Thailand Plans

As promised, here are the basics of our trip to Thailand, which is coming up in less than 2 weeks from now!

I've put shapes on the map of Thailand above (Thailand is the yellow country) so you can quickly find where we're going.

We arrive into Bangkok (star shape) on Dec 8th and stay for nearly a week. Then we fly up to Chiang Mai (paw shape) and spend about 5 days there. Then we fly down to Phuket (happy face) and spend the rest of our time there and the surrounding islands. In early January we fly back up to Bangkok, and then back to Oz on Jan 4th. So we'll be there for nearly a month... perfect!

At first we were only planning to go for about 2 weeks, but when we priced things out, it'll cost about the same amount to travel in Thailand as it would to live in Oz, so why not go for longer and have some more fun adventures??!

Some of the things we're looking forward to most are:

-ziplining
-surfing
-taking a 2-day kite-boarding course
-rock-climbing
-checking out the tropical islands and beaches
-Thai food
-elephant rides
-Thai massages
-taking a Thai cooking class

We will be going by ourselves... our friends Bonnie and Shane from China were planning to meet us there, but the plans fell through... so we're a bit sad about that, but will have a great vacation anyways. I'm sure we'll meet plenty of other travelers to hang out with!

We will try to keep in contact with you from time to time, but won't be bringing our computers with us, so don't worry if you don't hear from us for a bit.

We will also try to be in touch before moving to the coast and flying to Thailand, but be warned that this upcoming weekend will be SO busy that I'm not sure we'll have time to phone much, so it may just have to be a few emails here and there.

Alright, gotta go... have a good one!

~Corinna for Team AC

More November happenings

Alrighty, so it's been another super busy week down here as we are winding down to the school holidays.

Last blog post I shared how Andrew was doing Movember, and this past Friday the kids got to shave off his "beautiful" mo in front of everyone at school. They also got to dye (hairspray) his hair white, which took about 3 washes to fully get the smell out. He was a great sport about it, and our school has raised just over $1000 for prostate cancer research now.

On Sat morning Andrew got up at 5am to join a bunch of other guys from school at 5:30am to hike up a nearby mountain. It's SO hot right now that if you want to do anything physical, you really have to do it before 8am, or after 6pm.

The other morning I woke up at 5am to hear Andrew taking an ice-cold shower... that's how hot it is in our room. Oh well, not complaining... it's just strange when normally we'd be freezing our pa-tooties off in November!

On Sat evening we had our friends Greg and Sunelle over for dinner, and then on Sunday we got up early-ish and went to the beach for a walk. Usually it's a bit breezy by the ocean, but not now... it's sooo hot, and the water isn't really refreshing either since it's bath-tub temperature. Beautiful scenery though.

After the beach we were invited for lunch at the family of one of my students (near the beach). We had a great time with them, and ended up riding various skateboards on their driveway afterwards.

You can see I'm not quite a pro-rider yet... but just you wait!!




Sunday evening we were on worship team at our church for the last time and said our good-byes there. Next weekend we will be busy packing and cleaning our rental house, as the movers are coming on Monday, so don't think we'll be going to church then.

We are now in our LAST week of school (yipppeeee), then Andrew has his final for his Masters course on Sat morning, and then we are gonna start to really hit it for the rest of the weekend with packing and cleaning... I think it'll be a big job, but at least we get a good reward at the end of it it all... a holiday!

I will do a quick post on that soon so you know where we're off to.

Mo-vember

I forgot to mention something kinda important in yesterday's post: Andrew's new look. He's taking part in Movember, which is where you grow a mustache and raise money for prostate cancer research during the month of November. Men all over the world do it, and this is Andrew's first year.

I don't really know whether to be horrified or proud to be honest. To wake up every morning looking at this face....

Anyways, he has raised over $130 from his homeroom class at school so far, which is great. December 1st it all comes off though... just 10 days to go!

November in Rocky

Hi Guys,

It's a been a couple weeks since a blog post from us, so here you go: The first pic above is from when we decided to have a picnic dinner on the top of Mt. Archer, the tallest mountain around here, which overlooks our town. We grabbed some pizza and drove up, but we kept being interrupted by these annoying magpie birds that were swooping in for our food... that's why Andrew looks so wary in this pic :) We soon gave up and went home.


The next couple pics (sorry, out of order), are from our church picnic which was held on someone's property in the outback. He had this massive lean-to where we all ate in, and then there were games outside, a giant waterslide down a hillside, and "bush-dancing" to end off the night. It was our first go at that, and it turned out to be a lot like square-dancing. We even did it in a empty field, so it was pretty authentic.


Last Sat Andrew and I had to re-certify our CPR certificates, so we spent the afternoon pumping the chests of dummies. The guy across from Andrew is our friend Will from work, who's a total legend... they were having a little too much fun together, but I think we all still passed anyways!



Last Sunday we went to the beach for the afternoon with our friend Chris from church... it was so great walking along the bathtub-temp water and just relaxing... life can be pretty hectic with work and stuff, so it's nice to just breathe in the ocean air and chill out once in a while :)


Later that evening Andrew and I were playing on the worship team at church... you can see him at the back left in the pic above playing his bass. It was really good night.


On Monday I took a few of my girls to the beach (same beach as the day before) for some beach volleyball and swimming. Our school is a bit budget on sports equipment, especially beach volleyball stuff, so we ended up having to take two high jump standards as our posts, and just tie a rope between them as a net. The girls had a blast anyways. I love it when girls this age get into sports... makes me feel like I'm accomplishing something :)



Lastly, we had some concreting going on in our Middle School area at school this week... the kids were running out of room to play handball at lunch (the most popular lunch-time game here), so they paved another area and are gonna paint the lines soon.

One of the yahoos in my class decided to write "I was here" in the concrete as it was drying. Big trouble for him.

Anyways, that's life this month. Two more weeks till we are done school, and then we'll be packing up, moving to the sunny coast, and flying to Thailand all in less than a week. Can't wait for the adventures!


Ciao for now...

~Corinna for Team AC