And behind the GIANT chicken...

...painting was a very, very nice Korean restaurant.

One of the things about being newly arrived is negotiating your everyday needs.  Everything is being negotiated by foot at present.  This draws a walkable circle around where you live.  We are concentrically discovering what we need.  Cheese is walkable, vegetables are walkable, fresh bread.  Nice places to go for a meal or drinks, walkable.  The small wild area for walks.  Once we have exhausted this circle, we need to get bikes.

Other staff have bought cars off other leaving teachers.  There seems to be a pool of them in our parking area.  I don't feel trapped in my circle yet but this could be a consideration at some point.  Then the circles get vast.  The traffic has a bit more of a rhythm now.  Drivers we know have said that driving is not too bad as you cannot move quickly, therefore, few accidents.  If you get stopped by the police, which is frequent, just accept the ticket.  You will have little or no understanding as to why it has been given to you.  Give the ticket to the school security staff who will then start protracted negotiations on your behalf.

So the Korean restaurant is significant as it represents a safe haven.  Spotless and delicious.  Looking after your gut is essential.  The difference between a good week or several days off work, hospital even.  Mr P has been obsessed with his inner workings.  To the extent that he came and told me mid work day recently that he had achieved a very decent number 2 at last.  Maybe he was after a well done sticker?  We are slowly compiling our own list of shops and eateries that match our version of 'safe'.  Over time, this can be relaxed.  Vegetables off the street stalls get soaked in the solution that comes out of a bottle with a blue cross on it.  Somewhere between bleach and washing up liquid.

The other obsession is sleep (it really does come down to the fundamentals).  Our mattress has been changed, pillow rearranged.  We sleep with the ac controls between us and flip it off and on as we stir.  We have a very strange (Stranger Things) bedroom light that glows like a giant jelly fish all night.  I love it.  Sometimes we can sleep with the screened window open.  It casts an amazing pattern.  Wrought iron swirls with a thick vine climbing up it (seriously Stranger Things) but this gets complicated as heavy rains and early birds are very bloody loud!

 

It is Mr.Ps birthday today!  All the 5s! We are hoping to go to the museum.  It is slightly outside of our walking circle but not by much.  A slight stretch.  I am a huge museum fan.  In particular social history/folk art, a life long fan of the Antiques Roadshow as you will know if you have ever tried to visit on a Sunday evening.  I love the stories that weave around artefacts and treasures lined up on peoples mantle pieces.  I love the way that everyone curates their own histories by the way they arrange photographs on walls.  I have high expectations today!

This evening we will go for drinks at Sika.  Nice lounge style bar/restaurant.  Everything is a bit of a minefield socially.  If you issue a school wide invitation, everyone feels obliged to come and you are agreeing to pay for all their drinks.  So we only issued the invite to expats who will understand that they are not obliged to come and that we will probably not pay for all their drinks!  Birkinabae folk have been lovely and welcoming we have had some serious belly laughs.  I ran the plan past my local teaching assistant, who said it was fine and would not cause any offence.  

But, then there is the wall in my classroom.  Before my time, a huge board was taken down in the art room, leaving a filthy unpainted space.  The last teacher lived with this but I can't.  No school would expect a Maths teacher to work in a half painted class.  Apparently, art teachers don't care.  This one does.  So, initially I asked for it to be painted.  But the painters have gone.  Then I asked for the paint.  This took a while because if you have paint and no painters, who will paint the wall?  It is hard to explain, if you haven't seen me in action, that this just isn't an issue.  "But if you paint the wall, that is less work for the painters!" (who are no longer there).  So I am now pretending that I am painting the wall as I am an artist.  The paint has been purchased and, yes of course, Luke will help me.  Because, even though I am an artist, I cannot paint the wall as I am not a painter-but Luke is a man so he may be able to do it.  I will go in when no one is watching and just paint the wall...

One of the teachers at school has a mother who has a local traditional weaving studio.  I have seen some of the beautiful cloth woven from both wool and cotton.  She will take me to meet her mother as she may be able to weave some of our fleeces for us.  I cannot explain how exciting this will potentially be!  And just for a moment I am transported back to our fields and sheep and have a pang of missing.  here I am, clean, happy and having an amazing experience-suddenly missing being covered in some kind of dirt (crap) cleaning up after some kind of animal and wanting to take our some kind of wonderful dog for a walk.