Around the world

Around the world; a Nation Hopper's journy to teach on all 7 continents.




Thursday, September 1, 2011

Long post alert

But so many exciting and fun things happened tonight. Ok, well three things to be exact, but I had to share them. 
Had an awesome evening. The group of kids I had today were phenomenal, picking up words and phrases faster then I could dish them out. I had to scramble half way through the lesson to come up with more material for them to learn. Today we covered colors, action words (jump, sing, eat, dance, go to school, and run), numbers, asking do you like (insert color or action word here), yes, I like (color or action word), no, I don’t like (color or action word), how are you, I am (fine, happy, sad), and what is your name, my name is. 
Dinner was excellent. Rice noodles and a tofu curry that had green tomatoes and something that looked like a pea but tasted very herby. Bananas wrapped in rice, sugar and coconut milk, steamed in a banana leaf for desert. YUMM! 
After dinner P Ui, Nathan and I sat and talked. Well mostly I sat and stared off into space until I heard my name mentioned then looked to Nathan for a translation. I can’t remember what started Nathan and I’s conversation but all of a sudden we were talking quickly about the randomest things. The stray dogs in town and how they don’t move when a car or motorcycle approaches, which lead to all the car accidents we have been in (Nathan has been in some serious ones. One is Tom Cruse, Mission Impossible worthy in which Nathan gets sandwiches between two cabs on a motorcycle in Bangkok. The cabs separated, the bike flips, he some how ended up on top of the bike as it slid fifty feet down the high way. Picked the bike back up and rode off), the topic of conversation then changed to snakes, spiders and our shared fear of them. 
It was so nice to have a native English speaker to talk to. We both jabbered on for at least thirty minutes straight through. Not that I can’t communicate with P Ui, the people in the office, or Ja at Church, who all speak different levels of English, some high some low. But it’s different when I talk to them. I have to slow way way down, sometimes not use complete sentences, and swap out words that are too unfamiliar/hard for simpler words (hospital turns into ‘doctor’, I am a vegetarian turns into ‘no meat’, I would like to do this turns into ‘I want do this’. All of which is accompanied with wild hand gestures and the use of a sometimes not so helpful dictionary or Google translator). It’s nice to be able to talk with someone and not worry about slang, speed, or words that are too big. I hate using incomplete sentences, I’m here to teach English and incomplete sentences definitely do not qualify as proper English. But there is no other way to get my point across. 
So to sum it up. Awesome English lesson. Wickedly delicious dinner. And a much needed talk with an American. September has kicked off with a bang. 

3 comments: