It's Almost Been a Month. Wow.

The first month of this trip has flown by. We will have been here for 4 weeks on Tuesday...which isn't exactly a month, I get it, but still. So, updates.

I'm now pretty settled in at my school. I've been doing mostly solo teaching for the past week with my superior in the room observing, but next week she wont even be at the school. The classes will be all mine! I am really enjoying the teaching. My girls are wonderful, just a little chatty sometimes but nothing major. I teach 21 hours a week, but have to be at school Mon-Fri from 7:30 to 4:30...aka I've been thrust into adulthood. I get up every morning at 6:00!!!! Anyone who know anything about me knows that I like my sleep...so I go to bed by like 10:30 or so...I feel old. Meanwhile I gt up at 6, get ready and then begin my commute to work. I take a taxi from my apartment to the BTS (Skytrain, Basically the MARTA of Bangkok), take the BTS two stops and then...wait for it...I take the motor bike from the BTS to my school. Somehow I always knew that the bike would be part of my daily commute since I hated it so much early on. I'm beginning to be ok with it. I will never love it because its so freaking scary but I can be ok with it.

Funny Story: Remember how in the last blog I talked about the rain? Ok, so. It rains pretty consistently every afternoon, sometimes early afternoon and other times right about the time I'm beginning my trek home (which is the exact reverse of the sequence mentioned above). So last week I'm getting ready to leave work, as always I look at the window of the teachers' office to see what the weather is doing as I'm packing up and the weather looks pretty ok, not great but ok. As I'm walking out it starts to drizzle a little bit. (Teacher Wesley did not have an umbrella with him) So I pick up the pace a little and then the bottom falls out. Damn. So I find the nearest sheltered bench and sit down to wait it out. Mai Pen Rai right? I mean realistically how long coud it really rain that hard? (raining house pets) Well as it turns out it could rain that hard for quite a while, because I sat there for an HOUR before deciding to make a go of it. So I start the quarter mile or so walk to where we catch the bikes. In that very short walk I managed to douse every fiber of my being. Also, the drainage on that street is not what it should be so it turns into a small pond with the curbs acting like banks. And I think we all know what happens when cars go rolling through 5 or 6 inches of water...ok so I'm walking next to that. Finally I have to ride the bike. Holy hell, y'all. Mai Pen Rai nothing at this point. I was swearing up a storm. I flag a bike and am hoping to make this the quickest bike rid of my life...but it seemed like the longest. BECAUSE. When you're on a moving vehicle in the rain one would think you're moving so fast that you could dodge all the rain right? wrong. It is exactly the opposite. Every drop of rain hit me as we were going. AND the motorbike drivers like to run through all the puddles bc its fun for them. So when I got to the BTS I was soaked and not happy about it.
I hate rain.

Last week was fairly uneventful besides the rain, and the purchase of an umbrella. Except on Friday. Wattana (my school) gets out at 2:20 on fridays. I don't know why nor do I care bc it means I get to leave early and miss the rain. Except last friday. The company I work for called me and said that another teacher had called in sick and that they needed me to fill in for a 2 hr kinder lesson after I got off work at 2:20. Pissed. I was so excited to go home and be lazy while waiting for everyone else to get home. So I, of course, agree to teach and they tell me they'll send a bike for me. Awesome. The bike they sent is the guy who also works for the company and his job in part is to tote english teachers all around the city. He is notorious for driving very fast because the teachers are usually on a very tight schedule, as I was on Friday. I had 30 mins to get to a place that would take 30 mins with no traffic. (recall here that it is Friday. Rush hour.) So we're going super fast, (perk: he had a helmet for me to wear that fit suprisingly enough) and the only way to make it somewhere depsite the traffic is to pretent like there is no traffic darting between anything in your way, cars, busses, other bikes etc. It was terrible. In several place I had to move my arm or turn my body to keep from hitting rear view mirrors, and then my teacher bag smashed into the back of a bus. It has a small battle scar but nothing terrbile. So that was Friday.

That night we met up with a few of the students here from Baylor University for drinks on Khao San road. For a more detailed explaination of this google it. They're a really fun group, we're going to hang out with them a lot more.

So now you're caught up on everything Thailand. Maybe I'll have pictures from my school next post.

Mai Pen Rai!

Motorbikes

I don't have much time to post tonight, hopefully I will tomorrow. In the meantime though, here is a video by Al Jazeera about the motorbike taxis that I talked about before. Please note that motorbikes are now a part of my everyday commute to work. Yes, thats right, I take one every day...twice a day.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia-pacific/2010/08/20108475044105208.html