Our house in Thailand

I am still unable to add photos, but if you'd like to see our house, check out Facebook.
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2016906&id=1222639240&saved#/album.php?aid=2016906&id=1222639240

Our house is very comfortable and came well equipped with everything we needed. Many thanks to the Yluans, from whom we bought all the furnishings, etc.

Thoughts on Three Weeks in Thailand

Unfortunately, at the moment access to this site is sketchy, the Thai government is finding it to be immoral. Today I can put on words, but not pictures, sorry about that! Try checking us out on Facebook for pictures, that still seems to be working.

Thai food:
An excellent meal can be purchased for about a dollar. We've been to several amazing buffets for about $3. I've learned to say not spicy in Thai - mai phet. Although sometimes the food is a bit spicy anyways, generally this gets it to a level I can eat.
Yesterday morning for breakfast we bought Thai pancakes - rhoti - from the street vendor just down the block. He takes a little ball of dough and stretches it really thin, to almost the size of a dinner plate. Then he puts it on a sizzling hot griddle and breaks an egg over it, scrambling the egg and spreading it over the pancake. He folds it a bit until it gets brown and crispy, moving it to the edge of the griddle to keep it warm and let the oil drain off a little. When he takes it off the griddle, he drizzles it with sweetened condensed milk and sprinkles it with sugar, just a little of each, rolls it like a burrito and wraps it in paper to take home. Eaten with iced coffee (also sweetened with sweetened condensed milk) it is an amazing meal. Each pancake is about 30 cents.
I could go on and on just about the food. I'm not going to lose any weight here!

School:
Dan and I are enjoying getting settled in at school. We feel very valued, needed, wanted there. It feels like our skills, talents and experiences are really the ones that are needed right now. We feel very affirmed that we are in the place that God wants us to be right now.

Weather:
It's hot and muggy. For Americans not from the west coast, it probably feels like normal summer weather, for us Seattleites, it's hot and muggy. I am finding I do better when I avoid air conditioning, I think extended periods under air conditioning may be yet another migraine trigger for me, but I crave air conditioning. It's an afternoon treat to go to shopping at Makro (Thai Costco) or Big C (Thai Fred Meyer) just for some aircon. We have it at school as well, but I really am trying to use it for only short periods at a time. Lindsey has suggested turning it off a while before I leave so that my body adjusts gradually to the heat instead of suddenly. It can't hurt to try!
Last night it rained incredibly hard, so it will be cooler today after a week of hot, rainless, muggy weather. I am thankful!

New experiences:
I love all the new sights, tastes, experiences and smells. Yes, even the smells. Chiang Rai is very clean, so really the worst smells are walking past the fish area in the markets, (the girls avoid this area as much as possible) and the durian in the fruit areas. The durian here isn't as smelly as the durian in Malaysia, though. Dan gets exhausted by all the new experiences sometimes. It energizes me most of the time. Of course, I enjoy any kind of shopping, which he doesn't, so that's probably part of it.

Shopping:
Going to the grocery store and seeing bags of chicken feet, a pig head or pigs feet, frog legs, roast chickens complete with head and feet, pig snout, whole cooked fish (a common type here is a fish with the head at a strange angle, I admit to being too chicken to try it, not being a fish eater anyway).
Beautiful fabrics! I bought a lovely piece just to hang in the living room. Melissa McGill would be in heaven!
Can't get top sheets here, which is all we want for sleeping under right now. We're borrowing from new friends at the moment.
Many things are more expensive than I expected, some are cheaper. I could shop everyday just exploring all the different things. Good thing I'll be working full time soon!

I'm out of time, we're heading out to help the librarian move this morning.

The Golden Triangle Trip

Ruth, our principal, and Barb, the secondary program directory, took us on another sightseeing trip. Ruth's a great guide! She knows all the best spots to eat and has routine trips worked out that fit everything in. She could be a tour guide if she wasn't such a great principal. This time we went up to see a Buddhist temple built in the 1200s (pictures on that will be delayed, the batteries were dead in our camera), the Golden Triangle, where you can see Thailand, Myanmar and Laos all at the same time and also to a government project where villagers work on beautiful handicrafts, making paper, cloth and pottery as well as the king's mother's garden. We didn't manage to see her villa, we'll save that for another trip. The garden was fantastic. If you've ever been to Butchart Gardens in Victoria, this is a Thai version. The pictures don't do it justice. Thankfully, since two of us (mostly Megan and Cindy, despite the picture) were riding in the back of Ruth's pick up, it didn't rain as much as was predicted! Megan says riding in the back off the pick up is almost as great as riding in Grandpa's boat.

