Hello there,

At school and once again all the children have run away (well my year have gone to military camp) so I'm not teaching all day.

I guess I should cover new years quickly, headed to bangkok, stayed in a hostel on the ks road about 10 of us in all. spent the day mooching round the market and eating western food and napping in recovery from the overnight journey. We were pretty lucky, after arriving at 5 am we managed to find a hostel that would let us in the rooms from 6am and still only charge us for the next evening! After meeting up for a bite to eat we all headed for buckets. Not much to say about the night except we all got very drunk, ended up chatting away to lots of random people and even in the chaos we managed to come back together as a group at various points in the evening!

Counted in the new year at the irish bar to some random band playing and then headed outside to join in the huge and mental street party that had broken out on the road. Lots of dancing, singing and drinking continued for most of the night and while some of us ended up back in gazebo to end the night others continued to enjoy the buckets. The only real unscheduled event was jenny managing to cut up her foot on a broken bottle and coming over to us with blood pouring from it, had any of us been sober I'm sure it would have felt quite traumatic but we all took our roles in cleaning her up, mine was role of hugger, finding myself far to hazy to actually do anything useful, she was cleaned up and sent back into the street to dance!

About 5.30 am I found myself dancing away in gazebo at which point lizzy and I decided to make an exit over the road to the hostel. A great night was had by all unfortunately i had a nice reminder the next day about why I dont drink that much very often and I got to spend new years day in bed until about 5pm when a banana shake seemed to do the trick and banish the hangover! Dont think I've felt that rough since new years day 2007! Rotten! I blame the crazy thai redbull.

Anyhow, since I've been back Ive set and marked my mid term exams and last weekend we all had to head to the laos border for our visa run.

So after spending a night on the Thai border (in Nong Kai) we headed over friendship bridge to vientienne and the other interns. AYC had organised for all of us to do the visa thing together so while they dealt with our passports we all settled into a hotel for the day and night in Laos. while those who had bused it from bangkok got some kip the north easterners and a few others found a shop selling wine and baguettes and made good use of that for the rest of the day and evening! Gotta love Laos and its frenchness!

A very nice day and evening was had by all, drinking wine, eating fresh bread and catching up with one another. the next day we headed back to the border to get our visas (some of which are correct and some of which (including mine) are not correct and will take another trip to Bangkok to fix) I headed down to Koen Kaen with the others not wanting to land back in sakon nakhon late and night and stranded at the bus station. We spent the night there and caught an english movie (Gullivers travels) eat pizza and ice cream and headed to bed. Arrived back in Sakon Nakhon yeaterday and back at school today.

Been a very nice day except I found out the school term dosn't end till march 18th and not feb 28th as i had been told. Totally gutted about this as that extra time was the time i was gonna use to go do volunteer work in Laos, now havng to rethink my plans! didnt get to the islands last tme i was here so thats a must for me this time and i really wanna catch a full moon partywhile i'm there. think now with just 4 weeks i may just head to chang mai for a few days and then spend the rest of the time island hopping! would waste so much time in just traveling to vang vieng to join the community school, would take at least a week! sucks though! Anyway, I need to see what i can do with the time i'll have now, some re planning to do i'm afraid. Well I'm off out of school for lunch with jenny and jiep, noodles in the nice place and then an iced coffee i think! yum! and no year 6 to spoil my day this afternoon! hehe