Well, mid-terms are officially over. (Except for those who failed and have to retake the test...but I'm not worrying about them this week. Especially today. There is a 4-day weekend this week, starting tomorrow...and I'm leaving for vacation to Ko Samui in southern Thailand tonight. Eee! I am very ready for a vacation after mid-terms...there wasn't a lot for us foreign teachers to do, but we still had to be here the entire mid-term week. Every day. Every morning. I did some lesson planning for the rest of the term early on and did some grade calculating...that got old very quickly though. A week of doing nothing has made me desperate to get away. Soon!
Last Saturday turned from a quiet, boring, relaxing day, into an adventure. Friday Pook took me and three of the other teachers to get our work permits and visa extensions. The work permit is a cool little bright blue book. And I am now legally here until the 10th of October. Still not sure when I am done with school though...oh well!
Anyways, Friday one of the teachers had a motorbike accident...he fell on the motorbike and scraped his hand and arm pretty good, along with being bruised all over, so Friday night it was decided that I would go to his Saturday morning teaching job for him. 6 am was very early. I don't like being awake at 6am. The teaching job was in Bangkok, so it was a bit of a travel. Luckily, since it was the first day, Pook picked us up once we got to Bangkok. I had plenty of coffee that morning. Coffee, yay!
It was the first week so there was an entire little opening ceremony where the program's leader gave a speech, and then there were a lot of photos. Photos with the teachers, photos with the students, click click click. It took up a good chunk of the morning though...less teaching time for me! The ironic part is that I am not actually teaching most of the course, and yet I will be in a lot of the pictures.
The students were a mix of boys and girls, which was kind of different from what I'm used to. All girl's school all day every day here at Chomsurang...it was nice for a change. Luckily, Jacob, who is doing one of the classes, had a lesson plan I could use, so I wasn't trying to think of everything on the spot, or stressing myself out the night before.
La dee da, teaching until 12:30, and then we got to go to lunch. Pook took the four of us teachers out to a restaurant that served a sort of pad-thai omelet. The noodles were inside an egg, it was quite interesting and quite good. Afterwards we went to a temple...where you could feed fish. Pook bought an entire bag of kibble and we fed fish...a lot of fish. The fish go crazy, hundreds of them all crowding around pushing at each other, swarming to get the food the instant it touches the water. When it gets too crowded, a frenzy of water splashing occurs as fish that have been forced out of the water desperately try to get back in. I saw a couple huge albino fish too. They got crowded out rather quickly though. If you threw the food farther out into the water, smaller, slimmer fish would dart around eating it, and sometimes you could get them to jump out of the water to catch it. It was quite entertaining. Unfortunately, I hadn't brought my camera that day.
After the fish feeding extravaganza, Pook dropped us off at the shuttle to JJ's, an outdoor market. After a bit of a ride, we arrived and it was huge. JJ's was an open air market with stalls for just about anything you could possibly imagine. You could spend an entire day getting lost in there, shopping. I didn't buy anything, saving for my upcoming trip, but it was still amazing. Getting back to Ayutthaya after that took a bit of running around...getting misdirected constantly around a bus station is no fun. Still, we managed to make it back in the evening, utterly exhausted from the day, but it was a good one. And I still had Sunday to laze around in.
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