our house, our neighbors and their names

We spent the first three weeks of our stay with the family of Pi Ray one of the english teachers. As we mentioned in an earlier blog one of our housemates was "Pak" or "Anong", Pi ray's son, who was our first intro into how Thai people name there children. Everyone called him "Anong" which is the general thai word for " little kid" but his birth name is Pak. Over dinner one night we learned that Pi Ray loved to eat vegetables or in Thai "Pak". Her love for vegetables was its strongest during her pregnancy with "Pak" and therefore determined his name. We thought is was funny but kinda cool and didn't really think about it much more.Our stay with them was lovely but we were excited when they told us they were "building" us our own house. We soon discovered that by "building" they meant fixing up an already existing house (which actually was where Pi Ray's family had originally lived). Our house consisted of two floors. The first floor was all tiled, had a leather couch (Brigid's seat) and three leather chairs (Brian's seat), a TV that didn't work, a refrigerator, and a bathroom (including non flushing squatting toilet and cold shower). Upstairs were two rooms, one of them was scary and we shut the door and never went into and the other was the bedroom complete with school view, porch, and a "mattress" (two long hard pillows on the equally hard wooden floor). It soon became our home and we began to appreciate all of the little things that came with it. The geckos that lived with us that helped too control the large bug population. One of our favorite pastimes was watching the geckos hunt and eat bugs on our wall. We named all of the geckos, Max, Sam, Pedro, Julian, Becko, Nubs and Big Mama (about 6 inches long ). We also had lovely backyard neighbors, the roosters who would wake us up always in time for school with their crowing, frontyard neighbors, the cows who became increasingly more friendly as time went on even poking their head in the front door, and everyday visitors, the random dogs, Leo, Boom, and Fanta who had no real home but were taken care of by everyone and lived on school property. Brigid really struggled with these last neighbors because all she wanted to do was pet and love the dogs which she was not allowed to do because they were dirty street dogs.Even though she was not allowed to have contact with the dogs she still found ways to sneak food to them when Brian wasn't looking, and therefore ensuring their continual presence.
We had human neighbors as well....