of relaxing and hobby time, per Nan usual.  Saturday, we biked out to the City Park Hotel, and for 50 baht, swam in their giant pool- it was glorious.  Sunday, P’Benz, our Thai partner in crime, borrowed her brother’s car and drove us to the Nan Riverside Art Gallery.  It is a beautiful sequence of buildings up in the mountains, filled with modern renditions of traditional Thai scenes, as well as exhibits of old temple murals.  It was such an oasis up there, complete with giant staghorn ferns, fishtale palms, and other tropical plants.  

We were appreciated

        For what? you might ask.  Well, last Friday was Wai Kru Day, the Thai equivalent of teacher appreciation day.  Even though we had only been teaching for five days, were were included in the festivities.  All of the teachers were dressed to the nines in matching traditional Thai outfits, so Katie, Dana, Allison, and I went out the day before to buy new skirts.  After a solid hour of trying on, refitting, and bartering, we had purchased four new patoongs, the traditional northern Thai skirts.

         The assembly was in the open-air gym on Friday morning and boy was it hot.  They packed in all 1000+ students, plus all the teachers into the gym, and after an hour of listening to people talk, every class came up to the teachers to wai us (imagine a Namaste-esque bow) and to give us flowers.  There were many flowers, candles, incense, and photos to be had, but it all finished in time for our eleven o’clock classes.

                                  Our new skirts:

 5th Graders lining up for the assembly:

 Kindergardeners are the smallest

 The school:

 The crew:

What's in a name

Every Thai person has a full name, which is usually quite lengthy and impossible to remember or to pronounce, and a nickname, which they usually go by.  Apparently it has to do with the superstitions in Thai culture.  A nickname is given to a child at birth and used in lieu of a true name so as to protect themselves from the bad spirits.  After all, who would want the evil spirits to know their real name?

Thus, everyone uses a nickname (thankfully for me and my memory).  I had eight classes of second and third grade this week, and I am struggling a bit to remember everyone’s name, but I did catch on to a few great nicknames.  Here are some favorites, to give you a taste of the diversity:

Giant

Captain

Gun

Boss

Donut

Beer

Oil

Whiskey

Bignut

Littlenut

Goodview

Gong

And then there were four

Allison and Dana have arrived! They both hail from Princeton and graduated two days before hopping on the airplane and crossing the Pacific. 

We met up with them after teaching a English teacher training workshop for all the teachers in Nan Province.  There were about forty teachers, thirty-five of which were women, ranging from 26 to 58 years old.  We led some listening activities for a while, then had them do a speaking warm up with each other.  This is all it was: each person in a small group talking for 1 minute about themselves in English. Simple enough, but they loved it!  It was so fun to walk around and listen to what they said, especially the ones who were laughing a lot.  This one woman was particularly hilarious.  She was not shy about jokingly calling out “Teacher, I don’t understand!” and her group was having the best time speaking to each other.  I caught a snippet of her 1 minute speech, in which she said, “I hangover.” What a gem.  Then we played competitive taboo. So fun. Not bad for a mandatory Saturday workday.

After teaching, we met up with Allison and Dana and biked around Nan and to a coffee shop.  For whatever reason, coffee shops are all the rage here.  And they are really nice, usually with nice gardens or AC. We came back to Katie and my apartment, as Dana and Allison are currently living in a guesthouse.  We are still trying to figure out how we can all live in the same place (which is usually the case in Nan), but Ajaan Prakop has not found a place yet… But it was fun to hang out in our downstairs, which we really hadn’t done yet, and play some ukelele/banjolele, and hoola hoop.  I’m pretty into Saturday Hobby Hour.  Or actually, it is more like Hobby Day.

We met up with the Thai friends and the other farang at Kad Nan, the bar central of Nan.  Apparently, it used to be a strip mall in the daytime, but then a bunch of bars moved in.  So is sardine-can bar after bar, complete with competing music. But it is pretty fun.

Today, we are off to see some of the temples that Nan has to offer, and probably hit up a coffee shop, maybe do some reading or painting. Sunday is Hobby Day too.

