Living in Bangkok

Friday was English Together International Day and I have some stories to tell! But first…Thanksgiving! Roman and I waited until the last minute to decide what we wanted to do for Thanksgiving. I had initially thought I would cook, but once I started working at school, I realized I wouldn’t want to arrive home at 4:30pm after a long day and try and make a whole Thanksgiving feast using only the stove and my little toaster oven. One of the most popular options in Bangkok is to go to one of several Thanksgiving buffets, which cost from 30 to 60 USD for all-you-can-eat. But since buffets are all about quantity over quality, they just aren’t my favorite—and I won’t eat enough food to make it seem “worth it.” We were kind of on the fence about whether we’d do anything for Thanksgiving at all, especially since we’re at the end of the month and our funds are low. But on Thursday afternoon, once we were home from work, we decided to order from Dean & Deluca, a fancy international stor...

Maybe one of the best ways to talk about teaching this week would be to share some stories about a few of my students… Asher is one of my tiniest students. He’s three years old and has a big smile that reveals all his front teeth are missing. I only ever saw his smile in online classes, though—like all the other students, he’s always wearing a mask, and his is a particularly tiny Union Jack mask. His father is a foreigner (British? I’m not sure—I’ve only seen his mother) and Asher has brown hair and speaks a ton of English. Still, he’s hard to understand—he has a small voice and can’t enunciate very well, and the mask doesn’t help. When I ask questions of the group, like, Is it snowing or raining in this picture? , he’ll raise his hand and, when I call on him, go off on a pretty incomprehensible monologue about some experience he had that maybe has something vaguely to do with the rain. He also had this really earnest, slightly surprised way of saying “yeah” where he stretches th...