Goodbye Dinner

The ladies in Ubon got together this past Thursday night to have a little goodbye dinner for my teammate, Joelle. We don't all meet together regularly, so it's a treat to have time with each other. We went to my favorite Vietnamese restaurant in town...delicious! For dessert, ice cream sounded good (it's HOT season right now!). The first place we went too had some strange sounding ice cream flavors such as spicy mango and black sesame. We ended up at the "foreign" ice cream place and got what we were looking for!

Training Day

Last week I visited the school where I taught last year. When I arrived it didn't look like any of the students were studying. Instead I was told it was a "training" day. I'm not really sure what they were training for...some students were preparing herbs, other students were making potpourri pockets, and the teachers were line up to get massages. Hey, I guess I picked the right day to visit :)

Bamboo Rafting

After the course, I didn't leave northern Thailand without a short trip on a bamboo raft :) I didn't want to take my camera, so I nabbed this picture off the internet. Rafting was fun. We tipped over once and got a little wet. Also saw some cows and an elephant along the river.

CELTA course

Throughout the month I enjoyed spending time with the other trainees. There were 11 of us from 6 different countries. We all got along quite well considering that we were together 24 hours a day! The last night the students had a little thank-you party for us. We presented them with certificates and they presented us with some gifts. Our two tutors were both British and they were wonderful. I really appreciated their feedback and recognition of all of our strengths and weaknesses.

CELTA Course

Everyday we taught a group of Thai students from 6-8 pm. In the back the tutors and fellow trainees would observe our lessons and then provide spoken and written feedback. For the first two weeks I taught elementary level adult students. And the second two weeks I switched to teaching the intermediate level. The students were great...really motivated to learn and great guinea pigs for the things all of us trainers wanted to try out on them :)

CELTA Course

This is the residential campus for the course that I took in January. As you can see the setting was very beautiful and green. I only wished that I would have had more time to enjoy it all. Most of my time I was camped out in the computer room :)