Pad Thai

I’ve been promising pictures of our house since I moved in (February), and last week I delivered- with pictures of our toilets. Here’s a tour of the rest of the house.

Here's the front of the house (photo from Mara). We live on a very narrow street, so you can't really back up to take a better picture. It's a pretty normal townhouse in Khon Kaen. Those are our motorbikes in the driveway.

This is what you see when you walk in the house. On the left there is a small seating area with a TV, and on the right are our desks. Towards the back of the house is the kitchen. It's indoors, which is nice since many Thai kitchens are not, but the windows are only screens and not glass, so it's more like a screen porch.

Here's the same room standing in front of the kitchen. Note the three fans, there's no air-conditioning downstairs, so fans are a must.

This is our bedroom with a HUGE bed. It does have air-con.

This is our desk in the bedroom and a half-vanity/half-closet. There are no built-in closets that I've seen in Thailand (although I'm sure they exist). Most places just have small wardrobes.

Here is our other wardrobe, and a table and chair at the foot of the bed. Not very exciting, I know.





Other than the bathrooms, that's pretty much it (other than Mara's bedroom). It's comfortable, and relatively nice. Here's one final picture looking up the street from our house.

Necessities

As new fellows from Joe’s organization slowly trickle into Khon Kaen, Joe has been busy showing them around and helping them gather the essentials. I have played a less prominent role, but there has been one thing I’ve made sure everyone understands—how to use a Thai toilet.

I am making this issue a priority since many months were spent here by the last fellows before someone explained the proper technique. Let me also add that if you don’t choose to follow this advice, you will inevitably end up peeing on yourself.

First, here’s a picture of a Thai toilet so you can properly imagine what I’m describing. This particular specimen is in our downstairs bathroom.

Now I’ve been building this up like it’s some complicated procedure, but in reality all you have to do is stand on the toilet (note the grooves on the bowl to prevent slippage), and squat. Oh yeah, and you have to face the wall (opposite from the direction one faces when using a western toilet). That last bit is the piece of the puzzle we were missing, the essential chunk that makes the difference between splashing and no splashing. I know you’re thinking you would have figured this out yourself, but I promise you, it’s not as obvious as it sounds. Also notice the lack of a flusher. The toilet is flushed by filling a small pail with water and pouring it into the toilet until the water is clear. This even works on western toilets (and thankfully we have a western toilet in our upstairs bathroom).

The showers here are also different as they are in almost all foreign countries. Most notably, there is no separation between the shower and the rest of the bathroom, which means the whole bathroom gets wet during a shower. Our bathroom is even more unusual; the shower is practically directly over the sink.

Most houses here do not have a giant hot water heater like they do in the states. Instead, there is a little device on the wall that heats the water as it runs through. Sometimes this works very well, and sometimes it doesn’t. I love the shower at our house, but most others that I have encountered did not heat the water quite to my standard. I did learn a trick from one of the other American Ajan, if you decrease the amount of water flowing through the heater, the water will be hotter. Of course you are then left trying to rinse soap off with just a trickle, but on all but the hottest mornings that’s better than a freezing deluge.

PS. If my blog updates aren’t enough to satisfy your hunger for news from KK, I’ve added links to Joe’s blog and our new awesome roommate Mara’s blog. And if that’s still not enough, you should just come and visit.

Hua Hin and Vientiane Again

It may seem like I take an inordinate number of vacations, and I suppose I do thanks to the rule that you have to leave the country to update your visa. Alas, I will soon have a work permit and will no longer have to endure this heavy burden. Two weeks ago Joe and I made the “necessary” trek up to Lao again, which happily relieved me of the frequent dreams of cheese that have recently been haunting me at night.

Fortunately, this time I was prepared for the culinary bounty and was able to tear myself away from the coffee shops and French restaurants long enough to see some of the sites of Lao’s capital city. Honestly, the place is tiny, slightly larger than a one-stoplight town in the U.S, and there isn’t really that much to see. We did make a point of visiting Wat Sisaket, the only temple left after the Siamese burned the rest down in the middle of the 19^th century. It was beautiful, and different from wats in Thailand in that you could see the French influence in things like the motifs of the floor tiles and actual chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. You couldn’t take pictures of the inside, but here’s one of the outside.

They even had their own library (see the picture with Joe below), but I doubt that they’re hiring.

Our time in Lao is always too short. I’m thankful that the embassy makes you stay 24 hours before you are allowed to return to Thailand, but I did find myself hoping there would be a mistake in my paperwork that would force us to stay longer.

After a 5 day hiatus at home, we got on the (overnight) bus that started out trip to Hua Hin, a beach a few hours south of Bangkok. This trip was sort of a last hurrah for Joe since his summer break from school is over and in celebration of our 4^th anniversary.

The town was cute and the beach was amazing. Khon Kaen is nowhere near any large body of water (other than a few small lakes), and looking out at the beautiful expanse of the ocean was just perfect. I never thought about how spoiled I was in Miami when I got to see such things every day. It was also low season, so there weren’t as many tourists and the prices were very good. We stayed at a sleepy little place right on the beach. There were 11 “houses” and each guest had their own house with hardwood floors, lovely furnishings, and their own patio. The pool was literally right on the beach and you could sit in it and look out at the ocean. (I’m going to such lengths to describe the rooms because we tragically forgot to take a picture).

Although I was nursing a cold for most of the week, we still were able to take long walks along the beach and through the fishing village nearby to get to Khao Takiab where we thought we might stumble upon some rock climbing possibilities. We didn’t look too hard since I wasn’t feeling well, but we did find a nice little wat with a 20 meter tall Buddha that we could see from our hotel. The picture below is of Khao Takiab from the pool at our hotel. It wasn’t very exciting, just relaxing, which was exactly what we wanted.

As a side note: I can no longer access my blog at home. Don’t worry, I can still post, but I can’t see what I’m posting, so if the formatting is off, sorry. I’ve been told that it has something to do with a government firewall, but that might just be propaganda.