one month in

 Month one

So I have officially been in Malaysia now for just over one month, and it has been a crazy month. Full work days stared on the first of September, I really have to get used to getting up at 6 for work on a Sunday, at the moment my body is in denial and just tries to go back to sleep. I have been working with my first batch of classes all month, at the moment there are some big important exams on so half the school’s students spend their time buried in a book, but I have been teaching forms 1 and 4 so far, I’ll start on the other forms in January.

Teaching came as a bit of a struggle for the first two weeks as I found out that we weren’t teaching any actual syllabus, rather we would have to spend the next year thinking up ingenious ways to encourage our classes to “get active with English”. At first this seemed terrifying and a little disappointing, but now I’ve got into the swing of it and I now realise that I have the freedom to try whatever I can think of to get these kids speaking.

Work time, from 7-4:30 Sunday-Thursday, is normally a pretty similar day, with lessons or exam marking to do one way or another. In the down time after work tends to vary slightly more. Our school backs almost directly onto a pretty awesome beach, so I spend about one afternoon per week just chilling in the sea, I’ve seen a variety of wildlife ranging from a jellyfish which I’m told could kill me, to a meter long barracuda (not gunna lie, I saw the barracuda and I ran like a girl for the shore, I’ve seen the opening to finding nemo, those things are mean!). At the moment monsoon season is coming in about a month so there is quite a lot of storms and rain, so beach trips are becoming less frequent.

my camera isn't really capturing it but the sea is actually a really nice color

On non-beach days we like to try and explore the local area as much as possible, by this point I have developed a list of preferred food and drink places, so there is always somewhere to get some food. The scenery around the school is pretty badass. I’ve got a awesome jogging route that takes me along a great beach and then up a mountain trail, so hopefully I’m going to be able to stave off becoming fat from all this food. No promises though.  

We’ve ended up getting involved in quite a few sports, Sundays and Mondays are tennis days, Tuesdays we play ‘Futsal’ with all the staff at MRSM Besut, and Wednesday we play with the staff from our school. The skill level for causal players out here is ridiculous, and I’m far too slow to keep up, so I end up as keeper most of the time which I’m pretty good at so it’s cool. 

On Wednesday me and dale went for a bike ride out to the supermarket to see if they had some coffee so I could start handling the mornings a little better. We saw that they were selling a wedding cake for a clearance price of RM4, which is the equivalent of 80p, so we bought a wedding cake and went to town on that bad boy at the side of the highway like some really posh tramps.

  

Last weekend our fellow vols from Pasir Tumboh came down for a visit, we didn’t really do anything particularly special, just showed them around the area and all the hotspots. They stayed around for 2 days and then headed back incredibly jealous of our beach location. 

Last Saturday the three of us got into a spontaneous mood and caught a bus to Kota Baharu for the day, which basically resulted in us being lost for a long time, we ended up in a fish market where there were rats the size of cats running about. We got some traditional Malay food from McDonalds and I bought 4 bottles of cough medicine to treat the truly awful cold I’ve managed to contract (that’s right, a cold in a country where the coldest temperature so far has been 32°C) we thn caught a rust-bucket of a bus back. We got into Kuala Besut at about 7pm it was at about that point that a torrential storm broke out just as Fahmy told us he would be unable to give us a lift. So we decided to run the 12km back to the school through the rain wearing sandals (got some serious blisters from that). We got back at about 9, drenched through and miserable. The one good thing about the rain here is that it’s like 20 degrees, so you don’t really get cold, but It didn’t really go all that well with the cold/cough I already had.

soggy dale

damp dan

wet me

There has been a slight development in our home lives in the last few days, a tiny little kitten, of unimaginably cute propitious, has just decided that she is going to start living with us. She wondered in on a Saturday, and since then has just stayed, normally in my pants draw. We’re loving the company and have opted to name her Millie. She really just plays, sleeps and poops (but only of dan’s stuff J) we sent dale cycling to the ‘super-mas’ to pick up some kibble and now we all but own her. She is incredibly clean and healthy so we’re confident she isn’t carrying anything. So yeah…..free pet!

I’ll try to keep this blog a weekly thing so I keep people’s interest, but I can’t guarantee I’ll do something interesting every week. I'll do a picture post tomorrow for a more visual aid, the Internet her really doesn't play nicely, I think we're still on dial up.

Ciao for now

xx