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.