The floating market

Major posts

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!

Doc Rak Ban day (or the day I first fell in love with Thailand)

Major posts

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.

Beautiful (a just for fun post, not really insightful into my journey)

Little things, Other

Today we went to the store to buy pokey.  I got 7 different flavours: strawberry, strawberry with real strawberry, green tea, cookies and cream, chocolate and roasted peanut, blueberry with real blueberry, and “cream flavour biscuit roll” which is like inside out squished pokey.  All these together?  The 7 boxes cost less than one box would in Canada.

Now let me go into way more detail on these pokey than I need to.

The normal strawberry is what I would usually get, and is good.  It was my favorite.  It tastes like strawberry cream filling but a bit muted.  It gets a 6.5-7/10.  The strawberry with bit of real strawberry is very similar except that the strawberry tastes stronger and just a tinge sour, like many real strawberry’s tend to.  It gets an 8/10.  The green tea pokey tastes like Thai milk tea, and it is good, but not what I’m looking for in pokey.  It’s not nearly as sweet as the others and the texture stands out more.  The cookies in cream is very good, but I’ve had some really good ice cream that has kind of spoiled me in terms of cookie and cream flavoured things.  7/10.  The chocolate peanut is fantastic, but I’m not a huge fan of chocolate and peanut together personally.  For other people who aren’t crazy like me, 9/10.  On to…. the blueberry.  Ahh the blueberry.  This one is my favorite, it you hadn’t guessed.  It tastes like the sweet blueberry part of a blueberry muffin.  10/10.

Little things 3

Little things

Inside this class-on-the-roof, I learned very quickly that bowing was different after the incantation at the beginning or the class when one sits on the floor.  (I also re-learned something I had read in a Thai travel guide that says you must never step over a person or their food.  Not even their extremities.  I realized this because the kids in my Thai instrument class kept wanting to go past where I was sitting with some of the children [who were all in nice rows save me because I had thought we’d be sitting all jumbled together] but wouldn’t go even after I shifted in order that they could just step over my feet a little bit.  They refused to go until after I realized this and tucked my feet in and scooched over.)  Anyways I put my hands together to prepare to Wai the teacher and everyone else had their hands clasped one over the other resting on their thigh opposite to the side their legs were tucked under.  I decided to copy them and see this through, so when they put their hands palms together on the floor diagonally away from them I hurriedly followed suit, only to have everyone fling their heads at their hands on the floor!  I bowed my forehead to my hands which is what I figured they were probably actually doing.  I think I was right but I am not sure yet.  This was repeated in my Thai dance class (I’ll tell you more about how that went later XD) and nobody corrected me either time so I’ve about a 50/50 chance I was doing it right.

Little things 2

Little things
I found out there is a classroom (and a miscellaneous sweet-crunchy-flatbready-thing maker, who was a different person after I came out of the classroom than it had been when I went in) pretty much on the roof of the school, beneath a large awning. The floor was painted green with white lines in an extra space for gym classes, I would presume.

Little things

Little things

Yesterday I was told “The French teacher is very high.”, not in referral to her height.  They mean she is very loud, though I don’t find that she is, certainly not compared to the students.  Last night one of my friends from school told me something I am finding to be more and more accurate as the days progress:

    “True about Thai students
    1. Speak too much and loud”, (< yup yup yup as Ducky would say*)
   ” 2. Eat everything that we can eat in classroom
    3. Sleep in classroom”

My first day of school at St Joseph

'Acheivement Get' posts, Major posts

Wow.  Today has been both a very short and very long day.  I woke up at 3:30 because of jet lag and couldn’t really get back to sleep after that, then went to school at 6:30 and got there at about 7:30.  Walking through to courtyard was NERVEWRACKING, let me tell you.  My host mom, Jah, led me around to the administrative office (I think?) but on the way I just felt so out of place. Everyone else seemed professional and business-like in their uniforms, and I felt like a trick-or-treater.  In the morning at my school we have an assembly, wherein I think prayers are said and sung, and the national anthem is sung.  Before all that though, a nun (who’s name I don’t remember but want to learn because she is so very sweet) made an announcement and then I had to go up to the mike in front of 5000 STUDENTS and who knows how many teachers, and introduce myself in Thai.  I knew how to say “hello” and “my name is Aria” but the teacher explaining things to me wanted me to say “I come from Canada” as well, and I didn’t know that.  This meant I spent an eternity that was way, way too short trying to memorize two syllables and not pee myself or fall over.  It was the most terrified I think I have ever been in my life.  I succeeded, kind of, at saying what I needed to and then waited in the office while prayers and everything happened because I could not stand in front of those students any longer.  After that I was lead around to the front of the school for a couple photos, which can apparently be found here, and then followed the teacher (I still don’t know her name) to my class.  It turns out that you are not allowed to wear your shoes inside the building and it also turns out that I am not very good at taking off and putting on my school shoes.  Which is awkward.  Especially since I realized I was the only one wearing shoes while standing in the middle of a crowded and small stairwell.  When I got into my class there were only a few people, but soon all 50 students including myself were there.  First period was science and they were working, well, they were supposed to be working on pullies.  I think the teacher might have gotten them to do 10 minutes work all class.  Maybe.  For pretty much the entirety of the class I was just surrounded and being asked so many questions, a lot of which I understood for they were speaking the best English they had, but most of which were the same questions everyone else had asked.  The most popular questions were: What’s your name?  Why did you choose Thailand?  Where do you come from?  Will you eat lunch with me?  That last one was a favorite apparently.  I was asked by the person I agreed to eat lunch with if I would eat lunch with them first every day, then every Monday and Wednesday, then just every Monday.  Super overwhelming, let me tell you.  At one point I was asked if I had a boyfriend, and then I believe the same person asked their friend to ask me if I liked girls or boys.  I think my least favorite question though, was “Do you remember my name?” or “What is my name?”.  I really want to be able to remember their names! They are so pretty and interesting, but I am very, very bad with names.  I can usually just wait for someone else to use whoever’s name in a conversation and pick it up.  Instead I had probably 150 students throughout the day quizzing me on what their name was.  I now can remember 7.  Because they quizzed me repeatedly for about an hour during class and I wrote them down.  This isn’t to say I know who’s face matches which name however. 😛 Tomorrow will probably be harder still.  Anyways, for all that it was fun.  I have finally in the last hour of school managed to unclench my feet and calves and I’ve met some really neat people.  I’ve also learned a ton.  Mostly little things, like how to buy food and where to put my dishes away.  That I need to remember to wear an undershirt tomorrow (Wups!).  How to tie the scarf thing on my school uniform and to bow to the teacher at the beginning and end of class after a particular incantation is said. o.0  Everyone in this school is nigh unto constantly smiling, and I was told how beautiful I was probably 40 times.  My day is almost done, and tomorrow I start following my schedule, which ROCKS let me tell you.  I have French, Thai, and Chinese language classes, Sewing, Origami, Thai culture, Thai dance, Cooking, Thai music instrument,Carving, Math, P.E., and Science.  This is has been my dream for course selection at school for years.  I actually didn’t chose the subjects, either.  I was just handed a schedule.  Anyways, I am looking forward to tomorrow.  I have Chinese first thing! 😀 I’m writing this in my free time towards the end of the day, and I can’t wait to get back home to the 8 dogs. 8.  4 shih tzu, one chihuahua, and 3 Thai dogs.  It’s pretty great.  Thanks for reading, and I’ll try to keep you posted on my time in Thailand!