It’s so hot. I looked at the weather forcast and it’s in the high 90s. It’s supposed to get up to 105 three days in a row. I’m going to die. I stayed at Tip’s house last night. I came home around 9:30 am and went into my house to get a few things. Within 10 minutes I was completely soaked. All the rat poison I left out was gone except in my bedroom. However something ripped the window screen off one of my bedroom windows. What on earth is strong enough to do that and where is it now?
I went into school and worked on lesson plans. Pat had said she’d help me with lesson plans, but when I go there, I got “up to you”. I’m beginning to hate that phrase. It basically means there is a right answer, but I’m not going to tell you what it is. I’m almost done with the first month of lesson plans. I should be done tomorrow so that will make me feel better. There is a room at the school that is always open. Pat said if my house gets too hot, I can use that room to hang out in and turn on the fans. It’s not air conditioned, but way cooler than my house. I’ll probably hang out there tomorrow.
The janitor came over and boarded up some of the holes – the ones between my house and Q’s house. He has to finish the others tomorrow. I’m glad he started with those as I noticed Q’s windows were open and he has no screens – this might be one of of the ways the critters get in. I assume he’s home and opened them or someone is airing out his place before he gets home. But now I don’t know which side of the wall the critters ended up on. Are they stuck in my house or his? I sprayed bug spray into all the dark places and put out more rat poison just for good measure. I have seen two tokays tonight on the outside of my screens, but I’m still not happy because I’m thinking they might be big enough to have broken the screen upstairs and they might do it again. One is staring into my bedroom as I write this.
It rained. I went outside and just stood in it. One of the other teachers and I were talking and she kept trying to get me to stand under cover, but I wouldn’t. The rain isn’t hot. Then I sat on the front “porch” and listened. So many things started making noise after the rain stopped. It was almost deafening. There is a lot going on in the woods. It’s great when it’s going on “over there” and not in my house. I took video of it so you could here all the noises, but I don’t think it picked up the noises so now you just get a video of what it looks like from my front porch.
It’s been like a ghost town around here. I haven’t seen another teacher or student in the housing area and no cars or motorbikes parked out front. The teacher I mentioned above was the first. She just got back today. I heard some other people talking a little later in the evening. I bet more will arrive tomorrow too. I imagine they are going through what I just went through, cleaning out the disaster that moved into their houses. The only difference is they are probably use to it and it doesn’t make them want to run away.
I was going to go to the pool with Tip, but she had to cancel. I came home and washed all the dishes instead. I also made dinner. It was no where near as fun as the pool, but I felt a lot better after knowing the dishes were clean. I think just getting back into a routine will help with the culture shock a lot. I feel quite a bit better after doing the dishes.
Now I’m sitting inside the semi safety of my bug net. I’m marveling at the amount of bugs that are not kept out by the bug net. I’m thinking it’s time to turn off the light and attempt sleeping. I think I’m going to go turn the light on in the other bedroom so maybe the tokays will hang out on those window screens instead of my bedroom. Seems logical.
It was nice to sleep in a cool, clean room last night instead of my dirty house. But I didn’t sleep well because I just kept thinking of how much work I have tomorrow trying to clean and block things up.
Tip told me she had someone to help clean my house today and told me how much they wanted to get paid – deal! The school janitor came over today to look at blocking up some of the holes in the house. He said he could do it tomorrow. Yay! I did laundry and hung out at Tip’s house the rest of the day. Yet, I still don’t feel better.
A conversation with Tip confused me. She was asking if I knew anyone else that could help clean the house or if I could ask Pat to find someone to help. So, were the people she though would help now not able to? The rest of the conversation confused me and got way lost in translation. Of course, I can’t speak Thai so I’m no help. By the end of the conversation I was pretty sure someone is showing up at 4:00pm, but who knows? After this I just wanted to get on an airplane and cry the whole way back to the US. But there are no taxis here and no airport so I’m stuck. I wonder why this I feel so bad. I know that even though I have no idea what’s going on, someone will clean my house today. It’s like riding the bus with vague directions. It doesn’t seem like it will work, but it works. So, I question why I feel like fleeing. Then it hits me, I’m going through culture shock again. I’ve been gone for 2 months and I wasn’t here long enough before for this to feel like home. I feel like a burden. I feel stupid for not being able to speak Thai. I don’t like a living quality below what I had in the US. It’s so hot I can barely move. All of this is being blown out of proportion into despair because of culture shock – too many things at once.
