"You ah mai flend"

Okay so apparently even though there are three waves of volunteers there's only three of us in the third wave including me so when I arrived in Chiang Rai I walked out to a bunch of people yelling my name and waving because I'm the only new person right now...which makes it kind of weird. So my first night they invited me karaokeing (sp?) and I can NEVER say no to that. We stayed there for four hours and didn't leave until 1 in the morning but it was fun. A lot of the songs we sang were in Thai making it kind of rough but I just winged it. This morning we got up at 7 and they put me on the project working at a primary school teaching english. It wasn't exactly what I wanted to do but it turned out to be awesome. They taught me so much Thai and it was so funny; they would clap and cheer when I counted to ten. They were so intrigued by my tattoos and piercings and they kept wanting to touch my arm. It was kind of rough teaching english. We had four different classes, all at different levels but it was fun to make games and get them excited. They learned things like "my favoreet food ees feesh and lice." They were cuties. Then I played this game that sounded like "taco" with them which is kind of a mixture between volleyball and soccer and a played about a thousand games of bochee ball and some soccer. These girls would not leave me alone. They kept asking me if I love any boy and then they were trying to decide if I was fat or not (consensus: a little fat) and kept saying sorry while squeezing my love handles. Pretty funny. Oh! They also asked me where I was from and told me to pull up my shirt because the boys were looking. I wasn't even wearing anything low cut! Rough crowd. But they kept telling me I was their friend and beautiful etc so that was nice. Anyway, right now I'm chillin on the hammock back at home and it's hot as balls. I guess next week is vacation week so we're planning a lot of travelling around Thailand we're going to (hopefully) rockclimb, swim with sharks, and hike. Woooooo! Going to the night bazaar tonight to buy a machete. I'm going to take up whittling. Didn't know you needed a machete for that but I guess that's what people do here. This place is awesome.

Sample lesson (I drew the awesome hamster):