Okay, time for some serious catching-up.
My first "real" day of school was on Friday, Jan. 20th. We had our first language lesson with the teacher, which was slightly overwhelming - but in a good way. We dived right into the few things we knew in Thai and got the hang of greetings and introductions pretty quickly. It was a little intense, but we actually finished the lesson early and convinced the teacher - while Prof. Bob was out of the room - to teach us the elephant song! Bob had been promising to teach us on the train from Bangkok but kept pushing it off, and we were rather impatient. When he walked back in while we were learning the lyrics he just laughed. I can proudly say that I have since mastered this song! If you would like to see a video of me singing the elephant song, you should click here.
Or you can just watch the video right here!
I hope you liked it!
We also wore our awesome school uniforms for the first time.
Anyway, last Saturday we went to a few temples. Most of us weren't feeling the best, however, so we cut out early and I was a hermit for the rest of the day.
The next day was the best day ever: Elephant Day! I posted a picture of myself with one of the elephants in the last post, so here is one of my friend Ned getting a lot of elephant love!
So many elephants! The camp that we went to is called Maesa Elephant Camp, and it is a place where elephants are trained to do tricks and tasks - but NOT like in a circus. Most of the elephants have been rescued or rehabilitated, and are fed and treated very well - and seem to love their jobs, too. If you would like to see some videos of the elephants, I have several short videos up on my youtube account - which you can view here.
Monday through Friday we had regular classes that started around 9 a.m. We've really learned a lot language-wise in the past week. We can order food at a restaurant, define foods, say things that we like, and go a few places in song taos. I would say pronunciation is harder than actual grammar, since Thai doesn't have to modify its verbs at all and its sentences are simple and straight forward. Bob has been telling us we're doing really well, which is great!
We got to meet Bob's "daughter", who also happens to be our favorite language teacher! He calls her his daughter because she lived next door when he and his family lived in Thailand and would come over every night to play cards with his kids. She's super awesome, and also ended up giving us a mini-lecture on Lady Gaga music videos during our break!
I also settled on my independent study - which is translating Thai into English - and have been working on memorizing the alphabet, which is going better than I expected. I can read most of the consonants, of which there are 44, and have started to works on the different vowels and vowel combinations.
Well, I think I'm off to the Sunday market. That's pretty much all for now, so I'll talk to you guys later!
~Abby
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