Time for a short update straight from the city of angels. Bangkok is kind of my escape place when Udon Thani gets to boring (which it is almost 24/7 as long as I am not working).

Get your Bangkok T-Shirt

Since the urge to escape Udon Thani hits me quite often I feel confident to say that Bangkok and I are building up a more and more intense relationship every time we meet. Now that the time of tourist attraction hopping is over I have time to experience and discover the other Bangkok. I wouldn’t dare to say that this is better or worse, it is just totally different to the Bangkok most of the tourists experience.

This time I did not choose a guest house in or close to famous backpacker road – Khao San Rd...

I am the proud owner of a Non-Immigrant Working Visa that allows me to stay in Thailand for one year and work here. Great. Paid quite some money for it and thought it saves me any other trouble….oh yeah, how naive!

1.) Even though the Non-Immigrant Working Visa is valid for one year, you still have to leave Thailand every 90 days in order to not become an illegal alien here. Why? Well…just because (I won’t dare to say that this is just to make money with foreigners…..).

2.) My Visa expires in a few days so I went to the immigration office to extend it. Now they told me that it does not expire on the date it shows, it expires on the date, the stamp of my last entry to Thailand shows. This means: I went to Laos last month so I could, theoretically, stay for another 90 days...

Man incredible! I just came back from the immigration office where we (a Thai colleague & I) tried to extend my Visa in order to continue working here at the GOVERNMENTAL college. One should think that might be easy when working for the government but – frankly – the woman at the immigration counter couldn’t have cared less. In fact it seemed to piss her off that I came with help (a governmental officer from my college) since she knew from the beginning we wouldn’t bribe her in order to get the visa done quickly.

While the guy in front of us slipped 1.000 Baht on her desk and got his visa within 5 minutes we had to wait a long time and have a now a heck of things to do and show in order to get the visa...

After ranting a little bit during some of the last posts (truth in Thailand) I thought it is again about time to mention some of the nice things. One of the very nice habits here in Thailand (or at least in Udon Thani – not sure if Bangkok and the touristic regions are the same though) is that the term ‘mi casa es su casa’ (my house is your house) is taken seriously.

give and take - not only during meals important in thailand

People usually do not have a problem to let you in their house, borrow you their motorcycle, car or whatever you need. A good example just happened the other day after our Schnitzel experiment here at the college. Some of my students wanted to go to the park but unfortunately only had 2 motorcycles for 6 people...

This is just a short heads up and advertisement for my own good. So if you feel annoyed or whatever…sorry!

sayfun.me - language learning with fun(k)

For all others who are interested in learning languages with me, please feel free to jump to sayfun.me – the home of my teaching material/information and course overview.

Why I started teaching after school? Two reasons: First, it appears that I am good at helping students to understand language related issues and second, I became incredibly annoyed by watching other private language schools work. It’s incredible how they screw students just by setting up some fancy certificate names and offering unbelievable boring and unreliable classes. There must be a better way to do this – this is my try.

Explanation in greater depth can be found on th...

This time it is not an april fools joke, this time it’s the real deal. Last week I signed my contract with the Udon Thani Vocational College and extended my stay for one more term.

Even though I am not getting rich over here (actually I am far away from financial freedom or wealth) and Udon Thani is still an ugly city there are quite a few reasons that make me stay here. The most obvious reasons are that I simply love teaching and the students over here. It is a great feeling to finally do something that I really like and to actually have fun at work.

Nevertheless I also promised that this will be my last term here in Udon Thani...

If there is one thing that is extremely noticeable and all around Thailand the same, no matter if in the south, east, west or north. No matter if students, teacher, parents or whatever….it is this one thing: Almost everybody is a make-up addict. It is incredible how much time people spend in front of mirrors, windows or simply anything that somehow reflects the shade of ones face.

student putting on make up and waiting to be able to move again

No matter if girl, tomboy, ladyboy or normal boy…many of them use every single spare minute in order to refresh their make-up or re-style themselves...

Finally! Schnitzel, Potato Salad & French Fries! Since I do not have a real kitchen in my apartment I really miss cooking some ‘normal’ food once in a while. This weekend I couldn’t take it any longer, held our college kitchen hostage and invited some of my amazing students to taste German food made in Thailand.

schnitzel made in udon thani thailand

Before we started the cooking action I had to buy the food though and that wasn’t that easy. The first problem was to find decent pork meat! I finally ended up to buy it on the fresh market (yeah one could have thought of that before, but actually I tried to find more ‘schnitzel like’ meat). Funny fact: When I went to the butcher on the market i bought almost all the meat he had. At 7.30 in the morning. His face was priceless!

Then I went on my...