A Typical Day in Chiang Mai

Today I thought I would describe what a typical day is like for us here in Chiang Mai. We wake up around 7:45 to catch our truck ride to school at 8:20. We rotate who gets to sit inside the truck to enjoy the air conditioning and who gets to sit outside and risk the rain and heat. We usually get to school by 8:35 and wait around until 9:00 for our first class to start. Our school is called the Srilimongklatan School and it is a very poor primary school. Here's our schedule:

Monday/Wednesday

9:00- 3rd grade

10:00- 4th grade

11:00- 5th grade

Tuesday/Thursday

9:00-Pre-k (On Tuesday) and Kindergarten (On Thursday)

10:00- 1st grade

11:00- 2nd grade

Friday

10:00-6th grade

11:00- 6th grade

We usually spend the first 30-40 minutes of each class with some sort of educational intruction and activities, while spending the latter part of the class playing fun review games or in some cases just playing fun games.

There are between 13 and 20 students in each class, with only one class per grade. I think there are about 120 kids in the whole school. We each every student and there is only one teacher per grade.

At 12:00 after we have finished with our classes we eat lunch with the teachers. I mentioned before how the teachers sometimes leave the students unattended for long periods of time, well, it's because they're always cooking lunch. On Friday at 11:00 I saw the 4th grade class helping the 2nd grade teacher (Oye) and the 4th grade teacher (Wat Nit Da) cook us lunch. We have huge spreads of food and it's always way too much. This time is definitely our opportunity to eat our fair share of local Thai food. We eat with the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grade teachers, the school principle and the school "manager." For the main part of the meal we usually have some sort of fried rice with meat and vegetables or Pad Thai (fried noodles.) We also always have a soup, 3 or 4 different Thai fruits, pork rinds, sticky rice, some sort of chili dip, and about 5 other bowls of food that when I ask what they are, Oye says "local Thai food." I put up a couple pictures of fruits and noodles at the top of the page.

We really appreciate how much Oye and Wat Nit Da look out for us and we love eating lunch with them every day. It is a little hard though because their English is very limited, so sometimes we just keep saying, "Ohh, it's soo good!!" or "It's spicyy!!!" Oye always wants to make sure we are completely full and repeatedly during the course of the meal tells us "One more! One more!" The school principle hardly knows any English but apparently one day he'd learned the word "fat", and was quite proud of it, because he kept pointing at himself and the other male teacher and saying "Fat!!!! Yesss, fat!!!!" We thought this was hilarious because they aren't fat at all and he was so excited and proud to be calling everyone fat.

So after we finish lunch the truck takes us back home usually by 12:45. Then we have the whole afternoon to do whatever we want. Some days we all go home and just take naps because it's so hot outside and the teaching is exhausting. And sometimes we'll go exploring Chiang Mai, or go to the Anodard Hotel to go swimming. We do a lot of reading (I've read all the Harry Potter books and a Jodi Picoult book so far) and a lot of playing cards. We'll go to the Internet or Airport Plaza (the local mall.) Most of the time for dinner we eat out; we either get street food or go to a restaurant. Our two favorite restaurants are EllieBum and Jerusalem Falafel. EllieBum is a cute little cafe/boutique right near our house. It has amazing smoothies,the best french toast, air conditioning and free Wi-fi. What not to love? Jersalem Falafel is a Middle Eastern restaurant we all like to go to because of it's hummus dip and pita bread. We're usually there right at 5:00 when it opens, which is actually getting a little embarrassing.

We've had a pretty exciting weekend. On Friday Robbie and I went with our housemates Jackie and Neha to watch them...Bungy Jump!! It was so cool and we might just have to do it before we leave Thailand. On Saturday we all rented a taxi for the day and drove to Mae Rim (NW of Chiang Mai.) We went to an elephant camp first. There were sooo many elephants, if I had to guess I'd say at least 50. They were every where and not even in enclosures. They would just walk up to people! We watched 10 elephants take a bath in the river and then saw a 1 hour elephant performance. It was so awesome how much these elephants could do. They played soccer, they played the harmonica, they painted pictures with paint brushes... I could go on all day.

Next, we went to the Tiger Kingdom!! Robbie and I did a package deal, where we got to play with the big tigers and the baby tigers! We paid an extra 5$ to have a photographer take pictures for us, and boy, that was a mistake. This guy was crazy. Maybe I've just never had professional pictures like this taken before, but he took 200 pictures in 30 minutes. He kept putting us in these awkward positions (laying flat on our backs, laying with our heads on the tigers' bum etc) Then he would say, "Okay, now, look into each others eyes, now you both look at the tiger, now both of you look at me, now close your eyes and pretend to be sleeping etc etc." It was so hilarious and so awkward!!! I just wanted to tell him to leave us alone and let us play with the tigers, but I couldn't get a word in. Maybeee we'll share some of the horrible pictures with the blog, I don't know though. After about 10 minutes he asked us if we were dating and when we said yes, he took Robbie's hand, my hand and the tiger's paw and put them all together, like we were one big family. It was a little ridiculous. Despite the awkward photographer, we loved playing with the tiger cubs and with Mikey and Pfala the grown tigers. It was definitely scary because we were inside their enclosure with them, but I'm so glad we did it!

Okay I'm going to add some more pictures, miss you all!

LOVE
Maggie and Robbie