Back to School

I'll admit, I was a little less excited than maybe I should have been to get back to teaching. Mostly, I blame the lack of enthusiasm on my first day back in Doembangnangbuat, a few days before classes actually started.

I arrived home with my bulked out backpack and a few extra plastic bags around dinner time. One of the teachers met me at the school, which turned out to be a good thing because my bicycle tires were flat. He offered me a lift home, which was great. What wasn't so great, I discovered later, was that without a bicycle, I had no way to get to the market if I needed to go shopping. Which I did. I had no water left in the house, other than the water that comes out of the tap in my bathroom--which isn't safe to drink. I also had no food other than a few snacks I'd gotten at the bus station in Bangkok. And I'd planned on topping up my internet card first thing when I got home, so I also had no internet. As for the rest of the welcome home . . . well, I had to sweep up several dead creepy-crawlies (I suppose if I hadn't left a bug-killer hanging from a door handle, they might not have been so dead), including a six-inch centipede in my bedroom. Brrr. Also, the refrigerator decided to have it out with the extension cord while I was gone, so I came home to scorched plastic and a fridge I wasn't sure would work if I plugged it into a different extension cord. And the air conditioning, boon of my bedroom, also decided it had had enough--or rather, that the batteries in the remote had had enough. All in all, not a great first night back. Instead, it was a sweaty, thirsty, buggy sort of night. Hilarious in retrospect--sometimes the story-worthy, adventurous things don't happen exactly when you expect them.

Most of all that got fixed the next day (well, not the bugs--those got cleared up almost as soon as I stepped in the door the first night). One of the workers at the school pumped up my bicycle tires, which meant I could go shopping for food, water, internet, and batteries for the air conditioning remote. I asked the other teachers about the fridge problem, bringing in the burnt out extension cord as evidence. I was sure it was some sort of problem with the electrical bits of the fridge itself, but as it turns out, it just needed a different model of extension cord. Good as new.

My first day back at school didn't involve teaching, much to my surprise. Instead, I got to introduce myself to two different assemblies full of parents. And in the second one, I also helped give out achievement certificates of some kind to the students. Introducing myself was a little intimidating, but kind of fun. I'd forgotten what it was like to be the only westerner in town (while traveling, I was always just one of the ubiquitous tourists), and as soon as I opened with "sawat dee ka," I got a huge round of applause. Both times. Guess I'm back to being the exotic foreigner who can say a few cute phrases in Thai. I'm trying desperately to learn more, of course, but it's a tough language, and the words just don't seem to stick in my head. I'm also back to getting tons of smiles and waves whenever I ride my bicycle through town, which is fun, and probably my favorite part of most days. Can I do this for another semester? I think I can, yes.

The Last Half of the Holiday

I discovered some things about my tolerance for traveling. First of all, I can't keep up the traditional backpacker pace for long--you know, staying somewhere for one or two nights, seeing all the sights, and then heading off to the next place for one or two nights. It just gets exhausting. I ended up enjoying places more when I stayed for a week--a day to recover from traveling (especially if I used a night bus), a few days of sightseeing, and a few days of chill time before dealing with more public transportation.

Also, being sick while you travel is Not Fun, capital N, capital F. At the end of my first week on Koh Tao, I got food poisoning for the first time ever. I'd take the stomach flu over food poisoning any day--it's gentler. My stomach was determined to turn itself inside out from that pad thai. I had sore abs for a few days just from one night of throwing up--apparently it took more muscles than I possess.

On a brighter note, I spent a second week on Koh Tao learning to scuba dive. I got my PADI certification and even did a couple of deep dives. Ok, so we didn't see anything that experienced divers label as exciting, like turtles or whalesharks, but it was a blast anyway. I've never really understood the drive some people have to do things like skydiving or hang gliding, and I don't really get the "high" (ha, ha) that my brother does from mountain climbing, but I can understand why people might get addicted to scuba diving. I did scrape my foot on some coral while doing the swim test for the certification, and I can say that diving in salt water with a scrape is not fun (oh, the stinging!), but the rest was worth it. I would list all the different kinds of fish we saw, but it's pretty long, and I can't imagine that reading a list of the different kinds is anything close to as much fun as seeing them.

After two weeks with less than stellar internet on Koh Tao, I spent a day just hanging out in a hotel in Chumphon (the ferry point for Koh Tao) just doing internet things and catching up on the rest of the world. Then I headed to Phuket, which was a little bit the way I picture New Orleans would be. If New Orleans were Thai and had a Chinese quarter instead of a French quarter, that is. But I'm pretty sure I spotted the word Bayou in one of the shop names . . . My dad arranged for me to stay at a somewhat nicer hotel than the standard backpackers' destination for the last few days of my break (thanks, Dad!), and I spent those few days reading and enjoying the seaside at a luxurious snail's pace.

I feel like I've gained a lot of independence after spending so much time finding my own way to places. I've also perfected the art of long-term light packing, and I can load a backpack in ten minutes flat (and that's with everything scattered around the room beforehand, thank you very much). It's hard to go back to actual responsibilities after two months away, but I'd also started craving a bit more routine again. I know some of the places I've seen are places I will probably never be able to see again, because I won't have much free time to travel between now and the end of the semester when I return home. But it's been the experience of a lifetime.