This is where I will be living when teaching begins! I got my assignment right before I left and I will be teaching high school in the city (Nakhon Phanom Muang). The high schools here go from grade 7 to grade 12, and I will have 8 and 9. Great ages, huh? There are about 2200 kids in the school! Not what I expected but at least I only have two grades. There will be another volunteer at my placement who will be teaching grades 7 and 8. At the moment we are trying to figure out a good schedule for teaching because the principle originally wanted us to each 15 classes per week, which would mean we only see each class once per week which really isn't conducive to learning English. To top it off, the students don't get all that much support for learning English, especially in the villages. The parents and older relatives don't think that English is necesarry as they are rice farmers or construction workers and the like. We've been warned that it's going to be tough to get the kids excited about English.

So I will be sharing the house with the other volunteer at my placement in the capital city of the province. There is another volunteer who is at a home stay (she's the only one) and it's a gorgeous house with air conditioning! That tends to be rare here. So I'll be over there a lot. Plus it will be nice to have a family around for the year!  Here are some pictures of the school I'll be living/ teaching at. It's huge!

Thats my little house on the right! And the above picture, my house is on the left and those are a bunch of the school buildings in front of it. I'm about a minute away from my classrooms :). 

This was the reception we had for us when we got to the school. They had coffee and little cakes for us as well that the students brought over while the principle and some of the Thai English teachers told us a little bit about what we would be doing and how happy they were to have us! Us 10 volunteers are mostly all teaching at different schools throughout the province and everyone got a reception of some sort, most got flowers and the principles was so grateful to meet us. We had to ceremonies complete with Thai dancers, a Thai band, and toooonnnss of food. One of their specialties over here is Green Papaya Salad and it's soo spicy. But some of the Thai teachers taught me how to make it! It's delicious.

Here are some pictures of the city. We spent a couple afternoons walking around and exploring the markets and such. The province borders the Mekong River and you can see Laos on the other side. It seems to be pretty hazy and I'm not sure if it's from pollution or just the weather. In any case, there are mountains on the other side of the Mekong that hopefully we will be able to explore when we go into Laos! Border crossing is very close and it's something like $30 to get a 30-day visa into Laos. \