It is amazing what you can accomplish if you start your day at 3:00 am.  Tawn came home from his parents’ house at 2:00 Sunday morning after having had a very good conversation with his father about a dozen different subjects.  Since Tawn didn’t have his house keys with him, he rang me up to come open the door.  After settling in, he debriefed me on the conversation by which time my brain was fully awake and active again.  So when Tawn decided to hit the hay at 3:00 I was unable to get back to sleep.

Really, you can accomplish a lot if you start at 3:00.  The internet connection, which has been noticeably impaired since the Taipei earthquake several weeks ago, zips right along in the middle of the night.  I was able to complete another ten pages of my yearbook project on Shutterfly, which normally requires laboriously long and sometimes incomplete downloads.

Of course I was a little bit tired by the time the sun rose, but by then I was in the car with two bicycles strapped on the back, on my way to pick up Markus.  We did a shorter than usual 20 km ride out near Minburi in a morning with air so humid you could top a latte with a scoop of it.  Speaking of which, since we rode less than normal that afforded time for a coffee before he headed off to church.

Okay, I’m not superman: I did have a twenty minute power nap after I came home.  Then Tawn and I met Tod for lunch at Bug and Bee, Otto and Han’s little find in the Silom area.  The food is tasty but you can’t be in a rush, for the service is erratic.  After lunch we plugged in our laptops and Tod and I developed the examination we’re going to administer to the students this week.  Nearing the end of the academic year in Thailand (another seven weeks or so) Ajarn Yai has asked us to assess the students as part of their overall progress report.

I’ll talk a bit more about the examination on Wednesday, but I think it will sufficiently measure the skills of spelling, recognizing written vocabulary, recognizing spoken vocabulary, reading, pronunciation, and constructing sentences.  We have set up different groups of vocabulary for grades 1-3 and for grades 4-6 and these are hopefully of sufficient difficulty to identify higher-performing students while still allowing below-performing students to get some parts correct.  Don’t want any “zeros.”

For some reason, after lunch we decided to run errands up on Thanon Ratchadapisek, which is what our street (Asoke) becomes when it crosses the Rama IX expressway.  Traffic can be messy up there and sure enough, it was heavy.  We inched our way to Carrefour and HomePro, fought the crowds inside, and then inched our way back home.  Inching aside, I decided to whip up a nice Sunday dinner: Emmental cheese souffle, fried mixed sausages, and mixed green salad. 

The secret to the souffle is to keep it simple by using Jacques Pepin’s recipe from his mother, which she created as a new bride before anyone taught her that the egg whites are meant to be separated and beaten.  Since there is no separation and beating, two more laborious steps are removed yet the results turn out just as beautifully.

Saturday afternoon after a morning of running errands I headed home and Tawn picked up his mother from her home.  Typical of many Thai housewives, Khun Nui doesn’t get out and have as much fun as she’d like, instead staying at home and running the household.  So on occasion we try to spirit her away so she can have some fun without Tawn’s father!

First stop was our apartment, where she sampled some homemade banana bread.  Then after visiting for a while, we caught a taxi over to Basillico restaurant on Sukhumvit Soi 23.  Having lived for two years in Italy way back in the years before Tawn’s birth (that would be, what, about sixteen years ago?) she is very much in her element in an Italian setting and can still speak proficient Italian.

We ordered a bottle of prosecco and after not even half a glass she was tipsy.  A plate of prosciutto and salami came and went, then a bowl of ham and pea risotto followed by a thin-crust pizza.  She started to flirt with the Italian chef who was making pizzas in front of the wood-fired oven smack dab in the middle of the room.  “Bravo!  Bravo!” she shouted each time he tossed another pie in the air.

Three times the lights dimmed, a birthday cake with blazing candles was accompanied to the celebrant’s table with a host of off-key waiters singing the Thai version of “Happy Birthday” which is like the American version only to a slightly Salsa beat.  The fourth time the cake arrived at our table, surprising Tawn’s mother whose birthday is this coming week.

