Living, Breathing, Teaching....Thailand

1.    Sometimes I teach barefoot. 

2.    I’m confused most of the time.

3.    My strange new English-Thai hybrid language is actually making my English-speaking skills deteriorate. 

       My pidgin sign language on the other hand?  …yeah, that still sucks.

4.    I have a new appreciation for real beer – all Thai beer tastes like light beer.

5.    I can easily tell when something contains condensed milk.

6.    We get laughed at.  A LOT.

7.    I’m usually told I’m beautiful no less than six times a day, and at least one person says they love me.

8.    Just because intense nose-picking is a way of life here doesn’t make it any less revolting.

9.    The guy who sliced my loaf of bread was shirtless and smoking.  I still ate it.

10. Thai people go to the doctor for everything

11.  Seeing students stick a tube of menthol up their noses is no longer shocking…in fact, I’ve got my own “smelly stick.”

12.  Six people on a mortorbike is normal.

13.  Six farangs on a motorbike is probably illegal and probably the only road rule in the country that would be upheld.

14.  There are road rules?  Oh wait…no there’s not.

15.  A ten-year-old driving a motorbike is normal.

16.  I have eaten scores of tiny ants because they are EVERYWHERE and it is unavoidable.

17.  I have squatted to pee. 

      This of course resulted in me peeing on the floor. 

      Because I did it wrong. 

      Turns out you’re supposed to face the wall.

18.  When I hear someone say “okay okay” I want to squish their face in a vice.

19.  Turning clothing blue is not something specific to my crappy washer in Ireland.  It is in fact a trait common to all shitty washers and all people who suck at doing laundry more than they suck at life.

20.  I HAVE envisioned the power-tripping men who run this school dying in various gruesome, bloody ways. 

       It’s cathartic, but not entirely satisfying. 

      Sometimes I want to stuff a Susan B. Anthony bobblehead up their rectums and watch them cry.

      (Sometimes I’m salty)

21.  An entire sliced pineapple costs 65 cents.

22.  People talking all around me is just noise at this point. 

       My brain will overload when I get home when I can actually understand all the noise.

23.  We saw two white people biking through Aoluk this morning and we stared like it was our job.
       Our first reaction:  “What the heck are those white people doing here?”

24.  Confession:  I have NO idea what I’m going to do when I get home.

       This makes me not sleep.

25.  The quantity and frequency of profanity in my journal is directly proportional to just how much the school has pissed me off on any given day.

26.  It’s impressive how many different parts of speech the word “fuck” can become when I am so angry it’s the only word I can think to use.

27.  If I turned said journal into a series of blog entries, the unanimous diagnosis of psychiatric professionals would be that I am bipolar.

28.  I am not bipolar. 

       I am teaching in Thailand.

       The two ideas are interchangeable.

29.  Truth:  I spent twenty minutes trying to remember the phrase “mutually exclusive” for the above sentence.

      Then I realized it didn’t work.  Fail.

30.  I have NEVER eaten this much rice before in my life.

Thai Students Meet War Heads. Chaos Ensues.

So my awesome parents have been sending me packages filled with wonderful things the entire time I've been here.  I doubt I would have survived if they weren't so spectacular.

Sidenote:  Shoutout to all the other wonderful people who have sent me an endless stream of packages and cards:  Gram; Rachel; Marilyn & Bob; Meg & Bob; Georgine; Dianna, Chris, Stephen & Dominic; Jackie & Shirley....and George (Seriously dude, you've got a weird sense of humor), thank you all SO MUCH!!!  It's such a fantastically terrific surprise to get mail here from people I love at home!  End sidenote.

A while ago, we decided it would be fun to give the students some American food that they don't have here.  Since candy is the easiest and least-perishable thing to ship, it was the obvious choice.

First up was Jolly Ranchers which they thought were especially tasty.  Then came Sour Patch Kids.  For a bunch of children who can easily eat food so spicy it could kill a herd of wild horses, it was completely hysterical to watch them squirm with surprise and over-worked salivary glands at the tart deliciousness that is Sour Patch Kids.  Truly hysterical.

Skyping with my mom one day, she had another suggestion:  "If they loved the Sour Patch Kids so much, you should try some War Heads!"  Thus was born the idea to give my Thai students War Heads.  Jane and Ed sent a package containing food for me and candy for my students.  In addition to War Heads, Pop Rocks also made the journey.

