One week in Thailand. It's been 7 days since I arrived. And, I am happy to report that I am still healthy and loving Thai food. There's this little place down the soi (street) next to ours that sells a barbecue chicken and sticky rice that is absolutely amazing. The kind of thing I could eat for lunch every day for the next 45 days that I am here. While I'm on the subject of food, I'll take a quick trip over to beverage lane to share an amusing story from the grocery store at the mall yesterday. We stopped by the store to get stuff for breakfast since nothing near us seems to open early enough for breakfast, unless you want meat skewers from the street vendor, which I have been told by the Evangel team is not a bad option, though I haven't yet tried it. Anyway, while at the grocery store I saw a refrigerator with canned sodas in it, like we would have in the states. There was Coke and Pepsi in it for 13 baht (30 baht = 1 U.S. Dollar, so less than 50 cents). That's the standard price around for canned soda and cheap large water bottles. I wasn't even thinking about grabbing a soda... But then, I saw it. Among the red and blue and green of Coke, Pepsi and Sprite, all with their Thai names inscribed on one side and their English logos printed on the other, the angel of light and civilization, the beverage of heaven. Yes, for the first time ever outside the United States of America, I found Dr. Pepper! Ice cold and on the shelf next to Pepsi and above Coke, right where it belonged. I was no longer in Asia, I was home!
Why all this dramatic build up, you ask? What is the punch line? It was 48 baht per can. Yes, that's right, more than 3 times as expensive as a Coke or Pepsi. More than $1.50 U.S. The price tag for Dr. Pepper was right next to the one for Pepsi, and I was torn. My heart sank for a moment as I realized I wasn't “home.” But we had just come from Starbucks where I found the Chiang Mai city mug for my sister-in-law, and I didn't get anything to drink there, so I deserved it. ;)
I bought myself a Dr. Pepper, and it's still sitting in my fridge, waiting for a special occasion to be consumed. By the way, the average meal in Thailand costs between 30 and 50 baht, equate that Dr. Pepper with a meal. It was so worth it, just to have it in my fridge waiting for me. Tomorrow morning I think I will drink it and be glad.
;)
Anyway, on to much more important things. Today was our third day of classes and I got another student. I teach two classes that are the same level just at different times. It feels more like tutoring because I have one class of 4 and one class of 2 students. It's amazing. It was so much fun today, because today's lesson was about the weather, so we had all kinds of vocabulary about the weather and we discussed the seasons and things like that. The lesson was really short so we had time at the end for a game of, for all intents and purposes, pictionary. I wrote out all the vocabulary words (ex. hot, rainy, humid, stormy, partly cloudy, etc.) on pieces of paper and the students came up one at a time to pick a paper and then draw that weather on the board for everyone else to guess. The girls (all my students are girls) loved it. It was especially funny, because I had no way to help them understand “humid” as a word. “Not dry” just wasn't cutting it. So when A (one of my students) got humid to draw she started writing it phonetically in the Thai alphabet, which still took the classes just as long to guess as most of the other pictures. It was very funny. (I finally got out Google translate and showed them the Thai word for “humid” and it finally clicked for all of them.)
Fun times. Tomorrow is Friday so we have our first end of the week party (every Friday at 7pm we will have a party for the students after the last classes get out). It's going to be very fun, and hopefully we will have all of our students stay for it, because we want to be able to build relationship with them outside the classroom. Pray that we continue to get more students coming in (Classes at the university started on Monday and out class started on Tuesday, so we expect to pick up a few more students over the weekend) and that the party goes smoothly so that we can connect with our students and be able to build relationships with them during this short time we are here.
Love you all,
-Kristen
Charity (Lauren's friend from Missouri), and three of my students: Sigh, Sigh and A, playing Sequence.
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