Living in Bangkok

As a Christmas present, Martin and Ellen gave us a dinner at a fancy restaurant, and it was so cool, and we took so many pictures, that I'm going to devote a blog post just to that.  We chose to go to Restaurant Sühring, a fine dining German restaurant started by two brothers, that some people say is the best restaurant in Bangkok (dang).  The restaurant is in a beautiful converted villa in Chong Nonsi, and you walk through the garden to enter. We were seated in a lovely glass-walled room, with the garden all around us. We started with an amuse bouche that was a kind of gougere with warm speck.  We chose the five course tasting menu, and then ordered some Indian tonic mocktails. Our first course had three small bites--a very pretty pink bite with smoked eel, a warm baked bite with speck and cheese and a quail egg (our favorite), and a kind of meringue filled with a soft cheese, which was kind of like trashy food done classy. Then came a dish with ...

So...how about some photos from the last week or so? Here are some pretty flowers at my school.... And here are a couple photos from last Friday's staged reading... A couple 7-Eleven dogs... Here's a cool building in Phra Khanong... And another cool building near the Ekkamai BTS... Here is a very blurry photo of a costumed cat in front of a beauty salon near our condo... And another picture that better conveys what's going on. The merchandising possibilities of Squid Games are endless. Roman is slowly recovering from strep throat, but still isn't totally better. On Wednesday, I came home from meditation to find him passed out on the bed, a Marvel movie playing on the laptop in front of him. On Thursday, it rained at Roman's school and all these little frogs appeared.  Meanwhile, at my school, the Kindergarteners performed an end-of-year dance for the parents. All the kids looked cute, but I had to get a picture of Kaning's Squid Games outfit, and tiny Wayha'...

It’s been a couple weeks, and I feel like I ought to post to catch you up, but where to start? The school year is coming to an end. All last week, the K3 students got dressed in their bright red polyester robes and posed for pictures in the main school building, with their class, and outside with their teachers (the above photo is me dressed in a borrowed shirt and blazer for the photos with the teachers). For two weeks, the parents of the different classes came in to observe us teach and to meet with us. On three separate days, I had a large group of parents watching me work with the students through the windows, and it felt…awkward. Luckily, the students were mostly well-behaved (and in the class where they weren’t, I don’t think it was super obvious). And the meetings with the parents went fine—I would meet with a group of K1, K2, or K3 parents, and would talk about each of their kids, one-by-one. I had no guidance on how to do this, except what I got from talking with my fell...