May 29th

With each passing day life in Thailand is beginning to feel like life. The sweat that trickles down your back as you walk the markets, the large gap between the rich and the poor, the dirtiness...thats just the way things will be like for the next little while. Some days  i think about what little things i have to talk about on my blog but as a matter of fact there is lots you dont see. So i kind of made it my mission today to take pictures of things that i see that has become 'normal' to me but not to the Canadian eye.

This morning while i was waiting for my taxi group in front of sev i see the normal dog that hangs out on the front steps. Each sev has stray dogs that loiter around them, and know better than to walk inside. Many of these dogs basically live in front of certain stores. 

This particular dog i have never seen walk around. Some days i am convinced he has ascended to doggie heaven but the next day i see that he is sleeping behind the garbage can or moved to a different spot in front of sev. Some stray dogs have super saggy tits, its pretty gross...they kind of look like sows (female pigs) but not as large of coarse.

Most mornings i visit a the congee lady, and she teaches me Thai words like egg (i always get a salted duck egg package from her), lemon, sugar etc. She is very friendly and on weekends she sells fresh soy milk that you can ask to get cooked barley, tapioca and sweet basil seeds added to your milk. 

In the back of this photo you can see a cross walk that spans across the 10 lanes of traffic. Every morning we cross this to go to the other side to catch a cab. We usually get to school an hour to an hour and a half in advance just because we all want to get our monthly bonus if we arrive on time every day. Traffic an be terrible in the mornings and so we always pick up breakfast and eat in our office. 

My breakfast usually look something like this:

congee in a bag, salted duck egg that i mash up into the congee. For those who are unfamiliar with congee it is essentially rice cooked with lots of water and is in the consistency of oatmeal. The one that i always buy is a mix of red and white rice. This bag of egg actually was taken from a different day as you can see greens in the congee (cilantro) and purple *shallots). 

We were waiting for one more person of our cab group and noticed some strange looking things wrapped in banana leaves. Curtis decided to be adventurous and buy em. It seemed to be coconut rice with banana. The other one (i didnt take a picture) was sticky rice and mung bean (savoury) 4 pieces each of the two flavours for 30B ($1). Sorry pix are kind of blurry because we were in the taxi.

Every day afterschool we cross another cross walk to catch a cab. The steps are SUPER steep! The view from ontop is quite scary if you are scared of heights.

By the end of the school day we are all very tired, Lin used to ALWAYS sit in the front (even when she isnt paying) and then one day she count handle the crazy driving and said i dont care anymore you guys can sit in the front i get too nausous. I find that she will do whatever she wants if it benefits her and if it doesn't she wants nothing to do with it - yea type A personality. The other girl (Lisa) gets anxious and curtis just wants to sleep in the back seat. Haha lucky me i get to sit front =D. Its so exhilarating and i always get an adrenaline rush haha. I was going to take a video but then it would be kinda strange i think. So i decided to snap a picture of the middle console. Can you spot what looks strange about it? 

The temperature setting is only blue! haha which makes alot of sense because why would they have heat right?

After i got home i waited for William who is the gentleman in charge of our housing - he came by to do an inspection and to document damages before we sign our lease here. After he left i went to the market and had a fruit/food spree lol. I know i have an eating issue....this is my desk at school lol!

The rest of the night was just filled with marking. The kids did interviews of each other and drew pictures of things the interviewee liked. These kids of have great talents!

Thats it for tonight =)

May 28th

Post from yesterday:

After school i left straight after class to hunt for the hospital that was supposed to have UV treatment.  I took the taxi on the wrong side of the street so he took a drive before he could u turn (streets here r structured quite differently). Finally after a long ride i arrived at the hospital only to find the dermatologist not in.  She told me to come back the following day before 9pm - but i got lazy today and also wanted to finish marking at school and go home to eat. 

This was the hospital

Not as nice as the other international hospital but still very clean inside this department. 

Since i was by myself i decided to walk home.  After 15 min of walking or so i realized i was near t he far big c which ment at least another 35ish min of walking >_<.  I decided that i  would just taxi home since i had my laptop in my bag and a carry bag of books. Since i was near big c i might as well go in and buy some stuff.  Grocery shopping is almost as fun as retail therapy when u are in a foreign country haha.  Plus u dont feel as guilty about spending money (on a budget till Friday --> PAYDAY). I bout all sorts of fruits n food  that i think i could live in my room comfortably for at least a few days haha!

So i bought these strange fruits that looked like the Chinese fruit called loggan "dragon eyes"

The ear pods r there so u have a size reference.  These r very fragrant and look like lychee but minus the big seed. This bundle was 28B so about $1.  Not too sure if they would irritate my skin so i brought them to school to share.

