An English Teacher in Thailand

Being in Thailand and teaching is a very different experience from visiting as a foreigner. So I thought I would write this post to give you a better idea of what it’s really like to live here and get to know Thai students and other Thai teachers. All the stories below are from either myself or other teachers out here that I have met through my TEFL course or at work. Some are funny, some maybe not, but hopefully it will give you more of an insight in to the Thai life.

-         Teacher asks P5 students to name as many items of clothing as possible, getting towards the end and one shouts out G-String.

-         Thai Teacher says to English Teacher- “teacher has small Nom Nom” (nom nom in Thai is boobs) They don't hold back.

-         Teacher asks a Secondary school student to carry all the work books for him, it isn’t until he’s half way down the stairs that he realises he has a club foot and is struggling.

-         Practicing directions by using a game similar to pin the tail on the donkey. One boy and one girl volunteer blindfolded. The other students are directing in English and the teacher realises after a while they are not directing them to the board but in to each other. Then just lets it happen.

-         All Thai kids get called by a nick name chosen by their parents rather than their full long Thai name. However some of them are very random. In my classes I have an Elle, Sarah, Mark and Eve alongside a Pooh, Petch, Brown, Porn, Pun-pun, Poogun and Game.

-         English Teacher says to another English Teacher “Oh I like your skirt” Reply – “I’m not wearing it again I got called sexy today.” “Oh I see.” Being called Sexy Teacher is not a complement it’s a way of Thais saying it is not appropriate for school.

-         English Teacher walks out of the staff room on third floor and 3 students on a push bike ride past, at least they had helmets on!

-          Kindergarten kids playing a game where they chant the vocab word and take a step forward until the teacher changes the flashcard and they all run away as the teacher chases them. Two kids collide and one ends up with a bleeding nose. Home room teacher cleans the boy up and he’s back playing in ten mins, no accident book for the teacher to fill out, all will be fine or as the Thai's say Mai Pen Rai.

-        English Teacher uses a puppet to introduce vocab but scares a kindergarten kid so much she pees on the floor.

-         While doing swimming lesson little nursery boy goes to the bathroom, English teacher goes to find him, He’s done a big shit. Teacher bum guns (this is the water gun next to every toilet that you can use to clean yourself) him down and shoves him back in the pool.

-          Telling a child to “say it in English” and they reply with “say it in English”

-          A student tells an teacher to F**k off, he is taken to the principle who smacks him and tells him off. Then next day the student comes in with his parents, his parents are not happy as the principle smacked him. The principle tells the parents what happened and then the father smacks the kid.

To be continued…..

A Day with the Elephants and so much more!

After a delightful trip to Bali, Sophie and I headed much further north in the world to Chiang Mai in the north of Thailand for the build up to New Year. There we met some of my friends from the TEFL course. Because we got a bus ten hours overnight we had a quick nap in the hostel before heading off for the day exploring the city. The hostel we stayed in was amazing, Deejai Backpackers, it had such a lovely, friendly laid back feel to it. There was also an adorable outdoor area, with a campfire, tree house, bar and pool. It was so great I've decided to stay there again when I visit for Songkran in April.

Tom, Jess, Hanisha, Sophie and I hired bikes for the afternoon to adventure around the city. The majority of us were confident riding around on the Thai roads with cars and mopeds wizzing past us. But if you talk to others in the party they may disagree that it was a lovely peaceful afternoon riding around. We passed and stopped off at different beautiful temples and markets before finding a bar to recover in and have a cider (which was delightful as cider is hard to find out here). In the evening we found a cute restaurant for dinner and then had a few drinks round the camp fire.

The next day was Jess' birthday and what a day it was. We wanted to do something very special for her day so we organised a day at the Elephant Nature Park. We all love elephants but not nearly as much as Jess so it was the perfect birthday present for her. Well I hope it was, I think her constant smile throughout the day showed us it was. Having said that we were all smiling the whole day. The elephants were adorable. I had very mixed views about elephant care before coming to Thailand and what was right and wrong and what hurt them and what didn't, but this place certainly told me more than enough about the right way they should be treated. Please check out their website and go visit if you can http://www.elephantnaturepark.org/

Throughout the day we got to feed them bananas and watermelon, walk around the park and explore their home. None of the elephants are tired up or ridden, they each have a Mahout that looks after them and with positive reinforcement keeps them in check, especially the young boy elephants who can be a little naughty. We learnt about there individual stories and where they had come from, some of which were so sad, but so lovely they had now been rescued. The day finished by giving them a wash in the river and splashing them with buckets of water.