I went to the market at 3:00. I love the market. It scares me because I get so many strange looks and I have no idea what most people are saying to me. I just smile. It scares me because of all the strange food – not just the scary food like frogs in a bucket, but I have no idea if I will like that veggie or fruit or how to cook it. I can ask how much and understand the answer, but that’s about it. I love the feel of the market and knowing the person I’m paying is probably the person that grew the food. I felt a little better after the market.
After the market, two ladies showed up at Tip’s house and followed me to mine to clean it! See, why didn’t I trust. At some point I pulled a black trash bag out from under the stairs. It has been there since I moved in. It moved. I screamed. One of the ladies grabbed it, took it outside and beat it with a broom handle until it stopped moving. I didn’t look in the bag, but she confirmed it was a tokay. So now my house is clean and the tokay is gone. I did some more laundry and ate some celebratory ice cream.
As I’m sitting outside the 7-11 eating my ice cream a couple ladies walk by. One asks me something and I look sadly at her since I have no idea what she asked. She then asks me in English where I am from. I tell her America. She asks how long I am here. I explain I am teaching and will be here until September. She asks if I am teaching at Sam Ngao Witt, which I am. Then she asks me if I will come visit her at her house some time. She points down the road and tells me it’s way down the road. It’s the orange house. I told her I would. She makes me promise. I don’t even know her name, but I’ve been invited to her house.
I’m so hot that I don’t know if taking a shower will do any good. My plan is to take a shower, crawl into bed with the fan on and don’t move. I can work on my computer and try to sleep. I get a text from Tip telling me it’s hot and I should stay at her place again. I feel bad having them take care of me. I feel grateful at the same time. As I’m coming downstairs to shower, I see a huge tokay. I’m not sure if I can even get down the stairs. He’s not blocking the stairs – he’s on the window screen. I’m sure he won’t jump out and attack me, but still……I take a couple pictures, of course. I manage to get down the stairs. I want to open the window screen and shue him out, but I just can’t get that close. I abandon the plan and go to Tip’s house. I am done. I don’t know if I can do this for 5 months – no ac and a never ending supply of large lizzards.
I showed the pictures to Ging and Tip and asked if this is normal to have these in your house. They said yes. Ging sees them in her house all the time. “If you chase one out, another comes in”. So, now I want to run away and cry again.
It did motivate me to apply for Antarctica jobs again. I should have been working on lesson plans, but I suck at making lesson plans so I searched the Antarctica jobs instead. They get posted in March so I’m a bit late to the game. Right now cold and very few (no?) bugs or tokays sounds amazing!
I got home around 5:30pm. I’m glad it was still daylight when I got home as it would have been extra creepy in the dark. It’s completely disgusting. There is a thick layer of yuck on everything. The refrigerator was half ice. I’ve never seen so many spider webs before, of course complete with large spiders. There are geckos everywhere. No sight of tokays though. They obviously are not doing a good job or they don’t eat spiders. There is mouse poop on everything. None of the bags of food have been touched, but a bag of instant noodles had ants in it. There are ants all over the house. The bathroom was a war zone. One of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen. I’m not sure what was pooping in there – frogs? Something ate holes through the screen doors upstairs. I’m not sure why I need screen doors upstairs anyway, but I don’t want to think about what decided eating screen was a good idea. My favorite flip flops were eaten. Something ate through the straps and chewed huge chunks out of the soles. There were quite a few bug wings on the floor upstairs. My bed has ants in it, not many, but enough that I won’t be able to sleep because that’s all I’ll be able to think about. The bug net save my bed from being a total disaster. My closet seemed to be ok. I went around with a can of bug spray and sprayed all the spiders, some roaches and under the stairs. I cleaned the bathroom since it was the worst. I was sweating soooooo bad. I don’t know if I will survive the heat. I turned off the refrigerator and opened the door – old fashioned defrost method. I asked Tip if she knew anyone that could help me clean tomorrow and if I could borrow clean sheets. Her cleaning lady may be able to help me tomorrow. I’m now at her house. They are going to let me stay here tonight. So, I’m now clean and I feel human again. I sitting here having a conversation with a furby. Tip’s daughter set the talking toy in front of me and then left the room. Tomorrow I plan to get some more cleaning supplies and bug spray. Tomorrow I go to war.
