Phrathat Reuang Rong (Temple near Sisaket)

A few weeks ago, Brad and I bought ourselves bicycles. We decided we did not want to get a scooter or motorcycle because traffic around here isn't anything you would want to drive in. The cars and motorcycles do whatever they want, and traffic lights are a mere suggestion. Crossing the street on foot is even a challenge, so we definitely did not want to drive in it. But walking takes too long, so for exploring purposes, we bought bicycles.

Our first adventure on our bicycles was to a temple called Phrathat Reuang Rong. We rode 6 miles out of town, and then in the middle of nowhere there was this beautiful temple. 

When we arrived, we took our time looking around. There was a museum component to the temple, in which there were ancient artifacts (and by that I mean lots and lots of pots) in display cases. There were words describing the artifacts, but I still cannot read a single word of Thai, so I simply looked and took pictures. But in case you are wondering, I am working hard at learning to speak Thai for day to day use. I can say hello, goodbye, thank you, and a few other polite words. I have also mastered ordering food on the street, but I'll save that for another blog post.

Anyways, here's a few pictures I took at the temple. 

As you can see, there is a grand set of stairs. Here I got photo bombed by one of the wild dogs.

In this picture you can see some monks, in the orange robes, walking around. I'm not exactly sure if I can take pictures of monks or not, so I snuck this picture. There are certain rules with monks like women are not allowed to touch them. For example, people give them money, and men hand it to them, but women have to put it in their pot so there is no hand to hand contact. 

There were also more statues of Buddha than I've ever seen in my life. Big ones and small ones. They were everywhere. It also was very common to come across families or individuals bowing and praying to Buddha.

Here is a statue of bulls pulling a wagon. I have no idea what it represents or why it was part of the temple. Sorry, not being able to read Thai makes things difficult. 

Finally, we climbed up five flights of stairs to the top of the temple. This is part of the view we saw. Also, if you're paying attention, you might recognize that those are actually the stairs from the first picture over there. 

I'll finish with the selfie we took at the top of the temple. There's a million more pictures, but I have to go teach my kindergarteners, so that's all for now.

Home Sweet Home

Accommodations in Thailand are a little different than at home. Depending on where you live, you might not have a toilet, but instead a squatty potty. You might not have any hot water or anything that resembles our showers, and you for sure will not have a kitchen.

Thankfully, we have it good in Thailand. We have a toilet, hot water, a box thing that resembles a shower, air conditioning, and a mini fridge. Below are a few pictures of our place that we decided to pay a little extra money for, so we could have the things that we're used to. Also by pay a little extra, I mean we pay 120 U.S. dollars a month for this place with utilities and wifi included.

You can see that when you walk through the door you're right in the part of the room that we have as the bedroom. Now the bed is not that comfortable, and sometimes the occasional lizard runs behind the bed. But it's okay because the lizard never tries to cuddle us, so we just leave them alone. 

Across from the bed we have our desk and then at the end of the room we have our wardrobe.  

Then next to the wardrobe we have the mini fridge, and on top of it we have a little electric burner that we bought. In Thailand, food on the street is so cheap, that it's cheaper to eat out all the time than to buy groceries and cook. This is the reason that many places do not have a kitchen in them. We, however, wanted to be able to make eggs for breakfast before school, so we bought a few dishes and pans and the electric burner. We also bought the table so we would have somewhere to sit and eat, and this is the part of the room that is the kitchen.

The door at the end of the room goes out to the laundry room and bathroom, which are partially outside.

The first room you walk in to outside is what we consider the laundry room. We have a washing machine downstairs in our apartment, but there is not a dryer. So once we've washed our clothes or towels or whatever, we hang them on the clothesline in our 'laundry room' to dry. You also can see the sink we use to wash our hands and brush our teeth.

Off of the laundry room we have the bathroom. Here you can see the box that is our shower, that thankfully has hot water. We also have the toilet, and next to it is a sprayer thing that people use instead of toilet paper. We went and bought toilet paper anyways.

Anyways, that's our home sweet home for the year. I hope you enjoyed the tour.

Teacher Appreciation Day

Coming in to this experience I was told that teacher's are highly respected in Thailand. Supposedly, teachers lie third in the social ranking. At the top there is the king, second is the monks, and then third is teachers. Students used to be taught by monks, but now they are taught by teacher's like myself. So in Thailand, I guess I'm pretty important! :)

Last week they had teacher appreciation day, in which a traditional Thai ceremony was conducted. Since I teach kindergarteners, this was their first year learning the ceremony. In preparation for the big day, we spent the week practicing all of the technical details. My students struggled a bit, but they  will perform this ceremony every year for their teachers, so in a few years they will have it figured out.

