Roi Et - town and country and life

It's a bigger town than I expected. I thought it was going to be a podunk one-horse little town. It has a rather nice city center with a lake and fountains and a pagoda with a large Buddha statue on a little island in the middle.

Well, the school we are teaching at is outside of the city, about a half-hour drive. We pass endless rice paddies, endlessly, along a red dirt road. Small neighborhoods with clusters of scrappy houses bunched closely together. Simple cement structures or wooden houses on stilts. Laundry hanging and various scraps littering the space below and the yard. Cows, chickens and dogs wander among the houses. And little kids. Suddenly, next to a scrappy shack with a corrugated metal roof, there's a big fancy house with white-washed walls, clean and new, and a beautiful blue tile roof, as well as a gilded gate and fence. And then another scrappy shack. Peculiar contrast. And cows everywhere, grazing between the houses and along the roads, in front of municipal buildings, on the soccer field, and in the grassy divider section between highway lanes.

We travel in the back of a pick-up truck. Common mode of transportation here. I like the sun and wind in my face. But sometimes it's going a bit fast, especially over the potholes in the road.

We live in one of the school principal's houses, sandwiched between a Thai boxing place (which interestingly is housed in what looks to be a cow shed, next to cows grazing in a field) and a temple. At night one hears the monks chanting, filling the air with peace and serenity, and then on the other side the "pow! bam! boom! aargh!" from the boxers.

Every morning at 6 am I am awakened by announcements on a loudspeaker with the occasional music and chanting. Apparently, the temples broadcast announcements (local news?) across the neighborhood. The ultimate public radio. I am pretty much ready to get up at that time anyway. The sun just having risen, the day starting. We go to bed early instead. By 8 or 9 o'clock we're beat -- after a hard day's work jumping around with the kids!

We work at the school from 9 am to 3 pm. I teach three intensive classes. It's hot. Already after the first class I am soaked with sweat! At the end of the day I feel like I've been run over by a truck. But it's great! Cuz it's good work and the kids are getting so much out of it.

The other teachers along for the ride are Liz Knox (from Canada), who's clowning with me, and then Pat, a Thai juggler, and Tony, an American ex-pat juggler, and they are teaching (you guessed it) juggling.