Orientation: Welcome to Thailand

It's hard to believe that orientation was almost a month ago. It was one of those weeks where you meet a ton of people, and all of you take it pretty much for granted that you're not going to remember a quarter of each other's names. After all, we all put into the same hotel for a week before being shipped off to different parts of the country. It was a good week, though.

Okay, some of it was boring. We had classes for a lot of the week, some on the basics of the Thai language, and more on the basics of teaching--with particular emphasis on what kinds of language problems we should expect from our students. While each of these classes sounded interesting to begin with, there wasn't much that I hadn't already come across either in my online TEFL course, or in the few books on Thai I'd picked up from the library a few months before leaving. 

The most interesting parts of the week were the field trips. As you might guess from the picture above, we saw the Grand Palace in Bangkok. We went in the morning right when it opened, but walking through the grounds (I kind of want to say campus) was still sweltering. This was my first prolonged test of how well I'm going to deal with heat and humidity for a year. I did okay for the first half. The second half I stumbled around in a dehydrated haze.

No photo can accurately capture the detail on any of those buildings. Inside one of them is the Emerald Buddha (which is made of jade, not emerald). It's rather like what I've heard seeing the Mona Lisa is like--smaller than expected. It was also where I accidentally lost my tour group. The funny thing was that it was actually an accident. I'm not one for milling around in huge tourist groups, but I'll take feeling like I'm in a herd over the feeling of being lost in a strange country. Luckily, once I found the exit (which was a feat in and of itself) all I had to do was wait for my group to appear.

Other highlights of the week included a stage production about the history of different regions of Thailand--complete with traditional Thai music, dance, elephants, people flying through the air on wires, and a river across the front of the stage--and a two-day trip to Kanchanaburi. It's tough to say what was best in Kanchanaburi: the Bridge over the River Kwae was beautiful, the dinner and dance music on a boat floating down the river was also hard to beat . . . and elephant riding and bamboo rafting--need I say more?

Orientation week was busy and exhausting and amazing. I'm not sure I want to feel like such a tourist sheep again while I'm here, but even that was okay for one week. It was a splendid and elaborate introduction. And with my next post we'll be on to the real thing . . .