Tuesday was a long day.  I have the most classes on Tuesdays and I’m exhausted by the end of the day.  Pat has been bringing me lunch most days.  It’s nice, but at the same time, it means I don’t go to the cafeteria (they call it the canteen) with the other teachers.  So, today when Pat said she couldn’t bring me lunch I decided to go to the canteen.  It’s a bit strange and felt overwhelming.  There are several different food sellers and I have no idea what I can eat and what I can’t because I can’t handle spicy food.  Noi was there and helped steer me in the right direction.  I felt very watched and stared at as all the students are in there eating and a lot of the teachers are.  I sat at one of the teacher’s tables, but they all soon got up so I ended up eating alone.  I didn’t love the food.  Overall, it was a somewhat unpleasant experience.  I’m just so tired of not being able to communicate.  But there just isn’t enough time in the day to all my work for school and my brain is fried when I go home so I can’t seem to take in any information and Thai is just not sticking.

At some point I asked Xploreasia if they would work directly with my school to replace me when I leave.  I have an agent that charged my school to “find” me and then told me she is not my agent. She hasn’t done anything.  I’m ok with that because she is an unpleasant woman.  Xploreaisa decided to contact her and tell her everything I said instead of just giving me a yes or no on the subject.  She is now livid as I listened to her screaming and yelling at Pat yesterday about how horrible I am and how I’m complaining.  Then she told Pat that next semester she was going to charge more.   I don’t trust that Xploreasia has my back.  I don’t feel I can trust the placement group at all.  And now this lady is going to try to punish the school because, well, I’m not even sure why.

Even though I was tired and just wanted to go home after school, I had a date.  The coffee shop near my house also is a hotel with a few rooms.  I had Tip reserve a room for him there since it’s brand new and closer to me than the hotel at the dam.  We went up to the dam and looked around a little and then went to dinner and just sat and talked after dinner.  He is from England and is riding his bike from Chiang Mai to Phukett.  It was delightful hanging out with him.  Tinder for the win!

Today was ok.  I had my first class after school teaching a monk and three other people.  They knew a lot more English than I expected and I went through my lesson plan way too fast.  I was struggling trying to figure out what to teach.  The monk is getting ready to go to India for a month and wants to improve his English for his trip since it is spoken in most places.  So, now I have to come up with lesson ideas for English he might need in India.  I no longer want to do this, but I can’t exactly back out now.  I think I can pull it off, but it’s going to be a lot of work.  I assume it will get easier once I get into the lesson planning.

Tonight after dinner I looked up and could barely see the ceiling.  There were long winged bugs flying everywhere.  And of course, that’s not enough of an issue, but there’s a giant tokay in my house just hanging out above where I was sitting.  How does he get in there?  I watched him for a short time and he wasn’t moving.  There’s bugs of plague proportions and he’s not even eating them?  Why is he even here if he’s not going to eat bugs?  I tried spraying the bug spray I have in the air.  That didn’t even put a dent in the amount of bugs flying around.  All it did was make me choke and gag and now hours later I have a horrible headache.  I have skipped a shower 6 times here.  Three because it was too cold to shower, twice because there was no water and tonight on account of bugs.  The bugs were covering me so I figured getting wet was going to make it worse.  I grabbed my computer and phone and am now hiding in my bedroom.  My bedroom appears to be plague free for the moment.  Maybe I shouldn’t have said that out loud.  At least they weren’t biting bugs.

(c) All rights reserved Kimberly Fiore