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Travel books will tell you all about the food, culture, and language of Thailand, but the nitty-gritty of daily life doesn't tend to reveal itself in these descriptions. For instance, nobody talks about bathrooms. This may seem like a weird blog topic, but the Thai bathroom experience is (to Westerners) bizarre enough to merit a walkthrough.

A typical Thai bathroom, whether in an average working-class home or business, is to Western eyes a truly horrible affair. First of all, there's often no toilet, or at least none that fits the American definition of that word. Instead, there's a porcelain bowl on the floor, elevated only a few inches. If you happen to be a man with only a brief bathroom necessity, the initial step poses few obstacles. However, for women and for men in need of a sit-down, this is a bit of a process. You have to straddle this bowl and, for lack of a less hideous word, squat. Not such an issue with skirts, but if you've got pants on you have the additional challenge of pulling them far down enough to be in the clear, but not so far as to interfere with the squatting action or to be on the (inevitably filthy) floor. The real difficulty here is getting through this without urinating on your own shoes or clothing.

Now that you've finished, you need to move on to cleanup. Thing is, the Thai sewer system is not nearly so advanced as to allow for the flushing of things like toilet paper. If you try, the results will be disastrous. You will therefore encounter one of two situations. You may be expected to use the provided toilet paper and deposit it into a wastebasket. This wastebasket will be full of the used toilet paper of previous visitors, and the room will smell accordingly. The more likely circumstance is the absence of toilet paper. In this case, it's bum gun time.

The bum gun, a space-saving cousin of the European bidet, is a three-foot hose with a head like those dishwashing nozzles you'll sometimes see on a kitchen sink. It's generally installed right next to the toilet (or squatty bowl thing, as the case may be). This is your TP substitute. If the water has run out, as Thai water supply is wont to do, you're simply out of luck. Should have checked that before you got started.

If you're lucky enough to have had water at a decent pressure, you're on to the flush. (No, you don't get to dry off. This is Thailand. You were already drenched in sweat and monsoon rain anyway.) Now, the mini-potty doesn't have a tank. It's nothing but a bowl set on top of a pipe in the ground. This means no handly flush button. Next to the bum gun there will be be a bucket full of water with a tupperware bowl floating on top. You scoop up the water with the bowl and pour it into the "toilet," effectively flushing it. Were you wondering why the floor is completely soaked? Were you concerned that it was urine that was soaking into your shoes and the ends of your jeans? Partially, yeah, it probably was. But it was also the spilled water that results when people get this step wrong. Because it will splash. On the floor, and on you.

You're done. Get out. No, you're not washing your hands, where do you think you are?

jungla

My first semester in Thailand, a brief and overwhelming maelstrom of spicy food, language barriers and runny-nosed seven-year-olds, has passed. The experienced has been mixed, the daily joy of the unsurpassed cuteness of a Thai elementary school tempered by a constant pollution cough and my inability to effectively coymmunicate or integrate, but finally, this dirty, weird little river city is growing on me.

After four months there, Levi and I opted to flee the dorm-style house our school provides. It's a fine place, newly renovated and well located, but with five new teachers moving in for the new semester, the appeal faded. So we moved to the lesser developed side of the river, a peaceful forest village called Ban Bai Mai.

The container

Our new house, recently vacated by two former teachers, is composed of two metal storage containers, each about eight by thirty feet and nine feet high. They've been welded together along their lengths, furnished with doors and windows, and wood floors, piped and wired, painted blue and stuck up on stilts over a creekb  inb a dense palm jungle. To the front we have a broad tiled porch, fruit and flowering trees bearing delicacies I've never seen and couldn't name, and our neighbors, a friendly Thai family with whom we share a gravel drive. To the back, only jungle; a thick ground cover of grass, vines, and pandan shrubs beneath banana trees with six-foot leaves and two-storey palms swaying on trunks no wider than my leg. In October the flood rains come to southern Thailand so there are fish and frogs under the house and every shade of green outside the window.

The view from our bedroom

Living room

So rather than try to wrestle pleasant travels out of so wet a season, we're spending our month of freedom in this gorgeous box. The mornings we devote to improvements, painting furniture, dusting, and scrubbing the metal walls clean of their accumulated dirt and mold, but the afternoons are luxurious stretches of movies (or in my case, admittedly terrible by nevertheless irresistible Spanish soaps), books, and watching the rain run off the banana leaves. The place is a respite from the chaos and grime of Surat, and with the addition of this much-needed hideout, I'm happy I came to Thailand.