Settling Down Here in Krabi...

Meeting the neighbors...

We are in a great neighborhood with very friendly neighbors!  Thai people are amazingly hospitable.  Since we have begun to meet them, we have received more yummy treats than we can begin to count.  Sometimes, it's a pomelo, sometimes sweet coconut milk with some kind of treat inside, or a dinner entree.  Sometimes, we are not quite sure what it is--a great opportunity for a little Thai cultural lesson. On just one day this past week we received a huge hand of bananas, two coconuts (hand picked by our neighbor's son, who climbed the tree himself to get them for us!), a pack of fried banana chips, a couple bags of shrimp flavoured chips (which the girls loved!), 3 cucumbers, and 3 mangos.  If we meet anymore neighbors, we might not need to go grocery shopping anymore!

Our super sweet neighbor, Loong Chai peeling a pomelo for us to eat.

I've tried to reciprocate and have received (and had) a lot of good laughs!  One morning, our neighbor's son, Monchai, came to do some yard work for us with Chris.  Since they had been blessing us with so much, I  decided to give him some of our oatmeal to try.  :-)  I'm not really sure that he liked it; but, he gave it a go.  He only finished a third of the small bowl.  The next day he came, I made pancakes topped with pure maple syrup from back home.  This went over much better; he said it was much more tasty than the day before.  On Hope's birthday I poured some milk for everyone to drink with their cake and ice cream.  The two teenage girls didn't even attempt to pick up their glasses and the father drank his like it was a shot glass, quickly pouring water into his glass to chase it down!  I still laugh when I think about it.  I'm hoping to make some chocolate chip cookies to pass out soon; I think they might win the day with everyone!  We'll see...

Another thing that amazes me is how quick they are to invite us to go on significant trips with them, after knowing us for only a short while.  The family that we are renting our house from came by this week to deal with our terrible termite problem.  As we were talking, they invited us to come to visit their shrimp farm in another province.  They said they would pick us up and we could stay with them for a couple days.  Our neighbor's son invited us to visit his relatives' fish farm on a nearby island and then take Chris to go deep sea fishing.  A couple of days ago I met a neighbor who, after talking for only a short time, invited me to go to another province with her to see a large temple in the city.  I can't really imagine people in America meeting a foreigner and inviting him to his uncle's house in DC after one brief encounter!  :-)  We'll see if we can somehow fit all these trips in into our increasingly filled and busy schedule.

By far, our most exciting experience this past month was when a snake came to visit!  I was passing by the kitchen window and thought I saw something move in the carport.   So, I went for a closer look.  Sure enough, it was a snake!  I called Chris to come and kill it (you don't mess around with snakes here!).  Too late.  It quickly slithered under a concrete based table I had set up for the girls to color on.  We waited for a while to see if it would come out.  When it finally peeked it's head out, we saw that it had a diamond-shaped head; so, we were fairly sure it was poisonous.  Chris tried spraying water under the table to encourage it to leave; but, it didn't budge.  With the table being right next to our house where our kids play everyday, we decided to call our super-helpful neighbor, Loong Chai (who works only 3 minutes down the road) to come and help us.  He sped here on his little motor scooter right away with a long PVC pipe as his chosen weapon of execution.  Chris and Loong Chai managed to lift the heavy top of the table off without getting bit to see inside.  Loong Chai started swatting; we could all hear the snake hissing at him.  Thankfully, he was able to kill it. When he dragged it out for a closer look, we saw it was a cobra! Yikes!  Thankfully, it was not the spitting variety often encountered here.

In addition to snakes, we have huge spiders and poisonous centipedes here, as well.  Chris has killed two giant spiders under our carport and the longest centipede we have ever seen in our lives under a pile of rocks he was moving with Monchai.  We have also seen some dead scorpions, but know that their living relatives must still be lurking around outside somewhere.  Thankfully, we haven't encountered anything in our house yet, other than lots of lizards, termites, ants, and a newborn kitty, which lives above our drywall ceiling in the kitchen and screams for its mama throughout the day!  Speaking of lizards . . . the day after we killed the snake, Chris was just waking up in the morning when a kamikaze lizard leapt from the air conditioner on to his bare back.  I heard a loud crash in the bedroom and ran to see what it was: just a kamikaze lizard . . . no need for alarm.  

On the way home from language school this afternoon, Faith noticed a family of monkeys tightrope walking on a neighborhood power line to get to a rose apple tree in blossom above the street. . . . just one of the many unusual, fascinating, and (sometimes) scary, sights we experience daily here in our new home near the equator on the other side of the world.  Anyone want to come visit?  Our guestroom warmly awaits you!  ;-)

This centipede was over 7" long!!!  Crazy!