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Wednesday, December 3, 2008
It's been a while since I've updated. A lot has happened, not least of which was the occupation of the Suvarnabhumi International Airport by PAD protesters. It's bad in the sense of absurd inconvenience -- lots of everyday people are getting stuck, if not actually threatened. My partner, Josh, got stuck in Singapore and had to change his flight to Phuket and ride a bus for most of a day to get home. Thai Muslim Hajj pilgrims who've sold their rice fields to fund the journey are stranded. All around, it's a ridiculous situation. But the Supreme Court ruled that the party in power was guilty of electoral fraud (I'm reserving judgment on that one) and will proceed to disband the coalitions, so with a bit of luck that will calm the protestors down before anybody really gets hurt.
In the meantime, I'm safe and sound, and for my part I can't think of a much nicer place to be stranded than Thailand.
I'm working away happily at two and a half jobs, one of which is teaching kindergarten at Mater Dei, a prestigious Catholic all-girls school in the middle of town. I was a little reluctant to take the job at first; I had some negative experiences teaching little kids in China, and was also secretly a little worried that the sisters would discover I was living in sin (gasp!). It turns out Thai Catholics are really laid back, though, and most of the people here are Buddhist anyway, predictably enough. It's a wildly disorganized environment from a bureaucratic standpoint, but I don't really mind being bumped around from classroom to classroom without any warning. If my teaching suffers, I think it's their loss, not mine. At least, usually.
Anyway, today was another one of those "Surprise!" days. As I finished teaching my first of four periods, the head English teacher rushed in to apologize and tell me that one of the classrooms had organized a visit and demonstration with some soldiers, and the other classes had all decided to participate at the last minute. It seems to be part of the ongoing series of "stop everything, Kotchaporn's mom the chef is here to teach us how to make smoothies" / "Natcha's mom the air hostess is here to look pretty and give us airplane snack boxes" / etc. It's like an ongoing impromptu career day month. The upside: suddenly having an extra hour to sit in the computer lab and print out animal pictures. The downside: one of the girls is inevitably tearful when her parent has to leave to go back to work.
They're cuties, these girls. I get more hugs than I can handle every day. It's awfully good for morale, though I've taken to carrying hand sanitizer in my bag, since they're still growing out of nose-picking.
I have a lot of adorable photos to share from last Sunday's school exhibition. They're on Matthew's computer, since for the third time in five years I left my camera cable behind in North America and have had to stick my memory card in his camera to retrieve any photos. I'll post them soon, I promise.
In the meantime, I think I'm going to creep back downstairs and spy on these soldiers. While their uniforms aren't nearly as sexy as the semi-ridiculous skintight Thai cop uniforms, I did catch a glimpse of them going through their paces, and they appear to have added a rather saucy move that involves planting a fist on a cocked hip. Silly. I love it.
