Takes the Cake

This weekend we mostly had plans for no plans: just relaxing.

Saturday we visited a new street stand for breakfast and tried out their fruit salad: cut-up apple, dragon fruit, papaya, dried banana, carrots, and peanuts drizzled with spicy lime sauce (see pic). Deeeelish.
The women working at the stand couldn't stop smiling at us, and once we sat down to eat they were over-accomodating, even pulling up extra chairs to set our bags on, which we had just thrown on the floor beneath the table. Every day I wish more and more that I had some kind of proficiency in Thai - I would love to be able to communicate with people whose hospitality and kindness I've so come to appreciate. I picked up a few Thai language books at school, and during my free periods I try to browse...I even tried out writing "hello" (sawadee kah) and "my name is Caitlin" (chuu Caitlin kah) in Thai characters last week (and it took a good 15 minutes to copy just those phrases). I'm setting a goal to learn something - anything - new every week.

After breakfast Saturday the four of us ventured out to City Park Hotel, just on the outskirts of town and a considerable bike ride away. It was nice to escape the "ajaan farang" stares in the city for a day. The hotel was blissfully deserted, and there appeared to be very little risk of running into one of our students while wearing a bikini. So, we spent the hot afternoon submerged in cool pool water, laying out on the hotel's partially-disintegrated wooden deck chairs, and getting some solid reading time in. I've just started book #2 of the summer (Posession by A.S. Byatt - borrowed from the extensive library collection of Aj. Emily)... The quiet life of Nan has some definite perks.

Saturday night we had plans to meet up again with our friends from Tha Wang Pha, and in the meantime we essentially had two dinners. Because really, our life here revolves around eating. The first meal (which was intended as a snack, but who are we kidding?) came from the market: I tried out a fresh veggie salad from the salad lady, a very mysterious but delicious hot milk egg treat from the man next to the waffle man, and a waffle from the waffle man for dessert. I also sampled a cup of sweet yellow corn from the corn lady, who is the prettiest lady at the market and speaks very good English. (These are pretty much the terms we describe our food lives in: "Where'd you get that? The fish man. Where should we eat tonight? Definitely not the pink noodle lady"). We ran into Prakop outside the 7/11, and she made sure we had made plans to watch the USA game that night.

Of course, we did: although the game didn't start until 1:30am our time, we ventured over to the Nan Steakhouse around 10pm for Dinner Part II and to stay up with Ingemar and our visiting friends to watch the match (the Steakhouse is the only place we know of with a TV that will stay open past 11). We watched the first game, then some Wimbledon, then finally the USA-Ghana game, then ran sprints and did jumping jacks to stay awake, then watched the overtime periods, then our miserable loss.... 6 hours later we were truly exhausted, slightly regretting our decision to stay up so late, and could barely keep our eyes open for our 4am bike ride back home. But trying a bite of the ostrich steak made it all well worth it. So. Good.

This morning at work I spent three hours carefully cutting out and laminating sets of vocab word flashcards ("Classroom Objects") for a game that wasn't nearly as successful as I'd hoped and that lasted all of 10 minutes. Such is the life of a teacher I guess. My great success of the day was learning how to correctly pronounce Khunsuek's name in my 6/1 class. I've been saying it wrong for weeks, and knowing that I was messing up because the whole class erupts with laughter every time I call on him - but in typical Thai fashion, no one ever corrected me. So finally I stopped everything during the lesson today and asked him to yell his name at me. Got it now. I'm also getting a sense for who the "teacher's pets" are in 6/1. A prime candidate is Cake. In the last 5 minutes of class today I was asking students if they'd come up with group names yet for the singing competition, and a lot of background chatter started up. Cake, who sits in the front row and was also the only student to volunteer to sing a solo in our competition, looked at me and shouted exasperatedly: "Teacher Caitlin, I'm SORRY!" She then turned to the class and yelled, "QUIIIEEET!!!" Thanks, Cake. During 2nd period, Emily was giving speaking assessments to her first graders, and as they waited to be called out one-by-one into the hallway they were in the English office watching a movie while I worked at my desk. I was helping keep an eye on them, and one in particular - Tony - to "tell Aj. Emily if he gets his behavior sticker today." All I can say is, Tony definitely did NOT earn any kind of sticker today. Who knew a 6-year-old could be so defiant and mean? Yeesh.

I'll keep you posted on our Independence Day in Nan plans for the coming weekend. Let's just say we've been planning for weeks and intend to go all out for our party of 4: the day may or may not involve a kiddie pool, temporary American flag tattoos, jean cuttoff shorts, and a game of makeshift Bagg-O. We'll see what a little resourcefulness and a trip to Tesco Lotus can produce.

Also if you're sick of reading blog posts and want some snail mail from Thailand, leave me a comment or email me your address! I'm making a trip to the post office this week.