Hey everyone! Sorry for the delay in posting. If you can believe it, not much has happened so that’s why I haven’t been updating my blog regularly. I know it seems weird- the last post was so full of exciting things. So I’ll start there.
The following week… nothing. The entire city went back to normal, and it was like the civil war never happened. It was really weird actually. I started teaching on Monday and nobody talked about what had happened, and besides posters popping up around the city about the importance of unity, and events held for displaced vendors so they could still sell things, people just didn’t really talk about it at all.
There are also several burned down buildings in Bangkok now. I think I updated right before this happened, but the last few days of the civil war the government started cracking down and there actually weren’t that many red shirts left in Bangkok, and so those who were left started burning down buildings and doing what they could to keep everything going. The biggest building they burned down was CentralWorld. It’s the second biggest, if not the biggest, mall in Thailand and also Thailand’s trade center, which I actually didn’t know till it burned down. It was mostly sad for me because Forever 21 is one of my favorite stores, but I would have thought that Thai people would have been really upset about it, and maybe they were, but society just carried on as usual. The BTS started running again, the streets were crowded with traffic, all schools started up, and it was as if nothing had happened at all.
And that’s really all I have to report on the political situation. It doesn’t seem as if the government has taken any major steps toward solving the issues with the red shirts, besides kicking them out of Bangkok, and I think everyone here is really hoping that things don’t happen again. The government is saying they’re going to follow some kind of “road map” plan to address some of the red shirts’ demands but it doesn’t seem as if any big changes have happened politically just yet. There are a few articles cropping up on Thaksin’s involvement (previous prime minister) and attempts to bring him back to Thailand to be put on trial, etc., but otherwise nothing major about the riots has been in the news.
I’m officially getting in to the swing of things with teaching, which has been both fun and stressful. I’m teaching four classes in K2 mathematics at Panaya. That basically means I teach the same thing four times a day to four different groups of four year olds. I really enjoy the kids at Panaya. They’re so sweet and most of them genuinely like learning English and just want to be like best friends with me. Of course I have a few kids who are really bad. One of my classes has 27 kids, and it’s definitely the most difficult class to control behavior-wise. They’re a trial every day. They’re really smart, they have some of the smartest kids in the whole grade level, but because there are so many of them it’s harder to keep tabs on all of them.
Which brings me to the stressful part of my job. One of the things I find stressful is that I have a class of 27 kids and a class of 17 kids. How does that happen, you might ask. Why would it make sense to put 27 kids in the K2/1 class and only 17 kids in the K2/4 class? Apparently the parents assume because the class is called K2/1, it’s the smartest class since it’s number 1, so they all want their kids to be in K2/1. I wish I was kidding.
And since it’s a private school, the way behavior and discipline works is based around whose parents will freak out if their child is reprimanded. I have one student who is a really intelligent kid, actually one of my favorite kids though I’m not supposed to have favorites, and he’s constantly getting into trouble. Usually it’s because he knows the stuff already, he has a native English father so he’s already fluent in English. I reprimand all my kids in the same way- I’ll say their name really sternly if they aren’t paying attention, I won’t give them stickers or stamps that day, I’ll take their work book away if they aren’t following along at the right place, etc. I generally handle discipline through good reinforcements like writing the good kids names on the board so they get stickers and telling the kids that if they’re good, we’ll get to play a game.
The Thai teachers who are in the classroom with me are technically supposed to be in charge of handling discipline, and for the most part they do. They’ll slap kids hands if they’re being bad, etc. But some of the kids they don’t treat like the other kids because of their parents. I’m not saying I think kids’ hands should be slapped at all, but it’s a little frustrating that we have to keep certain kids happy at all times so that their parents won’t pull them out of the school. It’s really more like a business than a school, and it’s been a little hard for me to deal with the politics because I just want to treat all of the kids the same way.
The other thing that’s been really frustrating is the way the system at my school works. I’m a new teacher at my school, and at this point I’m the only first year teacher in Thailand- the other first year teachers have all been fired. So let’s just say there’s a little pressure on me because of this fact alone. I knew going in that I was going to make mistakes. My training was observing two teachers and then being thrown into lessons, where I was given no feedback, so of course I’m going to make mistakes. The problem is that the Thai teachers don’t talk to me about the mistakes I make. They talk to the principal and then the principal talks to me. Which is so much worse than if they could just come to me and tell me to adjust my lessons a little bit in certain ways.
Case and point. Last week I taught pictographs. To four year olds. Who don’t speak English. Yeah that was a real party, let me tell you. They understood the basic concepts of pictographs, but then one day we had a worksheet where they had to count how many pictures of chairs there were vs. how many pictures of tables there were, and tell me how many more chairs there were than tables. At this age, we are just kind of starting addition in English. It’s a difficult concept for kids to learn in a language that isn’t their own. So for me to teach them the concept of counting “how many more” was not a one day thing. I knew going in that my kids probably wouldn’t get it, and they didn’t completely. So I planned to spend the next day going over it again.
Well one of the Thai teachers went to the principal with the workbook page and told her that the kids didn’t understand my lesson. All of a sudden I’m getting called into the principal’s office and being told that she wants me to observe another teacher teaching a lesson on pictographs because she doesn’t think I know how to teach it properly. The frustrating thing of it was, the other teacher, who is a friend of mine at the school, ended up teaching the lesson while I observed, taught everything I had already taught without teaching the concept of “how many more” at all, and did a workbook page in a completely different unit, throwing off my whole schedule. And this made the principal happy and the Thai teachers happy, so I had to deal with it. It was also a bit frustrating for me because I don’t want to think that the Thai teachers are going to run to the principal every time my kids don’t understand a lesson the first day I teach it. I mean, some of these concepts are difficult. We’re using books that are meant for kids in regular English kindergarten, not ESL, and they’re books made in Singapore no less. My kids aren’t always going to understand everything the first time, and I don’t like feeling as if I have to go in to each lesson as if I only have fifty minutes for them to perfectly get each concept.
There has definitely been a lot I’ve had to figure out about Thai culture in the past few months and really quickly. Speaking of Thai culture, we had the best holiday celebration ever a few weeks ago- Teacher Appreciation Day. Let’s just spend a minute talking about how much I love Teacher Appreciation Day. This should be a worldwide thing. Our students brought us presents and flowers, and there was a whole ceremony where they gave us bouquets, and it was a wonderful day all around. We were all pretty excited about it.
Besides teaching, the only other major event in my life is that I’m moving this week. My roommate Kristina is leaving on Wednesday to go back to the US, so Holly and I are both moving out of our apartment and closer to our schools. I’m moving into a building called The Winning Tower in Phra Khanong, which is in the same section of town as my school. I’ll be sure to update my address, don’t worry. I signed a lease starting on Thursday and I have to be out of my other apartment by Friday night, so I literally have two nights to move everything from one apartment to the other. In theory I only have two suitcases worth of things, but that’s really only in theory. I’m hoping it’ll only take two trips, but we’ll see.
I’m pretty excited about my new apartment. It’s a studio and it has a bed, desk, little couch, dining table with four chairs, a little kitchen area with a fridge, and a bathroom. It’s pretty basic and the whole building is ancient, but I kind of like the lived-in feel the whole place has. I’m going to buy some new sheets and a comforter, and a few other things. I may also get a microwave. I’m still trying to figure out why the kitchen counter has a fan above it, but no stovetop. I’m also trying to figure out how I’m supposed to have three friends over to eat at my dining room table when I can’t cook dinner haha. It’s a little bit interesting, but that’s Thailand for you. There is a ton of space and I have air conditioning and plenty of storage space, so I can’t complain too much. Plus there is a gym and a pool in the building, which is nice, and the apartment is right on a major street in a safe area of town. The best part is that I no longer have to get up at 5:30 am! I can sleep in a whole hour. It’s going to be awesome.
I’ll be sure to take pictures once I get everything set up! I know I haven’t updated any pictures in awhile, but to be perfectly honest I actually haven’t taken that many lately. I may take a trip outside of Bangkok in a few weeks, so there may also be some more exciting pictures than those of my new, slightly old, slightly lived in apartment haha.
I miss all of you! I’ll try to update more often, though the updates will likely be slightly shorter than they have been before since most of my life is consumed by teaching. I hope everything is going well back in the States!!
Love,
Monica
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Bangkok Riots
Hey everyone! Thought you might want an update on the situation in Bangkok. I know that I haven’t really talked about the past few weeks of school, but in light of the situation and the fact that we've just been lesson planning the past few weeks anyway, I think I should skip that and head straight to the good stuff.
So the protests started to get worse the past few weeks, with attacks and incidents happening mostly on the weekends. The rumor is that this is because the red shirts wanted the press, but nobody wanted to affect the regular work week, so attacks would flare up Friday and Saturday nights and then calm down by Monday. They got really bad starting this past Thursday night in Lumphini Park when a sniper shot one of the red shirt generals, Seh Daeng. There were a lot of people injured in attacks that night, and schools and the BTS (sky train) were closed the next day. Which was news to me because I tried to take the BTS and it decided to dump us all off halfway to the school and close down, which meant I had to trudge through areas of town that I would rather not have been in until I could finally find a motorcycle to take me to an area where I could hop in a cab. I found a cab to take me to my school and when I got there, two hours later (but only ten minutes late), the principal said school was closed and we could all go home. After all that. So we left and took cabs home. And school has been closed ever since. We were supposed to start on Monday with the regular school year schedule, as were most schools in Bangkok. That didn’t happen.
