It's been awhile so here's an update on what we've been doing...

Christmas

We had a pretty low key Christmas. We had school on Friday and then went to another teacher’s house for a little while that evening. We got to talk to our families on skype and Dylan was there for the opening of the presents and I got to see the Christmas tree and snow, so it was a little like we were home for Christmas. Then we came back to our apartment and enjoyed some krapow moo (sweet basil and pork) and a bottle of wine.

New Years

Christmas might not be a big holiday here but New Years (Phi Mai) sure is. On the 30^th we had a New Year’s party at school for the teachers. I don’t know why I didn’t think about karaoke being involved considering most departments in the school have their own karaoke machine and during free periods spend their time entertaining each other. But before we even sat down with our food we had already been asked about karaoke. Dylan was a little more eager and was quite the crowd pleaser dancing around on stage, which of course meant he was called up to sing 5 songs. I on the other hand was asked to sing “My Heart Will Go On” by Celine Dion. For those of you who haven’t heard me sing, I am slightly tone deaf. Anyways, the song was a way out of my range and as I tried to sneak off stage I was pulled into a duet with a male Thai teacher for song called “Evergreen Tree,” I’ve never heard it before so really it wasn’t much of a duet. But I quickly escaped and was only asked one more time to do karaoke, which was replaced with a request to dance. Any sort of party in Thailand means there will be dancing. And of course this means we must join in. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen traditional Thai dancing but the women keep there hands in an awkward position while the rotate their wrists, sounds easy enough and they make it look so graceful and easy, pretty sure this isn’t how I looked. In between songs they would call out raffle numbers and people would win rice cookers, microwaves, and a few big prizes including the small bookshelf we won. We were wondering how we’d manage to bring it home on our motorbike but a teacher offered so we never had to get to creative with that. Right now we’re keeping our cooking things on the shelves and our rice cooker on top, makes the apartment look a little more homey. It was a great night and fun to be with our teachers outside of school.

On Wednesday we headed to Laos to meet up with a bunch of the other teachers we met in Phuket. We spent the night in Vientiene, which is a really cute clean city about 6 hours from Chaiyaphum. There’s a large French influence there and the coffee shops and the small outdoor restaurants were a completely different feel from anywhere we’ve been in Thailand. The next morning we made our way to Vang Vieng to meet up with everyone for a few days of tubing, rope swing, slides, zip lines, bringing in the New Year, and so many baguettes. The town was full of foreigners from all over. It's a small beautiful town with the Nam Xong River flowing through the outskirts of town. The Nam Xong is just beautiful with cliffs surrounding the river. It was great to see everybody and a really fun long weekend; hopefully we’ll make it back there at some point in our travels. Now it's back to school with only 7 weeks left, it's flown by.

5k

This morning at 6am I met two of our friends to run a 5k, keep in mind even though it’s warm here right now it still is dark until about 6:30. We arrived to a mass of people ranging from 6 years old to probably 70. There was a 10k also, so most of the people around our age were running in that. As we ran we took note of how different this was from running in the U.S. Most students were wearing there school shoes, which really aren’t made for running and we even passed a couple kids without shoes. When we came through the finish line the announcer ran through with us. It was a lot of fun and we even got a medal and shirt.