Monday 19th November - Sunday 25th November

This week went pretty smoothly. All our lessons went to plan although some of the kids have started being really cheeky with us! They hide under the tables and play "boxing" with each other (really their just fighting) but with our language barrier we cant tell them off and they can't tell us what happened. With year 1 on Monday though none of them were listening to us so their teacher made five of them huddle round and do squats as their punishment! Again, slightly different to at home…and if you send them out the classroom they think you're telling them they can have a break and they go play on the playground! Other than that though, the lessons have gone well and the kids are starting to learn the topics were teaching! On Wednesday, all the teachers had a conference/exhibition in Chiang Mai so school was shut. So on our midweek day off we went to the resort and had a swim and read our books, stopping for lunch in ThaTon on the way home. On Thursday evening the principal Aree took us home with her so we could go swimming where her husband coaches. So we went along thinking that there was a swimming pool in her village but no…she has a 25m swimming pool in her back garden!!! So we watched the kids swimming, some of them were pretty good. One is trying to get onto the Thai youth squad. They then gave us dinner and ample amounts of Leo beer and Thai whiskey.

Saturday there was another festival up at the temple in Sanpakha! So we went up in the afternoon and all the teachers were there. We gave the temple an offering and had to pray with everyone again (were getting pretty good at that now!). Won, Somsin and Ploy (2 of the teachers and our neighbour) then took us to a temple up the road that you can see for miles! It looks like a massive bell! It was amazing, so different to all the other temples. They told us that it wasn't funded by the government and that's why it was so different. It's on the top of a hill and so the views of our village and the surrounding rice fields were stunning! We then headed back to the temple in our village for the rest of the festival. Ploy left us briefly and we got kidnapped by the village elderly women and made to eat! And then the party started and everyone was drinking and dancing, they had a live band. It was really good fun! The ladies tried to teach us Thai dancing but gave up pretty quickly as we were no where near getting the hang of it! So a lady who had consumed too much whiskey got us to dance like her which was more like doing step aerobics! Mel was even made to try octopus! Luckily it was dark so she threw the rest of it into the trees it wasn't to her taste!

Sunday was pretty relaxed. We went back to the resort for a swim and then met up with Erin (she used to work at the resort and now teaches English once a week at our school) for lunch. Then the waitress at the restaurant gave us a lift home! It was lucky we stopped at the resort as it meant we could pick up a package that the Baileys had sent us so were all ready for December to open our Spongebob advent calendars (their currently in the fridge so they don't melt!)