Last night Cherry told me, "tomorrow you wont go to school." She always says things to me in that form, and I never know if she is asking me a question, or just telling me something. Anyways, she couldn't explain to me why, and just told me her dad would explain to me. Then he told me something along the lines of. "well tomorrow I must go to the south of Thailand and it is a very long journey, about 500 km, so you probably won't want to come. You just stay home and rest instead." I really didn't want to go with him anyways, since he was going on cock-fighting type business, but I didn't understand why that meant I wasn't going to school. But whatever, I've learned to just kind of go with whatever here, and not ask too many questions. I've also kind of gotten in the habit lately of not going to school on Mondays... Needless to say, I spent another lazy day in my room. I got to talk with a bunch of people from home, which really made my day. At about 2 pm I was starting to get hungry for lunch, so I went downstairs and found Klang sleeping on the floor in the living room, then I went into the kitchen and saw my host gramma along with Kai sleeping on the dining room chairs (they just had the chairs all lined up in a row and were laying across them. I didn't want to disturb them so I just went back to my room. Kai came and got me for lunch a little while later. I actually had an entire conversation in Thai with her! It honestly gave me one of the best feelings I've had in a while. The conversation went like this:
Kai: "Gin Som-tam." (Eat some papaya salad.)
Kristen: "Pet mai?" (Is it spicy?)
Kai: "Mai Pet." (Not spicy.)
So I tried the papaya salad.
Kai: "Pet mai?" (Is it spicy?)
Kristen: "Nit noy." (A little bit.)
At some point in the afternoon my host cousin Debbie arrived from Hong Kong with her friend Ivy. It was pretty much the biggest jumble of languages I've seen. Ivy speaks only English and Mandarin, so she didn't understand any of the Thai they were saying (I actually felt a little proud of myself for understanding more than she does!) Debbie speaks Mandarin, English, and the Chinese dialect (not Mandarin) which the rest of my host family speaks. Everyone else in my host family speaks Thai and the other Chinese Dialect. So, someone in my host family would say something in Thai, then someone else would translate it into the Chinese dialect, then Debbie would translate it into Mandarin for Ivy to understand, and then sometimes Ivy would translate into English for me. Tres confusing. Most of the time when they were speaking Thai, Ivy would just look at me with an extremely confused look on her face and I told her, "this is how it's been for me for the last (almost) two months." I feel like a pro at being confused now.
I spent the rest of the evening visiting with Kla and Beam in the living room. Beam has apparently been learning all about North American culture at her school, and she was asking me all sorts of questions, such as about the whole fact that our parents stop supporting us even before we get married. I also told her all about how it is normal for students to have a part time job outside of school, and that we actually have to work for 30 hours in order to graduate. She told me that kids in Thailand generally don't have after school jobs (which I've actually noticed), however she did when she was in high school just to earn some extra cash working at KFC. Pailin came over for a bit to help Klang with some of his homework, apparently the document was given to him in English, and he needed it tranlated into Thai, but Beam couldn't figure it out, hence Pailin coming over.
Overall it ended up being not too bad of a day. I got to spend some time bonding with my host siblings, which is always a good thing. While we were all hanging out in the living room, Keng was playing some computer game which was all in English of course, and whenever instructions would pop up I would have to read them, then explain them to Beam (since the intructions were given using lots of English slang words) in normal English, and then she would translate to Keng. He would always get so into the game and tell me "GOOOD!" after the whole translating scenerio when he would complete the task sucessfully. Yay me.
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