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| Wandee and I |
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| My cool new wallet from Wandee |
Today was our third to last day teaching. One of my students came in and gave me and the two other teachers, Charlie and Becca a gift from Chang Mai. The gifts were really cool they are little keychains of dolls. Once we walked downstairs, Wandee, the Assistant Director of the program and one of my students, also gave us each a personalized gift. It was so sweet. Becca got a necklace, Charlie got a scarf, and I got a clutch type wallet that's super cute. I'm really sad to leave the students behind and I know a new group of teachers are coming in so I feel very defensive of my students well-being now. They bring us coffee and cookies every morning. Even these delicious homemade cookies that Wandee makes and she even gave me the recipe...in English. She keeps asking me where I am going after this and I would love to stay and teach them, but I'm not sure I would be allowed to anyways because now they have some type of thing with LanguageCorps. I will however, always keep that connection. Me, Charlie, and Becca are trying to work out what to give as gifts. Apparently, watches mean death and shoes are bad luck. Not that we'd give thirty students either of those things, but just so you know. Those are more cultural faux paux for the Chinese-Thai though.
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| My Chang Mai Doll |
After teaching, I had my last Thai class and I have to say I still suck pretty bad, despite having an indecipherable dream in Thai. We have a test tomorrow, but you only need %50 and its open book. Aside from all the paperwork I still need to catch up on, my one-on-one is done, ad lesson planning for Friday will pretty much be 90 minutes of games, singing, and dancing to Gangnam style which was requested by the students. Speaking of which it was the director's husband who requested it. Yesterday, he broke out into song starting off with a surprisingly good rendition of Tom Jones' Sex Bomb. Followed by something by the Beatles and then We Are The Champions by Queen. Fucking Awesome. That said all of my requirements for the course have to be done by Friday.
Karisa and I did our lessons today with the bar girls and again we had a lot of fun. We went around five and obviously the bar wasn't too busy. That said, the girls gathered around us when we'd start teaching a particular student and most of the girls wanted to get involved. When potential customers would walk by outside, all the girls would turn maybe even yell out 'sexy man', but overall they seemed to be weighing their options and going with the English lesson which was pretty awesome. There is a huge variety of levels. The ladyboy, the tomboy (opposite of ladyboy) and the manager are probably the most fluent. I taught a girl I hadn't met yesterday whose name was Tong and although she could speak English, she told me she wanted to go to school and wanted to know everything. It seems odd, since she could speak but she couldn't really read and the words she knew she didn't exactly understand. For example, she had the days of the week and the months of the year written in a little notebook, but she didn't exactly understand what they meant. I find that is the hardest thing about beginners. To a native speaker something so simple beyond explanation needs to be explained and learning how to do that is really difficult. For example, one of the reasons Thai is so hard for me is because when I try and form sentences in my head I am constantly searching for silly English words that don't exist in Thai, like prepositions and auxiliaries aka all the random shit most native speakers never even think about. So when a student asks what the word 'to' or 'although' means, how the fuck are you supposed to explain it. Meanwhile translating to Thai you leave out half the words so if I want to say "what is your name?" it translates to "khun cheu mai ka" which says 'you name ?--speaker is female.The good thing is they don't really have possessives. There is no, you(plural), your, mine, ours, you're, their, etc. which potentially makes the language less confusing to learn. The kicker is one word has one of any given 5 tones, so the word maa can mean 'to come', 'horse', or 'dog' depending on the tone in which you say it. There's also two more tones you can pronounce maa that don't mean anything at all. Language is kind of a bitch and now that I do so much modeling of everything all the time, I feel like everyone in the world should just learn sign language instead.
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| The Ohh La La Bar Girls |
Anyways that being said, the bar girls have asked us to come back tomorrow, so hopefully we can bring some friends to help us.
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