Beautiful

The Thai word for beautiful is "suay." For some reason, this makes me think of the English word "suave"--and I don't just think of the word that means cool and handsome, I think of the shampoo brand (derived from the first meaning, of course).

It's a strange experience to be told I'm beautiful as often as has been the case over the past eight months. And I do get it a lot. I think part of that is just being the only westerner living in a small town--I don't get nearly as many comments when I go to Bangkok or more touristy areas.

I didn't grow up believing I was beautiful. That's not as sad as it may sound--after all, I didn't believe I was ugly, either--and I wouldn't have believed anyone who said I was. If asked, I would have said my appearance rested firmly in the range labeled average. I think this opinion came down to two basic facts. First, for most of my teenaged years, I was overweight--not enough to be called fat by anyone (not even bullying cheerleaders--at least, not to my face), but enough that I didn't automatically fall into the American beauty standard of thinness. The second was that I wore glasses from age ten until my last year of high school. As far as I was concerned, that meant the likelihood of being called beautiful went down to almost nothing. I realize how silly it is now, of course, but I totally fell for the stereotype that people who wear glasses look smart, not beautiful. My vanity as a teenager centered on my intelligence, not my appearance. And as false as the stereotype is, I still got called smart a lot more often than I got called beautiful.

So being in Thailand, where I'm called beautiful an average of a few times a week, is a very different experience. I got called beautiful the other day when I was wearing my glasses, had no makeup on (I tried using makeup my first few days in Thailand, but the heat and humidity here kind of make it feel--and sometimes look--like your face is melting), and my hair was still wet from my morning shower. My reaction was something between an automatic "thank you" and "are you crazy?" It all seems to come down to skin tone, which is a much different standard of beauty than the ones I'm used to--and not one I'm all that comfortable with.

I have to laugh to myself sometimes at a few of my lower level classes--the ones with students who don't pay attention--because in each of the classes, there is at least one girl who will pull out tiny mirror and would spend the entire class gazing and primping, if I let them (I usually give them a chance to just put it away, but I start confiscating pretty quickly these days). Last week during an exercise about phone conversations, I used the names Snow White and Cinderella for the example conversation to make it a bit more interesting. When I chose two students to read the conversation, one a little darker-complexioned than the other (but not by much), a girl at the back of the class called out "Snow White and Snow Black!" In another class, where I had students writing sentences about themselves, I was walking around checking work and helping where needed, and I saw that one girl had written "I am very ugly" among the rest of her sentences. I told her the sentences were very good, but that she needed to change "ugly" to "beautiful" for it to be correct.

Every culture has its own ideals for beauty, I guess. It's only when we're removed from our own culture's ideals that we see what a flimsy thing it is to be called beautiful, and how ridiculous some of the standards are. The truth is, I don't think I've ever met someone who wasn't beautiful.

War on Bugs, Part II

With the onset of rainy season, the ants have gotten more determined. Perhaps they've all moved inside to get away from the rain. That would certainly explain recent encounters. Through trial and error, I've discovered the following Rules for Fighting Ants:

1. All food belongs in the refrigerator. This is the only place it is safe. Pay no attention to where items are shelved in the store; forget all your preconceived opinions about whether any one type of food should be stored at room temperature (or tastes better at room temperature, for that matter). Food is consumed or it is stored in the fridge. It does not matter if food is in sealed, air-tight packaging. The ants will find it. 

2. All crumbs and other food remnants must be cleaned up immediately. Ok, this one's pretty obvious. What's not so obvious is the extent of the rule. I spilled a few drops of soup, forgot about it (I think my attention was taken up with something like grading a bunch of homework) and they found it. It doesn't matter how small the crumbs or where they fall or the type of food. The ants will find them. 

3. Garbage is to be taken out on a daily basis. Even if said garbage is in a plastic bag inside a bin. Even if you don't think it's garbage that ants could ever be interested in or even eat. The ants will find it. 

4. Check the house daily for creepy-crawlies that might have died in the night. Ok, this one's a bit disgusting. But to date, I've had ants find a dead frog and a dead gecko before I could. (Heck, I'm just grateful there are no mice or rats.) I suppose it comes of living in a house that has screens instead of glass in the windows, not to mention a few other holes. Even an anal-retentive level of cleanliness only guards against so much if there are enough openings to the outside. Things find a way in. The ants will find the things. 

5. Spray as needed. If needed, spray daily. When you find them, be merciless. If you happen to find a nest of them in the woodwork of a door frame, ignore all feelings that you are becoming a mass murderer. There are plenty of ants out there to replace the ones that die on the battlefield in your house. In all probability, more ants will find a way in. 

