Looking out Ry's bedroom window, some very hard working gardeners, but a few took time to decorate their hats
Outside our gate
Along Rob's running route are rural fields adjacent to our neighborhood & golf course. Workers nap here in hammocks during hot afternoons
500 m down road from our neighborhood
She thump tests for the perfect one, does the dirty work and slices up the entire thing... all for about 50 cents. Always feels like I'm stealing a little piece of heaven
Laundry room, love it! Can you spy the gecko? Just a bitty one. Yes, it is both a washer & dryer, but drying feature takes forever & I like hanging things out. Trying to get more green
Girls' bath repair. Water started dripping through ceiling below soon after moving in, thankfully just into the laundry area
Alternate bath for little mermaid
Neighborhood spirit house, every neighborhood & establishment has one. Pool is on the right
Laem Chabang golf course from our yard. Another little piece of heaven
Our little yard with golf course behind
Fall foliage
Between 9 & 9:30am and in the course of 3 minutes (I timed one. It's been a slow week stuck home with sick child & maintenance guys) this little bud opens into...
...this.We picked a country home away from town. Sort of in the boonies, very green & lush with small conical mountains nearby. 25 minutes inland from Pattaya, about half way between the sea and Rob's office. School isn't walk-able, but just a 5 minute drive. In good traffic, Rob can be to work in 15-20 minutes, but 30-40 is proving to be his norm. We picked the closest home to Rob's work, and it happened to be very close to the school we liked as well. Shortest commutes for all. We have a couple of my beloved small markets & local vendors close and will search out more. To Pattaya when we must buy from the chains.
Never thought I'd live on a golf course in a brand new cookie cutter home, but here I am. When Rob & I visited here in August, we learned that in the Pattaya area it is safest for expats to live in gated expat communities. Most all neighborhoods, except slums, are gated with guards. Still a very poor country, thievery and break-ins are common problems.
On September 24, the girls & I moved out of hotel and into our new single family, fully furnished home, rented for us by JCI (grateful, we are). Sits on the Jack Nicklaus designed Laem Chabang golf course... beautiful, peaceful setting... gonna have to pick up golf again. Our neighborhood has 17 homes built last year. We are the 6th family to move in, so it's still pretty quiet here. 2 German families, 1 Italian, 1 Japanese/USA, 1 Thai/USA, and us... some Aussies with kids the girls' age come next month.
The laundry room is on a covered terrace outdoors with coconut trees in view. Twice now I've had a frog keeping me company out there. Sat right next to me while I hung laundry and the teeny Thai washer chugged with challenge from our averaged-size american family. We hear the frog at night and very unusual bird sounds, especially just before & after dusk. Hope to identify some birds when our dust settles a bit. Little 18" cobras are of the common variety in our area as in the way garter snakes are common back home. Haven't seen any snakes yet, but the school principal tells me every 2-3 weeks they get a snake on campus. My prayers now have "snakes" in the subject line.
We had taken pictures of our new house for the girls, their bedrooms, yard, etc. but we didn't tell them about the pool in the green space 30 meters away. They were happily surprised and have been enjoying it daily. They are spoiled by our new pad complete with satellite TV, and I'm afraid may never want to go back home to our little cable-free house in the woods. No geckos to chase in Holland either. Ry hasn't caught one here yet, she did on Corsica, so she knows it's possible. We will enjoy our new setting all the more when we can take hot showers & bake in the oven. Shower #1 hasn't had hot water since we moved in, shower #2 went down a couple days ago, and I was about to bake a carrot cake last week (I'm already missing autumn) when I found the oven locked. So much for brand new house & minimal issues. Appears to be form OR function, not AND. Our new neighbors had similar issues upon moving in, but have been happy ever since so there is hope. Contractors will apparently need to break open a wall to fix one of our showers. All in Thai time... slow.
In many ways this is a charmed existence for our family. We hope to share with the girls some more typical Thai housing arrangements, slums, corrugated metal roofs, dirt floors, pit toilets. We see these homes daily when driving from here to there. The first time we passed a slum, Al's jaw dropped, "They LIVE there?" Then we passed another, and another, and another.
Yes, my little Yankee, many people live there.
