Week 1!

Second post!

We’ve been here a little over week now, but we’re definitely starting to get settled. I went into work every day this week from 9-4 and Jacob worked from home, even though we aren’t getting internet until today (Saturday). He’s been doing what he can with no internet, then coming to campus or to a coffee shop to use wifi for a while each day.

We moved into our apartment on Tuesday, and really like it here so far. It has 2 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, a kitchen with a small table (fits 3 chairs with one side against the wall), and a living room. We also have 2 balconies and 3 air conditioners. The kitchen consists of a sink, a microwave, and a good amount of counter and cabinet space. No oven or burners though. Apparently Thais don’t really cook much at home; it’s normal to not have an over or burners. It’s so cheap to eat out and the food is all so good. It’s cheaper to eat out for every meal then to buy supplies and cook at home. We’ll probably still end up buying an electric wok or something so we can cook sometimes and because we want to learn how to cook Thai food, and because it’s nice to not have to go out every meal. Pretty much every sidewalk is filled with food vendors selling really cheap good food. We’re going to try to eat at all of them in the neighborhood, but it will be a challenge! Besides the sidewalks, there are large outdoor markets every several blocks, and each of those has at least 20-30 food vendors. So yeah, there are easily over 100 different food vendors in the immediate several blocks nearby our apartment and my job.

We’ve eaten most meals with other people, teachers from school mostly, but have successfully gotten food on our own a few times as well. It’s a little scary at first, but we’re learning our numbers and food names, and when we don’t know what to do, we just smile and point and give them more money than we think it will be and they just give us the right change. Then say “cahp khoon kha” (that’s what I say, what females say) and Jacob says “cahp khoon khrap” for males. That means thank you. If you always start with “Saw wat dee kha” (girls) and “saw wat dee khrap” (for males) and end with cahp khoon kha, and just smile then you’re okay. Here's some basic Thai if you're curious about what this sounds like.

Four of the English teachers are recent University of North Carolina alums. There’s a UNC study abroad program at the university here, and those four teachers studied abroad here so they know a lot more Thai then we do, and know their way around. There are also 16 current UNC undergrads here studying abroad, so we’ve met about half of them as well.

My walk to work is about 20 minutes, but I walk pretty slowly because it’s so hot all the time. I just give myself extra time and walk over slowly. A lot of the other teachers live in the same apartment complex where we live (called Ban Suan Thon – Ban means house, Suan means park, and Thon is short for Thonburi, the area of Bangkok where we live), but none of them walk to work, they think it’s too hot to walk, and that I’m crazy. They all take kra-pongs, or can cars. They are these mini pick-up trucks, more like golf-cart sized pick-up trucks. They are like little buses, each has a number and a specific route. You can just wave one over pretty much wherever you are and hop on and off wherever you want. Each ride is 5 baht (30 baht is $1).

We finally made it to downtown Bangkok last night! It was our first time, and fun, but I’m glad we don’t live there. We left in taxis around 7pm and it took about an hour to get there because of traffic (the trip back at the end of the night took about 20-25 minutes). We went to dinner at this fun place that played American oldies. After that we walked over to Khaosan Road. It’s probably the most touristy place in the city. There were so many foreigners (farang is the Thai word for foreigner, we hear that a lot. Though one Thai teacher at school told me I don’t look like a farang because I’m not white) there, it was crazy! It was kind of like the Vegas strip, I don’t know how else to describe it. Lots of bars, shopping, food vendors, and Europeans. It felt really weird, I didn’t really like it. I can’t believe some tourists only go there when they stop in Bangkok. We did go to a place on Khaosan that was mostly Thais though, so that was nice. It was a huge bar that had live music, and it was packed. Of the few hundred people there, there were only like 10 farang. I’m glad we went there, and not to any of the other bars, they all seemed pretty sleazy.

We’re looking forward to exploring more of Bangkok on the other side of the river, there are so many temples, markets, parks and other things to see and do. Unfortunately I just got a text (a lot of communication here is via text not actual phone calls) saying internet is being installed tomorrow afternoon. We’ve stayed home all morning waiting for them to come today when we could have been exploring, and now it looks like we’ll have to do the same tomorrow. It’ll be nice to have internet, but it’s a little annoying that we’ve spent our first full non-jet lagged weekend sitting around the apartment instead of exploring the city. Oh well – we have another year of weekends to explore I guess!

And now some more pictures:

This is right in front of the apartments where we live. See that 7-11? Turn right there, and that's our apartment complex! It's pretty big, there are twelve streets and we live on the twelfth, so we're far back from the main street. Also, there are 7-11's every here, and we call it "the seven."

When you turn right at "the seven" from the picture above, this is what you see, and we live way at the end on the right.

This is the road that I walk to and from work on, it's relatively quiet as far as streets around here are concerned.

That's all for now, don't forget to check my picture-a-day blog for more! We'll try to update here about once a week. If you don't want to forget to check it, you can subscribe by email at the top right of this page, and it will email you whenever we update. :-)

We miss everyone, send us updates!