Needless to say she was not only tipsy but very happy.  Tawn took her home in a taxi while I walked back to the apartment.  Once home, Tawn ended up having a very long and very good heart-to-heart conversation with his father, not arriving back until 2:00!  Then he proceeded to tell me about the very long and very good heart-to-heart conversation, which is why I am now awake at 3:00.

Monday afternoon three letters arrived:

• The first was a Christmas card from my brother-in-law’s sister and her family, mailed from Kansas City on December 8th.
• The second was a Christmas card from Ryeroam, send from the 15eme arrondisement de Paris on November 19th.
• The third was a birthday card from my sister and brother-in-law that was also mailed from Kansas City.  Postmark date?  November 6th.

What in the world happened that it took a card more than two months to make it from Kansas City to Bangkok, let along the nearly six weeks it took for Ryeroam’s card to get from Paris to Siam?  Normally, it takes between a week and two for letters to get to and from the United States.  The best I’ve yet to see if five days.  If only there were a tracking number so I could figure this conundrum out.

Wednesday we were back to a normal teaching schedule at Bangkhonthiinai.  Per Pat’s suggestion, made after she visited the school in November, we have swapped the two groups of students: the younger children (grades 1-3) now study English before lunch and the older children (grades 4-6) study in the afternoon.  The goal: get the younger children when they still have some energy and attention left in them.

The results were mildly impressive: while their attention spans, especially those of the boys, still are infinitesimally small, they were at least more awake.

In fact, we are in the unit where we begin to learn about food so we learned vocabulary around noodles and then played “noodle stand.”  Students took turns playing vendor and customer, ordering bowls of noodles with chicken, fish, pork or beef and being asked what condiments they would like: sugar, chili sauce, fish sauce, or salt.  We had some props from the kitchen which made it a bit more interesting, especially when one of the boys discovered that the bottle of fish sauce leaks a bit when you turn it over to “add” some to the bowl.

After class, Ajarn Yai and the other teachers took Tod, Markus and I out to an early dinner to thank us for our contributions during Children’s Day, a perfect example of grangjai – a very Thai concept.  We did something that was perceived as unnecessary, resulting in the Thais having “grangjaied” us – troubled us – and as such they need to do something to make up for that trouble.  Never mind that Tod and I gave of our own volition and free will, there was still a debt to be settled and a free meal settles debts quite nicely.

Except that all three of us were absolutely stuffed and said as much both before going to the restaurant and while Ajarn Yai was ordering.  Nonetheless, we ended up with a volume of food that was just downright too much: after eating past the point of comfort, grilled prawns arrived.  After that, two large steamed fish arrived. 

So I haven’t eaten in two days.

Last night Tawn and I went to watch “King Naresuan” the first installment of a 3-part historical epic that picks up where director Chatrichalerm Yukol’s 2001 film “Legend of Suriyothai” left off.  It was two hours, forty minutes long and the version with Thai subtitles doesn’t open until next week.  (Which is odd because that will result in the distributor having to strike extra prints since the film is already playing at nearly every theatre in the Kingdom, resulting in unnecessary additional expense.)  So I had an extra Thai lesson: listening to more than two hours of pasathai boran (“old” Thai, similar to listening to the Thai version of Shakespearean English).  I was pretty mentally bashed by the time that ended!

Today there is construction work going on in a neighboring apartment.  I can’t tell if it is above, below, or next door but the demolition work is quite noisy.

Friday morning when Tod and I were driving down to Bangkhonthiinai, we saw a gorgeous sunrise as we drove over the Rama IX bridge.  The sun was coming up over the new mega-bridge project near Phra Phadang and with the hazy sky the colors were amazing.

This got me to thinking that there was probably some waterfront access along the river under the bridge, maybe at a local wat, and that it would be nice to go back and take some pictures.  So I resolved to get up early one morning this weekend and go on a photo hunt.

