A Normal Normal Day?

It would be a good idea, I decided this morning, to let people know how my life's going with a blog about a normal day. Just a regular old day. So naturally, fate thought it would be funny to screw with me. But I swear, some of the things below are quite normal here.

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6:00
Leap out of bed, set to take on the day. Whip through my Thai flashcards (pulling a perfect score out of 29 consonants!).

6:35
Okay, time to write. Gotta practise the fiction writing while the mind is fresh.

6:50
Actually start writing.

7:40
Stop writing. I'm gonna be late for work. Good thing I don't care.

8:10
Sign my name in at work 10 minutes late. Also, sign my name out for last Friday, because I can never be bothered signing out on the same day.

8:30
The flag-raising ceremony/school assembly begins. Another teacher and I leave halfway through and sit in the canteen and chat.

9:15
I go back to my desk and start planning classes. I have four hour-long classes today and lots of correcting to do as well.

10:00
One of my favourite grade 5 classes. My boss, also the homeroom teacher for this class, sits at the desk instead of going back to her office, forcing me to stand the whole class. She interrupts the class a few times to translate my instructions to the kids. Annoying and redundant, as the kids learn through doing anyway. She must wonder how I can possibly survive in all my other 15 classes without a Thai teacher.

11:00
My last free period for the day. I've got so much to get done, but my boss interrupts to talk about annoying things, such as the teachers' trip to Chiang Mai at the end of the month. Stuck with her on a bus for four days of driving? I'd rather drink petrol. I say no.

11:25
She informs me that all the grade 5 teachers are going to a restaraunt for lunch. That's all the information I get. I try getting more info out of her, such as where it is and when I should meet the other teachers. She doesn't really understand because my questions are too logical for her.

11:35
She gives up trying to understand and says, "Come with me. Now." Lunchtime isn't until 12:00, but I'm led into a car with three other grade 5 teachers and we drive about 6km to the restaraunt. We enter a kind of shabby room with a long table that seats 14 and a widescreen TV on the wall. This isn't just a restaraunt - it's a karaoke room. The party begins, although I still have no idea what we're celebrating. They ask if I want coke or beer. I'm one of the only people drinking coke.

Every now and then my coke disappears, and when it returns a short moment later, it's full again. This is often the case in Thai restaraunts with beer - your drink is constantly refilled as long as it's lower than a centimeter from the rim of the glass - but this is the first time I've seen it occur with softdrink.

11:50
All the teachers have arrived, as well as the school's Assistant Director. People are singing, eating, and drinking alcohol. And it's still not even lunchtime.

12:40
Speeches begin. I have no idea what they're saying and no one cares to translate, which is good because I don't care to listen.

12:50
Speeches are still going. I begin to wonder if I'm going to make it to my 1:00 class.

1:20
Don't all these partying teachers have classes to go to? How can the entire grade 5 building have no teachers? (Actually this often happens, and it was the case just over a month ago when I walked into a classroom to find a student lying on the floor with a broken leg. Of course, I had no idea what the kids were trying to tell me and, helpfully, there were no Thai teachers in the building to assist me. FLAWLESS RESPONSIBILITY.)

1:40
I leave with the same teachers I came with. Everyone else is still singing.

1:50
I enter my classroom. The kids don't care that I've been gone, of course - they're just playing around. I half-heartedly get them seated, hand back last week's corrected worksheets, and spend the rest of the class mucking round with them. After that, the workday continues as per normal.

4:30
I get home but I have no drinking water. Time for a walk to the drinking water dispenser.

4:40
I shuffle down the street, backpack loaded with heavy bottles of water, but a middle-aged lady on the other side of the street calls out. She speaks some okay English, though her daughter and husband know little. Still, they sit me down and offer me a whisky and coke, which I reluctantly take. (If you refuse an offer like this, Thais take offense because to them it means they've done something wrong.) They want to chat and possibly, I suspect, marry me off to their daughter.

5:05
I finally manage to escape, though not before the lady grabs my head and kisses me on each cheek. Except they're less kisses and more just her smooshing her face against my cheeks and sniffing me. Kinda strange... Maybe it wasn't her daughter they were trying to marry me off to...

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With all that said and done, it must be said - Thailand is a wonderful, albeit different world from what I'm used to. Living in the poor northeast, away from the tourist zones, means I've been exposed a lot more quickly to some key aspects of Thai culture - the good and the bad. But I'm not living here so I can criticise these different ways of doing things. I'm here to learn about them. So if at times I sound distanced or annoyed, it's probably just that - as an outsider - I find this all so very, very amusing.