This is One of My Favorite Posts

A few nights ago, we sat at dinner (which was a picnic on our bedroom floor, because the kitchen was too hot) and made lists of what we will and won’t miss. I’ve added a few explanations with some of them.

What We Will Miss:

• The view from our house, sunsets & sunrises, the mountains, banana & mango trees
• Khao soi and sai ua (Northern Thai sausage, one of the best things I’ve ever eaten)

Sai ua

• Markets
• Motorbikes
• Easy, cheap medical care
• All four of us going to school together, seeing each other throughout the day
• Butterflies (the colors and sizes are insane, and they’re everywhere)
• Geckos in the house (they're noisy, but cute)
• Fresh bananas
• Big tropical thunderstorms
• Monks

Every time I'd run in Chiang Mai, I'd see this. Sigh.

• House days (in-school field days, similar to Harry Potter houses)
• Thai national anthem (which we hear every day and will remember for the rest of our lives)
• Waterfalls, nature, crazy intense shades of GREEN
• Rice paddies, banana & pineapple fields
• Time with each other
• School lunches (delicious Thai food every day-- this really is as good as it sounds)
• Affordable travel; the prices of everything
• Hotel pools (it’s a thing here to pay a small fee to use hotel pools for a day)
• Flower smells
• Long, the dog (a sweet semi-stray that lives between our house and our landlord’s house)
• Thai dogs in general
• Our great landlord, Yves

Long

• Friendly old Thai people
• MASSAGES
• The BTS train in Bangkok, tuk tuks

Things We Won’t Miss:

• Our hot kitchen
• Shaky wifi
• No dishwasher
• Our muddy road full of massive potholes
• Toilet trash (This is #1 for me. You can’t flush TP here. It goes in a little bin next to the toilet. This concept has never gotten any less disgusting for me in two years. Emptying it is my least favorite job.)

Vile. You don't want to touch the lid when you use it. But if you get one without a lid, then you can see everyone's... business. I will never, ever miss this.

• Ants x10000, and scorpions, and bugs in the bed/drinking glasses/food, crawling on our skin
• Perfectly still, sweltering humidity
• Super-sweet snacks & drinks (I ordered an iced tea the other day and saw stars with the first sip)
• Thai Netflix (It’s Netflix, it just has a more limited selection)
• “sausage” (most sausage served here is really some variation on hot dogs)
• Hard floors (make my legs & feet ache, break everything that falls on them, and make for horrible acoustics)
• Terrible overhead lighting everywhere
• School uniforms (that was Sascha’s contribution)
• Lack of friends outside of school
• The Chiang Rai movie theater
• Distance to grocery stores (it’s basically a road trip)
• Dirty feet, sticky skin
• Burning plastic smells from garbage fires
• Banking/credit card problems
• Our electrical system, which is basically powered by an extension cord that runs up the hill to our house. It blows out if we use the kitchen sink at the same time as anything else. Also, it gives us random electrical shocks from our microwave, toaster, and metal shower caddy—yes, in the shower. 

Those two black wires provide our electricity.

• Creepy old Western men on the prowl for Thai women. *Not all Western men here are creepy! We know plenty of normal guys. But I have lots more detail on this subject that you'll have to get from me in person. Those words are a little too strong here.

And finally,

Things We Won’t Miss… But Kinda Will Miss!

• Roosters and dumb chickens (my apologies to all the chicken fans out there, but the ones we have around our house are loud and stupid… they run in front of our approaching car 100% of the time)
• Squatty toilets
• The language barrier (charades are fun for all parties involved)
• The culture barrier (it's mind-blowing to be around people who don't know the same cultural references as you, and sometimes a little tiring; but mostly it's cool)
• Teaching middle schoolers (this is mostly a "will" miss; man, they are sweet)
• Thai pop music. It sounds like the same two songs everywhere we go. To be fair, if Thai people moved to the US, they’d hear exactly the same thing. (“American music is just ‘Under the Bridge’ and ‘Free Fallin.’” Yes, I have a grudge against those two songs.)
• All coffee here is only espresso drinks, no drip coffee. I do love this, but sometimes I just want a simple cup of coffee. We have a coffee maker but it was hard to find, and the only one like it in the store.
• Hanging laundry. I will continue to do this back home, except for towels, and I don’t know how well it will work in the dead of winter. It’s so great to push the drying rack out into the sun and have everything dry in 15 minutes.

So that's that. I am writing this on Tuesday the 6th. Two weeks from right now, we'll be home. I had a tiny flash of panic yesterday. I checked the weather forecast on my phone and realized that very soon, there's going to be a weather forecast for Chiang Rai that we will not be a part of. That was a weird feeling.

Oh! One more thing! I almost forgot to post the latest real estate offering I saw from back home:

 Asking price: $580,000.