Learning Thai

Today was my first day of Thai language classes at Union Langauge School in Bangkok. It consisted of repeating a series of vowel and consonant sounds for about four hours. Some of these are sounds that I am accustomed to, but others are not. It seems that Thai has several sounds that necessitate stretching your mouth into a wide smile/grimace. My cheeks were literally sore by the end of the class. The hardest sound for me (by far) is the "ng" sound at the beginning of a word.

There are about 15 people in the class. Several of us are from the States and the rest are from South Korea, Finland, Japan, and Australia. There was something comical about this group of adults struggling to copy the sounds that the teacher was making ("Naan...Ngaan...Faan"). From what I've heard we have a couple more days of this and then we'll get into learning vocabulary and putting sentences together.

On another, completely random, note I read an article in the paper today about a man in central Thailand who has had to move a number of large crocodiles into the second-floor bathroom in his house to make sure that they don't escape due to the flooding.