3 Months in Thailand -- and Counting!

Well folks, as of today, I have officially been in Thailand for 3 months.  That's 12 weeks.  90 days.  2,160 hours.  And here I am -- still kickin' -- to tell the stories.

As promised in my last blog post, I've got some more videos and pics from the school where I work, Samchaiwitaedsuksa.

Here's a video of just one of my Grade 1 classes (all age 6) holding up their new English books.  Per our program, every student gets their own book to study with.  They love the classes and are learning very quickly.  Because we have two Teacher Tylers at the school, I am called "Teacher Tyler Song" which means Teacher Tyler #2.

This is one of my Grade 2 classes holding up their new books.

This is another one of my Grade 2 classes walking into my classroom.  You can hear me doing the Star Wars theme song.

This is one of my Grade 3 classes.  I was taking a random video before class and some of them caught on.  They loooove the camera :)

These are some of the high-schoolers.  Tyler 1 teaches them but I'll pop in sometimes during break and say hi. This particular class are all very good students.

I'll usually play a few games with every class.  With the Grade 1 kids, I have this game where they have to respond to a command.  It's boys against girls.  A boy and a girl come up, then I say a command and the first one to respond correctly gets a point.  The first gender to 10 wins!  They absolutely love it every time.  Here's a video of the final match.

Two weeks ago they had "Teacher Respect Day".  This is basically where the kids spend 3 hours wai'ing and showing respect to the heads of the school.  All the kids get together in the auditorium and the each class systematically gets on stage and pays their respects.  As you can see, it's just a sea of black haired kids.

Some of the kids on stage.

Because my 3 months was coming up, I needed to renew my visa.  I had to go to Cambodia to do this.  I went with about 15 other people who all needed new visas.  We were at the Cambodia/Thailand border for two nights, most of which was spent hanging out in or around the hotel while the visa run staff took care of the paperwork for us.

I befriended a cool group of Filipinos that came along.  They invited me to eat with them at a Filipino restaurant that also had karaoke.  It was a blast.  This is us.

And of course, I just had to break out the Frank Sinatra.  Oh, I sang to my hearts content and they frickin' loved it.  This is me in the moment whilst singing "My Way".  Franky would be proud.

That's it for now.  It has been a great experience being here.  The people, the culture, the food, the language, the stories.  You don't get this anywhere else, my friends.

Until my next blog post!

The Halls of Samchai School

In the halls and classrooms of the vibrant school of Samchaiwitaedsuska lie books, pencils, whiteboards and... insanely hyper Thai children. 

The Samchai school is a private school located in the Samut Sakhon province of Thailand.  It is near the ocean and is about a 45 minute to an hour drive out of Bangkok.  It teaches from kindergarten all the way through high school.  The school has approximately 1,000 students.  And as of mid-May this year, they have a smoking English program!

Consisting of two Americans (both coincidentally named Tyler) and a dynamic language program, this school is rockin and rollin' with a fantastic amount of A to Zs, not to mention every letter in between.

The Learning Space program, the one's I work for, were approached by Samchai in desperation to put in a successful English program.  Every school in Thailand is required by the government to teach 3 languages: Thai, English and Chinese.  Each school will have a corp of Thai teachers, Chinese teachers and English teachers.  Samchai was severely lacking good English teachers and a good curriculum to teach.  One indication of which can be seen in this picture -- a banner hanging in the school:

It reads, "Academic Strength Have Morality Leading in Language to Widen Your World."  They've got some solid words in there, but not necessarily the best grammatical syntax.

So after a few months, and the advent of a fresh new school year, we rolled in there with our program to pave the way to a bright, English-speaking future!

Here are some shots of the school.

The admin building.

The hallway of the second floor, where I teach.

The school has everything it needs.  There's a full-size soccer field, an outside basketball court, a kid swimming pool, an Olympic-size swimming pool, auditorium, cafeteria, movie theater room, music room, computer room and plenty more.

The kid pool.

