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23.10.06

Short and Sweet...

Thanks for the encouraging words Matt! :) I miss you guys too.. haha.

Oh and forgot to let you all know, I updated the pics to include pics of the house and the bus trip to Myanmar. Yay!
http://flickr.com/photos/thai-fly/

Let me know what you think, you can post a comment on the pics themselves or here on my blog. Feedback is always a good thing. And let me know if there is anything you want me to take a picture of to show you guys. Like you know the neighborhood i live in, Chiang Mai University, them fine thai girls that wander around! haha. Anything you want.

The international flower festival is coming up next month, that should be pretty awesome! Flowers from 27+ countries from around the world are going to be setup here in chiang mai! Including a replica of mt fiji made entirely of flowers and the blossoming of 2 ancient chinese bulbs! Fascinating! :P

Oh and London House gave me a callback, so i may take on a weekend job there for a 10 week period! Hurray for good karma.

All in all things are looking up. Although the rent was due today and my wallet is starting to feel the pain. haha. Don't worry though, alls well that goes well. :)

Kisses
Thai-fly
Krystal
21.10.06

Border Run...

Haha border runs sound funny. But unfortunately for us, the borderrun we took was anything but fun.

Let me explain what a borderrun is. Here in Thailand, Farang/foreigners, are required to leave the country every once in a while. I don't know why, but we are. So depending on your visa that you obtain before coming to thailand, you may have to go every month or every three months, to renew your visa (sort of). So you travel to a surrounding country. There are 3 that you can get to by car, bus, bike or if you're insane foot. Cambodia, Laos or Myanmar (formerly Burma). You can of course just fly back to your own country or go to another country, but these are the closests neighboring ones.

So once your visa is up you have to make a run for the border to renew it. The consequences could get pretty severe if you get caught with an out of date passport stamp. So in order to do that you have to get on a bus or take a minibus to the border, unless you're crazy and drive yourself or a stupid hippie backpacker and walk yourself.

Well our experience began when we realized that we didn't look at Danny's passport right and ended up having to leave a few days before. It cost us in all to get to the border and back, 4000 baht. So we get on the bus at 9:30 in the morning. We make it to Mae Sai the border town at 2:30. We walked to the border where we were told we would have to pay another 500 baht per person to get across the border.

Now here is where we learned a very valuable lesson. If you can manage to con a thai girl into going with you to the border on your border run, make sure that you make it clear to them that its not going to be fun, you're not going to be doing any shopping, and its just going to be a waste of their time. Danny forgot to mention all this to mook. So as we stumbled onto the other side of the bridge separating the two countries, we exhaustingly turned to go back to the other side dreading the trip home. Mook, our thai girl friend, was sooooooo disappointed. She thought we would be there for at least a few hours and was in the mood to shop, or eat, or do anything to make the trip there worth while.

She wouldn't talk to us for an hour or so, but we eventually got on the last bus out of Mae Sai, which happened to be right before it started to rain. The bus also stopped every couple of minutes to pick up other people going to Chiang Rai, the city that was closest to Mae Sai that had a bus station. So it was driving in the rain, with all the doors open. Everyone's hair looked like they were in a wind tunnel, it was pretty funny. And wet... mmmmmmm street water. haha.

But we eventually made it to Chiang Rai and were able to get on the last bus to Chiang Mai. We got back into town at about 10:00 that night. So 12 and a half hours later we had our stupid stamps and we were safe at home, miserable and ready for a shower.

But hopefully when we do our next border run we'll have a more pleasant experience. Not to say this one was bad, but maybe we'll stumble across a couple million dollars and can just take a plane by then. Haha....
16.10.06

A string of bad luck...

Long time since I posted, but things have been stagnant here.

And unfortunate circumstances have come about...

My job at London House is no more. They had an influx of students attend their October camp for the first 2 weeks and then it died off. So they were overstaffed. I hadn't been there as long as everyone else so i was let go. :( Sad news, but I think its for the best. London house had too many rules and it was hard for a teacher to actually get any teaching done. I cherish my experience that i had there and the wealth of knowledge I obtained in the short 2 weeks i was working...