(c) All rights reserved Kimberly Fiore
What is big enough to do this to my bathroom?So much poopI loved these shoes 😦
I go back to Sam Ngao today. I would have expected to wake up with the morning dreads, but I didn’t. It was more like minor grumblings mostly about waking up in general. I don’t want to go back to my house or back to work, but I feel a sort of resolve. This is what is happening and it’s ok. I will miss the lack of roosters. I haven’t heard one in Chaing Mai. I will miss the swimming pool. Goodbye Western food. Goodbye air conditioning, I will miss you most of all.
I packed up, went out for breakfast and then went back to the condo to work on lesson plans and watch more bad tv. I caught the end of Minority Report. I like that movie. But then it was paranormal activity investigators on the sci fi channel – boo. I waited in the lobby of the condo for 45 minutes before Pat asked me to get a taxi and come to her. I got a taxi to the other side of town and had lunch with Pat and Dam. Now I am riding back to Sam Ngao with them listening to 60s and 70s American music and watching Pat grab the oh shit handle every time Dam tries to pass another car.
I’m wondering how terrifying my house will be after being locked up for 2 months. Will it be a little dusty? Will the rat and other creatures have found the snacks I left? Will the refrigerator have flooded the kitchen? Will I come home to bug wings inches deep like I did one weekend? Or will it be a total war zone? Tune in tomorrow……or later tonight.
I like this part of Chaing Mai that I’ve been staying in. Of course, I probably like this area because it’s a more expensive place to live so with nicer condos comes nicer restaurants, shops, etc. I’d rather be staying in a hotel than an condo, but it’s a real nice condo.
I found a language school near the condo. The shortest class they offered was 20 hours. I don’t have that much time. My brain would explode if I tried to do that many hours over a few days anyway. I went in and talked to them anyway and asked if I could do private lessons. I signed up for 3 hours Friday and 3 hours yesterday. My teacher was a wonderful, cute, young, energetic lady. She taught me basic sentence structure and gave me good worksheets I can refer to later. That is good because I have forgotten just about everything she taught me. She basically gave me everything I would have learned in the 20 hour class. My brain did not explode, but it was touch and go for a while there. Not much stuck. I think it will come back as I study the worksheets later. We went to lunch together the first day and then the second day I offered to buy her a coffee on break. She took me to her favorite coffee shop and made me order in Thai. Now, I just have to put in the time to practice.
I worked on some stuff for my engineering company. It wasn’t much, but every little bit of income helps. I spent way more on vacation than I made. I hung out in the pool. I hung out in the condo and watched bad American and Thai tv. Thai soap operas are horrible. Their game shows are hysterical. For American tv they had bad cop shows, Grim, a firefighter show, A Minute to Win It, the ScyFi channel and a movie channel.
I got massage almost every day. My fingers hurt. I wonder what’s going on with them. I wonder if I’m getting arthritis, but assume it’s something else. My shoulders are very tight. It feels like my muscles are burning, like a chemical burn, when they work on them. My hamstrings and IT bands are pretty flexible though which has never been something I could say. I got a body scrub one day instead of a massage. Unlike the one in Vietnam, it didn’t hurt. At no time did I think I might be bleeding or might need a trip to the hospital. After, she put on oil. It didn’t feel like massage oil or lotion. It felt like she was turning my skin into silk. Oh, I wish I had asked what she used because it was a marvellous feeling. Now my knee caps are peeling. With all the sun I got over the past two months, no part of my body has peeled except my knee caps. So weird and fascinating.
I went on a few google maps adventures. Some of the restaurants I asked it to lead me to didn’t exist. Some of the routes were impossible. Still, how did we ever do anything before google?
