Mangoes and Pomelos...: ATC

The Annual Thailand Conference is over. We just flew back to VN this evening. The conference was refreshing, but traveling can be a little time consuming and tiring. Also, it's expensive and we missed the opportunity to spend Tet with our students. So, some of us were discussing whether or not "the juice was worth the squeeze." Ongoing debate...

There's no doubt some of the teaching and encouragement was good and we needed them. Also it was good to see some familiar faces again, finding out how their semester went, whether or not they're returning next year. There's something to be said about being at a conference with several hundred other teachers, all being in different places throughout Asia but doing roughly the same thing. There were good stories, and there were sad stories. Some had a discouraging semester and some had a very busy semester. But there we were, listening to each other's stories, sharing both joys and burdens. And then by the time we knew it, it was time to say goodbyes, not knowing whether we'll ever see some of the people again. Ongoing sense of temporalness, temporariness, fleetingness, short-livedness, transitoriness, briefness, ...-ness

(Are the mango juice and the pomelo juice worth the squeeze? Ongoing question...)

A book store brought in some books during the conference, so I also bought some text books on Listening and Reading, hoping that they will come in handy in helping me reduce the lesson prep time. I need all the help I can get in this area. I attended a workshop on how to teach Pronunciation in class and was exposed a little bit to Phonology and some of the technical terminologies involved in producing different English vowels and consonnants. Very interesting. I didn't know there was a whole science behind speaking English...

Since we don't have dental insurance anymore, we were advised to get any needed dental work done in Thailand because it's a lot cheaper there than in the US. So all three of us went to a hospital downtown Chiang Mai to see the dentists. I got two fillings and cleaning, Grace got two fillings and cleaning, and Caleb just got some cleaning. We paid $160USD for everything.

Anyway, here are some pictures.

We took the "Red Truck" from the airport to the hotel for 80Baht. A real taxi would have cost us 100Baht. We sat in the back of the pickup truck, and the driver picked up two other passengers along the way too. So it took him a while to get us to the hotel.

Here, we're taking a "Tuk Tuk" to the hospital to see the dentists. Also 80Baht. We were glad the driver's driving skill was better than his photograhy skill.