KL and parent teacher meetings!

Went to a national park with Kieran today after eating my first Indian dish completely by hand over a single, massive banana leaf. Not sure how I feel about eating with my hands. I hear the upside is you experience more flavor but the downside is it makes me feel uncomfortable and an inefficient eater. 

Super cheap and very traditional. However, I am trying to eat minimal rice while outside of Thailand. I managed it for my entire trip to Canada, Malaysia has been less successful. To get to this forest we needed to take this train like system. I am a man who enjoys sitting down so sat down in these empty seats. WELL, did I ever feel like a muppet when it came to my attention that I was sitting down in a ladies-only cart. Part of the train only for girls?? I find this to be mildly discriminatory. Probably for the best but still, made me feel cheap and inferior.  Won't make that mistake again. 

My other friends from Nakhon got here today so met up with them, will spend the next few days touring the city with people I really like. They leave on Sunday for Burma and Indonesia. 

Another quick thing I wanted to write about was I had my first ever parent/teacher meetings last Friday. I found this fascinating for a few different reasons:
 1-Strange being on the other end of that. I feel like I was in school my whole life and now instead of being the student who doesn't want to be there, doesn't study, review or want to learn French, I am now the teacher who is telling their parents their child needs to study more, talk less, read their English book every night and focus a little more in class. 

2-Not all of the parents come, some do and some of the students tag along as well. First, it sort of shows what parents take this seriously and which do not. I think you can tell a lot from how a student is doing by meeting with their parents for even just five minutes. 98% of the parents can't speak English or are too shy to talk to me. So I basically just sit there, try and play with my student or ideally a little baby brother or sister of one of my students while my Thai teacher and the parent talk. 

3-This might not be the best or nicest thing to say but some kids just tend to blend into the class and I don't really have anything great or bad to say about some of them. Some of my students are unbelievable, perfect students. Some kids need extra help for whatever reason, some kids don't listen. But a handful of my kids I really just want to say are doing alright, behave fine, do their homework and come to class. Is this mean? I try and think of creative things to say or use a thesaurus or google teacher comments for kids but I really struggled with some of them. 
Those are my thoughts as of October 3rd. Enjoy the rest of your week, don't forget to have a very Sexy Thursday (except you mom) and I will see you when I see you.