I was also really excited to find these:

NORMAL FRUITS haha! These were very tasty! I dunno if. It's cause i haven't eaten them in a long time but i really enjoyed them lol. 

Heading to school this morning i realized i didn't have a smaller bill than 1000B so i head to sev to buy something small just so i could get change. I didn't know what to buy so ended up with this cute lil bun 

It was SO cute, well despite the fact he had orange eyes lol but inside this steamed bun was custard =D.  I was looking for baked custard buns the other day at big c but all they had was pandan custard buns. Pandan flavour is good but its not my favourite. Walking down the aisle of sev i also stumbled upon a new type of mama noodles! Mama ramen noodles "BAKED, not fried"! I didn't even know they were fried!

Unfortunately this turned out to be a bad flavour.  I was rather excited to try it at the end of the day too!  My taxi group collectively decided that we would prep for two hours at school instead of going home right after school.  A taxi ride to school is about 80B each way (a little over $2 cdn).  The four of us take turns paying each day to make it easier.

School lunches are always tasty and we get two options from two separate counter. The cafeteria is a large open area outside (think building but no windows or doors) and so it gets very hot eating in. Here.  I find it best to bring my large bowl to the cafe, get my fill then eat in the office where ac is set to at least 17C daily lol. This was today's lunch:

All their fruits n veges are cut w a wavy knife it looks kinda beat. As u can c - this bowl has a bunch of mishmash of things, but it was very tasty.  There were noodle of some sort under w a light broth. Lunch is usually where i get my protein since cook in my apt (that doesn't have a kitchen) is hard - any lil crumb will draw ants. It's Always a surprise to wake up or come home from school to look on your desk/floor since ants will swarm around ANY tiny piece of food u missed when u were cleaning up.  

Tonight's dinner at home consisted of mixed grains (white n purple rice, and lentils) cook w ground chicken, carrots and daikon.  While at big c i also stumbled upon something called "pickled green mustard". I was so excited because i thought i found one of the ingredients for my fav comfort food is 雪菜肉米粉.

My hopes were still high even after cracking it open and seeing it was in a different form than i was used to...but was disappoint that it was something different. It tasted alright and I'd probably buy it again...but gonna still hunt for what i like. 

That's all for tonight!

May 25th

It's that time of day agin - BLOG time! Started off my day early n went to campus 1 (within walking distance from Piyapat - my apt) at 9 and stayed till 2:30.  By abt noon i was getting a bit fidgety   and so went for a walk to sev and got some tasty candies:

I think those sour berry candies a my favourite so far!

I also noticed that I'm starting to peel too! My classmate Lin got so excited lol and she started picking at my shoulder

A few of us (andy, kirstyn, joanna) went to the mall, mostly to get out of the office and out of the apt.  We ended up at a sukiyaki place all you can eat for 350B (a little over  $10) and ate lots of meat and veggies! That's all that we basically did at the mall was eat since we were there yesterday. . 

After eating everyone was kinda lethargic so we hung around outside since it was a relatively unsticky day. The McDonald's here has some pretty cool Asian twist to it

They also have KFC here 

The girls went home and so Andy and i went to big c (the one furthest from our place) and did a bit of shopping.  I bought some mangosteen and some Edammame beans. I also decided to get a taller pot so i could actually cook better food on my hot plate since the pot that it came with was so shallow

I ended p picking up some ground chicken to cook at home so i can get some protein other than from eggs.  While in the meat department i found this hilarious pack of processed meat 

"Buffet fish ball"

Outside of the big c was a really big night market where i found a white blouse for 250B - yay for doing less laundry during the school week. It's just a ordinary white louse tho not exciting enough to post a pic about. We decided it was such an enjoyable evening (and to help us digest all the food we ate) we were gonna walk home.   Turns out we walked about 30-35 min. 