Celebrity Status

It’s day three at Bandon Sriserm School today, and day three of air-conditioned office sitting. I was supposed to teach my first class of third graders at 10 am, but turns out they were learning math instead.  My co-teacher, Teacher Angelie, seemed to feel that I should start tomorrow anyways, so I just met the class for a hot second before returning to the office oasis.  It’s nearly lunchtime, which is always exciting:

Katie and I usually walk down from our office around noon and make our way to the canteen.  Meanwhile kids are swarming and waving and hugging Teacher Katie like mad.  They don’t even know me and I am a celebrity, too!  We got lots of trinkets along the way too, like candy, cookies, partially eaten snacks, roses, and art projects. Pretty sweet. It’s a bit like the Pied Piper—a crowd gathers around us until we really make moves to the canteen and then a small group hovers outside the door waving while we eat.

But after lunch is my favorite event.  Each of the kids has a little drawstring bag that they carry around during lunch, most of them have it dangling around the neck or hanging from their arms, and inside the pouch is a cup, a toothbrush, and toothpaste. At the end of lunch, a song comes on the loudspeaker and all the kids fill up their cup, squat around a trough in the ground and brush their teeth, with the occasional wiggle dance move thrown in.  It’s a school wide brush-your-teeth-time! My favorite time of day.

Other news from Nan: we met three new friends, also farang from America, who are teaching high school on the other side of town.  P’ Benz, the ringleader of our Thai friends, is master at befriending anyone who is visiting Nan, especially if they speak English.  So he introduced us to them last night while we were at the Riverside skate park. Yep, skate park.  We are friends with a bunch of skater dudes.  They are all really nice and speak a fair amount of English.  There’s Benz, Tuti, Bass, and Daum.  We went to P’ Daum’s house out in the country last weekend.  His grandpa has tons of chickens and ducks and rabbits, lots of fruit trees, and a small pond in the back that is stocked with fish.  Tuti tried to fish while we hung out by the pond, it was real sabai sabai.

Kun Yai continues to be a source of entertainment for us.  Katie and I brought Kun Yai and Kun Dtah some fruit yesterday, then got a full tour of their (huge!) house, then we ate snacks, then we were served a giant mug of corn milk (who knew? it tasted exactly like an ear of corn), then we took a drive through town in their air-conditioned car.  They are just a hoot, and all too willing to look after us.  You know what they say, you give a neighbor some fruit… 

Here is our house:

Here is where I live:

Here is Katie and me, represented by new friend Fah:

Here is the breakfast of champions:

Here are the muddied waters of the Nan River:

Welcome to Nan!

I’ve arrived and settled into a new home with one of my three fellow fellows, Katie. She is returning to Nan after living here last year, so she’s an old pro and has been showing me all the hot spots that Nan has to offer.   We are living in a spacious apartment with a big open room and bathroom in the downstairs and two bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, plus two balconies! Luxury status.

Some highlights so far:

1.     Buying 6 mangoes for 20 Baht, roughly 70 cents. And they’re delicious!

2.     Planning a PiA band with Katie: with any luck she’ll be on Melodica and I’ll be on banjolele.

3.     Turning the carport into badminton central (soon to come, but I did buy two rackets and birdies today).

4.     Riding two-to-a-bike almost as well as the ten year old Thai kids.

5.     A series of interactions with our landlords:

Kun Yai and Kun Dtah (the landpeople), have visited us no less than 5 times in the two days that we’ve been here.  The visits have been a mix of cordial and helpful to confusing and parent-ish.  Yesterday, Kun Yai, who is probably around 70, came over 3 times before 10 am. Whoa. Mostly she came to tell me to turn off the balcony lights at certain times of the day, and she walked me through the house to each lightswitch and to the front windows describing when they should be on and off.  Unfortunately, I always confuse the words for open and closed/on and off (they sound so similar!), so I didn’t quite catch on for a while.  Then she came back with a set of drinking glasses for us to use, and she was very adamant that we drink only water from them, as “beer is bad, not good” (keep in mind that all of this is in her fluent Thai and my very broken attempts…). Basically, she wants to mother us.  And we sure are being watched—yesterday Kun Yai said, “You go running today, yes?” And it was true, but I never saw her while I ran.  Close circles with eyes everywhere… And Today Katie and I were setting up a hammock on the front balcony and we saw the landlords and this other guy who works for them (maybe? not really sure…) down on the road. They flagged us down, and within a few seconds, Kun Yai was back with a man to measure our doors to get screens.  Then we tromped through the house/storage area, and after seeing my pile of notebooks and school things on the floor of my room, they brought up two bookcases for Katie and me.  They are very generous and kind and are definitely taking care of us, hopefully not too much. But in the meantime, I think Kun Yai and I are on our way to being friends. She smiles at me a lot.