First Day of School

Meep ><

OK so I haven’t taken a uniform pic yet but this is the closest thing I have (pls don’t judge):

This was taken at the Grand Palace (one of the many palaces the King’s family could live!) near Thammasat University & it was a selfie b/c I’m ronery and I was looking around by myself~ but I had to attach the buttons on the shirt by myself (with some help from the Thammasat book staff) and you can see my Thammasat student pin (school pride SuP).

ps i need a haircut i kno ok

Here’s some pictures of the Grand Palace:

Everything is covered in gold paint / jewels that I’m not sure are real or not, and there was so much beautiful detail on the outsides of the buildings. On the bottom picture, there were GORGEOUS doors, but I didn’t get pictures (my bad).

I went to the Grand Palace with two other students during our break. So today was the first day of class! Since I’m used to 50 minute — 75 minute classes at UT, these three hour long classes are definitely going to take some time to get used to…

Marketing wasn’t so bad because the teacher was really upbeat and fun, but man, finance is going to kick my butt. I paid attention and took notes, but it was so hard to understand the teacher (sad, but true) that I couldn’t understand a single concept..I think I legitimately learned one term during the entire three hours of class. Also, I didn’t realize how Thai time is seriously Asian time..we took a “15 minute break” during marketing, and our professor told us to keep in mind that it was in “Thai time” so the break was really 25 minutes long LOL. My finance teacher wasn’t as lenient with time, but still..

Also, they’re super intense on attendance here. At UT, no professor really cares if you come to class or not, but here we have to sign into class by a certain time (granted we have a 15 minute leeway), and if we don’t go and we miss more than 13 hours of class, we have to get the dean’s approval for taking the final exams ;_; and every class has a final exam..I know I shouldn’t be complaining because this is a privilege and we can choose to pass/fail these classes, but I just feel like I’m in high school with the uniform and attendance and such. Whatever, I’m in SE Asia only once, right? And if that’s how the culture is here, so be it.

Oh, random extra note. You have to be “appropriately dressed” to enter the Grand Palace, AKA wearing a long enough skirt, no sleeveless shirts, etc etc, and my friend, Jamie, was with me and she was wearing a shorter skirt than me. The security guard told her it was “too short, sexy” but ended up letting her in anyways. And I think Thai people kind of use sexy like we use inappropriate because it was just an odd time to use the word sexy, and I keep hearing professors and people speaking to us use sexy very casually and in kind of weird times…welp just a random thought.

Ooh, another random note. It’s so hard to avoid pork and seafood here ;_; Today I got pad thai for lunch and there was about 100 tiny baby shrimp in it so I spent more time picking them out than I did eating (sigh, warning to kosher dieters out there / Muslims / vegetarians).