For the ceremony, the entire student body gathered in the auditorium. Once everyone was seated, the head director spoke some words, that I couldn't understand because they were in Thai, and then it began. It started with the kindergarten teachers going up and sitting on stage. Next, two students, one girl and one boy, were selected from each class to come up and perform the ceremony. These students crawled in a line across the stage, and then one student stopped in front of each teacher. They handed the teacher a large flower arrangement and then did a series of bows. As the student would bow, the teacher would pat their head. Finally, the students crawled off the stage and the teachers went back to their seats.

Then first grade went up and performed the same ceremony. Brad teaches math and science to a few of the first grade classes, so he went up and got to be honored by his students too. The ceremony continued with each grade going up individually and the students performing the same series of bows and the presentation of flowers to their teachers. The bowing and the patting of the student's heads made the ceremony seem a little strange and foreign to us, but it was a very cool experience to take part in.

After each grade had honored their teachers, we went back to the classroom where we did the ceremony again. This time each student participated in the ceremony, instead of just the two that did it in front of the school. Each student had brought a bouquet of flowers for us, and when I left school that day, I had a dozen bouquets to take home. That's definitely the most flowers I have ever received in my life time!

Here's a picture of two of the students honoring myself and the head teacher in the classroom.

A Typical Day

I'm now in my second week of school at Anubansisaket, and I'm finally getting the hang of it.

On my first day at the school, I was told to simply go, meet the teachers, and observe. Well, that's not what happened. Instead, I arrived and within the first ten minutes, I was pulled in to a classroom and told to teach. Now I had no idea how old these kids were or how much English they knew, so I simply did my best and tried to explain the two workbook pages that I had been given. Then when I got done teaching, I was told that this would be my class.

Here's a picture of one of my students, Snow.

Anyways, my class has 36 kindergarteners who are in their first year of school. Over here, they do two years of kindergarten, and then they move on to first grade. My kindergarteners, however, are brand new to the whole school thing, and it definitely makes teaching challenging. Thankfully, I do have a head teacher, June, a co-teacher, Pinky, and a nanny, Uwee, who help me out all day. The four of us work together to teach and try to control our class.

On a typical day at school, I arrive at 7:30 in the morning and we greet the parents as they drop off their students. Then at 8:00 I lead the students as they walk in two lines to the flag ceremony. Now this doesn't seem like that big of a task, but I assure you it is. Since these kids have never been in school, they don't know how to line up. And since I don't speak much Thai, I have to grab each student and pull them in to line. The boys line up in one line and the girls in the other, and they are supposed to hold hands as they walk. Now to get them to hold hands is also a difficult task, which usually gets completed by me grabbing the girl's hand and the hand of the boy across from her and putting their two hands together. This takes about 20 minutes to wrangle all the kids into line and then walk to our destination.

When our lines finally arrive at flag ceremony, we do our best to get the kids to stand still, but it's pretty close to impossible. While the kids are all over the place, they raise the flag and then sing the national anthem. When all of that is done, we do these dances. Honestly I thought it was so strange at first, but now I realize that we dance around for almost an hour to get out their energy. Then the students play on the playground for a while, and then before we go back in to start learning, they drink a carton of milk.

When it's time to go back to the classroom, all of the students and teachers must take off their shoes and leave them at the entryway to the building. Shoes are only worn when you're going from building to building, not inside. We then line the students back up and walk them upstairs to the classroom.

Finally, we're back in the classroom and ready to learn. The students sit down on the floor in lines and once they are as quiet as I can get them to be, I start teaching for about an hour. Each week there is a different theme, that both myself and the head teacher, teach about. Last week the students learned about body parts. We went over flashcards to teach the body part, then we learned the song 'Head Shoulders Knees and Toes', played games like Simon Says, and completed worksheets. All of my teaching must include a song and a game, since most kindergarteners learn best that way.

As I'm teaching, the co-teacher helps explain anything that the students aren't understanding. Pinky's English is very good, so she can understand what I'm saying and then re-explain what I taught in Thai.

Once the lesson is complete, they go to their special subject for the day. Each day they have one of the following: music, computer, Chinese, or swimming. We go with them to these classes and pretty much babysit and try to keep all the students on task. At 11:00 they leave that class and head to lunch. Here we have to direct the kids to where they sit, and help carry their trays because every other kids seems to spill.

