We finished our first term at Saint Francis Xavier and are now officially on vacation! We are heading up to Northern Thailand tomorrow night and will be up there almost two weeks. We'll write more when we get back...

Cooking Class

We had an awesome experience last night! One of the touristy things to do in Thailand is to take cooking classes and learn some typical Thai dishes. Since we love to cook, and we've tried our hand at Thai cuisine once or twice at home, we naturally wanted to do this. But since the classes tend to be really expensive, we put it on the back burner (no pun intended).

Well, out of the blue, one of our fellow English teachers at school said that she had met a lady at the market who was starting up a cooking school and wanted to take pictures of foreigners doing her class for marketing purposes. So she invited us to take the classes for free with a few of our fellow teachers!!

She had a beautiful couch with an outside kitchen on a large deck. She had a big garden where she grew most of the ingredients that we cooked with. We learned to make some of the Thai classics: fried egg rolls, tum yum kung soup (spicy soup with shrimp, really delicious), fish cakes, green curry (my favorite), and of course, phad thai.

Some spices that we used:

Dana cooking the egg roll ingredients:

The prep table. Everyone except the couple at the back is a teacher at our school.

John quickly established himself as the chef of the group and the chopping master. Our teacher told him to chop the green beans finely, so he started showing off a little. She looked at him, smiled, said, "You call that fine?!" and started chopping as well. :) So here is a picture of their competition. She was a fun, sweet lady.

Our green curry:

Although this looks like a block of cheese, it is actually coconut sugar, the secret ingredient in a lot of Thai dishes:

The class ended up taking 5 hours. We were very tired by the end of it, but we had a lot of fun, and a ton of food!!

Dinner on the River

Last weekend, we had a sudden craving for Italian food, and decided to try out a restaurant recommended by an Italian foreign teacher at our school. It wasn't too far from our house, so we just took the song thaew to where we thought it might be, and started walking around trying to find it. The problem was that when we hit the street that the map said it should be on, it seemed like we had hit the end of town, there were no lights or people. Also, because of a downpour that afternoon, that street was completely flooded, to the point where we could walk and explore.

Well, we finally asked a security guard if he knew where Mr. Enzo's was, and sure enough, he said to go along that street about 3 blocks. We proceeded with caution. A few blocks down, we found it! It looked very charming and elegant, but it was on the other side of the street! There was nothing to do but to roll up our pant legs and wade across the street! The water came up to the middle of our calves.

Their were still a few cars brave enough to come down the street, but the restaurant had set up a "dock" to allow the passengers out.

It was a delicious dinner, complete with a ice cream crepe with real chocolate sauce for dinner, and a lovely wade back across the street to get home. Maybe we will only go during the monsoon season; it makes a very romantic restaurant on the river.

Furniture Fest

One of our favorite weekend pastimes is visiting an exhibition hall nearby called Impact Stadium. I mentioned it before when we went to the OTOP festival in one of the previous blogs. Anyways, it's this gigantic building, large enough to hold all 25 apartment complexes, and every weekend it hosts another festival. This weekend it was the Home and Decor exhibition. I don't know how many millions of dollars worth of furniture there was in a room, but we had a blast trying out every comfortable-looking couch and chair. It was kind of like IKEA, except on a much larger scale.

Here is a collection of some of our favorite finds. There was every possible style of furniture under one roof. One day, I would like to direct a play or a movie that uses chair like these. They remind me of Johnny Depp movies.

Friday Flooding

We're in the rainy season here in tropical Thailand, where the streets flood in about 60 seconds. Here are a couple of pics of our neighborhood last Friday as we were walking home from work. Actually, this was not one of the worst rains we've had, it was just the only day we happened to have the camera with us.

Last night we had a much worse downpour that flooded all the streets and sidewalks. Most people were smart enough to stay home, but as I didn't want to miss my Skype date with my Mom, there was nothing to do but to hike up my skirt as high as modestly possible, take off our shoes, and wade through it. By the time to got to the coffee shop, we were completely soaked up to the waist in smelly, sewage water. I had a great talk with Mom, and then we waded home to took a shower, shoes and all!

The Nitty Gritty

Some of you may have as much trouble believing this as we do, but we have been teaching for 6 weeks now. The semester is wrapping us. Next week is finals, and then a week for retests and grading, and then we get two weeks vacation before second semester begins.

We are both looking forward to starting over fresh. It has been very exhausting jumping in the middle of a semester and having to start teaching without really knowing where the last teacher left off. We are now having to write a final exam for the students that include material that we have not taught them, and we have to deal with all the grades and methods of the previous teacher. Thailand is notorious for last minute changes and not warning its teachers about what is going on, so we are having to deal with turning things in that we didn’t even know we had to do! For example, all our grades for the semester (except the final exam score) are due this Friday, but my students have an essay due next week, because no one warned me that grades were due before that. When the previous teacher left, John was handed a huge stack of ungraded assignments without being told what they were or what to do with them.

