What's happened to me. On the 6th October 2012, a nervous wreck landed in a sweaty Bangkok International airport wondering why on earth she puts herself up to crazy challenges like teaching her complicated language to a bunch of kids in a very foreign South-East Asian country. Without a word of local gab. But here I am looking back on a pretty darn crazy set of escapades in my first 6 weeks of living in the Land of Smiles. Here's a little sample to check off my bucket list:

1. Ridden an elephant around a roundabout.

2. Leapfrogged in front of a class of Thai monks on a secluded island monastery to demonstrate the preposition 'over'.

3. Been pummelled and groped by a Thai masseuse.

4. Taught newly-qualified (and very horny) policemen how to locate my lost pink elephant (and no, that wasn't a euphemism).

5. Befriended live adult tigers.

6. Been groped by a ladyboy in the street.

7. Been dangerously close to getting mowed down by motorbikes taking casual shortcuts on the pavement.

8. Visited a medical museum to find very real and very dead bodies floating in glass tanks showcasing a disturbingly morbid variety of injuries and medical phenomena. After a very big lunch.

9. Boxed myself to exhaustion at a Muay Thai 'taster' session.

10. Waded to lunch through the flooded streets of Bangkok.

11. Been propositioned by random Thai blokes in the street and had written declarations of love from my high-school students.

12. Watched the sun rise over the city from a hostel's rooftop pool.

13. Ridden around a floating market in a boat.

14. Been offered rides to 'ping pong shows' by dodgy street vendors (you don't wanna know…).

15. Scared myself stupid while attempting to climb a vertical staircase to the summit of a giant temple.

16. Dined in a monsoon beneath the thunder and lightning because the air-con inside the restaurant was set to North Pole.

17. Mastered the deadly mid-air quick-speed fly-swat hand-clap (making little improvement on my appearing to be the juiciest hunk of meat in the vicinity).

And all alongside completing my TEFL qualification in the name of becoming an official foreign language teacher. Can't say I imagined myself saying any of that this time last year! And now here I find myself, after a 12 hour bus ride to the north following 3 very touristy weeks of training in bustling Bangkok, residing in a tiny village community in the mountains as the new and very obvious 'farang' (foreigner) about town. The change couldn't be more extreme!

Now that I have become acquainted with this previously very scary and unknown area of the country, I might attempt to describe my new Thai village home from home in the Chiang Muan District; picture lush green pastures, dusty palm-tree-lined dirt tracks, dogs, cows and chickens roaming freely in the streets, stilted wooden shacks scattering the road-side, small, rustic, open-air diners and street vendors cropping up in every direction, and a large bustling market selling everything from slabs of meat to bras. Not to mention giant model dinosaurs chilling on street corners and beside the school gym, showcasing the locals' pride in unearthing a huge dinosaur skeleton a few years back. And all surrounded by the constant and very powerful presence of the beautiful shadowy mountains reigning over the nearby national parks. On many a morning on my short bike rides to school, a light mist descends over the landscape giving the distant hills an intriguing mystery, with the sun casting an orangey-yellow haze over the fields. And the sunset on my return home I have no words for.

Thankfully (and I mean THANKFULLY!), it is so much cooler up here than in the hot and humid capital - I can actually stand to have the air-con turned off for a period of time (shock horror)! Though don't get me wrong, it would still qualify as a hell of a good summer's day in England, however you know it's 'cold' for the Thais when they come to school in fleeces and jackets and you're fanning yourself with the nearest vaguely-flat material you can locate).

Because of the small size of the community in Chiang Muan, everyone knows everyone here. Which of course makes me stand out like a sore and very white thumb. It is definitely as close to celebrity status as I'll ever get; I'm openly gawped at wherever I go, kids run up to me to shyly mumble "Hello" before legging it and giggling manically, random men yell "I love you!" as I whizz past on my twee little bike, and I'm regularly informed of how beautiful ("suay") I am in reference to my apparently incredibly desirable white skin. It's still very surreal and hard to get used to! I'm a huge novelty as the rarely seen 'farang', and although a fellow western teacher, Kris, is also staying in the same village from America, she has Thai roots and is often mistaken for being Thai anyway. Which makes it funny when they constantly turn to her to translate something for me and she stands there looking just as nonplussed as I am.

This huge desire to have whiter skin and to appear more western is pretty disturbingly prominent actually, encouraged by the fact that EVERYONE in Thai TV, music and advertising has been air-brushed to oblivion or has overdosed on the skin whiteners - these are placed in literally EVERY skin product on a shop shelf (I even found some 'nipple-pinkener' in a local chemist..!). My students regularly use the products daily and tell me how much they want to have skin like me. I find it really sad, I think the Thai people are beautiful and I tell them as much.

So my new crib, 'The Cabin', is a pretty snazzy wooden hut which is actually pretty decent by my village standards; enter my great wooden double doors into what I like to call my kitchen-diner but actually just consists of a kettle, fridge and microwave - the standard thing by way of cooking here is simply not to and Thais regularly eat out. Why wouldn't you if the selection is this good! Then stroll through into my giant bedroom complete with air-con and TV (offering a great choice of Thai soaps or blue screen), then continue into my DRESSING ROOM (oh yeaah!) before reaching my bathroom with ACTUAL flushing toilet. Some of my friends haven't been so lucky with the ol' squat bog…

Although I'm living alone, I'm regularly visited my new friends and often co-tenants - a few speedy geckos and some very fidgety mice - alongside my much appreciated and considerate rooster neighbours who decide that 5am is when the whole town should be getting up. On special occasions (Monday school mornings…) this could be 4am. And I'm still expecting a visit from the local scorpion community, long-overdue apparently. They should be warned, though, that this farang has already eaten one of their distant cousins fried in Bangkok, so they may need to think twice about popping in muhahahaa… (OK, never in my life would I eat one again, but they don't need to know that).

