the transition to normal

i've re-entered the real world...sorta. for the first 5 weeks that i was here i was pretty much in vacation/tourist mode. i was spending most of my time exploring, discovering, getting lost, wandering, napping, carousing, etc. but since my teaching course ended about 3 weeks ago, life's taken on a different feel. i'm feeling settled and more at home each day, and feeling less and less like a visitor.

i've been on a relentless pursuit of employment and am happy to report that i've landed a full-time position in a highly respected language school, work permit included. it's strange to know that people are paying to hear me talk and watch me dance, but i suppose that's what teaching is about. i imagined when i first decided to move to thailand to teach english that i'd be spending my time sitting on the floor surrounded by kindergarteners teaching them their ABC's. i imagined doing arts and crafts all day with them, and getting sporadic hugs, and being doused with glue, and couldn't imagine anything better. and while i've done some of that, i have to say that my most rewarding teaching experience thus far came today - a 1-on-1 lesson with a 32 year old doctor. she wanted to improve her english speaking skills so that she could better communicate with her patients. after the experience i wrote about in my last blog i couldn't have been more excited to help her. at one point during the lesson i was trying to demonstrate the difference between the sounds 'd' and 't', and explained that it lies in the placement of the tongue relative to the teeth. in her quest to master these sounds she proceeded to bring her eyeball up to my mouth as if she were looking into a telescope and hold my lower lip down to better understand where my tongue was landing. we laughed at her inability to verbally differentiate between 'vowel' and 'bowel'. this is a very important distinction to know in a country where everyone always has diahrrea. at the end she told me that i had made her comfortable during the lesson and had taken away her shame, which is probably the best thing i could have heard as a new teacher.

other stuff:
my living situation is amazing at the moment. a woman with whom i studied during the teaching course has a house with her son (who has lived in thailand for 4 years) and his girlfriend. i'd visited them one weekend when i was still living in the hotel several weeks ago and felt just so at home and at peace with them, and in the house. they're one of the most generous, thoughtful, and fun families around and i feel so blessed to have fallen into such a wonderful situation. home-cooked meals, family game nights, the rent is cheap and the love runs high around here.

i saw a cart the other day at a festival that was selling ice cream sandwiches. it was a hot day, i'd been walking around the city for hours, and nothing sounded better at the moment than ice cream squished between two soft chocolate cookies. i ordered and what i received instead was an ice cream sandwich taken way too literally - ice cream in between two pieces of white bread.

during the final day of the stand-off between thailand's anti-government rebels and pro-government supporters that shut down the country's two major airports, i was walking home from the market and it seemed as if i was walking upon a concert. there was a stage and people shouting. but as i got closer and saw that the 'fans' were all holding baseball bats and wearing bandanas over their faces i soon realized this was no concert, it was a protest. luckily it happened to be non-violent at that moment.


there's a captivatingly enormous and beautiful statue of buddha near my house and i watched the king's birthday fireworks from his feet last week.

I seem to be living a mundane Thai experience. But I'm living a Thai experience and that's far enough from mundanity for me i suppose.