And What Do You Do On Your Day Off?

Okay, so maybe that's rubbing it in a little too much, but hey, come to Thailand. On monday we found out no class today because the teachers were having a seminar. What's the topic?? Something along the lines of "how to help students improve grades" or "helping more students to graduate". And what do they do? Take an entire day of school away from the students in order to discuss. How about first thing let them go to class, huh? Anyways, no school for me or my students today. Hopefully the Thai teachers learned something useful...

A little disclaimer: these pics are slightly repetitive of previous posts, and there are too many of them. but i like them. it was a beautiful day and we climbed upstream for about an hour or so, running out of time before reaching our destination (as we almost always do): the waterfall. it was loads of fun, i now have a great sunburn on my legs, and the bottoms of my feet are raw. sounds like a success story to me.

oh, and ps. we tried the firefly chalet again (surprisingly open), and it is a retreat. it was completely dead, but we could easily have imagined companies spending the weekend all in "team-building fun", etc etc. amy's country home was still closed to us. lame. 

we also managed to forge our way into the "closed" butterfly exhibit and latch on to a chinese tour. it was exactly like the great wall tours i took in beijing, where you come out into an open room filled with lots of stuff for sale, and then they feed you in a big open area. lia blended in pretty well, but it was incredibly obvious i wasn't part of the tour. we made it work though. there was not a single butterfly to be seen. from what we could tell (our tour, of course, was all in chinese), most of the museum was about bees and honey. hmph.

me trying to blend in and not get too close to the tour. ever so often they would glance back at us with a complete "wtf" expression. classic.

next stop: waterfall. it's hard to tell in this pic but the arrow just points out into a field of nothing. 

really thailand. do you have dinosaurs back there?

hard to see, but the sign says something like "don't leave trash in my home" and then above they have a feaux (sp?) web with all sorts of trash. we liked the message.

trekkin on up. it was too late in the day by this point, so we didn't make it to the waterfall, but our initial journey turned out to be quite a fun surprise.

it was seriously, seriously beautiful. 

some local picnic-ers that enjoyed the rare farang sighting.