Oh the places you'll go!

Hi everybody!

Sorry I haven't made a post since last week. As you might expect, things have been pretty busy around here. I only have a few minutes before class starts this morning, but I thought I would try to give a bit of an idea about what's been going on.

For starters, I taught my first observed lesson last Wednesday. Here at the school they offer free English lessons to the locals. This allows us, the trainees, the opportunity to practice our teaching while saving the students a bit of money. The class sizes here range from 1-14 on any given day, and are composed of people from all walks of life, ranging probably from about 17-60 years old. My first lesson went fairly well, considering I'd only been training for 3 days at the time. We don't find out if we're teaching that day until 1:30 PM or so, and you have to be ready by 4:00, so the first time I wasn't exactly as prepared as I would have liked. In any case, I'd consider it a success.

This past weekend most of us students met up over at Patong Beach, the most touristy and popular beach on the island. While the school is located in Phuket Town, which is on the southeastern side of Phuket, the nice beaches are all located on the west side, toward the open ocean. Patong itself is quite the adventure. Hopefully I'll get to write a long post just about the weekend. So many stories to tell.

Life is good here, especially now that I'm more accustomed to the area and know where to go most of the time. The heat isn't terribly bad, but if you do perhaps decide to pick up a game of basketball with some teenage Thai guys while wearing jeans... there's a good chance your body temperature won't come down for a day or two without a good swim. Not that I'd know.

I did end up dumping some random pictures on Facebook, since it's much easier to drop them there in quantity, but again, I'll try soon to add more here when applicable. I also changed the settings on comments so that you don't have to be registered to leave them. Sorry about that.

One final note for the moment. An add on to the food post, I've now tried deep fried chicken knuckles, which are precisely what you think. Diced up chicken feet battered and deep fried. They were actually very tasty, though I can't say gnawing on the knuckles was my favorite. What IS my favorite food out of anything here so far has to be deep fried bananas. While I can't say that any Thai meal I've encountered has actually been bad at all, deep fried bananas are an absolute treat.

Okay, time to run along, hope all is well at home! Go Phelps!