On the food note, I'm proud (and slightly disgusted) to say that along with the scorpion, I've munched on salted crickets, pig-snout soup ('snoup'?), the sewage-smelling 'King of the Fruits' durian, raw pig skin, tentacles and fish balls. Much of it unknowingly until kindly informed afterwards. The Friday Night Market has to be the most happening thing around town, though, where you can find these delicate little morsels, though the rest of it is really incredible; from crispy chicken in a sweet sauces and melt-in-the-mouth pastries, to juicy sweet exotic fruits and multi-flavoured iced teas (diverting hastily away from crates of live ill-fated insects due be roasted, whole bloodied toads speared on kebab sticks, fried chicken feet, the innards of god knows what animal slapped on a banana leaf and sweating slabs of pig slung out in the heat with nothing but a few lazy wafts of a vendor's fan to distract the flies. Yes, even I have limits). It's great to see how much the community relies on the local produce and independently-run stalls though, even with the neon-lit presence of the snazzy new air-conned 7/11 across the street.

The language barrier has been a bit of a struggle, and it's really sunk in as to how much communication is vital to everyday life. Next to none of the villagers speak English (why would they have to?) and even at school it's often a struggle to form a meaningful conversation between the Thai English teachers and I. Apart from a friendly 'Sa wat dee ka' helloand a nod of the head, there's rarely any conversation between me and the other teachers - I've become a master of mime! I often too catch myself saying a Thai "Thank you" instead of "Hello" or vice versa. So it's amazing to have the American girl here for a normal conversation not dominated by attempts at acting out 'noodles' or broken up with 2-word phrases! Kris has totally kept me sane and it's become routine to stop in at her place on my ride back from school to find somewhere to eat, debrief about the day, share our frustrations and anxieties over teaching and joke about the various mishaps or faux pas made at school (I happened to call a student "penis" in Thai when attempting to take the register. Bloody hell.). We are making an attempt to learn as much Thai as possible while we're here though; I have numbers and greetings down and still working on food - why does there have to be so many different words for rice and noodles?! Alongside the new vocab though, Thai is also a tone-language so the same word has many meanings depending on the intonation used with it. God help us.

Thai etiquette is also on the learning agenda, having to remember to 'wai' (a respectful greeting made by bowing the head and clasping the hands together below the chin) to those of the same or superior hierarchical position to you whenever you meet them (but never to someone serving you food), always to cover legs and shoulders in temple and at school, never to point directly at someone, never to use the feet to do anything i.e. push something over to someone, step on money, stamp feet, show the soles of your feet, as they're considered the lowest and least sacred part of the body in a Buddhist's eyes, and so by contrast never to touch the top of anyone's head as the most sacred part. Forget the bog standard p's and q's of English life!

My school, Chiangmuan Wittayakhom (try saying that in a hurry!) was set up by Ban Phu, a large mining corporation with a big influence in the north, as part of what appears to be a 'giving back to the working community' attempt, and have brought in myself and 3 of my other teacher buddies to increase the very low level of English proficiency in the area. This means that I'm lucky to have a Thai co-teacher in each of my classes to help me translate and maintain discipline, which was daunting at first with the thought of them observing me fumble through my lessons, but has actually come in very useful. I'm also to say "Pi" before each of the female teachers' names to mean sister, which is quaint. Each Thai person has a short and often randomnly English nickname alongside their long Thai name, meaning that in my classes I have Ices, Beers, Dears, Apples, Milks, Dreams, Earths, J's, F's, L's and even a Donut! Although with many of them, no matter how short and simple they seem, I still can't seem to get the pronunciation right - now a pretty entertaining part of my lessons…! And I'm happy to say I've been given my very own Thai nickname by my languages department: 'Mali' ("mah-lee")! It's supposed to bear some kind of representation of you, so as I was born in August when they celebrate mothers, and because I'm "white and beautiful" (hah), I've been named after the white Jasmine flower and Mothers Day, which I love (a previous English teacher was named after the rain that fell when she first arrived…). During a welcome dinner organised for me last week by my department, I was even presented with a Mali plant as a beautifully thoughtful gift that I can plant outside the cabin to keep a little bit of "their Mali" here when I'm gone!

I've now officially survived my first 3 whole weeks of teaching at the school as the only foreign English teacher, and am definitely realising how much work is involved in this role; I'm plonked in front of 18 different classes a week ranging between 32 and 44 students in each, all varying hugely in ability both between classes and individual students, without any real teaching experience before, with VERY little communication between the students or teachers to explain a task or activity, with few technological resources, with the job of administering speaking and listening exams to all whilst performing separate pre-tests and post-tests to create a report for the mining company, in order to demonstrate that we're making an improvement on the school's overall English ability. With a few hours' sleep thrown in between. Overwhelmed slightly?!

However, I think I finally seem to be getting into the swing of things and my crazy late nights of lesson planning and desperately trawling through the internet for tips may be paying off; when telling my 16 year-olds during one of their 2-hour periods to take a quick 5 minute break half-way through, I was hit with "No, Teacher, we stay!" (cue shocked face), I had the young Chinese teacher ask to sit in the back of a lesson one day to see what her students had all been talking about, and have been told now by both co-teachers and students that my lessons are fun and exciting. I could've hugged each and every one of them. However, I now have a very healthy appreciation of the amount of time, effort and sweat a teacher has to put into their work behind the scenes to reach towards producing a 'good' class! I can only hope that things stay this way or get better, but I'm definitely taking each lesson as it comes and trying not to put too much pressure on myself. There will be bad days and good days, but I will do it the Thai way and live by their motto, "Mai ben rai" - no worries.