Another interesting difference is the way that the school cancels class. There have been many times, especially with the high schoolers, where we have shown up to an empty classroom, only to find out that everyone is on a field trip, or an errand for another teacher, or a school project. It sometimes seems like everything is a priority here, except for CLASS!

It has been a very frustrating adjustment, especially since we both care a lot about our students and want them to do well, not just academically, but as people. Copying is completely acceptable here, and so is cheating on the exam. Just yesterday, I was so sad to catch one of my very best students writing formulas on her arm before going to take a math test. More than anything, we hope to inspire our students to live with integrity and to start to value school, at least a little. It’s definitely been an upward struggle, but it will be nice to start a new semester now that we know our students a little more.

I am excited to finally be seeing some progress. I am the fourth teacher that my students have had this semester, so it has taken a while for them to warm up to me, but I think we are starting to understand each other. Here is a picture of a few of my 12th graders. The two in the back are dressed in Traditional Thai costumes for a dance and song concert at the school last week. It was fun to stand with the rest of my class and cheer for them.

Here are some pictures of my 11th graders. Since I’m there homeroom teacher and only English teacher, I spend a lot of my time with them.

Here is my class of 10th grade French students. I brought them a surprise of mineral water, baguette, cheese and salami last week. None of them had ever tried French cheese or water, and they made the most priceless faces to smell it!! The consensus in the end was that the cheese was delicious but the bread was no good.

Here are some of John’s kids. They are all so cute!! He definitely has a fan club. Some girls blush every time he walks by. But he is having issues with class control. The kids here are often allowed to do whatever they want, so he really has to crack down on discipline. Since he’s a new teacher, the kids are pushing him to see what they can get away with. His kids tend to be all over the place, and crawl all over the place, as you can see in this picture with a student climbing the bookshelf in the middle of his lesson. But they have a lot of fun in his classes.
This is one of his trouble makers, but I think he's so cute. And John has gotten to know his Mom pretty well, which is great.

Having said all that, even though we haven’t been teaching for too long, we are definitely ready for a break. This environment wears us down, and it is difficult to stay positive when everyone else around us in the teachers’ lounge is constantly complaining about it. We are excited to go back North to Chiang Mai for a while: go back to our favorite places, and hopefully explore some of the surrounding area, too. Then we will come back refreshed and ready to try again.

This past weekend, we explored a place called Koh Kred. It’s a river island that is super close to us. We just took a quick taxi to the dock, and after a 2 Baht boat ride, we were there! It’s a small village famous for its pottery. Everywhere you look, there are kilns and people making handicrafts. It was super fun. We’ll definitely go back!

Pinnochio

John and I have been feeling really lonely for some fellowship with other believers. I know a lot of you have been praying for that, and we want to say thank you. We were feeling especially low last week, and were asking God to help us find a church and meet some other Christians. He answered our prayers through Pinnochio. Not the Disney movie, but the small Italian restaurant on Sukothai Rd. Friday, we decided we were sick of phad thai, som tham, and random meat on a stick, so we went to this nice Italian place that we heard about from various people. The pizza was delicious, we had actual dressing on our salad, and the best part was what happened next.
In the same restaurant, there was a large group of people meeting for a party. We heard them playing games and stuff, but when they started praying, we really started paying attention. At the end of our meal, we walked over and asked them if they were from a church in the area. As it turns out, they were a group of OMF missionaries, some of whom have been in Thailand for 25 years! We exchanged emails, and asked where they all went to church. What a nice surprise and an answer to prayer!!

As it turns out, there is an International church about 25 minutes from us, much closer than downtown Bangkok. We called a couple of the ladies that we met on Friday, and went to church with them on Sunday morning. It was so wonderful! We met several people after church, and connected with a small group leader. Yesterday, we took a taxi back to that neighborhood and went to a small group where we got to meet other English-speaking people from the church. Some were older, retired ex-pats, others were young people working with kids with disabilities in an orphanage. We are so grateful!! Thank you for your prayers.

We've had a lot of fun exploring our neighborhood and the area around here. We love our little suburb; we have everything within blocks of our house: restaurants, massage places, a market with clothing, electronics, movies, housewares, paintings, etc, work, laundry, Internet cafes, and everything else. If we really want to go farther, we jump on a song thaew for a few minutes and have a whole new set of shops to explore; we even have an English bookstore with cheap books for teachers. A 15 minute walk from our house brings us to a place called Impact Stadium, a HUGE, HUGE conference hall that always has some exhibition or other.

A couple of weekends ago, we went to see the OTOP festival, a huge exhibition promoting handicrafts from all over Thailand. It was a great place to start buying Christmas presents, and maybe a couple things for ourselves, too.

We have also discovered our favorite restaurant. It's called Siriwan, and it has the best Thai food around for a pretty reasonable price. It's only open for lunch, though, so our new Saturday ritual is to sleep in for a while, and then get up and go to Siriwan. Here is our promise: if any of you come out to visit us in Thailand, we will treat you to a delicious, filling meal at Siriwan. So come!!