Hey everyone, I hope you all are well. What a hectic few weeks I've had! Non - stop I tell you. For the past week all us teachers have had a week off as on monday the children were all practicing hard for the inter-school sports day on the tuesday and wednesday. Then on thursday and friday there has been a 2-day buddhist bank holiday - woohoo! So we've all had a nice week off. Tuesday was spent at sports day with all the kids. Greg and I were dragged into being a part of the opening sports day parade and so were practicing hard all last week. Greg had to carry a flag and I was a sort of cheerleader, carring and twirling a big stick! It was very amusing. On the tuesday I had to wake up at 5am - can you believe? - to get my make-up done and be ready at the school by 7am cos the parade started at 8am. My make-up and hair took an hour and a half! It acutally looked quite impressive when it was finished although I surprisingly looked rather asian. The parade was absolutely chaotic. Every school on Koh Phangan - there must be abotu 8 in total - had a marching band (made up of drummers and some percussion), flag carriers, cheerleaders and then all of the kids from the school who were running and who weren't walking behind. The whole procession took about an hour and a half to go about half a mile to the sports ground and around. It was extremely hot even at that time of the morning and poor Greg and I were sweating like anything! However it was very amusing when all the Thai people kept taking pictures of just me and greg as I don't think they had ever seen farang (foreigners) in the parade before! Even the mayor - who we had to walk and salute past - looked impressed! The two days went really well, it was all just running but there were a lot of races to get through. Each day went on from about 10am to about 4pm with two hours for lunch in the middle. Some of the best bits were defintely seeing all the different school's cheerleading teams doing dance-offs with each other while the rest of their school cheered, booed and sang! All the cheerleaders wore some amazing brightly coloured costumes, look at my pics to see more. At the end of the second day there was a prize- giving ceremony but unfortunately there was a torrential rainstorm right in the middle of it! However, no matter as Chaloklam - my school - won!!! Very pleased. I think it was definitely the massive banners Greg and I had made with the children and us being in the parade that did it! On wednesday night a lot of us went out and Haad Rin was absolutely packed and it wasn't even full moon yet. The island is definitely getting so much busier in general which is a shame as some of these farang are absolute prats. We all feel like thai people now getting anooyed at farang! It was a good night until I unfortunately and very annoyingly got my bag slashed and stolen with my phone and camera in it as well as some money. I looked everywhere in the club for the rest of the night but alas it was gone. Very upset. However luckily, my camera had only 5 pics on it and even though I lost my lovely british samsung phone it was only my thai sim card in it, not my orange one, so I mostly still have all of your numbers. On friday Greg, Dorette, her boyfriend, Steph and I hired kayaks and snorkels for the day and went on a little trip around part of the island which was fun. The snorklling was good even though the sea was very choppy. Really looking forward to going diving in Koh Tao now in a couple of weeks. Tonight is our 3rd and final Full Moon party. I'm not so keen on going after what happened on wednesday but hopefully it should be a good night anyway. Next week we are back to teaching but we only have 10 days left - can't believe it! My time here has gone so very quickly it's incredible. Somehow I think our last 2 weeks left with the kids will mainly be spent playing games and having leaving parties!! I'm really going to miss them, especially after seeing how far they've come and how well we've both got to know all of them. For examply our year 1 class now knows the alphabet, shapes, emotions and command words from knowing absolutely nothing! And they are all so very cute! I will try and put as many pics as possible on here of them to show you all. Anway I best be off - got to get some lunch but hopefully I've started to update my website again a bit better. Love to you all, Sam xxx