I couldn't identify the neighborhood where I live. That's just how it is with farangs: unless you live in one of the big three--Smile, SP, Wassana--or a well-defined muban, you never say where you live but where it's near. Same thing in Ayutthaya, Chiang Mai, Bangkok, HatYai, Khanom, anywhere else: nobody knows where you live, or if they do they wouldn't understand your explanation--a cabbie could take a local to the end of any of the smallest, most bass-akward and overgrown singletrack walkways, but if a farang responds to a prompt with "Tesco" (which, within town, is like saying "Take me to the Taj Mahal") odds are 50-50 at best that the farang will have to shout directions.
So I don't know where I live, just that it's near this one place place and across from that other.
In American terms, the neighborhood is about the size of a SuperWalMart and its parking lot. It has one entrance from the main road, which goes one building length--mine's the building on the left--and hits a T at the place everybody knows. The T goes a block either direction--paralleling the main road--before turning "back" from the main road for three extremely short blocks.
I would put ZERO stake in it, but at a guess there are fifteen hundred people living here. And it's one of the nicer--which is to say, more spacious--areas.
I've mentioned my laundry lady. She's a very large, very solid, broke-no-argument mother. You know she has your best interests in mind, but that doesn't change the fact that the merest shade of her discontent scares the hell out of you. And she's the mother of anywhere from 1 to 6 of my students (it's hard to tell with Thai kids--they move like shoals of sardines and herd half as well). I tell myself they're used to seeing people's skimpies hanging out to dry, or waiting to be pressed. And I pointedly ignore that mine are the only skivvies in this hemisphere to sport Monty Python, Superman, and tye-dye patterns (although not concurrently).
It's almost intimidating: I have to pick up my laundry promptly or she gets worried. And there is no waiting until I have a full load of dirty clothes--it takes two calendar days to get a load all washed and pressed, and if I don't have a new bag of dirties by the following morning, she gets worried.
I should backtrack some.
Laundry and I don't get along in terms that would meet my grandmother's approval. Option 1 is to let the stuff pile up until I've run out of key components of my wardrobe, and then go on a laundry bender. Option 2--from a couple of glorious schoolyears--was having a washer and dryer in the bathroom and fluffing what begins the week as seven or eight shirts, boxers, pairs of socks, and a few pairs of pants for a few minutes while brushing teeth, then just dressing straight from the dryer.
I also get in trouble for dropping off laundry without enough hangers.
But I've run out of hangers: somehow, when all but three day's wash is regularly done, hangars become as precious as fresh socks once were.
When I come home from school, there's food most days: a pot of rice with some sort of searing curry. If I do partake, there are frozen yogurt bars and packs of napkins. (No tangent, but it gets old being unable to eat an affordable meal without the skin being burned off my inner cheeks and tongue, not to mention the other cheeks....)
Two doors down is a place where I can buy ramen noodles, packets of deepfried whatnots, and recharge the minutes on my cell phone.
And then there are the ladies who live in between. They do haircutting and reflexology: 60 baht for about an hour with a straight razor flying around your head and terrifying every loose hair into perfect order. Or it's 100 baht for a session with a reflexologist who squeezes your feet and says, "you hurt in your XYZ and BCD, right? Is very bad down here."
There are other farangs here, I think. There have been, anyway, enough that kids don't stare unless I do something wild like walk around without shoes on. And I'm three long blocks from campus, or up to ten minutes from anywhere in town, if it takes that long to flag down a songtau or mototaxi.
Welcome to Thailand?
Here's hoping I get to spend a while in this part of the country.
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