Thursday, August 9

By today, I’ve developed my walking to school routine. I walk to the closest BTS, ride one stop to Thonglor (where my school is located), buy fruit from a stand (today I got bananas), buy coffee from a cute little man on the street with an actual espresso machine, hop on a motor taxi (while drinking my coffee), and ride a few blocks to work. Easy enough.

Some pics on my way to work...

After school today, I decided to go shopping for apartment necessities at Big C, the Thai equivalent of WalMart. Luckily, one of the girls from work came with me and was able to help me understand that “yes, this is dish detergent”, and “no, that is for the washing machine”. Glad I avoided that disaster. She also showed me the brands she uses for soap and milk, etc., which made shopping a little bit easier and faster.

You would think after watching it rain now every day at 4:00, that maybe I would have been smart enough to come prepared with an umbrella. But here I find myself standing outside Big C, loaded with pillows, detergent, milk, toilet paper and other heavy awkward items in the pouring down rain. No worries or “mai bin lai” – as Thai’s would say. I will just hail a cab. This leads me to my next lesson…good luck hailing a cab between the hours of 5-6. For lack of any other options, I started to walk. Every 2-3 minutes I’d turn around, wave at a cab through the monsoon like downpour, and watch it pass me. Sometimes, I’d even get splashed with street water… a little icing on the cake. Finally, someone pulled over and delivered me to my apartment, which at this point was maybe 2 blocks away. But hey, at least I have toilet paper tonight. Still no sheets, but I’ll take care of that this weekend. Apparently, decent sheets are hard to come by around here and a trip to IKEA is in the works for the weekend...details to come. As for now, I am heading down to a cute little coffee shop next to my apartment because I’ve been told it has the best inexpensive Tom Ka Gai around (coconut milk and chicken dish). It ranks right up there with fried pork noodle soup, so I’m excited, and the atmosphere is a perfect escape from the rain.