Friday my roommates and I started hearing the gunshots and grenades in the early evening. We didn’t really know what was going on in our area, though we knew the protests had started getting ugly again. We started following CNN and the Twitter accounts of reporters to figure out what was going on, and heard that the riots were flaring up on a few streets near us. We spent the night watching from our balcony as gunshots went off in several different areas around us. Since our apartment is on the 16th floor we have a really good view of the city, and noise carries up to us from several different areas, though it was difficult to tell how close everything was to us. We learned that most of the action was happening at Sala Daeng and Silom, an area of town that was at least twenty minutes away from us and that we couldn’t actually see from our balcony. However, red shirts had also spread to areas near us like Din Daeng and Rajaprarop.
The next morning everything seemed calmer and since I didn’t hear any gunshots, I caught a cab to my dad’s hotel. Something I'm sure reassures everyone who is reading this, but really the gunshots hadn't been on our street and at that point our street was still open, so I didn't see the problem in leaving. By the way, my dad’s here! He and Dawn flew in Friday night so I didn’t get to see them till Saturday morning, but I was super excited to see them. Anyway, we took a tour of the Grand Palace. Even though it was my third time there, my father still insisted on getting a tour guide. What can you do? So the Grand Palace was wonderful for the third time around, and I actually learned a little bit about it that I didn’t know before, mostly that my guide is a yellow shirt and vehemently opposes the red shirts, but also a few things about the Grand Palace as well.
After that, we hopped the ferry back to the Navalai, where my dad and Dawn were staying, and grabbed lunch on their street. We took a nice, leisurely afternoon swim and hung out around the pool, not a care in the world. In the evening we decided to go see Wat Arun, the Temple of Dawn, because even though it’s the Temple of Dawn, it’s supposed to be really pretty in the evening.
As we were on the way, my roommate Holly called. “Don’t go back to the apartment,” she said. “It’s in a live fire zone.”
I didn’t really know what to make of that so I told her I wouldn’t go back. She and Kristina were at their school with their boss, who had informed them that all of a sudden the riots had entered our neighborhood and it wasn’t safe for us to go home. We got to Wat Arun and climbed up it (you can basically climb any relics you want in Southeast Asia- I love it), and I could see the smoke pouring into the air from way too close to our neighborhood. The black smoke from tires. The same black smoke that has been all over CNN and BBC for the past week and that I’m sure you’ve all seen if you’ve been paying attention to the news because it’s the most obvious sign of the turbulence in Bangkok.
At that point, I figured none of us were making it home that night. I went to dinner with my dad and Dawn at a Thai restaurant and then Holly and Kristina met up with us. My dad basically saved the day by getting us a room at the Navalai so we wouldn’t be homeless, and we ended up staying there Sunday night too because the live fire ban still hadn’t been lifted from our neighborhood.
Sunday we had free breakfast (which we were all super excited about because we never get free breakfast), and then we went on a boat tour. The tour took us through the canals of Bangkok to an orchid farm, which was absolutely gorgeous. Somehow they’ve figured out how to grow orchids so that the roots hang down from baskets, but they aren’t actually in soil or anything. Some of them grow out of coconuts. It’s really fascinating. Orchids are some of the hardest plants to grow, but Thailand can make anything grow- the weather here is amazing like that.
Anyway we got back from the tour and discovered that we still couldn’t get back into our neighborhood, so we decided to stay at the Navalai for another night until we could figure out what to do. Not that staying at the Navalai was a hardship, mind you- it was absolutely gorgeous there and we got tons of TV channels and nice beds to sleep in, so we were getting star treatment. It was almost worth Bangkok trying to blow itself up. Okay not at all, but it wasn't a bad way to pass two nights.
Sunday night, my dad and Dawn's last night in Bangkok before they left for Chiang Mai, we went on a dinner cruise through the Chao Praya River. The dinner was amazing. It was doubly amazing because it was our second buffet of the day, and since I hadn’t really had a buffet ever in Thailand before my dad came along, I was pretty psyched about it. This particular buffet involved a strange mixture of Thai, Indian, Japanese, and Western cuisine. I came back to the table with a plate of spaghetti, French fries, na’an, fried rice, and sushi. After that and an amazing flan dessert, we made our way to the top of the boat and just watched the lights go by as the ship sailed lazily along the river. It was easy to forget what was going on in Bangkok, even though we had witnessed a lot of it Friday night.
That seems to be the general consensus around Bangkok, at least early in the week. Everyone was aware of the violence, but in the areas it didn't touch, people went about their daily lives as if nothing was wrong. In the areas it did touch, everything closed and people couldn't even leave their homes. It was quite the contrast.
Monday morning we woke up and got our free breakfast, of course. Bangkok is divided and partially on fire and there are grenades and gunfire going off in the city, but the first thing we did before dealing with any of that was to get our free breakfast. I mean, it's free breakfast. Then came our choice. There was a lull in the fighting. We called the front desk at our building and they told us that Rangnam Road, close to where we live, was closed off to traffic but that it had been quiet all morning and if we left soon we could make it there. Normally we probably wouldn’t have made the attempt to get into our apartment through a live fire zone. But we’re girls. And you must keep in mind that we didn’t know we weren’t going to be able to return to our apartment. I left on Saturday to visit my dad and Holly and Kristina left to go to the gym. None of us knew that we wouldn't be returning later that day. Thus we’d been wearing the same clothes for three days. We were in desperate need of contact solution, clean underwear, and other feminine things. So we decided to make the trek to our apartment.
The trip to the apartment involved convincing a cab driver that it was okay to take us as close as possible to Rangnam Road because we lived there. He tried to tell us we didn’t want to go down Rangnam, but we insisted. So he drove us to the barbed wire that crossed the road and kept out the cars, and that was as far as he could go. We walked down a few back roads, ran to the only remaining ATM open on the street, and then ducked safely into our apartment without any incident. The only thing we really saw on the way were guards looking wary, though not wary at us. Most people who saw us on Rangnam probably thought we were stupid foreigners who had no idea what was going on. I didn’t blame them- it was an entirely vain move to go back to the apartment, though one that proved to be safe.
Once back at the apartment, of course the gunshots started up again and it quickly became unsafe for us to leave. We took a quick vote. I was in favor of leaving as soon as possible. Holly wanted to wait it out in the building. Kristina fell somewhere in the middle. We questioned the staff in the apartment building to find out how many residents would be there, figured out that the restaurant and the convenience store downstairs were both open, and while we were trying to find other places to stay, realized that there were less and less safe places in Bangkok. Even though we knew our neighborhood wasn’t particularly safe, our building itself was- we had security guards, we lived on the 16th floor, we had strong locks, and we had a front desk staff who knew who we were and who would take care of us if anything happened. We could have left and gone to a safer area, but no guesthouses in Bangkok have as good of security as our apartment building and we likely wouldn’t have had constant internet access. It would have been hard to know whether that safe area would turn unsafe, and if it did, we would be much more inconvenienced than if we just stayed in our own building. So we decided to stay.
Another factor in the decision to not leave Bangkok completely was that we weren't really sure when we would have to work again. My agency originally told me at the beginning of the week that I may have to work sometime at the end of the week, even though the school year was delayed for students until the following week. My roommates' boss told them they had the whole week off, but we still weren't sure the whole situation wouldn't blow over and schools would then be able to start earlier. So that was one of the main reasons that we didn't hop on the next plane out of Bangkok.
I stayed until Wednesday. And believe me I was getting stir crazy by then so I can only imagine how my roommates felt. We watched CNN. We listened to the explosions and gunshots outside. We slept in the same room away from the windows at night, even though it was highly unlikely that any of the violence would affect us. And we watched the black tire smoke pour through the city streets. Though CNN and BBC have greatly exaggerated many of the events in Bangkok, there was a lot of smoke. I'll give them that.
We ate all our meals at the Vietnamese restaurant downstairs and visited the convenience store lady, who clearly lived in the building, at least once a day to stock up on junk food and beer. We played Yahtzee. We watched movies. We did what we could to block out the sounds going on outside, except for when we were trying to figure out what in the world was going on. Every now and then we would hear banging that didn’t sound like any kind of fighting, and then we would go on Twitter, still the best way to get information fast, and see if anyone had updated anything about Rangnam. Sometimes they had, but usually the noises went without being described and we didn’t know what they were. Many of them came from Din Daeng, a long road about three streets over from us where much of the fighting was going on, though it wasn’t the worst area by far in Bangkok. Even though Rangnam was closed down, most of the fighting never really touched it- everything seemed to happen close by and Rangnam was just a road that happened to be in the center. Like the eye of the storm. Which was a fascinating place for us to be because we got to watch and experience a lot of what happened firsthand but from as safe a distance as possible.
Tuesday we found out that the government had declared the rest of the week a national holiday. That meant no school till Monday. So I decided to move up my flight. I was previously planning to visit my dad and Dawn in Koh Samui Friday night till Sunday afternoon, assuming of course that I would have school. This was before everyone in Bangkok decided to start blowing things up. I changed the flight to Wednesday and hoped that I would be able to make it out Wednesday morning before things got really bad. Usually there was a lull in the mornings- we assumed the government and the red shirts tried to grab a few hours of sleep in there.
Sure enough, Wednesday morning proved fairly safe in our area. Which was good because even as I was preparing to slip out, tanks were rolling into other areas of town. Thank goodness they hadn’t touched our area as I was leaving because things would have been much worse and it would have been a lot harder for me to leave. As it was, my escape from the apartment involved a few James Bond maneuvers.
