Ants Ants Everywhere

I must mention as a quick aside that it slightly unnerving to have small brown ants crawling everywhere, including out of my computer. Really, they’re everywhere.

So woke up to internet down. Not the coolest - but must forge ahead. Sat down at breakfast and resolutely decided to have the soft rice soup with fish rather than the rice soup with fish. Bad idea. I had seen other people with it and it looked great. It looked not that differant than the regular one and it all reality it isn’t - the rice rather than being in grain form is a nice thick porridge.

So there I am spoon eagerly awaiting, and it sucked. Maybe I’m still mired in a mindset where breakfast isn’t salty soup with meat, but porridge should be sweet with nice things in it - a raisin or an apple chunk or even the occasional strawberry. Maybe I’ll have toast tommorow AM.

We walked as a group down to the ESL training center, another bit of a surprise as it isn’t on the university - just a storefront all ~25 of us strolled into. Strange. Back through a couple of doors and into a small classroom. The teachers, Paul & Simon, ended up being Brit expats with a propensity for using the word “lexis” as it pertains to vocabulary and saying “ok” between each phrase, ok?. We gathered that they did have some sort of degree, ok?, a connection to VIA, ok?, and in all fairness quite the teaching flare. ok?

Lunch was a bit of a blur - somewhere in there - probably consisted of us sitting at a table with a very, very dirty table cloth (we think the Thais must see a dirty table cloth as a measure of how much exuberance the last diners had - the dirtier the better) at pointed at some mostly fried meat/veggie to put over noodles or rice - good, but when was the last time you ate Thai everyday? The fruit is quite good - pineapple and jackfruit and lychees and longans and mangosteines(sp?) and dragonfruit (red & white varieties) and even a durian, once (think garlic and chives with a sweet aftertaste - everybody says the ice cream is better - but the thais make some weird ice cream - tarot for example).

We did quite a bit of interactive classroom work - being the students - first hour was taught to us strictly in Thai to put us in the mindset of a foreign student, 8 hours later I do feel a bit more prepared - only 13 more classes to go.

Dinner mirrored above - cept it was a curry. Had dessert called a “rotee”, think donut x 20 - fried dough rolled around some sweet mixture drizzled with condensed milk. Call my dentist.