Thailand has to be one of the neatest places on earth......

Today is Wednesday and the class here is half finished and things are getting smoother by the day. I have three really good students who speak almost no English but are really working hard and are a real pleasure to train with. Frankly the interpreter assigned to us wasn't all that useful and yesterday and today we just trained without him. The students speak Thai; I speak Texan English; and we all do a lot of drawing pictures and hand gestures and we're getting along just fine.

The Thai people are so friendly and gracious. the company caters in lunch every day and the students make a big ceremony of preparing the food and serving me first. Frankly I don't know what I'm eating much of the time but it sure tastes good. I learned a long time ago that you can be overly cautious to the point you don't enjoy yourself or, at some point you just jump in and experience the culture. I've jumped in and today I ate something fried--it tasted good--but it still had the skeleton inside it. I guess it's a culinary "don't ask...don't tell."

The countryside here is very rural but the roads are good and the scenery breathtaking. We drive through low-lying mountains covered with greenery and ever so often we pop over a hill and get a glimpse of the Gulf of Siam. The photo at the top of this post is of a coconut grove and the smaller green bushes, I'm told, are tapioca plants. You see the occasional farmer walking down the road with the Coolie hat and two large bundles balanced on a long pole. You go from modern to ancient so quickly here.

Until the next post......