Holidays At Last

Phew.  That was a long haul through the semester.  Everyone felt a little crazy by exam time.  But it's finally over, I'm finally free.

I'm back in Chumphon right now, I'll probably leave here for the island tomorrow night.  So I'll update a bit more then.  Have a good one friends.  :)

Pulling a Trip Together

Here's my rough (really rough) itinerary for Bali.

Trek north to Mount Batur and laugh in the face of an active volcano.

Travel back south to chill with some monkeys for a day.

Head to Kuta for my remaining time.  If I have money left, learn to surf and take a dinner cruise to Nusa Dua,

Sooooo ready to go!

This is a thing I have done, I did this thing

It was a Sunday morning like any other.  I woke up at 10am to the chanting of monks from a nearby monastery, found my glasses under a pile of hair clips and yarn before making my way out to the balcony to smoke a cigarette and establish how foggy I still was from the night before.

Thinking over the laundry list of chores and shopping I needed to do on my day off, a stray thought crossed my mind.  A whim.  But as we all know, Crazy Bree has a tendency to latch onto those whims and make them a reality.  In that instant, all other thoughts disappeared, and I knew only one thing with certainty.  I was going to book a plane ticket to another country and I was going to do it today.

Options swam before me.  India?  Nepal?  China?  Australia?  All places I want to visit.  I was going to need to narrow this down somehow.  Lonely Planet, yeah.  That's the ticket.  I wandered inside and pulled up their website and searched for attractions in... you know, I don't even remember what country I searched.  All I know is that the top four were a temple, a market, a restaurant and a 24 hour gym.  A gym.  Are you bloody well kidding me?  I'm not traveling somewhere to go bench press something.  I tried another country and got similar results.  Well, I'm not getting anywhere this way.  Time to get some coffee and try another method.

I decided the best thing to do was to treat this sort of like a dating show.  Start with all my options, then eliminate them one by one.  The Ladder Theory is more than happy to let me know that money is the only really important thing to a girl in dating, so I opted to start there.  I pulled up an online booking site and started plugging in countries, letting it tell me what days had the cheapest tickets.  That narrowed me down to three.  Next up, how big of a pain in the ass will it be to get the visa.  One of these countries had a visa on arrival plan.  Bing bang, we have a winner.  So who was it that gets to spend a fabulous 9 days with our lovely contestant?

Bali, Indonesia!

That's right, I'm gonna go visit some Hindu temples and beaches.  Plane tickets are booked, I'll leave Bangkok on April 19th, and return on April 28th.  Now I just need to figure out what I should do while I'm there....

Still

Still alive, still working, still boring.  So have some bonus Valentine's Day cards I made as examples for my kids before they made their own.

Till my life is more exciting, blog followers!

School Daze, pt 2!

I've been so busy teaching that I haven't uploaded any pictures here.  This will not do.

So here's an image dump of adorable Thai children that I spend six days a week with.  :)

 The most organized run and write ever.

 I don't always teach children.  Sometimes I teach monkeys. 

My favorite picture of the bunch.  They're about three years old, and have never seen a white person before. Most of the class is rolling on the floor, one girl is crying and the rest look confused.  Heh.  I love little kids.

 The entire school.  Yes, it's that small.

A whole bunch of kids cooking.  I couldn't guess the reason.  I had to break my vegetarianism for them, though.  They all wanted me to try their noodles or fried fish.  I just can't turn them down when they want me to tell them how delicious their hard work is.

Until next time, blog followers!

A short video of my class

Yes, they really are that crazy.  In all fairness though, Thai kids are really competitive (in a good way) and a run and write gets everyone's blood going.  Turn down your speakers a bit before you watch this.

The kids are all screaming "lao lao."  This word means something like finished or already, so they're just telling the person at the board to hurry up.  Well, and they're yelling Teacha.  I hear that a lot.  My classes call me some combination of Mrs., Teacha and Bree.  It just depends on the class which one or two they pick and in what order.