We went out the back way through the parking lot to this random little road that we had never known existed behind the apartment building. One of the women who works at the desk showed us which direction to walk in and I found a motorcycle driver. The woman from the desk helped me explain that I needed to get to where I could take a taxi to the airport, but because it wasn’t safe to walk through Rangnam I wanted to take a motorcycle. The driver agreed and I hopped on. We zoomed through the back road to Victory Monument, where a small group of red shirts was already gathering. Since being displaced from their main protest site by the government, red shirts had been gathering in groups all over the city, and Victory Monument was becoming one of them. A lot of the lanes were closed due to people just parking their cars there and leaving them. But it didn’t look like anything had started up again- someone was speaking to the gathering crowd through a megaphone, but there was no violence that I saw. We scooted around in one of the lanes that was still open and found a cab. My driver explained to the cab driver what I wanted, and then I paid the motorcycle driver and slipped from the back of the motorcycle into the cab. We cruised to the airport- there was no traffic since everyone was staying inside at this point.
I had a few hours to kill at the airport but wanted to get there early because it was easier to get out of my apartment that way. So I just wandered around, ate at Dunkin Donuts, walked through a bookstore, and basically enjoyed the fact that I wasn’t looking at the walls inside my apartment anymore. The flight to Koh Samui was easy and quick, and the airport was open and refreshing. I waited for my dad and Dawn for about an hour till their flight from Chiang Mai landed and then we took a cab together to our hotel. We changed and went down to the ocean, which was about the best feeling ever after everything that happened in Bangkok.
I’ll do a separate post to update you on all of our adventures in Koh Samui since I want this post to be more about what’s happening in Bangkok right now. But I will say that being in Koh Samui really feels strange to me. It’s like a different part of Thailand. There are no politics here. There’s nobody walking around in certain colored T shirts and there are no gunshots at night. It’s completely detached from what’s going on, which is both wonderful and a little scary at the same time that so much could be going on in one part of the country and it could affect this area so little. I’ve been keeping in touch with my roommates every day- they’re bored but still completely fine, nothing has happened. There’s now a curfew imposed every night in Bangkok until Sunday, which really sucks for some people but doesn’t really affect my roommates since they can’t leave the apartment that much anyway.
I will say that it does seem like the protests are at least headed towards an end at this point. The government is taking more action than they have taken before, and they are clearing out some of the protest areas. The red shirt leaders, at least most of them, have surrendered and there are still a lot of radical groups of red shirts running around the city but they seem less organized and scattered, so hopefully the situation will be brought under control soon. The government stopped the curfew on Sunday so it seems as if they are hoping everyone will be able to go back to a regular work week next week after basically shutting the city down this week. I hope so too. The riots have been terrible for the economy. Not to mention the fact that the more days my kindergartners have off, the more wound up they’ll be when we finally start school. Here I go looking at the big picture again, I know.
Anyway just wanted to post this update on the situation and let everyone know what’s going on and that it seems like things are going to come to an end fairly soon. I’m safe in Koh Samui with my dad and Dawn, and tomorrow we’re going to hang out at the beach and it’s going to be lovely, so I’m excited. I hope you’re all doing well at home and I love and miss you all!
Love from Koh Samui,
Monica
So the protests started to get worse the past few weeks, with attacks and incidents happening mostly on the weekends. The rumor is that this is because the red shirts wanted the press, but nobody wanted to affect the regular work week, so attacks would flare up Friday and Saturday nights and then calm down by Monday. They got really bad starting this past Thursday night in Lumphini Park when a sniper shot one of the red shirt generals, Seh Daeng. There were a lot of people injured in attacks that night, and schools and the BTS (sky train) were closed the next day. Which was news to me because I tried to take the BTS and it decided to dump us all off halfway to the school and close down, which meant I had to trudge through areas of town that I would rather not have been in until I could finally find a motorcycle to take me to an area where I could hop in a cab. I found a cab to take me to my school and when I got there, two hours later (but only ten minutes late), the principal said school was closed and we could all go home. After all that. So we left and took cabs home. And school has been closed ever since. We were supposed to start on Monday with the regular school year schedule, as were most schools in Bangkok. That didn’t happen.
Friday my roommates and I started hearing the gunshots and grenades in the early evening. We didn’t really know what was going on in our area, though we knew the protests had started getting ugly again. We started following CNN and the Twitter accounts of reporters to figure out what was going on, and heard that the riots were flaring up on a few streets near us. We spent the night watching from our balcony as gunshots went off in several different areas around us. Since our apartment is on the 16th floor we have a really good view of the city, and noise carries up to us from several different areas, though it was difficult to tell how close everything was to us. We learned that most of the action was happening at Sala Daeng and Silom, an area of town that was at least twenty minutes away from us and that we couldn’t actually see from our balcony. However, red shirts had also spread to areas near us like Din Daeng and Rajaprarop.
The next morning everything seemed calmer and since I didn’t hear any gunshots, I caught a cab to my dad’s hotel. Something I'm sure reassures everyone who is reading this, but really the gunshots hadn't been on our street and at that point our street was still open, so I didn't see the problem in leaving. By the way, my dad’s here! He and Dawn flew in Friday night so I didn’t get to see them till Saturday morning, but I was super excited to see them. Anyway, we took a tour of the Grand Palace. Even though it was my third time there, my father still insisted on getting a tour guide. What can you do? So the Grand Palace was wonderful for the third time around, and I actually learned a little bit about it that I didn’t know before, mostly that my guide is a yellow shirt and vehemently opposes the red shirts, but also a few things about the Grand Palace as well.
After that, we hopped the ferry back to the Navalai, where my dad and Dawn were staying, and grabbed lunch on their street. We took a nice, leisurely afternoon swim and hung out around the pool, not a care in the world. In the evening we decided to go see Wat Arun, the Temple of Dawn, because even though it’s the Temple of Dawn, it’s supposed to be really pretty in the evening.
As we were on the way, my roommate Holly called. “Don’t go back to the apartment,” she said. “It’s in a live fire zone.”
I didn’t really know what to make of that so I told her I wouldn’t go back. She and Kristina were at their school with their boss, who had informed them that all of a sudden the riots had entered our neighborhood and it wasn’t safe for us to go home. We got to Wat Arun and climbed up it (you can basically climb any relics you want in Southeast Asia- I love it), and I could see the smoke pouring into the air from way too close to our neighborhood. The black smoke from tires. The same black smoke that has been all over CNN and BBC for the past week and that I’m sure you’ve all seen if you’ve been paying attention to the news because it’s the most obvious sign of the turbulence in Bangkok.
At that point, I figured none of us were making it home that night. I went to dinner with my dad and Dawn at a Thai restaurant and then Holly and Kristina met up with us. My dad basically saved the day by getting us a room at the Navalai so we wouldn’t be homeless, and we ended up staying there Sunday night too because the live fire ban still hadn’t been lifted from our neighborhood.
Sunday we had free breakfast (which we were all super excited about because we never get free breakfast), and then we went on a boat tour. The tour took us through the canals of Bangkok to an orchid farm, which was absolutely gorgeous. Somehow they’ve figured out how to grow orchids so that the roots hang down from baskets, but they aren’t actually in soil or anything. Some of them grow out of coconuts. It’s really fascinating. Orchids are some of the hardest plants to grow, but Thailand can make anything grow- the weather here is amazing like that.
Anyway we got back from the tour and discovered that we still couldn’t get back into our neighborhood, so we decided to stay at the Navalai for another night until we could figure out what to do. Not that staying at the Navalai was a hardship, mind you- it was absolutely gorgeous there and we got tons of TV channels and nice beds to sleep in, so we were getting star treatment. It was almost worth Bangkok trying to blow itself up. Okay not at all, but it wasn't a bad way to pass two nights.
Sunday night, my dad and Dawn's last night in Bangkok before they left for Chiang Mai, we went on a dinner cruise through the Chao Praya River. The dinner was amazing. It was doubly amazing because it was our second buffet of the day, and since I hadn’t really had a buffet ever in Thailand before my dad came along, I was pretty psyched about it. This particular buffet involved a strange mixture of Thai, Indian, Japanese, and Western cuisine. I came back to the table with a plate of spaghetti, French fries, na’an, fried rice, and sushi. After that and an amazing flan dessert, we made our way to the top of the boat and just watched the lights go by as the ship sailed lazily along the river. It was easy to forget what was going on in Bangkok, even though we had witnessed a lot of it Friday night.
That seems to be the general consensus around Bangkok, at least early in the week. Everyone was aware of the violence, but in the areas it didn't touch, people went about their daily lives as if nothing was wrong. In the areas it did touch, everything closed and people couldn't even leave their homes. It was quite the contrast.
Monday morning we woke up and got our free breakfast, of course. Bangkok is divided and partially on fire and there are grenades and gunfire going off in the city, but the first thing we did before dealing with any of that was to get our free breakfast. I mean, it's free breakfast. Then came our choice. There was a lull in the fighting. We called the front desk at our building and they told us that Rangnam Road, close to where we live, was closed off to traffic but that it had been quiet all morning and if we left soon we could make it there. Normally we probably wouldn’t have made the attempt to get into our apartment through a live fire zone. But we’re girls. And you must keep in mind that we didn’t know we weren’t going to be able to return to our apartment. I left on Saturday to visit my dad and Holly and Kristina left to go to the gym. None of us knew that we wouldn't be returning later that day. Thus we’d been wearing the same clothes for three days. We were in desperate need of contact solution, clean underwear, and other feminine things. So we decided to make the trek to our apartment.
