Week One in Bangkok

Hello all! I've been in Bangkok now for 5 days and a lot of the culture shock is already wearing off. Day one was a bit of a struggle, everything on the outside looks a little run down or sketchy, so it's hard to know what's actual a shop or restaurant (especially because we can't read the sign), but once you get over that initial fear you just walk in and realize you're about to be served a huge Thai meal.
We landed on Saturday and had the weekend to get to know the other teachers here and to explore the area, but then Monday morning we started our first day of our five day orientation.
Following our orientation we get transferred to our new cities, which will be happening on Saturday. We have the weekend to get settled and then Monday morning we start teaching! It's all happening a bit fast, but I'm very excited to move and get started learning my new city!

Placement

We were able to request a certain area, but Emily and I put our focus on being placed together, so we basically said we would go in the middle of nowhere if it meant we got to live/teach together. Somehow a miracle happened and we got one of the best placements out of the whole group. We will be living in Chonburi and teaching at the same school. Although most people imagine blue water and white beaches when they think of Thailand, I never allowed myself to hope for that because I knew that the majority of teachers get placed out in the mountains or in small villages. But where did we get placed? Right next to the blue water and white beaches, I couldn't be happier! And on top of that, we're under two hours from Bangkok which is basically a miracle because most teachers are at least six hours out of the city. The cherry on top is that there are two other teachers coming with us to Chonburi. They won't be at our school, but we'll all live within 20-30 minutes of each other so we'll have our own small expat community. It currently all sounds a little too good to be true, so we'll see if the good luck continues.

Orientation

The agency that I'm hired through (AYC) provides a free week long orientation with all of the teachers. We have 11 of us total who are new, and then two guys who have been here since the spring also came to orientation to help out a little. So everyday it's the 13 of us in a classroom for about eight hours going over Thai etiquette, school rules, cultural training and lesson planning. Some of it has been extremely useful, especially the cultural training and etiquette lessons; but a lot of it has been way too repetitive and boring. I came over nervous that I wouldn't know how to teach a class or provide the right structure and activities, but now it has been drilled into my head one too many times. We get homework assignments like building lesson plans which we then present to the class, and although it was useful the first time I would much rather we got Thailand lessons such as getting a Thai SIM card or opening up a bank account. 

Regardless, I'm so grateful that I've had this time in Bangkok to really get settled and get to know people. Our boss is amazing, very nice and understanding of everything that's going on. He explained our contract in detail and answered all of our questions regarding our salary and health insurance. On top of that, I came over knowing just a handful of contacts scattered throughout the country, but now I know the rest of our AYC group and feel like I'm already a part of a huge support system. We spend the majority of our waking time together: all of our meals, eight hours in the classroom and long nights up on the hotel roof drinking beers and sharing stories. I'm grateful that I chose AYC, because although most of us are about to go our separate ways we've already been through some of the hard stuff together and will continue to lean on each other despite our distance. 

The view from our hotel roof