Starting off in Thailand

Being here is incredible. After the initial culture shock, I have settled in. Our house is beautiful and we are spoiled. The "mom" and "dad" own a clinic on the main level. Dad is a doctor, a pediatrician I believe and mom is a dermatologist.. You can't go more than a couple hours with having something that it won't get taken care of. They don't live here. We basically have the house to ourselves except an occasional member of the family that needs a place to stay. The second floor of our house is the kitchen and living room and a couple spare rooms for their family plus a bathroom. We have someone, we call "grandma" that cooks dinner for us every night and on the weekends lunch as well. Thai food is a lot better than I thought it was going to be, of course they voided the spicy dishes for the most part so far. If the dish is somewhat spicy, the other girls warn me before, so I typically have stayed far away from it... so far! Thai dishes go a little bit like this, rich, rice, rice, deep fried, rice, vegetables, rice, meat, rice, vegetables, sometimes fruit, and rice. They bought a couple months worth of rice in advance, they say it will last two months maybe. So much rice!! The third floor of our house is where we sleep, yes third floor. Lots of stairs all day long. There are five six rooms and one bathroom on this floor. One is locked all the time, I just saw it open today and found out it is another bedroom, one is their prayer room, shut the majority of the time. Mine and Gabby's room. Sarah's room, the head teacher, and Hannah and Arielles room. And one bathroom. On the fourth floor there are two different rooms, one is where the washer is, and the other is where you hang the clothes that you just washed and an entrance onto the roof where the garden is/was. Mom used to have a really pretty garden but since they moved, she has a whole yard that she uses as her garden. This house, we call the garden home.. Ironic? The garden home is a ten minute bike ride to another part of time. Beautiful house in the middle of, not so nice homes. They have a small, cold, pool, a beautiful yard, and many little dogs! Every once in a while we go swim, lay out, or just visit at the garden home. We ride our bikes everywhere, and I am starting to get to know my way around this town!

Currently I am the arts and crafts teacher

School was hard to start off... As most everything new is. The school is across the intersection from us so we just stroll over before school starts. The kids are darling, and young. We have kids anywhere from 1-5.. so when I say young, I mean young. It sometimes means that teaching english either gets really difficult or you have to get really creative. Most of the little ones can't even speak Thai yet, so english huh? We start at 8:30 with opening. Singing songs and talking about the weather and the days of the week is mostly what it consumes of. Then at 8:45 we go into our rotations. First rotation is 1/2 hour with our home room kids. I have the three youngest so we just play and I am supposed to be talking the whole time. Thats a whole lot of talking. Then second rotation and I get the third oldest group. The kids have snack time after this which they receive a glass of milk for, and then we sing songs till everyone is done drinking their milk. Next two rotations, then closing. After that we take the kids eat lunch and we go up into the office. Its about 11:30 by this time and we sit talk, cover some business, get ready for lunch at noon. We get freshly cooked Thai lunch every day at the school, Its usually really good but occasionally we get something like congealed blood, or some things that I am far too afraid to ask what they are. The rest of the day is ours to do whatever we want. This is where laying out comes into play, or shopping, watching movies, riding our bikes, aerobics at 5:30 every day if we are interested. Dinner is at six then we have the rest of the night to do as we wish as well. It leads to a lot of free time if you don't prioritize your time..

A typical dinner

The sign at the train staion. The train we talk to church (40 minutes away), Chang mai (11 hours away), Bangkok(4 1/2 hours way, and anywhere in between.

Flooding happens... and they make do.

Great view of..  my lovely pink bike and the scooter shop across the street. They love to play music that we can hear in the house as clear as if we were in the shop itself. My guess is that they play it whenever they get a sale.