The Busking Polyglot and the Day at School

Even though I was only with the Busking Polyglot (BP) for a short time, he was a great host and showed me around. He took me to a couple great restaurants, the dessert stand, and the market from my last post.

Couch surfing

I stayed at the B.P.'s place. He is extremely hospitable and has strangers staying at his house almost all the time. He is part of a collective called couch surfing. People join and agree to host people at their place for free. In return, the hosts can search for places to stay in cities they’re going to visit and then they stay with strangers when they are there. The one night at his house, I shared his place with him, his flat mate, and a Chinese woman that is spending the year visiting four great rivers around the world. At 4:45am, we were joined by a European woman arriving from the airport.

The concept of having strangers in my personal space is unsettling to me, but the B.P.'s experience has been quite positive and he now has friends all over the world.

One of his visitors left encouraging notes around the apartment such as on the mirror:

Today is a wonderful day! Oh! And you look amazing!

There were also instructions in the bathroom:

Repent! By expelling toxic substances from your earthly human body.
Below was the age old wisdom, "If you sprinkle when you tinkle, please
be neat and wipe the seat."

Busking

Before he lived in Thailand, he traveled around the world for 18 months busking, or playing music on street corners. His survived based on the contributions of strangers (check out his music).

One of my favorite experiences in Bangkok was when he and his flat mate
had an impromptu jam session in their apartment.

Teaching

The B.P. taught at a local school to help pay the bills and I was able to help him one day. The school served students of different ages from the nursery to our class and although we worked with the oldest kids, I was somewhat bigger than the average student:

 

We made painted eggs and the elementary school girls’ eggs were much prettier than mine:

My favorite class was music. The B.P. and I were in the Yale Gospel Choir together and we taught the kids how to sing harmony to Amazing Grace.

Despite a lot of encouragement and excellent teaching by the B.P.,
not all of the students had yet developed a love for math

Gym class

I volunteered to teach recess and we had a blast.

We had some epic games of dodge ball

We practiced our volleyball form

And then I decided to teach them my favorite game, four square. They had never heard of it and it took a while for them to understand the concept, but they slowly caught on.

Unfortunately, I made a grave error. At one point, I got out and was trying to return to my rightful place as king (the top spot). To get there, I had to knock the little kids out of their spots. I thought this would be a great time for a vocabulary lesson so I thought them the word "regicide" after explaining I was trying to kill the king. Well, it turns out that Thailand is actually ruled by a king and it's a serious crime to say anything negative about him. His picture is everywhere:

You can imagine my fear at the end of the day when I received a thank you note like this one:

"Thank U for Kill King Games"

I quickly made my exit and I was very happy that I wasn’t detained during my time in Thailand.

Teaching and playing with the children reminded me that even people from very different cultures have far more in common than we have that separates us. While politicians sometimes try to highlight differences between people, we must always remember the humanity in those we disagree with and those we fear. I find that reminding myself of the ways that others are like me helps me to treat them more compassionately and patiently. Oftentimes the best way to remind myself is to invest part of my energy, time, and self into those I want to ignore or criticize.