Certified at Last!!!!
We are finally finished with school and you can now officially refer to us as English teachers. So here we are teaching in our matching yellow shirts. We celebrated by going out and drunking way too many adult beverages. Crazy things happened, but that is all that I will say about that. Today we had the wonderful task of going on a border run. Basically, when you go to Thailand, they give you a one month tourist visa and in order to stay for another month, you go cross the border somewhere and then they stamp your passport another 89 times and then you can stay for another month. I assume that this is done so that people can make money by doing visa runs. They actually pick you up at your hotel and take you through this whole process without ever telling you what is really going on. So today we sat on a bus for about a million hours, got on and off the bus 365 times to do random things we have no idea what were for, and then sat on a boat while the guy in charge stuck viagra down his pants. We stood in a barbed wire section at the immigration station in Burma (which is now called Myanmar) for about ten minutes and then did the whole thing again on the way back. The funny thing is that this town that we went to is there entirely for visa runs. You can only get there by boat from Thailand; there aren't any roads into Burma from there. The whole thing is a little odd and pretty ridiculous, but I guess one more month in Thailand is worth it. Tomorrow we are off to a national park to hang out in the jungle for a while and (cross your fingers) see a tiger. We will be there for a few days until we return to Phuket to pick up Aleta. At the very least, we should see some leeches....

The other picture is of us doing one of our favorite pasttimes in Thailand, eating. We do it several times a day, so we thought you might want to see it in action.

Happy Bithday to the King!!!!

When I think of beaches, I usually think of sand and ocean, but in Thailand, beaches mean seas of chairs with umbrellas. You can rent a chair for the day for a mere 150 baht (about $5) what a deal for a place to sit your butt in in a country where you can eat lunch for 75 cents... Or you can eat bugs that this woman squirts with something for much less than 75 cents. That was at the king's birthday celebration. Happy Birthday!!! Eat crazy things!!!! We also ate crocodile kabobs. I must say they were a little chewy but much like chicken. Take note of her yellow shirt. people here love the king, I mean really love the king, and to show their love they wear yellow shirts all the time. The beach is a sea of umbrellas, but everywhere else is a sea of yellow shirts. We even succombed and bought some... Oh yeah, the funny looking bloke in the first picture is our new BFF, Tim. He's from Sheffield (that is very important). In that picture, he is doing something very illegal. Can anyone guess what that illegal activity is? We may send you a postcard, or some fried bugs, to the winner.... We are almost done with school, which means we will be traveling...something that might actually be of interest to you all (unless you want to learn about passive voice). We got nothing else...sorry.

Thai Boxing anyone????
Well the cute girls have now exprienced Thai boxing. Going into the evening they were not sure what they would think about 2 guys beating the crap out of one another....but it turned out that they liked it. They are lucky enough to have a friend from class who spent a year Thai boxing here and was excited to take them and explain the sport. The learned a few things:
1 Thai boxing is very cultural. They all do a dance before a fight and wear special clothes.
2 The fighters have very good sportsmanship. They smile after getting kicked in the face and hug their opponent between rounds. They also seem very concerned if the knock out their opponent.
3. When making a bet on a fight, choosing the guy with the coolest outfit, in this case a cape with a tiger on it (we love baby tigers...who doesn't?) is not the best tactic. Tiger cape guy got his ass kicked in the first 2 rounds and we were out a beer.

Fun at the beach
A weekend at the beach was much needed after a whole week of being in school. Ocean, sun, good food, a reggae bar what more could we ask for? As usual we cannot go anywhere without crazy shit happening. Paco managed to lose lots of stuff(beer can do that to a person), the list includes: nose ring, 1 flip flop, half a swim suit, and her watch (which she retrieved). While Paco was looking for lost items, Rachel became part of a search party for a lost woman who went out swimming and disappeared. Luckily the woman was found and turned out to be OK.

What do Cute Girls do for Thanksgiving? Normally we would cook and listen to NPR like the domesticated dorks that we are, but this year we are in Thailand so neither of those activities were possible. Well, we didn't make it out to the beach as planned, but we did wander around a grocery store for a couple of hours. We found lots of Tuykey Day-esqe things, like thai pumpkin filled with custard and chocolate ice cream. Well, the chocolate ice cream was just 'cause we wanted it, and Cute Girls like to share things out of a single container (or drink a single bucket to booze with two straws). The highlight of Thanksgiving came later in the day, when we ventured out to an Irish pub (owned by an American and Englishman and managed by a Canadian) and listened to Latin music. The owners had managed to find a whole turkey and pecan pie, so we got to eat a free Thanksgiving dinner in an Irish pub in Thailand(not likely that I will ever get to say that again). The scariest event of the evening was riding on a motorbike taxi. We have been avoiding this and walking everywhere because it looks like you might die if you climb on the back of one of those scooters without a helmet on. Other students here have been renting them and driving all over, but all that tells me is that they don't particularly value their lives. We did, in fact, survive the experience and we may do it again sometime. For now, I am happy to say that I had Thanksgiving in an Irish pub in Thailand. I guess I could die happy...

DLP's United in Thailand

Paco started out in Nepal. She walked for seven weeks. She met some attractive sherpas. She saw amazing things. She spent a lot of time on a toilet...

Swenny started out in Catalina. She saw some garibaldis. She misplaced an ovary (the left one and if anyone finds it, let her know). She jumped off the pier. She sang Tenacious D one last time in Agave.

Then the two met up in a hotel in Phuket, Thailand. Swenny knocked on Paco's door (Room 308) and Paco was sleeping. She almost didn't come to the door because she is a little grumpy when she first wakes up (make that really grumpy- she growls). Luckily for Swenny, Paco came to the door. Poor Swenny was being kicked out of her room by the hotel lady for some unknown reason and needed a new place to throw all of her ginormous bags. So the Cute Girls were re-united in a hotel where the walls are covered in geckos all the time (do we need more lizards for T-lab?). The Cute Girls then tried to eat in Thailand, which is challenging if you are in a non-touristy place and you don't speak the language. The food is really good, but who knows what is being eaten? Rice, lots of rice. And baby corn (is that really corn or does it just look like corn?), carrots, and cabbage. The oranges are green and the peas are not really peas but some sort of pod thing. The best part about eating a meal it that is usually costs less than a dollar.

School is going well. First teaching lesson today. Beach tomorrow (if we can find it...). More eating and going to the spa, where the pool has a waterfall. Sorry no pictures; we haven't taken any yet.

As of today, I have 22 days left on Catalina Island. I know this because one of my co-workers made me a countdown chain. Does that mean that she is excited to have me gone? Oh god, I am not sure that I am ready to be gone. I might have a nervous breakdown. And then I remember the screaming ADD kids, the cold wetsuits, and teaching the parts of the fish for the 8 millionth time, and I am reminded of why I am leaving. Still, there are times when I am sad to go. Like when Glikin makes a rule about not lifting your own glass to drink and then J. Broz pours beer down my throat until it starts coming out my nose. I don't think that beer was meant to be in your nostrils...

What to do with my last three weeks on the island? I will be on that airplane before I know it, and I will probably be having a nervous breakdown for the 13 straight hours that I am on that airplane. Oh well, tomorrow I think that I will teach the parts of the fish one more time, and then put on a cold wetsuit and chase down some screaming ADD kids. And I will enjoy every second of it.

Michael Hearne "live at the OBL"
It was a night of crazyness...a night of debauchary...a night of singing, dancing, two stepping, rapping, beer drinking, bocce ball playing...and yes of course Jagger shots...well for those of us that didn't drop them on the floor.