New Job/New House

First night in the new house and I can’t sleep, so I figured I’d take this opportunity to update you on our lives.

We’ve been back in Nakhon Si Thammart for almost one week. Once we got back we found a room near my friend Martin’s house and set about shopping for a motorbike. We have seen several and have not been able to make any decisions about which one we want. Do we want to go the cheap route and just buy something small? Yeah, but we are a 20 minute drive outside of town, so maybe we need something a little bigger for the highway driving. What if we want to take it out of town? Then we will need something even bigger. How can we know what we will need? That’s really the problem here. We are even kicking around the idea of leasing a car. You know, because it rains six months out of the year here. If we had a car, we wouldn’t need to worry about any of the ‘how big’ questions and we would never be stuck at home waiting for the rain to pass. There are just so many variables to consider!

I started work, just for a few hours three days last week. Day one, getting contracts signed and figuring stuff out. Day two, two hour English lesson for the Thai teachers (which I was only told about on day one!). It turned out to be a lot of fun and very encouraging. I think I’m really going to like my co-workers, and I kind of like the fact that the school provides the Thai teachers with some English lessons. I think it is a nice professional development opportunity that they are taking advantage of. Day three, another two hour English lesson. Another cool perk about my school is that they provide the teachers with free lunch, and it’s pretty darn good (so far)!

Also, I’ve gotten to know a few of my closer co-workers beyond just my two hour classes, which has been a most enjoyable experience. My director is a very kind woman who sees to it that we are well taken care of. She has taken us out to dinner, made sure we had transportation for moving day and made sure the bedding in our new house was clean (at the school’s expense) before we moved in. Also, we’ve gotten to be pretty good buddies with two of the Thai teachers, Toei and KoTuk, and they have been even more amazing. They came and picked us and our stuff up today and brought us out to our house, even though it was their day off, just so we wouldn’t have to get a taxi. They were the ones that did the running to make sure our bedding was laundered (I didn’t know they were doing it and had fully planned on doing it myself), and have just been a lot of fun to hang out with. 

Picture of the group dinner. It was a going away dinner for the out-going kindergarten teacher who's place I'm taking.

Tonight, we went out to dinner with them at the food fair in town. After dinner, they took us to this dessert place that is apparently very Thai. We had ‘ice cakes’, which are basically a bowl of shaved ice, coconut milk or sugar water, and a variety of different ‘toppings’ that are actually on the bottom. It forms a sweet icy soup and the ‘toppings’ float under the ice. It was good, but kind of strange. I think they ordered us ice cakes with all the toppings, and some of the toppings just don’t belong in a sweet treat, i.e. kidney beans. That being said, I’m stoked that we have friends who are introducing us to Thai culture, because we would have never found that place on our own and if we had, we never would have known what to order. They have also agreed to trade Thai lessons for English lessons, and have all ready assigned us homework!

After hanging out with Toei and KoTuk, we came home and cleaned. The house we moved into is on the University campus. And while it is totally livable, it’s a bit rustic by American standards. For some reason Thais don’t really sheetrock too much. So our walls are painted 2x4s. I’m still trying to adjust to Thai style bathrooms, where the whole room becomes the shower as soon as anyone decides to take one. It’s not all bad, but it means that the floors are almost always wet. Additionally, there is A LOT of cleaning to do in the house. It’s sort of a bummer when you move into a new house and you are so excited about it because for the first time in two months you will actually have a home, and then you walk in only to have the wind taken out of your sails when you realize you will be cleaning for a solid week.

Plus, we need to buy a lot of stuff. We need an extra bed, a sofa, a stove!, and some storage thingys.

However, after dinner with our friends and a solid first round of cleaning the bathroom, I’m feeling better about the house. It has some very redeeming qualities and I think with a little bit of creativity we will be able to make it feel very homey. Redeeming qualities include: what could be a very gorgeous yard, with some very exotic flower currently growing and a pond with a water fountain; nice dark hardwood floors; a rather large covered concrete pad that is supposed to serve as a parking place, but we have hung two hammocks and plan to buy patio furniture and a grill. Plus, I have some ideas on how to spiff the place up.

Here are some pictures of our yard.

 

 

 

 

One thing I learned today is that Thailand does not have as many cleaning products as we do at home. We couldn’t find any Tilex shower cleaner OR Mr. Clean Magic Erasers, two of my very favorite cleaning products for the bathroom. Don’t worry, we are making due but I could have done wonders in the bathroom today with a magic eraser…just saying.

We will be hanging around Nakhon Si Thammarat (probably cleaning and getting settled) through Wed of next week. I need to make sure my work visa stuff gets taken care of and Neils needs to sign contracts. After that, we are headed north again. We will stop briefly in Bangkok and then tour around Chiang Rai, Pai and back to Chiang Mai for Songkran, Thailand’s new year which they celebrate with a giant water fight!