I had a session with my teacher. He thought the hurting fingers might be a diet thing – too much starch. That might explain the burning muscles too. That or I have a rare horrible burning muscle disease. It’s probably diet. Nothing monumental happened in the session, but that’s not unusual for me. It did come out that I’m just not in a place where I have a bunch of emotional processing to do. I’ve worked through so much of that. It seems that now I’m down to Muscle Zero, that what I need to do is rebuild muscle while rebuilding my center. So, how do I rebuild? DSE exercises! In the past I did these exercises regularly and they usually put me into process, helping me work through the stuff that came up. I’m excited to see what the exercises will do now as I try to rebuild my body and energy system. So, I’m ready to go home with a new resolve of doing this conscious movement, finding a way to work out/lift weights, and seeing if I can eat better. The eating better will be hard as I can hear ice cream taunting me from somewhere off in the distance as I write this.
Strange food experiences of the week! I think this will be a regular feature of my blog. I went out for ice cream one afternoon. I found a place that advertised snow ice. It could be ice cream. I couldn’t tell from the pictures. I’m more adventurous with dessert than other foods so let’s see. I ordered the watermelon snow ice. It was gigantic. I couldn’t eat it all, but I tried real hard. The best I could tell is that it was like a snow cone except they used sweetened condensed milk instead of ice. Then they put water melon balls and ice cream on top. And they gave you a red syrup on the side to put on the snow ice. It was a bit much, but I’ll probably forget that in the future and do it again. The other food adventure was one morning I went to get breakfast. I found a couple coffee shops that had coffee and cake. I didn’t want cake for breakfast. I found a place that had bread. By now, I was starving and decided garlic bread for breakfast would have to do. They put syrup on the garlic bread. How on earth is that a good idea? Why can’t there just be food that is savory without having to be sweet too? Not every food has to have every flavour in it. It was edible, but I wouldn’t rush out and try to re-create this food concept. This I won’t forget, but I suspect it will happen again not by choice.
On a similar note I had a weird restaurant experience. I saw a restaurant near my condo and went in. They didn’t have a menu out front so I asked to see a menu. They asked if I wanted whiskey or beer. The place was called a café. I wanted a menu. They gave me a menu and then seven of them stood by my table and watched me look through the menu. This has happened often before where the waiter or waitress stands by the table waiting to take your order while you look through the menu. But it was seven women. I felt like an animal at the zoo. “What will it do next”? I’m not sure what was going on, but I decided I didn’t want to eat there.
I tried Tinder. It’s a dating app, but less intensive than most websites. It’s a weird concept to me. It shows you a picture of someone nearby and you either “like” them or not. If you hit the X or swipe to the left they go away forever. If you hit the heart or swipe right they go into your likes category. You don’t get to see the next picture until you’ve decided on the first. If you like them and they like you then you can send messages. There can be few photos and a short description you can look at. It tells you their age too. It only shows people that are physically nearby you. You decide what radius to look at. I messaged two guys, but didn’t meet up with anyone. I don’t think I like this app, but I am extremely curious to what comes up in the app when I get to Sam Ngao. And it might be a good way to meet people to have dinner with in the future when I go to other places for the weekend. We’ll see.
I’m feeling drawn to write a book based on my blog. I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know if I need to get my blog out to more people first or if I just write the book. I don’t know how to go about getting a book published. Maybe it’s just a matter of advertising on my blog and getting it out to more people to make money, but it feels more like a book to me than a money making blog. If any of you out there have ideas of how to make this happen, please let me know. You can email me at rrainefiore@gmail.com. I might try putting hashtags in my old blogs so they can be found easier by people I don’t know that may be interested in reading. If you haven’t subscribed to my blog, but are following it regularly, please do so as I assume the number of followers I have will be useful in marketing to a publisher. If you are not interested in subscribing to my blog, that’s fine too. I don’t want to pressure anyone. I know how annoying it can be to receive emails you don’t want. I may try advertising on my blog too. If I do and you find it takes away from the blog, let me know as I’m still figuring all this blog stuff out. I don’t mind advertising that’s off to the side, but if it highjacks my blog or gets in the way of readers enjoying my blogs, then it’s not worth it.
(c) All rights reserved Kimberly Fiore
3 headed elephant statueSnow IceThis penguin made my snow ice, I thinkI think he likes me
Yesterday I left Singapore and flew to Bangkok and then to Chaing Mai.
The Singapore airport is amazing. There is art everywhere. There are at least 2 gardens in each terminal. It’s easy to get around. They have reclining chairs in case you want to relax. They have lounges, tv rooms, a pool, and a movie theater. . I heard they had free massage chairs, but I didn’t find them. One of the gardens was a butterfly garden. I went early just to see the butterfly garden.
