Monday, October 21, 2013

Practice Teaching & The Last Week in BKK

At night when I can't sleep I go the window at the end of the hall and watch the trains go by. Our hotel might as well be a stop on the Sky Train for how close we are to the nearest station--from early morning to midnight, bright white trains zoom past our windows in a constant loop.  I like to watch the small dot people embark and scatter. I like digesting Bangkok from this 9th floor view and I like to imagine that if the trains were just a little faster, they could stitch together a thin white line that would wrap around the entire city. From this night window, the sounds of Bangkok are quieter and even the unrelenting rain with its thunder and crash is nothing but some damp whisper.

But, for the most part, I've gotten used to the clashing sounds of Bangkok. The whistles and trains and whirring AC machines and bells and yells in Thai about buying sausage or riding tuk-tuks. It's as if there is an orchestra buried deep in the pit of the city that is never quite finished warming up, creating dissonance with all its moving parts focusing solely on themselves.

I've gotten so used to all of this that it's hard to imagine that in just eight days I'll be leaving Bangkok for Yangtalad, my small village in the Kalasin province of Isaan in North Eastern Thailand. Then, I will be a teacher in charge of hundreds of students. I will no longer be living with a group of my peers in a cushy hotel with bottled water and laundry service, but in a single house on the outskirts of the jungle. I will no longer spend nights eating at restaurants and going to bars because the fanciest eating establishment in my village is the local 7/11. Clearly there are several large changes coming my way. I'm not sure how I will handle them but they are coming at us at such a speed that I'm not sure we have much time to truly prepare in any other way than to hold on desperately to a railing that may or may not even exist.

However, one of the ways in which we're able to ~**kind of**~ prepare is through a week of practice teaching at a local school in Bangkok. Starting today and carrying through Friday (with a random holiday on Wednesday because Thailand), we'll be teaching in pairs to a small group of students for ~2 hours a day. In true Thai style, we weren't told the age of our students nor their level of English proficiency before arriving at the school this morning and were greeted with a large, awkward ceremony in which photos were taken and flowers were presented to us and a lot of people bowed and said things in Thai and then laughed.

We then split off into our pairs to play games and teach key English phrases like "I like to read," (which was quickly shortened to "I like book") and "I like to eat pizza" (shortened, predictably, to PIZZA!). The students may not speak English well, but they are experts at blatant mockery and saying "We understand teach-uhh" mostly only when they very much don't. But they were also kind and eager once things started rolling, especially when they learned that I will literally do anything to make someone laugh.

And even though certain aspects of this first day of teaching were frustrating, it's important to remember that my job is not to teach English fluency, but rather to offer them a different perspective on what education is and what it can be. Thai students spend their entire lives in strict little boxes learning everything through rote memorization--as foreign teachers, our role is one of expanding these boxes and, hopefully, getting them to come outside of the box and sniff around for a while. And that's a really empowering position to be in because we get to expose them to the wonder of this precious world.

My job is to dazzle and fascinate and I know that eventually I will do just that; for now, however, I'll focus on getting these little tykes to learn that screaming the word PIZZA! when I ask them what they like to eat doesn't really count as knowing how to speak English.

Cody

Sunday, October 13, 2013

All Quiet on the Western Front


When you are foreign in Thailand, you are a falang (pronounced, fa-wrong--the humor of this pronunciation is not lost on me). When you are white and a foreigner in Thailand, you are a Westerner, which does not imply that you are a cowboy-boot-wearin-panner-of-gold, but someone who lives in the Western hemisphere. Never before in my life has my hemisphere contributed to my sense of identity but, here, the way that I talk and the things I like to eat are no longer American tastes, but Western ones.

I write all this because this past week has been a week of indulging in the Western things I’ve been missing from home: blockbuster movies in mall theaters with huge buckets of over-priced popcorn, bagels with lox, Krispy Kreme donuts, bitter coffee that isn’t flavored with granulated sugar and condensed milk. While I’m starting to find myself craving chicken satay and sticky rice for breakfast and even learning to prefer Leo beer to American fare, there are still small parts of me that feel empty, unfulfilled, pulled back to the places in the States that I have called home.

This was never more apparent than when a group of us traveled to Nana for dinner at a Tex-Mex restaurant someone had found in one of the many travel books we’ve been clinging to over the past few weeks. Nana, a small district located to the East of the city center, is, essentially, the Ex-Pat hub of Bangkok. Each street is divided into little ethnic neighborhoods: banners with Arabic script advertising bowls of hummus, a flag in French, murmurs of Spanish floating and caught in the power lines, and of course our destination, a small back alleyway that is as White and as English as any street in the United States.



