Thailand travels - Bangkok and Sukhothai

Around Christmas I had the chance to take some holidays, and spent the most wonderful vacation in Thailand with Jackie. A very unique Christmas. Lots of gorgeous, interesting scenes, colour, craziness, and delicious food.

Our flight there gave us a snack basket - unexpectedly, the onion cookies were my favourite.

This coconut water (?) was actually delicious.

Ah tourists.

Kind of felt like we had stumbled into a small community's market - after just a few minutes in a taxi, we were the only foreigners in sight it seemed. We were entertained by some off-key karaoke singing in the park nearby while we ate our lunch.

Tiger man.

Giant reclining Buddha at Wat Pho.

Chaotic Khao San Road.


Mmmm maybe not a good sign.

We'll cook your street food AND do your laundry.

Christmas pad thai dinner.

Sweet accomodations.

Ruins of the ancient kingdom of Sukhothai.

The monks took just as many photos as us.

It's a Thai Iced Tea! And a goldfish table!!

How are you?

I hadn't realized how much I rely on this one tiny bit of English as a way of easing into conversations: "how are you?"

As I'm slowly acquiring some Japanese, I remain at a loss as to what phrase to use in place of this while conversing with Japanese acquaintances. "O genki desu ka?" essentially means "you are well?", and is the closest equivalent that I am aware of. As far as I can tell, though, this is not exceedingly common, especially in casual conversation. I have only heard it used a couple of times, and once quite jokingly with students who were causing some mild mayhem.

I could be wrong, or there could be something quite simple that I've been missing all along and just haven't learned yet. But in the absence of such knowledge, I wonder why it might be that we ALWAYS follow our greetings with an inquiry as to the other's wellbeing, and why this doesn't seem to be the case in Japan.

I wonder...are personal feelings a less common conversational topic? More private than public? People seem to avoid discussing how they really feel about things, instead remarking on the state of situations and how they have affected other people and things. In my observations this seems to be the case, but I write this with a bit of hesitancy about making an easy blanket statement about the entire culture. I'm still sorting my way through everything, and quite possibly have just missed these kinds of subtleties. However, maybe there is more of a reservation about inward, personal matters than I'm used to.

On the other hand, though the surroundings I have grown up in seem to value being emotionally open (in some ways), we very rarely answer the question "how are you?" truthfully. Possibly with those closest to us, but usually it's an automatic "Good; you?"

This is one reason I find the "greetings" at the start of English classes in Japan so interesting and yet not quite natural.
"How are you?"
"I'm fine/sleepy/tired/hungry/hot/cold/happy, and you?"

Hm. I don't think I've ever responded to that question by elaborating on my body temperature.

Mameshiba - a cute little bean that gives weird advice

Oh if school lunch actually talked...

Makes me smile

My teacher said "Avril Lavigne" in class. Boy at the back laughed; "Ha! "Avril LaBieber!!"

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The sentence "Doraemon [popular anime character] is yammier [*yummier] than pizza" cropped up on a student's worksheet. I asked this particular boy if he eats Doraemon; he seemed confused.

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I asked the hypothetical question "This weekend: you can do anything you want. What will you do?" in a warmup activity. Some of the students were real creative geniuses, planning weekends trips to outer space and conquering the world. Others, however...I don't think they quite understood the question. Like the boy who said that he would stay at his home. And study English.

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I sometimes get asked very strange questions. Such as "How many toilets do you have in your Canada home?" and whether mannequins have faces in my country.

Shortly after this one, I found out that mannequins do not have faces in Japan.

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And...I currently feel incapable of using a computer. I spilled peach tea on my laptop keyboard, making the keys rather sticky. Not only that but the layout of my Japanese keyboard from work has become so engrained in my mind that I keep hitting numbers instead of quotation marks.

You know it's a good day at work when it includes a round of Mario Kart and a game of Quidditch.

The Muggles even won.

As for the group that chose to be team Voldemort...they are either the coolest or most evil students I have. It's a fine line.

We actually played "quidditch" now in both of my 3rd-year classes, thanks to a section of the textbook in which Yuki, one of the characters, goes to London and gushes about her love for Harry Potter. "Harry is so cool, isn't he?"

I just loved being able to legitimately say "10 points for Slytherin", in English class. As well as asking them "What time will Snape go to bed tonight?" as a review question.

The game involved dividing the students into six teams and outlining three quidditch hoops on the blackboard. I asked the students a series of review questions to practice the grammar point, and after discussing with their team members, the first to raise their hand was called on to answer. If they were correct, they got a chance to throw a ball at the board in hopes of scoring on one of the hoops.

The game took a surprising twist when the golden snitch made an appearance after the final question was answered.


And in another character-themed review activity, Donkey Kong (me) pulled into the lead in Mario Kart thanks to pulling a star item card after trailing the whole game. Success.

This game is similar; teams choose a character, who moves forward on the track when they are able to successfully answer an English question. They roll the dice to determine the number of spaces, and also choose an item card which allows them to do any number of things, including roll again, move forward another space, send all the other players back 3, or cruise into first place (as in the case of Donkey Kong).

I think I have just as much fun preparing and playing these games as the students do.

Road trip in pictures

For one of the long weekends in September, a road trip seemed like a good idea. I think it was. We went from Yokote, to a small town in Yamagata that I can't pronounce to pick up Jackie, a failed attempt at going to Mt. Zao, and onto Miyagi - including Akiu waterfall, Sendai, Ishinomaki, and Matsushima Bay - aaaand home again.

"Road or Not-A-Road?" Game I often play in Japan. This was probably not a road.


Fantastic ramen shop in Sendai. We made our selections at a vending machine, which gave us a ticket to present to the chefs. Service was pretty speedy.


We saw some of the damaged coast from the tsunami in Ishinomaki and Matsushima. This was an entirely sobering and haunting experience, but also helpful in grounding in my mind the reality of what happened in this part of the country not even a year ago. It's easy to forget, living in an area that hasn't been so directly and obviously affected.

But it was weird, being there and not being able to do anything. I'd like to find more ways to help instead of just knowing what it's like there.

I should mention that Ishinomaki is famous for a certain manga comic. Thus we saw these characters all over town.

Well-wishes from the world.

Matsushima Bay
Mountains of rubble still to be cleaned up.
Finally, we said goodbye to all five of our couchsurfing hosts. Three of them did tricks. Guess which ones.
Yes I realize that was cheesy.