P'Patch-Less Day

Today I was Patchless at school (as Patch stayed home sick today). And although I thought that meant the day would turn out to be pretty boring with nobody to talk to, it ended up being quite fun actually.. the rest of my class just kind of combined efforts to make sure I wasn't lonely and had people to eat with at lunch etc. In the morning when we had to stand in line for assembly, the grass was all wet, which meant that instead of sitting down all cross-legged, everyone was just kind of crouching down as if they were going to the toilet on a squat toilet. Now, I guess since Thai school children are just used to crouching down like this at school, they find it no problem to sit like this for a good half an hour. But I don't. So one of my friends, named Ing, took out some paper from her backpack and put it on the grass for me to sit on. It was really sweet of her. I spent most of my morning classes just talking to my class mates and reading my book, which I finished (it was amazing, I must admit).. When we were in our Thai Art class (which really just involved everyone watching a Thai movie on the TV) my teacher gave me a book which teaches how to draw Thai Art (and although the instructions are in Thai, it's easy for me to just follow the pictures) for me to practice in. At lunch one of the gay boys in my class asked me to eat with him (and with a bunch of other people from my class it turned out). It was nice to get a chance to just hang out with some new people and get to know them a bit. After lunch we had no classes, but stupid Thai school rules say that students can't leave the premises until 3:00 even if they have no classes. Today happened to be the day that some nurses and doctors came to the school to check up on everyones health.. and first thing my class did after lunch was get our check ups :) It was quite an experience for me... none of the nurses really spoke English, and they were trying to ask me all these questions about my health that I didn't understand.. They asked me what my blood type was, I told them I understood, but I don't know my blood type ("kow-jai but mai-lou") so one of the nurses did a blood typing test on me... and I am type......A! Good to know for the future I guess :S I had to do an eye type test, where I just covered one of my eyes and had to read a line of numbers.. I read them in English, because I thought if I read them in Thai and got my numbers mixed up, they might assume it was my vision that was bad, not my number skills... but afterwards I realized that even though I understood the English numbers, maybe the nurses didn't, and they would have had no clue if I was really reading the numbers right or not. The very last thing I had to do was fill out a form that I think (but I'm not sure) asked me all about my emotional health. Ing translated the first couple of questions for me that were just basically along the lines of "are you feeling happy?" and then she couldn't translate anymore/was in too much of a hurry, so she just filled out the rest of the form for me :S We spent the rest of the afternoon just sitting around and talking until 3, when my host cousin Ron picked me up from school. Now I'm at home.. and just ate an enormous amount of fried rice, which some random lady (who is apparently my host aunt's friend) at our house cooked for me. She told me that tomorrow she is going to cook me a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch. Should be tasty if the Thai version of a grilled cheese is anything like the North American version.....