another weird day.

turns out no school for us today. lol. no surprise there. i'm not surprised by much any more. the whole Thai attitude of just waiting, chilling out, not expecting answers, etc. is really starting to work for me. i kind of like it. i need to chill out in life in general, so this Mai Pen Rai bullshit might be good for me. =)

today was strange and many of the teachers were upset with it, but i honestly wasn't too bothered about things. here's how it went: we got to our office around 8:45, found out we wouldn't have classes for another week, so toured a bunch of classrooms (which we weren't allowed to see last week) and the library during the morning. i got a library card today - that's one thing i accomplished. then after lunch our jobs took an interesting turn. we had a meeting with dr. supa (crazy lady whose job is to run the program but who does a really shitty job at that). apparently some of us need to "volunteer" to teach at the other campus, which is of course where we expected to live and want to live, but were told we could not because we weren't allowed to commute. now we're living out in the boonies and might have to reverse commute because they couldn't figure out a class schedule until... well actually not until "sometime" later this week. anyway i'm volunteering to teach at Hua Mak twice a week so that I'll be closer to the city on those days but not have to commute every single day. it'll be nice to be able to get into the city more easily at least half the week.

then supa told us that we might not have enough students signed up for the classes, so we may need to find some other way to "contribute" to the university. so she wanted our ideas for that. we suggested things like informal English clubs, coaching sports, working with HR, etc. someone said help out in the counseling department (because heidi has her masters in counseling, so she would volunteer to counsel students to help make up her hours) but then Supa turned that into "can you teach psychology?" and started asking everyone if they could teach courses related to our majors, which of course we're totally unqualified to do. weird bootleg university.

then we brought up the fact that most of the students we've met on campus have never even heard of our department or courses (which are new) so we asked what they had done to promote the courses since we hadn't seen any flyers or anything like that on campus. that discussion turned into us setting up a few marketing projects, like designing flyers, setting up promo tables, etc. i worked with some of the teachers to make a schedule for all of us to go to various English Lit classes tomorrow and Thursday to talk for 2-3 mins in the beginning of class to promote our OPE classes. you know how i like making schedules. =)

anyway, it was just strange and a lot of teachers were angry that 1) we might not have enough classes to do the job we were hired for, 2) we suddenly need to find other ways of filling hours even though they are not things we're qualified to do nor what we signed a contract to do, 3) that we find ourselves promoting our department and classes even though that should have been done weeks if not months ago. it's all kind of crazy. Ken, a really sweet older Aussie teacher who has been in country for a few years, just shakes his head and quietly tells us that Thai universities never have their shit together but that you eventually get used to it and learn to love it. we've heard that same sentiment echoed by a few other teachers too, so here's hoping...

also a lot of peeps are pissed that we're so far from the campus. it's clear to us now that Supa lied about where we'd be living. like she lied to us about other things in the past few months. supposedly we live in Bang Na, right? which is a suburb of Bangkok. However, we clearly live twice as far from Bangkok as Bang Na. Our address is off of Bang Na HIGHWAY, but NOT in the town of Bang Na. So even though a map says that Bang Na is like 32 km/27 minutes from BKK, and that's what we all though when we researched it from back home before making our decision, our campus is actually significantly further than that. So we're all trying to gather our thoughts and take a more united stance to insist that we move to the Hua Mak campus, which is much closer to the city and definitely not in the middle of nowhere. That's the other thing about here - it's bad enough that we're so far from BKK, but even worse is that fact that there's nothing around here. literally NOTHING except the campus. not exaggerating at all. there's only one bar within walking distance and even that is a 20-25 minute walk away. and in the other direction, we can take a short cab ride to get to a small street with a couple vendors, one restaurant, and a waxing salon. that's it. this campus is crazy secluded. we're surrounded by a golf course, lots of rice paddies, and nothing else. and a bunch of 17-21 year olds. though some of the might be cool and it's good to mix with the students to a certain extent, it's not exactly a good social pool for us. our students probably should not be our friends, so we need to get somewhere that we can actually meet people and not be so isolated. so yeah, people are pissed. btw the loyola marymount teachers all get to live in Hua Mak, so it again makes no sense that ABAC & Supa think we can't handle commuting.

anyway, that was today. i know it sounds goofy, and it was for a lot of people, but actually i was okay with everything. i've been much more chilled out this week and less stressed about everything. oh - in other good news, we actually got a pay stub today for our work in october. we won't actually get it deposited into our accounts until friday, but it was still a pleasant surprise (lol) that we are getting anything at all yet. we were told that we might not even get that until after our Nov 25th paycheck. Not that we have ATM cards yet to be able to USE the money that will be deposited into our accounts, but still.... it's nice to have a bit more of a concrete date that we'll start getting some dollas.