The trip to the apartment involved convincing a cab driver that it was okay to take us as close as possible to Rangnam Road because we lived there. He tried to tell us we didn’t want to go down Rangnam, but we insisted. So he drove us to the barbed wire that crossed the road and kept out the cars, and that was as far as he could go. We walked down a few back roads, ran to the only remaining ATM open on the street, and then ducked safely into our apartment without any incident. The only thing we really saw on the way were guards looking wary, though not wary at us. Most people who saw us on Rangnam probably thought we were stupid foreigners who had no idea what was going on. I didn’t blame them- it was an entirely vain move to go back to the apartment, though one that proved to be safe.
Once back at the apartment, of course the gunshots started up again and it quickly became unsafe for us to leave. We took a quick vote. I was in favor of leaving as soon as possible. Holly wanted to wait it out in the building. Kristina fell somewhere in the middle. We questioned the staff in the apartment building to find out how many residents would be there, figured out that the restaurant and the convenience store downstairs were both open, and while we were trying to find other places to stay, realized that there were less and less safe places in Bangkok. Even though we knew our neighborhood wasn’t particularly safe, our building itself was- we had security guards, we lived on the 16th floor, we had strong locks, and we had a front desk staff who knew who we were and who would take care of us if anything happened. We could have left and gone to a safer area, but no guesthouses in Bangkok have as good of security as our apartment building and we likely wouldn’t have had constant internet access. It would have been hard to know whether that safe area would turn unsafe, and if it did, we would be much more inconvenienced than if we just stayed in our own building. So we decided to stay.
Another factor in the decision to not leave Bangkok completely was that we weren't really sure when we would have to work again. My agency originally told me at the beginning of the week that I may have to work sometime at the end of the week, even though the school year was delayed for students until the following week. My roommates' boss told them they had the whole week off, but we still weren't sure the whole situation wouldn't blow over and schools would then be able to start earlier. So that was one of the main reasons that we didn't hop on the next plane out of Bangkok.
I stayed until Wednesday. And believe me I was getting stir crazy by then so I can only imagine how my roommates felt. We watched CNN. We listened to the explosions and gunshots outside. We slept in the same room away from the windows at night, even though it was highly unlikely that any of the violence would affect us. And we watched the black tire smoke pour through the city streets. Though CNN and BBC have greatly exaggerated many of the events in Bangkok, there was a lot of smoke. I'll give them that.
We ate all our meals at the Vietnamese restaurant downstairs and visited the convenience store lady, who clearly lived in the building, at least once a day to stock up on junk food and beer. We played Yahtzee. We watched movies. We did what we could to block out the sounds going on outside, except for when we were trying to figure out what in the world was going on. Every now and then we would hear banging that didn’t sound like any kind of fighting, and then we would go on Twitter, still the best way to get information fast, and see if anyone had updated anything about Rangnam. Sometimes they had, but usually the noises went without being described and we didn’t know what they were. Many of them came from Din Daeng, a long road about three streets over from us where much of the fighting was going on, though it wasn’t the worst area by far in Bangkok. Even though Rangnam was closed down, most of the fighting never really touched it- everything seemed to happen close by and Rangnam was just a road that happened to be in the center. Like the eye of the storm. Which was a fascinating place for us to be because we got to watch and experience a lot of what happened firsthand but from as safe a distance as possible.
Tuesday we found out that the government had declared the rest of the week a national holiday. That meant no school till Monday. So I decided to move up my flight. I was previously planning to visit my dad and Dawn in Koh Samui Friday night till Sunday afternoon, assuming of course that I would have school. This was before everyone in Bangkok decided to start blowing things up. I changed the flight to Wednesday and hoped that I would be able to make it out Wednesday morning before things got really bad. Usually there was a lull in the mornings- we assumed the government and the red shirts tried to grab a few hours of sleep in there.
Sure enough, Wednesday morning proved fairly safe in our area. Which was good because even as I was preparing to slip out, tanks were rolling into other areas of town. Thank goodness they hadn’t touched our area as I was leaving because things would have been much worse and it would have been a lot harder for me to leave. As it was, my escape from the apartment involved a few James Bond maneuvers.
We went out the back way through the parking lot to this random little road that we had never known existed behind the apartment building. One of the women who works at the desk showed us which direction to walk in and I found a motorcycle driver. The woman from the desk helped me explain that I needed to get to where I could take a taxi to the airport, but because it wasn’t safe to walk through Rangnam I wanted to take a motorcycle. The driver agreed and I hopped on. We zoomed through the back road to Victory Monument, where a small group of red shirts was already gathering. Since being displaced from their main protest site by the government, red shirts had been gathering in groups all over the city, and Victory Monument was becoming one of them. A lot of the lanes were closed due to people just parking their cars there and leaving them. But it didn’t look like anything had started up again- someone was speaking to the gathering crowd through a megaphone, but there was no violence that I saw. We scooted around in one of the lanes that was still open and found a cab. My driver explained to the cab driver what I wanted, and then I paid the motorcycle driver and slipped from the back of the motorcycle into the cab. We cruised to the airport- there was no traffic since everyone was staying inside at this point.
I had a few hours to kill at the airport but wanted to get there early because it was easier to get out of my apartment that way. So I just wandered around, ate at Dunkin Donuts, walked through a bookstore, and basically enjoyed the fact that I wasn’t looking at the walls inside my apartment anymore. The flight to Koh Samui was easy and quick, and the airport was open and refreshing. I waited for my dad and Dawn for about an hour till their flight from Chiang Mai landed and then we took a cab together to our hotel. We changed and went down to the ocean, which was about the best feeling ever after everything that happened in Bangkok.
I’ll do a separate post to update you on all of our adventures in Koh Samui since I want this post to be more about what’s happening in Bangkok right now. But I will say that being in Koh Samui really feels strange to me. It’s like a different part of Thailand. There are no politics here. There’s nobody walking around in certain colored T shirts and there are no gunshots at night. It’s completely detached from what’s going on, which is both wonderful and a little scary at the same time that so much could be going on in one part of the country and it could affect this area so little. I’ve been keeping in touch with my roommates every day- they’re bored but still completely fine, nothing has happened. There’s now a curfew imposed every night in Bangkok until Sunday, which really sucks for some people but doesn’t really affect my roommates since they can’t leave the apartment that much anyway.
I will say that it does seem like the protests are at least headed towards an end at this point. The government is taking more action than they have taken before, and they are clearing out some of the protest areas. The red shirt leaders, at least most of them, have surrendered and there are still a lot of radical groups of red shirts running around the city but they seem less organized and scattered, so hopefully the situation will be brought under control soon. The government stopped the curfew on Sunday so it seems as if they are hoping everyone will be able to go back to a regular work week next week after basically shutting the city down this week. I hope so too. The riots have been terrible for the economy. Not to mention the fact that the more days my kindergartners have off, the more wound up they’ll be when we finally start school. Here I go looking at the big picture again, I know.
Anyway just wanted to post this update on the situation and let everyone know what’s going on and that it seems like things are going to come to an end fairly soon. I’m safe in Koh Samui with my dad and Dawn, and tomorrow we’re going to hang out at the beach and it’s going to be lovely, so I’m excited. I hope you’re all doing well at home and I love and miss you all!
Love from Koh Samui,
Monica
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Teaching in Thailand (yay!)
Hey everyone :) I hope you've all been doing well since my last post!!
I left off talking about teaching, so we’ll start there. A few weeks ago I started teaching part time at a school called English Planet. It was about a fifteen minute walk to the bus station and then an hour’s ride on the bus to get there. Not exactly ideal. But I taught for three hours from 9-12 and the pay was pretty good, so I didn’t really mind it. I taught for exactly three days from Wednesday to Friday. On Friday after teaching, I went to a kindergarten school called Panaya where I got offered a full time job. I toured the school, met the principal (who scares me by the way), and got an idea of what the schedule would be like if I worked there. I then went to an interview with another language school that basically provides teachers to schools within Bangkok each day of the week. I would be teaching different kids but would be given all the resources and lots of training. So I had a lot of decisions to make really quickly. Because Panaya offered me a job first and seemed decent, I took the job there on a trial basis for the first week.
My first day was a bit chaotic. I wanted to observe some classes since I really didn’t know what was going on. So they had me observe Cat, one of the other teachers, the first hour at 9. Then they decided that this was good enough and had me teach a class at 10. Which was fine except that no one gave me any guidance on what I was teaching, what level the kids were at, or what I should focus on. Nobody even came to watch my class. So that was interesting. The next day I taught two classes, a K1 class (three year olds) and a K3 class (five year olds). Basically the kindergarten structure in Bangkok is divided into three levels: K1s, most of whom have never been in a classroom before and have never seen a white person before (pretty sure I made some kids cry just because of that fact), K2s who are just starting to sit at tables and get used to the structure of a classroom and follow directions, and K3s who are actually learning English at a rapid pace and can say sentences. It’s kind of a huge divide between each of the three.
Anyway on the third day I found out that I would be teaching K2s Math. So my new schedule became two classes in the morning and one in the afternoon with all three K2 classes teaching strictly math. This turned out to be a lot easier and more organized for me because I had a workbook. For the next week I enjoyed teaching and loved the fact that the workbook existed. It gave me an idea of how to structure my lessons each day and I knew what level the kids were at and what they could handle.
