Today I went to dance aerobics in the park. They were mad hard… When I walked home there was an
elephant…that’s right, an elephant…blocking my path so I had to go around a
slightly different way and it took a couple more minutes to get home… I see a
few elephants a week…sometimes I hear them at night and they keep me up… it’s
weird to think that I’ll be going back to a country without elephants… back to
exercising… I’ve been exercising like a freak-show lately. Everyday I exercise 2-3 times… I do
stretches, crunches, and arm curls every night…and during the day I either jog,
swim, do dance aerobics or a combination of the three… today I did all three because
my Thai friends and Thisie went with me and they’re
good motivation… I’m ADDICTED to exercise,
seriously!!! I have to be home every
night by 5 for dinner and then I can leave at 5:45…but I have to be back by
7pm… and I don’t have homework or anything… so I have to exercise so that I’m
ready to go to bed by ten or so… because if I can’t go to sleep then I just go
down right crazy... you can only sit in your room and do nothing for so long… lol…,,,,,
(*NOTE: all conversations are actually in Thai *)…On
Thursdays I have an English class that I help teach to “moh-sam”
(8th graders)… sometimes I teach it alone… but this time Ajan
Nongyow was there…
They were doing a little exercise on Valentine’s day. Ajan Nongyow had an English classifieds section and she was
reading it to the class… then out of nowhere Ajan Nongyow goes “Kati, do you have love problems??” I thought I heard her wrong, so I was like
“huh?” and she
was like “Kati, do you have love problems?”
and I was like “No”… and then she gives me the
“you-can-tell-me-(and the entire class)-look”… and I was like “NO”… and she was
like, “oh, okay… then who do you think is the best-looking boy in here?”--wait
a minute, let’s take a second to realize that these kids are in EIGHTH GRADE
and I’m a JUNIOR… and Thai kids look like they’re at least 3 years younger than
they actually are…k, continuing—So I answer as vaguely as possible…because if I
say I don’t think anyone’s good-looking then they all feel bad because they
idolize me because I’m a fulong (foreigner)… and if I
say a certain person is good-looking then they’re all like “oh, he’s your boyfriend”…
so my response was “Fulong like people with dark
skin” and they all sat there stunned…
because in Thai land dark skin is disgusting… you want to be as white as
possible. Then they all turn to a boy
sitting at the back of the room “like him?”… and I was
like “Yep. Fulong
love dark skin. That’s why we’re always
tanning!” and I don’t really know how to
explain what happened next because it doesn’t happen in the states… but it
happens all the time in Thai land… all at once (without counting) there was an
ear-shattering scream as 40 students screamed and beated
their desks all at once in the exact same way on the exact same pitch…. And
then it was time to go to my next class…
Yesterday I ate an amount of food that I would
usually eat over a period of 3 days… I ate breakfast, had a HUGE lunch (gwae-tio le cow gap pak)…then I
went to Gwen’s house, watched a scary movie and ate kanom
(that’s Thai for “snacks”)… then I went home and ate dinner….Then my family
took me shopping at Big C (Big C is kinda like a
mall…)… my little sister Khuan (13), my older sister Poo (24), and my mama all went…. we went grocery shopping
and shopping for other random things and it ended up costing about 900 baht
(about $23)… too bad things are this cheap in the states, eh?? While we were shopping, mama tried to force kanom down my throat, but I was too full… then we went to
this kinda coffe-shoplike
place…. And I got this really good lemon tea… then we started to drive home…and
all of a sudden the truck stopped… but we weren’t home yet… I was like “mama,
where are we??” and she was like “I’m craving Vietnamese food”… then we walked
and bought three HUGE platefuls of Vietnamese food and we all got our own
Chinese desserts… by the time I got home, I felt like a snowman I was so big—lol…
Then I took out my pictures from
Kati Kimmer-
ps-
thank you all so much for the cards!