Ruairí and Alfred: New house, new job(s), new post!

THE NEW HOUSE

(Alfred: OK, OK, it’s wonderful! Spacious, clean (well, once Martine scrubbed it clean), nice furniture and not too much of it, proper bathrooms of which one even has a water heater that works and, best of all, a massive garden. Quiet area, very secure and not TOO far from the city centre. Here are some photos to bore you to death! And remember, Ruairí has never figured out how to arrange photos properly on Blogspot, so it's going to look pretty weird. Make sure you scroll ALL the way down!)

Guest bedroom

The new house is a massive change from where we were living until now: big, spacious, more modern (Alfred: without being actually state-of-the-art, if you get my drift) and with an absolutely fabulous garden. To be honest, the first day we moved in, I was a bit shellshocked, almost like I had come down with agoraphobia! But that wore off soon.

Our bedroom

The main pluses are a really big kitchen with a proper gas cooker with oven, three en suite bedrooms with good beds (Alfred: Well, if you like mattresses which seem to have been made from the remnants of a 'what can we find that is harder than diamond' experiment), beautifully tiled floors throughout, a washing machine that sort of works (Alfred: More on that later) some nice wooden furniture and windows modelled on early modern Italian churches.

Sample bathroom

On the down side, but not too much so, the electrics are a bit wonky (and there are various sockets we may well tape up permanently in case we use them without thinking), only one of the three showers gives hot water and there is a lot of rubbish around the garden that needs to be cleaned up. None of these are in the least bit serious. Slightly trickier is that we are quite a lot further from the centre than was previously the case, so cycling to and from my new job is an hour or thereabouts each day (Alfred: More on that later as well).

Main hallway

But it is a lovely area, much quieter (though still lots of barking dogs) and you could probably live here for years and never see the neighbours (Alfred: French on each side of us and the Prime Minister's personal advisor across the way). The cats are a bit bewildered, happy with the garden and the trees and a plentiful supply of insects to torture and kill but not happy that they are confined to the garden and the carport and are having to make friends with other cats that have, until now, viewed the garden as their own territory.

Kitchen

The garden is wonderful, a bit bare at the moment as the grass will only grow back once the rainy season starts but there are about twenty large trees in total, including coconuts, mangoes, starfruit and various others we haven't identified yet. Martine picked a starfruit off the tree today! And I had to water the plants as they need watering two or three times a week until the rains start.

(Alfred: I told him to put all the photos of the garden at the end so people who have the same level of interest in the great outdoors that I have aren't forced to wade through them all. Having said that, if you DO like plants and trees, they are well worth a look).

NEW JOB(S)

Sitting-room

So, work has also begun to creep upon the scene. Already I have been teaching six hours a week one-to-one to an Italian guy who contacted me through Facebook. Now I have a contract with AVIS Rent-a-Car to teach English to their 37 staff for six months beginning in January. This will be two or three classes a week (depending on numbers) running from 1800 to 1900.

View of verandah from the gate

And last Saturday we went to the Career Fair in the hideous Don Chan Palace Hotel where I made contact with some people from a translation agency from whom I am hoping to get some proofreading and editing work. This would be translating documents that have already been translated into 'English' into proper English! So, nothing definite yet but fingers crossed!

WASHING MACHINE

Yeah, this was fun. We have a very old Sharp EA-E60A washing machine which is one of these old all-in-one machines which you usually have to manually fill with water and manually drain and rinse and spin (OK, not spin but you do have to press a button at each stage and sort of stand guard over it). I did track down a manual for it online but it was in Thai and running it through the Google Translate program didn't really help (Alfred: It did guarantee 'resin-free washing' and there were frequent mentions of rats). But it worked, even if I did have to stand over it all the time and switch it off and on a few times (Alfred: Just like using Windows, actually).

TELEVISION

Oh yes, we also now have a television set beside which the washing machine is a marvel of 21st century technology. I had forgotten those wavy lines blurring the top quarter of the screen!! Plus the volume is stuck on maximum and there is no remote. But do we really need a television anyway? (Alfred: Ahem .... World Cup on the way? Kick-off times around 1 a.m. and 3 a.m Lao time meaning pubs are not really an option. I think a TV might be a smart investment!)