I don't like killing things, not even the creepy-crawlies. I prefer the relocation program I used to have for spiders (back when they were all tiny). But, there are boundaries, and I'm certainly not going to let my cleanliness or my health deteriorate for the sake of insect life. Plus, I'm determined to avoid at all costs ever again having an ant crawl over any body part while I'm asleep.

On with a (hopefully?) ant-free rainy season! 

Welcome to Rainy Season

So, it's definitely here. Rainy season in Thailand is at least not like "rainy season" in Seattle--I won't be getting months of gray, drizzly days. Rains here are more like what I experienced when I lived in Atlanta, Georgia: short bursts of heavy downpour. I've also found that, in general, I can count on rain in the evenings rather than the mornings. But there are at least a few sunny portions of every day.

The picture above is of some of the fields near my house. I took it ages ago, not long after I got to Thailand. But it's not far off from what the fields look like now. We seem to be on the second rice crop of the year (the first having been harvested not long after the March-April break started). The farmers drain the field to plant, and then let it fill up with water again, so the effect, once the rice starts growing, is something like a very soggy-looking field of grass. The fields were planted again a few weeks ago, so the rice plants are just peeking above the surface of the water now. This is what they'll look like later on:

And then they'll turn a bit golden, almost like wheat, right before the fields are harvested. I still see pumps draining the field sometimes--I guess under the theory that even rice shouldn't drown under the rains of the season.

A teaching update: well, it's been a bit exhausting the past week or two. I'm doing a better job at explaining to the students that they need to get their homework on time, but some understanding seems to slip through the cracks. I had an entire class that only did half the assignment last week. I gave them another week to finish, and when I asked for it today, they gave me blank looks. I was very specific about what they needed to do. But, it's the last hour of the day, and the students in this particular class tend to be quite squirmy and ready to go home. So they might not have heard/listened to what I was telling them last week. I can't quite figure out if the missing homework is from the students being lazy, or from a lack of understanding. I've given them another week. We'll see if they do it this time. I also called out an entire class that, with the exception of five students out of the forty-five, had all copied each other's homework, a very distinctive and completely wrong set of directions. (We'd been working on the phrases "go past the ____" and "turn after the _____" and somehow the phrases "went above" and "undertaking" got in there--seriously, how does that happen?) The downside to having classes that are divided by ability level (as in, the top class in any given grade level is often called the "smart class") is that you know some days are just going to be challenging. On the other hand, you also know which days are going to be delightful.

A Few Rules This Time Around . . .

Well, I've survived the first two and a half weeks back at school. It's been really interesting to teach the same things I taught six months ago. Two of the grade levels have completely different lessons this term, but for the rest, I can repeat at least some of the lessons from last term because the students moved up a grade level. It might not be the easiest thing in the world to go back to having a set schedule after traveling for so long, but it's been so much easier than starting from scratch was. I have a general idea of which lessons worked and which didn't, which lets me focus more of my planning time on the few classes where I need to come up with brand new lesson plans.

I changed the introduction lesson this time around. Last time, I wanted to get the students speaking as soon as possible, so they weren't just sitting there listening to me. It was a good thing, but by jumping right into the material, I think I confused a lot of the students about what they should expect from the rest of the term, and about my expectations for them. It's strange--as a student, I always hated the boring "reading of the rules" day each year when school started. But, as a teacher, I'm starting to see how necessary the boring first day is. I gave the students a brief outline so they would know what I'm using to determine their grades. I also gave them a few rules for the English classroom. The two main ones were: "Don't copy homework" and "Don't do homework for other classes," but I included some more abstract ones like "Be creative" and "Mistakes are ok," just so they would know I wasn't going to focus on being super strict. Last term it seemed everywhere I looked I could find students copying homework or doing homework for other classes--which, when I told them to put it away, they would, only to bring it out again when they thought I wasn't looking. It's a little to early to determine the outcome of the "don't copy homework" rule, but I have noticed fewer students doing homework for other classes. Or when they have, I've taken it away and returned it at the end of class (which I didn't feel justified in doing last term because I wasn't sure they'd understand why I was taking it away--but they do this term). Big improvement.

I also introduced the concept of Participation Money. It's amazing to see all the raised hands that come from introducing a fake, photocopied $100 bill. There's a little bit more focus on the lesson, at least. Now if I can just get them to stop shouting out the answer as they raise their hands . . . although I think they'll realize soon enough when I can't give out the participation money because too many people shouted the answer. On with the new term!

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.

I Am Kayak, Hear Me Roar

And what does this picture have to do with the post, you may ask? Well, nothing. I just saw this little statue of Ganesha over a fountain and had to stop and take a picture. On with the real post . . .

