A new semester, a new beginning. And NEW FRIENDS!!

(April-May 30)

In between all my adventures during the summer break, I still had plenty of time in Sawankhalok to spend time with some of my favorite people. The girls I was teaching a special class to took me to the mall in Phitsanulok one day, a two hour bus ride (which doesn’t include the time it took for our bus to break down, then waiting at the Sukhothai bus terminal for an hour waiting for a new bus to take us to PhitLok), just to take me out to a sushi lunch. Love those girls.

Also with summer means that Tara and Steven are finished teaching at Sawananan and were heading back to America. Their departure was slightly lightened by gaining a new best friend. There is a woman at the night market who sells rice porridge who I visit regularly to teach her English. My first night in Sawankhalok after both Tara and Steven left and Be was out of town, I was on my own…at first it was a relief because I felt like I hadn’t had time to myself in months. But when I went to the night market to go teach my friend English and her shop was closed, I all of a sudden felt really lonely. I grumpily walked to the end of the market and got the same meal I had the first night I was on my own in Sawankhalok six months ago from the same shop: Pork basil with a fried egg, my comfort food that will always and forever remind me of late night dinners with my dad after working at his restaurant all night. Needless to say, I was feeling a little homesick. I went to the grocery store on my way home, and I was leaving the parking lot, I heard a familiar voice calling “Koriiiin” in a terrible Thai accent. It was BaNee, the woman who sells rice porridge at the night market! I asked her why she closed her shop that day, and she told me she was taking a few days off, and invited me to come with her to a temple the next day in Phitsanulok. Desperate for an outing and a friend, I eagerly said yes and canceled my special class for the next day. She picked me up early in the morning for what I didn’t know was going to be an all day adventure. Our first stop was a temple way up in the mountains of Phitsanulok. I forgot that PhitLok bordered Laos, until BaNee’s friends that was driving us pointed to the mountains we were approaching and said that past those mountains is Laos. I had no idea! The temple was unlike any I’d ever seen. The Buddha shrine was covered in these small brightly colored stones that were carved into Buddhas. Honestly, they resembled clear plastic toys you could get in a cereal box, and just seemed kind of strange.
BaNee’s friend showed me around the temple (he goes there often) and told me the history of the temple and the colorful plastic Buddhas. I wish I could relay this information in my blog, but the whole thing was in Thai, so the little of it I understood, I can’t remember. Sorry. But he showed me this huge collection of colorful stones that were on display all over the temple. He insisted that they were from nature, which I didn’t believe for a second because of their variety in colors. Nature doesn’t make stones those colors. After lunch with the women who work at the monastery, we returned to temple. BaNee’s friend told us that if we “tambun” 500 bhat, we would receive a relic from the monk. 500 bhat is a bit steep…(about 17 dollars), but I was really happy that they took me on this trip so I figured it was a worthy donation. BaNee, her other friend P’Kwang, and myself each chipped in 500 bhat. One by one, the monk handed us each a huge ugly stone in exchange for our donation. We sat there for a minute, disappointed and confused, looking at these plain old rocks you could pick up on the side of any mountain. 500 bhat for an ugly rock?? I was glad BaNee and P’Kwang were just as confused as I was, because that meant that even though the whole thing was in Thai, I hadn’t terribly misunderstood something. Then out of nowhere, this guy that I guess works at the temple came up with hammer, and started breaking my rock!

He hammered at it until it cracked in half! He broke my 500 bhat rock! BaNee and P’Kwang and I just sat kind of helpless, waiting for it to make sense. He brushed off the debris from my broken 500 bhat rock, and showed me a crevice in the middle of the rock…under the debris in the crevice was a shiny…yellow….thing. He took the shiny yellow thing out of the rock, brushed off the rest of the dust, and plopped the perfectly round bright yellow glassy stone into my hand. Then he broke open BaNee’s 500 bhat rock to reveal a purple stone, and P’Kwangs hid a red stone. Soooo everything makes sense. All those plasticy looking Buddhas are made of these colorful stones. They are somehow magically formed inside these rocks that the temple workers pull out from the side of the mountains around this temple. Some woman who could speak decent English (where was she this whole time…?) came to tell me what a yellow stone means. Surprise, it is a very lucky color and will bring me great fortune…but I can’t imagine the other colors differ in their auspiciousness.

