A Week In Floods

from The Bangkok Post...

from the Thai Visa Forum...

Nakhon's Flooding...

The flooding/rain here has not ceased, and it is causing a lot of damage to the city. I am just about ready for it to stop. I was really looking forward to teaching again after the week-long break, but now school has been cancelled until April 4th!- I miss those kids!! Also, my plans to meet my friend from home in tropical Samui may now be thwarted. Tourists have been stranded on the island for the last three days. It may be Bangkok instead. Or possibly the west side, although they've been hit pretty hard too.
The worst thing, though, is many of my friends here have been stranded, evacuated, trapped, and their lives and everything in them has been soaked.

• Fellow teachers have been marooned, literally, on a small beach in Ko Phagnan. The wooden bridges (see my pictures from Ko Phagnan) you have to take to get to and from places on the beach have been destroyed, and as of now, they have no way out of the particular area they are in. We are not sure when they will be able to get off the island, or when they will be able to return home. So far, no one is injured and everyone seems to be okay health-wise.
• A few others have not been able to leave their homes because they are flooded in. One teacher's wall had to be knocked down yesterday as an evacuation route was needed.
• One couple that teaches here in Nakhon was out of town, and a friend went to go check on their house, only to find it waist deep in water. Their cat, who just had kittens, had dragged all of her babies up onto the mattress and was found floating amongst everything else in their house. Luckily, they were all safe. They've since returned home, but obviously cannot stay at their house. Much of their belongings are now ruined.

Also, on a much more minor note, this week I was to begin my "Week in Foods" blog entry, where I took a photo of every single thing I ate for the week. But now I've been reduced to noodle cups, peanut butter, and ice cream. Ice cream does happen to be a part of my daily diet now, but the other items do not, nor do they even begin to reflect some of the interesting things at the school cafeteria that I encounter on a daily basis. Now, it's a "Week in Floods" entry. Obviously, pun intended.

So far, though, while conditions are not the best, people have managed to say safe and together, which is what is most important.

I have been trying to make the best of this time off by responding to friends' emails, getting things together for school, planning and preparing for lessons, dealing with a lot of the admin. stuff that has come up in the last week and a half (I think we may have found a new principal!!), and getting my life and new apartment organized. I have a feeling though, that I am just hours away from cabin fever.

We made the best of it last night by ordering pizzas (It's March, so it's buy one, get one free! This being thus, we each ordered a large pizza and then split one large between the 5 of us- lots of leftovers!) and watching Beetlejuice, probably one of the best cinematic works that I can think of. But then I could not get home because the roads were flooded and it was raining too hard. I waited for a break in the rain, which did not come until about noon today, and then spent over an hour making the usual 15 minute drive back to my apartment.

I am excited for school to start again on Monday so we can continue with our lesson. We just began reading Ray Bradbury's "All Summer in a Day," where a young girl and her classmates, who live on Venus where all it does is rain, are excited to briefly see the sun for the very first time. How very apropos...

The streets are a mess- many are still flooded, including one of the two major intersections. So traffic has to be re-routed onto smaller streets not equipped for such a heavy flow of vehicles. Garbage and sediment is everywhere on the streets that are not flooded and everyone was trying to get somewhere during the break in the rain, so the streets have been very congested. I passed multiple trucks whose beds were packed with black rubber tubes- locals excited to take advantage of this rainy weather and get some good, dirty tubing in. Sirens are constantly sounding. Rescue trucks are constantly whizzing by, and the rain continues to pour....