The first weekend...

... brings with it the first surprise. Even though there are 18 of us in the course this month, I'm the only one so far that has opted to stay in a room above the school instead of a hotel room down the road. What that means, with the staff being gone for the weekend, is that I have the entire school to myself for my first weekend here. I don't know that any of the other students know that I'm here, and I haven't as yet run into them by wandering over to the hotel. SO, I've spent my first days in a foreign country on my own.

It hasn't been all bad, just slightly less adventuresome than I would have imagined the weekend with other people to hang out with. Every day so far I have gone for a few exploratory walks, simply picking a road and following it on foot for a while. It always makes for an interesting walk, since the sidewalks are about as random as one could expect, sometimes disappearing entirely. I think the hardest part about the strolls has been remembering to look the right way when crossing a street. It is kind of fun not to have to obey any traffic laws though, you just simply walk out into traffic whenever you need to cross and they all go around you!

It has rained on and off since about 8:00 last night and when it decides to rain here, the sky isn't usually joking around. One of the engineers upstairs has obviously developed the means to allow the maximum amount of water to fall at once without actually requiring anyone to swim. This morning it was quite nice out and so I walked all the way down the couple miles to the supermarket, picking up a few snacks and wandering around the mall. KFC here is an ice cream shop inside the supermarket, which I found amusing, though Mickey D's appeared to be fairly normal.

On my way home this time, it of course started raining while the sun was still shining, though fairly quickly it was cloudy and raining quite heavily. Having nowhere to be, I simply made sure my bag shut tight and whistled my way home in the rain. The problem with getting wet during the day in Thailand is that you can't really get dry. Certainly a towel can make you less wet, but it takes a good couple of hours in front of a fan to really actually feel dry again, even after a change of clothes.

As I sit here, the sun appears to be out again, so I think I'll wander over to the hotel again and see if I can run into anybody before lunch. Maybe then I'll at least have somebody to laugh at me when my nose starts running again...