Still not in phase with the EST.

“Hey. A meditation class sounds really cool, eh?” says Matt.

“That’s a friggen’ dumb idea,” says Warren.

Matt is slightly taken aback.

“What do you mean?”

“Think about it— Okay, try this: don’t say anything and just sit there for the next four minutes.”

One steamboat, two steamboats—

“Okay, this is buggin’ me already.”

“Done.”

I’ve only just left my air-conditioned hotel room.

We arrived in Bangkok last night, me with a raging fever and pain every time I tried to swallow. You never really realize how often you swallow until each swallow feels like burning.

We found the aircon room last night, and this morning, blessed be, we realized that there was a clinic on the first floor! Now I’m all drugged up and ready to go!

Actually, I’m just about ready to go back to bed…

We have one more day of Martha recuperation in Bangkok, and then Monday we get on a bus/boat for some island somewhere. It’s strange, since I’ve been sick, Matt has been doing all the planning and navigating… luckily he has Agnes to help him. Really, he’s been doing a great job, and taking very good care of me. I guess I’ll have to do the same when he gets what I’ve got.

Another weird hygiene thing revolves around the hands and mouth. Almost all food products are wrapped because your hands are germy. Fine. You aren’t supposed to walk and chow on the food you just purchased from a street vendor. It’s unclean. Eat it by the stall. Weird. But, it’s OK to double-dip into the sauce bowl at the street stall after you’ve taken a bite of your pork dumpling (man do). What? Gross.

A bunch of us Canuck English teachers and some of our Korean teacher counterparts went out the other night. After a big bowl of noodles, we found the nearest norae bang establishment with a price in our range. Now, if you are imagining that we went to some big smokey bar and had to perform Captain & Tennille’s Love Will Keep Us Together in front of a bunch of strangers, you’d be mistaken. We got our own private room for the nine of us, complete with TV monitors, mics, light-show, tons of tunes to choose from and all the soju (Korean rice wine) we could sneak in. I found out that, in spite of all the norae bang infrastructure, I am still a very bad singer. Oddly enough my best performance was not to the Stone’s Start Me Up or Earth Wind and Fire’s September. I brought the house down with that Celine Dion’s song from the Titanic movie (My Heart will Go On). Okay, okay, before all the indie kids throw up their arms in dismay, let me explain…

At the end of camp, each class has to do a performance for the rest of the camp and all the parents. Think grade school recital. I tried to get my kids into Jungle Boogie by Kool and the Gang, Sedated by The Ramones and even Take Me On by A-ha. But they wouldn’t have any of it. They hated it all. But not Titanic (see aforementioned Korean proclivity). So, fine. I gave in. In the final performance, my eleven kids sang like little cherubim, each one holding a piece of their own art-work that, when lined up side-by-side, formed an long paper Titanic with the ship’s name running down the side. (In the dress-rehearsal only the kids carrying the two T’s and the first I were held up, so the audience was treated to TIT. Magic.) At the end of the song, I came out in my paper iceberg costume and smashed through my singing angels. It was great. So, needless to say, I had some familiarity with the song by the time I got to norae bang.

Martha, however, rocked the norae bang. Even with a gravely throat brought on by a cold, she wailed. Such a trooper.

Anyway, there’s Arthur. Unlike most teachers, he seemed to have a lot of free-time on his hands. I think he found this time by not planning for his classes, ever. Still, he managed to pull things off. Just before our camp finished, the teachers at Camp-Korea had to e-mail some student evaluations off. These get posted on the Camp Korea web site so the parents (and relatives and rest of the planet) can see how the little ones are progressing. What follows are Arthur’s first drafts of some student evaluations. They are hilarious. The students names are their English ones.

Jeremy

Jeremy writes like a psycho killer. Most children, even the dumb ones, learn at least a few English phrases that they can repeat day after day in their diaries—“I like camp. It was fun. Dinner was yummy.” Yet, every night Jeremy writes the same thing: ‘Pantech and Curitel’ over and over in a script that could only be accomplished if the writer held his pencil between his teeth. And the company’s name is never spelt right to boot. I recommend therapy. The other day, the kids in the class were given treats to share: bags of crisps, candies and such. One box contained lady fingers, or as they are called in Korean, pepero. Jeremy was damned if he was going to share these with anybody so he grabbed a handful, opened his mouth as wide as it could go and jammed his fist full of pepero in. He then used his other hand to ram the chocolate sticks farther down his throat, the whole time managing to laugh maniacally like an evil kung fu master who sees that the hero has fallen into an obvious trap. It was fucking hilarious. This is why Jeremy is my favourite. I also saw him eating paste.

Edward

Edward is the kind of student I dread writing about. There is nothing especially good or bad about him. He is a poster child for mediocrity and will grow up to live an unfulfilling life that even he will fail to take any interest in. Unless he does anything spectacular, he’ll get a B-. Usually, I give his type a B without a second thought, but your son is kind of whiny. He bugs me.

Lucinda

Your daughter is dumb and ugly. Usually I take no notice of these students, but it has come to my attention that your daughter has a crush on me. Most of the time, students with teacher-crushes are fun. I lead them on with little smiles and winks, while avoiding anything that could get changed into a rumour and prison-leading allegations. It’s good for little girls. Sure they’ll cry themselves to sleep for the two weeks following camp for love-sickness, but when they’re older they’ll trade teacher-crush stories with their new university friends. It’ll be fun and they’ll remember me and that time with fondness. But like I said, your daughter is dumb and ugly. This depresses me. They can be one or the other, but not both. I’m doing my best to ignore her.

Repeat after me, “Outta sight!”