The Heat is On!

Despite my friends and family in the US currently freezing from winter temperatures, March and April here are the summer months.  Humidity shot up from a pleasant 18% to 46%, a very noticeable difference.  Much has happened here and more will be happening soon.  School is out until May except for the summer schools here and there which is where I have been student teaching.

Nee got a job starting tomorrow.  As are most jobs, this one is a two edged sword, as she will be able to re-enter her old career of working export for a factory.  Unfortunately, the factory is somewhere between hell and gone.  The logistics for now will be for her to catch a red songtaew at 6:30 in the morning and go to the main market.  From there, she must take the white songtaew and get off about an hour later in front of a school in the town there.  The factory is still about two miles away so someone will be picking her up there for the next two weeks until we can work out transportation, moving, and any other problems we might find.  We spent most of this weekend trying to find a new home and talking about other modes of transportation.  Unlike the US, used cars here are not much of a bargain.  Cars, in general, are quite expensive.  In fact we were looking at some land that cost about $600,000 baht and that much barely gets you a car here. 

My teacher training ends this week which will have me out looking for work....again.  I have already begun applying however schools are out now and won't start up again until May.  I have also been attempting to gain employment in my old career, auditing, down in Singapore.  I would have to travel back and forth but the advantage is that a week of auditing pays the equivalent of two months of teaching.  Ironically, I would probably enjoy teaching much more.  If I were to audit, I would try to do some tutoring here to stay in teaching.  I like seeing the lightbulbs going off in students' eyes when the learn something.
Fortunately, before all this happened, we were able to have fun last weekend.  We were asked by some friends here to help them with a, as Nee called it, some sort of Buddhist festival.  She spent Saturday chopping vegetables for a soup in preparation for Sunday.  The next morning we did the red then the green songtaew and ended up across the street from a Wat filled with traffic, lots of men in uniform and, as Nee noticed, most everyone was dressed in black.  If you read one of my earlier blogs, you know that funerals up here are as much celebration as they are mourning.  This was no exception.  Though we weren't dressed for it, we did manage to fit into the crowd with no problem.  Our friends had made a huge batch of a yummy vegetarian soup and a few tubs of rice noodles.  My job was to rip a handful of noodles and deposit into a bowl to have soup added to it.  You can see me at work below.

We did manage to take a break and check out the funeral proceedings.  Though there were some somber places, we also saw this.

The blue elephant face is actually the tail of a bird to fly the monk up to the heavens.  I can't see the bird but then I am not Thai.  The fellow standing on the statue is next to the body of the monk.  He is loading the entire structure with fireworks.  These were going to be set off much later with the finale being the burning of the body.  The whole thing is quite meaningful to the folks there.

We also managed to make it to the King's Floral Show, Rajapruk, just a few days before its close.  I photographed hundreds of orchids as I have dreams of growing some at our home here some day.  We just need to get jobs, find a home, buy it and move it.  Perhaps it will be a few years before I see my first blooms.