1 May, 2006

Hi!
Well, at long last, here we are in Prachinburi, all moved in for another year's teaching. We thought we were going to be living in the house we stayed at when we first ever visited the school. I came up to Prachin last weekend and was told we could move in there, so off I went back to BKK with glad tidings for Rob that that would be our house. We were really happy about that!
Anyway, events took an interesting turn when, on Wednesday, I rang Sister Lamyong, who runs the school, and she told me that she'd found us a different house, as the first one needed work doing on the roof and it would be a while before that could happen. The one she now had in mind was a brand new build, owned by the brother of one of the teachers, near the school - it sounded exciting and intriguing. So on Saturday, with hangovers, in about 35 degrees of hot sun, we met Sister and a couple of people from the school, and they came to our condo with the school minivan. it was a bit of a last-minute rush towards the end, getting the last bits and pieces, but pretty much all of our stuff was already packed up and ready to go. So we loaded it all in the van, including the fridge, which we were thinking we'd have to go back for..........and off we set, with many well-wishes from the chef woman in our yard and the cleaners and security guards.

When we arrived outside our house, I was over the moon! It's down a side-street, off a road, in a little neighbourhood, and it's painted sky blue, with a cute little front door and a balcony. Inside it's all painted custard yellow, quite small, very cute and homey, tiled floors, and a brilliant little yard out the back. Perfect for our cooking and eating escapades! That's a definite highlight! We have a nice bedroom, a spare room with 2 wardrobes in it (that's where we'll keep the computer), and a proper Thai toilet (tho' not a squatter!!) - quite a departure from "modern" condo living in Bangkok! And all the better for it. We got there about 6.30 p.m., and loads of locals materialised and helped us to carry everything into the house - so it literally took about 10 minutes to get it all in there! A really nice welcome to the place.

We have now been here 2 days, and are finding our feet. Prachinburi is a small town, nothing is geared towards foreigners at all, it's just a normal Thai community with all the usual things. A huge bonus!! And Saturday and Wednesday nights are market time - our house is 2 mins' walk from the market and we can hear all the hustle and bustle. That will be a great social thing - everybody goes out to the market and strolls around and bumps into their mates. So that will be fun! We've found a couple of good places to eat (of course), and have been shopping for some bits and pieces for our kitchen adventures. Time to put our vegetarian and fish-cooking classes into practice! Now we're just waiting for our gas hob to be delivered. Sister has done us proud, though - we have pretty much everything we need in the house, and we haven't had to fork out loads of cash on furniture that we'll only be using for a year.

So now we've got a couple of weeks before school starts, so we can go in and do preparation work and settle in before work begins. We're living 5 minutes' walk from the school, and we'll be getting push-bikes this week so it will be more like 3 minutes.

the cupboard under our stairs is now well-sealed all round the edges, as Rob opened it when we moved in to find about 6 big horrible cockroaches. Not nice! there have been a few that scuttled across the floor in an escape bid, but they didn't get far. We have some good spray to blast them with. So much for the non-harming philosophy of Buddhism! We've put poison down and fastened the hatch up with some very wide tape, so hopefully that will hold out fine. I bet they find some other way of getting out, though! But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

My next t-shirt purchase will be one that says "I'M IN THE MOOD FOR YOGHURT". :0)

Out the back of the house is a swamp! If you jump up to peer over the wall of the yard (it's about 6 feet high), you get a lovely view of green waterlilies and lilypads. You can get a really good view of it from the spare room. It's really beautiful, and so noisy with cicadas and frogs! I'll be making some recordings of the cacophony at night. We've also rigged up some fairy lights out there, so we can sit in the evenings and have dinner and chill out outdoors.

So, on that note...........I'l take some photos and invite you to look at them on snapfish, as usual. Hope you are well and sharing some of this sunny weather we're having in Thailand.