Strings of Christmas lights hang above cobblestone and folksy acoustic guitar spills out of doorways where patrons drink Bud and Corona and talk about the Government Shutdown as something relevant to their lives. We make our way to a restaurant on the left side of the street, Charlie Brown’s. They serve salsa and tortilla chips on the table, pour strong margaritas from cheap pitchers. We order quesadillas and taco salads and bowls of black beans. The music is a mix of country and Top 40. The walls are decorated with pop-art paintings of sort-of-famous American celebrities. Like Mario Lopez and Santana. I feel warm and safe, more at home than I have in a long time. But the feeling fades almost as quickly as it arrived because the taco salad isn’t really a taco salad (more strips of lettuce and grilled pork than anything else) and the waiters are Thai and the environment is almost too carefully authentic. Of all the emotions I felt spending time in Nana (excitement, comfort, peace), the strongest one I felt (and the one I call back now) is one of disappointment.

Because Thailand is still in so many ways an alien place to me, I find few means by which to compare it to home. The food is nothing like the food back home. The people carry themselves in different ways and don’t remind me of anyone I’ve known. But going to Nana and interacting with a people and within a place that seemed so familiar seemed to highlight all the ways in which it was not familiar and was, in fact, still as foreign and as far away from home as any other place in Bangkok. Difference never seems as perceptible or intense as it does in a slightly askew imitation.

It's become clear to me that ease will not be found in Thailand by trying to find small Americas within it. There will be coffee shops and restaurants and back patio bars that will remind me of home, but they will be silkscreen, puffs of smoke. I can eat all the glazed donuts and bagels with cream cheese and over-stuffed falafel sandwiches as I want, but I will still be in Thailand, will still be struggling to discover how I fit into this new mosaic that I've found myself awkwardly jammed into. 

And just to make it clear that I don't spend my thaime (GET IT?>!!) here walking around feeling sad because I can't drink Sam Adams beer or eat pepperoni pizza whenever I want, here are some photos from a weekend jaunt we all took to Kanchanaburi where we stayed in small huts on a little creek and saw the bridge over the River Kwai and climbed a mountain and saw the most beautiful waterfall. 






Exploring as much of this country as I can seems to be the only way to better understand how this small mosaic piece fits into the whole. I think this past weekend was an amazing start. 

Cody 

Friday, October 4, 2013

Sabai, Sabai

This time last Thursday, I was hovering somewhere over Siberia, tightly packed into the window seat of row 41 on an American Airlines flight bound for Tokyo. Now, I sit in a much more comfortable seat, still by a window, in my small room in Krik Thai Mansion (or "The Mansion" as we've come to affectionally call it) deep in the pit of Bangkok.

Outside my window, the air hangs thick with humidity. It is gray from days of rain. Here there are no sunsets, just the stark transition from light smog to dark smog, accompanied by the buzz of whistles directing rush-hour traffic as it snakes its way along the curves of the Sky Rail. Soon, the sky will be inky with darkness, pocked by the thousands of small illuminations that make it possible to still walk the streets: the fluttering light bulb of sausage carts, the fluorescence of a 7/11, the vacant sign of a Taxi.

I'm beginning to grow accustomed to the rhythm of this city, or at least the small slice of a life I've carved out for myself here. In the morning, it's grabbing a 20 baht cup of coconut water on the way to Chulalongkorn University (called Chula by BKK locals), filing into line behind uniformed University kids as they walk to class. Then classes on Thai culture and language that are sometimes useful, oftentimes reductive and frustrating. Then lunch, in which I point at colorful dishes without knowing their names. I eat almost everything and sometimes even know what I'm eating, though most of the time it's a flood of unrecognizable textures and flavors. I'm trying to be open to things that I find scary or weird and I feel like food is a good place to start. As they say in Thailand, sabai sabai, which translates sort-of-kind-of to "go with the flow, don't worry too much about things you cannot change." So I eat what I think is pork mixed with strands of something orange in a broth that is pale purple and I try not to question it too much. If there is any key to learning how to navigate this place, it is to be open to everything and to not get so caught up in over-thinking (AKA over-americaning) the small details.

Most of this philosophy I picked up from the old batch of Thailand ETAs who just a few days ago wrapped up their grant periods. Before flying back to the states, they stopped in Bangkok to give panels and lectures on everything from sexual assault to travel in South East Asia to how to protect one's self against the rabid dogs that lurk in the rice paddies of the rural east. Apparently, the answer is to carry a large bamboo stick with you everywhere you go, which sounds about as ridiculous to me as someone telling me that it's possible to disarm a robber with a Q-tip and a good knock-knock joke.

But in all seriousness, it was a revelation to see and meet the people who were just as shaky and scared as we are now. And even if their answers to our numerous questions seemed to conflict one another or just generally irrelevant given our lack of context, they still had answers, which was more reassuring than any of the classes or advice we've received thus far. They made it through. And not weathered or beaten, but smiling and already longing for a place they never could have imagined would become a home. If nothing else, they gave us the gift of perspective, a small glimpse into a future that is bright and transformative.

As far as the less distant future is concerned, a group of us are planning to trek to two famous temples tomorrow (Wat Pho & Wat Aroun) as well as the Great Palace and JJ Market, an open-air market in the north of the city.

Life here is exciting and vibrant and new. And at least for now, that's more than enough for me.

Cody