Bangkok Daze

Hey everyone! So it's been about two weeks that we've been in Bangkok and you would think "Wow two weeks overseas in a third world country, you must have a lot to say in this blog post!" The sad truth is I really don't. But I'll start from two weekends ago anyway.

We went out on Koh San road on Saturday night. Koh San road is probably the most tourist-filled road in Southeast Asia. Backpackers and parents with kids running all over the place mingle with clothing sellers and food vendors to create this weird carnival-like atmosphere that doesn't seem to exist anywhere else we've found in Bangkok. We found an Indian place for dinner and then another restaurant with tables halfway into the street where we could sit and just watch the ridiculous-ness unfold around us. Starting with the fact that right in front of us, two little kids had been given a case of empty beer bottles and were using them as building blocks. And actually making money because kids playing with beer bottles tend to attract the attention of the general population.

We wandered around, got crepes from the street vendors (crepes are quickly turning into my favorite street food), and looked through the clothes and movies and shoes and other random things that littered the streets in a sort of market/bar/nightclub/restaurant all thrown into one road. Kids here don't have bedtimes, everyone always looks glamorous as if it isn't a hundred degrees outside, and it always smells like food. Everywhere we go. It's like being in a parallel universe, but one that's strangely similar to reality.

Where there are street markets, there are also malls with stores like Chanel and Gucci and Prada. Where there are outdoor food vendors, there are also fast food restaurants and sit down places that resemble Fridays and Ruby Tuesdays. Where there are barely covered shelters used as homes, there are also five star hotels with swimming pools and room service. Where there is Thai, there is usually a little English mixed in. Where there is music in the strangest places, like while I'm walking down the street minding my own business, it's usually Western. Actually it's almost always Lady GaGa.

So even though we were on Koh San road, the strangest looking road in Southeast Asia so far, the place where everyone from all corners of the world comes to congregate and shop and just gawk at everyone else, it seemed fairly normal. Maybe I've just started getting accustomed to living in Thailand.

Sunday was Valentine's Day. And yes they do celebrate Valentine's Day here. Valentine's Day happened to fall on the same day as Chinese New Year. The stores in the mall just looked confused. There were hearts and lanterns everywhere, and everything was pink. It was kind of a mess, but somehow they made it work. Holly and I took a trip to the mall and watched the festivities unfold everywhere. We got Western food and spent an hour in the bookstore and basically had a nice, luxurious day, mostly because we spent it in air conditioning. Which because of the high price in air conditioning at our apartment, we only get at night on normal days.

The rest of the week ran together. We had a few interviews sprinkled in between massive amounts of reading, researching Bangkok and Thailand for things to do, visiting a museum, and eating. And the pool, which is the only thing that makes our 95+ degree days bearable. The museum was one of the highlights of the week. It was an interactive museum- we got to play games throughout. Some of the games were actually fun, like buying and selling goods as if we were traders from different areas throughout Asia. Some of the games were mildly inappropriate, like the cannon game where you can attack oncoming forces with an actual cannon instead of a mouse or a Nintendo controller. Yes, an actual, pivoting cannon hooked up to a computer. It was mildly disturbing. We went through rooms that talked about prehistoric times when Bangkok was underwater, to rooms that talked about how provinces and languages formed, to rooms that talked about today and commercialism moving in. It was fascinating to go through the different realms of another country's history, especially a country that I really didn't know much about history-wise.

We all interviewed at a primary school to teach either first grade or conversational English for grades 1-6. The only thing that really set the school apart from the others that I've been looking at was parents' day. And parents' day wouldn't have managed to set the school apart except that they were showing a video of graduation that involved kindergarteners dancing to Boom Boom Boom by the Black Eyed Peas. Not a song I would have picked for my kids to graduate to.

This past Saturday (the 20^th), we made an attempt to find clubs in Bangkok. It failed pretty miserably. Apparently there isn't really a drinking age in Bangkok because I've seen kids who can't be more than sixteen drinking on the steps in front of 7-11. But you have to be 20+ to get into the clubs. Which means we all needed to have IDs with us. We also didn't really know about the fact that most of the nice clubs have covers on Saturday night and the ones that don't have covers are fairly sketch. So there was that factor. But we got to see a decent amount of Silom Road, which is right on the edge of the sex district I should add, and we found a good Irish pub. So not all was lost on Saturday night.

