7-11 Pizza Bread

28% wheat flour, 17.2% pork sausage, 8% sugar, 6.8% vegetable oil, 4.7% tomato sauce, 3% egg, 2% vegetable fat, 1.4% margarine, 0.7% salt, 0.4% yeast, unspecified % preservative and artificial colour: 100% delicious!

Two truths and a lie

This is a tale from teaching at the Juvenile Detention Centre (JDC).

We try to make our lessons interactive, and so we decided to play 'Two truths and a lie' at the JDC. In case you're not familiar with the game, I'll explain it. You have to tell a group of people three things about yourself, two of which are true, and one of which is a lie. They have to guess which is the lie. This is what one of them came up with: have a guess which is the lie....

1) I have videotaped people having sex
2) I have videotaped other people having sex
3) I was arrested for selling 9000 pills

Any ideas?

Nope?

The answer is 3) - she was actually arrested for selling 2000 pills.

This is why I love teaching at the JDC - the girls can be difficult, moody, distracted or disengaged, but never dull!

CThomas Weekly Journal 12th-19th July 2010

My boss makes us all write him a journal each week so he can keep an eye on what we've been up to. He says it can be any format we want - I decided to test it this week by making an illustrated version of the week's events, complete with lyrics from "Don't stop believin'" by Journey... the song I've had in my head all week. Enjoy....

Long live the King!

Last night I went to see Twilight. Please don't judge. There were just so many fitties... 
The Thai movie-going experience is pretty similar to the UK: giant and overpriced cokes, ridiculously cold air-con, queues of squealing girls and their reluctant boyfriends (but maybe that last one's just Twilight) except for one significant difference. At the start of the film, after all the trailers and the ridiculously fast-paced and surreal Thai ads, everyone stands up (it's actually illegal not to!), and they play the national anthem.
Here it is, for those who are interested:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLOhfo0MO00
 It's accompanied by quite an amazing video in the cinema as well, involving soviet-esque shots of dams and other symbols of progress towards industrialisation, as well as propaganda style scenes of young beautiful women and their adorable chubby babies. And, of course, the King.


There was a photo here, but it now has to be removed, because I want to do another post and it's against the law in Thailand to have a photo of the King lower than a photo of anyone else on a web page. They actually just made a new protect the king cybercrime unit to enforce this too!

Thai people REALLY love the King. In Bangkok we spotted flourescent orange "long live the King!" wristbands, which a few of the other interns are now proudly wearing. There's pictures of the King everywhere - like on the entrance to the airport, on bridges across main roads in Chiang Mai, in pretty much every Thai person's house - doing pretty much anything you can imagine - playing golf, wearing monk robes, getting on planes etc. And in the cinema video, my favourite part was a shot of two small children drawing pictures... of the King and Queen.
The King is on the money here, and it's actually a criminal offence to step on money, because that's stepping on a picture of the King, and stepping on stuff is really offensive in Buddhist cultures because the feet are considered the lowest part of the body, so to put them above or on someone else's body is a massive insult. Even pointing at pictures of the King is quite rude. It's kind of cool though, in a way - I think maybe here the King is an enduring symbol of unity in quite a diverse nation, whereas in the UK, the Queen is a nice old lady who doesn't really do anybody any harm, and the rest of the royal family aren't good for much except Daily Mail feature stories.
But, saying all that, the Thai national anthem (which gets played twice a day on all radio stations), translated, is actually


'Thailand is the unity of Thai blood and body.
The whole country belongs to the Thai people, maintaining thus far for the Thai.
All Thais intend to unite together.
Thais love peace but do not fear to fight.
They will never let anyone threaten their independence.
They will sacrifice every drop of their blood to contribute to the nation, will serve their country with pride and prestige full of victory.
CHAI YO. [Cheers]."


...No mention of the King whatsoever.
Whereas ours is:


God save our gracious Queen,
God save our noble Queen,
God save the Queen
etc.


...so who am I to talk about being obsessed with the royal family?

I think only one thing remains to be said:

bangkrak?

