Vol. 3 - 08/07/08

Tuesday 8th July
Hello everyone!
I’m sorry that I haven’t been in contact sooner, but I have been consistently frenetic in my day to day shenanigans. There is by no means a lack of things to do in this city, especially with my ever increasing work load. However, that does not mean that I have found no time to have some fun!
First things first, I finally made it to my apartment on Thursday. It’s a really nice and clean space with great access to the school where I study. I can either walk 5 minutes, or take a motorcycle taxi (40p) if I am running late to the subway at Khra Ram Kau to go 5 stops (for the princely sum of 50p). All in all it takes me about 20 minutes to get there as opposed to the 1 ½ - 2 ½ hours of last week’s little disaster! No sweating, and stress, just pure air-con and civility. I have managed to wash my clothes and acquire an iron for all important presentation purposes and now I mean business!
I live in a really good area with some nice restaurants, food markets etc. I have a massive shopping complex which I can’t really even begin to describe! It has 7 floors of madness with a ridiculously big TESCO Lotus which itself has two floors the size of football fields housing every consumer need known to man and then some. Apart from an umbrella... why are they so hard to find when everyone else has one! My apartment is the pure sweet deal (I have lost count where I am up to in the sweet-deal-o-meter now), because my friend hooked me up I have it without a deposit and I am paying 4200 Baht a month... sounds a lot? Well it works out as being £67 a month.... a month! I budgeted £250 with the deposit for this month and I have this place for a minimum of 4months... I think if I was in Leeds I would be paying £200-£250... I don’t need to tell you the maths do I? Oh, and I don’t have to pay until the end of the month (bills all inc.)!
The course is going well, they days are long 9-6 with enough homework to take me up until 1ish every night. Sleep deprivation has become a staple, but things are all good. I have taught three lessons now, going from bad to excellent – I have earned the name of the ‘Modal Gangster’ amongst my peers because I shot down and nailed my second lesson so well. The first one I probably made as many mistakes as you can without jumping out a window or performing some form of Harikiri – the part where I kept going past the section in the listening exercise was probably the best schoolboy so far – how was I supposed to know that Thai tape players have the ff and rw buttons on the opposite side to Europe! I have just finished my first assignment and onto the next one, and today I have just come back from 3 hours of observing experienced teaching at the British Council in Siam Square. I could have done without that really! My class are brilliant – they continue to surprise me every day, we have a student called Ampong, who is 69 and an ex-chemistry lecturer who is about as sweet as she is funny and I can’t control my laughter sometimes! I think if there is a scoreboard, then I am winning in terms of the amount of presents I collect each day, but I return the favours, I bought one of the other students Kasongo (a refugee from the Congo – yeah it’s a good rhyme) a dictionary to help him write letters to his family. In fact, I don’t think there is one student who I don’t have a really good rapport with, it will be sad to swap classes at the end of this week. It’s going to be gruelling teaching a new class and at a higher level as well.
I have found a really nice coffee shop where I go either in the morning or after school for my Western style fix of coffee and more free WIFI (unfortunately I can’t get it in my room at the moment, but I am looking into it – but there is an abundance of internet cafe’s in the vicinity). I have made a friend here called Ti who is a really nice guy. He studies Humanities and Philosophy at one of the universities here. We have a deal going to exchange English for Thai language which will take place a little more formally when my schedule is more relaxed. In the mean time we talk life, philosophy and Buddhism. He is actually a really nice guy who still represents some of the older and more traditional values of Thai culture, which on the surface does not seem to be so strong in the zeitgeist of people in the same age group.
I also see one of my trainers in there most mornings and have coffee and chat, which is pretty valuable for a couple of reasons; firstly, because she is a bit of a tough cookie in some respects and I have totally managed to use the James Pappas charm factor to get myself happily on her good side to the point that I can do no wrong, and secondly, because It means I can source some much needed extra tuition and ideas for lesson plans before I teach which considering the limit of time during the day for some of this one to one stuff can be pretty invaluable.
