I just looked at my pictures from Nepal for the fist time on the bigscreen of a computer and it made me really excited about Nepal again. I thought that I should post some more pictures from my trip, so I have decided to put up my favorites which are mostly of the artsy fartsy type, but I like them. All is well in Thailand, I just took my grammer and phonetics exam. In procrastination from studying over the weekend I spent hours reading Lonely Planet's Southest Asia on Shoestring getting really excited to hit the road again. As of Saturday morning I will be

free from school and out exploring again. Much love to everyone!!!!!

Happy Birthday to the King!!!

December 6th, the king's birthday...a very important holiday here in Thailand. Thai people love the king, and they show their love by wearing yellow shirts. Rach and I even bought some of the king's official yellow polos to teach in. Usually at any given time about 30-40% of people on the street are sporting the yellow shirts, but on the king's birthday it was a sea of yellow. We went to the celebration and saw lots of very interesting food, including crocodile and bugs. Crocodile I tried (it was a bit chewy) and I passed on the bugs. I have one week of school left. I am very ready to go travel. My sister will be here on the 20th of December, and my friend Germaine is popping over from Nepal on the 13th. I have had enough time in Phuket and am very ready to go see the rest of Thailand.

School is hard!!!
So I have not been in school in a while and seem to have forgotten that yes, indeed you do have to work. The classes are great and I am learning a lot, but we have a ton of projects and teaching to do outside of class, and it is a little overwhelming. We have been learning a lot about grammer which I love, and phonetics which I am not a fan of. We need to learn the phonetic alphabet, which is a bunch of crazy symbols that stand for different sounds. The problem is that our teacher is English, so the words she gave us as examples of each sound only work if you have an English accent, so I need to practice talking like a Brit before tackling the alphabet.
Rachel and took our clothes to the Laundermat today and the owner is one of our students, a favorite of both of ours. It was really neat to see one of the students out in the community using his English. The school we go to offers free English classes to the community, which we get to practice teaching. It is a really cool set up and seems to provide a good opportunity for people in the community to learn English.