A Reminder of Tourist Season

In addition to the flood of people continuing to flow through Khao Lak, an experience I had this morning signaled to remind me that it is definitely tourist season here. Eit and Jay, the new V-STAY project managers who are here to do some errands and update us on the project, hitched with Carrie and I to school this morning. A guy in a car with plastic covering all of the seats picked us up, dropped the guys off at Chow Tai Mei School before taking Carrie and I less than a mile further to Ban Lam Pi. When we were exiting the car with “kob kun ka’s” (thank you’s) for his generosity, he blurted out “300 Baht”. Even more upsetting than this being a ridiculous amount to charge us (a taxi ride to the school would only be around 40 baht) was the fact that he didn’t say anything about paying when he picked us up, in which case we would have waited to catch another ride. No, he waited until he was dropping us off to let us know that he wanted us to pay for the ride. We called Eit, who is Thai, and asked him what we should do. While he and Jay walked over to help resolve things, Eit told us to have the English teacher talk to the guy in order to “shame him” out of making us pay. Seeing as how our “English teacher” doesn’t speak the languag he supposedly teaches, we called Eit to talk to the teacher after failing in our attempt to communicate via hand gestures and small words. The teacher walked out to the car, and instead of telling the guy that he was trying to screw over volunteers, Mr. Non-confrontational whispered two words- probably “’’tao rai”, which means “how much”- and gave the guy in the car 200 Baht.

We were all bothered by how the teacher decided to handle the situation despite the conversation Eit had just had with him. Interestingly enough, he wouldn’t allow Jay and Eit to reimburse him when they arrived.

This is the first time someone’s ever tried to rip me off by charging me for a ride in Thailand after they’ve driven to the destination without mentioning pay…It must be tourist season.

The rest of the school day…

Fourth and fifth grade were frustrating to teach because it seems they’ve forgotten most of the alphabet and letter sounds, which they appeared to be retaining last week. There is, however, always comic relief in at least one of the classes to help get us through such a challenging day. Today, this took place in fourth grade. We were making a circle when the girls, including myself, began to scream after noticing a spider nearly the size of my entire hand crawling up a wall next to one of the girls. One of the boys began kicking the spider, eventually knocking it off the wall. As soon as the spider landed on the ground, the rest of the boys joined in, smashed the spider, and began to play soccer with it, passing the spider to each other’s bare feet, and ultimately scoring a goal by kicking it out the classroom door.