I'm fine, thank you, and you?

Boy oh boy, it’s been a while huh? Well, not a whole lot has happened since Karen and Teancum left. We started back into our jobs and that’s about all that we’ve been doing.

We both started teaching English at a nursing college. The classes are enormous. There are 90 students in each class. We actually have to use a microphone while teaching. It’s been fun and rewarding, but preparing for the classes takes a lot of time. It’s difficult to find good activities and ways to keep the students attentive and motivated for 3 hours straight. We’re also both still teaching a few classes at EFL (the language school where we’ve been since we started teaching). Katharina has an interesting class with a student named Hobby. He’s a super weird and funny kid who has great English, but isn’t very motivated. I’ll let Kat blog about him next time maybe. Other than that, there’s not much else going on. We spend our weekends preparing for our nursing classes. Oh! And I need to write about my first day at the nursing college. Ready kids? Once upon a time, a teacher was supposed to teach the nursing students on Mondays at 1pm. But this teacher got really sick ten minutes before class started (literally, 12:50pm. Literally.) So he decided to call Jeff, who had never taught such a large class before, and had absolutely nothing prepared to teach that day, and had no idea where the college even was! So after the big, mean teacher yelled at Jeff for a while about how Jeff had to take this teacher’s class, because there were no other options, and “sometimes you just get thrown into the deep end”, Jeff agreed to teach the class. So he drove around for almost an hour looking for the college because no one could explain how to find it except for the receptionist at EFL whose English isn’t very good. When he finally got there, an hour late, the school’s director said it was ok that Jeff was late, because the students could stay an hour late that day, so that Jeff could enjoy teaching Mr. Sick’s class for the full three hour block.

Well anyway, I was able to take up about one and a half hours, and then I just let them go early. Duh. That was an interesting day.

So (to change the subject) with the visa that we have as English teachers, we have to cross the Thailand border into another country once every three months. Our first border crossing was a couple weeks ago. We went to Myanmar up in the north. After crossing into Myanmar, I was reminded of Tijuana. Lots and lots of people trying to sell you things and pulling you here and there to look at burned DVDs and cheap cigarettes. Actually the big thing that every single person was trying to sell was Viagra and pornographic DVDs. So next time I need either of those two things, I know where to go.

On the way back from Myanmar we stopped in a nice little city called Chiang Rai. Everyone compares it as a smaller version of Chiang Mai, which was about right. And we had a really nice time. We saw the city’s main attraction, which is a Buddhist temple that’s completely white (most temples are gold). They were also celebrating their annual “Pineapple and Lychee Festival” which meant miles of entire pineapples for 30 cents, and the biggest lychees we’d ever seen. They had a lot of people performing music and dancing. It was really fun! They were also having a Som Tam (spicy papaya salad) “cook-off”, and we were invited to sample each and every one. There were about 15 different participants who were dancing to the music while making their salads. It was awesome, but the only bad thing is that when they make Som Tam for westerners, they tone the spiciness waaaaay down. But the salads they made for the competition were the real thing. Katharina actually had tears running down her cheeks after sampling one of them.


I think it’s safe to say we are officially into the rainy season now. Since we’ve been back from our trip with K-Diddle and Teancum Tenderfoot, it has rained every single day. But it’s been nice because it’s a lot cooler now than it was. The rain is also very predictable. It only rains in the late afternoon/early evening for about thirty minutes to an hour. It’s also helped with cleaning up the air which is normally very smoggy and polluted.

I know this is getting long, but last thing- One of our friends from Utah is coming out here to teach English. His name’s Jeff too. Or Jeff Two, haha…oh… Anyway, I worked with him building swimming pools a while ago and he’ll be here in a week or so to take the TEFL course and start teaching out here. We’re really excited. And a couple of our friends from Utah, Emily and Peter, are coming out to visit in the middle of August. We’re super excited about that too. And then my cousin John is hopefully coming sometime in December. And we can’t wait for that either! I’m just not sure when my parents are coming out here yet…