The first week

Teachers go clubbing!

After having been thrown into teaching pretty much right away, I was hoping to get some time to myself during the weekend to be able to go through the teaching material that I had received upon my arrival and orientation in Nong Khai. Instead I found myself at a going away party for a couple of volunteers that had finished their programs and were off to their home countries. Going out in Nong Khai proved to be a different experience than I'd had in any other country...very different. It started out at local bar, and after a couple of beers and some games of pool we we're all off to...karaoke! Those of you who know me and my endless love (not) for this very strange phenomenon can imagine the chills down my spine as I heard where we were going. But when in Rome... It wasn't that bad though, but I would rather have played another game of pool than listening to various interpretations of Sinatra's " My Way" and other classics. After about an hour or so of watching people fight each other over the microphone (I actually sang a couple of lines myself) we were off again to the nightclub next door. That was quite different as well, but a whole other story. After the police came and closed the place (they do that sometimes if you don't bribe them) we decided to make a final stop at Nong Khai's second nightlub worth visiting, before I could finally go back home and try to cure my jetlag.


Apart from teaching at one school, volunteering in Nong Khai also meant projects in the afternoons and evenings. That included teaching buddhist monks, university students and helping out at an orphanage. We would get a new schedule on a weekly basis where we were assigned to all of the different projects at least once a week. Teaching the university students was by far the easiest, because their level of english was already pretty good, and teaching the monks was both the most challenging but also the most rewarding. How often do you get the chance to sit down and talk to a buddhist monk for an hour or more with no distractions and the ability to ask them any questions you want? They were equally interested in us though, and topics could vary from anything from traveling, sports, buddhism, to social difference between countries or what kind of thai beer we (the volunteers) liked the most.

Shit happens

The orphanage meant playing with the kids, and feeding them (at least try to) since they were too little to talk in the first place. My first encounter with the (cute) little hell-raisers resulted in one of them taking a crap on me. I guess he saw a farang coming and took his chance. We have since made up and there are no hard feelings between us.