Smells like teen spirit.

Well talk about hard work paying off. This thursday and friday we have no classes for the Sport Carnival. The students in the whole school use the last period before the end of the day and after school to practice for this event. The students are divided into 6 house colors: red, yellow, blue, pink, green and purple. The M6 students organize pretty much everything. Each color has a dance, music, theme which are all created by the students. The whole sports carnival was a 2-day event. The beginning of the day started with a dance by each color then sports competitions. They had volleyball, basketball, soccer, bocce ball, badminton and many more.

Matt and I were on the yellow team. And luckily the yellow team won for best dance! It was a lot of fun and even better because we had two days off from sschool! Pictures are on my website and they are pretty exciting to see!

swine flu mask proliferation!

Swine flu. Beware! It's quite a feat to try to enunciate english words through a bright green cloth over your mouth strapped to your face. Each classroom in the EP program has been given boxes of masks with the regulation that EVERY student MUST wear their mask in the classroom otherwise the air conditioner will be turned off. Not only do the students have to wear these masks, that are now colorfully decorated and drawn on, but the teachers also must wear these masks. I never did think that one day I would have my own personal surgical mask without an MD degree. Interesting.

But it is quite a culture shock to walk into a classroom where you can only see the eyes of each students peering out at you behind a green or white mask. Apparently the flu has become increasingly prevalent in the central Thailand area. But lucky for me I'm healthy as a horse and plan to keep it that way! I'll try and get some pictures of my classes soon to post!

July 4th Weekend

It is nice to have a long weekend for July 4th. Even though it was for Buddhist Lent and not US Independence Day, but all the same I suppose because we got a 5 day weekend. Also, Matt got here on Thursday! So we got to relax on Ko Samet for our long weekend! We took a 3 hours bus to Ban Phe which then we took a ferry about an hour to the island. The part of the island we were staying didn't have a dock so a tinier boat had to come pick us up from the ferry and drive us to the shore. Surprisingly, the area of the island there are lots of Thai's and barely any foreigners.

It did rain all day on Monday but Tuesday's weather was amazing. We made friends with one of the only foreign bartender's from Holland who ran The Baywatch Bar. He made a killer Long Island Iced Tea. We sadly came back on Wednesday afternoon, spent a little time in Bangkok and headed back to Suphanburi. All in all not a bad way to spend the holiday!