Another Thai Wedding

Monday, 4 April 2005

There are gray skies this morning, and it's been pouring heavily since last night. Strange to have so much rain as we haven't had any in awhile, especially since this is the dry season. My last full week of teaching in Thailand is here...Summer school each day and a full afternoon of tutoring my English Program students. Then, my mom, her boyfriend Gary, and my childhood friend Nina get here a week from today, and my traveling will begin.

This weekend we had Ku Ai and Wondee's wedding. Ku Ai is our principal and director's son, an English teacher here at our school, and Wondee is a secretary at our school. There was a Christian ceremony in the afternoon and a reception on our school lawn outside our house, with the typical bright neon lights (looks like you've walked into a carnival), preferential seating right in front of the loud, blaring speakers for us English teachers and professors, scantily clad singers (this one was particular awful as she was a bit tone deaf), a Chinese seven course dinner, lots of mosquitoes, and Dang got to eat up the leftovers left all over the grass.

Yesterday, Aw and I went to Soi Sawng morning market to buy vegetables and meat to cook for our late afternoon party for P'Aut's belated birthday. I went to Bamrung Church and visited with Linda, who gave us a lot of teaching resource books to look at and copy. Then, after a lunch cooked by the newlywed couple, I headed back home for my second shower of the day to help relieve myself of the heat, only to enter the heat again not too soon after, as I helped Aw prep vegetables and cook soup for our suki meal. At 3:30 pm, P'Aut and Matt came over, and we had a feast of veggies, meat, noodles and soup that we cooked right in front of us on the table. P'Aut opened gifts after the humidity and the thirty-four candles on the cake nearly melted all the frosting away. We enjoyed cake and ice cream, as we listened to rock-n-roll oldies and 70's disco music.

Keisha, P'Aut and I went to 6:15 pm aerobics at the park near our school. It was so much fun, with more than sixty people dancing away to the energetic man with a microphone on stage. He has some very dancy moves; felt like I was in salsa classes again. Keisha and I rewarded ourselves with some ice cream afterwards. Watermelon and young coconut sherbert. Yum!