Each year for the past few years, I take my first and last photos of the year to create a blog post. This year's entries speak a little about who we are.
First Photo: Scarecrow in rural Chachoengsao
My wife and I are not city people. I used to say: “if I ask you directions to the city, it is so that I know which way NOT to go.” While Thailand still has a dominant rural/small town population, there are areas where the population is quite dense.
When we lived in Chachoengsao, we had a mix of both worlds. Our subdivision was close to the border of Bangkok and not far from Bangkok’s main airport. The subdivision was designed for the lower middle income bracket—and served primarily to house people who worked at the airport or related industries. And while the subdivision was surrounded by rice paddies, it was full of densely packed townhouses such as you might find in the city.
One of the challenges of urban life in Thailand is driving. Someone suggested that one reason driving is so challenging is that people learn to drive on a motorcycle first, and they drive those as if there aren't any rules in particular that apply to them (traffic signs, direction of traffic, uses of lanes, etc., are for cars.) Eventually they move up to a car or van or even a big freight truck but the bad habits from their motorcycle years remain.
Add to that the fact that roads aren't just for driving. They are also for temporary storage of construction materials, parties, selling, etc. They are also in some areas the favored sleeping spots for dogs.
The result is that driving is one of my least favorite things to do here. In Chachoengsao, the road to our subdivision was along a canal. It had two narrow lanes and no shoulder. Much of the way the road was lined with houses that were in the narrow space between the road and the canal. One had to be especially careful not to hit someone or something. So in the dry season, I tended to take an alternate route. There was another road ran parallel the canal road that went through the fields. It was mostly unpaved and quite rough about a month into wet season. But there was little traffic and hardly any homes to speak of. So I found the drive to be much more relaxing.
The main crop grown along the road was rice—at least 3 crops per year. And scarecrows could be seen in many of the fields. Sometimes, from a distance, on would almost think they were people as they moved about in the wind. I like the touch of adding a CD to the above scarecrow. Now if you could just get scarecrow to do karaoke—that would keep the birds away!
Last photo: hibiscus
A year later finds us far removed physically and culturally from Chachoengsao. We are living in a small town—so small there isn't even a Seven-Eleven (though rumor has it one is coming). While many people don’t like living in such a small town as this, it is well suited to us. A weekly trip to the grocery store in Chiang Khong (30 km away) supplies us with some of those things that our foreign taste buds enjoy that we can’t find in the market or small shops here.
We rent a house with a yard that even has space to plant things. So now it’s a challenge for me to visit a plant nursery because there are so many beautiful and/or edible things to plant, but the yard is only so big and time to keep it up is limited. And now that our goals for our work here have changed, it means we may actually be able to stay in our house a few years. Consequently, we can think down the road when choosing what to plant.
We were at a plant nursery in Chiang Rai a couple of weeks ago. One of the sellers had a good selection of different types of hibiscus. All so beautiful. We ended up getting two. The one in the photo got a pretty pot and became a New Year's gift for our landlord. I still have to figure out where to put the other one.
Wiang Kaen is not where we had hope to be living—we had dreams to be working in a different part of the country. But if one has to live some place, this, for us, is a nice place to live.
Take delight in the LORD, and he will give you your heart’s desires.Psalm 37:4 (NLT)
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