Supatach Vadhanachai, a native of Bangkok, Thailand, is this year's foreign exchange student at Telstar High School. He saw his first snow last week.
BETHEL — Supatach Vadhanachai said everything is so different at Telstar High School and surrounding towns than it is in his native Thailand.
Supatach is the school's only foreign exchange student this year, but he is far from lonely.
Along with the friendliness of the school's students and staff, he regularly connects with exchange students at neighboring Mountain Valley High School where there are five young people from Asia, and with the three exchange students at Dirigo High School. He lives at a host home in Mexico, which he shares with a South Korean exchange student. He also talks with fellow Thai students scattered around the United States almost everyday.
Supatach, 16, saw snow for the first time last week, something his home country never has.
“It was nice but too cold,” he said.
He plans to sign up for the Telstar Ski team.
“It will be a new experience,” he said.
Seeing the colorful leaves fall just last month was another new experience. So are the class sizes at Telstar.
At his private school in Bangkok, classes often have 40 or 50 students among the total enrollment of about 5,000 from first-grade through high school. And in Thailand, the teachers move from class to class, rather than maintain their own classrooms. Class days are longer in Thailand, too.
Supatach likes the smaller classes because he said it helps him learn better.
One of the major reasons for becoming an exchange student in the United States was to learn English.
Slowly, he is gaining knowledge of the language, and his grades, at a 90 percent average, show he is doing well.
Supatach isn't sure what he wants to do when he graduates from his high school. Perhaps he'll follow in his father's path as a businessman, but maybe he'll do something else, he said.
One thing he does know is that he wants to go to college in the United States. He wants to do more traveling in this country.
So far, he has traveled to Virginia with his host family, and is looking forward to going to Boston and New York. He likes the big cities for the shopping malls and being able to walk everywhere.
He also wants to see California, particularly Hollywood, and Florida.
He likes Telstar, though.
“This is a very good school to learn at,” he said.
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