a particularly good weekend

...means that i had no time at all to do laundry. is it weird that i find it satisfying that i was so busy that i now have no clean underwear?

on saturday i went with my co-teacher and her husband to the neighboring village of Ban Don (where i had a good community day last month), Ban Nattai to visit homes/parents of students. this was yet another community that FELT like a community. small streets in between houses, generally a more "neighborly" feel than my street. curiously, i thought a visit to the students' houses would mean talking to the parents about the students' progress in school. not so. my co-teacher had a questionnaire that she filled out by asking the parents questions such as "where do you work? how much do you make?" and the students "do you help around the house? what do you like to do when you're at home?"

In Japan, they did something similar, but homeroom teachers visited the parents of their students. Here, the visit was split up by neighborhood and teachers may have interviewed students they have never met before. It was interesting.

Ban Nattai is a 50% Muslim community so there were kids wearing traditional garb:



they wear regular school uniform at school though. there were lots of cats at Ban Nattai:


this one i wanted to take home with me, but seeing as how i only manage to feed myself dinner about three days out of the week, i figure i probably shouldn't take on another living being. here's kitty playing with my camera strap:

afterwards, i got to see how rubber trees are sapped. the major crop down here in the south is rubber. i learned that 1 kilogram of it is 20baht (or 40. memory is hazy) but either way. jeez. how are people making money??

process: the bark is cut diagonally halfway around the trunk. this allows the sap to leak out and drip down into the coconut cup.
this is done at night when it's cool because otherwise the rubber will harden in the heat.


after that, had lunch with my co-teacher and her husband. went home to sleep away the food coma. got called down to the school at 5 where there is a wedding reception. still waaaay too stuffed to eat, however.

the reception ends at around 7, and pawaw his wife and i do our weekly thing of going to the saturday market. it's a small outdoor market and vendors sell everything from food to CDs to clothes to piercings. a few weeks ago, i saw a girl getting her tongue pierced. right there. in the middle of the stall. in the middle of the market. i prayed that the needle had been sanitized beforehand... and thought of audrey.

spent the night at pawaw's for my weekly homestay. this was something we had agreed upon when i did my site visit back in march. pawaw told me to come and do homestay at his house on the weekends. i wasn't too excited about this at first, but now i look forward to spending time with them and chatting, playing cards with my host brother Nine, and sleeping in my own air-conditioned room with big comfy mattress.

it's really nice to have a set routine. it especially helps when i'm having a slow weekend. i find that i get bored really quickly and it's nice to have the homestay to look forward to because it helps break up my boredom.