It's 930 already, gonna look over a bit of school stuff while my hair dries then its off to bed then up in the early morning to campus 1 again to work on the last assignment for Lenna's class.  Come June we have a any teacher named Jan who is like a drill Sargent and demands the same expectation from us as the students that r doing the program in Wpg.  Wpg students don't teach all day nor do they have things to mark and plan so we are all anxious and pissed off that our load is so heavy.   If u don't c many posts in June its prob because I'm stressing over this coarse >_<

May 24th

This weekend is a long weekend here in Thailand which means sleeping in wooohooo! Except at 5am this morning i hear a flapping sound in my room - the same sound a moth might make if it was fluttering on the ground. It sounded like it was near the door or desk - so at least away from my bed. I dismissed the idea and thought "eh whatever...just a moth...or worse it could be a bat its all good as long as it doesn't attack me". i woke up again maybe 15 min later as the fluttering sounded like it was near the headboard...so i turned on my flash on my phone to look for it with no luck. Back to bed. Then it sounded even closer, so i leapt out of bed and flicked on the light just in time to seesomething scurrying   away. Then a very delighted thought popped into my head...maybe its a newt!!!! my neighbour had one in her room and ate all her bugs so i was quite happy. Upon further investigation i found that it was neither a newt or anything that i was familiar with. It was quick and once it climbed off the wall and on to the ground i threw a bucket over it and pushed it out of my room. When i lifted the bucket this is what i saw:

Not too sure at all what this thing is but it had a weird looking tail....a cross between a cricket of some sort and something that was going through metamorphosis or something ... =S. Needless to say i was awake and didnt want to go back to bed. 

I decided that i might go visit a temple since it was Buddha's birthday today. I got dressed in temple appropriate attire and head towards what i thought was a temple:

Im not too sure what this building was but it didnt seem like it was opened to the public so i went back home. 

I met up with some classmates to head to the mall to get our photos taken for our work visa and it was the best ID picture we all took ($15 for 24 pictures)! The also had some random props at that place like hulk gloves lol

The mall was 4 stories high, each level had a "theme" - like electronics, beauty, living, and home life. The living level had a HUGE indoor market that sold fresh fruits of all sorts (durian of coarse lol) as well as other health products like "sheut yee" (snow ear tong sui) in a bottle, coconut oil, natural soaps etc. The three other ppl i went with tried the sheut yee and thought it was so gross haha.  Ended up buy a bottle of coconut lotion for my hands since it didnt have bleach in it (hard to find lotions that are 'normal' here in Thailand). We also had some tasty cheap lunches all for less than $2 cdn! I ate Korean marinate pork with rice:

Alyssa had chicken fried rice:

For desert we had bubble tea ($1 Cdn!!!) and beard papa -THREE of em - because they're THAT good haha. 

Everyone always says BBT is better in Asia but i think their about the same as the kind you get at Global. I also spotted tako balls (octopus in some type of potato bater) - and had to get Alyssa to eat em (she is as white as white comes, but she is quite willing to try new things! She even at fish maw for lunch yesterday). The tako balls are drench in some kind of Japanese sauce with bonito flakes on top 

As we walked around the mall everyone agreed that it was so much more exciting shopping in the market because everything was SO cheap haha. We would rather sacrifice the clean AC mall for dirty markets lol. Near two areas of the main floor there were ponds with koi and other really huge fish and parrots. Very different than any malls in Canada

Ok now that i ran my errands and wrote my blog i guess its time to crack down on my assignment *sigh*

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Break time. 

I forgot to blog about my next door neighbour that moved in yesterday (temporarily).  I helped her call the bank using talkatone and she brought me fruits today.  Such an Asian thing to do haha.  It was a very nice gesture.  I now feel bad that i questioned if she was a scammer or if she really needed help. 

Thanks for droppin by =)

May 23rd

Ok, so i know its been a very long time since my last post but its been rather busy and kind of lazy to load pix from my phone to the computer then on my blog.  The app is rather limiting to how i place the photos etc, but i guess this is better than nothing.

So i went to the market tonight by myself and it was quite fun because i could take my time without needing to explain to other what things were or need to worry if they are uncomfortable etc in the market. So here's what I bought

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 Bought all of this for 260B which is under $9. 

So i have (from left to right) hydrogen peroxide, Vaseline, hair clip, belly button ring, fine toothed comb, hair clips x 2, cooked sticky rice  x 3, head bad, daikon, pan fried Chinese chives "dumpling", 2 bags of belly button cookies, beef skewer, and a hand cloth (at the office there is no paper towel or anything to wipe your hands so I've been wiping my hands on my pants all the time haha)

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I've been cooking really healthy in my apt because of my hands (eczema is flaring up long story short) and either that is helping or the cream from the dermatologist is helping not sure..... Speaking of hospital i haven't uploaded candid camera of the pimp international hospital i went to.  It took 15 min to see a dermatologist! But unfortunately they didn't have UV treatment.

This is the waiting area of the dermatologist area

This is the waiting area w glass dividers

This is what my prescription came in

The creams weren't labelled unfortunately so i don't even know what i got - except for Vaseline.

