December 14, 2007 Temp: 33C Steps: 16900

Had a busier day today. Spoke to Jennifer at 7:30 this morning to find out the Christmas concert at her school started at 8:15 not 8:30. Good thing I had already showered as her school is a 30 minute "quick" walk away. Jennifer teaches at Trinity International School. It is run by Seventh Day Adventists and attended by Thai and international students from JK to Grade 12. Oliver and Nick know quite a bit about Jesus and the bible and are willing to tell you all about it whenever you'd like to listen. Jennifer teaches Grade 5, as well as Grade 11 drama. The concert was the story of Jesus interspersed with some acting and song. It was really well done. The piano player was good except all songs sounded like "A Charlie Brown Christmas" music – particularly “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”. It was a little weird. Then, to end the show, 5 boys from Grade 4 did a hip-hop dance followed by 6 teachers dancing to the jazzy “All I Want for Christmas is You”. It was pretty funny. Everyone seemed to enjoy it though – especially the kids. I’m so glad we were able to make it on time. We went down to Jennifer’s class for a few minutes afterwards and she pointed out one of her students to Tom. Apparently he misses quite a bit of school as he is ranked 5^th in Thailand for kids his age in golf. Tom called him over to talk to him and asked him what his average score was – say around 100. The kid looked at Tom horrified and said “no, about 79 with no handicap”. It was kind of comical. Our next stop was the annual “Jim Thompson” sale. He’s a huge name here for silk stuff. He was an American who moved to Thailand, got very involved in the silk industry and then in 1967 he mysteriously disappeared. We thought we would be able to walk there but thank heaven we didn’t even try. We'd have been lost forever. They had buses laid on and it took about ½ hour by bus to get there. Tom thought it would just be your average retail store sale but no. The place was huge - a convention centre - and there were so many people. We made a few purchases – nothing for me – and then headed back out to the free bus. I could have looked around much longer but Tom was getting a little antsy….. The bus took us back to Lotus where I purchased another “noodle” for the pool. The boys think these are the best thing since sliced bread. I got some strange looks yesterday walking with my noodle so today, walking the same route I got even more strange looks. Can’t imagine what people must have thought…… We stopped for lunch at a place called MK restaurants. It’s a chain and we need to have some of these in Canada. You have an electric hot pot of stock on your table and then you choose what you’d like to put in that pot. There are 100’s of choices. The veggie choices are amazing and then you choose you noodles, meats, dumplings. They also have dim sum stuff, spring rolls and all kinds of deep fried goodies. It’s so neat. It was after 2:00 by the time we got home so we headed up to the pool for awhile. We’d thought of going into town for the evening but then Gone called to see if the boys could come over for a bit. So, we had supper, went for a walk, got ice cream for the boys and delivered them back to Gone around 7:30. Jennifer has classes this evening so isn’t home till 9:00 but I was too tired to have them any longer. We came home and I started reading the book for the film "The Golden Compass". One of Jennifer's classmates suggested reading the book before seeing the movie. I'm quite enjoying it and seeing as it's a trilogy I guess I'll have to get the other 2 books too.