See, the trouble with keeping an exciting adventure journal is that you have to stop having amazing adventures long enough to write about all the ones you have been experiencing! Clearly, I am having difficulties with this.

Last time I wrote I was fresh off the bus from Vientienne, rosy-cheeked and ready to move to my new apartment and start my job. Now, I have clothes strewn all over, snacks in the cupboard, ice tea in the fridge, cleaning supplies, and a broken overhead light. In other words, I am fully moved in (and have been for about a month and a half!) The apartment is fabulous, clean, and has wonderful natural light during the day. However, I am rarely here during the day!

Before I get into talking about teaching though, I want to just mention the variety of activities and festivals I filled my time with before teaching started. The most impressive, of course, was Songkran, the festival where people celebrate the Thai New Year by throwing buckets of dirty, and sometimes icy, water all over each other. Every day I walked twenty minutes into town because riding motorbikes is too dangerous during the festival. By the time I made it about ten steps out my door, the neighborhood locals were cheerfully coming up to me with buckets, and gently pouring them all over my head. This was contrasted with the people on the moat, who took glee in tossing buckets of ice water all over you from slow-moving trucks. Needless to say, by the time I reached the city I was absolutely soaked. There was a moment, when my friends and I were in the spirit, grabbed some guns, and were running through the traffic squirting everyone, when I thought "nowhere else in the world would I be doing this right now". It's a neat feeling. However, the feeling fades after FOUR DAYS of being soaked. Some friends and I tried to escape it by heading to Pai (a small mountain town), but even there people were still "playing water" days after the festival is technically supposed to be over. I understand now, why the local expats do not get very enthused about the festival. In Chiang Mai it just means seven-ish days of being constantly wet! But it was still an incredible experience. Pai was also lovely, and I have been back already. It is total hippy-ville, but there are some great people, beautiful surroundings, and AMAZING food! The second time I went I rode my motorbike, and that is definitely the way to go. The bus ride is windy and sickening, but on the bike with the open air all around you it is just fun fun fun! I have really surprised myself with how I've taken to the motor scooters! They are small, but zippy and maneuverable through the crazy traffic of Chiang Mai, which I have also gotten used to. You will now see me weaving and puttering up to the front of the traffic line just like all the other bikes. It's good to feel like a local.

Of course, there are still SO many things I haven't seen or done yet, but I have a list and I am slowly checking things off. Once I got back from Pai my adventures slowed down a bit because I officially started teaching! The summer classes we had were great, because they were small and accelerated, so there was a lot of material to cover. Three hours straight was a long time to teach one class, but we got along quite well and had lots of time for games and activities. I also only had to plan ONE (long) lesson! In May the real school semester started, and it nearly blew my head off! Rather than having one class of 15 or 18 students, I now have 4 classes, with anywhere from 32 to 28 students in each one. Two of them are "English Main" classes with mixed gender groups aged 14 - 15, and the other two are "English reading" classes that are single-gender 16 year olds! That means I have an English reading class with 32, 16-year-old boys. Woah! Everything is completely different from the summer teaching. Having more kids in the classes really does make classroom management much harder, and creating four lesson plans for almost every day takes a lot more time than I imagined. Still, I like the kids and for the most part they like me too. One of my English main classes has the "honors" kids and it is a fantastic class and a joy to teach. The other class is much more of a challenge because about half of them are not interested in learning at all. I'm using lots of tricks and games, but I'm still learning how best to work with them. I have definitely gained an extreme appreciation for all of my teachers in the past! I now know how difficult their job really was. Sometimes I get overwhelmed, but then I think about some of the stuff my classmates put our teachers through and I realize that these kids, while extremely talkative, are really just normal teenagers, and could probably be a LOT worse! J I think once I get the pulse of all my classes, planning lessons for them will be easier, and work will be less stressful.

Another surprise has been the amount of "extras" thrown on top of the teaching. I am not actually teaching that many hours a week (about 18) but since we have to be at the school all day there are lots of little extra duties that they didn't tell us about when we were hired. For instance, I was told that I should run an English club on Mondays. That turned out to be okay, because there are only 9 students and it is only once a week (but that is still another lesson to plan), and then there is the "duty teacher" job that we all have once a week to come in early and monitor part of the school all day. We also have staff meetings every week, and are the resident editing service for any school memos that need to be in English. Really, all of this doesn't take much time and isn't that bad, but it definitely shows me that I didn't quite read the "fine print", or more accurately I didn't ask very many questions.

Overall I am really enjoying teaching, and learning about teaching. I also teach a few hours a week at a small language school. The teaching there is SO much different! It is one-on-one, mostly with younger Korean kids. I have really enjoyed my lessons there, because there isn't much planning involved. You just have to go with the flow, see where they are in their books, what they need help on from school, etc. However, it too has its downsides, as I feel that I don't have as much opportunity to make a huge impact with those kids.

Anyway, enough about teaching! I am still managing to fit some fun and excitement into my life. Last weekend some friends and I jumped on our bikes and rode a really nice loop around the city in the mountains. We stopped at a beautiful waterfall along the way and had a really fantastic day. I love driving on those fun, curvy mountain roads! That night we went out and found some incredible live music, and ended up dancing until 2am. I am just discovering the music scene here, but it is really incredible! There is good, live music somewhere nearly every night of the week. Not to mention tons of fun places to enjoy a more club-like dancing atmosphere. Thailand continues to impress me at every turn. I'm excited to keep finding good food, and good music. I also can't wait to get out into the countryside some more. Now, though, I have to start thinking about the inevitable afternoon rain. Monsoon season is fast approaching, and I am taking the opportunities to practice safe driving on wet roads now, so that when it is pouring in the morning during my commute I won't panic. I just love that everything here seems new. I am constantly having experiences that I would never have in the States, and I am still loving it. The only things I am missing are friends and family.

Come visit!

I promise you'll love it.

Choke dii kaa! (Cheers)