So I totally trusted the whole thing. I believed that these rocks have been formed by some mysterious natural process…I mean, it’s Thailand. Crazy things happen here. Gullable? Maybe. But tell me, how would you put a stone like that into a natural rock, that has no pre-existing fractures? It’s not like he tapped it with a hammer and it cracked open perfectly. He had to bang on that rock for a while just to chip it down to the crevice where the gem is hidden. How do you fake that? Well, I went to Chompu’s house for dinner the next night. I told Chompu and Tdi my story and my awesome yellow stone. Tdi interrupted me mid-story, and exclaimed “No Korin, No. People who make these stones are bad people. Trust me, they are bad people. I know because I use to be one of them. I used to make these stones in Uttaradit…” This was a really cute confession by Tdi because 1. He said it in English, and 2. He’s the sweetest man I know and I can’t imagine him cheating people like that. So I still haven’t decided if I believe the temple or Tdi. I still think it’s impossible to get that gem inside a natural rock. But either way, it was a donation to the temple anyway, and so it was 500 bhat well spent.

BaNee and I praying at a temple in Pitlok

Speaking of scams….part of Sawananan being the best school in the region means we are in charge of holding yearly seminars for teachers in Sukhothai. There are only 2 other schools in the province that have farang teachers, so we have become the center for foreign languages, and have to provide training for 50 English teachers from all over Sukhothai. P’Sonya kind of mentioned this to me in the beginning of the summer break, but forgot (?) to mention until a few weeks before our seminar that the training had to be done by farang teachers, AKA, me. With Tara and Steven back in the states, Be and I were put in charge of running a three day teachers seminar. Yes, Be and I with our 4 months of teaching experiences, were going to teach all the teachers in the province, who have been teaching for 20+ years, how to teach English. Legit? Not in the slightest.

The seminar actually went surprisingly well. Overbearing me, I didn’t really let Be do much. Let’s just say this is more my cup of tea than his. Though he stayed by my side throughout the planning and execution of the camp, I ended up running all 10 made-up training sessions over the three days. Oh, did I mention, the seminar had to be about the ASEAN community? Yes, not only do I have to teach how to teach English, but I have to teach about how to teach about ASEAN in English. (ASEAN is the Association of SE Asian Nations…the Asian version of the EU, to put it simply), I know a good deal about ASEAN by now, but how to teach a three day seminar about ASEAN?? Well, I started with asking the teachers, out of the ten ASEAN nations, where does Thailand rank in terms of English proficiency? Turns out, like champs, we are competing with Cambodia for last place. And from my four day experience in Cambodia, making me a relative expert, I met more English speaking Cambodians on that trip than I did 3 weeks backpacking through Thailand. Anyway, that was a good jumping off point for the seminar, to show these jaded teachers, there is a lot of work to be done if Thailand wants to be a strong ASEAN country!! How patriotic do I sound?

After two days of literally making things up as I go to entertain these teachers, I was so exhausted. Being a one-man show for 8 hours straight is not easy or fun. Especially when I have no idea what I'm talking about. But the last day made it worth it, kind of. P’Sonya wanted to have a cocktail party, to show them how “Westerners” socialize. So (my proudest moment of this seminar), I came up with the do’s and don’ts of cocktail parties. Whereas Thai parties are a constant eating extravaganza, with plenty of whisky and karaoke, I had to face an astonished crowd and tell them there is no singing or dancing at cocktail parties. Unheard of in Thailand!! So my advice included (from, you know, all my experiences at cocktail parties) 1. Don’t expect to sit down and eat, 2. Don't expect the food to be delicious, 3. Don’t expect to be full, and 4. It’s always a good idea to keep an empty plate, so when you’re stuck in a boring conversation, you can easily exit by saying “oh those dumplings were delicious, I think I’ll go get some more”. That last one was my favorite, and I really enjoyed sharing that with the Director later at the cocktail party. So in the end, I think the teachers learned something? I was surprised my randomly good stage presence, and I think I actually pulled off being a legitimate trainer, so I sure hope they did learn something from me. I am skeptical any of them will change their teaching habits, but not to worry. The Ministry of Education is forcing our school to have another teachers seminar, of course run by farang.

At least for the next seminar, I will have new helpers. We now have two new farang teachers: Bryan and Kirk! Bryan is from the Philippines, and Kirk from America. Just starting the first week of school, and I love them already. Almost instantly, the four farang bonded together to form "The F Team". We’re still working on our individual super powers, but as a whole, we’re a pretty rad team. It’s nice to have such a tight knit group so early in the semester, and I can see already that this semester is going to be awesome.