Staying true to the complete disorganisation...

here at the school. I thought that after this week it would just be me doing all the English teaching, because Jacques is leaving to go back to Switzerland, but Open Mind have sent another girl (Ashley, from Los Angeles) here to teach for the next 6 weeks, so my teaching time is staying pretty much the same.

I'm writing this at school, because I've got a pretty long break just now. Also having read Lia's request for more blogging, I just couldn't let her down. I know it's hard to carry on without me, but do struggle on...

Anyway, I've had some really fun lessons when I've thought of some good ideas. Mum sent me a height chart (thanks that was a great idea), so this morning I measured all the kids in one class and got them all in height order to teach them tall and short/tallest and shortest. It went pretty well considering although I'm not sure how much they actually took in. I need to think of more ideas to get them up and moving and keep them entertained, since just sitting and copying from the whiteboard or listening to me natter on in a foreign language is unsurprisingly very dull for them and leads to the whole class messing around and trashing the classroom.

I had another great lesson with some of the younger kids. I made a sheet of shapes (circles, squares, stars, zigzags etc.) and they had to colour them in and make pictures out of them. The English classroom looks great now, with those up on the wall along with those posters my kind and lovely mother sent me. Also, a whole load of junk has been cleared out of there - I think there must be someone important coming, because all of a sudden the whole school is really tidy. Maybe there will be a government inspection or something. There was an English teacher here for a year who set up the Swiss Tsunami fund and built the English classroom and the computer room I'm sitting in right now. However, when he left, the Director (headmaster) of the school turned the English room into a staff room and nicked all the nice furniture etc. So when I arrived, it had been converted back, but with lots of old, falling apart furniture, and huge shelving units full of folders and trophies up one side. I'm really glad they're gone, because I think if the room looks nice the kids will want to keep it that way, whereas before it was so messy that they just treated it like the rubbish tip it was.

I had a nice time last Wednesday, when we had the day off for Chinese New Year. Ao Nang (where my school and accommodation are) is very touristy and just full of westerners. The first time I went there I had to really look hard to see a Thai person. But the bus we take home from there goes past a much quieter beach where Thai people go to have picnics. I decided to have a walk there and take some pictures and it was a lovely way to spend an afternoon. I'll definitely go back there. The tide was really far out so I went paddling in the shallow water and looked at all the tiny fish and crabs and sea snails. There were lots of crabs that seemed to live in little holes in the sand and pushed the sand out into little balls. I saw some more crabs like this at Railay beach where I went a couple of weeks ago. They are really fascinating to watch, just moving sand around until you get to close or make a noise and they disappear back into their holes.

On Saturday, we hiked up to see the sunrise at a Buddhist temple called Tiger Temple in Krabi. This involved waking up at 3.30 to get on a bus. Now, all of you guys will be aware how averse I am to strenuous exercise like climbing so I had a pretty tough time getting up there. There are over 1200 steps up the side of a really steep hill, and while some of them are quite shallow, some of them are about 30 cm deep and 7-8cm across. I'm really glad we went so early because we were all sweating buckets even at 4 in the morning when it's relatively cool. After a while, a few of us stopped every 100 or so steps and so made it up to the top. Once there we had to sit around for ages catching our breath and trying to feel human again, because we'd left kind of early, but once the sunrise came it was beautiful. It was quite misty so not wonderful for photos (I'll try and put some up soon but the internet connection at the school is too dodgy, so I'll need to go to an internet cafe). It was so peaceful up there, and when the sun came up you could hear all the animals below waking up. There were plenty of animals up there with us too. We had a mangey dog follow us all the way up, and there were lots of insects and lizards and even a couple of squirrels running around. There were several dead moths and cockroaches and things with trails of enormous ants carving them up and carrying them off which was pretty gross though, especially as once you could see where you were, you wondered what you had been walking on in the dark.

The temple itself consisted of a pretty large platform on several levels with a huge gold Buddha about maybe 20ft tall (excuse the mixing of imperial and metric in my estimations...) with lots of coloured figures around the bottom, and a large bell-shaped object with strips of coloured lights coming off it.It was so nice to see those lights when we got to about 900 steps, because we knew we were nearly there. It would have been nice to know the significance of the temple being there and how it was set up - I think I'll look up some more about Buddhism while I'm here. Although the area of Southern Thailand where I am a lot of people (including the owners of the house I live at) are Muslim.

A Buddhist monk and some Thai people came up the stairs after we'd been there for 20 mins or so, and they weren't even out of breath, so I presume they must make the trip regularly, or else they'd been hiding round the corner for ages just to make us feel even more unfit. We went down in 2 groups (there were 12 or so of us), and that was when we met the monkeys. I was in the second group and the monkeys steered a bit clear of us because we had the dog with us (and the Buddhist monk a little way behind, who I'm sure was secretly laughing at our clambering down, clinging desperately to the handrail while he sauntered along like it was a flat road). The first group however, were "attacked" by the monkeys, so when we got down they told us excitedly all about it and showed us a picture of 3 girls expressions when they saw the huge group of monkeys they had to walk through.

We're planning to do something fun this weekend too - maybe elephant trekking or visiting one of the nearby islands. I'll let you know all about it. This evening we're going for Valentine's Day icecream too, to cheer up the single girls here and the girls who've left boyfriends behind back home - all the volunteers where I live are now female apart from one guy called (appropriately) Boy.

So anyway, Happy Valentine's Day to you all. I promise to write again soon, Lia. I'll try and do something interesting so I have something to talk about.