I had to choose carefully which class to treat to the sour-fest since with 45 students per class and 22 classes per week, there was no way they were all getting some (plus, I just flat-out don't like a good portion of those over 900 kids).  I chose my favorite class - M2/10, by far the most skilled of all my "English learners"...yes, those were intentionally in ironic quotes.

Sidenote #2:  There is a set of twins in M2/10 and it took me a good two months to realize that they were two people, not one girl who had an uncanny ability to be two places at once and move really fast.  End sidenote #2.

Last week, I treated the M2/10s to their first taste of Pop Rocks and War Heads.  Neither Stacy nor Carlyn had class during that period, and the classroom is right next to the English department, so they came to watch it all go down.  The reaction to the Pop Rocks was pretty funny.  The kids wondered what the heck was going on in their mouth and all you could hear for a good five minutes was the sound of 40 12-year-olds fizzing.  I had a strong urge to also give them Coke :)

The reaction to the War Heads was possibly one of the funniest things I have ever witnessed.  Words cannot properly describe how hilarious it was to watch unsuspecting kids eat War Heads, so a felt taking a video of the shenanigans was imperative  (This is one of the twins.  Aon or Aum - I can never be sure which.  The other twin is to her left.)

Anthropology 301: Over Here

There is a heat wave in Krabi.  A heat wave in the tropics.  Imagine that for a second, will ya?  Having trouble?  Lemme paint a picture.  Put yourself in the hottest sauna you’ve ever experienced.  Got it?  K, now add a large bonfire, a space heater, and a fire-breathing dragon.  That’s about how it feels here.  Everyone knows what it feels like when sweat drips down your back.  It’s pretty gross.  But when I can follow the progress of that drop – or as is the case, drops – as they makes their way down my butt, that’s when I know I’ve never been quite so hot.  When said sweat trickles start inching down my leg, meaning I have felt their journey all the way down my icky sweaty body (Oh man, this is starting to sound like a bad porn novel), that’s when I start to worry about heatstroke.  It is the most horrifyingly disgusting thing ever.  We are apparently entering the “summer” months soon.  If what we’ve been experiencing so far isn’t summer, then these next few months could very well kill at least two out of three of us.   

As part of the school uniforms, girls at Aolukprachasan School must have short hair.  They’ve all got these little bobs, making it so difficult to distinguish who is who.  There are a handful of girls who have long hair that they wear pulled back in a ponytail or braid, but it is our understanding that they have to seek permission from the director in order to keep their hair long.  Whether there is a random lottery or good grades gets you long hair, or it’s simply based on the mood of der führer il duce the director is unknown, but there are very few girls with long hair.  Recently we’ve come to realize that the girls’ hair must be a specified length – just above the chin. If their hair exceeds the allowed length, then they are forced to have their hair cut by a male teacher (as far as we know, the designated hair-cutter) under Building 4 on Fridays.  Occasionally I’ll walk into class to see girls huddled together at the back, furiously hacking away at their hair so the guy won’t be able to cut it for them.  As you can imagine, this amateur trim-fest results in some pretty ridiculous styles.  Some girls have uneven hair all around.  Some have a sort of unintentional diagonal effect going on.  I saw one girl who must have been in a hurry and only cut the hair on the sides.  Her came around the back of her head and at her ears there was this abrupt one-inch step-up.  Sheer insanity.  Pun completely intended.

At all the markets all over town, there are caged birds for sale.  They’re everywhere.  Every little stall selling anything – from the weird corn-and-ice-cream combo I have yet to try, to Thai periodicals, to chicken satay – have rows of cages holding one single bird.  The birds are quite pretty – shiny black feathers with yellow accents and pointy heads – and they have beautiful, funny little chirps, but why there are so many for sale is still a mystery to us.  I think it’s possible that people buy them to release for good luck, but beyond that I’m out of guesses. 

