The Jungle House

A couple of representatives from my school headed down to Bangkok to pick up Jack and me. As soon as I met Pii Pan and Lung Janevit (Uncle Jane), they gave me big hugs and told me that they were going to be my Thai aunt and uncle while I’m here. How sweet! Since it was already late in the day and would take about 8-10 hours to drive to Hang Chat, they decided we should leave the next day. They told me we can stay at the Louis Tavern hotel another night. OK!

The next morning Pii Pan would call me and we would head home. Oops, Uncle Jane was getting the car inspected so it would be later. After a few more setbacks (mai ben rai!), we started our long journey at 4pm.

We stopped for dinner in Sing Buri at a cute little place on the river. The sun was setting and the view was beautiful.


Uncle took the liberty of ordering LOADS of food for us. Pii Pan was chatting us up so we didn’t get a chance to tell him that I’m a vegetarian and Jack doesn’t like seafood. Mai ben rai! We ate as much as we could, and some of it was pretty tasty. Some of the dishes featured were lobster, pork dumplings, fish balls, fish soup, and spicy prawn salad. Our friend Stephie would have loved it!


Back on the road for the bulk of the drive! I managed to fall asleep for the rest, which lasted until about 1am, so I’ll let Jack take it from here:

I counted THIRTEEN stops between Bangkok and our hotel in Lampang the Pin Hotel. One anecdote that should paint a proper picture - Uncle stopped at one of the many 7-11 oases that include a regular 7-11, a gas station, a rest stop bathroom, and a coffee shop/restaurant around 10PM. At this point, everyone was exhausted and I could tell Uncle was doing everything he could to stay awake. This did not stop him from spending thirty minutes wandering around the tiny 7-11, despite it being the fourth 7-11 we had stopped at since leaving at four. Sara is sleeping, I'm worried he's going to fall asleep at the wheel, Pii Pan is incredibly patient and won't say anything to Uncle because of Thai culture regarding being in a hurry, but even she is wondering aloud "Where is the driver?"

So, 10:30 rolls around and we're back on the road. About 150 miles from Lampang (lahm-pahng), and I start to feel a little better - home stretch, right? Wrong. Fifteen minutes later, Uncle spots an ice cream shop, pulls a u-ey, and insists the stop is necessary because they have "the best" coconut ice cream. To go, right? NO! He actually leaves the car running with Sara and I waiting and grabs himself a table to slowly enjoy his ice cream. When we left at quarter after 11, we had three more stops before being dropped off at our hotel at almost two in the morning. This story is the best window in the Thai psyche I can provide. =)

Of course, when we wanted to sleep in the next morning, Pii Pan was right on time to pick us up and show us Lampang. Sara and I got up early and had a very tasty, but oddly cold, buffet breakfast of eggs, pineapple, lightly fried rice, Coke, and toast with odd tasting butter. Water buffalo milk? But it felt good to eat a TON because the night before, we'd been taken to a gorgeous waterfront (a literal deck) restaurant in Sing Buri about ninety miles north of Bangkok. The entire village was there - cats, dogs, little kids sleeping on tables that weren't in use.

We had tons of good food yesterday, starting with breakfast at the hotel, then a welcoming snack of tamarind juice and rice cookies when we toured Bahn Sao Nak, the "House of Many Pillars", the second biggest tourist attraction in Lampang. It was pretty cool - quaint and underwhelming, but a nice shady spot to walk around.




We also toured Wat Phra Kaeo Don Tao, which (legend states) was the original location of the emerald Buddha before a runaway pack elephant took it to Chiang Mai before it wound up in Bangkok. Dontao means watermelon and there is a whole myth involving the emerald Buddha being carved in or appearing in a watermelon or something. Confusingly, you only say dontao when referring to the emerald Buddha myth-watermelon. They have a different word for buying watermelon on the street. Of course, right?







