Riding Bikes..........

just out of town and we saw this cute wooden shack restaurant. The fish was kind of gross but it looked out over a river and a temple. Pretty................

Tai Rom Yen motorbike rally!

Tai Rom Yen, National Park. Last Sunday, we rented motorbikes and drove to this National Park. The water was great and we got in for the Thai price after we told them we were teachers = awesome.
It was Chinese New Year and a lot of families were here on their holiday--notice no Thai people in swimsuits. All the locals went swimming in their normal clothes and stared at us when we went in our risque one piece suits. Just don't like the feeling of wet jeans.

The lady in the picture was the first of many people who brought us plates of food. Many families waved us over and wanted to shared their chicken, papaya salad, and Thai wiskey. Thai people are constant snackers and probably thought it was sad that we didn't bring food with us. It was a really good day in Thailand. Yay!

More murals from Wat Suan Mokk

More murals from Wat Suan Mokk

Chaiya!

Chiaya, Thailand. We visited Wat Suan Mokk, a buddhist wat and international meditation retreat. People come from all over for the monthly 10-day silent meditation retreat offered here. The men and women are kept separate ad you are not even supposed to look other people in the eye as you stare, sit, and sleep. I kept thinking that if they added aches all over your body, it would be kind of like the 10 days I had dengue fever. I stared, sat, and slept a lot.

There is a hall that had some interesting murals about Buddhism and other beliefs and a giant concrete boat called the "Dharma ship". It had a rock garden and a giant bell tower. It made me want to sail away on the S.S. Dharma.

The spacey hippie monk painting is the famous monk that founded the wat. He died 15 years, or so ago, and his picture is found in many places.

School Blessing

The company I work for, Super English, recently got blessed by monks. It had been a while, so it needed to be blessed again.

School Blessing

The little junior monks were so cute. They are just part-timers getting merit for themselves and their family. During the week, they are the normal cute/rowdy/slightly obnoxious/sweet boys in class. On the weekend--monkalicious. One of the mini-monks even is a student at Super English--so proud! Freshly shorn and sooooooooo cute! They did a very good job. When they would do something un-monk-like, like reveal their feet from under their robes, an adult would come over and correct them. After the ceremony they played with the box of action figures at Super English and pretended to kill each others G.I. Joe toy. Not very monk-like but what can you do. You're 8.
After the monks gave us their (half-hour) blessing (A droning chant that took me to my happy place), people gave them food and other monk essentials so we could get merit. The monks take these merit buckets and distribute them to the poor.
One picture is of super staff members that attended the blessing (very early Saturday morning, not everybody made it).

Dinner at the Kesorn's!

Kesorn--the most fabulous Thai teacher ever--(she's the one standing on front of her beautiful garden, which is actually a concrete garage).Kesorn invited us to her house for dinner. Her husband works for the state, hence, the blue uniform. They eat on the ground with a low table. Thais typically eat with communal dishes in the center that everybody takes food from. Kesorn showed us how to make Tom Yum soup or, more appropriately, showed Codie how to make Tom Yum soup. I had the pleasure of hanging with her husband as he surfed satellite television. The highlight was, as he was trying to be an excellent host, we watched 20 minutes of an Indonesian station. After this time, I commented that I didn't know he spoke Indonesian. He had been thinking the whole time that it was in English and was trying to find something I would like. Oh, the joys of being overly polite. You can also see in the photos the King on a calendar. The King's presence is in every room in the house. They love the guy.

Testing 1...2....3

I thought I should post this as I am finding out that the semester is winding down for many students and teachers in the US. We are on the precipice of summer vacation here in Thailand. Two weeks left! Woohoo! COdie and I have plans to head out to Nepal for a month to hang with sherpas and walk a lot. I mean wakl until your feet start to cry out "Please stop abusing me" but you still keep walking.....practically a month of walking and eating daal. We're totally psyched.
Life here has been filled with English testing in high school and island exploration on the weekends.

Testing in Thailand, for spoken English, consists of going out in the hall with students and having them recite a dialogue with follow up questions. You can't imagine how many times I had students order a hamburger from me with no ketchup. The best is when you can actually pull off a bit of a conversation and you feel like "Yeah, this kid could totally hang at a Mc Donalds in America" but the funniest ones are the slackers who understand nothing you are saying to them and just say "yes" to every question you ask. I guess you can't reach each of the 1200 students you teach.
As far as the aunubans (5-6 year olds) went though, it was teaching as usual.
"Do you like dinosaurs?"
"Yes I do."
Cue dinosaur impression.