Then there is the Laptop. The alienware laptop that Bj won 2 years ago at a computer tournament... it is also no longer in commission. It has decided that it doesn't want to turn on. And it decided this in the only country in the world that does not have the adequate parts to fix it. So now we have lost a very important piece of equipment that we were going to use when we're doing our private lessons...

Which is another issue. The private lessons have not even started either. We have all the supplies, materials and manpower to do it, but we just haven't seemed to come across the motivation to get the job done. We put up fliers but they immediately get taken down. We're not sure if its from prospective students who will call us eventually. Or if its from the Thai cleaning crew at night...

On top of all that, there is Duan. Duan was a "friend" of ours. Not really a friend, more like some one that hung around. At first I was OK with her, she seemed nice and sincere. And then i started noticing subtle things about her. Her eagerness to constantly be around, and when she was around she had to be near Brian. Or touching Brian... I played it up to just me being a woman. But then she would come over and completely ignore me and everyone else, except for Brian. So i knew what was up. We kind of started to push her away, and i guess we pushed too hard.... She came into the house after I went to work one morning and stole 7500 baht from us. That's a little over 200 dollars.... We hadn't seen her for a week and figured she went back to her village in the north, but then Brian and Danny ran into her at a club and he got a confession out of her. As well as a profession of love and other sexual advances...

She promised to get us the money back, but i didn't believe her when she said it and now a week later and still no money, no one else does either. Needless to say she doesn't want to meet me down a dark alley. Don't get me wrong there are steps we can take to get her into trouble with the Tourist police. But it won't get our money back and it would just make her life hell. I'd rather just let it go....

Like the title says this is just a string of bad luck. I'm looking optimistically to the future and i know things will be better. But I'm not delusional and not taking into consideration that things could get worse, but we'll take those as they come too.
2.10.06

Sustaining...

Hello! Its been a while... We finally got internet installed in our house. They said, on September 20th, they would come install it on the first. So i have been patiently waiting for the time to come, and turns out the first fell on a sunday. So they got it installed today! Yay!

Still no decent pictures of the house, I'm a bit of a procrastinator, but i do have good news. Besides saving a bunch of money on my car insurance by switching to geiko, I have been recently employed. I work at a school called London House. It is a privately owned organization and is really nice. The entire school has maybe 30 students. Unfortunately i have a larger class of six year olds-nine year olds and there are nine of them. And they are demons! I am sure teaching children in america would get a little overwhelming, but there was a moment when i was surrounded by rampaging children and i had no idea what to do.

I teach 5 days a week, monday-friday. Tuesdays i teach cooking, HAHAHAHAHAHA, and fridays are Field trip day! This friday we are going to a clay house.. not sure if the house is made out of clay or if the house makes clay things. We will find out. Luckily this gives me something to take pictures of. And my students, as rambunctuous as they are, have very funny names. In thailand it is customary to adopt english or thai nicknames. Not like danny or timmy or anything that has anything remotely to do with their own names. Here is my roster:

JJ
Alice
Smile
Freshy
DoDo
Stang
Peem
Oil
Ailsa

I will take pictures of them. I am glad to have a job, gives me something to do. But now i actually have to come up with lesson plans. It was very sudden that i landed this position. I went and applied on Friday. I received a call on Sunday to come in for an interview and a meet and greet. 10 minutes later i received anotehr call to start working on wednesday. Another 10 minutes and i was asked to come in to work today. Very sudden. And my class went from having 5 students to having 9 and possibly 12 as time progresses. I'm in a whirlwind. Haha.

I make 18,000 baht a month for 3 hours of work a day for 20 days. Thats about 8 dollars an hour. Not bad. Since it is a part time position I am still available to do private lessons in the afternoon or to attend another school on the weekends.

Dinner time! kisses and bugs!
Thai-fly.