Performing Elephants, Temples and Chopsticks

I have enjoyed this week at school so much more than the first few weeks as I have been working as a teaching assistant not a teacher (we are employed as teaching assistants). Whole class teaching was incredibly difficult when I am unable to communicate very well with the class and the children weren't learning as much as I expected. I was beginning to doubt myself as a teacher back in England because I couldn't control the class and they weren't progressing, so after support from the British Council, I now have a Thai translator in most lessons. Yay! This means I can be a lot more chilled out as I am not panicking to think of ways to be understood and can put more effort into making sure the children are learning and enjoying themselves.

Dressed in traditional Thai outfit with Grade 1

This weekend, I went with Sian and Dan to help at English camp in the next province, Surin, for Saturday morning. I was working on "listening station" where the students listened to me read a passage and then had to answer questions. Highlight of English camp was definitely watching Dan introduce himself to the students. He arrived late so missed what he was meant to be saying (which was " Hello my name's Dan and I am an English teacher" sit down...) Instead Dan spoke for a good 10 minutes, telling his life story to these students who didn't have a clue what was going on! He told them what his parents do for a living, what he studies at university etc. with me uncontrollably laughing in the background not really helping. Sorry Dan, was priceless!!

After English camp, Sian's mentor took us to Surin elephant village for the afternoon. Surin is famous in Thailand for its elephant festival in November, and for the rest of the year the elephant village is open for shows, elephant rides etc. We saw the elephant show, I wasn't a great fan of all the tricks the elephants were doing though. It was cool how they knew exactly what to do, we saw an elephant painting, a football match and I even got its trunk around my neck, but definitely don't know if it is that fair on the elephants. Especially with the massive hooks they use to pull them around and control them with, not to mention chained feet...

Despite this, here are a few piccies:

Saturday night, we had a girlie sleepover with Sian and Meg, watching movies and eating 7/11 toasties, looking forward to our lie in Sunday morning.

7am Sunday Morning and Sian is awake - Thanks Sian!!

We went for a bike ride around my village and visited two temples, we had a few local kids (not from my school) showing us round the first one which also had some very odd statues depicting what will happen in the Buddhist version of hell. For example, if you hit your parents you will get really big hands, if you commit adultery this happens...

It was a cool place though, with lots of Khmer ruins as well as horoscopes. My horoscope wasn't very good, so I followed a local girl's advice of tying the piece of paper to a tree.. run away from the problems!!

On the way back to mine, we visited this pretty Chinese temple which can be seen from my flat.

Cream, my housemate, had offered to cook us traditional Chinese food for lunch, which was really good. Got some ideas to try back home - everything was a lot fresher and tastier than from a takeaway!! He also cooked us chicken drumsticks in coca cola - sounds grim but actually really good! Turns into a sticky BBQish sauce! Will try and recreate that one in Winch - watch out girls!! Sian, Meg and myself made a banoffee pie for dessert - definitely didnt turn out as well as we hoped, but the Chinese teachers saw the novelty of banoffee soup...blame int on the dodge ingredients!!