Ode to my Thai masage lady.

Now THAT was a Thai massage. Deep in the back roads of Bangkok, I have finally found a real Thai massage. I had some lovely little women in Chiang Mai loosen me up and bit and twirl my legs around and even get a crack every once in a while. That was nothing. She was the real deal. In the beginning they asked me if I wanted hard or light. In the past, it's almost never been hard enough (my blind Japanese anma masseuse being the exception). I had sweet little Japanese and Thai women crack the knuckles and strain away trying to soften the cement block that is my back. But not this time. I answered "Hard Hard please!". From the start I wondered if I had made the right decision. I now know what boiled chicken feels like when its having its meat pulled off the bone. I've never enjoyed so much pain in all my life. That robust 5 foot-even Thai woman massaged me so painfully and deeply that it tickled my bones. I actually laughed half way through her massage. I was elbowed and kneed and yanked on and contorted and stepped on - repeatedly - and it was bliss. She made my back crack more than my old chiropractor. Anyone who's tried to crack my back can testify to the enormity of the task. She made my body do things it hasn't done in years. It hurt to walk home because my calf muscles weren't sure what to do. They were stunned! She bullied my shoulder muscles so much they can't even gather the strength to tense up again as I write this. I had a one hour massage. The owner tried to convince me that 2 hours will fix me better. Could I possibly handle two hours straight of that torturous angel? I'll find out. I'm hooked.

Occupational Hazards: Snot and Being Unable to Get "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" Out of My Head

We've just spent our first week in Bangkok and there's been a surprise or two but we're both as happy as pigs in caca. On the roller coaster that just keeps on going, we arrived in Bangkok overloaded with luggage and a little apprehensive about our new arrangements. We arrived at our new apartment and were ecstatic. For once it was just like the pictures! Our place is in Thonburi, on the other side of the river from the craziness of Bangkok. Its covered in trees and greenery. the view from our balcony is no longer just concrete and soulless building after soulless building. It's a varied mixture of green hues and district houses and the bangkok skyline in the background. Amenities like a pool, fitness room, laundry room, tennis courts, delivery services for convenient store items are going to make this place really hard to leave. The staff is bend-over-backwards helpful. The help us find our way around and the very business savvy owner helps to make sure we don't get overcharged for things like gyms and tailors.


In terms of work, well, that's been a whirlwind. Our company has three schools - a bilingual school and 2 Thai schools. Monday, on our first day of work, we went to the bilingual school. It was the wrong one. No worries, our new boss greeted us and let us know about our mistake. It worked our well as we needed to go to a doctor and get a certificate basically verifying that we had a pulse. Maybe the living dead are a problem here in Thailand. It's something to consider for our emergency kit. You can never be too prepared. So we got a ride to the doc's, got our certificate, and headed to our assigned Thai school. Our assigned school was not a bad school, however in comparison to the bilingual school, the differences were not subtle. The bilingual school was huge and colorful with a separate playhouse that, oddly enough, resembled a Japanese love hotel. I'm pretty sure that speaks worse of the Japanese rather than the Thai. It has a fingerprint scanner for clocking in. It has an elaborate computer lab. It has a mini-Theater. Our school had an elevator, just like the bilingual school. It didn't work half the time. Our office was on the 6th floor. It had one working computer between 4 Foreign Language teachers and no printer. I was in charge of 1st - 3rd grade and Brett, 4th - 6th. We walked around, got our bearings, made friends with the very friendly staff, and made a point to learn everyone's names (or at least write them down). Truthfully, I liked the feel of the Thai school. It was more laid-back, more friendly, more relaxed and I saw the elevator as an exercise challenge. They helped us figure out which bus would basically drop us off door to door. It had only been a day but I had three days of lesson plans made out and we were settling in and ready to start teaching on Wednesday.

