Don't Panic

At the end of this week, I will start again where I left many years ago.  I will be living in a house.  The difference this time is that the house will be in Thailand.  I spent a good portion of my younger years caring and tending a house and the garden around it as well as raising two sons.  Now, after so much has gone by, I will recover a life I have missed.

Nee is still in Bangkok, getting classes on farming, as we are also buying a piece of land here in town.  My town is Fang, Chiang Mai, a farming community 150 kilometers north of the city of Chiang Mai.  I am only a few kilometers from the Myanmar border.  For the last year, I have been teaching English in a large private school across the street from my one-room apartment.  Starting next week, I will be in a house just behind the school in a very modern neighborhood, similar to one I might find in an American suburb.  If I had stayed in the US, I might have been able to regain my momentum and gotten another house.  My luck looked like it was more likely I was going to be living in my car, though, and so I am here.

My new home starting this weekend

Meanwhile, I continue to teach.  This year started quite differently from last.  The first time I walked into a classroom then, I had never been responsible for teaching a class before.  I had been through brief teacher training, though most of that was in front of nursery school children.  My first job long-lasting job was at my current school.  I had done a brief assignment in the south deep inside a rubber plantation and far from any shopping or entertainment and rain fell every day, all day, leaving all I owned damp and miserable to wear.  I knew I wanted to go back north.

As of this writing, I have one more month of teaching until I end the first semester of my second year here.  I feel as if it only just began.  Teaching here is exhausting, occasionally frustrating, challenging, but most of all, it is great fun.  Each day I come into one of my 16 classes of 50 students each to see their smiles.  Whenever some personal matter came up that left me feeling depressed, I would go to a class and all would be forgotten.  My only thoughts are of my students and how I can get them to speak more clearly and feel confident in their own abilities.

I will continue to write my adventures as it looks like we may be heading in directions I had never considered before.  Stay tuned.

My Adventure Continues

I came to Thailand a year and a half ago for a new beginning.  My wife is Thai, I was out of work in the US, the economy was in terrible shape, I had lost my home and all I had was a rented house full of my furniture.  When I came here, I had many plans, many different ideas of how I was going to regain my western lifestyle. None of them worked.  Strangely, at least for me, the longer I am here, the less I miss the life I had before.

This is my story of leaving everything that I was familiar with and coming to a foreign country to make a life for myself and my wife.  Before I came here, I wrote a weekly blog of my joys and struggles, and this will be a continuation of that story, though the theme has changed.  At first, I resisted change and yet change was forced on me every day.  I think I am changing.

A view from land we are buying

My blog is not a travel journal, though I do talk about my travels when I take them.  I avoid complaining about Thailand as it is pointless to complain about a place I chose to be that is so entirely different from where I came from.  I am also not a night clubber, so don't expect tales of escapades in various wild hangouts.  I am still basically the same person I was a few years ago, though my eyes have been opened to possibilities I had not considered seriously for a very long time.

In the US, I was an auditor.  I spent most of my days reviewing work done by other people and reporting my results to their managers.  The managers appreciated me when I gave them good news and ignored me when I gave them bad news.  The work paid well, though I found I was able to do it in my sleep after so many years.

The first major change that was thrust upon me was losing my job.  This particular management only wanted happy news and that isn't what auditors are very good at.  They gave me a nice check and sent me on my way.

What I liked most about the work was that it was mostly unstructured.  I had a method that I applied to each review, but what I reviewed was up to me.  I apply that flexibility to my new work as an English teacher to 800 Thai high school students.  Surprisingly to me is that I both like teaching and find I am getting better at it.  Thus my story is about teaching and living in Thailand.  Feel free to drop me comments and suggestions.  As the title of this says, my adventure continues.