Honestly, I had no idea I was going to teach kindergarteners, and it is such a challenge because they don't know how to do things that seem like common sense. My little bit of student teaching high school students, definitely did not prepare me for this. Nevertheless, the kids are growing on me and I'm really starting to like them, especially after lunch when they're tired and not full of so much energy.

My favorite part of the day is when I read to the kids as they get ready for their nap. Once I'm done reading, I get to go home as the kids nap for the next two hours. I come back at 2:00 and the kids wake up and put their blankets and mats away. We then brush their hair and they drink milk once again.

Once the students are awake and ready to learn again, the head teacher teaches about the subject of the week. During this time, myself and the other two teachers try to keep the kids sitting in their lines and paying attention, but it's a challenge. Over here in Thailand, discipline is very different than in America. The students get hit on their legs or their backs with metal rulers. Now I haven't done that yet, instead, I simply say their name and gesture as to what they should be doing.

When teacher June is done teaching, the students practice lining up again and we walk back to the cafeteria for snack time. Even though it's like 90 degrees and really humid, we eat soup everyday for a snack. It's actually really good soup. Pretty much all of the food is great, but I'll save talking about food for another post.

To end the day, the students come back from snack time and play with the blocks, legos, dolls and the other toys in the room, until their parents come. Finally at 4:30 I get to go home and usually I'm so exhausted from wrangling kids all day that I come back and eat dinner, work on the next days lesson plans, and then go to bed super early. There's not a ton of stuff to do where we live, so during the week we devote ourselves to school. Look for my next post to find out what we do on the weekends when we have time to get out and explore!

144 Hours

144 hours went by between leaving America and arriving in our new home, Sisaket. It would have been a lot shorter, but when we got off the plane in San Francisco we found out that our flight had been cancelled. We panicked a little at first because we were on a strict timeline, but since there was nothing we could do, we just had to go with it. We found our bags and got a hotel for the night and then the next afternoon we took off for Thailand. We flew to Hong Kong, then to Singapore, and then finally arrived in Bangkok.

Once we got off the plane we found all of our bags (thankfully!) and then went to get a cab. I knew where we were supposed to go next, and so I handed the cab driver a sheet of paper with the name of our hotel and directions to get there. That's when I realized I wasn't as prepared as I thought. The sheet of paper had everything written in English and he couldn't read it! I had no idea how to explain where we needed to go because our phones didn't work, and all I had was that piece of paper. Finally, I realized I had a phone number for the hotel, so the cab driver called it from his phone and got directions from them.

When we arrived at the hotel I fumbled through my wallet, trying to pull out the right amount of Thai baht to pay him. We're pretty sure I gave him 500 baht too much, but between the flights, the layovers, and the new time zone, we were too exhausted to worry about it. And anyways 500 baht is only about 15 dollars.

We got checked in and then spent all day and all night sleeping. When we woke up it was morning and we made our way to the AYC office nearby. We met with our employers and they explained their program and the school we would be teaching at. They went over information all day and then put us on a bus that night. We rode the bus for nine hours until finally they called the stop for Sisaket. When we got off we got a taxi to a hotel, (this time we had the name of the hotel in Thai) and then we showered and had to report to school.

Brad and I figured we would continue the tradition of taking first day of school pictures, so here's us on our first day as teachers.

Anyways, those 144 hours were spent on way too much public transportation, but in the end it was worth it.

How We Ended Up In Thailand

If you would have asked me a few years ago, if moving to Thailand to teach English was part of my ten year plan, I definitely would have said no. The plan was to graduate college and become a high school math teacher. Well half of that came true. I graduated from the University of South Dakota last May, and during my four years there, I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to study abroad in New Zealand. And it was during my time there that everything changed.

While I was in New Zealand, I heard the Kiwis rave about how great their holidays spent in southeast Asia were. Immediately this area became the next place on my bucket list. All I wanted to do was travel and see the world. I wanted to explore as many new cultures as possible, and it was all I could think about. I started planning for how to make this dream come true, and so after I graduated I got certified to teach English as a foreign language. I was certified by the fall and antsy to go. The only thing stopping me was that their school year didn't start until the end of May.  

As the time passed before I was set to leave, I started to get more serious with my now fiancé, Brad. We have been friends for the past five years, but it wasn't until I moved home after graduation that we went on our first date. The sparks quickly flew, and at first we didn't know what would happen to our relationship once I left for Thailand, but after only a few short months, we knew we never wanted to be apart. So now we're both living in Sisaket, Thailand and this is our story.