Learning Thai

The last week has been anything but boring! Confusing, exciting, exhausting, humbling, terrifying, and overwhelming are all emotions that come to mind when I think about our experiences. We moved into our new house three days ago and have been keeping busy learning how to keep house, furnish it, buy food, communicate with landlady and neighbors etc. Every afternoon our house has been a beehive of activity- a man installing ceiling fans and another our phone and internet, neighbors stopping by to check us out and tease the girls, our landlady bringing us gifts from soup to trashcans and toilet paper dispensers, and the landlady’s son with his ever present Thai/English dictionary.

We’ve been shopping many times and have been pretty successful in purchasing things for our house, no thanks to our meager Thai. We depend heavily on the dictionary, other people’s (mostly very limited) English, and our early Thai vocabulary (mostly Tom’s). We’ve gotten a lot of basic furniture like a washer, beds, a small fridge and hotplate (stoves don’t seem too common), and we’ve ordered a couch and chairs for the living room. In the meantime, we don’t have too many places to sit and are thankful for the table and benches that came with the house. We spend quite a bit of time out on the veranda in front because it’s a little cooler and people are often visting us out there. We hope to do some more shopping soon for other furniture like a desk and bookshelf so we can eliminate some of the many piles of things sitting around with no home.

The girls have been practicing their first Thai words too. Claire does very well with the Thai greeting “Sawattdii kaa” and the wai (bow). She also just learned our address in Thai which she has fun saying. Eliza can say the “ka” part and is pretty friendly, flirting and saying hi to lots of people. Both girls are big attention getters in shops or on the street. Many people stop us to talk to them and touch them and often even want to hold them. They are adjusting to the attention and handling it pretty well.

We’ve also had many culinary adventures so far. Thai food is not quite what we expected but we are beginning to find some favorites. We love the fresh pineapple that is available everywhere you go in the streets. We also really enjoy the shrimp or chicken fried rice, guava juice, wide Thai noodles, and a delicious seafood/lemongrass/mushroom soup our landlady made us. Tom enjoys the curries and the girls and I are working on enjoying spicy foods in small doses. The desserts are quite strange to us- a kind of flavorless jello is popular and we sampled some very sweet yucca last night (at least we think it was yucca- very dense, mushy). We are just beginning to explore our new neighborhood and are looking forward to trying all the little food stands and small open air restaurants around here. We have breakfast and some lunches at home- fruit, drinkable yogurt and bread mostly.

We are trying to learn many things quickly, ie: getting around in taxis and buses, locations of language schools, etc because two interns will be coming next week and we will have some responsibility for helping them get adjusted, since our regional director, Dan, will be out of the country.

Thank you all for your prayers and words of encouragement- we’ve been so blessed and it’s always wonderful to hear from home. In some ways we feel like we’ve been here a month rather than a week!

-Candice