"Teacher, teacher! Can we have a selfie?"

The second week of my teacher training course ended with our first teaching practice that we'd all been nervously anticipating for a while. In pairs we prepared a lesson plan to teach disadvantaged children at a community school that consisted of a small covered area outside a temple. As if we weren't sweating enough through nerves the infamous Bangkok heat and humidity was in full force that Friday. We had to make sure we weren't sweating all over the children! My partner Stacey and I taught the children basic directions and names of locations; teaching children who know very little English is challenging, particularly when you don't know much of their language and we're encouraged not to use any Thai so that the students get used to hearing English, even if they don't fully understand. When it was all over the incredibly cute children begged us for selfies and one of their parents gave us three bags full of mangos that she'd picked from her garden to say thank you.

Teaching English as a foreign language involves an awful lot of repetition, miming and jumping around like a fool. It's a lot of fun!

"Teacher, Teacher, can we have a selfie?"

That night my fellow trainee teachers and I decided to celebrate our initiation into real life teacher-hood by ticking an essential experience off of our Bangkok bucket list: a ping pong show. For those of you that don't know, this is definitely not a recreational team sport played with paddles....I suppose you could call it a 'sex show' and I'll leave what happens to the ping pong balls up to your imagination. But let me tell you this - it wasn't just ping pong balls...it was fairy lights, bananas and one 'lady' even manage to 'drink' a bottle of coke only to have it come out two minutes later as water. Wait...what?! One person remarked that next they'll be producing humans from 'down there'. Ummmm....that's called childbirth. We made it through twenty minutes of the show, decided we'd seen more than enough and got the hell out of there. Taxi!

Another night out.

And another...

Chicken feet soup - yummers!

Our second chance to practice teaching was at the Bangkok Police Academy where cadets between the ages of seventeen and twenty-eight study for a year to become police officers. At several intervals during the day the cadets would ask me permission to go to the toilet-some of them were my age! Thailand has a problem with corruption in its forces and this issue was addressed by the young, bright eyed and eager policemen in training; they pledged to be honourable throughout their careers and it was being drummed into them that they must be approachable to tourists, hence why we were there to assist them with their English.

I persuaded some of my cadets to sing for me and give me a Muay Thai demonstration! They saluted me after each session. 

Here's us foreigners struggling not to squint in the intense sunlight-all the Thais don't seem to bat an eyelid! (terrible pun intended...).

Better Late Than Never

This post has been a long time coming....this is because I've been extremely busy sorting out the next major chapter of my adventure! Apologies to all my millions of loyal fans i.e. the one or two lovely people that can still be bothered to read this after ten long months!!!

After the Songkran street festival in Bangkok I caught a flight, bus, ferry and minivan to see my friend from home, Ash, on Koh Samui. She is teaching English on the island and although I'd been there for a few days in January it's always ideal to be shown around by someone who knows what's what! Of course we indulged in our fair share of the party life that all the southern islands of Thailand have to offer and it was incredible to catch up with Ash albeit surreal 'bumping in to' her in Asia!

Beautiful Koh Samui.

Midget Granny and Furby Face reunited!

Nightly fire shows and beach parties.

In the last week of April it was time to leave Ash and start making the (almost impossible) transition from scruffy traveller back to 'normal member of society' so I could begin a course that will help me learn how to teach English as a foreign language. I'd been attempting to 'de-backpacker' my appearance for a few weeks now; you know you've been travelling too long when you find your hungover self in a dark toilet in Cambodia hacking at your hair with a pair of miniature scissors from a Poundland sewing kit, in an attempt to give yourself a haircut....
The course was for three weeks and enables me to volunteer or work as an English teacher in most countries around the world (oh hello extended travels!!). I arrived in Bangkok in the early evening and made my own way to the hotel where the course was based. I was sharing a room with an English girl, Stacey, and on our way to grab some food we bumped into two other people from our course; we decided to 'grab a beer' but somehow this turned into to many, many beers, some dodgy impromptu karaoke, setting Stacey's entire dress on fire (although this arson may have been executed by Thai ghosts) and a late night swim in the hotel's rooftop pool. This all would have been fine if we didn't have to get up bright and early the next day to start our teacher training - cue four hungover, soon-to-be teachers traipsing into to the small conference room to meet the trainer, Mera, and the three other people on our course.

Fire!

Sunset over the Bangkok skyline as seen from Bansabai hotel roof.

Thais love karaoke!

My attempt at dressing smartly for the first time in a while (check out the rooftop pool!).

Bangkok is utter madness at the best of times but luckily we'd been placed in a quiet area away from the hoards of tourists; for the three weeks we were there we spent our abundant free time playing snooker, eating street food from the local night market and playing 'menu lottery' where we'd point at something in Thai and pray to Buddha that it wasn't donkey brains. A visit to Thailand's capital isn't complete without a night out (or ten) on the infamous Khao San road and, having been there four or five times during the last nine months (I forget how many because that crazy road is like a black hole), I was able to find my way around. I became really close to some of the people on my course but I did also learn some things amidst all the fun...honest! Lesson planning, classroom management, grammar refreshers plus an indispensable guide on Thai culture for example I'm not allowed point at anyone with my finger, touch a child's head, shout, show the soles of my feet or speak badly about the King as all of these and more are considered extremely offensive and the latter could land me with a hefty prison sentence! We were also warned that all meetings and register sheets are in indecipherable Thai and that it's very common for a foreign teacher to be kept in the dark about pretty much everything such as public holidays, the curriculum and schedule changes. This is going to be more of a challenge than I anticipated...

Khao San keg.

Tuk Tuk race through Bangkok.

One of the many street food snacks on offer just down the road from our hotel.