This of course quickly turned into a nightmare. We had the second week off for Songkran and I’ll go into that later. And I decided to accept the job at the end of the first week, so I signed a contract and came back to Panaya the start of the third week. The problem was that before I took over math, there were two teachers teaching math. So the classes were at totally different places in the workbook. The other problem was that the workbook is not set up in order from easiest worksheets to hardest, so I needed to go through and find out what worksheets had already been finished, what would be easiest and what would be hardest. I also found out in the middle of my second full week of teaching that I had to complete the entire workbook by the end of the summer school session or the parents would complain. My love for the workbook quickly dissolved into hate as I had to start doing two workbook pages a day to make up for the fact that the entire first week of summer school, before everything was organized, nobody did anything in the workbook and so we were behind.
I got to the current week and found out that there was going to be a field trip on Wednesday. How did I found out? Well you would think the principal or the assistant principal may have deigned to tell me that hey we don’t have classes on Wednesday, we’re taking the kids somewhere. But no, life just isn’t quite that easy. The Thai teachers heard that there was a field trip coming up literally the day before and told Andrew, another teacher at the school, who told me. Nobody knew where. Nobody knew when. We didn't even know if we all had to go. Plus it would put me behind on my workbook pages, which were basically my life at this point. My roommates have heard so much complaining about these workbook pages it’s like on equal level with breaking up with a boyfriend or failing an exam. Fortunately for my sanity, the field trip got canceled and I had enough time to finish all of the workbook pages based upon the fairly complicated schedule I had worked out for myself.
Also fortunately, my kids are so adorable it’s kind of worth it all. Even though they’re so bad. My K2/3 class are angels. Okay they aren’t angels, but they’re so much better than the other two classes it’s amazing. And the rumor is that I get to keep them once the school year starts, which I’m excited about. Apparently Andrew and I are splitting the K2 classes and I’m getting K2/3 and the possible K2/4 class that may be forming because of how many kids we have. Though that could change. With the way things seem to happen so quickly around the school, I could go from teaching kindergarten to teaching sixth grade by the time school starts. Everyone warns me that this is the way Thailand schools work- there is generally not much of a schedule and little to no notice of field trips, days off, or changes in the schedule. But the work is easy and the kids are great- it balances everything out. At least I won't get bored.
My second class of the day, K2/1, used to be my smart kids. Now they are my crazy kids. I am not sure what happened over Songkran. There must have been something in the water. For real. You’ll understand that really bad pun later. Anyway, there are so many kids in that class it’s hard to keep them all focused and once we start on workbook pages some of them work ahead and some are way behind, and they’re all basically at different learning levels so it’s really difficult. Some of them have English speaking parents at home and are basically fluent while others can’t even count. So I have to go slow for the kids who don't know much English and then the other kids get bored waiting for them to catch up and start talking. It’s been a bit of a struggle, but stickers are a really effective bribe and I've been using that to my full advantage.
My K2/2 class is adorable and falls somewhere between the two classes. There are a ton of them but they are better behaved than the 2/1 class- they listen a little better and sit quietly. It’s probably because half of them are asleep since I teach right before nap time, but hey I’ll take what I can get.
Also it needs to be noted that my kids have the most awesome names ever. Yogurt, Yoyo, Ting Ting, Earth, Center, Nice, Mine, Mint, and Far are only some of the names that I have to say every day with a straight face when I hand out the workbooks.They also all stand up when I walk into the classroom and say "Good morning Teacher Monica" and they say "Thank you Teacher Monica" when I finish teaching. We need to find a way to bring this to schools in the US.
Summer school ends this week and I have a busy two weeks following it. This Friday I set up my bank account finally. Saturday I have to make a visa run. Basically my papers have been at the school for two weeks waiting to be signed so I can get my non-B and not have to leave the country every two weeks. A non-B is an intermediary visa until my work permit can go through. However, because the principal of my school got stuck in Europe for four days of those two weeks, she doesn’t have enough time to sign them. Slightly frustrating. Also slightly frustrating: my break next week got canceled and I now have to keep normal hours, along with all other new teachers. So instead of the eight days I was supposed to have off, I now have Sunday. During which I will be sleeping. All. Day.
Anyway. Let’s talk about my last break. The week of Songkran. Oh Songkran. We decided to go to Chiang Mai for the first four days of the celebration. Songkran took place April 13-15, but everyone celebrated the whole week straight. And let me clarify what I mean by celebrated. Songkran is the Thai new year. Since it is also usually right before rainy season begins again, Songkran is a water festival. That means people stand in the streets and pelt each other with water for an entire week straight. It’s pretty awesome, for the first day or two anyway. So we met up with our friends from LanguageCorps in Chiang Mai, grabbed water guns, and joined in the festivities. The entire first day we spent soaked with buckets of water being constantly dumped over us. There was a concert in the center of the city in mid-afternoon with a stage that literally spouted water on everybody who was standing in front of it. All in all, it was a pretty spectacular day and a really good glimpse into Thai culture. The next day, we went out and joined in the festivities again but by that point we were a little bit over the whole being soaked to the skin constantly factor. I mean, it’s been about 106 degrees in Thailand so it was definitely hot enough for it. But it made sightseeing a little difficult. We managed to see the summer palace and a temple on the mountainside while we were there, both main tourist attractions in Chiang Mai, and we got to visit the night market in Chiang Mai. The night market was a bit hectic in that people packed literally shoulder to shoulder, so if we wanted to stop and look at anything we had to all signal each other to move to the side of the crowd so we wouldn’t get swept away in the crowd. It was fairly similar to the night markets in Bangkok except that everything was set up literally on the streets instead of crammed on to sidewalks.
We left Chiang Mai Wednesday night, the second day of the official Songkran celebrations. We got soaked on our way out, of course, and managed to change right before boarding the bus so that we wouldn’t have to ride the bus the entire way back to Bangkok wet. I would definitely suggest Songkran in Chiang Mai for a day or two, but it does get exhausting after awhile. I’m not sure how everyone was still going by the end of the week. It’s also a little dangerous because people throw buckets of water at motorcyclists, which if I were a driving a motorcycle would definitely cause me to crash. We didn’t actually see any accidents, thank goodness, but Songkran is still a pretty dangerous time of the year just for that aspect.
I really enjoyed the laid back atmosphere of Chiang Mai though. It’s much much smaller than Bangkok, just a town really, and it seems less touristy than Bangkok. There are also lots of mountains and fresh air, which doesn’t hurt. It was nice to get away from the bustle of Bangkok for a few days, even if we were caught in the middle of the wild festivities of Songkran.
The main reason it was so nice to get out of Bangkok was the protests. I’m sure you’ve been hearing about a lot of things on the news, at least if you watch CNN, I’m not sure if it’s really been on other channels or not back home. The protests can be measured by shirts. I wish I was kidding. The red shirts are the main protest group, and they’ve set up camp in a major intersection in Bangkok called Ratchaprasong. Because of where they’re located, both Siam Paragon and Centralworld are closed- two of the main malls that we used to go to. I know, clearly I’m looking at the big picture here right? But it’s been going on for weeks now and it’s been annoying to us and everyone that such a major commercial area has been shut down.
Several other protest groups are also starting to get involved now. There is a pro government group called the multi-colored shirts (I don’t ask) that keeps rallying at Victory Monument, though we don’t actually live close enough to the monument to see it. There is also another pro government group called the yellow shirts that is threatening involvement if the government doesn’t act soon to oust the red shirts. Tensions have been really high here, and there have been a lot of incidences, but no major breakthroughs have really been made on either side yet. Basically the red shirts want the current PM out and the House dissolved immediately, and the current PM is not agreeing to that (big surprise there). Negotiations haven’t really been working so well and the government is stepping up to take further action against the red shirts if they try to protest outside the Ratchaprasong intersection in other parts of Bangkok, but they haven’t really made an effort to get them out of that intersection yet. Mostly it hasn’t affected me or my roommates that much. It’s been annoying for us because traffic is worse in certain areas, and the BTS (sky train) is closed earlier. One morning it was closed for a few hours and I had to take a cab to work, which was expensive and irritating because I didn’t know what was going on and it was 6:30 am. It ended up being more annoying that it was closed because the red shirts decided to put tires on the BTS tracks, which doesn’t make sense because of the negative light it gives them with the public. But for the most part, we’ve been away from the protest sights and fairly unaffected by them.
One other thing that I feel needs to be mentioned in this post: last weekend my roommates and I met up with a friend of one of our friends in Chiang Mai, Steph. She invited us to a superheroes and supervillians themed birthday party. Because we haven’t gone out that much in Bangkok, we were of course really excited and spent the day running around Bangkok getting fabric and designing costumes. Mine was easy- I went as Catwoman, so I just wore all black and a mask and a headband with ears (there will be pictures posted, don’t you worry). Kristina went as Super Girl and Holly went as Bat Girl. It was one of the most epic nights of our life in Bangkok. Of course, we showed up at the party and almost no one was dressed up- don’t you hate when that happens? But we still had a great time designing costumes and it was fun to do something completely silly for a change. That didn’t relate to singing songs in front of a kindergarten class, that is.
Anyway that’s the general update on my life here in Bangkok. I think this post is actually slightly shorter than usual, but that may be because for the past few weeks my life has been fairly predictable haha. I’ve been enjoying getting into a schedule and being able to teach the same kids every day, and I’m hoping that next week while I’m lesson planning I can figure out what my schedule will be like once the school year starts. I’ll be sure to keep you updated! I love you all and I miss you!!!