Sunday was again same old same old. I went to Siam Paragon, one of the biggest malls in Bangkok. I just feel the need to add this in: the basement of Siam Paragon is the biggest aquarium in Southeast Asia, and it looks awesome. If it wasn't so expensive, I would probably have already hit that up because aquariums are one of my favorite things in life. But that's going to be one of the things I do with my first paycheck. I had to go to Siam Paragon to get a children's book for a 30 minute teaching demonstration that I have to do with a class of kindergarteners. My instructions were to create a lesson by reading a book and then doing an activity related to the book. So I found this cute kids book about a monkey who can't find his mother and thinks she's every other animal in the jungle (not the brightest monkey but the pictures are nice at least) and figured that would work for the demonstration.

I was supposed to go to the school and do the demonstration Monday afternoon. That in and of itself is a story. I got an email Sunday night (Sunday night mind you) asking if I could "postpone the time to 10 PM." I sat there confused. Well, yeah if you can get a group of kindergarteners to come into school at 10 PM. I figured it was a mistake since English is the second language of most people here and that he meant 10 AM, but then I wasn't sure if he meant 10 AM on Monday or Tuesday since he said "postpone" instead of using an easier word like change or move. I emailed him back in all of my confusion and received a response at 1 AM. What he was doing up at 1 AM I try not to question. I read the response at 8:30 AM the next day when the Internet café decided to open. Most places here kind of operate on the schedule of the owners, not the schedule posted, so you have to be fairly flexible. Except that punctuality is key in Southeast Asian teaching jobs and if you aren't early, you're late. So you have to be flexible, but in a timely fashion.

Anyway he told me that the time had changed to 10 AM. At this point I whipped out my cell phone and called, and muddled through a ten minute conversation until he figured out that it would be basically impossible for me to get to the school in an hour and could we meet at a different time? Or the time originally scheduled before it changed Sunday night perhaps? Thankfully he was really nice about it and I'm fairly certain the reason he had to change the time in the first place was because he was going to a wedding, although the way he said it made it sound like he had already gone to a wedding and just wasn't going into work for a full day in order to recover. So now I have the teaching demonstration later this week- I'll let you know how it goes.

That brings us up to the present. Our major endeavour this week was signing up at a gym. I mostly signed up for the fitness classes- they have classes anywhere from weight lifting to aerobics to latin dancing to bodyjam. Honestly this is the most adventure I've had since apartment-hunting. But we are also going to a national park this weekend, which I'm psyched about. It's similar to a national park in the US. Except for the tigers. And elephants. And natural waterfalls. And jungles. So there are some slight differences. We're doing a guided day hike that lasts eleven hours (I'm not sure I'm going to last eleven hours in the weather we've been having but I'm giving it my best shot). I'm excited about the guided hike because the prospect of wandering alone through jungles that tigers frequent just doesn't seem right without the staff of Animal Planet present.

If I don't melt in the upper 90 degree weather we've been having, I'll update you again soon! And I'll try to stop complaining about the weather because I know half of the US is covered in snow right now- I feel for you guys, I really do. Though I'm a little sad that I missed seeing this much snow. Anyway I miss everyone back home and I hope you're all doing well!

Love from VP Tower in good old Bangkok,

Monica

Adventures of Apartment Searching In Bangkok

Hello everyone! Again sorry for the delay, but I have now officially moved to Bangkok and have found a place to live, so that’s at least two of the stresses of my life gone. And I have completed the LanguageCorps program!! So that’s three.

So let’s see. When I left you, I was in my first week of student teaching. Preschoolers. For three hours straight every day. I basically developed one lesson plan and did it every day during the week. Kristina and I taught together thank goodness, so we each got a bit of a break when the other was teaching. She taught alphabet and I taught shapes and colors, and we both kind of handled art time. I made four shapes out of Thailand’s version of construction paper, which comes sticky on one side and is a pain to work with. I also used four sheets of construction paper to teach blue, red, green, and yellow. The kids had a lot of trouble with distinguishing yellow and green, probably because they sound a little weirder than blue and red. They also had trouble with rectangle and triangle.

