Trip to Lang Suan

So the week of developing lesson plans was pretty uneventful – except for the fact that we had to sing, dance, and be a clown and many other things that will still haunt me at night when I sleep. We had to do speaking lesson plans, listening lesson plans and reading lesson plans. (Even when I type this I start to feel nauseous – seriously we had to type lesson plans till it came out of our ears.) And the amount of creativity you need to do that amount of lesson plans can only be induced by a fair amount of alcohol – the catch 22 though is the fact that you may not arrive at class smelling of alcohol. Thus we had to do all our creative thinking being very sober.

The Tuesday morning Steven and I had skype interviews with an agent (which will tell you about later) for (what sounded at the time) a very cool job down south in the lovely little town of Lang Suan. Steven still had to complete 2 weeks of his Tesol and I had to finish this week – that meant I would go down to Lang Suan and check everything out while Steven finished his Tesol.

The Sunday morning I got on the bus to take a VVEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRY long trip down to Lang Suan (one thing you have to understand about the Thai’s is that EVERYTHING is “not far”. Except for Taxi-drivers – from them that you will hear that everything is “too far to walk”.) I had a daunting (every bus- or taxi driver has to take a “scare-your-passengers-to-death driving course before they get their license) 8 hour trip down to what I thought at that stage was Lang Suan.

I asked someone to write a message in Thai for me asking the busboy to show me when to get of in Lang Suan. So after a very long trip the busboy showed me to get off. I phoned the head of the English department (Ajarn Janya) to tell her I am at the station and she told me in very broken English that there is no bus station in Lang Suan and I should give the phone to a Thai person. After a confusing phone call I found out that I am in Chumporn – a town that is about 1 and a half hour away from Lang Suan. So I had to wait for another bus that dropped me of next to the road in the middle of nowhere.

Luckily for me (and not so lucky for them) there were a couple of random Thai people next to the road. So I phoned Ajarn Janya, ran to the unsuspecting Thai people and gave them my phone (you can only imagine the expression on their faces when this crazy farang shoves his phone in their hand and gesture that they should talk on the phone.)

They told Ajarn Janya were I was at and she came to pick me up. And finally I could relax a bit and not worry that I was lost somewhere in Thailand where no one speaks a word of English except for being able to say “hello”. Ajarna Janya took me to the school to show me around.  

After the school trip she took me to my accommodation – a beautiful house in what is supposed to be the center of town. Here are some pictures of the house:

 

While I was sorting out everything in a non-english speaking community Steven had his own very interesting experience in Hua Hin with a mosquito or two. He will tell you all about it in the next blog.