Bangkok airport has no gardens.
The strange food story of the day…..Mochi. I like the gummy mochi candy you can get in the US at yogurt places. I love mochi balls (ice cream wrapped in mochi). I saw this mochi dessert on the airplane menu each time I flew. Then a video of it appeared on facebook on someone’s page as clear cake (it resembles cake in no way at all). So, it was time to try it. It is a clear tasteless jelly. Then you pour a brown uneventful syrup on it and top it with crushed nuts. It was good enough that I ate it all, but there is no reason you should ever pay money to eat this.
I got to my hotel in Chaing Mai, only it wasn’t a hotel, but an apartment complex. The guards had no idea what to do with me. I had no idea where to go. I called the number on my reservation, but it said “this number is not available right now”. I sat in the guard’s office for a while trying to figure out what to do when someone called me. He said his wife emailed me (I didn’t receive an email). The key was at the guard’s shack. So, it appears I rented a 2 bedroom apartment. I’d actually rather have a hotel, but it is a real nice apartment. There’s air conditioning which I won’t see for 5 months, a gym and a pool. The location seems good – near a mall, plenty of restaurants, and massage places. I ate at a restaurant that only serves made to order salads. That made me feel a little better. Then a massage. I was going to do a massage and a body scrub, but if I ordered two services, they would tack on another 50 baht in addition to the regular cost of the two services. This marketing approach is backwards and didn’t work. I gave up on the body scrub.
Today I signed up for private Thai language lessons for tomorrow and Saturday, 3 hours each. I’m not sure if my brain can handle 3 hours each day, but any new Thai I can learn will be helpful. All of the classes I looked up on the internet last night were longer – weeks or more so that is why I did the private lessons.
I went to the hospital. I had to do the health certificate again since the one I did in February is now outdated. This is for my work permit. The first hospital I went to was a mass of people and no English anywhere. I couldn’t tell if I was in the emergency room, the general hospital or what. There were many windows and steps to go through, but I couldn’t figure out where to start. I knew there was a more foreigner friendly hospital somewhere so I found it on google maps and went there instead. Within 30 seconds of being there, I was pointed in the right direction. Then began the game of move Rraine from seat to seat to room to seat to room. Overall, it didn’t take very long. They actually took blood which was more than the last place I had this done did.
I had to wait 2 hours for my tests to come back to get my certification. So I went and got lunch. There was a mall with a pizza hut and another pizza place. I opted for the other pizza place. My pizza looked and tasted suspiciously like pizza hut though. I was able to find the phone store and get my internet issues resolved (in theory – haven’t tried it out yet). I got my certification. I didn’t look at it because it was in a sealed envelope. I assume I’m healthy enough to work in Thailand. The blood test was for syphilis. I think you have to have sex to get that so I should be good to go.
While I was waiting for the certification, I got a message from the owner of the condo. He wanted to know if I could move to the room I actually rented today. Huh? With all that confusion yesterday, this isn’t even the right room. Ok, not a big deal I guess. I told him what time I’d be back and he said he’d have the maid change keys with me. This didn’t go so smoothly either. The new room hadn’t been cleaned. It was a mess and had no clean towels or sheets. I went to the pool hoping the problem would solve itself. A lot of messaging back and forth and now someone is cleaning my new room.
Thoughts of the day though: This morning when everything went so smoothly with the language lessons, hospital and phone store (the three main things I needed to do today), I felt good and thought I might accomplish everything today . I wanted to finish blogs, do some engineering work and finish lesson plans too. Ha – too ambitious. Then the dirty room dashed all of that. Now I’m cranky and grumpy and have a bit of a poor me thing going on. Such a little thing. So, I know this is no big deal, but the old nervous system pattern is getting triggered that makes me feel bad when things are out of my control and not going the way I want. It’s not panic, but a dulled down version of panic. The new learning of the day is I’ve never been a person to panic. That’s rarely, if ever, a reaction I have. I realize that in the past I couldn’t actually panic because then there’d be no control over the situation I already have no control over. I can keep from panicking, but I can’t seem to let the dulled down reaction go either. Of course, the bigger issue is that I don’t actually have control over anything and I’m in the process of letting the ego’s control go and learning to go with the flow of life. Another tiny layer of the onion can now fall away as I see the dulled down panic as a control defense.