That night after a trip to the night market, where I spent too much money on souvenirs, we put on our glad rags and headed out for Jess' birthday. We danced the night away at Zoe's in the Yellow. Zoe's is a cool cluster of bars and dance floors playing music from Thai reggae to main stream chart music, there was something for everyone!

After the night out and a little too much to drink the next day ended up being a very chilled lazy day, we wondered down the street, found a Thai massage by blind people and snoozed by the tree house. That evening we had the pleasure of being reunited with our Thai trainer Rungwit from Koh Samui who lives in Chiang Mai with his wife (Nadine who also works for TEFL Heaven so a lot of us knew her from emails) and their adorable son Ollie. Rungwit put on a lovely BBQ and we all chatted and caught up with the gossip within the TEFL family.

The next day was mine and Sophie's last day in Chiang Mai before our flight back to Bangkok. In the morning with Hanisha we ventured up the mountain to Doi Suthep a beautiful temple on the top and to "find the beauty". As per usual the Thai temple didn't let us down in how magnificent it was, Unfortunately the view from the top overlooking the city was unseen due to it being misty. Nevertheless the trip up the mountain was worth it.

Back in Bangkok, Sophie and I bought in the New Year from my balcony and watched as the city came alive with fireworks. We filled New Years Day with a whistle stop tour of the sites of Bangkok for Sophie to experience before her flight back to Jakarta.


With Love from Thailand xxx

A Bizzare Christmas in Bali

Bali – Christmas – 22-27^th

In Thailand Christmas is not widely celebrated as it is a Buddhist country, however unlike a lot of my teacher friends I managed to get a week or so off over Christmas. I decided to go away to the island of Bali in Indonesia and meet my friend from home Sophie who is also teaching in Jakarta.

We arrived on the island of paradise to pouring rain, and it did not stop raining for three days. This put a drastic stop to our plans of lying on the beach for the week. We spent the first few days just chilling and doing a bit of shopping and squeezing in a lovely relaxing Balinese massage.

Christmas Eve

It was still raining when we woke up on the eve of Christmas so we decided to embrace the weather and take a trip out for the day. We hired a driver who took us to various attractions on the way to Udon a town inland on the island. These attractions included a Hindu temple, some rice fields and a coffee plantation.

Each were beautiful in their own right, but my favourite stop was the coffee plantation. Our tour guide showed us how the coffee was produced at this particular plantation. An Indonesian cat called a Luwak eats the good coffee beans in their shells. They don’t digest them but poo them out, the beans are collected cleaned off and removed from the shells. These are then roasted and ground down in to what we know as coffee. We then sat on a beautiful terrace overlooking the rice fields on the edge of a mountain and tasted the “poo coffee” along with lots of other flavours such as ginger, vanilla and chocolate.

  

After tasting the surprisingly delicious “poo coffee” we ventured off to the small town of Udon to find some lunch and do a bit of market shopping. For lunch we had an Indonesian dish called Soto Ayam which is like a chicken noodle soup, it was very tasty. It was nice to try different food, as the area we were staying in was very tourist it was hard to find Asian food.  Another yummy Indonesian meal is Padang, you have a portion of rice and then lots of added extras like spicy veg and this delicious pork marinated in yummy spices I also tried catfish for the first time (bit bland I wouldn't recommend it)

That evening we put on our party dress and wondered off to a bar which had free drinks for travellers from 9-10 so we took full advantage of this, maybe a bit too much of advantages as we woke up on Christmas day with a slight hangover.

Christmas Day

Waking up to glorious sunshine (yes it had stopped raining) on Christmas day was very bizarre. It did not feel like Christmas at all in 28 degree heat and not being with family or heading off to church and then returning for turkey and champagne. But Sophie and I had each other to get us through. We opened a few presents (no stocking with an orange in the bottom this year) and then headed off to meet some of Sophie’s friends at a bar on the beach nearby. After a dip in the sea, a nap on the beach and some yummy food at the bar we headed back to our hostel (guesthouse) to skype the family after seeing the most beautiful sunset ever!