Dan and Lindsey in the back of Ruth's truck.

Myanmar's on the left of the river, Laos is to the right and we're in Thailand!

Warning: The following pictures are for all my gardening friends, taken at the queen mother's villa. Please know the sunlight, even through the clouds, washed out the colors considerably.

The garden is up in the mountains, the air had a little cool freshness to it, it felt great!

What kind of bug chews a hole this big?

I guess the kind that eats leaves that are a yard across!

This flower was the size of a dinner plate.

Vines grow big here, too.

The color of the water gives you an idea of the color of the soil here. Everything grows well in it!

Elephant Ride!

Today was a play day. Ruth arranged for us along with two other new friends to take a longtail boat ride up the river to a village where we could ride elephants. The longtail boat ride was beautiful, it took about an hour past farms, mansions, shacks, jungle and gravel operations (two guys digging gravel off the bottom of the river and piling it in their longtail boat until it almost sunk). It was a very hot, heavy day today so the breeze during the boat ride felt fantastic.

The village was oriented to tourism with small shops selling trinkets; cloth, jewelry and puppets and especially elephant rides. The ride took about an hour through the village and jungle. As you can see in the pictures, Megan and Cindy rode one elephant, Dan and Lindsey rode another and our friends rode a third. Megan and Cindy's guide could speak English and was very interesting to talk with. He allowed them to ride on the neck of the elephant, not just up in the seat. It was great, riding on the neck was a relatively smooth ride, up in the seat you rock back and forth alot, but it's warm sitting on the neck and those big ears act as blankets, very unnecessary in the heat today! Dan and Lindsey's elephant kept stopping to eat, pulling up large branches, and once

an entire small banana tree!

Riding elephants!Cindy and Megan got to 'drive'!Similar to the boat we rode in, these guys are collecting gravel from the river bed to sell.

Jogging

Below are some pictures from our jogging route. We actually managed almost a full half hour today. It has been raining for 24 hours nonstop, so it's a bit cooler. Previously we've been afraid to go very far for fear of overheating. We got absolutely soaking wet in the torrential downpour. The Thai people in our neighborhood really got a good laugh watching a couple of farang (foreigners) jogging (strange thing to do) in the pouring rain (downright crazy) with a dog actually on a leash (what in the world is a leash for?)! We got lots of stares and smiles today! We leash Lacey mostly to protect the chickens and ducks running around since our neighborhood is small and very quiet (other than the fact that we look at the back end of the Thai version of Costco as our view).


Rice Fields

Friendly neighborhood cow

Everyone has orchids, these surround a Thai home's address sign.

Close up of a banana orchard.

We made it!

After 19 hours of flight ( the dog was in the cabin with us, sleeping drugs are amazing, she did great!), three hours in the Tokyo airport where we all fell asleep on the floor and 19 hours in Bangkok (where we convinced the hotel clerk to let Lacey into our room with us instead of making her stay outside with the security guards and the scary mongrels and six hours touring the city, see photos), we have arrived in Chiang Rai! It's great to finally be here. Yesterday the principal of the school showed us around Chiang Rai. The drivers aren't as scary as in Uganda, and the roads are very good, but the motorcycle drivers are reckless and land designations aren't carefully observed. We haven't been able to drive our car yet, the doors won't unlock, but we are able to borrow the Quesenberry's car for a couple of weeks until we get it worked out. (The Quesenberrys are the couple who invited us to come to FLC, but are now in CA for cancer treatment.) The girls got an opportunity to hang out with the principal's son and his friend who are Megan's age. It was fun for them to begin to make friends here. Today we'll figure out how to do some shopping and how to get to church this evening. Our house faces the back of the Thai version of Costco, so we'll probably start there. This could be interesting!