Surprisingly, Tawn was game and so we awoke at six Sunday morning, bundled into the car pre-coffee, and headed off on the miraculously traffic-free tollway.  After crossing the bridge we took the first exit and turned on intuitive navigation mode.  Eventually we were able to find the main road that parallels the river and as we crossed under the bridge, discovered that there is actually a public park there.

Rather cleverly, to the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration’s credit, this park places soccer pitches, basketball and badminton courts in the large expanses between the towering bridge pillars.  This gives local people a place to play and makes good use of otherwise uninhabitable space.  There is a outdoor gym facility and a one-kilometer path for running, jogging and walking.

Best of all, there is direct access to the river, although not a very wide stretch of it.  A small pier juts out a little ways into the river and provides a really nice view.  As the park came to life with dozens of health-conscious denizens of Khrungthep and as Tawn dozed on a bench, I snapped a few hundred exposures.  I wasn’t the only one; there were three other photographers, one of whom had much more advanced equipment.

The air wasn’t as hazy as on Friday, perhaps thanks to one weekend day of less traffic, so the colors weren’t as brilliant.  Still, it was a spectacular sunrise.

The rest of Sunday was a baking day: biscotti for Tawn’s mother and croissants for us.  The croissants were a disaster.  Unlike the first batch I made two weekends ago, the dough this time never really came together and formed the strong, elastic proteins necessary to create really flaky croissants.  Instead, they were super crumbly, to the point of disintegrating when they were handled.  Very disappointing.  I’ll have to investigate the possible causes and try again.  The biscotti, however, were a success.  Blanching and peeling almonds is a laborious process, though!

Saturday was Children’s Day here in Thailand, a holiday that we don’t particularly celebrate in the United States.  My theory for this lack of celebrating is that we have Christmas, so children get plenty of spoiling at that holiday.  No need for another one.

Unlike the schools in Khrungthep, the school in Bangkhonthiinai was celebrating the holiday, although a day early on Friday.  Ajarn Yai had invited Tod and I to drive down and participate in the events and so we switched our normal teaching day from Wednesday to Friday so that we could see how the day is celebrated.

In preparation, Tod and I decided to buy presents for the children.  Taking a taking to the most crowded shopping district in Bangkok, Sampheng Lane.  This narrow soi stretches for about six blocks from Chinatown to Rattanokosin Island.  Barely wide enough for two people to pass each other, Sampheng is the center of wholesale fabric trade along with the buying and selling of household goods and toys.  In the midst of all of the packed confusion, motorbikes slowly weave through the crowd, large bolts of fabric strapped precariously behind the driver.

Along the way we purchased a few dozen stuffed animals along with four dozen additional, smaller toys.  We thought we were going to “wow” the kids, and I had visions of being an ersatz Santa Claus.  Of course we managed to start at the more expensive / less selection end of the market and after we had made most of our purchases we moved into the less expensive / wider selection end!  Note to self: move from east to west when shopping in Sampheng.

Friday morning the car was loaded up with goodies and Tod and I made the ninety minute drive southwest of Khrungthep, crossing the Rama IX bridge under a gloriously hazy pink sunrise.

We arrived to find a flatbed truck parked in the school yard with a large stack of speakers already playing everybody’s favorite Thai country songs.  A large tent was erected in front of the main classroom building with chairs set up underneath it.  In the shade of a large tree, food tables had been set up with beverage and ice cream stations.

Along the main classroom were a half-dozen tables overflowing with gifts for the students, donated by the local community, parents, and the teachers.  While I had had visions of our gifts being particularly overwhelming, I was outdone by the younger sister of one of the school board members, who donated a few dozen heart-shaped metal calculators as well as some laptop cases and very large stuffed animals.  Competition getting the best of me, I made a mental note for what to buy next year: canvas tote bags from Lands End with each child’s name embroidered on it!

Left: Our sound system

One of the classrooms had been transformed into a dressing room and the children had changed into costumes for their grade level performances and were undergoing makeup application, courtesy of a small army of mothers, older sisters, and aunties.