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Our key stage leader at Lertlah (he is in charge of making sure all of us foreigners are doing the right things etc) started  a video blog which you can find here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRnF0p9cq4o. I'm not sure how often he will be posting but every Thursday he plans to buy something unique and blog on it. Here is another link to one of my classmates blog http://mattandmarlena.blogspot.com/.  They're a little more up to date of what we do (to be fair there is two of them contributing to the blog and one of them doesn't have night school haha).  

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Last nights dinner was huge! I didn't quite plan to make it that big but it just kept growing and growing lol i brought it to night school (located across from our apt) and i think i stunned people at the size haha.... I ate it all  lol.  I have no problem pigging out on vegetables lol

 Under all the veg was noodles and spicy ground pork

After class (last class of one of the courses) our prof treated us out to a near by lounge where beers are 50B each! They were the huge bottles too! Their cashew chicken was supposed to be legendary so i was forced to order one too (yes i still ate after this bowl of noodles).  I was a little disappointed with it tho - i guess everyone hyped it up for me. Unfortunately no pic lol. However i did take a picture of the really cool looking ice cubes that we have here

They all have a hole in the middle (which means they were manufactured in a factory and not some random ice). Just like in Vietnam u have to drink beer w ice to be able to enjoy it.  The lounge we went to has been nick named "old bar" because it literally is a shack! Rusty tin roof with wooden chairs and tables.  The toilet was a squat toilet with a leaky roof lol.  I peed once there (got toilet paper from a classmate) and left shortly afterwards cause i had to pee agains and  didnt want to ask her for more toilet paper. The sewage system here in Thailand is very primitive so your actually not supposed to flush paper down the toilets and so u would dispose of them in a waste basket.  I've yet to find the "enjoyment" of washing myself after i do my business in the bathroom and drying w toilet paper lol.  

At school there is a hilarious sign in the stall that says "please keep feet on the floor, refrain from squatting on toilets".  The school has western toilets and so i guess some kids might try and squat on them.  

May 16th

Today was the first day of school for the little kindergartners. Many cried and didnt want to be left at school. All the parents looked very well off compared to the people you see on the streets. Defiantly the pale skin, designer purses and well dressed.

Coming from a country that believes in equality we strive to treat each other with respect. We treat others the way we want to be treated. We learned in one of our school meetings that Thais do not follow this rule and therefore there exist a drastic differences bt classes. It is hard to ignore the very hard working individuals that try and make a living by setting up street carts that sell food, snacks, clothes etc....you see their kids loitering around bc they have no where else to go. In the market the other night i saw a blind man walking around with a stereo playing music buskering for money...it was talent that he was able to avoid bumping into ppl since it was a very packed area. 

Everyday to school we travel through the streets filled with hardworking men and women at the crack of dawn  all with smiles on their faces ready to serve you breakfast. After a 15 min car ride (30+min if its a heavy traffic day) we enter the world of high end society - where life is clean, white and shiney. 

May 13th-14th

Today started off like any other day, wake up early for school and get to school to do paper cutting, laminating, and other elementary stuff. It so extremely time consuming and quite honestly the only people that would appreciate this would be the parents. I spent all morning cutting out and laminating calendar numbers! Interspersed with meetings and uniform measurement w the seamstress Im so excited getting uniforms that are wrinkle free =D Its gonna be a forest green tho so i dunno if ill have a chance to wear it afterwards. This is the style:

Since its all school (8-430) at Lertlah then 530-830 (University class) updates arent gonna be as entertaining until after the weekend

Everyday now requires lots planning - in the morning i have to wake up early to get breakfast (Found a stand on the street that sells a bag of congee and salted duck egg for 24B so less than $1 cdn), lunch is provided from the school then after school figure out what to have for dinner from the market race home to shower then go to class. Good thing that class is the building right beside our apartment so its a quick walk and prof is ok with us bringing dinner to class

May 12th

Finally a day of relaxation, its 5pm here and its great to not be in a rush to go anywhere! Did some homework and cleaning. Ventured by myself to a nearby market where theres LOTS of options for shopping - from fresh fruits to stationary to clothes! It was a different experience going by myself bc i dont get stares like i do when i go with the other white teachers. The first morning we went for breakfast (i forget if i posted about this yet), there was about 10 of us 8 girls 2 guys and as we sat at the market for breakfast a random Thai guy came up to take a picture of the group...twice! haha. Anyways I picked up some school supplies and apples. Its so tempting to indulge in tropical fruits but thats what may have triggered my eczema outbreak when i went to Mexico....so layin off of that. Especially bc this morning i got a slight tingle on two fingers =S knock on wood itll resolve itself.

OH i forgot to post about yesterday! We took the