Our Surroundings

So, this is our home in Lopburi, Thailand. It's a two bedroom house with lots of cracks and crevices for roaches, ants, geckos and other lizards to enter through. As you can see we live in a gated compound. There are five other houses in our compound. We have one air conditioner in our bedroom but that is it, and it does get HOT here! We have one bathroom (hong naam in Thai) and one sink in our kitchen. Oh yeah, there is no hot water here either. I am actually getting used to that but I am a little nervous about the cool season when the water in the water tank won't be warmed all day long by the hot sun and warm temperatures. In Thailand it is polite and cultural to take a shower at least twice a day, during the hot season it is suggested you take three showers a day! Especially for the farang (foreigner) who is living in Thailand this is important to heed. We smell to the Thai folks and to be polite we must shower often!

The picture to the right is of the flood we had last week. There was a tropical depression situated over most of Thailand and so Lopburi got dumped on. It's hard to see it here but that water is about knee deep in the center. Our house was the only one not to flood in our compound. I was most happy about that but only a few more inches and the water would have been in our house as well. We had to bike to language school in this water...and we even spotted some fish swimming in the streets, the water in the streets was midway up our bike tires! It was difficult peddling and keeping balance with the wake from the cars and trucks passing by.



This is Lopburi Language Center (LLC). This is where we are learning to speak Thai. We have been here now for 1 1/2 months learning Thai. It is quite challenging but it is also exciting when a Thai person on the street understands what we are trying to communicate. We are one on one with a Thai teacher for two hours a day and spend another 2-5 hours studying and listening to cds and tapes and practicing in the market, etc. One really great thing about learning Thai is that there are no verbs to conjugate like in English, Spanish, French, etc. But, there are plenty of other things that make it difficult such as the tones and sentence structure.
LLC is made up of the center two aparments. One side is four storey and the other is three. There are air conditioned study rooms here and our teacher's rooms have air conditioning. We are very thankful for the comfort of those a/c units!