Everyone got makeup, girls and boys alike.  As there was no stage lighting I’m not sure why it was really needed, but Thais like their beauty pageants so maybe this is related to that phenomenon.  Some of the girls looked a little to similar to Jon Bennet Ramsey in a cupie-doll sort of way.  All in all, though, adorable children look even cuter with a little blush and eye shadow!

Some of the older boys didn’t seem too happy about the makeup (above), others didn’t seem too concerned and didn’t rush to wash it off after the performances, while at least one or two seemed pretty happy with it.

Costumes ranged from some Swiss Miss outfits with make blond hair pieces to just jeans and super hero t-shirts.  Tod and I couldn’t figure out exactly why some of the girls had these particular outfits on as they didn’t really match the music they were performing to.  But then sometimes in life you just have to stop looking for reasons and accept things as they are, right?  Especially on Children’s Day.

While the making up happened, other children were entertained by games of musical chairs, first the older children then the younger ones. 

The game was pretty competitive by the older students but the younger children didn’t pick up the concept as quickly. 

In fact, the first few times they left extra chairs out to give them a chance to practice just running to a chair.  Of course there were consolation prizes for those who were eliminated along the way.

The morning started with performances by each grade level, beginning with the pre-school/kindergarten group.  Each class had selected a song and the students had learned a dance routine to go with it. 

The pre-schoolers did something akin to the Bunny Hop song, wearing little rabbit years and hopping around and wiggling their “tail.”  (right)

Audience members purchased chains of ribbons to use as garlands to put around the shoulders of their favorite performers. 

The ribbons were very inexpensive, just enough to cover the cost of supplies, and were collected after each performance and used again for the next one.  Especially for the younger children, the audience went out of their way to grace everyone with an overwhelming number of garlands, resulting in some little children who could barely see over the top of their accolades!

The combined first and second graders sang a fun children’s song.  The third graders sang something in Thai reminiscent of a 1960’s girls group song.  For a moment, I thought they were going to sing Summer Lovin’ from Grease but that didn’t turn out to be the case.  The fourth graders, who are all girls with the exception of one boy, performed to a popular Thai pop love song, while the all-boy fifth graders did something a little more hip-hop in nature.

Above: First and second grades.  Below: Third grade, a very large class.

Above: Fourth graders.  Below: Fifth graders.

One really fun part of the events was the opportunity to see some of the parents and start figuring out who belonged to which students.  Sometimes the relation was very easy to see, other times not so easy.  Mostly there were mothers but a good number of fathers made an appearance.  I would have really liked to take family portraits, but that will have to wait until another time.

Mid-morning the monks from the adjacent temple came over and chanted, offering blessings for the students and their parents.  Ajarn Yai, a school board member, Tod and I sat in during the chanting.  The ceremony was taking place in one of the small classrooms with very pink walls and a very green floors.  Between that and the saffron robes, the room was quite Technicolor.  And I didn’t even have my camera on the “chroma” setting!

After the service was over lunch was served to the monks, who must partake of their last meal of the day before 11:00. 

After lunch, the children each received a scholarship from the monks, paid for out of the community fund.

Above: One of the student’s younger sisters enjoys her chocolate ice cream cone

The children continued their performances including a musical performance on angaloon – a bamboo instrument that sounds like a xylophone but is played differently, as well as a classical Issan (northeastern Thai) dance.

After these performances, while the give away of gifts was being organized, the children ran around and played.  When I took out the camera, everyone wanted to be in the pictures.  Then everyone wanted to take a picture.  Then everyone wanted to have a picture just with their brother or sister or best friends. 

Finally, it was time for the giveaway of gifts.  Each child receives a large plastic bag in which to take their haul home.  Through a combination of lucky draw and “here, you get this and you get that” we managed to get all of the gifts distributed in about twenty minutes. 

Afterwards it felt just like Christmas morning after all the gifts have been opened and there are a few minutes when the moment is particularly anticlimactic.  All in all, though, it was clear that despite the high level of poverty among the students in that district, there was a great deal of happiness that day.

