A Day in the life of Pat

I know its been a little while since I last wrote a blog post and I know my people out there are hungry to know what Pat is thinking and feeling these days. So I feel it is my obligation, no my duty, to let you all know how things are going for me in Trang these days. The school I work at is fairly large it has about 2000 or so kids here broken up into 6 grades, M1-M6. I am teaching M1 and the kids there are 12 and 13 years old. Its pretty crazy that some of them who haven’t hit puberty yet are still like 4 feet tall and some of them are 5-6 or taller. I do have to announce that I did make a kid cry on my first day. He was one of the kids who was sitting in the back and would not shut up. So I made him sit in the front of the classroom facing the rest of the class. I guess this was just too much shame for his Thai heart to handle and he broke down and started crying. And if you can imagine how awkward it must feel to make someone cry on your first day of work it felt exactly like that. However the next day when I saw the cryer he bowed to me really low, the lower you bow the more respect is shown. So I’m pretty sure he knows what time it is.
As for my other classes I teach 10 classes of about 45 kids twice a week. I’ll give you a moment to do the math in your head to figure out how many young lives I am molding into my image on a weekly basis. It’s only a matter of time before they begin to live and breathe for all things UNC basketball related. Isn’t that why I came here anyway to enhance their cultural understanding of all things English related?

What I have found when interacting with the kids is that they know how to spell and read way more words than they know how to accurately pronounce. For instance they constantly mispronounce the letter “v” as “we” and the letter “r” as “ahh.” I try to correct them but sometimes they just cannot say it correctly. I’m hoping to slowly wear down their mispronunciations like a river does a rock until there is nothing left but accurate pronunciations. However I’m sure that is just a hopeless pipedream much like my dream to teach someone here how to make a chipotle style burrito.

I figured here I would write about some of the things in Thailand that just trip me out in general. For starters every day has a color associated with it. For instance Monday is yellow, Tuesday is pink, and I think Wednesday is green. And because the King was born on a Monday around 70 percent of the people will wear yellow every Monday. For instance I am sitting in the teachers lounge right now and every single person in this room but me is wearing yellow. And in case your wondering how many people are in here with me its 10. And that brings me to another thing that freaks me out here. How much the people actually love the king. There are pictures of him everywhere, and I mean everywhere. There is a picture of him in every room in the school. There is one in every restaurant and probably one in every home. There are also huge pictures of him on billboards and roadside stands. Some of his pictures in Bangkok make the Lebron “we are all witnesses” billboard look like garbage. King James needs to bow down to the real King baby, or get a better marketing team. Step your game up Nike. If I didn’t know how much these people genuinely love this man I would have sworn it was beaten into them. That’s the only other way I would imagine to explain the massive amounts of love and respect this guy gets. And I have yet to figure out what it is he does or how he amassed his huge fortune, around 25 billion US. I know he has done a lot of social projects and things like that to better the people of Thailand’s lives. But it seems like a pretty sweet setup he has going on over here. When the entire country gets the day off on your birthday you know you’re the man. Another thing that I find very interesting is the fact that there seems to be no driving rules here, if you can do it and get away with it its pretty much legal. Its funny that’s the way I viewed driving when I was 16 but was soon checked back down to earth after that first car accident. You can pass whenever you want, drive on the wrong side of the road do whatever you want. You can also try to fit as many people as you want on a motor scooter. The record I have seen so far is 5 people, but I’m hoping some brave Thai soul will try to best that soon. One last thing that I will tell you guys about that makes me laugh every time is the fact that every time I walk into my class one student will say “stand up please” and they will all stand up and then in a very sing songy voice they will all say “Good Morning Teacher.” Then I usually say “what’s up guys” or something else to throw them off. But they don’t understand that because all they are conditioned to respond to is “How are you?” And then they say “Fine Thanks and You?” I’m really hoping to break them of their conditioning and get them to say some different things. I am really hoping to get them to say “What’s happening hot stuff” Long Duck Dong style but I’m sure that might raise some eyebrows over here. I know at least Rod will understand that last part. I’m sure I will have more things to tell you all about soon that I either find really funny or extremely frustrating.

For now life in Trang is pretty good, its been a bit of an adjustment but I expected that. The food we eat is pretty good and extremely cheap, it costs me and Keats about 2 dollars to eat dinner every night. Our lunches are even cheaper at about 50 cents per person. Well I’ve written enough for one day and I’m sure some of you guys are bored now after reading all that. I’ll try to post a bit more soon.

Pat