After getting a van from Trang to Surat Thani, I got the night ferry to Koh Tao. The guide book warned it was more of a cargo ship than an actual ferry, and so not to expect comfort, but I figured I'd be fine and didn't want to find a hotel room to wait for the next ferry. Riding the night ferry was . . . well, an adventure, if you get to sleep during an adventure. True to the guidebook, the bottom deck was full of cargo, like crates of water and alcoholic beverages. A few motorcycles made it on board. The top two decks were full of very thin, narrow mattresses. And when I say deck--well, perhaps they were hoping to be decks when they grow up a little, because they were only about four feet high. I found my assigned mattress without too much trouble, as it was on an end (lucky), but had to double over to get to it. When I first saw the beds, my first thoughts were: 1) Yay, I get to lay down instead of sitting up all night like on a bus, and 2) You know, the proportions here are a little reminiscent of berths described on slave ships from that movie "Amazing Grace" . . . (great movie, btw. If you haven't seen it, go watch it now.) The girls who crawled in after me and settled on the mattresses next to mine had a more positive view: "it's like an enforced sleep-over!" I did get to sleep, and yeah, it wasn't too bad.

The boat pulled into Koh Tao in the gray, rainy morning. Which meant the island didn't give the best first impression. When the rain stopped, I decided to just walk around for a bit and ask at a few places before I settled on a place to stay. I had lunch, read the first quarter or so of Brahm Stoker's Dracula, took a nap, and walked on the beach. Not a great beach, as beaches go. Not one of those that calls to the world, "come lie on my sands and swim in my water." It was sort of mucky. I did have some very good pizza for dinner, though, and ended my day on an "oh, well" sort of note.

This is the morning that greeted me yesterday:

It's amazing the difference a little bit of sun makes. The beach still qualified as kind of mucky, however, no matter what you might think of the picture. So after a leisurely late breakfast and some more reading, I rented a kayak for half a day:

. . . and spent about four hours paddling around and humming pirate songs to myself (as per the Slater sibling kayaking tradition beginning circa August 2003). The kayak, unlike the ones I've experienced in Seattle, was more a sort of aero-dynamic plastic raft with a paddle than anything else (the ones in the Seattle area almost always have rudders), with strategically placed drainage holes that guaranteed a saturated bum. But at 200 baht per half-day, I wasn't going to complain. I started out from about midway down Sairee Beach and made it all the way around the nearby island Nangyuan--which, given that my upper body strength is, well, negligible, felt like quite the accomplishment.

I finally understand the phrase "turquoise waters"--I don't think I'd ever seen a body of water that didn't look more sea green (or murky green) than turquoise, but once I got away from the shore, there was no other word for the color. The guy who carried the kayak down to the beach for me warned that the coral was quite shallow close to the shore, so I'd have to be careful not to scrape the bottom of the kayak and sort of zigzag out into deeper water. I wasn't quite prepared for just how shallow it was--less than two feet down, I got to see tiny fish darting to safety as I passed. You can sort of see it here:

When I got into deeper water, I caught glimpses of schools of fish around the island, some with bright yellow tails, some tiny and silvery, and some with stripes similar to the tiger barbs I kept in an aquarium when I was little. Unlike kayaking in Seattle, there were no seal heads that popped up, and there were more butterflies than sea birds passing overhead. And I got to see things like this:

and this:

Which don't look as huge and impressive in photographs as they did in real life.

You've probably lost all curiosity by now, but the title of my post comes from an episode of Gilmore Girls, in which one of the characters compares herself and her husband to two people paddling a canoe, which will go in circles if one person stops paddling; and then she compares her daughter to one person paddling a kayak, with power to steer herself because she can paddle on both sides instead of just one. Sometimes it's daunting to be traveling alone, and sometimes it's just plain lonely. When I first got to Koh Tao and sat at the dock waiting for the rain to stop, I watched several couples and other tourist groups help each other unpack rain gear. And there have been several moments when I've had the thought, "I'm the only one seeing this" and I haven't had anybody at hand to whom to point out some curiosity or wonder. While there are always new friends to be made, it's mostly brief acquaintances. Not that traveling on my own hasn't been a good experience, overall--I get to choose what to see, travel according to my own preferences and in my own time. But for the past few days I was feeling the lonelier side of the experience. Kayaking helped with that a bit, I think--it's an empowering feeling to go somewhere and see amazing things under your own steam. I don't need to wait for somebody else to do something amazing. I am a kayak, not a canoe.

I'll admit, though, that my arms and shoulders are very sore this morning.