Other Miscellaneous

Tawn playing a Taiko drum video game at Big C

Lego model of Suvarnabhumi International Airport, on display at the Emporium shopping center

Pim’s daughter Tara, 18 months, plays with Uncle Tawn and Legos.

Every week is full of blogable moments.  I think every life is, too.  But sometimes we don’t recognize what the blogable moments are.  They aren’t generally things like “I ate a Big Mac and then went to the store to buy nail polish” although there are occasions when those moments are blogable.  The best blogable moments are the ones that provoke reflection, even just briefly.  It is within those moments of reflection that we can glimpse who we are inside, seeing our essence.

It is within those moments of reflection that we discover that our essence really isn’t any different from the essence of anyone else: we all want the same things and emanate the same feelings, just in different packaging.  Sure, our insecurities and ignorance can lead to coating ourselves in vitriol or banality, but that doesn’t change the commonality among each of us.

(philosophy lesson over)

Sunday morning Markus and I saddled up again for another ride, starting at the early hour of 6:30.  We drove north on the tollway past the old Don Meaung Airport, Rangsit Mall, and Thammasat University Rangsit campus, and wound up in a country road along some khlong, a stone’s throw away from a mega-wat that is similar (and similarly controversial) to the “Mega-Churches” you see sprouting in mid-American suburbs. 

Left: Markus in front of the now-closed Museum of Agriculture opened for His Majesty’s 50th Anniversary on the Throne, ten years ago.

The campus of this wat is a huge construction zone the results of which will be something akin to a convention center cum meditation retreat cum amusement park.  Size?  I’m not kidding when I tell you the main building appears to be about four times the footprint of Moscone Center in San Francisco.  It is really, really large.

Instead of trying to find a place to park at the mega-wat, we crossed the road to a hugely modest wat that has just a single ordination hall which appears to be in a half-finished state.  Or maybe it is in the midst of one of those never-ending remodels?  Preparations were underway by a group of university students for some event, with food being chopped, peeled, sliced and diced.  After confirming that it was okay to park there while we rode (I have yet to have someone at a wat say it isn’t okay) we started riding up the small road that parallels the khlong. 

Not too far away we came across a tiny village – two dozen houses – that were setting up a large tent across the road and arranging tables and chairs.  Already a speaker system was pumping out the popular Issan tunes (think country and western by way of Northeast Thailand) and the village drunk, reeking of cheap beer well before eight in the morning, stopped us to ask where we were going.

Which was a bit of a challenge to my Thai because I didn’t know quite how to explain that we weren’t particularly going anywhere.  We were just going.  Finally, I said, “bai, ma, bai, ma.”  (Roughly, there and back, there and back) and thanked him as we continued on.

We passed one community after another, this one Buddhist, that one Muslim.  Friendly people smiled, some saying hello and others waiting until we said sawatdii khrap first before responding in kind.  Traffic was light, rice paddies were green, and the weather was blissfully cool.

Above: The Thai version of “Field of Dreams”

Straying from the paved road we took what looked to be a disused road, the pavement of which became increasingly deteriorated until it gave out altogether and we found ourselves in a cul-de-sac of fields and nothing more than intuition and the sun’s location to give us an idea of where to continue.  In the distance, a slow moving tractor was coming towards us, inching along the edge of a rather stagnant-looking body of water.

Figuring that at this early hour he must be coming from somewhere civilized rather than going to it – especially since there was little civilization the direction we had pedaled from – we decided to follow his tracks in reverse.  Eventually we found another road and made our way back to the wat.

Right: A local tractor – definitely front-wheel drive!  Notice the umbrella over the driver that can be opened to keep the sun off him.  No risk of it being blown away as this baby zips down the road!

