"This is the island in the sun..."

The third and final destination of our trip was my favorite: Koh Samui.

In Thai, "koh" is "island" and "samui" means "coconut." Coconut Island. :) How tropical does that sound!?

True to its name, there were lots of palm trees with coconuts...


One of the highlights of the trip for me was when we rented motorbikes (surprisingly easy to do!) and rode around the island...

The view from the road:

We stopped biking a few times in order to eat, take a few pictures of the view and go shopping. I bought an outfit to add to my collection of tropical clothing. :)

During the second day on the island, we signed up for a program that included: an elephant show, an elephant ride, a monkey show, a Thai boxing demonstration, swimming at a waterfall and canoeing.

Elephant show:
Oliver got kissed by an elephant (!!) when he volunteered during the show. According to him it was smelly and gross.

Thirty-minute elephant ride:
During the ride, our guide on the elephant made us each a necklace and ring out of leaves. Cool!

Monkey show:
After the show, we could have a photo taken with a monkey. :)

Waterfall:

After taking a jeep to the jungle and then hiking up to the waterfall, we got to swim at the bottom of it...

"Oliver, Liz...help me!!" haha

Canoe ride:

The time on the island was a great balance of relaxing and adventure. It was hard to leave and come back to cold and rainy Japan.

In fact, it's official that I'll be going back to Thailand during Christmas break! One week was not long enough there. Originally, we were going to spend a little bit of time on the trip volunteering at an orphanage. But since we didn't do that this time, that's what I'll be doing during Christmas. Looking forward to it!

Seeing the sites of Bangkok

Follow Liz, Oliver and me and we'll take you around the capital of Thailand...
Ready? Ok...

Starting from our hostel with map in hand, our destination is the Grand Palace. Along the way, we stop to take photos of random Buddha statues...

Thumbs up. Cheese. :)

After avoiding the people who tried to scam us into taking their "special tour," (not fallin' for it, fellas) we've arrived at our destination. Make sure your shoulders are covered and you're not wearing shorts before entering the palace grounds...

"Hi, I'm Dana, and I'll be your tour guide today. Here we have the gorgeous Grand Palace."

Don't mess with this guy.

Next stop: The giant reclining Buddha. And here he is...

From the vantage point of his giant foot.

Walking around the area, we see a school, and a teacher who looks less than thrilled that I'm taking this picture...

Up ahead...is that a Buddhist priest on a cell phone?!?

Yes, indeed it is.

It's well past lunch time now, and we're hungry! So we hop in a tuk tuk (small taxi), headed for China Town to find something to eat...

The tuk tuk driver is smart to wear a mask. Bangkok is not a very clean city.

We're not very impressed with China Town, but we find a mall, where we eat lunch at the food court. Then we take a taxi to the flower market to check that out...

Back at our hostel, it's time to relax before taking a night train to Koh Samui, the last part of our trip. This vacation is flying by!

"We're soooarin', flyyyyin'..."

(Now singing High School Musical. Again.)

The song/title will make sense later on, when I write about one of the high adventure things (literally) that Liz, Oliver and I did in Chiang Mai. Stay tuned.

When we first got to the city, we decided that after all the traveling, we needed a massage. :) Massages are very popular--and cheap!--in Thailand, and we collected all kinds of spa brochures in the airport. We went all out and got one that was two and a half hours long(!!): thirty minutes foot massage, an hour of Thai massage (which is kinda like yoga, I thought), and then an hour of aromatherapy. I had the same lady the whole time (what a trooper!), and she ended the whole thing by braiding my hair up in a Thai style...

How appropriate that the back of my shirt said, "Just fine." :)

After we were completely relaxed, we did some sightseeing in Chiang Mai...

A look inside one of the temples we went to.

More statues. Lots of statues everywhere.

During our second day in Chiang Mai, we took an hour bus ride into the jungle, where we went went soarin' (and flyin') on a zipline!! Here are a few pictures and a video from the day-long zipline experience...

Oliver getting ready to use the wooden break, upon arriving to the platform.

Liz being lowered down to the next platform.

Our group...

Besides Oliver, Liz, and me, there were three people from England with us and four guides.

The first part is Oliver on the zipline, and then I attempted to take video while soaring....

In total, there were 22 platforms, so we did the zipline 22 times! The longest one was 300 meters. Overall, I had a really great time feeling like Tarzan.

Err...I mean Jane. :)

"Everybody's feeling warm and bright..."

Sawat dee! {That's "hello" in Thai}

I have about 20 blog posts worth of pictures and tales from my terrific trip to Thailand, but I'm going to trim it down to five. :)

Oliver, Liz and I went to three different places within the country: Chiang Mai, Bangkok, and the island Koh Samui. So I'll write a post about each place (We did so much in Chiang Mai that it will take two), and food will get it's very own blog post. Sound like a plan?

The whole reason we took a few vacation days off work to go to Thailand this time of year was to attend the Loy Krathong festival in Chiang Mai. The festival is a time to release your worries or make a wish by sending off a floating lantern or one that drifts off into the sky. (Click here for a more detailed desciption of Loy Krathong.)

A few handmade "rafts" that people send down the river.

The festival was held during our first two nights of the trip. On the first night, we watched the festivities from a lovely dinner cruise...

