Day 74 - Thailand : What are your favourite kinds of food?

I spent my morning rolling around in bed for a few hours before actually jumping out to get ready. We have an early day at school today - starting at 1pm. So I had to quickly have lunch before making my way to school. I stopped by Top Bar and Restaurant and ordered a fresh watermelon shake (sweet and extremely tasty - freshly made with no added sugar) and a stir fry chicken with cashew nuts - OMG, I was in heaven. The food in this small town is unbelievably tasty. I sat and read the final pages of Eat, Pray, Love before heading back to meet with Hans to walk to school.

I had two classes today. My first was only a class (C4) of two - Suphidet and Suriya. We did an exercise where the students had to analyse the photo from the text book and identify what items and objects they saw in the photo. Being in a class of two, it was so much easier to teach and I was able to pay more attention to the two students to ensure that the words were pronounced correctly. They did very well and I didn't even have to help with identifying the objects or items. I elicited the answers and wrote them on the board accordingly. We read through the answers and I taught them how to pronounce each word properly. They had troubles pronouncing words such as 'highlighter, clock and timetable'. The next exercise was to identify which was a classroom object and which was a personal item and dividing them into the different columns. I was very impressed with their English writing skills and the fact that they weren't shy at all to shout out the answers. The hour passed by so quick, I had lost track of time. Arjan Chatchawan had to tell me that it was time to move onto my next class.





My second class was the same as yesterday's class - C5. I really like this class because the boys are all so lively and not shy like what Hans had described most of them to be. The subject today was different types of cuisines (following their text book) - Italian food, Indian food, Korean food, Japanese food, Chinese food and French food. The students had to mark in their text books two of their favourite kinds of food. Pronunciation is most important teaching in Southeast Asia, they have a lot of difficulty in this area. I really emphasised on each word - French was quite difficult for the boys, the 'ch' sound is quite hard to absorb. The next part of the exercise was to build questions relating to favourite kinds of food. In pairs, they had to create a dialogue and then read it out to the class. 


P1: What's your name?
P2: My name is .............
P1: What are your favourite kinds of food?
P2: My favourite kinds of food are ........... food and ............ food.
P1: My partner's favourite kinds of food are .............. food and .............. food.


They all had a go and all had difficulty pronouncing 'favourite' and 'kinds'. We spent the second half of the lesson concentrating on getting these words right. They got it eventually but will still require more practice. Even Arjan Chatchawan was reading along with the class. As a fun activity, I asked the class to tell me what other cuisines there are. They elicited a few such as Malaysian, Taiwanese, Australian, Finnish, Swedish, Greek etc. We practiced reading the different cuisines. The boys has a great geographical knowledge, but I understand this is probably influenced by the likes of football (soccer).
Hans was still teaching his class, so I sat in for half an hour. He played a game with the students - the vocabulary word race. I was so shocked to see how big of a class he had had to tolerate with - approximately 30 students, or maybe more. The class was split into two groups and they were given a specific time frame to write down words on the board. Some of the interesting words they came up with was Facebook, Twitter and Google. 

We had just made it home on time before the heavy rain hit. Phew. It's monsoon season so there tends to be a lot of rain during the day (late afternoon) and the rain fall is quite heavy. The good thing about it, is that it only rains for a short while. I sat at the porch blogging away hearing the rain pitter patter on the tin roofs. The locals love it when it rains as the weather is a lot cooler for them. The owner of the guest house cooked lunch and offered Hans and I some. It was very nice of her. She made a rice mixed with mango and shrimp dish. It was a very simple dish, yet the flavours were amazing.

Hans and I went exploring in search of a noodles place - a small local restaurant but we stumbled across another food market. Everything was bagged up and displayed on the tables. There were so many choices but we didn't know what was what. I bought a fried chicken and one serving of rice for 45baht ($1.50).

We ended up at the other night food market and dined in the noodles place. I was very happy to see the big selection of greens and mushrooms. They even had a menu in English which was perfect for us. I ordered a noodle soup with lots of greens and mushrooms and chicken. The seating arrangement is an outdoor setting which was nice to enjoy our Chang beers. The downside of dining at an outdoor eatery are the wandering cats that made me very paranoid and uneasy. There were a few of them around. Tonight, there seems to be no mosquitos or maybe it was the mosquito coils placed around the tables. Nonetheless, it worked - I didn't get bitten at all. The noodle soup was so tasty, once again my tummy was happily satisfied. We sat and chatted for 2 hours. Time goes by so fast when I am around Hans. He is such an interesting man, telling me so many facts and stories. It Han's second last night, so I decided to treat him to dinner. Everything cost me 210 baht ($7) - bargain. I love asia's food.

Good night world.
XOXO