On the way home at a tollbooth just one exit away from our destination, a police officer pulled me over and explained in really broken English that we weren’t allowed to carry bicycles on a rack on a car on the tollway.  I started out following widely-held expat advice that you shouldn’t let on to whether or not (or how much) Thai you can speak, but our communication was so broken-down that I finally started speaking some Thai while Markus called Tawn on the phone.

Tawn spoke with the officer for about five minutes and by the end of it, it was clear the officer had been solidly beaten down.  Tawn’s argument, while acknowledging that the law is the law and we are subject to it whether or not we know what the law is, is that we had already been traveling on the tollway and had gone through multiple toll gates.  At any one of those, the toll booth workers should have refused admission if we were driving an unsafe vehicle.  By allowing us to enter or proceed, Tawn argued, they had given tacit approval.

Another officer, this one a little more fluent in English, came over and talked with us.  He was very friendly but explained that a bicycle rack was dangerous (but the incredibly overloaded pickup trucks and trucks with passengers sitting loose in the cargo area are, apparently, not dangerous).  I explained (er, lied) that we had asked a police officer from the Lumpini station and he had told us the rack was safe.

In either case, we were let off with a warning, no bribe paid, as we promised to take the very next exit and get off the expressway.  Which, fortunately, was the exit we wanted to take anyhow.

So I now have two incursions with the police under my belt and no bribes paid so far.

Thursday evening Ron and Kari joined us for dinner on their final night in Thailand before heading back to the United States.  A very interesting couple whom I never would have expected that we’d become friends with, which just proves why one needs to be open minded and not categorize people when you first meet them.  Let me explain:

Shortly after arriving in Thailand I started classes at Union Language School, operated by the Church of Christ in Thailand for the purpose of training missionaries from overseas in the Thai language.  The school is very reputable but I anticipated that most of the students, being evangelical Christians, would not be be very supportive of me as a gay person.

Sure enough, there were a few occasions when in the course of discussion (the common question being, “what brings you to Thailand?”) I would answer that I was here in Thailand to live with my partner.  The response to which would be, “oh, your business partner?” 

When I clarified that misunderstanding the response would be a bit of an uncertain “oh…” followed by something between avoidance and polite distance for the remainder of the term.

So when Kari and I met in class and went through that exchange, I was pleasantly surprised when she continued to talk with me and to ask questions about Tawn over the following days.  Likewise, her husband Ron was very open as well and when they met Tawn at a class get-together at an Italian restaurant, Ron suggested that we should socialize, which we subsequently have many times.

There are many people I know who are very prejudiced against religious people, especially Christians.  Sometimes I hear some really extreme statements made about them that paints them with the same wide brush with which some fundamentalists tar the gay community.  It strikes me that this “big brush” approach to defining people just results in us not getting to know people as individuals, meaning we miss out on many interesting and valuable relationships, as well as missing out on getting know know and understand the different viewpoints and opinions that people hold and what informs those opinions.

Prejudices on both sides can only be broken down as we have the opportunity to dispel misconceptions, which only happens when we can see the human side of things; when we can see the human beings.

Ron and Kari have been up in Ayutthaya doing missionary work and are now heading back to the United States in preparation of a new assignment in Nairobi, Kenya.  Kari has previously worked in Africa and really looks forward to going back.  They’ll be there in about six months for at least three years, so I think Tawn and I will be looking at taking a trip there to visit at some point.

Above: The beautiful Alpine town of Lugano, Switzerland.  Nikolaus, an airliners.net friend, mentioned that his friend is moving to Lugano.  I didn’t know where it was so googled it and found the tourism authority website that had this beautiful picture.  It reminds me a bit of Lago Como (Lake Como) in northern Italy.  Add that to the list of places to visit.  Question: do you actually keep a list of places where you want to visit, or is it just a list in your head?

Last night Tawn, Tod and I joined Markus and Tam for dinner at their place.  Markus prepared some wonderful German food including the German version of egg drop soup, spaetzle with lentils and sausage, and quark (a type of soft unripened cheese with the texture and flavor of sour cream) with strawberries.  Frankly, I ate too much of the cheese and crackers beforehand and was stuffed after the soup was served.  But since I didn’t want to miss out on this culinary adventure I went ahead and had small servings of the other items. 

