Teaching in the Land of Smiles: A Rude Awakening

This morning we all woke up to the sound of a rooster cock-a-doodle-dooing very loudly outside our window. We all debated throwing rocks at it as it was quite loud and went on for a half an hour but didn't want to offend any local Thai's around here. It still hadn't stopped when we went down for breakfast about an hour later.

We just had our first Thai lesson. A woman and a man came to teach us and they may or may not have been married. We aren't sure. We learned a bunch of fruits and other random phrases. It's very informal teaching. They ask us what we want to know and then we go over a bunch of vocab words. We learned a couple key words like "this" and "that" and "what is that" so we can now ask questions at the market in Thai! However, understanding their answers is a whole different story.

Here are some of the pictures of NKP that didn't upload with the last post. The first picture is the Indo-China market on the banks of the Mekong. A lot of Lao come over from Laos and sell things here. The next picture is a Wat (temple) close to the Mekong in the center of town. And the last picture is the Mekong! Not the greatest picture as you can't see the mountains on the other side, but its actually so hazy they are hard to see with the naked eye.

Here are some pictures of where I am living for the month of orientation. I know it's a lot of pictures but it's so hard to describe!

This is a main house, where the two guys and John and his family sleeps. That's the van that we take everywhere in the driveway.

Thats where I sleep! The room on the left, upstairs above the blue awning. Our classrooms are beneath us, as are our bathrooms.

This is most of the girls and what our sleeping arrangement looks like. I'm over in the back corner. It's basically one huge sleepover. But we're asleep by 10 every night.