Dan Chang 3-Loi Krathong

Loi Krathong (Loy-Cratoong) is here and everybody's full of cheer! The big festival celebrating water came to and end yesterday with an incredible finale. The whole town, school included was decorated for the Monday celebration. As foreign teachers were expected to sing a song, what we were not expecting is that it would be sung in front of about 5,000 people. It was the closest we will ever get to winning a singing contest, losing one in my case. The whole celebration had the flavor of a county fair, complete with games, tons of food and lots of people watching, unfortunately, mullets are not a style to be found in Thailand.

We were received warmly by the crowd and even the children seemed to like our simple song. The kids performed some really great routines and their costumes were quite intricate and impressive. Deb and I were able to sail a Krathong (small banana leaf boat) down the local river for good luck and answers to our prayers. The party lasted well into the night, we heard the last fireworks around 2am. Needless to say, school is pretty quiet today, the kids are hungover from the copious amounts of sugar they ingested and the teachers are plain tired from preparing for such an event. I am bright eyed and ready, Deb is more of Pink eye and ready. That's right, Deb came down with Pink Eye on Friday evening, but a trip to the doctor and $2 worth of antibiotics later, she is feeling better. We spent the better part of the weekend around our cabin as we didn't want to spread the sickness to anyone else.

Our teaching assignments still have not come down, we are in a bit of a holding pattern still. We are starting to feel like firefighters, waiting for the call to run and teach English at a moments notice. The bummer is that there is no brass pole to slide down when the alarm rings.