All good (sort of) in our hood

Our teaching schedule has us getting up for school at six but thankfully Surat Thani has provided a fail safe way of making sure we don’t miss class. Alarm clocks entirely unnecessary! What a score! Instead of using an alarm we have our initial wake up call of the 37 roosters that our neighbors keep in their yard. It’s pretty easy to hit snooze on the roosters so thankfully our neighbor in the next flat like to start hand scrubbing their laundry outside of our bedroom door at 5:35 sharp. The vigorous scrubbing of clothing, after a ten minutes of listening, actually takes on a soothing rhythm, like ocean waves. You hit a second snooze. At 6:30 the cacophony really begins. Cue the barking yipper dogs dressed in sweaters across the street, now slowly bring in the putting and whizzing of tuk tuk, motorbikes,and song thoews (mini trucks with benches in the back to carry passengers), build the final crescendo by adding our creepy German neighbor across the street blasting THE ONE mix CD he owns. If the track list of Steve Miller’s “Abracadbra”, Celine Dion, and crappy German techno do not wake you up, consult a doctor.
The alley we live in is quite a mix. Poor neighbors who collect bottles and seem to have barely enough to get by. Kids who wash themselves outside out of a garbage bin used to collect rain water. Rich neighbors with huge gates and expensive TVs inside. The internet cafe owners who have invited us over to have guitar jam sessions to Thai pop songs. And, our creepy German neighbor who has said fewer than 15 words to us since we moved in. He is about 55 years old, has a younger Thai wife, and runs an ice cream stand from his living room. It’s just a giant cooler where school kids grab a cone on their way home from school. His hobbies appear to be staring out of his house into ours (which became evident when nine of the fifteen words he has said to us included “I can see you at night in your house”), staring at his TV, and drinking an excessive amount of alcohol. Not really into the music, but kind of scared to question his passion for Kraut rock.
Our alley is also home to an adorable dog that follows us everywhere, two dogs that want to bite us, an unknown number of mice and cockroaches, a teenage girl who we pay to do our laundry (who has a dog so mean she makes us hand the laundry through a side window so the dog in the front room won’t eat us) and a small store that sells cups of noodles, jugs of water, and various canned and dried ocean products. Ahhhh! Home sweet home.