Love from Bangkok,
Monica
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Koh Samet and Life In General
Hello from Bangkok! First I'd like to apologize for taking forever to update my blog. I literally wrote out a post (I promise this is true), but then my life got a bit chaotic and I didn't get the chance to upload it. And now more has happened so I needed to alter my post a bit. And I finally put pictures up! I know I already wrote a quick blog post about it but I feel like it should be mentioned again since it took me two months to do it. You'll get more pictures soon- I haven't been taking as many pictures as I usually do. I feel like I already have a lot of pictures of Thailand and Bangkok from this summer so pictures have gone by the wayside a little. But I'll make more of an attempt.
Now on to the fun stuff. I left for Koh Samet on Friday the 12th. I was supposed to leave on Wednesday. Isn't that the way life always works? Never time for a vacation and when there is, it never goes as planned. I ended up having three interviews for a school called St. Joseph's located on Silom Road. The location was great. The school not so much. It was a catholic school, very rich and upscale, very strict. Very not the place I would have imagined myself working in Thailand. I also had to give three demonstration lessons. Three. One to the agency that's helping me find a job, one to the actual school, and then yet another to the school. I got to the third demonstration lesson and one of the women who works for the school came in, told me to teach a half hour on adverbs, and left. Adverbs. That's what I had to work with. And the fact that my students would be 6th graders. She said I would have an hour. I figured an hour would be plenty of time for me to come up with something.
Ten minutes later. "Well the students are ready now, so you'll have to go now."
Yeah that lesson wasn't the best lesson I ever taught in my life.
The school said they liked that the students responded to me and seemed interested in what I taught but that they didn't really like my technique. I didn't like my technique either having had only ten minutes to prepare, nothing to work with, and really no experience teaching adverbs in particular. I mean don't you usually start with nouns and move on to adjectives before you get into the good stuff like adverbs? I couldn't even define adverbs without teaching the students what verbs and nouns and adjectives are anyway. Needless to say, the school wasn't particularly sold on me and I really didn't want to spend the rest of my time in Thailand being miserable, so I spoke to the agency about it.
And then I jetted off on vacation to try and forget about the job search. Which definitely worked. Koh Samet was gorgeous. It wasn't as nice as the southern islands with their perfect, picturesque beach scenes, but I loved it anyway. I had been in Bangkok for a little over a month and I was starting to feel smothered by the big city atmosphere. So I hopped a bus (which cost $20 bucks round trip by the way- this is why I love traveling in Thailand) and headed to the pier in Ban Phe which would take me to Koh Samet. The bus was actually more of a glorified van for fifteen passengers. On the way, the girl sitting behind me threw up and the guy sitting behind me had a seizure. (This is why I don't love traveling in Thailand). Apparently people in Thailand don't consider seizures serious enough to pull the van over to the side of the road, let alone go to the hospital. So we kept going while the guy's girlfriend and another woman who had some medical experience tried to help. It was a mildly scarring experience.
The ferry ride was another experience in and of itself. Our van load of tourists (including me) sat in the ferry for an hour while vans kept driving up and teenage boys who worked on the boat loaded it up with various types of food, a few kegs of alcohol (yes I'm being serious), and other merchandise that we could only assume they were being paid to transport by who knows who on the island. All we cared about was that it was ridiculously hot, we were so close to the island we could see it, and we had been stuck in a van with puke girl and seizure boy. The ferry couldn't leave quickly enough. It took another hour to dock in Koh Samet, we jumped our way onto the dock (literally) and then I set off to find a guesthouse.
I hopped the first baht bus (also known as songthaew, but I like baht bus better) to Naga guesthouse, which I had read about in my guidebook as being a good budget option. Definitely an option for those on a tight, tight budget. I paid 400 baht a night, which is about $12. What I paid for was, well, worth about $12 on a good day. I had a little glorified cabin built on stilts a few feet above the ground with steps that were actually wooden boards leading up to the door. The door had a padlock on the outside. That was great. From the inside, all it had was a little push lock like the kind you find inside a bathroom. There was a mattress on the floor draped in mosquito netting and I shared my little cabin with a wasp determined to make her home in the corner and a particularly noisy bird. The bathrooms were located up the hill about ten minutes. Needless to say I only spent one night at Naga guesthouse, but I will always remember it.
The next place I stayed was a step up. I paid 3$ more a night. It was worth about 3$ more a night, so at least Thailand was giving me exactly what I paid for. I had a bathroom in my new home, which was what I really wanted. The problem was that it was Thai style, meaning the only way to flush the toilet was using buckets of water. The sink was also slightly problematic in that the piping had a hole in it where the water spilled out at the bottom and the floor was angled so that the water was supposed to flow to the corner of the bathroom and drain there, along with the water from the shower head stuck to the middle of one wall. Unfortunately it didn't work that smoothly. But I didn't care-at least it was my own bathroom. And I had a little mattress and a fan and screens on the windows, and a cute little porch. And two locks on the door from the inside, which was a plus. It was like a lot like camping, which I haven't done in years, so oddly enough I enjoyed it. And by that point, I was sick of moving and wanted to enjoy being on the island.
My first day on Koh Samet I spent at the beach, out at dinner, and then in bed. I know, I clearly know how to party. In my defense, I was exhausted and still a bit traumatized from the trip to the island in the first place.
My second day I spent at the beach again. I stayed on the beach literally all day except for a pit stop to buy bug spray and sunscreen. As my friends will tell you, I'm a terrible packer. You would think after all these years of taking trips I would be good at it. Nope. I went to an island that is a certified national park and forgot both sunscreen and bug spray. Fortunately there was a little shop that happened to have both, and even though I'm pretty sure my bug spray attracted more bugs than it actually rejected due to the fact that it was scented, and my sunscreen was only SPF 15, it was better than nothing.
That night I went to Jep's for dinner. Jep's is a great restaurant tucked beneath trees but still right up against the beach. And they have fire shows every night. So as I ate whatever I ordered (something Greek with lots of potatoes that was absolutely amazing), I got to watch kids who looked to be about five and seven twirl fire. And wow were they good. I put a picture up on my blog so you'll have to check it out to really see, but it was amazing. I mean I spent the first ten minutes wondering where their mother was, but once I got over that impulse, it was a great show.
That night I decided to check out a bar called Silver Sand. There was a soccer game on (Chelsea won that night by the way)and I ordered myself a gin and tonic and was perfectly happy for awhile to just watch the game. And the people at the bar. It was a Saturday night so the place was packed. It didn't seem like that many people were into the soccer game but I saw a lot of people glancing at the screen from time to time. Soccer seems to be on a lot here, but it isn't treated the same way we treat football in the States. People glue themselves to the TV in the States when they watch football. In Thailand, everyone watches soccer but it isn't quite the same obsession. There has been a lot of publicity for the World Cup though, and I'm excited because so far we haven't been able to watch any kind of sports. We missed the Olympics, we're missing March Madness, and I just want to see something on TV that isn't the health care bill getting passed and Chile's earthquake. I know current events are really important and affect a lot of people, including me, but after hours spent watching it, I just really want something, anything, else to come on the TV.
Anyway. So I was at the bar on the beach in Koh Samet. I ended up talking to one the bartenders for awhile and he bought me the rest of my drinks (clearly it pays to know the bartenders in Thailand). I also met a group of really cool young people working in Bangkok who were from everywhere. And I mean everywhere. Flora was Thai but she was from California. Vik was from India. There was a girl from Georgia, a guy from England, a guy from Australia. We had our bases covered with countries and continents. I ended up hanging out with them for the rest of the night and we danced and it was really the first time that I've gone out successfully in Thailand.
The next day I went on a snorkeling trip. So in the morning, as I hurried to get ready after having had a few gin and tonics the night before, feeling not so much like getting on a boat, I went to the beach and met the speedboat that picked me up. An hour later I got off the speedboat not really feeling less queasy. We had ridden on the speedboat from Koh Samet to one of the smaller islands surrounding it, far enough away that I could barely see Koh Samet in the distance. And there were some fairly decent waves on the way- I had to hold on pretty tightly to the railing. Fortunately, snorkeling helped me feel better. A lot. The snorkeling right off the beach wasn't as good as the snorkeling to come, but I love snorkeling enough that it was still very cool. After letting us snorkel for an hour off the beach, our guides set up a barbeque on the beach and we had chicken kebabs, vegetable fried rice, and fresh fruit. It was one of the best meals I've had in Thailand. Then we packed up our stuff, hopped back on our speedboat, and headed for another island.
This island we just hopped off the side of the speedboat and snorkeled around. It was amazing. The coral was beautiful and there were fish absolutely everywhere. We were only there for about fifteen minutes and I wanted to stay longer. It was gorgeous. After that, we went to a fish farm about five hundred meters off the shore of another little island. The first picture on my blog is the picture of the fish farm. Tiny little boards separating roped off sections in the ocean where all kinds of creatures existed. The picture and that description about sum it up. I inched my way across the boards, taking about five minutes to get anywhere as the waves made them rock back and forth and my own natural clumsiness made me a little worried about falling into one of the nets. I soon discovered that while most of the nets held fish, some did not. Our guide stopped by one of the net areas and started pulling the net up. It turned out two tiger sharks and two huge sea turtles were lounging on the bottom of the net. About six inches above the water, I was a little afraid for my life as the sharks started cresting the surface, let alone falling in. After awhile, they settled back down and we decided to keep moving. I shuffled out on to one of the boards and realized that I had tiger sharks on one side of me and nurse sharks on the other. One good wave would have finished me off. Our guide took pity on me and started leading me around, explaining what each of the fish were and making sure I didn't trip and fall in anywhere. He eventually let me back to the tiger sharks and when one of them went swimming by, he grabbed it by the fin and gestured to me, so I touched it. Sharks feel really smooth, by the way. After that experience, I was ready to head home. We all piled back on our speedboat and headed towards Koh Samet. I got dropped off at about waist level in the water and waded my way into shore, then went back to my little grungy yet oddly cute cabin to shower and change.