After those sights, Pii Pan took us to see her sister, who is also a teacher, at her sister's school outside of Lampang. No students yet, so her sister was just quietly working on lesson plans in the middle of a gigantic campus. She was very nice but not quite as friendly as Pii Pan. I think she was thinking, "Why is my sister bringing these Americans around like circus animals who can't do any tricks?" But she (and literally everyone I've met so far) was impressed by my Thai - I get real nasally with it, and adopt the accent of my taxi drivers. Seems to be working for me, although everyday I learn a new confusing rule, strange word order choice, whatever.

We left her sister's school to check out of the hotel. Uncle was there with his bigger vehicle to fit our luggage. We went to a beautiful Japanese style patio restaurant (Pok๙Coffee) that had some very welcome and very effective cool mist fans, lots of plants, and American pop songs sung in Thai style - cheap sounding drum loops, cheesy saxophone solos, and unemotional vocal delivery. Some songs actually improve when given this treatment, and Sara and I enjoyed ourselves. We had vegetable fried rice (Uncle is vegetarian every Sunday because he was born on a Sunday), mixed vegetable salad, Thai style omelet, and even some french fries.



One more stop for a few iced drinks in Hang Chat - which is literally a main road and a few side streets but probably has everything we'll need for the most part - and they dropped us off at our new home.


That's where things took a big turn. Last night I was so uncomfortable I had to admit to Sara I was thinking of putting in the effort and money of finding an apartment elsewhere. The bottom line is there are holes in either the windows, walls, door frames, or all three, because the house is teeming with an almost unimaginable amount of unwanted guests. The first five minutes, Sara actually got a kick out of seeing a mouse-size lizard scurry across our kitchen floor. After three or four, she started shrieking. As the day went on and we realized there was no corner of the house that was actually clear of vermin, I started to get depressed. Sara was being a real trooper until a spider the size of a coffee can lid showed up. It was pretty terrifying. After the effort of killing him, we both had a pretty sizable breakdown. I spent an hour quarantining one of the bedrooms, shutting it up as tightly as I could, and spraying the most powerful bug killer we could find all over every inch of the room. Let it sit for a half hour and probably killed ten thousand bugs. Went back, cleaned up a little, stretched our mosquito net over our beds as best we could, and fell asleep out of emotional exhaustion around one o'clock.

This morning, I felt a little better, having survived the night. I think as long as we can have one "safe" room to crash in, we can avoid the place during the day. It isn't air conditioned either, which was such a shock to Sara and I that I'm still not sure we believe it. We were both SURE that the literature she received said it was, but reading the info very closely, it can be interpreted as saying parts of the SCHOOL have A/C. I don't know. There's a genuine sadness. It's like...maybe this is the first time I'm afraid of something that is actually scary, that's actually happening? At the moment, neither of us has the emotional energy to do much about it, and that's causing some sadness as well. I definitely felt is this morning when it dawned on Sara that we were both shredded and she hadn't even taught a class yet.

But anyway, last night, before the real meltdown began, we were lucky enough to get out of the apartment and spent some time with Kru Pu, who is Sara’s coordinator here at the school. She and Pii Pan are like the bigwigs of the English department. Kru Pu and her little daughter came and picked us up at the school at six and we went to Big C for some household supplies and then to dinner with Pii Pan at a Vietnamese restaurant in Lampang that was really good. I had a big spoonful of what I thought was green onion with one of the pork dishes. When it turned out to be green chilies, I had steam coming out of my ears. It was a really nice dinner though, they are both VERY sweet, love to laugh, and speak impressive English.


This morning, we got up about 6:30 with not nearly enough sleep, got dressed up, cleaned up, and were introduced to all five-hundred students at once during opening ceremonies for the new semester. Kru Pu introduced us in English and Sara scrapped her Thai introduction for English - it was really sweet, she told them she loved the country, how happy everyone was, and that they could teach her things too.

Now, it is 11AM and Sara is finishing up her second of three classes today. She has three today and four the rest of the days this week. The students are VERY shy, so the real struggle will be to get them to risk being laughed at (by their classmates) and actually speak up in English. Despite this and the fact that she found out only yesterday that she starts teaching today, I think she’ll be great.