It's the final countdown! (dum dum dum dum dum)

"WE NEED MASCARA.. STAT!"

I have only five days from now left in Phuket and I am currently experiencing my last weekend on my 9 week placement. This time next week I will be getting ready to fly home. Although I can't deny that I am really, really ready to come home and see all my friends and family it is going to be a weird experience having to leave. Especially when Kip, one of the EP2 girls, reliably informed us on Friday "Teacher, when you go England we cry!" which was so so sweet (although the teacher in me wanted to mention that it should be "when you go to England" but my sentimental side let this go). Saying goodbye to EP2 and EP1 (even if EP1 have been a nightmare to teach sometimes) is going to be very hard- they're such cuties.

Thursday passed by in a blur as I was convinced that Friday would mean my last maths lesson with my Architect class as this week we are leaving the school on Thursday so I spent ages drawing out cards and such for games so I could have a fun last lesson. In true Thai style, however, we arrived at school on

My voice doesn't need a mic but here we are

Friday morning to discover that the kids were off to some "fix it" automobile center and hence all lessons were cancelled Friday morning. I even brought sweets for my last classes. Gutted. I'm hoping this doesn't become a common occurrence over the next week as I would like to teach a final lesson at some point! Instead, we spent all day practicing a 15 minute play with the EP kids which, considering around 2-3 hours of this time was trying to perfect the princess's make up by all the kids (which seemed to be somewhat of a military operation between the girls. It was taken VERY seriously) wasn't a bad way to spend a day considering it was Friday and I'd been having a hard week.

Thais love a selfie!

With that Friday feeling in mind, we headed to the beach all set to relax and have a beach-view meal at our favourite place Phens after school. Unfortunately for us, it seems the military who have been slowly moving illegal structures slowly off Naiyang sea front since we arrived 8 weeks ago have decided to pretty much wipe out the entire beach resort in one go. Every restaurant/bar/souvenir shop we've grown accustomed to in the past 2 months has been ripped down so that the small beach town is now a ghost town. In the long term, I guess it's a good idea to preserve the national park and they're illegally built etc but it's such a shame that the Naiyang I've grown to love has now been turned into a dump. It has also drastically narrowed down our choices of where to eat dinner everyday as it is very hard to order food at entirely Thai restaurants in town that isn't "fried rice with chicken" the only Thai food we can get across the language barrier. Sometimes, not having our mentor around outside of school time does pose a few potential issues...

Having said that our mentor, Pink, arranged for the students to perform the play at the Swedish orphanage

Kip and Seen are too cute! Proud of them!

on this morning so, despite it being a Saturday we were up and ready to go at 8am (Thai's are far too much of morning people for my liking...) I had been told multiple time by Pink that the students were to perform the play at a "Swedish orphanage". I understand both the words "Sweden" and "orphanage" but I could not for the life of me work out the connection so I just let it slide and I figured I'd find out eventually what was going on. It turns out that a Swedish couple set up an orphanage about ten years ago originally for children who had lost their families in the Tsunami. Now it is home to about 20 children aged between the ages of about 4-15 and our job was to play games and teach the kids a bit of English. When we arrived some poor Swedish girl who was volunteering for a short while at the university was like "I didn't know you were coming!" as apparently the Thai lady who worked there didn't tell anyone. Don't worry love, we never get told anything either- welcome to Thailand! However the whole morning activities went pretty smoothly and the kids even aced the play they've worked so hard on for the past god knows how many weeks. Shoutout to Princess Bifern and Prince Seen who, bless them, weren't the best at English and ended up with the most lines but worked their arse off to remember them AND did them with amazing acting and pronounciation- I'm such a proud teacher! I'm also gutted I don't have any videos of their

Musical chairs was fierce

awkward dancing scene. Romeo and Juliette eat your heart out!

It was such a lovely morning and the kids who lived at the orphanage were really cute and seemed to have fun- even when playing word animal bingo and I had to read out the word "hores". (I think whoever typed it up might have meant horse but as I have the maturity of an 11 year old boy I definitely thought this was the most hilarious thing ever). It is almost too cute getting a bunch of 8 year olds up dancing during the final dancing scene of the play too. I'm a little bit jealous of people who are placed in primary schools as Thai children are undoubtedly the cutest! Never the less, I'm very proud of our kids who helped out and ran pretty much the entire morning and they did a great job. I am definitely going to miss teaching them and I hope they get the jobs they want in life- they work very hard and deserve them!

I stick out like a very sore thumb