Our second weekend in Myanmar was just as busy as the first. Bright and early Saturday morning we met with the other new teachers to get a personal walking tour of the downtown area from Zoe and a few other long-term ISMers. Read all about it and see the very cool pictures I captured here: Downtown Yangon Walking Tour

Sunday we finally had our first full day to relax and settle in, we slept in, went grocery shopping, hung up photos, and had general time to just be. 

The first day of school came quick and ready or not, Monday morning the students bursted through the doors. Even though a small part of me was saying "yeah, you got this, you've done this plenty before" the rest of me was anticipating the unexpected that came with teaching a new grade level (from elementary to high school), a new school level (from public to private), a new school culture (from government run to international, for-profit), a new set of societal expectations (from rural Maine to urban Myanmar), and of course just a new set of students all together. 

I had heard in my research that the students here had a higher regard for their education and I was thrilled to find out that this was true. I told many people when I took this position that there was no way I would be able to teach High School in the States because of the attitude towards education (not being respected, taken for granted, etc.). I am very happy to say that it is different here for many reasons including the fact that this is a private school so parents are paying for their kids to come here and as we all know if you have to pay for something you appreciate it more. Also because teachers in this culture are respected just as monks, doctors, and government officials are. I had been very much looking forward to finally be respected for the career I chose instead of just being passed along and given the bare necessities that so many teachers are. 

And the first week of school did not disappoint. The students were eager and welcoming, their skill levels were far exceeding my expectations, and they were attentive in the way that showed me they were actually interested in being there. We started right off into exploring the element of line in my Art 1 (Art Foundations) class. I hope to soon post the unit in its entirety but here are a few photos of my classrooms and the students creating.

ISM is an all english speaking school that teaches an American Standards-Based Curriculum to prepare students for American (western) colleges. What that means is that I am teaching the same curriculum here as I would if I were teaching at a high school back in the States. 95% of the student population are from local families who are very (VERY) wealthy. The other 5% are children of the teachers here. We have a "normal" school schedule that starts at 8:15 and goes until 3:00 every Monday - Friday with a good amount of holidays/vacation days off throughout the August - May. (Note: we do start the school year about 4 weeks earlier than in the States but we also get out about 3 weeks earlier. We have 190 contact days compared to 185 for schools in the States). The high school works on a block schedule where we have the same classes every other day, but they move around the periods within the day so we don't always have the same class in the morning/afternoon. It can be a bit confusing but I really like it for the most part. 

I teach 3 sections of Art 1 (Art foundations) that is the first art class that every student in school "must" take for their graduation requirements therefore this class consists of mostly freshmen. I also teach 2 sections of AP 2D Design which is an Advanced Placement course where students are working on building a portfolio to submit to the College Board at the end of the year. If they do well on this they can get college credits for the course. Although AP 2D Design can be taught as more of a studio arts course where you do anything from drawing to painting to collage and so forth, ISM asked me to teach it more as a digital arts course. This is very exciting because that means I can finally teach Photography and Digital Editing - two of my strong points as an artist! I am beyond happy to finally be able to share my photography knowledge with young artists. 

To kick off my AP 2D class we dove right into digital photography in my unit called "Beyond Auto" where we learn about the different camera settings and how to fully control our photographs. Again, more to come on this but for now here are a few photos of the students practicing and learning.

For food this week I had a combination of eating on the street at the stalls near school and eating in the cafiteria. Wherever I decide to go it is usually the same types of choices: white rice, fried rice, or noodles - a handful of different meats in oily, often times spicy, sauce (chicken with the bones, beef, mutton, or pork) - and a variety of various veggie dishes, again usually in an oily sauce. These are some of the meals I had this week:

Luckily I have a phenomenal wife who is a phenomenal chef and cooks us equally phenomenal food from home. Kim has been struggling  for the past week or so in terms of trying to find the basic ingredients that she is used to like sugar, flour, brown sugar, pepper, and so forth. Recently, after many trips to different grocery stores, she has realized that they do in fact have such ingredients but they are all named different things or are just in different languages. She is very happy to finally be building up our supply of kitchen goods that she is used to. 

The interesting thing is that it is significantly cheeper to eat out than to cook ourselves. We can go out and get a meal for $1-$2. The downside is that it is always rice or noodles or noodles or rice and that has gotten old pretty fast. So it is wonderful to come home to Kim's home cooking. Here is one dish she made this week:

Thursday night we were walking back from getting a few things from the supermarket and decided to go for a drink. On the way down to the market we had seen a couple buildings with flashy lights coming from the inside and big signs at the entrance saying things like "DJ" "Spy Wine" "Club" etc. So, silly us, we thought they must be dance clubs. Heading up to the doorway we passed a half a dozen security, which you think would have been our first clue that something was a little off, but the thing is here businesses tend to have a large amount of employees that are just for directing parking. However, when we arrived at the front door there was just a small lobby that looked strange. So we asked the security guy who opened the door for us "Beer?" and his response was priceless: "Yes, yes, bootie bootie." Without skipping a beat we turned and walked back out to the main road. Our laughter lasted all the way to the next building where we decided to play it safe and ask one of the security guards (you think we would have learned by now) hanging around the entrance to the parking lot. Kim: "Beer?"   Guard proceeding to do a foul hand gesture "Titty Bar."

At this point we gave up all hopes at finding beer and just headed back home before we found anything worse. On the way we saw two other ISM teachers having a beer at a nice local establishment and decided that must mean it was safe. After we got our cold drinks we decided to order some fried chicken and what came was probably one of the worst meals I have been served since being here. We got a plate of what Kim calls "fried assholes" because it was a plate of bones from the worst part of the chicken with barley any meat on them. It was pretty ridiculous - even more so when they charged us $4 for them! I know that doesn't seem like a lot but when I can eat a full lunch for less than $1, four is quite a lot for a plate of deep fried bones. At least the drinks were cold. And that was our Thursday night Titty Bar experience. 

