Monday, July 17, 2006
I've been in Thailand over a week now. It's really hard to believe but so much has already happened. Today is my third day in school. I'm in M 5/1 with the math and science group. But for right now there really aren't any classes. Suratthani High School will celebrate it's 100th year anniversary later this week, starting on wed and lasting until Friday. For celebration there will be a festival and so in order to prepare all of the teachers have meetings all the time and in Thailand they don't have substitute teachers so it means sometimes they send work but most of the time it's just a free period. Which has actually been really good for me because it means I get to send more time talking and getting to know my classmates. I will however (hopefully) be changing my schedule once all the festival is over because right now I'm in physics, precalc, chemistry, bio another math class, English and a few other classes I'm really not sure. All these classes except for the English class are taught in Thai and since I just arrived I haven't a clue what they are saying, not to mention the fact that I've taken all those classes already and I would really like to learn Thai arts. Well my advisor says that soon I will be able to pick where I want to be and it will all be classes that shouldn't be too hard for me so that I can better adjust to Thailand. Ok enough about school for now. This weekend I went with my family to a rambutan festival and my father actually opened the festival. That meant driving up in a van driven my his personal driver and being protected my guards for the entire night. We ate dinner on a sandy beach next to a beautiful river and mountain. Yup that's right I finally saw my first Thai mountains! They are amazing! I've never seen anything like them all of a sudden we were driving along and I looked out the window to see these mountains just jutting up out of nowhere. It was really weird because there weren't foothills of anything building up to them it was just these really steep mountains surrounded by basically flat land. Okay so back to the festival. It was amazing the dinner was delicious and the setting amazing. After dinner we were taken towards a stage where some children where playing Thai music. My father and mother were seated in the first row which was made up of special wood benches with coffee tables in front of them. I was seated in the second row directly behind them with Dana (Pet's English tutor) P.Nu (Pet's nanny) Ploy my sister, Pet and my father's secretary. Once the children stopped playing 2 people got up and introduced Thai dancers. The dancing was beautiful and was made up of two groups of women in different Thai costumes. Next came some officials talking (the ones I had dinner with) then my father went on stage. First he gave out awards to people for different things like cooking the best with rambutan and growing the most ect. Then he gave a speech. When the speech was over he hit a gong 3 times to open the festival. It was crazy I couldn't believe how important and honored he is, after al I eat breakfast and dinner with him every day. So odd. Once the opening was over he went around to visit all the booths set up for the festival. My mother had me go with so that I could learn more. It was so odd because I was already being stared at because I'm white and other than Dana the only white person around but now I was surrounded my guards and with public officials of very high rank. The good thing was I was given tons of stuff for free. I had fresh goat's milk, tons of rambutan, fresh salac (a Thai fruit) and learned about the industry in Suratthani. When it was all over we hopped in the car and drove back home. I have a bunch of photos to put on including ones from the festival and my first 2 days at school but right now I'm in school so I don't have access to the photos but I'll put them up soon. Oh and a note about the photos, if you click on any of them and put them in a new window they get much bigger and you can see them better.
