So, I Moved to Thailand

My blog before was a bit more diary than cultural exploration, so I'm going to try to rectify that to the best of my ability now that I'm older, though not necessarily wiser.

I am no longer living in Korea, but in Thailand.  I moved to Thonburi, a part of Bangkok city just across the river from western Bangkok, about a month ago.  So far, I have been lazy and have not done much to update people on my life here.  My facebook posts have mostly been intellectual jems such as, "I was just listening to a song from the Pocahontas soundtrack, and looked off to the side of my Facebook and saw, "People You May Know: John Smith." Coincidence? Probably" and, "My inner How I Met Your Mother fan LOVES that I have a student named Captain."   My brilliance is astounding at times, even to me.  It's a little out of control.

For now, I'll shoot out some of the basics of my life here and within the next few weeks I will hopefully get my act together enough to note some of the cultural differences that have jumped out at me.  

 
I live, like I said before, in a part of the city called Thonburi.  It's not in Bangkok proper, but my apartment is about a ten-minute drive from Bangkok, so it isn't too much of a stretch to head in on weekends.  I teach at a primary school, but I teach Pre-Kindergarten and Kindergarten 1 and 2, which means I deal with two, three, and four year-olds all day.  I'm hoping that my English becomes accordingly accomplished.  I still have students that cannot even repeat after me if I sit directly in front of them and say "Hello!" very slowly to just them.  Instead they tell me their name, as if I've asked.  Silly children.  I have three classes of each age, and I teach each class three times a week for 50 minutes each time.  The language level is extremely different from Korea, and I'm still adjusting.  Don't be surprised if, by the time I return to the states, my English is halting and broken, my vocabulary has reverted to that of a five year old, and I've lost the ability to read and write.  If you're so inclined, I invite you to witness firsthand the eventual loss of my mother tongue here, on this blog.  In fact, it's already begun.  On my first pass I misspelled "tongue."   But I digress.  School is good.  Teaching fifteen hours a week is in many ways preferable to the 29.8 hours per week I taught in Korea.  I have a lot more time in the office to plan.  Mostly I spend this time doing nothing.  Maybe now I'll start spending more of it writing blogs!

You might have noticed that staying on topic is not my forte.  I'd apologize for it, but I've already forgotten what we're supposed to be talking about.

As far as the apartment goes, the set up has some huge benefits and one really huge... not benefit.  See? I'm already losing words.  I live in a real human apartment, as opposed to my shoebox studio from Korea.  It's a two bedroom, 1.5 bathroom place, with a kitchen (sans stove and oven because food is so cheap here that people don't often cook- more on that in a minute), living room/dining room, laundry balcony (it's definitely not a room, but whatever, it's in home laundry) and a nice balcony in the big bedroom.  Our building has a small gym and an outdoor pool on the sixth floor, which doesn't sound like it would work, but it does.  Our living room wall is made up of three huge windows, which look out at the river and the Bangkok skyline.  The view is actually one of the major benefits of the apartment.  I often get caught walking through the living room and have to stop and just look out at it for a while.  Again, saying I will post pictures will probably be a lie, so don't expect them.  If, by some pagan magic, they do actually appear on here, just be pleasantly surprised.  

I live there with two other teachers from my program who work at the same school I do.  Luke lives in the small bedroom by himself.  He's a funny, off-the-wall, good-hearted Scotsman who does AMAZING impressions.  I live in the big bedroom with Molly, another American girl.  She's really friendly and funny.  She and I actually are kind of stupid, and any time you leave the two of us together we end up laughing and giggling the whole time, generally at nothing, though occasionally we are talking about sad or disturbing things, but still laughing.  She's from Washington D.C. by way of Ohio, by way of California, with a little sprinkling of Mexico and Spain in there somewhere.  We sleep in bunk beds though, which isn’t exactly ideal.

For now, that is what I have for you.  In the future I'll post more about the actual day-to-day of the program, and catch you up on the first month in Bangkok.  I'm hoping that because I have more down time in the office I will be better at posting sensical things than I was when I lived in Korea.  This time I'll try to be saner.  The key word is "try."