First day (Part II)

I wake up and instantly regret it. But I have no choice, my alarm is ringing and I need to get up and get ready to go and meet Binnie at work. She said we could go over what I need to prepare for my first lesson today, and my first full day of lessons tomorrow.

God I feel awful. It’s the kind of hangover where you feel like someone is sitting on you, crushing you, no matter what position you’re in. This makes it hard to get up. I hit snooze and have another 10 minutes. The alarm goes off what feels like 10 seconds later. Shit. I have an argument with myself about getting up. It goes on for a while. The Will that wants to stay in bed is winning when Binnie calls, asking where I am. Just at my apartment, I tell her. I’m not late yet, I think, a little confused. She tells me she’s going to be late and then she’s teaching ‘til 12 so won’t be able to speak to me until then. Hoo-fucking-ray!

The Will that wants to stay in bed is very triumphant and smug and I instantly fall asleep and stay that way for another hour. Of course it feels like 10 minutes and when I wake up I feel EXACTLY THE SAME. I hate hangovers.

Eventually I drag my sorry arse out of bed and get ready to go to work. The walk to work is a staggeringly bad experience. My neighbourhood, as I’ve said before, is some very nice houses, some nice houses and some not so very nice houses all jumbled together, all encircling what they call a wat. This is a walled area that contains lots of temple-type buildings and residential buildings for the orange-garbed monks (who I rarely see at my local wat, strangely). Most of the nice and not so nice houses run little food stalls out the front or beneath their place. Stray dogs wander about the place, looking filthy and unpleasant. A canal winds through the area. The canals in Bangkok are unspeakably disgusting – a thick, dark green soup with plenty of rubbish and garnished with mosquitoes that buzz about on the surface. Try walking past that, the food stalls and the smelly dogs with a hangover brought about by far too much of what James appropriately calls ‘headache juice’ – the lovely, cheap Thai beer.

I make it without vomiting, amazingly. I’ve never been one to vomit on hangovers, thank God, although my new neighbourhood does its best to change that this morning.

When I get in I sit and chat with Binnie about this new student. He’s 20 and is going abroad towards the end of the month. Where and why she doesn’t seem to know but I figure I can ask him, give us something to talk about. She goes through my schedule tomorrow as well. It’s a full day of it. Saturdays and Sundays are the busiest in the school as lots of parents send their kids here for extra English lessons. And older students come in if they don’t work at the weekend. My schedule makes me even more nervous than I already am, but Binnie gives me lots of guidance and ideas about how to start off so that boosts my confidence somewhat. The good thing is I can spend much of the lessons doing `getting to know you` exercises and, you know, get to know them.

When we’re done talking I try and do some more prep of my own. But I can’t focus my brain at all. I’m not sure I have one left, although I am still aware of my pain, so something must be in there. I go get coffee and bread-based products in an attempt to ease the suffering.

The 20-year-old lad arrives at three. He’s called Tong and is a chubby lad with big fluffy hair. He’s painfully shy and barely acknowledges me at first. When I say ‘at first’ I mean for like half an hour. I ask him ‘getting to know you’ questions and get him to ask me the same. I eventually elicit that he’s going to Australia but not what for, whether it’s holiday or otherwise. I spend a few minutes trying to get him to pronounce Melbourne and Australia properly before realising that he has a lisp and maybe I shouldn’t push the pronunciation aspect of the lesson too much. The whole thing is painful and difficult, hangover notwithstanding, and after two hours (which actually go surprisingly quickly) I end it gratefully, and, unexpectedly, with a fair bit of understanding of what I will need to do with him before he goes. Get him to talk, basically.

I call Mengly and arrange to meet her for dinner. I bump into Sai, Aom and Aor at the exit to my building; they’re just on their way to meet Mengly too. We go to a restaurant that’s right next to Mengly and Sai’s apartment block. There are some awful singers taking it in turns to man the karaoke. One woman and the man are fairly good singers, but there’s another woman who is tone deaf. I physically flinch whenever she starts. I’m not in a good state for such things. I order sausage and fries, but it’s not all I’m getting. As before they’re ordering loads of dishes and we’re sharing. I’m not sure I can handle Thai food but I give it a go. Most of it is delicious, although one dish has whole chunks of lemongrass in, which gives me a bit of a shock when I bite into it.

Mengly has a shock with the same dish when she eats a chilli. She can’t speak for about 15 minutes, which is quite funny but I’m not sure she’d take well to me laughing so I don’t. One dish is lots of little things in batter which look good so I try them. They are disgusting. I think they’re little bits of animal, from what Aor is saying; the bits that don’t get used for anything else. So they fry them in batter. Gross. They taste WRONG. There’s no other way of describing it. Like eating something that was never meant to be eaten. But they’re munching away on them like they’re peanuts.

The meal seems to drag on for ages. All I can think about is bed. I’m so tired I’m not even thinking about tomorrow’s full day of lessons. But everyone is dawdling after the meal, enjoying each other’s company, and I feel bad for not behaving the same. Then, eventually, everyone says goodbye and I get my wish.