Boxing Day

This sun was still shining!!!!!! It was our last full day in Bali so we headed down towards the beach and found a glorious pool to sunbathe by. We read our books, napped and took a dip in the pool until our stomachs decided it was time to find some food. As it was our last day we treated ourselves to the Hard Rock Café it was very filling but delicious.

We then had an evening of entertainment. We headed south to a temple and cliff to watch a traditional Balinese play while the sun set in the background. The dance/play was interesting to say the least but the costumes and dancing was incredible it was mesmerising and bizarre to watch. The perfect end to the first part of our holiday.

With Love from Thailand xxx

Katie's Surprise!

On Thursday 5^th of December it was the Kings birthday meaning a national holiday. This meant on Wednesday we could celebrate! People from Speak EZ joined with a few added friends from my TEFL course went for dinner followed by a few (too many) drinks, making a fun random night ending back at our apartment (four of us that work together all live in the same apartment block) playing drinking games to the early hours. It was then decided in our hung over state the next day that we would go and surprise our friend Katie in Mukdahan for the weekend.

On Friday Jess, Tom and I got on a bus to travel overnight 10 hours north-east to the town of Mukdahan near the border with Laos. We arrived at about 6.30am which meant we got to spend the whole day being shown round the town. It was so nice to get out of Bangkok and see where Katie had settled and was making a very different yet very exciting new way of life. She is one of very few foreigners living there so we were stared at the whole weekend, attracting lots of attention. There are no taxis or motor bike taxis unlike the capital but everything was close enough to walk too. It was a lot cooler up north that I actually wanted to wear a jacket for the first time since being here. Katie has also had the opportunity to make Thai friends and see so much more of the culture here and the Thai way of living – there’s no McDonald’s in site!

Laos in the background

Katie showed us the huge murky river which is the border between Thailand and Laos, my first view of Laos which I will be sure to visit when I start travelling. After breakfast we wondered round a market before finding a quite lunch spot looking over the river. The afternoon was very chilled and we discovered a temple full of monkeys. However these monkeys were slightly different to the ones in Lopburi at the festival, they were little scarier and slightly aggressive. We had no food to give them so before being attacked made a quick exit!

 

 

That evening we went to a local bar for some drinks the Thai way – order a bottle of whisky and mixers and drink away. We were the only white people in the whole bar so created a lot of attention. We then created even more attention when we moved on to a Thai Club. This was a whole other experience. With lady boys to our right, Thai men saying how beautiful we were (Tom included!) to our right (because of our white skin) and a stage full of Thai girls only wearing their underwear at the front. A few songs were western, a few Thai (which we knew from hearing them out here) and a few we had never heard but still had a good dance. You know you’re the minority when you go to order drinks at the bar, they ask where your sat, you respond with “the Falangs over there” and they know exactly where to take the drinks. Falang is the word Thai use for foreigners.

We woke up the next day after sleeping in to go to one of the local hotels to use the pool and sunbathe before having to say goodbye to Katie and catch the overnight bus back to Bangkok. We arrived back at 6am in time to get to work to start the next week. Luckily Tuesday was another public holiday so we could catch up on sleep.

 With Love from Thailand xxx

Ayutthaya

Ayutthaya is a town about an hour north of Bangkok it used to be the old capital of Siam (This is what Thailand use to be called) from 1350 to 1767. 33 different Kings ruled during the 417 years it was the capital until 1767 when the Burmese Army invaded and looted the city. They destroyed the capital by burning down the temples and removing the heads of the Buddha statues. They stole many of the treasure’s which have never been found and the remaining are now in museums in Ayutthaya. Now what remains of the historical site is protected on UNESCO’s list of world heritage sites.

Jess had a friend visiting for the weekend, who also happens to be called Jess, so the two Jessica’s and I travelled to Ayutthaya on the Saturday. We checked in to a cute hostel, where we could hire bicycles for the day to explore. After a quick bite to eat for lunch we cycled around taking in the ancient ruins. They were very peaceful despite the number of fellow tourist mingling around.

