It’s been a good few days here. One week of intensive Thai down! The weather is much nicer these days now that the rainy season is on. It does sometimes dump rain for ten to twenty minutes and going anywhere during this torrent is impossible. On the other hand, the weather has been cooler and there is often a layer of rolling clouds protecting my pasty white skin from the sun. It also makes for some good views. Sometimes it creeps me out a bit when it get super dark really quickly during the middle of the day from these thick clouds overhead. Are the deatheaters coming for me, or is it just about to rain?

There really is not much to do here at night. After dinner I usually head back to the room pretty early. I have made friends with some of the younger shopkeepers in the neighborhood, but we have only hung out a few times. On the other hand I have been meeting up with some of these cute little ladies. Luckily I haven’t had any inside my room yet, but I know it is only a matter of time.

A few nights ago I went out with a new friend I met on campus. She took me to an all you can eat barbeque place. Pretty awesome really! You pick up raw meat, vegetables, and noodles and grill them on your table. Also, on the way home I discovered a little street cart that makes a dessert with a sort of super thin wafer wrapped around marshmallows and raisins. They are great!

School has started, class is great, and homework is happening. There are five students in the class, and everyone seems really nice. There is a young man from Vietnam, an older teacher from Wales who has been teaching at private schools around Asia for the last twenty years, a language expert from Singapore, a young women who I think may be in seminary and here on exchange, and myself. Also, because we are special students, our class is held in the international/graduate student building which is brand new and really nice. This means air conditioning and no bugs. Also, it is an inside/outside building so it is sort of like a touch of home (in this case home being Sakamaki Hall at the University of Hawaii).

And as always, the food is great. I have now entered the “hubris stage” and am trying to eat anything and everything edible. Will this come back to haunt me? Only time will tell. I took a picture of the menu at my favorite eatery so that I could come home, translate it, and figure out what the foods were. This has been great. It has allowed me to order foods that I know are loaded with vegetables, or on the other hand, to order deep-fried balls of pork stuffed with chilies! My favorite go to is a really simple and lean long roasted pork with a sort of thin peanut sauce. It is pretty delicious. Also, I have gained a reputation as one of the only foreigners that anyone on my street has met who likes fruit. Thus people now regularly bring me fruit to make sure that I experience the real variety. Not too bad a reputation I guess.

Despite a concern that my classes maybe canceled, it turns out that my classes are on, the tuition is all paid, and I start Monday. One month of intense Thai language training to go.

I woke up pretty early this morning to the sound of chirping and flapping birdies. As it turns out, the mommy/daddy bird decided it was time to toss the baby birds out of the nest to make sure they learn to fly. I suppose it is vital that children are thrown out of the house to make sure they become adults, I mean you don’t want them living there forever, but man does it seem to make a lot of noise. Despite a couple of the birds hanging out on my balcony in the morning, I think they all made it through the ordeal.

Speaking of wildlife, I spotted my first one of these (not) so little cuties yesterday.  He ran away pretty quickly and I had no desire to chase after him. I mean, me and Hagrid our pretty tight, but still you never know how many friends he has.

I also had my first meal this time around that was genuinely too spicy for me. I felt a little like I might be sick after finishing it. Although it doesn’t look too hot, I have found it is really the salads that get you. I guess the idea is to burn off any bacteria, germs, etc…

On the other hand, I had an extremely pleasant and super cheap bag filled with mulberries as a dessert. These are really a sort of byproduct of the silk production industry – you need mulberry leaves to feed to silkworms – but they are dried and sold in hippy food stores in the United States as a “super food” so they must be good for me.