Ahh crap.

It's been almost a month since the last time I wrote.

It's hardly been more than a month since I got here.

You know what that means.

There is a lot of important stuff that was never written here.

Since the last time I wrote:

• I've started school.
• I've actually like gotten to know friends and things.
  
• I've started taking classes.
• I've started taking muay thai.
• I've started having a life of sorts, since I have friends.
• I've gone places.
• First semester is already over, with this next week being finals, so now I'll be taking different classes.

My lovely not-Thai friends, here in Thailand, during muay thai practice. (Sophia loses. Yes.)
Dana, on the far left, is the only one not yet mentioned, because we met her when we started school. She's hosted by a different Korat rotary club.
We are all from North America. At least we've got three different countries... hmm...

Anyway, for the past few weeks I've been taking Japanese, cooking, baking, cha cha dancing, and cocktail class:

• Japanese was very, very basic, and served better as a crappy Thai class. Maybe there is a more advanced class I can be in.
• Cooking... I chopped a lot of garlic in that class. And that is about all I did. Once I chopped some water chestnuts. (EXCITING.)
• Baking... I only ended up going to twice. Hmm. The first time I sifted flour. The second time they just had us sit there.
• Cocktail class was the only successful class this semester, hilariously. The kids were nice, and all of us ended up actually doing stuff, and making cocktails, and having fun.
• We only had cha cha dancing like one and a half times, really, because things kept getting in the way, and we only had like 4 weeks of classes altogether or something. I can sort of cha cha dance now, though. Good stuff.
  

Sooooo yeah. School here is ridiculous, and I usually have one class a day, which is either 2 or 4 hours. Muay Thai is at 5 on Mondays and Thursdays. Us exchange students have a lot of classes together, but even if we don't we're usually all done at/by 12:30, so then we go eat lunch together and chill somewhere.

We've pretty much taken over our school library. It's oursssss. This, by the way, was prompted by the school's assistant director who seems to be in charge of us. She told us to base ourselves there. So now we are on the computers ALL THE TIME. And we just all meet there. Once we didn't feel like going anywhere after classes, but we had to go to muay thai at 5 (all of us are taking it, and it's just us), so we spent like 4 hours watching some awful BBC thing on the TV there. They have a couch and bean bags. So yeah. The library is AC'd during the day, after like 10 am and until like 3 pm or so, so that's lovely too.

A ton has happened since I last wrote-- lots of things that would have been great to have down here. Lots of interesting stories and things... but, an entire month's worth really, so I'm not going to do that. I'll just have to start back writing now. It will forever be a mystery month.

Except Thursday morning, because it was recent and hilarious:

Me, Alex, and Mauricio were sitting in the library before our classes started, Dana and Rianna weren't at school yet. We heard some music drifting in the window for a few minutes, so we were like "Let's go find where that's coming from and see what's up." So we went and found it behind the library, where a couple of women were doing some dance to a Golf Mike song. I assume it was a cover dance thing. It seemed like there were some people there promoting Golf Mike's current tour, and also the drink brand that Golf Mike is paired up with right now. (Puriku. They make tea drinks. There's this one that's like Golf Mike lemon-pomegranite-tea that I like, actually.) So they were there promoting all of that together.

While we were standing there they seemed to start holding a couple contests. At some point they were obviously trying to get people to collect red things, but I don't really have any idea why. Then they got a bunch of students up with them and lined them up. At that point Mauricio had gone off to class, but one of the girls somehow told me and Alex that they were going to do a dancing contest of some sort. Of course that meant that me and Alex had to join. We had to dance to this Golf Mike song while holding a bottle of tea. Let me announce this to the world: Sophia can not dance. I CAN'T DANCE. At all. But I did it, because you know what? I'm in Thailand and I don't mind making a fool of myself for a contest. And you know what? It payed off to be the stupid looking white girl, because I ended up being one of the people who won. SCORE ONE FOR BEING WHITE AND SO STANDING OUT. They told me I won two tickets to a Golf Mike concert at Krang Plaza, and I was like "Oh, really? I won something for making a fool of myself? I was just doing it because I could, but sweet!!" I was dancing for these plastic things they were holding, because I wanted to try and snatch one if I won. They ended up being like "We can't give you one, but write down your name and you'll be able to pick up tickets at the show." I didn't have ID on me, though, so Alex had to write down her name. I said she could be the one going with me anyway, since she was dancing too and didn't win, and also because Alex is cool and stuff, so it's fine. Hopefully that'll work out. It doesn't matter that much, really, hahahaha, oh man, hilarious.