9.17

9.17

Today was my last day of school. Well until the end of October.

I started off the day waking up at 7:00am, leaving myself too much time to put on clothes that have already been determined for me by the Thai government. Back in the states I usually wake up between 6:30 and 7:00 and hopefully leave my house in one piece by 7:15 to make it to school by 7:25. Here I have plenty of time. I leave my house at 7:30 and get to school at 7:40 which is 10 minutes early. All the students gather for the anthem around 7:50 and classes actually start around 8:20.

Each day the students sing the Thai national anthem, although, I don’t know the words to the anthem. So instead I make up my own words. Sometimes they’re silly, sometimes I try to make them rhyme. Sometimes I just zone out and forget to make lyrics.

So I stand singing these words in my head with 3000 of my closest friends on a concrete basketball court with no shade. I think the school is secretly roasting us students until we complete our senior year and then we’ll finally be considered “medium rare”.

After the mass roasting today, student had finals. Well really they had midterms because it’s half way through the school year for them. I only had to take one exam, for German. But it was at the end of the day, so I had five hours to kill.

Testing here is not like finals in the states. In the states we still go to our classes as normal, we just have a test. The testing here is more like when one takes the HSPE or WASL or whatever state required test. (It’s odd to think that some students back in Washington have never heard of the WASL.) They cancel classes for the day and your class is sent to a different classroom and you spend the whole day testing.

Usually lunch is at noon but today it was at 10:30. I was shocked, why is it so early? And then I realized that’s the time I eat lunch back in the states….

While my classmates were testing, I spent my time reading. I finished The Great Gatsby. That was a good book. I usually don’t read classic novels because they are just plainly harder to read. Like I tried to read Huk Fin and Treasure Island but just couldn’t do it. But TGG was not like this. Sure sometimes I would have to reread a page or two to fully understand what was happening. Overall, I would recommend this book.

And I started reading Will Grayson, Will Grayson. I’m already on page 95.

When I read I ‘dog-ear’ the pages at the top of the page that I think contain something funny or witty. I find myself ‘dog earing’ almost every page……

The best part is that I find myself actually laughing out loud when I read this book. This book contains quotes like “’Why would you like someone who can’t like you back?’ The question is rhetorical, but…you like someone who can’t like you back because unrequited love can be survived in a way that once-requited love cannot.”

Or witty things like calling a spilled drinking on a shirt a “monochrome Jackson Pollock.”

This book is brilliant and truly connects to the thoughts of the reader.

One time when reading WGWG I looked up from my desk to find that I was the only one is the classroom and the students had finished their test. Oops. But seriously no one even tried to tell me the test was over! Come on people we’re supposed to be “friends”.

For lunch I had spaghetti. Yes sometimes they have spaghetti at my school.

However, it’s not the same.

The pasta looks and tastes the same. But the sauce is no where close to actually being considered as “pasta sauce”. It more looked like spaghetti o’s. I have never had anything made by the infamous Chef Boyardee but I’m pretty sure I did today. I think there was more sodium than tomato, so I scraped the majority of the so called “sauce” off to the side of my plate and just ate the pasta.

I took one final today which was for German. It was pretty easy, although I think I missed a couple of points. Luckily, you can’t miss points for spelling. Thank goodness.

Currently I am eating these cookie wafer things that taste like vanilla from Mexico. Yum.