October 26, 2012

  • one week in Bangkok

    I've been in Bangkok for the last week, staying in a guest house in the Khao Sahn Rd. area. It's been a quiet time spent waiting to hear from my agency concerning a new placement. I am playing catchup with my journal entries. Should have it done in about a week. There are times when I am tired of words. I get tired of looking for the right words to say, to think, to write. I hear many accents, dialects, languages, and with it varying degrees of speed as words are poured out. Fast talkers from Wales. Clear-speaking New Zealanders who sound Australian, but claim to be more cultured (less slangy) than the Aussies. Met a pair of Koreans, one of whom was going to Chiang Mai and happy to hear of a Korean restaurant in the area where he could get some bibimbap. In the guest house restaurant we have people people checking in, people lounging around reading, people conversing. Shania Twain is still the one on the radio, along with a bizzare mismatch of international musi ranging from MNM to Gangnam Style. I'm tapping away on an Android tablet wishing my right knee would stop aching. The movie starts at 1:00. At my last school I asked about vegetarian food. The only thing they had on a regular basis was a three egg omlette that occasionally had something like onion added to it. Eventually I stopped eating the eggs because the cooking oil didn't taste good. Thai food in a Thai restaurant in the US or somewhere outside of Thailand is not the same as what you will find in a Thai village. Its hit and miss. The fresh fruit purchased from a street vender will always be good, though. Nothing compares to fresh watermelon, pineapple, papaya, or mango. I've eaten better here than I did at my last placement. Over the next-to-last weekend of September, the rains were heavy enough to flood the parking lot where I was staying. On Monday the water was ankle deep. Eventually it would be a little deeper, but in some places it was knee deep. At school the ground floor classrooms were flooded. We were closed until Oct. 15. On Friday I started having problems with my right knee. It was a real pain during my visa run to Vientiane. I asked a teacher with a medical degree about the swelling. He told me that there were torn ligaments in my knee. So I am resting and giving my knee time to heal. Money is very tight right now, and payday is Tuesday. Let's see what happens next...