Long live the King, Teachers’ retreat, and Christmas

Sorry, but in the last weeks I didn’t have time to update my English Blog. So now, you’ll get a summary of what I did since the beginning of December. On the 5^th of December, it was the Kings 80^th birthday, the national holiday of Thailand. In the beginning, it looked like a normal day, many people out shopping, maybe a few more with yellow shirts. Yellow is the color of the King, because he was born on a Monday. But then in the evening in our village of 150 houses, we had a celebration. Everyone came to the central square to watch the ceremonies on TV and then sing three songs: the royal anthem, “Sadudi Maha Ratcha” (“Praise the King”) and “Por Haeng Paen Din” (“Father of the Land”). The last one, even I could sing, because it’s been on the radio all the time since I came here. So my Thai is getting better, but I still have a long way to go. On Thursday (Dec 6), I went to see the fireworks in the city. Very nice, and they managed to draw an 80 in the sky.

Last Thursday-Saturday, I went to Ko Chang (Elephant Island, in the East of Thailand) with most of the other teachers from my school for the teachers retreat. Really nice place, and for us foreign teachers it was just relaxing for three days. The Thais had a seminar for half a day, and then some of us went on a speedboat to go snorkeling at the neighboring island. Had lots of fun there. For pictures, check out my German Blog (post of Dec 17, http://klausinthailand.blogspot.com).

Today, it was the Christmas celebration at my school. Since the 25^th is no holiday, we will have school then, too, but the students have midterm exams then. So the foreign teachers dressed up like Santas and we sang “Mary’s Boy Child” and “Feliz Navidad”. I even sang a Spanish song on stage while two students played guitar. I can’t speak Spanish, but I guess I did ok ;-). It wasn’t even a Christmas song, but this day was all about foreign languages, not only Christmas. Again, I got a picture on my German Blog.