Teaching English...yea

Greetings!

Today is a holiday here in Thailand. I'm not too sure what it is, but I do know I was woken up this morning with music blaring from the local temple (in addition to the obnoxious rooster and some other animal that sounds like it's dying a very slow death), so I'm assuming that it's a religious holiday...

Since I have the day off, I decided to catch up on some much needed chores. Y'all would be so proud! I washed a load of clothes (meaning, I filled a bucket full of soap and water, put my clothes in, let them soak for 30ish minutes, scrubbed them by hand to get the stains out--haha, the stains never truly disappear, though, so it's a good thing I brought OLD clothes, poured the dirty water out, refilled said bucket, swished the clothes around, emptied bucket again, refilled with clean water for a final rinsing, dumped the water out, and then finally hung it all out to dry); I washed my pillow cases and sheets (same process...my arms feel like jello); swept my room; and then took out my trash. All accomplished before 10 o'clock in the morning!! Shocked?!

This afternoon, I will be going with a group of people from Wildflower to visit one of the women here who is in the hospital. This is the kind of day that makes you feel good inside, clean, refreshed :)

Okay, so I had a funny experience teaching three of the women English yesterday and I thought y'all might appreciate it too! It is hard for Thai people to make many of the sounds of the English language. That being said, I was teaching them about opposites, like hot and cold, salty and sweet, and...beautiful and ugly. Well, I asked them to come up with a few of them on their own and one of the women said "beautiful". I then asked them what they thought the opposite of beautiful was. One responded "angry".

I was like, hmmm... I didn't want to dampen the girls enthusiasm by telling her she was blatantly wrong, so I was like: "Oh, okay, you want to do angry instead of beautiful?" She looked at me in confusion. I thought it would be better if I wrote it down to show it wasn't the opposite of beautiful. She said: "No, no--Angry!"

"Yes, this is angry--but it isn't the opposite of beautiful...Does anyone know the opposite of beautiful--look for it in the dictionary if you need." To humor me, they looked it up and then gave me the dictionary.

"Angry!" they said together, pointing to the word. I looked and saw the word "ugly" and it all clicked for me! haha, they were trying to say "ugly," not "angry." I then tried to explain to them the pronunciation of ugly...ten minutes later we were all laughing really hard and not one of them could take the "n" sound out of their pronunciation! I looked like an idiot as I kept exaggerating each sound of the word: "ug! not ung!" but to little success.

After the laughter died down, we started on a different lesson about how you describe the taste of food. I told them you could call a dish you are eating "tasty". So I started to write it on the board and my mind completely went blank on if there was an "e" after the "t". For those of you who don't know, I am the worst speller (haha, this blog has spell check, or else you would have seen for yourself). So as I kinda talk to myself out loud about whether or not tasty has an e, the women started laughing. I looked up and one of them hands me her dictionary, "Here you use!" It was so funny that we all started laughing again. She had to give the English speaking person a Thai/English dictionary to help spell tasty...it was quite a humbling experience for me!!

Haha, I am here to help these women and their children, but they teach me more about myself with each passing day!

I miss you all so much!! Keep me updated on everything that is going on!!