Some of you might now that I am a skydiving fan and that I always wanted to jump out of perfectly good airplane again. Right now, while looking for some skydiving spots in Thailand – or to be more precise – in Udon Thani, I came across an interesting fact. One skydiving site states, that Udon Thani is the place where in 2006 a remarkable skydiving record took place: The largest freefall formation ever! Guiness World Record!

Largest Freefall Formation: 400 people

The mass group jumped from five Royal Thai Air Force C-130s over Udon Thani, Thailand in 2006. Donning red, white and blue jump suits, the divers, who hailed from 31 countries, had about 80 seconds to form a flower-like arrangement in the sky. At over 23,000 ft...

Since I suffered from red eyes for the last three days, my colleagues ‘forced`me to see the doctor. So the college nurse took me to the eye doctor (who spoke perfect english) and after less than 10 minutes I knew that I was suffering from an infect and that I had to stay away from students, colleagues & friends for the next 3 days. Furthermore I received some drugs medicine. Pills, cremes, etc. It somehow makes it interesting to take medicine if you can not read the description…..but I simply have faith….and hope everything will go well

Thai medicine - red eye

The worst part of being ill. I was not allowed to held class today. Really dissappoining knowing that they might have waited for me. So fingers crossed for next week. Hope the Thai medicine you see on the pic helps...

A little shorty. After 5 weeks full of awesome rice, pork sticks, curry etc. it was just about time to have a little, beloved and missed, european food. Pizza it was! So we went to a Pizzeria in Udon Thani (close to Nong Prajak Park called “Bella Italia by Enrico”) and were quite suprised by the surrounding and italian flair. Very nice & tidy. Old Italian Lamps, chairs, tables…like in little Italy. Very cool!

pizza in thailand - at udon thani pizzeria

The Pizza itself (and the french fries at starter – when non-Thai, then really non-Thai!) looked very very good and was quite good. It lacked a little on spices (salt for example) but was, compared to other experiences, very decent.Besides tasting quite good, it was also quite expensive. About 300 Baht for one dish…...

Here comes another fun fact Thai story. As mentioned before, Thais are (and consider themselves) usually as a bit lazy. But while beeing lazy, they have a lot of rules too. For instance the color rule. People working in the public space, are asked to obey to a color scheme. An example for this can be the following (provinces might modify it to their needs).

thai colors

• Color of Monday is Yellow.
• Color of Tuesday is Pink.
• Color of Wednesday is Green.
• Color of Thursday is Orange.
• Color of Friday is Blue.
• Color of Saturday is Purple.
• Color of Sunday is Red.

old people do not like black. it is reserved for funerals. young people consider it trendy.

Life is colorful!

Now where does this take us? Well…this leads to the point, that I just bought pink and orange shirts...

Yeah yeah yeah. Public holidays! Thanks to King Rama V (Chulangkorn) the 23rd of October is a big holiday. This year it was a Saturday. What would be kinda bloody in most western countries, is not a problem in Thailand at all. Public holiday on the weekend? – Let’s get the next working day off. Yay! Nice rule, I think

But back to King Rama V day. We have been told that there is a biiiiig parade at the Mekong river in Nongkhai and surrounding areas. So we tried hard to find somebody who wanted to go to Nongkhai and take us with him. Finally Sina’s vice director of Mahasarakam College said he will take us to Nongkhai on Saturday. Great!

Intermezzo: The Mekong is said to release fireballs at this very special day into the nightly sky...

After my first teaching impression in Thailand, a lot has changed and developed. I had more classes, talked to more students, had more work to do and prepared more lectures. But – again – first things first:

Teaching gets better. And preparing also. But – on the other hand – it event get’s more difficult. Right now I have done all the ‘easy`stuff with my classes. So now it’s time to get down to business. Besides more input and more explanation, this also means I have to think about evaluation systems.  Which sounds fun at first (yeah, giving marks) can be quite of a headache when thinking about fair and good evaluation processes. Written or verbal? Single oder group? How long? How hard? With A-stopper? hmm…

teacher at work =)

School get’s cooler

The nice thing right now is, i start to kno...

After receiving my teaching schedule yesterday (completely in Thai, of course…) I held my first four (of 18 / week) hours today…

And man, what should I say. Teaching rocks. I really like talking to students. The immediate feedback, looking in their eyes and realizing whether the understood or not. Answering questions, telling something new…helping to guide (at least a little). That rocks!

On the other hand it is really really exhausting. Right now I can understand former teachers and professors. After talking for about 180 Minutes in a row, you’re done and need some time for yourself. Would not have thought that before. And the organisational tasks behind every class…huh….kids, you won’t believe that.

But back to class. My students are really nice so far...

For those who kept asking about the money over here in Thailand, here are some pictures of the money we use day by day. By the way, the money in Thailand is called Baht and the current exchange rate is about 1 Euro = 41,49 Baht. Fun fact: The money shows the counterfeit of King Bhumibol. So when he dies (not to soon hopefully) the complete money needs to be exchanged.

Thai Money

20 Baht

50 Baht

100 Baht

500 Baht

1000 Baht

Today was my first conference as faculty member of the Udon Thani College. I did not understand a word that was spoken (well except khop khun khrap, ji-ßip and ‘macintosh’) but learned something from my english speaking colleague whot takes very good care of me at the moment (thank you very much!). One think we talked about was the eductation system which is based on three pillars. Actually there are a lot of similarities to European countries. But let’s just have a look at it in a little more detail.

pillars of thai-education

1st pillar: Elementary / secondary school. Free for use and complementary. Earliest drop off grade is grade 9. Highest level is grade 12...

When crossing the streets of Thailand you might get a lot of eyes on you. Reasonable since you might look quite different than Thai people. Especially in areas where people are not that used to foreigners, they will look at an talk about you. You might not understand that much of what is said, but one word will be repeated quite often. Farang. Farang (spoken: Falang).

farang - guave

When you google for Farang, different pictures might come up. On one hand a farang is a fruit (guave). Tastes quite ok – pretty good when dipped into salt (at least I liked it that way). On the other hand farang is a word for foreigners from Europe, America, Australia…western people. It describes the ‘long nose’ & foreign attitude...