This first entry comes from the Soundlab of Klongnamsai Wittayakarn High School, the improbably-named place in which we are spending the next four weeks as volunteer English teachers. To give you a bit of context, we’ve spent the last two weeks marauding around Laos, where our most strenuous activity involved floating down a river in an inflated rubber ring, supping dirt-cheap Beer Lao and occasionally stopping to hurl ourselves into the water from impossibly tall and rickety wooden structures on rope swings, trapezes and zipwires. For this reason, the return to some semblance of routine has been something of a kick in the teeth, if not a full-blown haymaker to the jaw. Our volunteer experience was presaged by an overnight rail journey from Vientiane to Bangkok, most notable for the fact that seemingly the entire staff
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