Before I write anything about Bangkok, I would like to add a disclaimer: I haven't really slept for about 30 hours so nothing I say should be taken seriously by anyone. ALSO today I had a meeting with someone whose name was "Kiddieporn". And I was only with my boss and thai people so nobody else found it amusing.
Annnnnnyyyyyway Bangkok. The reason I am so epicly tired is because we got a flight at stupid o clock this morning to get back in time for work, and then I had to go to the juvenile detention centre, and then to a meeting where I had to be alive, and then do work. I tried to sleep on the floor of the prison but unsurprisingly, it wasn't particularly comfortable, and I had major dengue paranoia so I had to keep twitching to throw off the mosquitos. Me and Kyla didn't even watch the world cup final last nigh because we were too preoccupied with trying on our purchases from the final round of drunk shopping. Now, we all know drunk shopping is always an amazing idea. And we also all know that you get better at foreign languages when you're drunk. So when you get to drunk haggling in thai you reach drunk nirvana and it's AWESOME. I bought a dress, a jumper, two tops, a ring with the letter H (for hipster), a ring with a cassette, some bangles and best of all, some pacman earrings. All entirely useful. Specially the pacman earrings.
The best shopping experience by far was the truly epic chatuchak (that's definitely not how you spell it, but I have no idea how, so you're going to have to get over it) market. It's apparently the biggest weekend market in the entire world ever, and it has about 8000 stalls. What that means in real life is that I walked around it for about five hours on Saturday, thought I saw everything, came back on Sunday and went to a whole new section that I hadn't even been to yet. It's a maze of really trendy and cheap designer boutiques, 8000 baht antiques, dried fish that makes you retch if you get stuck behind the little man who walks round really slowly singing, vintage leather and levis and utter shit. I came to the conclusion that if it's not in chatuchak, it doesn't exist. Unfortunately if it does exist, it will only exist in size tiny. However, pacman earrings don't come in sizes, so all's right with the world.
Apart from shopping, my time in bangkok involved a lot of riding around in the sexy hot pink taxi meters, a lot of lounging by the pool, a life-changing steak sandwich and an outrageous amount of tuk tuk karaoke, fuelled by 7-11 smirnoff mules. I don't even know what a smirnoff mule is, but I know it's delicious and it makes you want to sing journey a lot. I'm currently having a bit of a dilemma, because I have "don't stop believing" in my head, but I don't have my headphones with me, and the potential embarassment I would face if someone walked in and I was genuinely listening to that song alone in the office at night would be horrific. I blame Chris for knowing all the words to everything. No, I am actually going to listen to it. Please don't tell anyone.
To distract you, here's a picture of seven (yes SEVEN) of us in a tuk tuk. If you've ever ridden in a tuk tuk, you'll understand...

I apologise, because this has been entirely nonsensical, and I haven't really said anything much about anything. Just stop and be quiet now. Sleepytime.

America Special Day!

So this week was the first time I've ever celebrated the 4th of July, and I must say, I had a ball. For the unitiated, as far as I can make out, this is a holiday that seems to involve only binge drinking, fatty foods and fireworks. We had red, white and blue jello shots, mac 'n' cheese, vegetable kebabs (most of which didn't get eaten, too healthy), slightly burnt bratwurst, delicious potato salad from someone's mum's special recipe, and home-made burgers. And crisps. It's at this point I should make a confession - I did call them "chips". Completely accidentally. I think I'm getting sucked in...Anyway, I don't know what I enjoyed more - the party, which involved teaching some Lao professors how to play ring of fire - or the mad hours of food prep in the morning, accompanied by some hip hop classics of the 90s. But, they always say pictures speak louder than works, so I think I'll let this one (courtesy of the lovely El Bell) do the talking:

The joys of working for free

So, last night, I stayed up until midnight drawing pictures with felt tip pens for flashcards, and then got up at 6.3oam today to go to school. I swear, I never worked this hard when I was actually getting paid.Today we all headed up by redtruck to some very small and rainy village in the mountains to teach some kids at a childrens' home at the first day of saturday school. First lesson was a bit of a disaster: by the time we'd introduced ourselves and managed to differentiate between Clara, Carla and Kyla and handed out the bingo cards, it was the end of the lesson, and we had to collect them all back up again. Second lesson, with the smallest kids, went slightly better: we managed to actually play the bingo game. However, we read the numbers out in Thai because the kids' English wasn't so hot, and even then, they tended to not actually cross them out on their bingo cards when they came up. So, we resorted to peeking over their shoulders, finding out the ones they needed to get a line, and rigging the game. Classy.

Our final bingo lesson was the most successful - we read the numbers out in English and most of the kids actually crossed them off their sheets when we did. However, they went from being extremely shy and unwilling to participate to shouting BINGO BINGO BINGO so loudly we struggled to make ourselves heard. For the older kids, we dispensed with the bingo and went for telling the time instead - I think we managed to eventually get across the concept of "quarter past", although we didn't quite manage "quarter to". After the first three lessons, we stopped for lunch which was delicious fried rice that unfortunately came in orphan-sized portions, accompanied by monsoon rain and the obligatory photos of the falang teachers in front of the blackboard. By fourth lesson I was too tired to do much but gently point the kids in the direction of the right numbers, trying my best to "elicit knowledge from the learners" rather than telling them the answers.

All in all though, it was a really lovely day with some incredibly cute kids. I'm kind of getting the hang of this teaching thing, just about, and making it up as I go along. The kids apparently loved the flashcards - they were for a class I wasn't teaching - and so we decided to donate them, meaning a thai childrens' home is now decorated with pictures of a gecko, a native american, a hamburger, an elephant, ronald mcdonald and a moose (In case you couldn't guess, that's an America/Thailand theme). So, in conclusion, after an exhausting day, I would summarise what I've learned so far as "flashcards good, bingo bad".

Things they have in the supermarket in Thailand

Crisps in crab curry, sweet basil and roast pork bun flavours

Waitrose rich tea biscuits

Chocolate bread with a bun inside the loaf

Litre bottles of fish sauce

The world's most overpriced cheese