On Friday, I went out for some drinks with the English lads from my course, three of us managed to scam some free entry through friends to this club on RCA. RCA is a long street close to where I live like no other I have ever seen. It houses Bangkok’s most expensive and exclusive clubs and is pretty much reserved purely for the rich, the super rich and the famous. To cut a long story short, we got pretty fucked up, went to a few of the clubs, drinking Sang-Som (cheap rum) by the 70cl - it is pretty common practice here to just buy a bottle of liquor here when you go out, get a bottle of soda (read soda water) and a bucket of ice – sit down and nail it! Surprisingly rum and soda water is a great drink and I don’t think I can possibly look back now! We then went down in a taxi to Ko Sam Road to a purely evil club for dancing, wine and cocktails, this got pretty messy and I fell for the old walk into a mirrored wall with a white Russian in your hand trick! I pretty much had enough by 5am and got myself into a taxi and blurred out my best drunk Thai and got home. The next day was a bit of a non-starter, and after doing a few menial chores, I went into town close to where I study, had some more Japanese food and went for coffee. I realised at some point around 10pm that I didn’t have my phone on me, re-traced my steps back to the restaurant where luckily the staff recognised my white broken-Thai speaking ass and hooked me up with my phone again!
I then went to the coffee shop to meet Ti for an hour after he finished work, we talked for a about an hour – I was trying to get some information on Bangkok International Film Festival which is currently in doubt as it is the centre of an FBI investigation, for, yes you guessed it massive corruption, bribery and embezzlement! At around midnight I decided to go home and get some food on my way from the markets, however, I only half completed this before I woke up on Sunday afternoon in my room with another stinking hangover.... After eating, I got in a taxi and explained where I lived, but the guy just decided it would be a really good idea for him to take me to RCA, so well I just went for a quick drink on my own... which turned into an fully blown bender! I went to this little live music bar and procured myself a quart of Sam-Song which I preceded to nail, I started to get friendly with these Thai guys and girls who were in one of the bands and we got pretty messy. They taught me some funny Thai, we played some drinking games and had a really good laugh. They taught me another way of saying ‘cheers’ which it turns out is really, really impolite - Daak Mott! Which roughly translates to ‘have you finished’ (your drink), but it’s the way you say it which becomes pretty addictive. I can just about remember getting into a taxi after totally out drinking everyone and then it was Sunday afternoon when I woke up.
Sunday was the pure relax and recover day, I ate plenty of fruit and juice and i have a good restaurant across the apartment complex that I live in which i have been abusing for my evening meals as they deliver to my room and it costs about £1.20 (after the tip) for a feast. I have really gotten into Som Tom, which is a really hot papaya, Birds-eye chilli and cow pea salad, which everyone seems to be really impressed that I can eat because it is so hot, but it really is fantastic. I usually have it as an accompanying dish to something. I always learn a little more Thai when I go to order there as well which is pretty helpful. Everyone around here is getting to know me quite quickly as this is a pretty much Thai only area so I stick out like a sore thumb.
In the evening, I sat down to do my assignment which took a couple of hours and then my friend Es came over as her work is close to here and we have a deal where she stays here if she needs to – usually sleeping during the day whilst I am at school. We talked for a bit, had a beer and saw a movie before the purely deserved sleep. (I forgot to say, I went DVD shopping of Saturday night on Silom Road before I got really drunk. You have so many street vendors selling both legit and knock off DVD’s for 100Baht - £1.30, so I had to get a couple!). It’s really strange to see films here on DVD that are not even out at the cinemas yet, all going for next to nothing, neatly packaged with dvd covers et al.
Monday was business as usual, it is nice to be back in clean clothes – I can use the random street side washing machines for 20Baht a wash, I am still drinking too much iced-coffee and smoking too many cigarettes, unfortunately the length of our breaks don’t really allow for much more. I say my friends from the course, and we had a good old laugh trying to piece back together the fragments of Friday night. Of the three guys I went out with, Konrad, Jez and Mike, two of them were living and studying in Leeds and it turns out lived in Woodhouse – pretty weird huh? Jez has already been teaching out here for a little while and he has a place to work at IH Bangkok where we are studying, he had a friend who worked there who put in a good word and so they decided to pay for his CELTA which is a pretty strange but cushy deal. He let me in on some inside information the other day, one of our trainers Barry (Dave, Kate if you are reading this think Mark Jowel/Jowet whatever his name is) has an 18 year old Thai boyfriend which he brings into work every now and again.... I can’t shake some of the scary imagery which occurs in my mind now when he teaches me... the sort of thoughts that make you want to wait for the next lift rather than get in with him!