After cycling between all the temples and nearly crashing in to the elephants wondering the streets with tourist riding on them we headed back to the hostel. That evening we went on a boat trip around the Island. Ayutthaya has been made in to an Island by a river splitting and going either side of the land. It was a night so all the temples along the riverside were beautifully lit up. With just the three of us in a little thin long-tail boat with our Thai driver, it was very tranquil motoring along the murky water, with our eyes peeled for crocodiles. We got dropped off at a quite night market, which was a must see in the guide book but ended up being very small and closed early, but we ate dinner and then headed back to chill at the hostel.

Another must in the guide book was the floating market so after a lazy morning we headed there for lunch. However it turned out to not be that traditional but more of a tourist attraction of how a Thai market would be perceived. Having said that it was still fun and full interesting stalls.

We had ticked off everything on our Ayutthaya list so it was time to head back to busy Bangkok, and get stuck in traffic for hours because of the political protests going on.

 With Love from Thailand xxx

Loi Krathong

After a busy weekend of lots of people visiting and an awesome night out on Soi 11 again, we escaped the hectic-ness of Bangkok by retreating to one of the local parks on Sunday evening.

Loi Krathong is a special festival held in Thailand on the evening of the full moon of the 12th month according to the Thai Lunar calendar which this year worked out to be the 17th of November.

Loi means to float and krathong refers to the lotus-shaped container which floats on the water. The "boat" is traditional made from a slice of the trunk of a banan tree and then banana leaves are elaborately folded over for decoration along with flowers, incense sticks and candles.

Thai’s celebrate Loi Krathong for various reasons, but for the most part it is to float away any anger and bad feeling you may have and start afresh. You can place a hair or fingernail on the Krathong which is seen as letting go of the dark side. Once the Krathong is then released on to the water you can watch it float away and it will bring you good luck for the year. The further it floats and the longer your candle stays alight the more good luck you will have. A small coin is sometimes included as an offering to the river spirits to pay respect to them as they will bring you all the luck. 

With love from Thailand xxx

Lopburi – Monkey festival

Last weekend was spent visiting Faye, Jenny and Liz in their placement town of Lopburi. It is a cute town just over 2 hours away from Bangkok, so we managed to get there after work on Friday evening with enough time to go to one of their local bars for a few drinks and meet some of their work colleagues and friends.

Saturday was packed full of adventure. The 9 of us (the visitors Jess, Leigha, Hanisha and Lindsey with the locals, Jenny, Faye, Liz and Ruth) took a pickup truck taxi for the day which firstly drove us to some beautiful sunflower fields. We spent a while here being typical girls taking hundreds of photos in different poses.

Next stop was a tranquil lake. We chilled here for the rest of day having a casual dip in the lake and waiting about 2 hours for our food to arrive. Standard Thai etiquette.

As dusk fell we headed back to Lopburi and stopped at a bat cave to watch them wake u and venture out for breakfast. Unfortunately even Jess’ amazing camera couldn’t catch the thousands of bats that flew out over our heads.

After grabbing some cheap street food (was so nice not to pay Bangkok prices the whole weekend!) and a little nap we headed out for a few drinks at a bar nearby. It was a lovely chilled evening chatting to new people that were also visiting Lopburi for the weekend either as travellers or fellow teachers. The night soon turned as the drinking games started along with dancing in the street.

We woke up with a trip to a local restaurant for a hangover breakfast to cure our needs before heading to the monkey festival. On a normal day in Lopburi monkeys roam the streets like dogs do in any other Thai town or city. They steal food, jump on cars, and climb up street lamps. Wherever you look you are bound to see a monkey cheekily staring back at you. But don’t get too close or taunt them as they can be vicious and attack. The monkey festival was slightly different as all the monkeys, hundreds of them, were gathered at the monkey temple (an old ruined temple were they live) to be fed. The people of Lopburi had bought a variety of food to the temple for the monkeys, from fruit and vegetables to ice and lollypops. Lots of tourists and locals showed up to give them food and take photos. The monkeys did not hold back they took food out of your hands and would jump on you if you let them. Jess and Lindsey were brave enough to let this happen. I was happy to just watch.

The monkeys were satisfied and so were we with an awesome weekend exploring a new town so it was time to head back to the city ready for the next week of teaching ahead of us.

With love from Thailand xxx