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Views #269 | Intermediate 4

Unpleasant surprise

Gloria talks about having a scary visitor in Thailand.

Script
Vocab
Quiz


Gloria	Todd

Todd: So, how was your trip to Thailand?

Gloria: Oh, I spent about six weeks in Thailand and had a really, really great time. I spent three weeks in Northern Thailand and then three weeks on the beach in the southern part of Thailand but my last night I was packing up and I had a suitcase in the corner with the warm clothes from Northern Thailand and I saw something dark in the corner and I'm thinking," Oh, it's just some clothes that fell out of my suitcase so I reached out to grab the clothes and something dark rose up and spread out and it was the weirdest feeling because at the same time I felt like a hand grab me from behind and yanked me out of the cabin and I didn't feel any fear until I was in the middle of the clearing and I screamed twice and got everybody's attention, "What? What? What?" and I said "snake" and of course a few people started laughing, thinking,
"Oh, well, this little bitty green, harmless snake" Ah, no big deal. So one of the little bitty Thai girls, walks into my cabin and she comes running out, "Aah, snake!" and so it was a black king cobra which is the most poisonous snake in the world and this is really kind of scary because my little brother had been killed by a snake and so it's frightening to me to think how close I came. After I left Thailand, two things happened: I found some photographs in which in the photographs that I took of my cabin you could see the snake crawling into my cabin and the other one is an e-mail from the owners of the resort that they found two more cobras underneath my bed.

Todd: Wow, oh man! So normally do they have king cobras on that part of the island?

Gloria: No, they don't. They say they may come in when they transport.. the building, they're making a lot of new buildings so they brought in wood from Northern Thailand and maybe it came in there. Also the envirorment's being upset and they're chopping down a lot of trees and they're finding more and more snakes that they didn't know were there.

Todd: Wow. Well, you're very lucky.

Gloria: Yeah, I've been told that.

Learn vocabulary from the lesson!

reached out

I reached out to grab the clothes, and something dark rose up and spread out.

When you 'reach out' you extend your hand in front of you to touch something. Notice the following:

I reached out my hand to pay the woman.
The man reached out to stop her from crossing the street.

weirdest feeling

It was the weirdest feeling.

A 'weird feeling' is strange or unusual sensation, something that you are not used to. Notice the following:

It was the weirdest feeling to know I didn't have a job or a house and that I was moving to a new country.
Getting stitches is one of the weirdest feelings ever.

yank out

I felt like a hand grabbed me from behind and yanked me out of the cabin.

If you 'yank something out' of a place you grab it and pull it away quickly. Notice the following:

I didn't want to yank the gum out of my hair because I knew that it would hurt.
Just when I thought the movie couldn't get worse the man yanked out a gun.

how close I came

It's frightening to me to think how close I came.

We can use the phrase 'how close I came' to talk about physical closeness or distance to something. We can also use it to refer to something that could have easily happened. In this case, Gloria was both physically close to the snake and something terrible could have happened. Notice the following: