The Day Before Makha Bucha

Makha Bucha is a day of honouring Buddha and doing good deeds, and is a public holiday. The day before, it's common to bring offerings of flowers and money to the temple and pray. All the students at school visited the temple across the road to do just this; I was invited along with the grade 3s.


As always in Thailand, presentation is everything. The teachers had made this traditional stand to hold the money, which we left at the temple. The green notes are 20 baht (about 60 cents each), the blue 50 baht ($1.50) and the red 100 baht ($3.00).


It would've been too bad if I had any strong religious beliefs that weren't Buddhist, because the grade 3 teachers eagerly invited me to join them at the front of the temple. We knelt down, hands doing the wai (as the students are doing in the photo on the right below). As words of prayer drifted through the temple, we occassionally placed our palms on the ground and lowered our heads to almost touch the ground, doing three consecutive bows in that manner. This happened several times. It was good to take part in a spiritual Thai tradition.


We then placed the flowers and the crazy money stand beside the monk. The ceremony didn't take long - after about 30 minutes we were meandering slowly back to school. I took this opportunity to take more photos of my students... but I'll spare you this time!



Other School Things

Unlike a lot of foreign teachers in Thailand, I don't work at a rich school. In fact, there are a lot of poor kids at school. They pay 300 baht ($9.00) for a semester (though this is rising to 500 baht from next May). At the school nearby, students pay 15,000 baht - which gives you an idea as to why my school wasn't interested in paying me much more.

This is our school canteen. Unless you arrive really, really early, it's usually quite messy and full of kids. Along the back wall you can see where the vendors dish up lunch that costs only 13 baht (39 cents), and which I get for free anyway. Like a lot of places in Thailand, the food isn't well sanitised... in fact, what's sanitisation? But for all the weird bones and body parts I usually find in my food, it actually tastes pretty good. And I haven't been sick since January, which means my stomach has toughened up a fair bit.


These days, I tend to have lunch with three of the grade 3 teachers, who call themselves my "Thai mothers". Giving family labels like this isn't uncommon in Thailand, but it's not something that's thrown around willy-nilly, either. These ladies really try to "look after" me, in that they give me gifts and food constantly.


Birthday

On Friday, my boss bought a cake for my birthday. It was like a stack of thin pancakes joined with cream.


Some of the grade 5 teachers came in and sang Happy Birthday, which they don't usually do on people's birthdays, so I felt extra special. One of them said I was her "son-in-law". I laughed and asked if that meant I could marry her daughter. Thankfully, I don't think she understood...

EDIT: So Mum sent me a Betty Crocker cake mix in the mail and requested that I upload photos of how the cake turned out. I cooked it in my 300-baht ($9.00) rice cooker which only has two settings: cook and warm. It kept flicking back to 'warm' even despite my persistence that it should 'cook', and the chocolatey goo inside simply bubbled and boiled for a while. After two full hours, I opened the lid of my rice cooker... and there was a cake inside! It had cooked evenly all the way through, without so much as a black crisp on the outside.


I iced it and sprinkled it with MnMs when my friends were round, so it wasn't a perfect job... but it definitely tasted good!