Real life is not a Sandra Bullock movie...

....if it were, there would be a stunningly handsome guy rushing from the airport to sweep me into his arms and lessen the culture shock with his sparkly eyes and strong hands.

But this is a fantasy.  Real life is this:  Our "beds" are mattresses on the ground...two mattresses for three people, which we have put all in the same room as a means of moral support.  Our house has two bathrooms.  One has a sink which is attached to nothing.  The other has an anemic stream of water we must use to wash our face.  The anemic water stream bathroom has a toilet with a flusher, but it doesn't seem to flush anything down per se.  The bathroom with the disconnected sink has a toilet which in order to "flush," we must scoop water from a bucket and pour it into the toilet until it appears that the pee has made its way down the drain.  The "shower" is a hose of cold water that sprays out in millions of directions, except usually the one you want it to spray in.  Shivering in the shower is so depressing.

Oh, and also the light is out in the shower/toilet bathroom so we must do everything in the dark with a flashlight.

Couldn't make this up if I tried.

Also, there is this waiting for us every time we come home:

The neighbors have farm birds.  It's literally like someone wrote down my worst fear and made it happen.  Worst fear being my home overrun by birds, not those other fears I frequently have nightmares about (kidney harvesting and quicksand....for real guys).  They cock-a-doodle-do every morning at 5:30 and I am *this close* to finding some sucker to sell me a sawed off shogun so I can cock-a-doodle-do their sorry behinds at 5:25 tomorrow morning.  The neighbors may be startled by the crack of a shotgun and the sudden disappearance of their devil-roosters, but I will simply repeat what they say to me when I get stressed about the fact that I have to use a bucket of water to flush my toilet in the dark: "mai pen rai."  It's the Thai version of Hakuna Matata.  It's a very Hakuna Matata culture....unfortunately, I would like a flushing toilet so I'm not quite so mai pen rai at the moment.

Our coordinator is "trying" to speak with the manager of the apartment complex where we were originally supposed to live, but evidently the fact that he is a "ladyboy" makes this task difficult, and the owners do not like foreigners.  We are living racial profiling, people.  It's a ugly thing.

I had my first day of teaching today and long story short, the children are nearly impossible to deal with.  They barely behave for the Thai teachers, so the fact that we can barely speak a word of Thai means that its so hard to control them at all.  I had six classes today, after which I wanted to violently hurl myself off the roof of the building....or actually, I wanted to hurl someone else off the roof of the building.

There is usually a couple girls who sit at the front of the class who are the good students.  They listen when I talk, they do the work I ask them to, and they can grasp enough English to be teachable.  There are boys who wander around the classroom doing god knows what, and there are girls who shriek at the boys.  All the doors and windows are open on account of no air conditioning, and the echoing effect is ghastly.  Its basically a zoo, and I now have a greater respect for any teacher I ever had....and would also like to seriously question their sanity.

We are again tonight at the hostel in Krabi Town where we stayed a few nights ago (about a 40 minute bus ride from the school) because there are flushing toilets and bed frames here.  We considered getting a place in Krabi Town and commuting in every morning like many of the teachers do, but we may not have communicated that so well and the others teachers are concerned about the unreliable transportation.  And I think the school will only pay for accommodations in Ao Luk.  Unfortunately for us, Ao Luk is totally devoid of any sort of nightlife, bars, exciting street vendors or shopping.

*****

On a positive note, we took a trip the other day to the beach called Ao Nang, where aside from a freak rainstorm, we had a lovely day at the beach.

 Raining at the beach :'(

Stacy and I got delicious pineapple shakes....Carlyn's papaya shake tasted like moldy carrots.  Lesson learned.

 Ao Nang.  Not exactly paradise, but in a pinch, it'll do perfectly fine.

On the way home from Ao Nang, we ended up riding below deck with the luggage on the bus!  It was so ridiculous, but made us laugh at the vast cultural differences.  Can you imagine the lawsuit that would become of people being forced to ride in the bottom of the bus at home??!!

Here we are on our first day at the school yesterday.  We didn't teach, since it was some sort of holiday for us, but the students were there and the other teachers taught, so what happened with our classes is anyone's guess.

We all look so sweaty and nervous because we were....sweaty and nervous.  Seriously I have never sweated so much in my life!  We must do laundry asap because our clothes are beginning to smell.

And I'm running out of clean underwear.  Eeshk!

What is really adorable is that all the students seem to think we are beautiful despite the fact that we are dripping, sticky messes.  They yell at us as we pass, "teacha! teacha! hallo teacha!"  "teacha beautiful!"  I've never had so many people tell me I'm beautiful....I could totally get used to this!

The view from the windows of the English Department at school are pretty cool what with all the mountains and palm trees....would be nice if there was air conditioning, but when a nice cross breeze gets going, its actually very pleasant.  Most of the school is in shade from the huge canopy of trees except for two buildings far away, so it could be much worse.