Because the hot-water boiler-thinger we used in the morning to make our “coffee” and oatmeal was unceremoniously ripped from the English department, the only explanation on the matter being that “The owner come to get,” we had to find an alternate way to get hot water.  After some searching, we found that the school store had a large drum of hot water we could use.  Now every morning while the kids are at their assembly, we fill our glasses with boiling water in the store.  There is a table next to the big hot drum where some random assortment of teachers and staff sits to chat in the morning, and because Thai people are so generous with their food, they constantly offer us snacks.  And because it is rude to turn down food offered, we generally have to take what’s given.  One morning, one of the women gave us delicious banana muffins she had made.  Sometimes we get sticky banana leaves wrapped around gooey sticky rice wrapped around funny meat (not a favorite).  This morning, hoping for more banana muffins, we were instead given a small bag of what looked like dense pink and white mini-cupcakes that had split open at the top.  They smelled faintly of flowery soap.  Turns out they tasted like flowery soap too.  Soap cakes, if you will. 

Yes, yes, fine.  I’ll cease and desist with the cringe-worthy puns. J

Scars & Souvenirs

More than a little nervous....That's baby
powder on my wrist.  It's a whole Thai thing...

If Rashard Mendenhall had gained ten yards this season for every time someone told me “Oh wow, I didn’t think you would actually do that!” over the course of my life, then the Steelers might actually be vying for the Lombardi today instead of the Coughlin/Manning v. Satan/Antichrist battle going down in Indianapolis.  But I don’t, and Mendy’s a fragile-pansy ignoramus, so let’s not revisit that again.  It’s like there’s something fundamentally weird about me that makes people either think I won’t do something marginally offbeat or that said action goes against my character.  I can’t be sure what that says about my character, but that’s a discussion for another day.

Along those lines, I got a tattoo on Saturday (yeah, it happened) and Caitlin’s verbatim response to the email and photo I sent was “A bit surprised ‘cause I didn’t think you were going to do it…but I like it!”  Jane’s response was “You’re so cool,” but I’m sure that was just a polite cover-up of what she was actually thinking which was “Holy crap, she really did it?!” …except she never says “crap,” so it would have been a less crude variation of that.  If we travel back in time to when I was fourteen and she took me to get my bellybutton pierced (or as Jane comically calls it, my “navel”), she only really did it because, in her words, “I didn’t think she’d actually go through with it.”  This theory apparently having been supported by the three times I chickened out before I finally got my ears pierced, the only (glaring) difference being that I was like six.

Watching as the artist traces the lettering

So I either give off an air of goody-two-shoes prudishness or I am way flakier than I’ve ever thought.  I don’t need to know which of these possibilities is more accurate since they’re equally depressing.  Instead, I’ll take this moment to enlighten you all on the art that is the bamboo tattoo.  Oh, I’m sorry, you thought I got a normal tattoo?  Psshh please, I’m in Thailand.  I went authentic!

Bamboo tattooing is, I believe, more formally known as sak yant.  Sak means “to tap” and is the word for tattoo.  The technique has origins in Southeast Asia – Buddhist monks would tattoos prayers on each other for health and protection.  It is still possible to get a tattoo from a monk, but what little we heard about it sounded a little shady.  One of the most popular sak yant tattoos is called Gow Yord which means “nine spires” and is a very cool-looking, primitive design of the outline of a temple.    Another very popular one is called Haa Taew which means “five rows.”  This is five vertical lines of Khmer script, typically on the back left shoulder.  Each of the five lines relates to a different blessing for success and good luck – made famous by Angelina Jolie.  She even flew to Thailand to have it done!

Prep work

The main difference between a Thai tattoo and a western tattoo is in the procedure itself.  Whereas most tattoos are done using a machine gun type thingy that buzzes and actually rips through the top layer of skin as it applies the ink, mine was applied entirely by hand.  A small needle was attached to the end of a long bamboo stick with a piece of pink string and fired to make sure it would hold together.  Then the tattoo artist, who had to have Derek Shepherd-steady hands, tapped the ink into my skin, one little pin-prick at a time.  It was quite impressive to watch actually (yup, I totally watched), and while I’ve heard that bamboo tattooing is quite a bit more painful than normal tattooing, that’s either wrong, or I have a badass, high threshold for pain.  It hurt, sure, but it was hardly excruciating.  It just kind of felt like a bunch of tiny ants biting me.  Some taps were more painful than others, but I survived and it was over in no time at all!

The second guy is holding the skin tight for artist-guy.

