a lazy sunday

Sunday morning bright and warm. I woke up to sunlight pouring through my blinds, little birds twittering in the banana tree outside my room and... the sound of one of my Thai neighbors wailing into the microphone of a karaoke machine. volume turned all the way up. [Be aware that this is at about quarter to eight in the morning.] Karaoke is a national pastime here and I've become accustomed to finding these public humiliation opportunities almost everywhere, but in a quiet neighborhood, early on Sunday morning? It was all the incentive I needed to wriggle out of the sheets and get into the shower (more to drown out what now sounded like a horse enduring a slow death, though, than to get clean).

After a full 30 minutes with no respite from the "singing" I had to escape. I wandered through the neighborhood, greeting ("Sawasdee kaaa" "Sawasdee kaaa") and bowing to everyone.. the construction workers, policemen, groups of women with strollers and parasols, grandmothers hanging out wet laundry, old men weaving down the road on chidren's bicycles (I don't know why, but they all seem to ride kids' bikes here), street food vendors sweating over vats of wonderful smelling and completely unidentifiable foods, packs of motorbike drivers sprawled on the streetside, lounging in the shade..

I worked up an appetite swimming at the school's pool, which is always completely abandoned because, I've been told, no one here knows how to swim. [this begs the question why they would build and maintain an Olympic sized swimming pool, but I've learned to stop searching for conventional logic here.]

breakfast
sweet, cool mango with juicy little (paper-flavored) dragonfruit cubes

My papaya tree
(they wrap the fruits with plastic bags when they start maturing...
to help them ripen? keep bugs/birds away?)

I ate breakfast out on my little patio in the shade of my papaya tree, surrounded by last week's laundry hanging from the clotheslines. I lounged there with my book for a couple of hours before wandering out for some lunch...

lunch
Spicy, tangy soup with lots of lemongrass and lime, crunchy bean sprouts,
fresh green beans and chewy, meaty little oyster mushrooms

The rest of this day was entirely unexciting. cleaning and preparing lesson plans. dinner was scrambled eggs with rice and fish sauce. mmmm.