Motorbike Adventures - Genie

Guys, I got Amanda on the back of my motorbike and nobody was injured.

Last night I desperately needed to find some flowers. Why? Because I'm teaching about sex in basically every class I have and on top of playing the song from Once Upon A Mattress, I did need to show them the anatomy of a flower. So Amanda and I jumped on the back of my motorbike and for two hours we zipped around Nong Khai.

You know what we found? Nada.

Well, we found a lot. A pile of coffee shops (it's the only thing advertised in English over here), street food vendors, piles of sociopath drivers, and a lot more confidence on my new, sweet wheels.

We drove home. I was a bit dejected because I still hadn't found flowers for my 2 hour M1 lab. We went down to the laundry on the end of the street to throw a load in. We then discovered that the laundry machines only take 10B coins. Guess what we didn't have? Ayup. So I went on another adventure to the little grocery two blocks away and bought 4 eggs (something my doctor explicitly said not to buy from corner groceries in Thailand. Challenge accepted.).

I did not receive any 10B coins as change.

So I started trying to communicate with the elderly lady behind the window that I wanted a 10B coin. I showed her 2, 5B coins coming together. No luck. I showed her 10, 1B coins in a pile. No luck. I pretended to rip a 20B note in half. No luck.

I showed google translate to a 12 year old in the store and immediately got 10B coins.

Thank god for pre-teens and google translate.

We started a load of laundry and walked home. We stopped along the way to grab a couple limes from the neighborhood lime tree and then I spotted it. A TREE WITH FLOWERS.

Amanda and I scavenged the ground looking for flowers with all the correct parts I needed: stamens, pistils, filaments, ovules, petals, sepals, ect. We only found about 5 of them, but that was enough for me. My lab class went really well today. None of the M1s ever need to know that I didn't intend on only having 5 flowers. ;)

We got home after picking the limes and flowers and made a bowl of ramen.

I do not know what they do to ramen here, but it is significantly more delicious. It's spicy, tastes like fish soup, and is quite delicious just by itself. However, now we had four salted eggs and two limes. So our noodles were quite decked out last night!

That's another odd part about being over here. I'm hardly ever hungry. And when I am finally hungry, there's no food that is convenient. We now have a kettle and ramen - so we can eat at home, but even after school all I want is a big glass of water and a nap.

I didn't mean for my adventure to Thailand to be an adventure to a healthy BMI, but that's certainly where we're headed. (It's also where my M1 health class is headed next week... the BMI is so much easier to calculate in metric. EVERYONE QUICK SWITCH TO METRIC IT IS SO MUCH EASIER TO DO LITERALLY EVERYTHING.)

We've got 2 hours until the weekend.

But fortunately, we work for MediaKids, the slave institution, so we get to lesson prep all weekend.

Ok. Since I'm rambling at this point (great job if you've made it this far in the post. 13/10 for you.). But our boss at PTK, who looks like a life-size, Thai Barbie. I'll try to snag a picture of her at some point, but she is probably the prettiest person I've ever actually seen. She's also incredibly good at her job. Today she came up to all of us to apologize for being so busy lately. She gave us a lot of good advice about the Thai students and told us if we were ever having problems, to let her know and she would call the kid's parents and put a stop to the nonsense. She also brought in Lychee fruit for us to try. Weirdly enough, I've had these a million times and never knew what they were called. I used to eat bowls of them when my parents would take us to Chinese buffet in Rochester! She also brought these delicious chicken strips. Well. I ate one and said thank you for the chicken strips. Then she said: "potato and banana". So I was radically wrong. They were the best vegan chicken strips ever. ;)