The next day, our boss called us early in the morning at the school. Two teachers did not come to the bilingual school as planned and they were short 2 teachers. Would we consider coming to the bilingual school? To the bilingual school we went. I am now a kindergarten teacher. We spent the first half of the day going to immigration to convert our tourist visa into that long coveted non-immigrant B visa. We are now legal. A woman from the school accompanied 3 of us teachers to the office and it was surprisingly painless. We spent the rest of the afternoon at our new school. Having missed all of the orientations, we were clueless and lost. I scrambled around looking for the week's lesson plans and mucking up the Thai names of my coworkers. I struggled with the a number of the 30 some odd idiosyncratic computers (with a big fancy printer/copier) and got my bearings. The next day, I walked into a room with 22 precious and expectant little faces and 2 stern Thai teachers helping one last little face puke all day long into a garbage can. They're adorable. They're precious. They have the attention span of goldfish. At least we have that in common. They're a large bunch of 3 year olds who can barely go to the bathroom by themselves and I don't understand "I need to pee" in Thai...yet.

I'm learning. I'm getting the hang of it. I sing about 4 different songs a day. They love it. They actually request songs. They've gotten so much more vocal just within a week. On Fridays, we get to go to the playhouse. That would be the Japanese love hotel structure that I mentioned earlier. It's, in a word, AWESOME. It's got child-sized hamster tubes going up and around the ceiling. It has slides and chutes everywhere and a pit filled with plastic balls that they swim in. We had our first bite that day in the hamster tubes. Note to self: add "Don't bite" to the lesson plan. It will be an interesting five months. Much time past that, though...I'm not too sure. I'm fearful of losing my ability to express ideas more profound than "It's red", "Let's count the books! One, two, three! Three!", and "Don't bite!".

Otherwise, Brett and I have are getting nice and settled in the apartment. He's been quite the trooper, enduring one of his most despised activities (shopping). We're learning the neighborhood. I'm getting reacquainted with Tagalog as two thirds of the foreign teaching staff at the school are Filipinos. While Mango Sticky Rice isn't as plentiful here as in Chiang Mai, cheap and wonderful food is just around the corner. I'm getting more and more comfortable with riding side-saddle on the back of the motorcycle taxis. I never tire of the scent of sambaguitas (jasmine) in the streets and taxis. Life is good. Very good indeed.

がつだぜ

I took a bus to Burma and on the way I took a nap.
I wrote myself a note saying I'd better give this one back.
And there is a lot going on underneath.
There are roots and pipes. There are drainage leaks.

After a thunder storm, Bangkok resembles a weird hybrid creature consisting of the merger of the city of Venice. without gondolas, and a wet dog. I can't explain this any better.

We went out shopping this afternoon in the lovely little area known as Khao San Road.
This place is amazing. If there is anything you have ever wanted to buy, this is the place for you to find it. A PhD in Parapsychology from Yale, no problem. A Doctor of Journalism from Berkeley, you got it. A Padi certification, a driver's license, a dog license, hell, a fish license (for your pet fish, even though it might be a dog license with the word dog crossed out and the word fish written under it in crayon).
We were looking for a tailor. We found one. I will, very soon, have shirts that fit in the body, neck and arms (instead of the usual one of the three) and pants that go all the way to my ankles (I am not sure this has ever happened before). Maya will have two new pairs of pants for her long, lovely legs.
It stormed on our way home this evening. We got to our street, got off the bus and proceeded to wade home. Yes, I said wade. The water in the street was, at the deepest point, up to about my mid-shin.
Maya was, in a word, nonplussed.
I thought it was great. I thought about all the oil and trash and sewage that was teeming in that water that we were walking through in the dark after just having bought tailor made clothes and I felt like such a rugged adventurer. Indiana Jones, look out!
Oh, and I ate McDonald's today and I feel really bad about it.
What else? On the whole, work is good. After our first day at the school we were supposed to work at we got transfered to another school. Now, instead of being an English teacher, I am a sixth grade homeroom teacher. I am teaching science, computer skills, math, English, health, reading and writing, and I am running the English club. Maya is teaching kindergarten at the same school and has a class full of kids who are adorable "when they are sleeping."
Maya has been teaching since last Wednesday, I started teaching on Thursday.
Tomorrow we are going to venture back out into the wilds of Bangkok to go searching for a mythical power transformer that can covert the 220 volt current that pulses through Bangkok's power veins into the much tamer 110 volt current that most of the computer accessories we own can handle.
I also plan on sleeping late tomorrow and having a dream that I am a race car passenger. I love the word race car, its a palindrome. I palindrome I.

Love and Lickens...