To celebrate finishing my first week of school and being in Myanmar for two weeks, Friday night we met up with Shelly and Luis (two new ISM teachers) and grabbed a taxi over to the famous 19th street. 19th Street is well known in town, and in the guidebooks, as a place where the locals come to drink late into the evenings. There are a series of locally owned drinking establishments spilling out into the street with their miniature plastic chairs and tables wet from recent rain. The word was that this was the place to come for a night of drinking festivities on the cheap.

It was a drizzly evening, which made the others that were going to join us decide otherwise, but the four of us decided to make a go for it and I’m glad we did. Because of the rain, some of the places were closed – or at least not as busy as I imagine they usually are – but most had a fair amount of customers with beers in their hands. We walked down to the end of the street, out to the hustle and bustle of a busy main road lined with street carts and vendors in every direction. This may not be an up-all-night kind of place (like Bangkok) but it certainly wasn’t the “everyone is in bed by 8 pm” city that I had read about before coming.

After walking back down to the end of the road we started on, we decided to kick back at one of the places towards the end of the “strip.” Kim and Luis got a draft beer as Shelly and I sipped some wine coolers. Conversations were warm and flowing in strange languages all around us (from other expats and locals alike), our talk revolved around where we call “home,” hopes and dreams for Myanmar, and our beginning impressions of this strange new land. Drinks were cold and smiles were large.

All of a sudden I felt sick to my stomach. Sure that I was going to hurl I excused myself to the bathroom, but before I got there I got so dizzy that I blacked out a bit and half sat/half fell on to a set of steps. I knew that there was almost certainty that I would get sick in the first few weeks of being here but the urgency of which it came didn’t seem to fit that of food poising or the like. Taking a couple minutes to  I then recalled feeling these symptoms before. A couple other times in the past 10 or so years I had these indicators of stomach sickness and sudden dizziness. The relating cause of this, I quickly learned after having a full-fledged fainting spell when I was 15, was the heat. Although I feel like I have a great immune system and I rarely get ill, I don’t even get motion sickness, but something about intense heat makes my body start shutting down. I regained my sight enough to stand up and help myself outside where I sat (on a miniature plastic stool) in the rain, peeling my shirt off to reveal only a skin colored tank top undershirt. The locals stared (they usually don’t show their shoulders, let alone something so low cut) but I didn’t care, I just needed to cool off.

A couple minutes of sitting in the breeze and rain later I was feeling a bit better as we decided to hop on over to another little place just next door. The rest of the evening faded away with $0.80 mojitos and men broke into a dance as a trolley with loud American hip hop music rolled through. 

Often times the group of assistant teachers and school staff will get together and eat lunch in the teachers room. Just as any other teachers room the microwave is in constant demand, a small array of dishes litter the sink with no one to claim responsibility, and a small stack of school related paperwork is spread across the table in hopes to be read. Mostly the chatter of lunch-time gossip is heard from the moment you open the door.

Although I often go out for lunch at one of the street stalls, or grab something from the cafeteria and munch on it at my desk while doing various school tasks, I found myself in the teacher’s room heating up my lunch the other day. Like other times when I had wandered in there was a handful of ladies with a mix of foods in dishes spread over the table. Often I had noticed that the group of ladies will make one big meal for lunch right in the teachers room which is prepared with a range, multiple rice cookers, an electric kettle, and a variety of kitchenwares. If I have learned anything from my time here it is that you can make anything in a rice cooker.

I’ve seen them prepare and enjoy such group meals as cabbage soup (well, I think it was cabbage . . . you never really know with the language barrier being what it is) and rice based curry dishes. But today they had a whole different spread. There were a dozen or so small dishes filled with a range of different foods, both liquid and solid; there was a larger bowl that held four different “greens” and a giant pot of rice. One of the ladies that I usually saw cooking was holding a giant bowl and mixing together a bunch of the ingredients with her hand.

I approached one of the assistants that I knew and asked her what the spread was all about.  She explained that it was htaminthote, which means rice salad. What you do is start with a white rice base and add a mixture of the other items depending on your particular taste. They gave me a bit to try that they mixed up for me (leaving out the spice) and I was really impressed that I actually liked it. When they offered me more I gladly accepted and asked if they would show me how to mix it myself. This is what they had for options, in the picture below starting with the large bowl and going around clockwise:

(In the big bowl)

Rice noodles

Shredded cabbage

Been sprouts

Cooked potatoes cut into small cubes

(Starting with the small container on the right)

crushed chilies/ chili powder 

an oil based sauce to make it more sour (kind of like soy sauce)

garlic oil

fish sauce

dried ground prawns

crushed nuts

a bean powder/flour

crunchy fried onions

chicken powder (like powdered chicken base for soup)

and the bowl of green stuff was oriental greens (I don’t really know what that means but it smelled and tasted like cilantro, maybe they meant herbs?)

I mixed up my own little bowl and added everything except the cabbage, chili powder, and greens. The ladies laughed at me as I tried to mix the salad with my hands, they told me that my bowl was too small but I thought I did a pretty decent job. I ended up making way too much and had about half of it leftover. But I was really surprised at how much I liked it – it was nice to have a dish that was not too oily and that I could make depending on my tastes. The idea is that every person mixes his/her own so they can make it how sour/sweet/spicy they want which was just perfect for me.