I went to church last night (Sunday.) A professor at the University, Ajarn John, took me. By took me I mean, we met at the 7-11, I got on the songtaew and he followed behind on his motorbike and beeped and waved when it was time for me to get off.

It was at 5 pm in a little shop house near the town of Mahasarakham proper. Two Baptist ministers from Tennessee, Scott and Valerie, run it. We sat on the floor on a straw mat (ohh my aching hips), a Thai man played the guitar and we sang in Thai (phonetic script provided) then listened to a sermon in Thai ( I was so pleased when I heard one word I know, nam=water, and saw the pastor gesture "overflowing."  Everyone (all 8 ) was very sweet. One lady, Du, is working on her Doctorate and was asking for help translating her paper from American English to Brittish English - did you know the grammar is different? I never did. For instance, the punctuation goes outside of the quotation marks in the UK. Anyway, she had ridden her bike so at 6 ish , she got one of those battery powered reading lamps out of her bag and left early. I still don't know if she holds it in one hand or straps it to her bike - or her head.

One couple had been up at 2am and 5am to see their 2 children off to a pingpong tournament in Chonburi.  Very exciting, they will join later. One son is called 'copter' short for helicopter - I don't know why.

Everyone here goes by nicknames which have absolutely no relationship to their given name. They just chose one. And change it on a whim.   Pity the poor mailman. Although I don't think there are any, I've never seen a mailman or a personal mailbox. I have seen post boxes in front of the 7-11s and each town has a post office.

I tried to order some shoes from LLBean the other night.   Shipping is $35 so I figured that wasn't too bad all things considered.   But when I went to put in my address, there weren't enough lines or spaces on the lines. I emailed the live chat lady and she said the system can't handle that many lines so I was SOL. I had them sent to Joe who will mail them to me. I am a little nervous about using my credit card online over here - even though I pay $9 a month for the fastest internet (an exorbitant amount over here) it is still "not a secure network."  

Well on to work today. Oh, I must tell you about my classrooms. They have air con (thank you God) and each room has a computer set down inside the desk with a glass desktop (like you sometimes see on tv or in banks.) The computer projects on either a screen, the white board, or, in my case, 2 large tvs at the front of the room. But here is the cool part - every room has what we used to call an opaque projector - it's a flat board onto which you put whatever book or paper you're discussing and it has a camera that projects it onto the tvs. It can zoom in or out, focus, switch back and forth from projector surface to computer screen. It's just the handiest thing. Think how many times you go around the room and point to #7 , or the state of Florida in each kid's book.

I have been making all my lessons on Power Point, it's so easy and they're there to stay and you don't need to run 30 copies of everything. I had learned it years ago and spent a day or so relearning it so I'm good now. I spent 2 days reteaching myself Excel but I still get into snags that I can't figure out.

Gotta go to work. Why am I doing this? Oh yeah, for $900 (gross) a month. (although they only take out about 6% here, a real bargain.)