Other benefits to the Thai tattoo:  It can get wet practically the second after it’s finished, and there is no bleeding or scabbing.  Plus – its way cooler J

All finished!!

With Tattoo Man and Skin Holder Man.
We really should have learned their names...

Stacy got one too!!  We're either awesome or a little nuts.
Ps. This was seriously the teensiest tattoo parlor ever.

It says "mai pen rai"....Thai for
Hakuna Matata.  It means no worries / For the rest of our
days/ It's our problem free / philosophy :)

I'm a shiny sweaty mess for two reasons:
1) Nerves
2)  The fan was only blowing on my feet

The Art of Discourse

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” 

– George Bernard Shaw

Here’s the problem with communication:  No one realizes just how bad they are at communicating until something drastic happens.   From cruise liners crashing into icebergs, to entire governments going to war over a rumor (Shoot, did I just say something political?), to pretty much anything Christopher Columbus thought or said, it is a fact that the world really, really sucks at communication.  And it’s not just a large-scale thing either.  Communication blows all the way down to the human level.  The divorce rate isn’t fifty freaking percent for nothing.  It’s an epidemic, and there’s no end in sight.

                                                                                        

To that end, the Thai culture is especially poor at communication.  We think we’re making inroads, learning how to live here without stressing too much (after three months, I guess it’s about damn time!), and then we’re slapped across the face with the realization that we have no idea.  There is this vast cultural divide that it would take years to properly bridge, and even then that bridge would be rickety, at best. 

I’ve mentioned before how at school, the students serve as the janitors.  They sweep, they take out the trash, and they wash our dishes.  It’s a bizarre system, but it seemed to work.  Recently, the kids had a three-day scout camp.  There were no classes, but all the teachers came to school to participate in the activities.  We didn’t have a role in the scout camp, so we had to come to school every day and sit alone in the office.  Every day, we put our dirty cups in their usual basin for the students to come wash.  When no one came to get them, we figured it was because the students had been relieved of their janitorial duties during scout camp, but the next week, still no students came to get the dirty dishes. 

One afternoon, Bo, the new head of the English department, pulled Carlyn aside to explain to her that we were supposed to be washing our own dishes.  This, of course, was news to us since up until four days previously, the students were the dishwashers.  Carlyn said as much to Bo who informed her that the decision to have students wash dishes was that of Supalak, our coordinator and the unofficial former head of the department.  Supalak had stopped spending time in the English department for unknown reasons (We think there was some sort of drama, but no one knows for sure) and instead taken up residency in the library.  It seemed that in her absence, the rules she had laid down were being subverted by new ones.

Bottom line here was that the students would no longer wash our dishes; that was now our responsibility.  It’s hardly like we make a mountain of dishes every day – between the three of us, there is at most five cups and a few pieces of cutlery – so washing our own isn’t some great inconvenience.  The problem though was that no one told us.  Supalak had been spending her days in the library for well over a week by the time Bo informed us of the rule change which probably means that in the interim, while we thought the students were still doing our dishes, one of the other teachers was.  That hardly seems fair.

We’ve been doing our best for three months here to assimilate to the Thai culture and shed the image of the spoiled westerner (housing mishegas and salary dispute aside, of course), and in one fell swoop, we looked like divas through no real fault of our own.  Obviously there had been discussion after Supalak left the English department about modifying some of her rules, but like most of what goes on at school, it crossed no one’s mind to let us in on the change.  Not only did they not tell us, but they seemed a bit peeved that we weren’t following the new rule we had no idea existed.  “You understand?” Bo asked Carlyn with the condescending tone you use to tell a nine-year-old for the fifteenth time to stop climbing on the back of the couch. 

“I feel like I just got yelled at,” Carlyn said when she returned from her scolding.  It’s entirely possible the conversation about doing your own dishes took place right in front of our noses since we wouldn’t have understood it even if we did know what was going on.  And it’s understandable, I guess, when things like that slip their mind – it’d just be great if it didn’t happen so damn often.  We have no issue at all doing our own dishes – we thought it was strange we didn’t have to in the first place – but now it looks like we’d been turning our noses up at the new rule for a week!  Its times like this we have to chant mai pen rai under our breath until we achieve a satisfactory level of Zen.