Names I find amusing

This is a list of real names of students, separated by class, that I find amusing. In Thailand, all students have a long name and a "nickname". The nicknames are completely unrelated to their long names, and are often quite funny.

Earth

Bambam

Nut

Eark

Big

Boat

Boo

Ad

BB

Boeing

Pretty

Beer

Yee

Now

Cherry

Look Tan

Jeep

Ice

Mo

Milk

Guitar

Brite

Guard

Klit (hard to say this one when calling roll!)

Gun

Build

Safe

Jam

C-Game

Phai (pronounced "pie")

Bar

Faris

Boom

Cream

Mint

Chompoo ("pink" in Thai)

Thangkwa ("cucumber" in Thai)

Noon

Sim

Phone

Nice

Armani

Tin

Ball

Bank

Front

Hummer

Santa

Fluke

Keen

Auto

Bossy

Poopa

Dream

Grid

Tangmo ("watermelon" in Thai)

Dear

Punchy

Sim

Turk (he's not Turkish)

Beach

Net

Donut

Dam

Please

Cheer

Phu (pronounced “poo”)

Pager

Mickey

Ton

Sky

Piano

Phair (pronounced “pear”)

PP

Nonee

Peterpan (seriously Mom and Dad???)

Dude.

It's too much work to write about everything in detail from the last approximately 6 months, so this entry will be short and sweet (I hope).

Some photos from our apartment

In March, Kat and I were offered a one-month position at an international school in Bangkok. It paid well for Thailand, but we weren't given any materials or curriculum. We got there and they told us to "just have fun with them." The other problem was that we were teaching for 7 hours a day, and then we were expected to eat lunch with the kids, and watch them on all their breaks. Our first day I didn't have the chance to pee once. We complained, so they gave us a raise and let the kids have a computer class here and there so we only ended up teaching 6 hours a day. The nice part was each Friday they had a field trip where we didn't have to teach, and they were usually pretty fun. The kids were super cute too.

Keyboard class

Field trip to crocodile farm

Field trip to dinosaur museum

Making salt-dough volcanoes

Groups competed to see who could make a mummy the fastest

A visit from spiderman

Getting ready to add vinegar and baking soda

Greek dancing (according to Kat)

Diet Coke and Mentos is kind of educational, right?

 After Bangkok we had 2 weeks off, so we spent all our hard-earned cash playing on Koh Mak and Koh Chang, a couple islands just a few hours from Bangkok. We'd been there before so we didn't take a lot of pictures. Awesome place to unwind after our month of crying ourselves to sleep every night.

Our bungalow on the beach

This exact photo is in our copy of The Lonely Planet

Kat's cousin Kristina and her husband Alex came to Thailand in March before we went to Bangkok. They came to Chiang Mai for a few days and we were able to do a bunch of fun things around town. We were also able to spend a night in Chiang Dao. It was a lot of fun to see them again (I hadn't seen them since our wedding reception in Germany). They're super nice and friendly, and we really enjoyed spending a few days with them.

Driving to Chiang Dao

Elephant camp

Chiang Dao Temple

Through our school, we got free season passes to The Night Safari in Chiang Mai. It's kind of a zoo that only opens at night. They take you on an open tram through the animal enclosures and you get to see a lot of the animals up close. Karen and Teancum did it while they were here, but we had never actually done it until recently. It's fun and a lot of the animals come right up to the bus, which was actually a little intimidating at times.

With the rainy season come the bugs. They get flooded out of their rocks and holes and try to find somewhere dry to curl up for the night, which often means in your house. Kat found a big and very pretty huntsman spider in between some sheets of poster board in the school. We took it home and took some photos of it. On the same day, there was a 3 foot long snake in one of the classrooms that one of the teachers killed. We also found a big, black scorpion walking around in our parking garage a while ago, and now we have a new pet. :)

Teaching has been crazy. I started at the same school as Kat in May teaching English to 9th-11th graders. It was fun some days, and not so fun other days. One of the science teachers here quit for another job in another city, and they asked if I'd be interested in filling the position. I said yes, so now I'm teaching science to 1st-3rd graders. They're cute, but a lot more work than high school students. In May, Kat started teaching English to 4th graders, but a position to teach English in 1st grade opened, so she took that. She's enjoying it although she's also really busy with it.

We had a long weekend last week and we took a beautiful drive through the mountains to a city called Pang Mappa. It's an area that's FULL of caves. (Jared, when are you coming out?) The first person to do the majority of the exploration there is an Australian named John Spies. He owns a guesthouse we stayed at called Cave Lodge. He runs tours of everything in the area and has been there exploring for over 30 years. Really interesting and relaxing place to hang out for a few days.

