No Camera, Day 7

Still no camera, or word from Tor. If Thailand has taught me anything so far, it is patience.

A few anecdotes from the week:

I have discovered my favorite class. M 5.3 (11th grade). This week only 8 of them were there (all girls, + 1 'ladyboy' - more to come on 'him' later.) The other students were at scholastic competitions of varying sorts. We had a "chill" day since it was the last period of the day and there were only a few kids. I taught them my famous continent song and then they wanted me to sing. "I don't know what to sing," I protested. "Sing song Christmas!" little Som chimed in. Did you say Christmas song?!? Obviously I will sing a Christmas song! So I serenaded the little cherubs with "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire . . ." They were captivated - then they told me I had beautiful eyes. Erin and I have decided that because people are always telling us we're beautiful, when we go back to America, we won't be able to adjust to being completely average again. We'll see.

Last night Erin and I hit the "disco" in Lampang with some new Thai friends who own a restaurant we frequent. We shared a bottle of whiskey and laughed as one man, about 1 foot away from Erin, just stared at her for the entire night. Then we looked around and tried to find me a "Thai boyfriend." As Erin says, if I get a Thai boyfriend it will be so entertaining for her, and this blog as well. Sadly, no digits were secured except for a girl who wants to be our friend. We'll take it.

In Boston, after a night of drinking, a common practice is to purchase and down an $8 sausage. Here, we went to a small restaurant for fried rice. Erin ate two heaping portions. In her words "each plate was enough to feed a family of 4 people." I was too busy making friends, singing Linkin Park's "Numb," and challenging Asians to ping pong tournaments to eat my rice. So Erin ate my plate and her own. Whiskey hangover? No. Rice hangover.

There is a Thai pop song that we really like. Think of the catchiest song you can. This song is 100 times catchier. We are sort of obsessed with it. I can't stop humming it. And the live bands play it at every bar - sometimes twice in a night! Of course, it's in Thai so we have no way of knowing the words, or even the name of the song. Today, Pan took us to Lampang for lunch and shopping. We are in such dire need of this song that we proceeded to visit every music store in the mall and hum, yes, HUM, the song to the teenagers who work there, to try to find out the name or artist. We got a lot of strange looks, but no song. We did buy a Carabao CD. Sort of like Thai hippie music - maybe Santana meets the Rolling Stones . . .? 50 songs on the CD and only $2.50! We will become Carabao experts! We will try to hum our catchy song to each of our classes on Monday. That's 800 students and 1600 ears that can perhaps recognize this RIDICULOUSLY POPULAR song that clearly we cannot hum properly.

Erin has a new hobby. She has purchased an English-Thai dictionary. She likes to read a Thai word to a Thai person, and see if they know what word she is saying. Pan calls this game "Talent America Erin." (I think she's going for "America's Got Talent with Erin!") Sometimes Pan calls for a "repeat," but Erin is doing surprisingly well. She is going to find a new competitor in Lun tonight, although Lun does not yet know about our fun new game.

Lesson plan for this week:
1. Play Adam Sandler's Thanksgiving song
2. Make the kids walk around and gobble like turkeys
3. Thanksgiving vocabulary word search
4. Draw hand turkeys

Life is good.