thai silk, dress-up clothes and adventures in yoga

Today was a really cool day. There's this awesome lady named Pat who works at Chitralada and she is quickly becoming a grandma figure to Tiller and I - she's great. She's been working at the Palace school for years and years and has taken it upon herself to make our transition into this completely different world as seamless as possible. Pat somehow found out that Tiller and I would really like to have a Thai silk suit tailored for each of us, and she pulled us aside yesterday and said that there is a great seamstress who frequents the school and will tailor virtually anything for you! So, of course we were immediately interested, and today the seamstress came! We were introduced and handed two books chock-full of beautiful Thai attire. Most Thai women have several silk suits that they wear for special occassions, which appear to occur quite often here - the Thais love any reason to celebrate! Anyways, we thumbed through the books and found a beautiful skirt suit (yes, we picked the same style :) and then were measured after telling the seamstress which colors we would like. I, of course, requested a coral/peony pink colored suit, lol. It's cool because the seamstress is going to pick the Thai silk herself and when we get to see the suits early next week, what they look like will be kind of a surprise! Pat is such a sweet woman, and one who is highly looked up to at the school. She works in an office with a couple of women who practically run the school, and we were surprised to be able to go in there, lol.

Today was also a great teaching day. I taught 5 year-olds about clothing, ie: buttoning and zipping up, putting on a hat, what one wears to the beach, etc. and it was SO fun! The kids got a kick out of seeing me put on different types of clothing and trying to demonstrate wearing sunglasses, a sunhat and a sundress to the beach, wearing my raincoat in the rain or my strawberry pajama pants to bed...they were just in stitches as I threw the clothing on and off like a clown. Then we did a game where I divided the class into 3 teams and I had the person at the head of each team's line run to the pile of clothes that corresponded with a location picture that I held up. I was really hesitant to try a game like this because the language barrier can be SO frustrating. Usually even the simplest of instructions can take massive amounts of charade-like behavior (on my part) to ge the point across, but the kids picked up on the game incredibly quickly! They were SO into it, and I was just ecstatic to see that the language barrier does not have to dictate my classroom activities. After the game, we had workbook time and did some review from past lessons, and at one point, I was helping a student one-on-one with some spelling, and when I turned around to see what the rest of the class was up to, I saw a huge clump of kiddos trying on all of the clothing props I had modeled at the beginning of class. It was just about the cutest thing ever. One of the girls was proudly modeling my beach dress, one of the boys was sporting my bright yellow sunglasses coolly, and several others were just cracking up on the floor over the whole dress-up-behind-the-teacher's-back situation - it was hilarious!

If I've learned one thing so far, it's that teaching little kids brings so much joy. At first, I was so worried about messing up and not meeting people's expectations, but I've learned that class can be messy, fun, crazy and simply hilarious - AND the kiddos can still learn. I never expected to like being around that many kids so much, but they just have a way of changing one's perspective on each day for the better.

The day ended with a yoga session that Tiller and I signed up for yesterday. We had no clue what the class would be like, but had heard that one of the teachers would be leading the class after school, so we changed into shorts and t-shirts and booked it toward a makeshift yoga room on campus. We were late, but somehow happened to be the first ones there (I'm beginning to notice a looseness about being on time here). Then we saw some of the older women teachers trickle in with their yoga mats and stretchy pants - no, we didn't have mats, and we were the only ones in shorts, lol. Hey, you live and you learn, right? Luckily, one of the teachers lent us these lawn chair type cushions to use as sudo yoga mats, and by the time we hit the first position, Tiller and I began to laugh, not so subtlely. The instructor had us place pressure on our noses in an alterating motion with our thumbs and pinky fingers, while moving our heads up and down...it was so weird/funny, and we were already in a giggly mood over the awkwardness of not having mats and being in shorts, so you can imagine that it was hard to remain composed. Then, we did these spread eagle moves and ab-intensive lean backs that made my whole core area shake like a phone on vibrate - it was pretty entertaining to watch I'm sure! But, we decided that it would be a great Tuesday activity to commit to, and we could always use more intensive exposure to Thai. I think I've got numbers 1-10 down-pat as the yoga instructor repeated them several times with each position. I think it's nung, song, sam, sea, ha, ho, jet, pat, cow, sip. See, I'm learning Thai!

Okay, I'm starting to ramble and it's getting late...off to bed.