I sang a shapes song every day – yeah I know, but we had to fill up three hours here remember. And it was a good song- it was to the tune of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, but it went Circle circle, circle circle, triangle, triangle, square square square, square square square, rectangle rectangle. It worked perfectly with the song, and the kids seemed to enjoy it. We also did a rectangle worksheet one day and I had the kids trace shapes up on the board to get the hang of drawing them.

For art time, I liked to pick songs and make art projects out of them. For Old Macdonald, the kids colored in different barnyard animals and we put them on the board where their homes would be. Yeah I drew their homes. Yeah it wasn’t pretty. But the kids got it, and that was all that mattered. For Itsy Bitsy Spider, I drew a web up on the board and the kids all got to color spiders, and then we put the spiders on the board and counted them. About five times. Kristina and I learned how to drag out every activity to make it take as long as humanly possible. The kids also colored in fish and got fish stickers one day, and we sang the "One two three four five, Once I caught a fish alive" song. We also played with Playdoh three times last week and learned our colors.

That was pretty much my experience teaching preschool. I’m not entirely sure I did much good, but I feel like I’m fairly confident dealing with teaching little kids at this point and being able to think on my feet as far as filling time and adjusting to their ability levels goes.

Two weekends ago, we went to Koh Larn, a little island about a forty minute ferry ride from Pattaya. It was beautiful, but the entire beach was covered in lawn chairs and we had to pay to sit in them. Clever tourist trap. And it was a fairly crowded beach so there were people everywhere. But I couldn’t complain, it was a beach. And I met a nice group of people from India who needed somebody else to play water volleyball. I didn’t really get their water volleyball rules, but I had fun anyway. And miraculously I haven’t really been sunburned here yet. Knock on wood.

Two Sundays ago, Pattaya had a bed race. Which is exactly what it sounds like. Everyone uses a bed frame to create some sort of representation of their business or cause or whatever, and then they all race them down the street. It was awesome. I took a ton of pictures, and once I have an Internet connection that supports pictures I can actually post them. It was basically Pattaya’s version of a county fair. They had games like throwing darts at balloons and throwing balls at milk cartons, and they had stands of people advertising for different things, and a place to donate to Haiti. Tons of people turned out to both be in the bed race and watch the bed race, and it was exciting to be there. Though I have to admit, I went and came back a few hours later when it was actually time for the bed race. It’s been in the upper 90s here and that doesn’t include humidity, so being outside is mildly unbearable. I hear it’s been pretty unbearable weather back home too- hope nobody got stuck out in the snow!!

The rest of the week, we focused on teaching, Thai lessons, and getting our homework finished. And we had massive amounts of homework. We had homework for Thai lessons. We had lesson planning. We had requirements to make for the TEFL certificate. For the TEFL certificate alone, we had to type up all our lesson plans, keep a language journal, do a one-on-one interview with a Thai person and then design and give them a one hour English lesson, fill out four self evaluation surveys that were three pages long, and fill out an exit interview form. For Thai class, we always had assignments like finding certain places in Pattaya by asking strangers for directions, creating a lesson plan about what we had just learned in the chapter, coming up with two or three questions in Thai to ask a stranger about their life, that sort of thing. Then there was lesson planning for preschool, which was fairly easy because most of my lessons stayed essentially the same. On top of that, we were applying for jobs. I found a few websites online and just started searching for jobs in Thailand and sending my CV everywhere. All of this probably wouldn’t have been quite as stressful if we would have had constant Internet access, and access to a printer and copier that didn’t take half an hour for one piece of paper. But somehow we all survived. And graduated LanguageCorps.

I have to say, I’m glad it’s over. I like the LanguageCorps program, but I felt like there was definitely a little too much busy work and a lot less learning of actual strategies going on than I would have liked. We only spent a class learning how to lesson plan, and though we learned different lessons throughout the course, I wish we had spent more time actually developing our own lessons. If I end up teaching preschool, it won’t be much of a problem. However, I don’t really want to end up teaching preschool. They cry and wet their pants and eat crayons. I mean, what are you supposed to do with that?

Which brings me to my current situation. Saturday we moved to Bangkok. The Miami Hotel in Sukhumvit to be exact. The Miami Hotel is not what the pictures on the Internet say it is, to the point where when we showed up we almost left. Unfortunately we didn’t and ended up staying for four nights. I’m convinced it used to be a school or a jail- it has that type of feeling. And the mattresses were the lumpiest mattresses I think I’ve ever felt. I almost fell off a lot. The price wasn’t terrible and we didn’t have anywhere else to go and we all have two suitcases so we were stuck till we found an apartment. Needless to say, we found an apartment in four days.

