Real Life

I’ve been struggling for a few weeks to think of a good topic for a blog post. Life has been pretty “normal” here, and there haven’t been any big events that warrant a post. Here are a few small events that have made it feel less like a vacation and more like our real life:

Last Saturday I drove our car for the first time! You may or may not know that in Thailand, drivers drive on the left-hand side of the road, and the steering wheel is on the right-hand side of the car. Scott has been doing this flawlessly for weeks, but for me driving was a big deal. Granted, I only drove to the local grocery store next to our neighborhood, which required about 30 seconds of driving on the highway. Still, I had to park, back up, merge with traffic, etc, and no one died!

I also caught a pan on fire. We have a gas stove and oven outside our house in what is basically an enclosed porch. I had started to heat the oil and went back inside to grab something else from the kitchen. Big mistake! The oil caught fire and I had to put it out with some flour. Nothing was damaged and no one was hurt, but it definitely reminded me that this is our residence and if something goes wrong, we need to find a solution, not call on someone else to fix it.

Our outdoor kitchen

We had our first doctor visit last Sunday. E had a slight fever for a few days that just wouldn’t totally go away, so we took her to the hospital to make sure she hadn’t contracted some tropical disease. There aren’t really individual doctor’s offices here, everyone just goes to the hospital if they need to see a doctor. We were very impressed with how clean and efficient the hospital was, and how cheap it was to receive good medical care. Everyone we interacted with also spoke English, which was a relief since I didn’t know how to describe her symptoms in Thai. (Or describe anything, really, in Thai.) E just had a basic infection and is feeling much better now!

Waiting area in the pediatric clinic

This week we tried real street food for the first time. There is a market on select days at a plaza that we frequent and we bought food there for dinner. We weren’t super adventurous this time, but we do plan to go back and try some other things (i.e. fried insects) another time. The market has many individual tents and some tables behind the tents where you can sit and eat your food. We had all settled down with our individual food choices and were in the middle of eating when it started to sprinkle. This in itself is not a huge deal, but since it is rainy season we knew that it could quickly become a downpour. We scarfed as much of our food down as we could, then ran for shelter outside a nearby McDonalds. We were all pretty soaked by the time we got to our car, but we did get to see a beautiful rainbow while we waited for the downpour to let up. (Spoiler: it never did.)

Waiting out the rain at Meechok Plaza

These events and many others have helped us learn how to live like residents instead of tourists. We’re looking forward to acclimating more and more to Thai culture!