From the boat, we saw all kinds of light displays and we heard all kinds of fireworks.

Here'a a video I took of the festival. The first part is from the boat ride, and the second part was taken the second night, just after we sent up our own lantern.

Other types of lanterns were strung up to add to the extremely festive atmosphere.

As I said in the video, the three of us each set off our own lantern...

...and it joined hundreds of other lights in the sky...

:)

"They did the mash, It caught on in a flash..."

Vampires, mummies, witches....

Tropical monkey princess???

It's not a monster costume, but that was my outfit for my friend Janine's Halloween conversation class. She had a box of dress-up materials we could choose, and I ended with a monkey head covering, a tiara and a lei. Haha.

In addition to dressing up while listening to Halloween songs like "The Monster Mash," we had fun playing several Halloween games in teams...

such as "See which team can put together the paper skeleton the quickest" game...

...and the classic "Wrap two of your teammates up in toilet paper to make mummies" game.

For Halloween lessons at my junior high schools last year, I took the jack-o-lantern that I'd made into the schools and talked about Halloween traditions. But this year, I was't about to show my embarassing Mr. Fish Fin Face jack-o-lantern to my students!

So instead, I was inspired by Janine's class and planned a bunch of Halloween-themed English games. First though, I taught them some Halloween vocab words (ie: ghost, haunted house, skeleton) using some illustrations I printed off the from the internet...

"Class, repeat after me. "Costume. Costume."

Then we played a game in which I called out one of the words, and the students raced each other to see who could get the picture first.

Another game I played with my students at Yamane Jr. High was "Memory," using smaller versions of the Halloween pictures. Every time they turned a card over, they had to say the word in English.

We also played a scavenger hunt game; they had to find suckers that looked like ghosts. (I made the ghosts by putting tissue paper over each sucker with a rubber band, and drawing on a face.) Each "ghost" had an English word on it, and all the suckers put together in the right order made a sentence.

I ended each class by giving them a Halloween word search. Overall, the activities at Yamane on Wednesday went very well! I was going to modify the activities for larger classes and do them yesterday at Misaki Jr. High yesterday, but the school was actually CLOSED due to so many students having the flu!!

There's a big flu outbreak in Kuji, which gives me yet another reason to be excited about leaving for Thailand...tomorrow!! I'll be gone for a week, so it will be a while until my next blog update. I promise to return with lots of photos (and probably videos, too.)

And now I leave you with a few pictures of some scary things in Kuji (besides the influenza virus.) These things are out and about year-round...

On top of a random building:

Inside the Dofukan, behind my apartment:

Outside of the Yamane onsen (public bath):

This guy doesn't look very happy, huh? Creepy is more like it.

I wish for you a healthy, safe and happy Halloween!

A video post

With two school culture festivals and a dance performance, Sunday was a busy day in the life of "Dana Sensei." (as a reminder "sensei" = teacher)

I'm going to share about the day in the form of videos this time. So first up is a little video I took of all the students at Okawame Jr. High singing...

* For all the videos, you might have to pause them and let load for a few minutes.



I have no idea what they're singing about, but isn't it beautiful!? :)

Sidenote: The chairs in front of me were empty because that's where the students had been sitting. There was quite a large audience, but they were sitting behind me.

At culture festivals, students not only perform songs, but also plays and dances. Here's the closing of a play by my adorable kids from Yamane Elementary School...

After the play, it was time for the junior high students to dance...

At noon, it was my turn to dance at a small community festival! My dance team and I did four dances. (They had me be front and center!) I have videos of three of the dances, and I've just figured out how to put YouTube videos on my blog instead of just the link (which takes you away from my blog.) Yay!







As I write this, it's Tuesday night, and I've spent the last two days at a team teaching seminar three hours away from Kuji. I don't have any videos or pictures from that, but I came away with some new ideas for activities to do in the classroom. Tonight I've been planning some Halloween party games to do at Yamane Jr. High tomorrow, which I'll blog about next time.

Stay tuned...

I like your style.

Two words: Yellow hats. :)

I adore the cute first grade students and the yellow hats they wear when they go outside. Here are a couple of pictures I took last month...

Rainy day style. :)

The students at my junior high schools wear school uniforms, but elementary students wear street clothes at school. For the most part, the clothes look like what students in America wear -- t-shirt and jeans. (Granted, the t-shirts often have goofy English on them.) But I'll sometimes see students who make me think, "I like your style." Like this girl and her lacey outfit...

Leggings are pretty popular.

Lovin' the striped pants and the glasses. :)

Now that it's flu season here, surgical masks are "in style." (as are hand sanitizer bottles at the entrance of every building. Folks are quite concerned about staying healthy.) At Kuji Elementary School yesterday, all of the students in my fifth grade and sixth grade classes wore a mask to prevent getting the flu....

And they gave me a mask to wear, too...

...which I was so thrilled to wear, as you can probably tell. Haha.

This boy's mask had little illustrations of bullet trains ("shinkansen" in Japanese) on it! Niiice.

Besides the mask, something else that's real popular for people of all ages to wear this time of year is flannel. I see a lot of flannel shirts being sold in stores, as well as flannel on my students...

Well, that's all for now. Peace out!