There can be no better introduction to Thailand than staying in a nice, westernized hotel along the beach in beautiful Phuket. I have all my comforts from home still, complete with free and fast internet, western toilets, and warm showers. The skype reception has been great. My next tech experience will be a Thai cell phone, which I'll have to buy when I get back to my school. They're fairly cheap. Surprisingly, there is a pretty good presence of 3G networks in Thailand...
I see beach dogs everywhere and that just makes me miss Ozzy...Interestingly, the most popular vehicles on the island so far seems to be Suzuki Samurai's. Makes me feel right at home!
Oh, and I met the perfect, quintessential beach hippy. He grew up in Hawaii and retired in Thailand. He's been here for 20 years running a Vegetarian Restaurant and brews Kombucha to sell as well. I spoke with him a few times, and stopped by a third time but his staff told me: "he's gone to watch the sunset and will be back later." 15 minutes later he pulled up on his bicycle. Funny stuff!
I'm on a strict bottled water diet and fruit smoothies along the beach. The food here is cheap and delicious. For dinner I alternate between curry one night and pat thai the next. The ocean water is warm and wonderful. There aren't too many creepy critters in the main town areas. Plenty of mosquitoes, sicadas- they make a terrible noise when you try to sleep- and lots of stray dogs and cats wandering to and fro.
The group of soon-to-be teachers training with me are all wonderful and we are a diverse crowd; majority from the states but some from England, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Austria, and New Zealand. Our group did some great snorkeling at one of the other islands for one of our weekend breaks and saw amazing fishies. The next weekend break was spent on Kho Phi Phi, another famous nearby island which was the location for the filming of Leo Dicaprio’s film, The Beach. This island was incredibly beautiful! My tan gets better every day!
Training has been pretty intense so far. We are in class from 9-5 Monday through Friday learning how to teach, then have weekends to relax. Developing lesson plans has really given me an even greater-than-already-existed respect for my teacher mother. What effort and preparation must go into even just one day of teaching!!!
The Thai's have a song out here that translates to: "You can use the sky as your paper and the ocean for your ink, but still you cannot write all the nice things your parents have done for you." So true, this song. I am so appreciative of all the nice things our parents have done :-)
The last week of our training is spent live in classrooms not too far away from our hotels. The willing students do not know that we are actually still in training; they assume we are and have always been teachers. There is nothing to protect us from their stares as they wait for us to impart learning unto them. We survive as a group and suffer no casualties. Though we only have to teach for 30 minutes each, we all return to the back of the room where we observe the others, and each one of us returns dripping in sweat from the heat of open air classrooms and nervousness being in front of the high schoolers. The practice has its intended effect, I think, because we all have now experienced a Thai classroom, have learned a lot, and will be ready for the months ahead.
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