They say the darndest things...

It appears my worst fears have come true, as my hard drive is now useful only as a paperweight. Gone with it are all of my music, academic (most of which, thankfully, I backed up,) and photo files. A couple of the photos lost I had intended to post on this blog, but they'll have to wait, I guess. It has been replaced with one that has about half of the memory, which is unfortunate. However, I'm pleased that I at least have a computer to use, which means that not all is lost, and I can still use my digital camera. So that is some consolation.
There was terrible flooding last week up in Chiang Mai and other points in Thailand's Northern regions. Hopefully the remainder of the rainy season will be kinder to this area (and to us here in BKK.)
Now for the title of this posting. As many of you know, I studied Thai for five semesters at the University of Wisconsin, and while I'm not even close to fluent, I am functional and can understand a fair bit of what people are talking about. Most of my students aren't aware of this fact, or at least they weren't until rather recently. Because of this, I've heard my students saying some funny things that they most certainly did not want nor expect me to understand. For example, one of my students proclaimed that she wants to marry me, but doesn't think that she can because she's too ugly. Another girl, after a grammer lesson, thought that the class wasn't terribly entertaining, and announced that the class was boring. So I turned to her and told her in Thai that I would think the class would be even more boring if she had to repeat it two or three times. The look on her face was precious...
And in English, these Thai kids say things that never cease to amaze me. It seems that Thais are rather blunt when assessing each other, and regularly make jokes about their friends' appearances. For example, there is one girl who is looking to go on a program that will allow her to work in the US for a summer, and was asking me for advice about where she should go. The jobs are mostly food service and housekeeping. Some of the positions were working at McDonalds in New Jersey. I told her to steer clear of that one, as working at a McD's on the Jersey turnpike would not be my idea of a good way to see America. There were also posts at various theme parks, such as six flags, and at Harrah's casinos. However, the most attractive ones, at least in my eyes, were to work at either Yellowstone National Park or The Grand Canyon. I told her that she should go to Yellowstone, because she could see bears there. Her friends said, "are there elephants?" and all started laughing. As I was looking confused, they explained the joke. They call their friend "elephant," as she's supposedly fat (and believe me, she isn't by any stretch of the imagination.) The girl who was the target of the joke was laughing away, too. I just stood there with a shocked look upon my face.
Hail progress!