(c) All rights reserved Kimberly Fiore
One of the airport gardensMore airport gardensAt the airport – yay!
Mochi Series – Picture 1 – packaged for airplaneMochi Series – Picture 2 – Add the syrupMochi Series – Picture 3 – Add the nutsMochi Series – Picture 4 – EatI have no idea – just found it at a coffee shop
Today I took the morning off to do some engineering work. I am grateful that I have some work I can do because I am spending quite a bit of money I don’t have. I really need to work more than a half day, but that’s all I had for now. I went to a place that was part coffee shop, co-work space, part restaurant and had a pool. This is a brilliant concept to me. I didn’t go in the pool. By the time it got hot enough to not be able to stand it, I was done with the chunk of work I had. So, I decided to go back to my hotel pool. I did the pool then a massage and back to the pool.
My half sister, Carly arrive around dinner time. I’ve never been traveling with her so this should be fun. I was adopted and didn’t meet her until I was 34. We’ve hung out a few times in Denver, but not a lot. We went to dinner. The place we went was beautiful. It was huge and had little dining bungalows all spread out amongst gardens. If this place was in the US, it would be a real expensive dinner place. It was only slightly more expensive than any other place I’ve seen in Bali. We went to an open mike night at a nearby bar to meet up with my friend, but it was so crowded that we couldn’t get a seat at the same table she was at. We went upstairs instead. This is where I fell in love. I fell in love with the lamps they had hanging from the ceiling and over the bar. Sorry, not the “in love” you were all hoping for. They were made of fabric, metal and beads. The light shown through the beads on the top. Then strings of black with beads on them hung down below the lamp. It looked as if the beads were tiny stars of lights floating below the lamps. I took a picture. It’s not great, but you’ll get the idea.
How do I become a lighting designer? I think I would love that.
Annaliese wanted to take a Thai cooking class while in Chaing Mai and I really enjoyed the one I took in Mae Sot. I didn’t realize it was an all day class until last night. That seems like a little too much, but I was already signed up. It was a fun day. They picked us up from our hotels and took us to a market and showed us some of the most common sauces we would need. They taught us the difference between sticky rice and non sticky rice. Then the took us to the cooking school which is on an organic farm. That was delightful. The place was beautiful. We each made 5 different typical dishes. The teacher was so high energy and funny. It was a little too long, but I’m glad we did this class instead of a shorter one somewhere else. Not a long blog today – sooooo tired. Here, look at the pretty pictures.
(c) All rights reserved Kimberly Fiore
Coconut Milk Soup
Spring RollsRed CurryChicken with BasilBananas in Coconut Milk
So school is over and I plan to travel for the next two months. My first stop is Chaing Mai. This is the second largest city in Thailand and I remember when I was here in 2006 I love it. This is the town I asked to be placed in, but was told “you don’t want to live there”. By car, Chaing Mai is probably 3 hours from Sam Ngao, but by bus, longer.
So, my instructions for travel were to come to the school at 7:30 and get on a bus. A certain student would meet me there to tell me which bus to get on. Then that bus would take me to Baa tan cuen which is the bust stop on the side of the highway. I then had to walk past the police box and find the lady that sells bus tickets. Then get on the bus to Chaing Mai. Well, that sounds like a solid plan. What could go wrong?
I showed up at school at 7:30 towing a suitcase and answered “Teacher, where you go?” about 15 times. The student showed up and pointed to a bus. She walked over to it with me and said something to the driver. 15 minutes later, the bus took off with me and a monk. It drove so slow I could have walked faster, but considering I had a suitcase and no real time agenda, who cares? It drove through both villages and picked up a few people along the way. It dropped me off at Baa tan cuen. I looked up and directly in front of me was a lady sitting at a tiny table (on the side of the highway). I said “bus to Chaing Mai?”. She made a phone call, told me 9:30 and I paid her. At 9:25 she said “Chaing Mai” and motioned me and two other people to stand near the median. A minute later she grabbed my suitcase, said “Chaing Mai”, and took my suitcase 20 feet down the median. We followed her. The bus came at 9:30 and took me to Chaing Mai. I can’t imagine any of that going smoothly in the US.
