It's a nice day for a Thai wedding

Beaut western breakfast and no food poisoning.. yet..

7am Thursday morning arrived (a time which is most certainly not acceptable in my view) and we piled into the minibus along with the other teachers of the school and set off for Nakhon Si Thammarat for teacher Morn's wedding. By this point I was miserable, tired, hot (we had no running water in the appartment since Tuesday evening. In fact we owned about a mouthful of water- there was more water on the pavement outside than what we had coming out of our taps) and I was pretty much ready to come back to England. I was almost certain five hours in a minibus wasn't going to help improve my mood and after about 2 hours of watching some Thai shadow puppet show on the TV screen I was proved right. Nevertheless, after almost 6 hours and a lot of rice later I was feeling somewhat happier as we arrived at a vocational college in Nakhon Si Thammarat.

As far as I was aware, the entire point of this journey was to get the teachers to Morn's wedding however it

I did it Thai way.

seems Thalang Technical College has links with another school which is where we visited. It was absolutely massive and although it offered many of the same courses that my school offers, it became apparent that this school was much more organised and seemed to offer much better options for after graduation. It seems Thalang technical college has a lot to learn! So after a LOT of photos of the directors of both colleges (and a LOT of photos where the Director would shout "FERANG!" and drag either me or Flo to stand beside him in a photograph. It would seem that he is under the impression that having a white person next to him in a photo will bring some publicity to the school..) we headed back to the hotel the school had paid for all the teachers to spend the night in.

Food is a massive part of Thai culture so we weren't surprised to find out that the teachers were having a

I'M ON A BOAT

joint dinner between the schools at a pretty nice Thai restaurant. What was surprising, however, was finding out that Thai's really seem to love Karaoke and that the teachers would get up halfway through dinner to perform on the mike. I am used to drunkenly screaming Queen songs during karaoke so it was a bit strange to see stone cold sober teachers performing slow, morbid Thai ballads as the rest of them continued to eat. We had been told multiple times that karaoke was a part of Thai culture however it seemed to quickly descend into "make the white people entertain us" as myself and teacher Glenn kept being forced to go up on stage and perform (although Glenn seemed to get progressively more into it with each beer he had..). Obviously, I had no choice but to stun them all with my performance of Bon Jovi Livin on a Prayer which must've been good as the director handed me a 100 baht tip. Not long till I'm famous, not long at all...

The Friday morning we headed off to Morn's wedding which is what we've been excited about ever since we were invited. Arriving at her house, under a massive tent seemed to be about 200 people eating rice dishes while a buddhist ceremony went on in the room inside. What struck me was how many people

Yep, I was here.

seemed to be wearing day to day clothes- I am telling you now if anyone wore jeans and flipflops to my wedding they would be sat outside in shame. Eventually Morn and her husband came outside and she looked so stunning in a traditional Thai wedding outfit (and I was so happy for her- she told us that she had been waiting 8 years for her husband to pop the question! Men.) and received gifts and took photos. The whole thing was very exciting, made all the better by the fact EP1 and EP2 were there. I was well aware they were invited but I had presumed they were going as guests. Wrong. Morn had her students doing the washing up in "Morn's wedding" tee shirts. Which I'm pretty sure would never happen in the UK that's for sure!

I had a fabulous time and it was really nice to experience a Thai wedding however, the teachers asked us to leave with them in the minibus after we had been there about 45 minutes. Yep. We had been building up to this for 6 weeks, traveled for 5 hours to get there, and then left after 45 minutes which was sort of a shame but I've just learnt to go with whatever happens in Thailand.

My tough teaching life.

As this weekend is the long weekend we decided to stop off in Krabi town for three days so we could see a bit of Thailand which wasn't Phuket- a decision which most certainly did not disappoint. Krabi town, although small, turned out to be really really nice! Having been in Phuket over 6 weeks it's almost tiring being shouted "TAXI" "WHERE YOU GO?!" all the time and the island has a feel to it that it definitely caters to the tourists needs more than the locals. Krabi town was surprisingly full of tourists but actually still felt really traditionally Thai and no one tried to bully us into buying any of their stuff. It also had some great night markets which were even cheap! (after spending last weekend in Patong where they try and charge about £5 for a pair of elephant shorts this made a nice change) and managed to stop off at an American grill, owned by a genuine American, for some beautiful and much needed carbs and cheese in the form of a burger.

Saturday morning we thought the best thing for us would be to head down to Railay beach- Railey beach is one of those places you constantly see on Earth Pics/Instagram and is the most beautiful place. You can't reach it by car so we had to take a longtail boat from Krabi town which took about 45 minutes. This was so much fun and felt so Thai and, ignoring the fact that it was a very rickety boat to get in for someone who couldn't swim, and the French lady who looked like she was 3

Monkey lad

I'm so ashamed...

seconds away from vomming all down the side, was definitely THE best way to travel! And Railay certainly did not disappoint- it was so BEAUTIFUL! The best place I've been to since I've been in Thailand, and although we didn't do anything very proactive it was really nice just to be able to lay on one of the most gorgeous beaches in the world. It's a tough life, ey. Even saw my first set of monkeys (after being absolutely convinced by my doctor that Phuket was crawling in monkeys and being conned out of £75 for a rabies jab and haven't seen a single monkey on this damn island) which were pretty cool to watch, even though it was funnier to see a load of European women absolutely terrified of them. It got to the stage where I most certainly did not want to leave Krabi and return to the over priced and over commericalised Phuket.

Also a shout out to the bar where, when we ordered cocktails, a Thai man from the next table came over to us and looked like he was going to try and sell us his resort in Ao Nang (just outside of Krabi). However, upon learning we were teachers he proceeded to pay for our drinks, thanking
us for teaching the next generation of Thai's English- how sweet! (Also a shout out to the same bar who got my order wrong and brought me a barcardi breezer in a champagne glass. I am one classy lady...)

And just one last thing before I go back to my life of feeling sorry for myself due to the almost hundreds of

Thanks EP2!

mosquito bites I accumulated in Krabi (who knew my blood was this appealing), it's my dad's birthday today. Being out here this summer I feel like I have missed out on a lot of stuff (my brother's 18th, boyfriend's graduation, family birthdays etc etc) so I enlisted the help of EP2 on my last lesson with them to help me say happy birthday and this was the final result- so happy birthday Dad!