Aaand, I’m off!

(Picture of me in front of the Los Angeles Thai Consulate)







(I don’t know if this is the ‘right’ post to be my first post, but I have to start somewhere!)

Well, it’s finally for real. I now have a Thai visa in my passport, so that I can stay in Thailand for longer than thirty days.

(Of course, anyone could drive down to Los Angeles to get a Thai tourist visa just for kicks, if they really wanted to.)

After finally sitting down to read about the whole business of Thai visas, with only twelve days before my departure date, I realized that not only did I have to apply for a special visa at the Thai Embassy if I wanted to stay in Thailand for forty-five days, but that the closest Thai embassy was in Los Angeles; and the only way to get this visa (other than in person) is to toss your real passport into the mailbox and hope for the best.

With only twelve days left, I had no time for hoping.

So, last Wednesday, I found myself wiring about two thousand dollars to Thailand for the CELTA, getting a tan, borrowing some language cds and audio books from the library, getting two vaccination shots and Typhoid pills, and then driving down to Santa Barbara so that I could then drive to L.A. the next day to get my visa. Whew!

But, I made it.

I was also able to turn my sudden visa run into a lovely visit with my step-sis and family in Santa Barbara. They were the fantastic hosts that they always are and made a long ugly drive into a fun trip. And after two days of lots of time with family and about twenty minutes at the Thai Consulate, I had my visa and I was back on the road to San Francisco.

Now, I am doing everything in my power to take care of everything. (Everything is a lot of stuff.) My most important focus, however, is completing the pre-CELTA task booklet before I go to Thailand. The pre-CELTA task booklet is about thirty-two pages of a lot of hard work, self-teaching, and re-thinking the English language. Now I really know what they mean they say that English is the hardest language to learn. English is my native language and I am starting to find out that I don’t even really know how I speak, read, and write it; I just do.

So, it’s on. I am really going to fly to Thailand in three days. I will do my best to share the experience of all of it and everything after with you.

They say I’ll be an ESL teacher when I’m done with the CELTA. I have a feeling that it will take a lot more than a month-long course to turn me into a travel-savvy, grammar-spouting, classroom-handling, word-confident, guru.

I wonder what else it will take.