Without much of a plan, I grabbed dinner at Jep's and watched the fire show. A guy from Switzerland walked up to me. "Are you here by yourself?"
"I'm at Jep's by myself." I tried not to say I was on the island by myself because I didn't really want people knowing that.
He asked to sit down and we started talking about where we were from, why we were in Thailand, and life in general. We walked down the beach a ways, found more fire shows, and then found a Black Moon party at one of the local bars. We ended up staying there for awhile but I was so exhausted from snorkeling all day that I excused myself and headed home at a fairly early hour.
My final day in Koh Samet (Monday) I just relaxed. I laid on the beach all day, stopping to get lunch at one point, and got a sunburn. It was glorious. At the end of the day, I was bound and determined to get to the other side of the island, the Western side, to see the sunset. And by bound and determined I mean I walked into town to the pier, which took about half an hour, and then found out that to get to the West side I would have to pay a cab driver an exorbitant amount of money (200 Baht for a ten minute cab ride? Not in Thailand). So I walked. About halfway through I figured it probably wasn't the best idea for me to be walking on a dirt path through a jungle by myself, but it was still light and I rationed that there were motorbikes passing me every now and then on the road so there must be people nearby. It took about a half hour but I eventually got to the other side of the island, and just caught the sunset. And what a sunset. It was worth the trek.
I walked half of the way back after spending about a half hour watching the sunset. I thought about catching a cab back but the songthaews wanted to wait for more people since they have space for at least ten, and I didn't want to spend my last night waiting. About halfway back to the East side, a songthaew stopped and the driver picked me up since he was going that way anyway and gave me a huge discount on cab fare, which saved me walking the rest of the way through the jungle so I was pretty grateful.
When I got back to the beach, I showered and wandered down the beach to a restaurant that I had seen the night before with fresh seafood. Seafood so fresh that I picked my own crabs while they were still alive. I still feel bad about that. Though it was a really good meal. After that I got a crepe right off the beach (love Thailand) and went back to Silver Sand, the bar that I went to Saturday night. The same bartender I had met Saturday night was still working. It was dead. There was almost no one there. I mean I know it was Monday night but how many people go to Koh Samet to work? Na (the bartender) and I ended up playing Connect Four the Drinking Game (which we invented) for hours. Turns out there are a lot of strategies to playing Connect Four. I got really good by the time we finished- keep that in mind the next time you challenge me to a game of Connect Four.
The next day, I headed home to Bangkok. And an hour of ferry ride, two hours of killing time in Ban Phe, and three hours of van (it would have been two and a half but the driver forgot his sunglasses and felt the need to go back) later, I arrived on Koh San road. I grabbed dinner and took a cab back to find my apartment still in one piece.
The rest of the week was fairly standard. Holly and Kristina came back from Koh Samui on Thursday and Holly's friend Jacey flew in that weekend, so she spent part of the day with us on Sunday. That Saturday we were supposed to meet her and Gina, another friend of Holly's who was in Thailand, at a wine bar called Bracchus. We ended up at the wine bar by ourselves because the traffic was so bad that it was difficult for Gina and Jacey to get across town. So we ended up indulging ourselves with good wine, which we never get, and bruschetta and nachos, which we also never get and which was amazing. When we were almost finished and ready to head home, the bartender told us that a cabaret show was about to start upstairs. So we wandered upstairs and sure enough there was a mini cabaret show because it was a girl's birthday and she had hired them to come to Bracchus. Who knew that that was a birthday tradition in Thailand? The show was amazing. It started with a woman dressed as Beyonce who knew the Single Ladies dance perfectly, then progressed to Cher and Lady Gaga. By the end we were all but dying of laughter because of how perfect everything was choreographed and how great the costumes were. It ended up being one of the best nights I've had in Bangkok yet.
The next day, Holly, Gina, and Jacey left to go to Chiang Mai for a few days. That week basically nothing happened except for Tuesday. I was in the movie theater and ended up having a really bad panic attack, so after about a half hour of explaining that something was wrong to the people who worked there, Kristina and I got across the fact that I wanted to go to the hospital. They eventually got me downstairs and into a van, and half an hour of sitting in traffic to drive a mile down the road later while being asked if we wanted a refund for our movie tickets like we cared, we were in the ER. About forty five minutes after that, the ER attendant came in and asked what happened.
I said I was in a movie theater and I wasn't sure, but that all my muscles tightened up and I couldn't talk, and I thought it was a bad panic attack. He asked if it was a scary movie. I said it was Dear John. He said he wasn't going to go see that movie. Then I asked him to check my blood sugar and take my blood pressure. It seemed like everything was normal, so I asked for some Xanax because my muscles were still pretty tense and breathing was difficult. That seemed to work after about a half hour and I asked to schedule an appointment to see a doctor the next day.
In case you hadn't noticed, there was a whole lot of me asking for things in the picture that would not have happened in a hospital in the US. Fortunately, by the time we reached the ER I was at least a little better and felt fairly certain it had just been a panic attack.
The next day I went to my appointment with the Behavioral Health doctor. He told me that I had hyperventilation syndrome and that too much oxygen had gotten into my body, and that's what happened. His advice to me was to "stay calm." I tried to tell him that I was in a movie theater, not exactly a stressful situation, but that didn't seem to sway the diagnosis or my treatment of "staying calm."
So I went to see a neurologist. That was even worse. I walked in and he asked, "So what's a pretty young girl like you doing in my office?" I told him what had happened. He asked if I had a boyfriend. I didn't see the connection. His prognosis after taking my blood pressure was that it was a bad panic attack. I wasn't sure if these people were just repeating my own diagnosis of myself or actually creating their own diagnosis, but he launched into a lot of medical talk about too much oxygen that matched the Behavioral Health doctor's speech earlier, so I figured if they both agreed on it, it was a safe bet that's what happened. I asked for a CBC just in case. Then I asked for an MRI. He laughed and basically told me that there was no way I needed an MRI. "You're too young and pretty to be sick," he told me. So going off that clearly medically related diagnosis, I headed back to my apartment.
Besides that interesting event in my week, nothing else happened till that weekend. Holly, Jacey, Kristina and I went to a restaurant called Cabbages and Condoms. The restaurant had classic but delicious Thai food and offered us condoms at the end of the meal instead of mints. The restaurant raises money for awareness of family planning and the importance of contraceptives in Thailand. Thus the condoms.
After that we went to a cabaret show called Mambo. We thought it was on Sukhumvit, close to Cabbages and Condoms. Turns out there were people on Sukhumvit who offered to take us to Mambo but that the actual show was located about fifteen minutes away down some random roads. So after packing into the back of a cab and a ride through the city to the point where we had no idea where we were headed, we finally got to Mambo. I have to say, it was the worst cabaret show I have ever seen. Not that I've seen many. But it has to be one of the worst in history. The costumes were gorgeous and the guys were hilarious, but the girls just seemed to hate being there. It was a strange combination. The music made it so much worse. But I was still glad I went; even though it was pretty awful, it was still really entertaining.
And that was the rundown of the past few weeks up to last weekend. I have found a job that I like and I think I'm going to take it, by the way, so I'm really excited. I taught part time last week, and then ended up getting offered a full time position at a different school, and I have been teaching there for the past week. However, as this post is ridiculously long already and I haven't signed the contract with this school yet so nothing is final, I'm going to update you on the teaching situation in my next post. I know, I know, you're thinking "Dear God, it's gonna be another month," but I promise it won't be. I'll try my best to update you next week after Songkran (Thai New Year). And I'll be able to update you on the exciting trip that we're taking to Chiang Mai during Songkran, so it'll be a good post ;) I miss you all and I hope you're doing well!
Love from Bangkok,
Monica
P.S. Some of you may have heard that Thailand has declared a state of emergency due to the red shirt protests going on in Bangkok. So far they've been fairly peaceful (and kind of entertaining for us to watch), and we're reading the newspaper religiously and it doesn't seem like that will change. But if you're interested check out www.bangkokpost.com.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Pictures!!
I finally put up pictures on my blog! It only took two months :P If you want to see more pictures, check out my roommate Holly's flickr page at http://www.flickr.com/photos/hollylove04/ . I'll update you on Koh Samet later this week!
<3
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Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Khao Yai and Trying Not to Fry
Hey everyone! So I have a few more things to report in this post, and not all of them are about Bangkok, so that'll be a nice change for once.
The first one is about Bangkok though. In my last post, I talked about a job interview I had where the day and time kept getting changed at the last minute. I finally had the job interview two weeks ago and it went well- I read my book about monkeys, the kids all got to color in monkeys, we put them up on the white board and counted them, and then we all sang "Five Little Monkeys." The whole interview itself seemed good and I'm still waiting to hear back from the school. The major problem with the school and actually most of the schools that I've applied to is that it's on the outskirts of Bangkok, and Bangkok is huge. So it takes about forty five minutes to get there. On a good day.
