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.