Hello, สวัสดี (Sa wa dii), Hola

Friday after school Earn and Ajan Sumet drove Michelle and I to Nakhon Phanom to meet up with the rest of the WorldTeach Volunteers for our insane trip to Surin to go to the Elephant Round Up. They first took us to dinner at the restaurant that was built by the man who owns it and is legit a maze of bamboo high off the ground on the banks of the Mekong River. There are all these little raised rooms of the main path that either have regular table and chairs or the short tables where you sit on the floor. We sat at a regular table. Our dinner was phenomenal as always and I even learned to cook one of the dishes on Monday during cooking class. We then met up with the rest of the bunch and explored the festival that happen to be going on in town and watched a little bit of professional Ta-kaw, which is a sport played in Thailand that is a mix between volleyball and soccer. It is played with 3 people on each team on either side of a volleyball net. The ball they use is small and woven, either from wood or plastic. The team kick the ball over the net and can only keep the ball on their side a certain about of kicks. The high kicks and backwards jumping kicks that happen during this game are ISANE. Our vans then left for Surin around midnight. We arrived in Surin around 6am and freshened up to head over to the Elephant Round Up, which started at 8:30. It initially seemed very odd that a show be from 8:30-11:30 am but then I remembered it is actually fairly cool and daylight hours at this time, so then I thought it was very genius. Hahaha The elephants did all kinds of crazy tricks and had mock battles with epic music playing representing the history of Surin. It almost felt as if we were on the set of an elephant version of 300. They even played a game of soccer … or rather football. It was quite amusing! There was a coupon attached to our tickets and the Thai woman we were with, Daew (who is one of the volunteer’s host mom and is the craziest person EVER) insisted that we use them so I got a Tshirt that has 3 pink elephants sitting on a heart shaped green earth with little pink and green hearts all around it and it says, “Elephants love the earth. Please love our earth. Surin Elephants Round Up 2010 Thailand” … it’s also a white v-neck. What whaaaaat! Basically all the souvenir shirts they sell in Thailand are v-necks which is AMAZINGGG. So then for the rest of the day we explored Surin, took a little nap, went to the night market and hit the nightlife. When we were at the night market we ran into a bunch of other volunteers with a different program. They then ended up at the same bar we were at so it was really nice to mingle with a bunch of other Americans doing the same thing as us. Our program is so much more legit though since they all only work at 3 schools, have dinner together every night and are here for only 5 months. There of course was a guy in the group from Philly so initially I got really excited and was like oh where are you from and he goes, “Center City” and my response was clearly, “ohhhh like you’re actually FROM philly … I’m not. Hahaha” He found that quite amusing and refreshing that I actually admitted to being from the burbs. So then we got on the convo of where we went to school and when I said University of Hartford his reply was, “oh do you know Joe Zeglinski?” … all I could do was laugh. This is a disgustingly small world we live in. The rest of the night we had an awesome dance party on the porch of this bar to the American music they played for us … what a blast. The next morning we left at 6am, which was painful but do-able … until we were about an hour from Nakhon Phanom and our van broke down. Legit. It started to get really stuffy in the back where I was sitting and so we asked for the air conditioning to be turned back on and it was for a little but then it just suddenly turned off … and then we noticed that a lot of people were passing us … and then we saw smoke … and then we smelled oil … and then we realized that we were only in first gear and the clutch was broken … awesome. So we convinced them to pull over and then Daew goes, “ok get out to push the van to the side of the road.” So we did. And then we sat on the side of the road, exhausted and hot, waiting for the other van to come back for us, a bus to drive by for us to flag down, or the driver’s sister to come pick us up. The sister got there first in a pickup truck, so half of us jumped in the back, the rest of us in the cab and we were off to Nakhon Phanom!

Once we were back in the city of Nakhon Phanom Michelle and I got on our Sawng-Tao and headed back to Nong Hee. At 6pm Earm and Ajan Sumet picked us up for Loy Kratong, which is a festival where Buddhists make a “kratong” (which is a float made out of banana leaves with a candle sticking out of it), light the candle on it, and set it afloat in a river or pond for forgiveness and pardon. You also pray for health and happiness after you have asked for forgiveness. You can also light a ‘kohm’ which is a tissue paper lantern with thin wire in a circle at the bottom and in the middle a small circle that gets lit on fire; when the hot air fills the ‘kohm’ it floats up into the sky. Seeing about a hundred of both the lit kratongs in the water and kohms in the sky when it is literally pitch black around you is just breathtaking. We first went to the celebration in NongHee, which was adorable and I saw students at it and then we drove to That Phanom which is about 20km away to go to dinner and see a bigger Loy Kratong festival where there were HUGE and ornate Kratongs, made by the villages in the area. To say the least I was exhausted and even though I very much enjoy the festivals I was ready to go home and sleep so I could begin another week of teaching.

Monday brought two great victories in my life: realizing the wireless internet works extremely fast on my laptop in my NongHee classroom and getting NongHee to split the 3^rd grade class so I only have 20 at a time once a week. A WOO WOO!!! And to make things even better this is the second week in a row I have not had to teach p. 1 and 2 due to random activities. And tomorrow I don’t have to teach at PhonTan because they are going to a competition in Nakhon Phanom so then NongHee invited me to go with them to see the English spelling part of the competition … this should be interesting. Hahahaha

I <3>