It's halloween and evil lurks...

Here is the view from our balcony. As you can see Samut Prakan clearly resembles the "quiet fishing village" described in lonely planet. Dunno bout you, but I'm not convinced they ever came here. After all, it boasts one of the largest crocodile farms in the world including a 6m croc. These pics are as of ten mins ago and surprisingly I managed to take them in the split second that there was no traffic around. Weird. This road is one of the main arteries feeding BKK and is usually a nightmare. You can probably tell why I'd rather move to BKK and spend 90 percent of my weekends at the beach or at least away from home. Tis not rain cloud, tis pollution.

These impressive images are brought to you instead of the pics of the kids I was planning to take but unfortunately there were none today and noone bothered to tell us that they weren't coming to school until tomorrow. Normally, I would be thanking my lucky stars whilst expecting the little so-and-sos to come round the corner any minute yelling "teacher, teacher" (honestly I haven't even taught my kindergarten the word teacher yet just so that I have one hour a day when I don't hear that word repetitively!) but the printer wasn't working and the computers sucked and after I'd made my huge "where is spot?" poster book I really was rather bored. I'm not joking, I did make it and it is quite impressive.

Those are the ramblings for today, I had much more to say but I think my brain is turning to mush and I've adopted the concentration span of a 4-year-old.

Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake bakers man, oooh look spider! can I eat it?

End of hols, boo hoo

Have just finished up 3 blissful weeks of time away from the kids. Well, I did bump into one yesterday unexpectedly in the mall. Poor thing, he got all excited and then didn't know what to do with himself
"teacher! teacher! Hello! Hello!"


(this is long beach on Phi Phi)

cue much pointing and nudging of parents and then even more shock as I wai (for the culturally challenged that's when you raise your hands like you are praying to greet Thais), then utter confusion as kid is clearly wondering to himself "ok, she's seen me, I've said hello, now what do I do?, I know"

"hello!, hello teacher"

"yes hello Supachai absolutely spiffing to see you, but we'll have a more in depth conversation in class on Monday shall we? don't forget your 5000 word essay on the advantages of your parents paying an exhorbitant amount of money to have a fully-qualified foreign teacher educating their child in the simple pleasures of linguistic acquisition and all you can muster is hello after one semester.

Can't wait to get to work on "how are you" with them this semester.

ah well, back to the holiday. Relive it one more time before the ugly reality of work raises it's head.

Did both Northern and Southern Thailand this time. Travelled in far more style and luxury than usual as TB's (The Boy's) parents came to visit for the first ten days. Went on a Thai cooking course which was great fun, in fact for more fun than I had anticipated as we were the only two learning thus avoiding sharing valuable learning time with drongos. It was fairly foolproof however, and lots of bashing of ingredients (which was my fave part) rather than artsy fartsy chopping of vegetables into equal size cubes which I've never thought particularly necessary to add taste to a dish.


Down in the South I had my first real beach holiday. I am not well versed in beach holidays as was burnt within 3 days. TB is far more susceptible than myself, no mention of rednecks here, so the last couple of days were spent hiding from the sun and peeling each other - woo that was some holiday! Did eat King fish, no idea what it is but it was nice, quite like the extensive choice of seafood in this country and did much snorkelling (main reason for aforementioned burnedness - yep, I'm just making up words as I go along, fab generally accepted trick I picked up from watching American television) and will definately be learning to dive in another upcoming holiday.


Well, I just had a computer mishap and lost half the text attaching the photo so shall leave for now as can't face doing it all again.


Important lesson learnt today: do photos first.