Storm! (July 3)

Tried another tasty new banana-leaf-wrapped treat for breakfast today. This one was a sweet coconut mixture surrounded by a sticky wheat dough, and is called kanom tien. At school I had three classes today: first, second, and sixth grade. I started each class with “Head shoulders knees and toes,” I have never sung this song so many times in one week! There are two students, who are 11, who have been selected to participate in a regional English competition, where they introduce themselves and tell a story. They are doing Little Red Riding Hood, so I also had a class with just the two of them today to work on reading and acting it out. Yesterday I rewrote Little Red Riding Hood with easier vocab/grammar for them. I hope that by acting it out they got generally what it is about. Acting out something, and then me teaching them the word in English and them teaching me the word in Thai worked pretty well.

            Another note about school, the students and teachers have different uniforms every day of the week. For example, on Monday all the teachers were wearing boy scout uniform type outfits, Tuesday didn’t seem to be anything in particular, and today was a polo shirt and athletic pants. The students were also wearing athletic outfits today, while on Monday at Tuesday they had blue/white and orange/brown uniforms. Bu leant me an athletic outfit to wear to school today, but I have to say that wearing nylon athletic pants all day in hot humid weather is not too comfortable.

            For lunch, Bu took me to an outdoor roadside restaurant near the school, where we had pad thai.  After school, we went to Bu’s father’s school to use the internet, since the internet at our school doesn’t work too well. This school is both a primary and a high school, and it seemed much wealthier with fancier and more modern buildings.

            Then, back to the house where I read for awhile and noticed that clouds were moving in and heard some thunder (so far it has been sunny or partly cloudy every day here). Around 5:30, we headed to a market to buy some fresh fruits, in particular durian, which is very smelly but many people say tastes very good. However, about 10 seconds after getting out of the car at the market, the clouds opened and an extreme downpour started, forcing us to run back to the car. Trying durian will have to wait for another day.