Katt's house and teaching and Caroline

Hi all, I've become less and less motivated to write this blog unfortunately. Due to my absolutely gripping schedule of activities, I never have ANY free time...EVER. Except when I spend numerous hours reading bad books and napping. But these are extremely important and time-consuming activities which cannot be replaced. However, at the insistence of Caroline (who has come here to visit for a couple weeks), I am now writing another blog post. In case you didn't know.

The last couple days have been filled with all sorts of teaching excitement as well as the crashing of Scooters, and the exploration of new parts of Thailand. I picked up Caroline from the airport on Sunday night and proceeded back home. The next day we decided to get massages at my favorite massage place Subai Subai and then proceeded to take a bus up to Kat's parents house. Originally, Caroline was going to arrive later and I would go to Kat's house by myself and teach students up there alone. But due to a change in plans, Caroline arrived early and we decided to go up anyway and would have her help me teach. Thank god this happened, or I would have been utterly lost as to what to do. In any case, we arrived and were picked up by Katt's father. Nothing notable happened at the house. The next day we went to teach kids. Now, what I assumed we would be doing is helping out Katt's dad in his class, either doing TA sorts of things, or teaching short lessons in English. I could not have been more confused on what was going on. Essentially, we walked awkwardly into a classroom (either 12-13 yrs old or 14-15 yrs old) and proceeded to introduce ourselves. The students tended to either break out in awkward laughter, laugh among their friends, and stare. We had absolutely no idea what to do. As we awkwardly glanced around and looked to Katt's dad to help us, he proposed we sing a song. This was completely disorienting. I mean, sitting there reading this, it seems like a good idea and not so difficult, but try being in front of 25, 15yr olds who are sitting there already laughing at you. And then come up with a song that is somewhat interesting but will still teach them something. I couldn't think of a single song other than Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance". Thank God Caroline was there and proposed Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Now, this isn't the greatest song to teach to 15 year olds, but its a helluva lot better than "Bad Romance". I was hoping that we could simply write the song on the board and then teach it to them, however, Katt's dad was under the impression that I should sing it to them. Let me just say that I have embarrassed myself a large large number of times, in numerous situations, and, while this probably wasn't the most embarrassing moment of my life, it was very very close to the top. So, to give you the full picture, I am standing at the front of 25 students, holding an overly large water bottle that I have been feverishly drinking from, drenched in sweat from both heat and nervousness, preparing to sing a child's song. I kinda just wanted to cry. To any of my teachers that may read this, I admire your courage. Nonetheless, I stood at the front of the class and belted out Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, then had Caroline write in on the board and teach the song to the class. Thankfully, after doing this for what seemed like 50 classes, at 12 hours each class (ok so it was 2 classes for about 30 minutes, but still...) we finally were allowed to escape back home. We both promptly fell asleep for a couple of hours and then hung out for the rest of the night. The next day, Katt came up to her parents house. Initially, Katt's father was going to be our guide for our entire time up there, but a meeting came up and he had to leave, thus making Katt come up with Alex because there was no one there who spoke English. The next day we went back to the school with a bit more of a plan. We had some games that we could play with the older kids and some other activities with the younger. Fortunately, the younger kids hadn't played with us yet, so we we and saw them. This took up the entire day and we luckily did not have to teach the older kids. We played games like Ring Around the Rosie and All Around the Cobbler's Bench. The kids mostly didn't understand anything we did, but they really liked falling down and pretending to be dead and such.
After the teaching Caroline and I took Katt's Scooter for a ride! We went up to the waterfall that I've already described. We also went to the gardens but unfortunately our ride was cut short by impending lightning and incoming rainstorm. I'm going to avoid describing the drive because it will sound really cliche and not really do justice to what we saw. But it was absolutely amazing having the wind blowing in your face as we rode between rice patties and sugarcane fields. We drove back the next day and hung out. Thus have been my activities for the last couple of days. I will post a bunch of pictures in about an hour. Hope everything is going well for everyone. I will attempt to get more motivated about this blogging.

Living and Loving