Day 21 Bugalicious 1/21/14

School was very interesting today. Moz taught us about reading and writing in Thai. He wrote a sentence on the board  in Thai,and then had us transliterate it using a chart of over fifty Thai consonants and vowels.As a class we were to identify the symbols in the sentence, match it to the vowel or consonant on the chart, and write the phonetics of it under the Thai word. The activity was challenging and took a couple of hours, but was very valuable. We learned that when two consonants are written together, there is an inherent "o" or "a" that is added between the letters. Because of this, Thai's have trouble pronouncing English words. When they see two consonants together, they automatically put in extra letters, for example they would read the word "school" as "socahool". Another  interesting thing about Thai, is that when written, there are no spaces between words "soeverythinglookslikethis." This makes it very difficult for nonthai speakers to read Thai.because you need to know all the vocabulary in the sentence in order to know where one word starts, and one ends. Also when reading a word, you  pronounce the first consonant of the word before the vowel in front of it, for example, "egg" would be geg. Thai as a written language seems like a real challenge to learn as a foreigner, but there are some aspects to the spoken language that seems easier than English.For example, they don't conjugate verbs.In English we say "I eat, I ate, I will eat", they say "I eat, yesterday I eat, Tomorrow I eat". Learning about the Thai language was really fun, but also very useful in teaching Thai children. It allow us to see why Thai kids struggle with learning English,and provides us with  a better understanding of how to help them.After school Ryan and I went the Chiang Mai international school for the men's basketball night. There were about twelve guys that showed up, most of them in there mid thirties. I was happy that they didn't mind me joining. We played full court games for two hours. It was a great workout. On the way home we saw a stand selling an assortment of bugs. Nick had told us that they were tasty and that if we came across them we should try them, so we bought crickets, maggots, and larva. The woman threw in two large cockroach looking things for free. I must say I felt hesitated to try them, but after Ryan put one in his mouth and said they were good I found my courage. The crickets and maggots were yummy. They tasted like a buttery meaty popcorn. The larva was really interesting. It had a taste similar to cabbage. The only thing we didnt try was the large cockroach. I never would have thought that I would eat bugs before, but I'm glad I did because they are a seriously tasty healthy treat. After our bug grub, we decided to get some real dinner. We went to our favorite hole in the wall joint for chicken fried rice. Earlier that day we learned how to say chicken fried rice, pronounced "cow pot guy". We ordered it in Thai, feeling a sense of accomplishment when the woman understood our order. We ended our night with the movie" Ferngully", one of the best children's movies.