We arrived on a Wednesday and stayed til Saturday. Friday, I had orientation with the teaching agency that I was employed to teach conversational English with. It was the usual filling out paper stuff and asking how our flight was. Saturday, we headed to Sungnoen, the city we’d be living in. Sungnoen…take a guess at how you say it. It’s pronounced like Soongnone with lots of singing inflections of the voice. One thing we learned right off the bat, Thai language is probably the craziest language that ever existed.
FYI to anyone ever in Thailand, if you see the phonetic Thai (thai in English letters), just know that it’s never gonna sound how it looks. We learned that lesson too. The city right before ours is pronounced like SeeCue but it’s spelled like this: Sikhio. How does that make any sense…who knows and we got tired of racking our brain trying to figure it out.
Back to sunny Sungnoen…it gives the definition to the word rural. Thailand in itself is not a civilized country. Sungnoen, well it’s beyond not civilized. The people of Thailand in general have great personalities. Friendly, outgoing, love to talk. But then, you experience them. They make you want to bang your head against the wall most of the time. Not all of them, but most of them. They lack common sense and they definitely cannot drive. Let me repeat this: they definitely cannot drive. If they aren’t the worse drivers, then I am scared to see the competitors. It really doesn’t matter what city you go to. They all look the same. If the country would be clean and well kept, then it wouldn’t be so irritating to see the same over and over again. But, it’s not. The entire place is dirty. Sure, you might find a nice hotel to stay in but when you walk outside…dirty. Sungnoen, isn’t any different.
We, going to a town where few and far between foreigners go, received lots of stares. Some came with a smile and nod. Others came with the look of death. You could hear their faces screaming, “Get the hell out of my country.”
I started school a couple days after arriving and boy was I nervous. I had never taught before. I especially wasn’t sure how I was going to teach someone to speak English. But, week 1 was there and I had to just go with the flow. As each day passed, I got to meet my students and prepare myself for what was ahead. I was teaching level M3 and M6…we would call that 9th and 12th grade. The majority of these kids never cared about English so didn’t bother in ever learning anything besides the basic hello. Needless to say, teaching them was quite a challenge, and in some cases, impossible. I didn’t think I could be more thankful for the time to get off and the weekends as I had become in those months.
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