So ever since my first day, people have been asking me: “What will you do on dokrakban day?” and then seeing my expression of utter confusion, would either laugh nervously and turn away or try to explain what it is to me.  Usually this was done by shrieking the first several words and then tapering off into murmured explanation.  It took a long time for the name to stick, “Dock-Rack-Bahn” but all that I understood until the day before when my class was preparing for it was that there would be a festival on Friday, who’s purpose was to raise money for the poor and hungry.  It is an annual festival which is a big deal to the kids of the school, and there would be much good food.  I agreed to be a ghost in the “ghost house” my class would be running.  Several times.  I still don’t know who was put in charge of organising it, or if there ever was a single person in charge of ANY aspect of the preparations.  One of my friends in the class gave my an old white shirt of hers with a picture of mini mouse on it to take home and paint bloody.  When I got home I used a combination of markers, sharpie, and watercolor pencil crayons to get something that looked kind of like blood stains and compared photos with her.  She suggested that I paint bloody tears on mini mouse’s face so I did that as well as some bloody hand prints on the back and something that looked sorta like I’d had a brief and less than through encounter with a guillotine.  By the time I had finished (I hadn’t started straight away when I got home, and I get home late) it was time to go to bed.  I needed to wake up at around a quarter to five the next day in order to get to school by 7:00.  I dressed in my gym uniform as I had been instructed repeatedly by my teacher, only to find when I got there that virtually everyone else in my class were wearing street clothes, sandals, and had their hair down!  I changed into my shirt and let down my hair and tried to back comb it a bit with my fingers for effect.  Most of my class were in the bathroom near the cafeteria, on the ground floor (there are 6-7 stories in my school by the way!) and I was directed there when I asked for phon, the girl who had agreed to do my makeup.  Another girl did it instead; she did most everyone’s makeup.  She (or someone else, I’m not sure) had brought a small tube of some sort of white glue the people were using the paste toilet paper onto each others faces.  Once this had hardened and dried a strongly pigmented red lipgloss was applied, along with some black eyeshadow in a ring around the ‘wound’.  Many people also applied some concealer to their lips, and I added some of the red lipgloss to the corner of my mouth and the side of my neck where my shirt indicated a wound.  After this we returned to our homeroom (M 3/7) and danced, took pictures, and several people finished their makeup.  We had to do morning assembly outside our rooms since kiosks had been set up in the main courtyard where we usually went.  This completely threw me off and I did pretty much everything wrong.  It didn’t help that everyone was goofing off and not paying attention and I didn’t really have anyone to follow.  So anyway, after all that was through we went back downstairs, I grabbed my shoes from the bottom of the stairs (they were easy to spot today since I was one of three people in the entire school wearing regular uniform shoes instead of gym shoes or sandals.  I hadn’t gotten gyms shoes yet at that point, but I have them now.  Anime white and all) and hovered near the ticket booth in front of our black-tarp enclosed section of the cafeteria, trying to figure out when I was supposed to do what.  Originally I had been asked what slot I wanted to be a ghost, and had asked for a spot in the first of the three shifts.  Then the day before dokrakban I was instructed to sell tickets instead because everyone would buy them since I was the foreigner.  I didn’t particularly want to sell tickets, I just wanted to jump scare students.  I could see their logic however, and didn’t really appear to be able to change her decision.  Eventually I manged to get enough of a say in that they let me do both.  After agreeing to this we all went to set up (I thought) but a small group broke off and led me down the hallway with them.  It turned out I was being used as part of the advertising campaign for our booth, as we went around to many of the classes in the school and I would present it in English and then the others would do it in Thai.  That is, of course, after the screams upon me entering the room had died down.  There was one class where we looked in, saw no teacher and just went ahead, but right as we had finished our spiel, the teacher walked in (and this class had been being very exclamatory throughout the presentation and we had left the sliding door open at least a foot and a half so there was no doubting that he’d heard how disruptive we were being) and my friends just froze, a look of shock and unadulterated terror on their faces.  I’m pretty sure one of them said “oh shit” which is considered a very bad word here, and then they wai-ed and scraped and bowed and apologised their way out of the room.  I, of course, was on the opposite sided of the teacher as the other students and the door, so I was still standing immobile trying to determine what the heck was going on when one of them harsh-whispered at me to get out and so I tried to copy their deferential attitudes as best my tall stature and poor balance and language would allow.  After we left and were scurrying up the stairs opposite the classroom as fast as they would go (think speed-walking pace) I asked if that was a really scary teacher, and the only answer I got was that sometimes hes really funny.  So I have no clue what to make of him.  Anyways, we weren’t the only groups going around.  we skipped a few classrooms because they already had presentations going on and I felt really bad for the teachers.  After that I went and helped set up our station, which was fun.  The teacher (I think his role is class adviser?) got me to stand on a bench and help him tie one of the big black tarps up to the top of one of the giant pillars in the cafeteria.  My height was pretty darn useful for this.

I will update more later.