How to Teach 37 Thai Teenage Monks

Consider the following:

• Monks are not allowed to touch or be touched by females.
• Monks are not allowed to pass or be passed anything (piece of paper, etc.) by females.
• You are female.
• During your lesson plan you are expected to guide these student monks into different positions (standing in a line, pairing together, turning around, sitting in groups on the floor)
• During your lesson you are expected to give them sheets of papers and different class materials and get these things back from them.
• During your lesson you are expected to have them come up to the class and display, in "Wheel-of-Fortune", Vanna White style picture cards, flipping the cards over when you need them too to display to the large class the other side as well.
• It became evident from the beginning that you can make the 13 year old a monk but you can't take the 13 year old out of the monk. Boys at 13, monk or otherwise, are very easily distracted.
• It became evident from the beginning that you can make the 16 year old a monk but you can't take the 16 year old out of the monk. Boys at 16, monk or otherwise, are very easily distracted by females.
• There is no air-conditioning in this temple school classroom.
• There is, however a bizarre type of opportunistic wind that blows in through the windows at just the exact angle required to blow your skirt up while you were trying to teach 37 easily distractable teenage monks...3 days in a row... with a different skirt each day. Divine intervention? Who knows.
  
• Whatever lesson plan you've spent 3 hours making, you have no idea as to whether or not it will be appropriate for their level as students change.
• Construction is going on right outside your window.
• A drumming class is going on just downstairs.
• Fans either don't work at all or only work on a speed that makes you fear decapitation.

So how do you do it? Pfft... you tell me.



Seriously. I think its incredibly uniqueexperience. One that I'm sure to brag about for the rest of my life, ie: "Oh, that reminds me of that time I taught 37 teenage Thai Buddhist monks how to discuss their favorite forms of exercise in English!" It's certainly not easy. But beneath the robes and the shaved heads, they're not that different from any other group of kids I've worked with in the past. Its fabulously challenging to work around the cultural restraints of monk to woman interaction (the men have it soo much easier in that respect). Its wonderfully rewarding to see these mini-monks "get it". To somehow, irregardless of all of the above, get them to do your bidding and see them excited to know the answer despite having sat through 4 similar English lessons prior to yours. Sure, it's humbling to have things not go as you planned and force you to reevaluate your methods and how you could have done it better. Its great to watch our peers and learn from their successes and mistakes. We are able to appreciate our different styles and watch our personalities come through in the teaching. We are also able to watch each other progress from looking like deer-in-headlights from the very 1st peer teaching practice to pulling off the most complicated lessons as cool as a frozen cucumber. The whole experience has been grand. It keeps you on your toes, forces you to be creative, and reinforces your ability to smile despite the proverbial fan chucking feces everywhere. In the words of Mastercard.... priceless.

so I said to myself, I said....

Whew! It has been a rock'n roll ride through the past few weeks. Since about a week before our departure from Japan the attempt to relocate to Thailand has been a whirlwind of headaches, new experiences, and amazement.
As I think is pretty evident in Maya's posts, nothing has really gone the way we would have hoped. In fact, I would almost say that they have gone contrary to what we would have hoped.
We started this adventure off under the false impression that two well-educated, fairly intelligent, experienced travelers would have little to no trouble handling the variables that would be thrown at us in the course of our relocation.
Man, were we wrong. Completely wrong. Terribly wrong. Magnificently wrong. Extravagantly wrong. Magnanimously wrong. Unilaterally wrong. Deliciously wrong. Effervescently wrong. Beautifully wrong. Profoundly wrong. Definitively wrong. Comprehensively wrong. Incredibly wrong. Unprecedentedly wrong. Mind-blowingly wrong. Unbelievably wrong. Infinitely wrong. Almost dead wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
From the initial problems with our visa status, the one that we spent three months working on only to be shot down four days before we left at the Thai Consulate in Osaka, to the problems we had at Kansai airport and the thirty kilograms of near and dear possessions that we donated to the airport janitorial staff as a result of our misunderstanding of the baggage weight limits and the charges that applied to overweight baggage, to the last minute switching of our transportation from Bangkok to Chiang Mai from an overland bus to a flight that only allowed 15 kg per passenger (we had cut our luggage down to about 30 kg each on the flight over from Japan). The abandoning of most of our things with a man we didn't know so he could keep them in his office in Bangkok for the three weeks that we were in Chiang Mai because we just couldn't afford to pay any more excess baggage fees, to me getting a little too sauced on Thai whiskey the first night in Chiang Mai and wandering out into an unfamiliar city alone which allowed for the worst thing (and the luckiest) that has happened to us yet on this trip. If you don't know what that it is, I will tell you now. My wallet was stolen somewhere, at some point, along the way of me drunkenly trying to find my way back to the hotel we were staying in. I was found by one of the others that was taking our TEFL course with us as he was on his way home at about four in the morning, about four hours after I had said my good nights and left to go home. It was the worst thing that happened because my ATM card to the account that has all Maya's and my money in it was in the wallet that was stolen, it was the luckiest thing for two reasons:

• I didn't die.
• There was very little money in the wallet since I had given 98% of the money that was in my wallet to Maya when she left a little earlier in the evening.

More bad news, UFJ, the bank I have my Japanese account with, doesn't seem to recognize that people travel and that, when they are doing that, sometimes things get lost or stolen. So far the bank is refusing to reissue my ATM card while I am overseas. We are still trying to get that worked out and hoping that we will have more options when we arrive in Bangkok in less than a week.
On a more positive note, we have ridden in ox-carts, on elephants, and on bamboo rafts. We took a scooter to the top of a mountain to see a temple in the midst of a rain cloud. We have found some really cool, cheap clothing. Maya has changed colors (from white to Thai). I have changed colors (from very white to less white). I now own a new wallet (and it is very cool). We have been eating amazing food (see Maya's ravings about Mango sticky rice). I am learning to make friends with the new creatures that have set up shop in my stomach. We have found a fantastic place to live for the four months that we will be working in Bangkok. We've gone swimming in the Gulf of Thailand. We've learned some Thai phrases (though the Thai's still don't know that we are speaking Thai). And, most importantly, we are both still in very good spirits and really looking forward to the adventure to come.
Just today, we spent six hours teaching young (13 year old) Thai monks English in a monastery school. We will be doing this everyday for the rest of this week. On Saturday we are taking a trip to the Burmese border to get new tourist visas stamped into our passports. After that, back to Chiang Mai to catch a night train to Bangkok where, hopefully, Sunday morning we will be able to start settling in to our new home in Bangkok and have a little bit of permanence for about five months. We start working at our new schools next Monday and the excitement and unease about that is definitely present. And, just yesterday, we found out that our paperwork is in order and we will not be having to make a second border run in a month in order to stay in the country.
Little blessings, eh?
The best news is that I am pretty sure that it can't actually get any more difficult than it already has, so, hopefully, we are on the upward swing and it will be pretty smooth sailing from here.
But, as one of my favorite musicians once said, "Same as it ever was."

Realizations that have occurred in Thailand:

1. Mango sticky rice is, in fact, one of the greatest culinary feats humankind has ever achieved.

2. Getting blind drunk and wandering around alone looking for your bed is an acceptable idea in no country other than Japan.

3. Winged Thai termites, not unlike their Central American cousins, are dumber than Paris Hilton. And THAT, my friends, is quite an accomplishment.
Click here for the academic explanation of the navigationally-challenged bugs.
Click here for a description of the clumsy, haphazard flights.


4. The MUFJ banking system is not at all prepared to make our life any easier* when the only ATM card is lost or stolen abroad. Honestly! What do Japanese tourists do when this happens to them?
*But Brett's parents are! Thanks!!!!

5. Dave Hopkins, primary author of "Smooth Moves", does not have a firm grasp on phrasal verbs. He also has a very convoluted way of explaining grammar. He also has a piss poor proofreader.

6. Elephants are awe-inspiring. And their eyes speak volumes. I'm pretty sure I'm not just anthropomorphizing here. Really. Astounding.

7. Asking for "spicy" at a Thai restaurant is nothing to joke around with. That's not to say I won't do it again. I just better realize what exactly I'm getting into.

8. Seriously. The Mango Sticky Rice.

9. Those fugly Croc knock-offs actually are comfortable and sensible. There are, however, still very fugly.

10. This place really is the land of smiles. I don't go 20 meters down the street without one.

11. Brett's "finding motivation to do something" looks a lot like sleeping. In fact, it is.

12. Brett has realized that I am more beautiful than he could have ever imagined. I didn't make that up, Folks. He said it himself with very little prodding.

13. Brett is smarter than he looks.