Apartment hunting was... difficult. We didn't know where we were, what buildings were hotels and what buildings were apartments, how much we should pay, whether or not we could bargain, and what areas of town are bad. We basically stumbled around neighborhoods in Bangkok and went into random tall buildings that looked like they could possibly be apartments. So the fact that we found an apartment in four days is actually quite amazing.

We are currently living at the VP Tower in the Victory Monument area. VP Tower is probably not worth the amount that we’re paying but it’s clean, nice, has a pool, and is located in a really good area for traveling through Bangkok. We’re five minutes from the sky train. There’s also a park across the street with two lakes and aerobics classes at night. I now understand why everyone here is so tiny. All they eat is rice and they do aerobics every night. About five hundred people turn out for this class. I’m not exaggerating. It’s actually a really good class. We decided to partake a few times this week and got a good workout out of it. It’s good it’s at night- if I tried to work out in the middle of the day here, I would either die of heat exhaustion or drown in a puddle of my own sweat. I know I’m so incredibly attractive here. And to sum up our apartment: "It’s not much, but it's got a great view." Points if you know the movie. The wrap around balcony and being on the sixteenth floor gives us a gorgeous view of Bangkok, especially at night. Bangkok is a weird city in that the buildings are everywhere- it really doesn't have a skyline, it just exists all around us.

Other than that, we’ve just been getting to know the city and interviewing. I met Alex’s cousin Martin and some of his friends for dinner at a pub, and they gave us tips on finding jobs and apartments. It was nice to meet some people who have lived in Thailand for awhile, even if they’re a bit quirky (I mean that in the best possible way- your cousin is awesome Alex!). They would probably say the same about us haha.

I had two interviews this week. Kristina and I interviewed together at Wall Street Institute, which is a really upscale school that is basically a tutoring center. It seems like a good job, but we aren’t sure how many openings they’re going to have. Let me stop for a second here and say we picked the worst time to find jobs. The Thai school year ends in March, so the odds of us finding jobs before April are slim to none. Although the odds of us finding jobs in April are about a hundred percent since there’s such a huge turnover rate everywhere. So if we can hold out till then, we’ll have a lot more to choose from. Anyway. The other job I interviewed for was Thewpaingarm (I can’t pronounce it so good luck) School English Program. It was one of the nicest schools I’ve seen so far, and both an elementary and secondary school which is a plus. It seems like a really good place to work. Besides the fact that I would be teaching third graders English, Math, Science, Social Studies, Health, Computers, and Art. I feel like I have to know more about those subjects than third graders, right? This is where watching episodes of Are you smarter than a fifth grader? really comes in handy. There are a lot of people interviewing for the job anyway so my chances probably aren’t that great, but it was good interviewing practice.

I’ve applied to about six other jobs and am waiting to hear back from some of them so we’ll see. I have one where I’m in the process of filling out the 12 page application and trying to decide if it’s worth it to finish. They’ve already asked me for my height, weight, religion, and how good of health I’m in. I’m not entirely comfortable with the degree to which they’re interviewing me about my life. Though most jobs aren’t like that. And most jobs don’t start till April, so the interview process is just now beginning at some schools.

In the meantime, there’s always summer camps. Dear God. There are a ton of them posted at job websites and I’m both excited and scared by the prospect of teaching at a summer camp in Thailand. I know what summer camps are like in the States. What would they be like in the peak of hot season in the middle of nowhere in Thailand? Who knows? If I disappear and don’t come back, it’s probably because I worked for a summer camp and fell into a boiling swamp or a pit of quicksand.

Anyway that’s the scoop on my life. Looking forward to the weekend and actually going out in Thailand now that we have an apartment secured and don’t have to scurry all over the place in the boiling heat looking for somewhere to live. I hope everyone back home is doing well!! I’m sorry about all of the snow but at the same time I’m a little jealous I’m missing it. I miss all of you too!

Love from Bangkok,

Monica

P.S. If you’re planning to send something to the address listed in the top right of my blog, do it soon because it’ll probably take a week or two to get here and we might be moving again at the end of the month. And I will love you forever :)