You want feed elephant?

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We ended up getting the afternoon off yesterday (although we haven’t really been ‘on’ enough yet to warrant use of the word ‘off’). One of our colleagues, Off (who according to Thai custom must be addressed as Pi - pronounced ‘pee’ - Off) had promised me that I could play in the teachers versus policemen football match in the last period, a fascinating prospect that I was sadly denied due to cancellation. We drove home, as seems to be the daily routine, with Mr Na Long Chai and his wife, who seemed vexed about something, and on the way we stopped at a restaurant and met a man who smelt strongly of alcohol and who may have been somebody’s relative. Again, our dismal grasp of Thai meant it was difficult to interpret the conversation - somebody had hit somebody’s car, it seemed, and this event seemed to necessitate the imbibing of gross amounts of whiskey, and we as the guests were encouraged to follow suit. After a fairly long session we got a lift straight back to the Na Long Chai residence as we were due for another Ta Koh practice. This time I didn’t get to participate in the intimidatingly proficient game that was taking place, but we did meet another Klong Nam Sai teacher, E, who had been away at a conference for our first two days but seems now to have taken on the role of a benevolent sister figure (see below). Afterwards the ever-welcoming Na Long Chai family took us to an Isaan (North-East Thai) restaurant for one of the largest meals of my life, punctuated by the ludicrous rigmarole of feeding an elephant that was being walked past the window. We were joined at dinner by several members of the school’s self-proclaimed ‘team whiskey’ (essentially, hard-drinking male members of staff), who were insistent that we drink as much as them - on a school night, no less! We managed to make our excuses at around midnight and get our lift home.

The next day started slowly, although less so for us than for Mr Na Long Chai, who had stayed up drinking after us and took a bit longer getting up than usual. I hasten to add here that he is a lovely, lovely man, who even gave us a couple of Ta Koh balls as gift so we can practice and generally treats us like royalty, actual royalty. It must be said, he does like a tipple - but we won’t judge him for that. We were teaching first lesson with Pi Off (smirk), who pushed us in at the deep end, telling us the students were going to learn about ‘the weather’ and then leaving us to do our worst. At the moment we are teaching as a pair, with the Thai teacher on hand to translate where necessary, and it seems to be working OK, albeit with some awkward silences where we try to elicit a response from the nervous or plain uninterested pupils. Wiz impressively managed to get something out of them by making them stand up and do actions for the different kinds of weather, while I basically clowned around in the background, although they did enjoy my explanation of the ‘t’ sound using spitting (Pi Off was arguably less enamoured by it).

Just before lunch we got invited to watch a Thai dance lesson, which to our untrained eyes looked like a bunch of children messing about, but it was fun to join in with a few of them, although I think so far most of the students are a bit nervous about our presence. Lunch today was with E, who’d make Jonathon Ross look like the shy, retiring type; E’s husband, who was the shy, retiring type; and the ever present Mr Na Long Chai. E has promised to take us out to various interesting places this weekend, which is nice of her, and we had another fine feed before returning to school. We had a free period straight afterwards in which Pi Nik attempted to teach us the Thai alphabet; with 44 consonants, 12 vowels and a seemingly limitless number of diacritics and tone markers (no, I don’t know what they are either), we decided it was best to leave it till later and ended up having a long conversation about why Thailand is so appealing to ‘falang’ (Western tourists). Pi Nik wondered whether tourists knew about the ‘bad things’ in Thailand, such as the rampant prostitution; I speculated that these bad things might be precisely the appeal for many tourists. This led her to tell us about an acquaintance whose falang boyfriend attempted to drive a tractor into said acquaintance’s house when he found out she also had a Thai husband. She told us that most Thais look pretty badly on girls who go out with foreigners, generally lumping them together prostitutes; while this is surely unfair in some cases, you had to wonder whether the attractive young Thai girl we saw in the restaurant last night was really attracted to the decrepit, odious 60-year old American she was nuzzling between forkfuls for his looks. We also talked briefly about how well-behaved Thai students seem to be, and Nik suggested it might be something to do with punishment in Thai schools - we had seen a teacher carrying something resembling a cane but weren’t sure if we should ask about it, but, yes, it turns out that corporal punishment is still going strong in the Thai education system, and that even the lovely Nik herself doles it out sometimes. It came as a bit of a shock, but the students don’t seem as though they’re living in fear here; perhaps it works as an effective, but rarely-used deterrent, or perhaps they don’t hit them very hard! As Nik left us she said she had to ‘beat’ a girl in her home-room for leaving a mess on the desk; this sounds terrible, but I suppose it was perfectly normal for teachers to do it just a few decades ago in the UK, and the majority of those teachers weren’t horrific Marquis de Sade-types but just following the rules. On the other hand, that’s pretty much a textbook Nuremburg defense. In case I didn’t mention it, by the way, Nik is a woman.

That’s it for now. E is taking us to the local temple tonight (we’re not sure why, but it should be fun), after more tah koh of course. More to come soon, wat di krap, lah gorn krap (put simply, goodbye).

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