At this point, I've had six or seven interviews, and most of them are for schools that are too far away. I have a few more interviews coming up this week so if anything major happens I'll be sure to let you know. Holly and I also had an agency offer us a contract to work at one of three different schools, and we've spent the past week taking cabs to the schools and then attempting to explain to the cab drivers that we didn't actually need to get out, we just wanted to see how far away they were from our apartment, and would they please drive us back? This ended badly on Sunday (the 7th) because our cab driver needed to go home and just abandoned us at the school, so we ended up by the side of the freeway attempting to flag down a cab. Needless to say, it wasn't the smoothest cab ride we've had.
Anyway on a different note, two weeks ago we went to Khao Yai National Park. Khao Yai is a huge national park about two hours outside of Bangkok. It also happens to be a monsoon rainforest. It stretches over endless acres of land- we could see the treetops for miles from some of the higher areas. Being a monsoon rainforest, Khao Yai is home to several species of animals. Namely elephants, birds, snakes, scorpions, tigers, and leopards. Though we didn't actually get to see most of those animals, it was still cool to traipse through the forest knowing they were out there. Cool, surreal, and possibly a bit nerve wracking at points.
We stayed at Green Leaf guesthouse the nights before and after we went to Khao Yai. Green Leaf was a cute little place tucked back into the outskirts of a town made popular by the presence of Khao Yai and tourists' interest in visiting. However, there was basically nothing near Green Leaf. We ate at the guesthouse (mostly rice and noodle dishes, very traditional Thai food), and stayed at the guesthouse for the entire time we weren't at Khao Yai- mainly because there was nowhere else to go. Our guide worked for (and possibly owned though it's unclear) Green Leaf, took our food orders, and gave them to his grandmother, who happens to be the cook. Our room was basically like a cabin out in the woods- beds with mattresses that go straight to the floor when you lay on them, a bathroom with no sink (yes that's right), and mosquito netting everywhere. Brushing our teeth was a challenge, but otherwise it felt like we were roughing it in the good outdoors. A really nice change from Bangkok. It was also cool enough that we didn't need AC at night- in fact it was even a little chilly. The weather was so amazing we've been tempted to go back and stay at Green Leaf for a night just to beat the heat in Bangkok.
We arrived at Green Leaf on Thursday night (the 25th). Friday morning we set off at 8:00 in open trucks with nailed in benches that I've mentioned in previous blogs as "baht buses." We wound our way up the paths of Khao Yai and got to take some pictures at a lookout. Then our guide started passing around white strips of cloth. We just kind of stared at them like "What are we supposed to do with this?" He showed us how to tie them around our legs. Apparently because of the amount of bugs and leeches, the strips of cloth help to protect our legs as we're walking around in the brush. At first we were kind of skeptical. Like how many bugs would we actually be exposed to on this hike?
Then we started the hike. Through the woods. And not on a trail, because that would have made life way too easy. We had to go straight through, making our own path, holding branches out of each other's faces, trying not to slide down as we descended part of a mountain, trying not to fall in mud puddles. In each blog post I like to take a moment and mention how attractive I look in Thailand. This is that moment.
I spent most of the hike looking for snakes and getting thwacked in the face by wayward branches because I wasn't paying attention to where I was going. This turned out to be justified. At one point, we stopped on the path and one of our guides handed out this amazing snack with sticky rice and condensed milk wrapped in a leaf. We ate our treats and waited to keep going. And kept waiting. Our other guide was walking around checking out the brush very closely. He then informed us that there was a cobra hole about five feet from where we were standing and he was trying to locate the cobra. Since he didn't happen to see it, he assumed it was in the hole. He started poking into the hole with a stick. Since that didn't magically produce a cobra, he stuck his hand in the hole. Thank goodness that didn't work, and we were forced to continue on without seeing the cobra.
Later in the hike we got to sit at the lookout by the waterhole and eat our lunch of rice and vegetables. Besides a brightly colored, huge bug that our guides said was dangerous, we didn't see any action going on by the water hole. After lunch we took another hike looking for a crocodile. That's right, we could give Steve Irwin a run for his money. Except that we would have actually needed to see the crocodile to be worthy of Animal Planet. As a wrap up for our full day Khao Yai experience, we spent four hours riding around at dusk looking for elephants. Which we did not see. So mostly we spent four hours riding around leaning out of our half a truck and straining our eyes against the dark in case one would just happen to emerge on to the road. Why an elephant would come onto a road where vehicles are driving by constantly I have no idea. Apparently they don't very often since we didn't get to see any.
Our trip to Khao Yai wasn't completely a bust though. We got to see some really cool birds (I have a few pictures which will hopefully be up on my blog). We also got to see macacas (monkeys) and gibbons (monkeys who live in the trees and never touch the ground). And we got to see an ancient looking turtle and a creepy looking spider. Not to mention the exercise trekking through our own paths in the jungle.
We returned to the guesthouse rather exhausted and surprisingly a little chilly. We all got dinner and ended up playing hearts for a few hours on the tables outside (until our guide's grandma wanted to go to bed and they had to turn the lights off). Then we retired to our room with its ridiculous mattresses. Mine had an indentation of where I had slept the night before that was so prominent I couldn't get out of it when I laid down- it was like sleeping in a hole. But the room was cool and relatively quiet, and it was easy to fall asleep to nighttime woods noises.
The next day we crammed on to the bus back to Bangkok. We were hoping that if we took the bus back on Saturday it wouldn't be as crowded. No such luck. Once back in Bangkok, we spent most of the weekend just recouping from our trip and getting readjusted to the heat.
Last week passed as most of our weeks pass in Bangkok- job interviews, filling out applications, spending much of our time at the pool, and watching the temperatures rise and rise with no end in sight. Apparently it's been unseasonably warm here and our temperatures have been typical April temperatures. I really hate to see what the temperature is like in April. We might have to start splurging a little on our electric bill. I've been spending a ridiculous amount of time at the gym as well because it's another air conditioned place to hide in. And because they have the best dance classes. I found a class called Dance Rhythms that I absolutely love and have been going to almost every day. Even though I'm a pretty terrible dancer, it's really entertaining to watch everyone else, and the room is full of people at all different levels so I don't feel like I stand out that much. Well I don't feel like I stand out that much based upon dance ability. I happen to be the only non-Thai person taking the class. I'm not entirely sure I should be the one representing American dancers here but what can you do?
Other than the occasional interview, the reviewing of a rather shady job contract, and several trips to the gym, not much happened until Friday. Holly's parents and her cousin and cousin's husband came to Bangkok and we ended up spending a lot of time with them this weekend. On Friday we went to the Royal Palace. Absolutely gorgeous of course. We got to walk through endless rooms of paintings and mosaics and past buildings that looked like they were built from pieces of precious stones and gold.
We got to go in the temple of the Emerald Buddha (after going through this ritual of holding a flower dipped in water over our heads). The Emerald Buddha was a bit smaller than I thought it would be (namely about a foot tall), but since it was completely made of emerald with precious jewels encrusted all over it, and basically set on a pile of artifacts made from gold, it was still very impressive. After the Royal Palace, we hung out around the pool, had happy hour around the pool (the only way to do it), and then went out to dinner at a cute restaurant right down the street from Holly's relatives' hotel.
Saturday (the 6th) we checked out Chinatown. Wow. I loved the experience of walking through but it was chaotic and overwhelming. I can't imagine what it was like for Holly's parents and relatives, who had just arrived in Bangkok. We made our way through impossibly small streets made even smaller by the trucks and motorcycles trying to push their way through crowds of people and stands of food, clothes, jewels, watches, stickers, and whatever else you can think of. The roads were nearly covered by the roofs of buildings overhead that almost touched each other, so when we walked through we were almost completely shielded from the sun. This plus the constant breeze made the heat slightly bearable.
After our Chinatown adventure, we had a casual afternoon by the pool and then went out to dinner near Victory Monument. Once dinner was over, we decided that we needed to introduce Holly's relatives to crepes off the street- the best street food in Bangkok, and probably all of Thailand. They affirmed my love of crepes and then headed back to their hotel.
Holly, Kristina, and I were feeling a little more adventurous on our Saturday night so we decided to find a club called Saxophone and check out the live music. The place was packed with people out for a fun but chill Saturday night. We slid into our worn wooden booth and watched the band get into the music. We speculated on whether or not they knew what they were singing since all of the songs were in English, but they were so into the words that I think they must have. And the music was amazing, as most live music seems to be, especially after a few drinks.
The rest of the week has been fairly laid back. Everything is starting to come to an end at the same time. Our contract is up for our apartment so we need to get it renewed and maybe try and get our rent down a little. Our visas are going to expire in less than two weeks and we need to make a visa run to the border and back (a pain since the closest border is 4ish hours away). We're all close to finding jobs and have had promising interviews, but we're still working on contracts and I think we're all starting to feel the pressure to get jobs secured for April or May. And we're all leaving this week. Holly and Kristina are going to Koh Samui with Holly's parents and I'm going to Koh Samet, an island about four hours outside of Bangkok, mostly just to escape for a few days and hopefully relax.
I'll be sure to update you about my trip and the other goings-on here in Bangkok soon! I hope you're all doing well and that you're enjoying your cold weather. No seriously, I'm a little jealous. I miss you all!
Love from VP,
Monica
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