Delicious but I have really got to pay more attention to when I’m eating, the habit I have of just nibbling away on things without regards to whether I’m really hungry.  Most of the time I’m conscious of it, but especially when I’m in a social setting I’ll just keep nibbling and nibbling and before you know it, I’m really stuffed.  Yuck.

Interesting read: Tae (aka Sagicaprio) just turned thirty-two and wrote a very profound and insightful entry to his blog on that occasion.  Read his January 4th post here.

Back in, what was it, late October my Seagate external hard drive crashed and I lost all of the pictures I had taken in my first year of living in Thailand.  Other than the ones loaded to this blog and a few others on Shutterfly, my photo memories had evaporated.

After several people helpfully provided suggestions of where to go to attempt recovery, I sent the drive home to Indiana with my parents and they forwarded it to Data Recovery Corporation.

Today I received an email from them explaining that there has been extensive physical damage to the hard drive itself and the read/write head.  The quote to attempt data extraction, with no guarantees of success: $1239.

Ouch.

Before I sent the drive, I set myself a maximum budget of $400 to pay for the data figuring that was about what the memories were worth to me.  While I’d really like to have those pictures back, $1200 is too much to pay just for a chance.  Besides, I still have the writings on the blog and that will have to suffice.

Sadly, though, I had planned to take the pictures and some of the blog entries and create a bound album as a gift for family members.  When the drive crashed I had only completed the first three months of the project.  It looks like it will not be a completed project after all.

So the question is, how much would you pay for your memories?

First, I’m excited that we received our first picture of Anne Marie and Brad’s new daughter, Harper Kathleen.  The picture has older sister Sydney Claire holding her baby sister. 

Anne Marie’s explanation for her early delivery (about a month) is that Sydney just kept pleading with the baby, “Please come out baby!” and she finally obliged.

Tawn and I are excited to be going to the Bay Area in March and have a chance to visit the newest addition to their family.

Yesterday was a special “integrated learning” day at Bangkhonthiinai.  Which means that the children spent most of the day working on a project where they helped prepare the lunch, learned about food, nutrition, math and science along the way, and then ate the lunch and had a follow-up lesson around the things they learned.  Somewhere in all that, English was supposed to be integrated but that didn’t end up happening.

Left: Ajarn Yai, the director, and Tod watching the mayhem… ahem, learning activity.

Right: Khruu Somchai, he of the frequent use of amplified voice, taught the children in the food room.

The menu was giiaw (wontons) with moo daeng (Chinese-style barbeque pork) and vegetables.  The children helped prepare the wontons then helped cook them.  Which means that there were a whole mess of children standing in the kitchen right next to a wok of boiling broth.  Of course there was the usual messing around, shoving and jostling that one expects with young children. 

I had visions of a scene I witnessed at a fresh market near Jatujak Market where a wok of boiling oil had been knocked over from its tripod base and spilled all over a man.  People were racing around pouring water on him to cool off what looked to be second- or third-degree burns over most of his torso.  Someone got a car and they hustled him in with more bottles of water to cool him off, driving to the nearest hospital. 

Thankfully nothing dramatic happened in the kitchen yesterday, but I couldn’t quite relieve myself from thoughts of how this type of learning would never be allowed in the litigation littered United States.  Small children next to boiling woks?  Never!

Left: The dining hall where students sit patiently, hungrily, bored as they wait for their food.

Other students were in charge of cutting the pork (they didn’t barbeque it themselves) and the preparing the vegetables.  Finally, some of the older girls put all the dishes together and the food was finally served. 

The food was tasty; the teachers were provided with a wider range of dishes to choose from as one cannot teach on wontons and red pork alone.