The Olympic-size pool, which I swim in from time-to-time.  I'm starting to perfect my butterfly and breast stroke!

And they are building some kind new structure on the property.  I'm not quite sure yet what it's going to be. 

The staff are very friendly and the kids are freakishly friendly.  I am constantly mobbed before, after and between every class by kids of every age.  Yesterday I literally had 5 kids grabbing onto me pulling me in 5 different directions.  One of them likes to cling onto my leg as I walk.

Here are some of my students.  They are soooo cute!

I always poke this little guy in the belly when I see him. 

These are my grade 1 kids, fresh out of kindergarten.  They've got their English books and they're all ready for action!

Except this little guy.  He was a little sleepy before class...

Before my grade 4 class the other day, I told them to lick their elbows, which as everyone knows is impossible -- but not these guys. They went for it -- haha!

These are some of the kids during our afternoon break.

I still have so much more to say and many more photos and videos.  I think I'll put them in my next post.

Signing off for now.  Thanks for reading!

Life's a Beach: Part 2

Completely beat and burned -- but happy.  That's how I felt after a full day on Hua Hin beach.  Part 1 covered our arrival to Hua Hin and the following day.  Now it's on to a little beach night life.  

Before it hit nighttime, we enjoyed a nice dinner at this little outside restaurant on a cliff of the beach.  You looked out at the ocean while you ate.  The three of us all got fruit smoothies, which were absolutely amazing. 

Just before sitting down, we passed a woman with an amazingly cute little puppy.  It must have only been 6 weeks old.  It was just so small.  I don't even know what kind of dog, but I couldn't resist taking a video.  

The night was highly entertaining.  There are bars, cafes, massage parlors and restaurants one right after the other.  They go on endlessly.  They all had 3 or more Thai people (usually women) outside smiling and saying "Welcome" as you walk by.  The humor we found in this was the fact that we hadn't even entered their establishment, so "Welcome" was really not the right word.  But that is what every single one of them -- one for one -- would say as we walked by.  We just smiled and nodded.

Amanda told us there was a foot spa around where little fish eat the dead skin off your feet.  I had been hearing about this for weeks so we were determined to find the spot.  And of course we did. 

These are the little buggers.  The lighting in this particular picture makes it look like something out of the movie Aliens. 

Tyler Capp and I decided to give it a go.  Amanda had done it before in Cambodia.  You stick both feet in and they swarm you, nibbling away like you were dinner.  At first, its an intense tickling sensation.  You look down and there are fish sucking away at your feet.  It takes some getting use to.  We did it for 15 minutes.  

This video pretty clearly demonstrates what we were going through the first few minutes -- haha!

Again, highly entertaining.  But that's just the tip of the iceberg.  Tyler had been talking about me and Amanda eating our first bug.  He had done it before so he was insisting we do it that night.  And lo, we happened to stumble upon a delectable fried bug cart.  They had crickets, water locusts and a few different others.  

Yummy.  Bug photos courtesy of Tyler Capp. 

As you can see, some of them were HUGE, so we left it at crickets for our first go.  It was a momentous occasion so we of course had to capture it frame by frame.  The three of us have seen this video over and over again and laugh every time.  The contrast between our faces is priceless. 

At the end there I say "Aloy mak mak" which means "Very good taste."  

The taste wasn't actually that bad.  Amanda's reaction is more towards the fact that she has just ingested a once-living, creepy, crawly insect.  An hour or so later, while playing pool in a bar, we had the opportunity to eat another small bug.  It was some form of larvae.  And it wasn't half bad , though I don't think I'll be making them a regular snack.

We polished the night off with more pool -- a lot more actually.  I was totally on that night.  I must have played 10 or 15 games.  When the waters flowin', don't bring the beavers.  That's what I say. 

We ate a nice breakfast near the water the following morning.  It was another pretty day so we couldn't resist taking more photos.  I'll leave you with a few of them...

Thanks for reading!  See ya next week!