Creatures and Comforts

I am not really sure what has happened since I last posted. All the days here seem to blur into one long sticky hot day.

Well, lets start with a few comforts. We now have a washing machine, which means clean clothes!!! And, most importantly, they have installed brand new electric showers into both of the shower rooms, which means NO MORE COLD SHOWERS!!! I never thought I would be so happy to have a but of warm water. So overall, there have been quite a lot of home improvements.

Continuing with improvements, I can now negotiate my way through ordering food at a food stall. I can ask what it is and understand the main meats, I can ask how much it is, I can then say the number of, for example chicken skewers, that I want, and then I can say thank you and goodbye. This may seem easy to a lot of you, and you may be thinking 'after two weeks I thought you would be a lot further than that'. But this is Thai, not French. If you make one wrong tone, like you go up in tone rather than down in tone, they literally look at you like you are crazy. They seem to have a complete inability to work out what you are saying. I do not know whether this is because I am Farang (white westerner) and they don't have any patience for me, or whether they really think I am talking jibberish. But either way, its the way it is, and I simply have to make sure I learn my tones in my words. Will need to wait for wifi in the house to improve. Youtube really can be educational.

One thing that I cannot get used to is the bugs. Not only do they eat these things (yes I mean street carts full of cockroaches and little worms fried in some unknown sauce), but no matter how much bug spray you put on, the mosquitos and ants and everything else that I see but do not wish to consider seem to devour you.I counted 9 bites at the top of my left leg alone last night. Anthisan is my new best friend.

Overall though, we are learning a lot and surviving quite well.We have sort of worked out the bus system, which seems to be quite limited. It appears that unless we have a private mode of transport, we cannot get from the main town to our rural town after 6pm. This makes any sort of socialising quite difficult and limited. Although myself and Saadia are both in agreement that to stay here on the weekends would result in cabin fever. I think a bit of travelling is needed after this week.

We get our timetables for our classes tomorrow, so hopefully I will have a better idea of my life for the next 5 months here by this time tomorrow.Fingers crossed.

Sawatdiikha.