Oh yeah, this place.

I have to say it was odd being back after such a long time away. Trying to remember the little Thai that I know, I was surprised to find that I’d forgotten a lot of it already. At the same time there was a feeling of being back home and found that parts of the language came back only when I didn’t think about it. Our first day back in the neighborhood, two men came to our house offering their services as cleaning and pest control. Without thinking, I spit out some Thai that I thought I’d forgotten. The problem is that once you start, they sometimes assume that you speak the language and then start jabbering at you. Such was the case with the exterminators. I did however manage to get rid of them in my own broken Thai-English way.
The neighbors quickly noticed my holiday paunch. Apparently I put on a few pounds over the holidays and the Thais aren’t shy about pointing it out. I guess that’s what happens when you pretty much eat nonstop and don’t do a whole lot of moving for a month. Or it may be because I’m now another year older and the old system just ain’t metabolizing the way it use to. At any rate, my new layer of blubber was the first thing our Thai friends talked about. “Oh!” they say, pointing to my bulging areas and motioning with their hands around their faces as if to indicate a Charlie Brown sized head. Yeah, it’s good to see them too.
The mosquitoes which quickly became a vague memory while I was back in the winter climate of Colorado came back to remind me of their god given duty in full force last night. I was bit at least four times on each foot. (My feet are prime targets for mosquitoes. They are the limited areas of exposed skin that don’t grow hair- I’m like a reverse Hobbit in that way.)
As I sat in a beanbag chair in the living room last night, enjoying what was a relatively cool evening and scratching my new mosquito bites, a cockroach approached me. We had had some guys spray for bugs a while back, but the appearance of this sucker indicated the effect has worn off. As I was searching for the nearest thing to smash the living hell out of it with, it seemingly had a heart attack…or some kind of a fatal cockroach stroke. It flipped over on it’s back, legs flailing in the air for a good twenty minutes and then it stopped. Dead? No. In my experience, roaches that are on their back and look in every respect, “dead,” indeed are not. They need to lie there motionless for at least a few more days to a week until they can be pronounced dead.
It’s the year of the Dog, according to the Chinese calendar. A large Chinese population coupled with the Thais willingness to celebrate just about anything makes it quite the recognized holiday over here. Our local mall is decked out in red dragons, miniature decorative storeyed pavilions and archways. Ubiquitous red garments, emblazoned with gold Chinese characters are displayed on mannequins that oddly enough tend to look as thought they were modeled after blowup dolls. (This isn’t unique to the holiday; the mannequins over here are weird looking.)
In other news, our neighborhood pool is finally constructed, possibly timed to coincide with the Chinese New Year, its been under construction for at least eight months. Finally we have a refuge from the depraved heat of the Thai day…and night. We’ll see how long it takes for the children of the neighborhood to turn it into a giant toilet. Yellow and blue makes green right?