Let me start by saying that I know even less of Catholicism than I do of Buddhism.  And I don’t even know enough about Buddhism to solidly explain anything other than Lent to someone, and what I know about lent I learned yesterday.  So I had know idea what today would be.  I was told it was a feast day, and a ceremony for the sisters or mothers depending on who I was speaking to.  I kind of assumed this was an initiation rite for becoming a nun actually.  That we would have one of the teachers becoming a nun or something like that.  That being said- one of the other things I learned yesterday was that one of my teachers is Buddhist.  The school just doesn’t care or discriminate against religion, apparently in students or in teachers. Fun fact: It’s the law in Thailand that you must claim a religion.  At the very least you need to have one if you intend to complete any legal documents.  Also a Thai passport has your religion printed on the page with your photo.  I don’t feel very comfortable with that because not all countries are as non-discriminating about religion as the Thais are.  Back to what I was saying earlier- I just googled Catholic feasting days and apparently it’s the saint’s feasting day.  In cases where the saint’s death date is recorded and there are few saints days already designated for that day, that date is used.  In other cases a date is designated by a church, or the date when they were canonized.  Hey!  I actually do know that word!  I was just about to look it up- but DadE taught it to me when I was teaching him what cannons and ships were in reference to TV shows and the like!  Okay so anyways the ceremony was very hot and I hadn’t been able to keep my eyes open for more than a few seconds a minutes or two before it began, so I fear I looked rather zombie-like.  I think 3 or 4 teachers asked me if I was okay at some point during this.  All of the students stayed standing in our lines outside from morning assembly throughout the duration of the ceremony and singing.  Well, except for one who say half dragged half led away.  I really hope she’s okay!  The only upside to the experience is that I did get to see a real live Catholic priest, white robes, gold scarf and all.  Which is pretty darned cool.

That’s from a Vanessa Carlton song if any of you were wondering.  I’ve thought many times in the past week “oh- I should write about today!” and then completely forgotten what I did that was so special, let alone the whole day.  So today, I’m just going to write while I have a moment before lunch and try to jog my memory.  Later I’ll be posting about yesterday when I went to the park with friends, but right now I’m too tired to do it any justice.

So this morning I had to get up early (5:00) because I needed to be at school early in order to read a speech about… shoot what was it called again?  Sur- something economy.  Oh!  Found it- it’s “sufficiency economy”.  I didn’t have much of an idea of what this was even after looking over the script, but my host dad explained it to me in the car.  Apparently it the idea of an economy where each person grows what they eat, and distributes what they have in a pyramid shape.  Firstly, whatever they make/harvest etc.  goes to them and their family.  If they have surplus, then that goes to their neighbors.  If there is surplus even then it goes to the community, and so on and so forth in an ever expanding bubble.  My conclusion from this, and the speech’s talk of not buying into excess, is that it is proposing that the people keep Thailand’s resources in Thailand, use Thailand’s resources for Thai’s, and distribute goods and money more throughout Thailand.  I have no way of knowing whether or not that is accurate, but it seems like a good guess to me.  This system was developed by the king, and I think that the speech thing I did today is a way of promoting it maybe?  It turns out I wasn’t actually saying it during the morning assembly, but about 30 minutes before the assembly, as students walked to their classes.  Anywho, back to what I was saying before.  I was supposed to get up at 5:00.  I did, and then I promptly fell back asleep.  So I wake up at 5:45, and think: didn’t I already do this?  Maybe I’m just remembering yesterday.  And then I remember and check my phone for the time.  Now last night my host dad said we should leave at six, or maybe 6:15.  6:15 it is!  I didn’t have my school stuff together and had planned to do that this morning you see.  Luckily for me I actually do very little on Mondays.  I still managed to misplace the bag I was embroidering though.  I had to bring my apron to sewing class instead and work on it, which was handy because I needed to use said apron in third block.  I also misplaced my hairbrush after I picked it up.  Turns out I put it in my book bag.  What the heck??  My hair stays in braids all day and there is literally no reason why I would have put it in there.  Good job sleepy Aria.  Anyways I didn’t have it with me for when Bee would do my hair so I did my best with a comb :X .  I found out when I got in the car that she had been sleeping until my host dad called for her.  Sorry Bee!!!  From there we drove to school, traffic bad as per usual [fun fact: Bangkok has the worst traffic in the world.  Actually.] I got to school, realised I had no idea where I was supposed to go, saw my friend waving to me from the office and revised then said our speech into the microphone at the office.

That’s not a run-on sentence it’s a list.  Sh.

First period was sewing, and I worked frantically on attaching my elephant to my apron, and continued that during break with my homeroom class.  Then it was dance class time.  I have two dance classes during the week, one Thai dance and the other… I don’t know.  It seemed a lot like the dance unit during gym at my junior high.  The class was separated into groups of about 7, and then told to make a “modern” dance routine for this Thai song about nature.  It was just as bad as in Canada.  Our group did not communicate well, language barrier aside, and the dance moves were choppy, very repetitive, and only used our arms.  That is to say, none of the moves save kneeling, standing up, and making timid kicks off beat and out of sync for about 12 bars at the beginning and middle of the song.  During our break just before this class there had been 5 students screaming at each other in good-natured conversation and another 15-20 just shouting.  Break is 20 minutes long, not including the designated “homework” break right before, which had been basically the same thing so I was irritable and noise sensitive and actually felt ill from all the noise.  I did not have patience for trying to make out whispered English from the din of shouted Thai, and did not try very hard to do so.  My apologies to those of you who were trying to talk to me during that period of time for not reaching out and trying to communicate.  After that I had break, where I came up to the nice, quite, air conditioned library to start this post.  After that I had lunch and ice cream with a really fun group of people who remind me a lot of my friends back at home, and came back up here to finish this.  Gosh do they ever make me work for my free time though.  There are 7 stories in my school, with the gym my class uses and my music class being on the 7th floor, the library I am to go to during my free time being on the 6th floor, and the cafeteria being on the ground floor.  My home room is on the 2nd floor.  Today I have climbed 51 flights of stairs I believe, as there are two flights between each level.  I have at least another 5 to go for the day, since the teacher I go home with takes the elevator down after school.  After school I need to go find my embroidery, play with the dogs, and maybe clean my room since this mornings furious scramble revealed that I’m not nearly as organised as I thought.

So after emailing my mom (who was awake at an ungodly hour helping me, thank you mom!), doing some research and making some phone calls my host dad and aunt took me on a car ride…. somewhere.  Previously my host dad had said he would be taking me to visit some of the holiest places in Bangkok, so i figured we were probably going to visit at least one temple.  We did, but it wasn’t what I had expected.  It turns out we were going to visit the floating market!  I was so excited.  We looked for a parking space for a while and eventually just parked in front of some semis ([insert mild french here] Thailand is different from Canada!) and then walked through a normal market, over a bridge that had kiosks lining the sides just like the market on the street, and onto a big… ….pier?  A very big platform over the water.  I believe this one was supported by struts in the water.  My host dad went over to a stand by the water and bought us tickets for something to do with boats, which later turned out to be a boat tour.

 

I will update more later.  Thanks for reading!

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.