Next stop is Vietnam!

Sorry I haven't rapped at ya for a while, but I've been busy closing down the semester. My students in the history class had a 20-30 page paper done in groups of 4 or 5 due about a week ago. When I gave the assignment a month before that, I warned them that if they copied it all from the internet, they would fail the class. Well, 7 of the 10 papers were copied directly from the internet - some didn't even bother to take out the links from wikipedia. I was quite angry, as you can imagine, but T.I.T. (This is Thailand.) The idea of writing your own paper here is foreign and strange, apparently. I asked my boss, who is Thai, what I should do, as earlier he had been complaining that teachers were failing too many people, and failing 70% of my class outright wouldn't help this trend. He told me to allow them to redo a shortened version of the paper, but to only allow them half of the score at best for it. So, that's what I did. Stay tuned!
Other than that, I'll be teaching "summer" school (as the Thai summer is March through May,) both English and History, and I've also secured an evening job teaching conversational English to BMW salespeople and an Interior Design Company for about 10 hours per week total. The great thing about this is the pay - 2000 Baht per hour (that's just under $60!) and transportation is free. That should help me get started quite nicely in the Bay Area. I'll be busy, but at that rate, I don't mind one bit!

This Tuesday, I follow in the footsteps of Jane Fonda and go to Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, and formerly of North Vietnam. Yes, I'll be visiting yet another place that the US Government has bombed "to the stone age." I'm looking forward to it - should be some good food, good communist propaganda, and interesting things to see. I've been to Vietnam before, but only the far south, and I was only there for a couple of days, so it will be good to give the country another view in another part. I'll post more for sure.

A few days ago, one of my former students, who is from China, took me on a trip to Chinatown during the Chinese New Year celebration. I have a few pictures, although most of them did not turn out very well due to the low level of lighting. Still, hope you enjoy them.

Yaowarat Road, the main street through Yaowarat, or Bangkok's Chinatown

People eating seafood on the street. We ate here.

Our meal. It was excellent!

A snack place, making a kind of ginger soup that also was very good.

A Chinese Buddhist temple in Chinatown

A red lantern or some kind of decoration for the Chinese New Year.

This guy was putting coins on this lion statue, for good luck in the Year of the Pig.

This woman is wishing for good luck under this gate. There was a long line of people waiting to do this, as you can see. It must work!

The gate they were waiting under.

A cardboard cutout of a cop at an intersection, to give drivers a good scare.