12.17.2011
Yesterday Brandon and I tagged along on a field trip to the Academic competition in Suphanburi (next province over from us). We awoke in the wee hours of our Saturday morning to support and hang out with our students we had been tutoring prior to this event. There were multiple competitive categories for every subject and a full science fair!
The English categories were: story-telling, spelling bee, speech, and "multi-skill" (a category consisting of reading, writing, speaking, and listening tests). Brandon and I had been tutoring Oom (Mattyum 3) for the spelling bee, I had been tutoring Winny (Mattyum 4) for the story-telling competition, and our friend Fon (Mattyum 5) was going just for kicks (like us!).
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| Kathleen, Fon, Erk, and Sugar. |
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| A view of the Suphanburi school where the competition was held. |
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| Cool-looking desolate hallway |
No one aside from the students and the judges were allowed in the rooms during the competition so we hung out with Winny beforehand and gave some last minute encouragement.
Winny gives us a practice performance:
Silly photoshoot with my new PSC jacket!
More... pictures!
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| Erk and her best friend she has known since high school who teaches English at another school |
After all the competitions start we head to a little market in front of the school to grub and peruse.
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| Handmade mobiles made from plastic straws! |
Then we checked out the science fair. All the contraptions they made or research they conducted were really geared towards practical-use and often used recycled materials!
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| Coconut meat grinder |
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| Land and water locomotive! |
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| Fish de-scaler |
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| Study to find the optimum amount of plastic shreds to be included in a plaster mixture to make sturdy bowls. |
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| Bottom of shoe cleaner: When they turned this machine on wind was created from the spinning brushes and it started to blow my skirt up! I felt like Marylin Monroe from a parallel universe. |
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| Their backboards had really cute and funny decorations. |
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| Homemade bug trapper! |
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| Awesome bamboo thermoses! This would be such a hit in the States for all those "nature-lovers", haha! |
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| Another bug catcher. This one uses a computer fan to suck the bugs into the sack when they fly near the light above it. |
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| A study in using light recycled materials for cinder blocks. |
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| Some contraption to cut grass (blade attachments) and/or clean the floor (brush attachments). Looks like it came straight out of the early 20th century! |
Another competition in and of itself was acting and dancing skits to demonstrate scientific principles to an audience. The participants always wore some kind of clothing made out of recyclable materials (trash bags, paper etc.) These were surprisingly not that interesting to watch. Maybe I was missing something.
Found in the cafeteria:
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| Ladyboys after an acting/drama competition |
Our students after they have finished with the competitions for the day.
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| What little cuties! |
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| Winny received second place for story-telling, and Oom spelled 17 English words correctly before spelling the word "congratulations" wrong in the spelling bee. |
I had bought some cheap earrings from the school market to make this masterpiece:
Waiting for the bus to take us back to Nakhon Pathom:
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| Kids playing in dirt. I miss those days! |
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| You can't tell from this picture, but Brandon has this little squeaking device in his mouth. He's pretending to be sad while making little squeaking sounds! Kathleen and I each bought one as well. This was a good laugh and killed a lot of time. |
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| Our flamboyant buses arrive. |
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| Everyone is tuckered out. |
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| Sneaky picture of our department head, Ajarn Waraporn. |
Later we head out to a dinner with Toon and his university friends Nut, Moss and Erk who are also student-teachers of English in Nakhon Pathom high schools.
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| Cook your own soup Northeast Thailand style. |
Toon, Nut, Moss, and Erk all put their heads together to come up with full Thai names for us!
Mine turned out to be:
Parnward Sinsuan (pronounced pahn-wahd sin-soo-ahn)
Parnward means: Girl who is beautiful like a portrait painting
Sinsuan means: Lively/colorful girl of worth
In Thai it looks like:
ปานวาด ศิลป์สุวรรณ
Brandon's turned out to be:
Wayu Rattanamongkolchai (pronounced wai-yoo rah-tah-nah-mong-kon-chai)
Wayu means: Strong wind (the falang all had a good laugh about this one!)
Rattanamongkolchai means: The bringer of 3 sacred good things for success (we don't know what the 3 good things are... )
In Thai it looks like:
วายุ รัตนมงคลชัย
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