I came here after a beautifully long train ride, most of which found me sitting backwards talking to other young teachers about the enigmas of the country I would soon call home. Jenna (my college friend who is doing the same thing here that I am) met me in our hotel lobby on the busy and white-filled, foreign-restaurant-lined Khao San Road and we began our adjustment to each other, Thailand, and the rock hard beds we would soon grow accustomed to. We arrived by taxi in Jomtien the next day and I knew I felt…different. Along the way I lost my innate sense of where the beach was, where water was, where the end was, where I could go if I needed to see something finished and I all of a sudden felt dizzy and lost.
Jomtien was not the small town I envisioned and I was confused by how there seemed to be no separation between Jomtien and its evil twin, Pattaya. Or should I say evil step-sister. Pollution, converted pick-up trucks, motorbikes, dust, condos, resorts, hotels, brown water, 7/11s and a certain buzz of complacency of people accepting this place for what it is overwhelmed me as we pulled into the school, a small tropical oasis off the main road. We met Tom, an older man from Boston who has been teaching there for a few years. He is one of the most helpful people I have met since I have been here. Later, we would rent a motorbike from him and buy two phones from him.
The school is beautiful; there are gardens, a pool, housing for the principals (May and her husband Eric) and some other teachers, there’s a covered playground and air-conditioned classrooms. The playground has raised fans that spray mist and despite my misgivings and initial mind-travel into the terrors of herding hundreds of children into a cement room and turning on fans spewing liquid, I held my tongue and was at least grateful that this tiny piece of Jomtien seemed somewhat immune to the depressingly stifling heat. After touring the school, Jenna and I went with Tom and two other office ladies to look for housing. I was already exhausted, tearing up because something inside of me was fighting and losing my orientation, unable to find a locality, a tropicality, the rurality I was instinctively looking for. The freedom I once had a few days prior in Malaysia to look for my own place to stay and to not have to put up any professional fronts slowly trickled out of me. In Malaysia I was only barely beginning to find, or build, my roots, to live in my colors and now here I was, washed away into everybody else’s paint streams.
I felt the dear of standing still come back. This fear was ugly, it was tepid and stagnant and brought back memories of the lukewarm terrifyingly pungent baths I used to take when I was younger and would get sick in my bed. I felt I would never get to know this place, not only because I straight up didn’t want to, but because I couldn’t let myself be my own enemy enough to admit that I pertained here. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Jenna and I found two rooms, one floor apart, on a busy and loud road. Our landlord is 19 and his girlfriend a few years older. They are sweet and naïve; sweet enough to have painted the complex immensely bright colors, which I thought was a good omen, as my room is the exact interpretation I have of the color cerulean. My room is simple. I have no desk, which I now see as one of the banes of my existence…I feel trapped every time I come home exhausted from school and my only options are a table-less chair or my bed. Ugh. Needless to say, I would like to move out to a room with a view that’s quieter, has a kitchen and a table, and properly draining water in the bathroom. Ahh, luxury.
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