I served a loaf of homemade banana bread to the teachers, who said they enjoyed it although Thais will say that just to be nice so who knows what they really thought.  My opinion is that the center of the bread was just slightly undercooked; another minute or two in the oven would have firmed it up a bit.  But it was tasty, and I say that as someone who doesn’t particularly enjoy bananas.

The result of this integrated learning event was that I didn’t really get much teaching done.  Maybe 90 minutes in the morning and an hour in the afternoon, with the young children completely spaced out in the afternoon.  Finally, to induce some sort of activity, we played a game where we reviewed the different names of animals we know and then, when I called out the name of an animal, the students would pretend to be that animal.

What a disaster!  Even with the most benign of animals the young boys brought the Nature Channel’s best footage – fighting and procreation – to life as fish became predatory, lions got the kill, and koalas mated. 

Within just a few minutes, chaos ensued and most of the girls were standing off to the sidelines looking on with dismay at their male classmates.  So much for trying to bring learning to life!

Left: the children pretending to be elephants (note the arms/trunks) 

Two Saturdays from now is Children’s Day in Thailand.  The Friday before (the 12th) there will be some events at the school so next week Tod and I will swap our normal Wednesday teaching for Friday and go to the school to participate.

In the Buddhist calendar we just started the year 2550, a nice round number although I think 2552 will be even more interesting.  So the Buddhist calendar started 543 years before the Christian calendar.  Some think that Jesus was perhaps influenced by Buddhism and given the trade routes stretching across Asia to the Middle East it sounds plausible that people in that region would be aware of philosophies and religions from further east.

There is the joke about a young monk who is telling an older monk about the teachings of Jesus, to which the older monk replies, “He sounds like a good Buddhist.”

Certainly we’ve seen in the past forty-eight hours that even the veneer of Buddhism isn’t a vaccination against violence, as the death toll from the New Year’s Eve bombings reached three.  It seems inconceivable that we would experience that sort of violence here in a place where even with the worst traffic jams you never hear horns honked in anger, let alone shorts fired by road rage fueled drivers.

But maybe it is a bit naive to think that there is anywhere immune from the twisted acts of desperate and deranged people.

Well, here’s wishing for peace in 2550.

New Year’s Day Part 2

Today was a holiday in Thailand.  I hadn’t realized this beforehand and so when on Monday evening Tawn said he was going to sleep in on Tuesday I thought he was deciding to play hookey from work.  Not the case, though, as nearly everyone else in the Kingdom was doing the same thing.  Traffic was wonderfully light for a second day.

Getting back into the swing of things, I met Khruu Kitiya for Thai lessons.  We spent nearly the entire class in dictation and writing and after two hours my wrist was very tired and my brain was coming unglued.  It is very taught but rewarding when I can read something in Thai and actually understand it.  No time to rest on my laurels, though, as I have a serious amount of work remaining until I can really function effectively.  Need to reach at least a sixth grade level in speaking, reading and writing – and the goal is the end of 2550.

More Baking Adventures

Banana bread was my latest thing to tackle: three small loafs last night and a large loaf tonight to take to school tomorrow for the teachers.  If I understand Khruu Ajarn Yai correctly, tomorrow is a special activity day for the children: they will be learning to cook their food.  She wants me to teach the English terms for them along the way, so it will be a little unstructured.  Thankfully Tod is coming with me and Markus will join, too.

Stay tuned for what could be some mighty interesting coverage of Bangkhonthiinai tomorrow.

Final thoughts:

I think I need to moderate the use of my oven or else ensure that the things I bake are given to others.  There’s a lot of additional calories lurking about that I don’t need to be consuming.

Lots of people in town.  Paul is in from SF visiting Aori, his girlfriend.  Will, an acquaintance from United who is now living here part time, has returned from the holidays and would like to meet up with Tawn and me.  Bill and Kom will be back from Bali soon.  And Jak, a Thai a.netter who has been corresponding with me from time to time, is back in town from London.  So lots of people to see.  Oh, and dinner with Ron and Kari tomorrow as they count down their final days before leaving for the US and, ultimately, Africa for their new missionary assignment.