Happy birthday to us! After testing we hit up Koh Phan Ngan and swam in waves to our hearts content. Sigh. Chalk up number seventy thousandth beautiful Thai sunset.

Korean BBQ

Want to know how to go into a food coma? Go to Korean BBQ in Surat Thani. For the low price of $3 you get your very own blast furnace, a salad bar featuring all the mayonnaise you could ever want, and a chance to grill all the various animal parts you can think of form their raw buffet of flesh (I'm talking everything form intestines to hooves and everywhere in between. That's right. You grab a basket and load it with every part of an animal you can think of before sitting down and cooking it over extreme heat and a cube of fat. They also have homemade coconut ice cream for dessert. I have never felt like passing out from food consumption until after this meal. I was sick the entire next day. Long live the BBQ!

Monkey Training School

A few weeks ago we decided to check out the Monkey Training College here in Surat Thani. I don't know what we expected but when we got there it was a small house with a pen full of monkeys. Some looked really ticked off that we were there but the three babies went ape.....or went monkey....or something. The owner let us chill with the babies for about an hour and a half as we waited for a monkey training demonstration that never happened.
What the monkey training college does is train monkeys to climb up coconut trees to harvest the coconuts (This is not a joke. This is where our coconuts come from). It seemed really odd and cruel but the man who runs the college said that the monkeys can pick one thousand coconuts a day when trained while the farmers can only pick about one hundred. He asked us what was the difference between this and a buffalo plowing a field or a horse driving a buggy. The short answer.....they're monkeys! They're like little people with nasty fingernails and strange odors who sometimes like to throw their poop at you.
I have to say, it was pretty weird to have a monkey climbing on my head, trying to crawl into my shirt, and sticking its fingers in my ears. If you want to try out this experience at home get a small child, cover him with hair, give him nail extensions and let him jump out of a tree on your head. Same thing.

Break bone fever can't break me.....

Hey all....I'm not dead. In fact, we're both alive and rested after a week off of school here in Surat Thani. It was exam weeek so spoken English was canceled. Canceled classes=island hopping in the Andaman Sea for Caleb and Codie. We spent the last few days on a tiny island called Koh Libong. We spent the week looking for manatees (no such luck) and snorkeling among the eels, jelly fish, and pretty much an aquarium of tropical fish. We're not ones to just look so we also ate the best fish we have had since coming here to Thailand three nights in a row. My rash and spots have now turned to a nice glowing tan and Codie was able to celebrate her birthday morning on a deserted beach. Pretty nice.
One highlight of the week was taking a longtail boat to another island, Koh Muk, and swimming through an 80 meter cave to an innner lagoon to swim some more. It was beautiful and a little scary when our guide's flashlight broke and we were swimming in pitch dark through a cave. I had multiple thoguhts of drowning and/or being eaten by a sea monster.

New Year's Fever!

What's covered with white spots and red all over?
Me!
Fresh back from my fourth visit to the doctors here in Surat Thani (who have to date prescribed me with five tubes of cream. three powders for digestions, two sets of antibiotics, and an arsenal of other pills that have yet to be fully explained to me) I have an official diagnosis. Dengue Fever.
"What's Dengue Fever?" you might ask. Well, to contract this special Oregon Trail-esque disease (right up there with cholera, the pox, and scarlet fever.....sadly, I have actually had scarlet fever too) you get bit by an infected mosquito and get really sick (nausea, high fever, diarrhea, sweats, chills, loss of weight) culminating in an itchy red rash with white spots all over your body. It's also called the "bone-break" disease (sounds like a WWF move) since you have great pain in your bones and joints. Imagine a really bad fever where you feel delusional and when you walk you feel like your legs are going to snap in two with each step. That's been the holiday season here for me over the past week! 2009! Wooohooo!

Low points included trying to teach last week one day with full blown 102 degree temperature and then getting hit by a tuk tuk on the bike ride home from school. Luckily the tuk tuk only grazed me and I was fine albeit delusional to the point where I caught up to the tuk tuk on my bike and tried to explain to him, close to tears from feeling so miserable, how it was "not OK to hit bicyclists in the bike lane just because you want to get in front of one car". All this was said in broken Thai and English which probably came across as "No. Hit. I die. Very sad. Understand?"
As I am recovering I am covered in spots giving me the youthful glow of an Oompha Loompha with acne. Hopefully the rash and fever are on their way out so I can write about more adventures soon. While you're waiting, check out the Cambodian infused psychedelic rock band "Dengue Fever" from LA. We saw them at the Eugene Celebration a few years ago and danced. We figure this is the disease coming back to get us for mockingly dancing to a band of its name 3 years ago. Curse you dancing fever!