Thursday, September 9

So we have a cockroach problem. They aren’t the big, nightlife-loving, cigarette-smoking cockroaches you see scuttling across the streets of Bangkok at night—they’re much smaller and less, uh, squishy to kill. But they are in our kitchen—on the floors, behind the fridge, and (worse) in the silverware drawer—and we occasionally see them in the living room or in the main bathroom.

At first, there were only a few and we mostly ignored them. Then, when we started seeing more, we bought roach traps, but that didn’t do anything—they just seemed to congregate around the traps and, if anything, they increased in number.

Then we looked for some kind of bug bomb/fogger, but all we could find at any of the supermarkets was a roach spray. We cleared out all the foodstuffs and equipment from the kitchen, and sprayed all over, but still there seemed to be no decrease in the number of roaches. Ugh.

We looked online for a roach fogger, and there weren’t many options on Lazada. We saw one product that looked like it might be right, but there was hardly any description (and what there was was in Thai). I Googled the product and found this video:

If nothing else, we will always have this amazing video.

Anyway, it looked the right thing, so we got the fogger. We decided to spray overnight, which is when the roaches really come out and party. On Tuesday evening, we cleared just about everything out of the kitchen, living room, and bathroom, and moved it all into my office. It felt weird.

We set off the fogger just before going to bed on Tuesday night. In the morning, we went out to breakfast before cleaning up our place.

Roman's eggs Benedict

My waffle with bacon and banana—I am trying to be more open-minded about bananas. Well, this was my first attempt.

This was the first time we’ve gone out for a Western-style breakfast in Bangkok—we chose an (empty) restaurant in the neighborhood and it was actually pretty good.

Back home, we wiped down all the counters and floors with a water and vinegar solution. I wiped down the top of the fridge, and then put my gallon-sized glass jar full of brewing kombucha on top. I slid it over a few inches to make room for the second jar, and it kept sliding all the way off the wet fridge top to crash on the floor below. Glass and kombucha went everywhere.

I was a little despairing for a moment—kombucha has sugar in it, of course, and now it was all over our kitchen—the kitchen we were trying to rid of bugs. Also, my kombucha! My culture! My special jar!

But Roman rallied the troops (me) and we put on some music, then sopped up the kombucha with towels, then mopped the floors, the mopped again, then wiped down the floors with a dry cloth, then swept, and then swept again and, in the end…the house felt pretty clean. Even if we did keep finding tiny pieces of glass everywhere.

So that was that adventure. What else? I’ve been cooking at home a lot. I made pork belly with charred cabbage, sticky rice, and a cilantro-lime-chili sauce:

And I made some of the same pork belly with bok choy and sticky rice:

I also made…would you believe…ostrich fillets. Which is not a common thing in Thailand, but something you can buy frozen at Foodland, and we just couldn't resist. I pan-fried the fillets and served them with roasted potatoes and a salad sprinkled with parmesan:

It actually wasn’t great. I marinated the ostrich and cooked it pretty rare (as instructed by the internet), but it was pretty chewy and didn’t have a lot of flavor. It’s super lean—maybe it just wasn’t the best way to cook this meat?

And we had a meal at Pier 21:

I got an assortment of vegetable dishes, and Roman got slow-cooked pork with rice and an egg.

Classes were a little challenging this week…we keep getting more and more instructions from the school about how the very specific ways they want us to teach these phonics lessons...I was just starting to get the hang of it, when I had to go into school to pick up some materials I had forgotten, and Teacher Noi gave me another lesson with more details on how to do these classes.

For example, when I teach the K2 and K3 classes, I'm supposed to say, kuh, key, and point with one finger at the image of the key. But when I'm teaching the K1 classes, I'm supposed to say, kuh as in key and point with two fingers. I understand that teaching these sounds a certain way is helpful for the kids, but they keep adding to what I’m supposed to do, and it’s a lot of little details to try and remember. Plus, it's so rigid. Some of this formatted lesson is too basic for the kids and I can feel them getting bored—but I don’t feel like I have much freedom to make changes to the structure.

And ALSO, if there are issues with my classes, it’s that parents are making noise in the background, which makes it really hard for the kids to hear me, which I think is a much more significant issue than whether I point with one finger or two. I am constantly trying to figure out where the background noise is coming from and muting the students (not my favorite thing to do, but I don’t know how else to solve the issue). But it’s hard to tell where off-screen noise is coming from…so it’s kinda like playing whack-a-mole.

Sigh. Zoom issues. Still, the kids are great, and I know we will all fall into a rhythm at some point. My classes are a little more wild than I would like, but the kids mostly seem to be having fun so...I try and not give myself too hard a time.

Anyway...here are some photos Roman took, mostly of our neighborhood, with his new camera...