They Traveled the World in Search of Adventure: Mai Pen Rai

I made some progress and improvements on Day 2. My attitude shifted from panic and frenzy mode to calm and collected.The other foreign teachers insist that I will never get the guidance or consistency that I am searching for so I’m just giving in to the madness. I am gradually seeing the bright side of things and just having fun with the tasks at hand. I'm even considering instructing the morning classes to stretch with me so I can imagine I am in bikram yoga, 100 degrees and sweating my butt off. Kill two birds with one stone.

All joking aside, the kids are truly amazing and making it all worth my while. They are so entertaining, amped on life and enthusiastic about everything. And for some reason, they all have really, really long names. In fact, Bangkok’s real name, for example, is the longest name in the world. So everyone in Thailand has a nickname. Funny nicknames. Some common ones are Donut, Off, Me, Tom, Nice, and Pim Pim.

Jason’s mom had sent some pictures with us before we left and I shared them with my classes today. They just went wild to see what American families and houses look like. I almost couldn’t get some of the photos back! During my end of day preparation time, I visited Jason’s class. Partly to see him in action and partly to enjoy his air conditioned room for a bit. He was in the middle of an art session and was teaching about members of a family. When I walked around the room to take a look at the student's drawings, one in particular really stood out. Pim Pim drew a boy entitled Me, a lady figure entitled Mom, and a man figure entitled Dad. For some reason, Dad had a knife in his left hand and Mom had a bloody bandage on her right arm. I found this disturbing but it didn’t stop there. Next to the people, he drew gravestones and put each one of his classmate’s names on the stones with ghosts of each child flying underneath. Jason and I tried to summon an explanation but the child just kept laughing. He was in second grade and didn’t know much English anyways. When we showed the head teacher, she just said, “oh, he’s always playing games and joking around, he’ll grow up one day.” We were awestruck.

For dinner we went to a Café. I ordered a hamburger and Jason ordered a club sandwich, we hadn’t seen either of these items on a Thai menu before so we thought we should give it a try. When the waiter served our food, I received a bun with 2 slices of deli ham, cheese, coleslaw and a whole bunch of mayo. I guess that’s what ham-burger translates to here. Jason got 2 pieces of toast with a half-cooked egg and coleslaw with mayo as well. We both just laughed, I don’t know what else we could have expected!

I think we will book a message for this weekend. It is just $6 for an hour long foot massage and $7 for an hour full body.