This ultra-jibbly caterpillar stung me when I accidentally touched it

Frog eggs

Water buffalo

Tham Lod Cave

Giant orb-weaver

Skink

Auf Wiedersehen.

Kat's birthday cake

4 months later...

Oh man, it's definitely much more effective to update frequently. Too many things to blog about now...

While we were still on Borneo (yeah, it's been that long since we've updated), we saw an amazing place called The Semenggoh Wildlife Preserve. We got to see orangutans up close which had been reintroduced to the wild after being rehabilitated. This was a treat for little Katharina who's quite the monkey fanatic. She uploaded a bunch of photos of this experience to her facebook page if you'd like to see photos.

Andrew and Jen Adair visited us in Thailand at the end of October for about 3 weeks. We were able to do a lot of really fun activities and see a lot of beautiful places in Thailand. We started in Chiang Mai, went to Chiang Dao, then to Sukhothai, then Bangkok, Krabi Town, Ao Nang, Tonsai, and ended in Koh Phi Phi. We had so much fun with Andrew and Jen. It was such an awesome experience. Kat and I got to see a lot of places that we had never been to either. Who knew that Bangkok actually has some pretty parts? Again, if you want to see pictures you can check out Kat's facebook.

Since we've been back in Chiang Mai we've just been working our lives away. We came back in the middle of the school semester, but Kat was lucky enough to find a job where a teacher had just quit before the end of the term. She's teaching 4th and 5th grade. It's been a little difficult for her at times because some of the kids aren't very well behaved. But it pays OK and the semester is up at the beginning of March. At this point she's not sure if she will continue there next semester. We shall see.

I have been doing hourly work for a company called NES. It's the type of school we were working in when we were here before. You get paid hourly and the classes are much smaller with more motivated students. Doesn't pay very well, but it's not too bad. I'm teaching Medical English to a doctor right now, GED Science Prep to a high school student, and a couple General Conversation classes.

We've been doing small trips here and there. We went mountain biking on Doi Suthep (the biggest mountain in Chiang Mai) with a company a few weeks ago. It was super fun, but when we were right at the end of the whole trip, Kat had a crash and landed on her face. She broke her helmet and got a few deep cuts on the inside and outside of her lips. We went to the hospital and she had to have 13 stitches altogether.  The cuts are healing well now, just a little red still.

Coffee plantation on the way down Doi Suthep

The one that required 10 stitches is on the inside of her lower lip

We did another activity that's super popular for tourists in Chiang Mai called Flight of the Gibbon. We actually won tickets to this and the mountain biking trip from a climbing competition we participated in, awesomely enough. It was a lot of fun. You fly from tree to tree on zip lines that go really fast. It was in a really beautiful and jungly area about 2 hours from the city. But very expensive. We'd never done it before because of how much it costs, although we'd heard many times about how fun it is.

We actually saw real gibbons

A couple weeks ago we visited a friend and one of Kat's old students, May, in a small town called Fang. May has opened her own restaurant where she serves various versions of Khao Soi. Khao Soi is a noodle dish that's made with yellow curry and is specific to Chiang Mai / Northern Thailand. The food was very good and we had fun hanging out with May and checking out the city and the beautiful countryside.

Hot springs in Fang

We celebrated my birthday with some friends. Kat surprised me with an awesome cake she had a little bakery in town make. It was a beautiful cake with three little Pokemon (Pokemen?). The sad part was when we went camping that evening, Kat had put the cake in the tent under all of our things and I didn't know it was there. I knelt down on a sleeping bag while trying to get something out of the tent and totally squished the cake. Totally.

Before

After

At a buffet called Shabushi with our friend Beau. The food comes by on a conveyor belt. Super fun!

Last weekend went climbing at Crazy Horse Buttress, which is the closest climbing area to Chiang Mai, about a 45-minute drive from the city. We stayed with some friends at a place not too far from the climbing area called John's Huts. It's a small bungalow operation that's built into the side of a fairly steep hill. We had a lot of fun hanging out with our friends and watching the sunrise in the morning.

We moved into our own apartment. Right in the downtown on the 10th floor. It has amazing views of the city and Doi Suthep (and an extra bedroom / sofa bed for visitors, hint hint, wink wink).

The big temple is Wat Chedi Luang, built in the 1300s

That brings us up to date.