Tonight I met Rob who lives in Chaing Mai and Annaliese for dinner. They were both in my TESOL class. Some of Rob’s coworkers joined us. I had pizza and it tasted like pizza and it was wonderful. Another teacher, Adi, and her mother joined us later. Let vacation begin!
(c) all rights reserved Kimberly Fiore
They named a motorbike after meNo, wait for the bus over hereWaiting in the median for a busBaa tan cuenTicket sales center (table)My cute hotel in Chaing MaiItty Bitty Hotel pool
As I’m adjusting to life in Thailand, changes in how I see the world and myself in it are happening. These changes started long before Thailand. These are results of many many years of hard work and investigation into what is real. So the rest of this blog is going to be about things that are spiritual in nature and difficult to explain because they can only be experienced. So, if this is not your cup of tea, this blog post is not for you.
I’ve been talking about foggy brain since I got to Thailand. After a session with my teacher and a friend confirming what I was suspecting, I don’t think it’s just too much sugar or too much rice although those things might contribute. I think things are rewiring in my brain. I’ve spent my whole life thinking the world worked a certain way and that things I was taught were true, things we were all taught were true. My childhood helped me create an ego, a story of how life is and I believed it completely. I’ve spent a long time digging into those stories and finding how believing the world is unsafe makes it unsafe and it’s a story not a truth. Finding that I’m my own biggest judge and the judgments are not true, but I believed that’s who I was. But, if I’m not who I thought I was, if I’m not my ego story, who am I? Sorry to tell you, I don’t have that answer quite yet. I have glimpses of it, but it’s still presenting itself and the ego is still trying to put it in terms it understands and make it fit in the old story. But, it appears to me that a lot of the foggy brain is my ego dissolving. Up to now, I had just been able to expose the lies and discover the truth. I became healthier and changed my posture and continue to see life with very little judgement, but some of my identity remained with my story. Now enough of my story has been proven wrong and the rest is just dissolving without me having to work through it. My brain doesn’t know what to do without the story so it just goes blank and fuzzy. In a place that is so foreign, where I’m lost and alone, the ego is having trouble finding familiar things to hold on to and it’s grip on my identity was already severely undermined with all the years of investigation.
I had someone make the comment that how can I have gone through this much work and graduated from Awakening to Presence class and still be suffering so much. I immediately was confused by the question. I don’t feel like I’m suffering. So, I thought maybe others reading my blog don’t see the fine differentiation that seems to not be there, but in reality is giant. Most of what I’m experiencing is challenging and entertaining, but not suffering. It’s not suffering because I chose this and because I’m not believing it should be another way. The travel from the US to Thailand were suffering, I’ll give you that. The challenges here have brought up feelings of wanting to go home, being overwhelmed and other stresses. Most of that is culture shock and I know that so I’m just holding on waiting for it to work it’s way through. Just because I’ve done all this spiritual work doesn’t make me immune to culture shock any more than it makes me immune to feeling horrible when I’m sick. I think maybe I haven’t portrayed that well in my blogs. I don’t think awakening means bliss, peacefulness and lack of discomfort for the rest of your life. Sorry to those of you who are seeking that. That is why I signed up for Awakening to Presence class 9 years ago. And when I finally fully got it that it was impossible, I was crushed. I also think that spiritual leaders that are portraying their lives as without challenge are not telling you the whole story. Then again, if I had gotten that in the beginning, I might not have signed up. But on this side I understand fully that Truth is what I want, not perfect happy all the time.
I have written this blog and many others several times. Half way through my thoughts no longer can be put in words and gibberish comes out of the keyboard as I realize that this is so hard to explain because it has to be experienced. So, I ask in the future that if you read a blog and think I’m suffering or “poor Rraine”, ask yourself if that is your story. Can you see it from a different angle, one with humor and lack of the thought it should be different. Discomfort, pain, exhaustion, crying and other feelings still exist, but if I don’t judge them as “it shouldn’t be” they are just feelings that come and go. If I judge them, it isn’t for long before I realize I’m doing it and then I can let the judgement go. I will try to paint this side of the picture more clearly.
Rraine Drops 