Bangkok Weekend

Bangkok - In a word, the city is chaos.  It's loud, vibrant, colorful and full of personality.  It's also incredibly hot!  I'm not sure what I'm going to do when April rolls around and temperatures can easily climb into the 100's.  Saturday morning was the start of our bike tour around Bangkok.

Andrea and I - tossing our bikes on the boat.

An early start gave us an opportunity to see the streets of Bangkok wake up.  We biked through the market, winding streets and back alleys. I still don't know how our tour guide didn't get lost.  It felt like we were constantly turning and weaving around corners, a new sight and smell at every turn. It's hard to describe everything that I saw but I was able to snap a few pictures along the way.  They are not the best quality unfortunately since my camera died and I had to use my iPod.  I had been using my camera so much all week and I forgot to charge it before we left Friday afternoon, oh well, lesson learned.

Our boat through the canals of Bangkok.

Cycling past rice paddies.

View from the the rooftop bar.

Saturday night the the other two women in the tour group (both also in the same teaching program as I am) and I had drinks at the rooftop bar of our hotel which gave us a great vantage point to see the city come alive for the night.  For dinner we took advantage of our excellent location and hit the hectic streets of Chinatown and had some authentic Chinese food and Tsingtao beer.  Yum!

Streets of Chinatown, already decorating for Chinese New Year.

Sunday was a day of travel back to Sing Buri, which for me means more opportunity for me to observe Thai life and culture.  As certain big picture things become more familiar I am starting no notice smaller details of Thai life, like the effects of the recent flooding that hit most of the country.  You can see signs of the flood on trees, buildings and road signs.  The bottom of  just about everything coming out of ground is a slightly darker color, stained from flood water.  In some places its only a few inches but in others its as high as three feet.  At times it looks as if the bottom foot and a half of the country just needs a good power washing.  The solid line is a constant and eerie reminder of what they say was the worst floods in fifty years.  Things are improving slowly but Thai's are notoriously slow about many things.  They also have a carefree and laid back attitude toward life so they certainly didn't let a bunch of water get to them.  They make do with what they have and get on with life.

The weekend came and went and Monday was the first day of our TEFL course.  Most of the course work is easy enough and fairly common sense.  It focuses on how to manage a classroom, writing lesson plans, how to keep kids engaged and how to break down the language into easy to learn chunks.  We went into more depth about Thai culture and values, the Do's and Don't of society and the school structure.  Too much to share now but I plan on writing a big 'Thai Culture' post soon.

The most exciting thing that we learned today though was what school we will be teaching at.  I was incredibly nervous about what my assignment was going to be, I had so many unanswered questions.  Where was the school going to be located? Where is my new house going to look like? Would I like the community?  Would I fit in?  My anxiety was not at all alleviated when I was told I was going to be placed in Bangkok.  Not only was I not expecting to be placed in the city, 2 hours away from my new home of Sing Buri, I was being placed alone!  I was the only one placed in Bangkok, three of the girls were going to be placed in Sing Buri at two different schools, and another girl is going to be in Chang Mai which is about 9 hours north of Bangkok. 

My fears were quelled when I got back to the Twin House, got on my computer and looked up my new school.  It turns out that I will be teaching at the largest bilingual school in Thailand!  It's located on the southwest edge of Bangkok but it's hard to tell just how far outside of the city.  The school looks more like a university, it has a half a dozen buildings, around 8,000 students and about 150 foreign teachers alone!  Definitely not at all what I was expecting but I am excited about this new opportunity.  Last I heard we are moving to our new schools on Saturday, should be exciting!  After seeing the school it has all started to get much more real.  In only a week I will have a new home and a classroom full of Thai children to teach.

Fun across the street I have to attend to! Cheers.