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!