Saturday, December 18

I am writing this blog post from my private room at a resort on Koh Chang, and if I turn around and look out the sliding glass doors that lead to my room, I can see palm trees and the sparkling blue-green ocean. Bangkok seems about a million miles away, and I'll have a proper update from Koh Chang soon...but, in the meantime, how about a quick update on the last week?

Roman and I recently discovered you can buy young coconuts, at 5 for 50 baht (or, like, $1.50), from certain trucks that occasionally drive up and down Soi 4. They've made a very thin, crescent-shaped slice in the top of each coconut, so you can open them at home and drink the milk and scoop out the flesh without necessitating a machete.

Anyway, I bought five in a whim and they were so good we’ve been searching (in vain!) for the truck ever since. Then on Wednesday, Roman and I both passed the elusive truck on our way home from the BTS, and we each bought 10 coconuts. So…we’ve really been enjoying our daily coconuts.

I also bought us some very fancy, very expensive doughnuts for breakfast one morning (I was lured into buying a 4-doughnut box but we didn’t actually eat them all in one sitting).

From top left: peanut butter with raspberry jam filling, raspberry rose, nutella hazelnut, and pistachio macchiato

The last week—Friday especially—was very festive at my school. 

The classrooms were decorated with lots of Christmas drawings the kids had done, and the courtyard and walkways were festooned with fake Christmas trees and wreaths. And on Friday, the kids came dressed in red and green, or Santa hats, or Spiderman costumes. 

The kids also gave the teachers a ton of presents—this is only my haul from Friday and doesn’t include the two boxes of chocolates and fancy beauty products I’d gotten the day before:

We also sang Jingle Bells and We Wish You a Merry Christmas and it all felt like a bit of a holiday. 

And then at the end of the day on Friday, I got my new schedule. Sigh. Nick, one of my fellow teachers, has taken a job at an international school and Friday was his last day. It was all pretty short notice so they haven’t hired a new teacher, and Luke, Ellen, and I are going to be taking over his classes. And the new schedule is intense (for each of us). They’ve removed all my pre-K classes (sob!) and several of my more chill, one-on-one periods, and replaced them with much more intense classroom teaching periods with the new class. They’ve also added more lunch time classes and filled in my few breaks with classes. I guess they can legally add in a certain number of teaching periods, so I get paid extra for the addition of some of the classes, but not all of them. And, like me, Nick has one class that’s much more unruly with a coteacher who he finds much less helpful—and that’s the class I’ll be working with.

So, I ended the work day on Friday feeling a little down. The school is, for the moment, saying the new schedule is only effective through January. But the school year ends on March 11, so I am skeptical that they’re going to hire a teacher for six weeks—or whatever it would be if the position started February 1. Also, the school is saving a LOT of money with this set-up—Ellen and Luke and I will get an extra 7,000 baht or so a month, and Nick probably made at least 50k a month. And it’s a lot of work for each of us to get to know a whole new classroom of kids. And of course, it’ll make things harder on the kids, too, who have already had a weird year—it’ll take us all some time to get into the groove and learn all their English abilities and needs.

So, not the best news. I tend to prioritize daily happiness over money, and the extra cash doesn’t really make this feel worth it to me. If we banded together, we could probably make a big fuss about it with the school, but I don't feel very motivated to do that. It’s only for 2 and a half months, at most. And, more importantly, I am now on VACATION through January 4.

The next post will be all about island life! And at some point, I’ll also write about the a Christmas festivities planned at Roman’s school. For now, I’ll leave you with this: