The Colours

The change in weather here is just fantastic! I am very sensible to light, so with no curtains in my room I wake up very very very early. Sometimes i cover my face and go back to sleep. But the first light is just "unmissable" as the sky goes red, and pink, and golden, and it is just sooooooooooo beautiful! Out of my window I see anything but green fields, and trees and the occasional buffalo. Then the sun goes up, while the temperature rises, the sky becomes completely blue, everything is bathed by light and then suddenly the wind blows, and the dark, heavy, clouds seem to appear from nowhere, and they suddenly burst, strongly, washing it all....it almost feels like a painter painting a picture on a canvas, shade by shade, tone by tone, detail by detail and then when it reaches perfection the painter tired with so much beauty just pours water all over it, and then starts all over again.

Everything seems more alive here. The storms, the sun, the clouds, and the animals. I sat today in the little straw hut in the garden, i was supposedly going to do some yoga but as I sat the wind blew, and I decided to instead pay attention to the sounds. the birds were just so lovely, that I dozed off. And when I woke up the sky was dark, not because it was night, it was just the "painter" tired again.

Have I told you about the geckos? They are "GINmormous!!!" And they make the funniest noise ever. And they are actually sooo beautiful. When i first asked what is that? as I was hearing a loud and strange noise, Non Nan ( Oh I go back to explain who she is in a second, in fact I will explain the name thing, which i finally get it!) took me by hand to show me... I followed her till she pointed to the wall, I looked and saw nothing, she placed my head in the correct position, and when I saw the size of the gecko I almost fainted.. it was at least 40cm. Do they bite? I asked? She said yes. Well, after one fell in my foot one of these days i lost part of my fear, and could observe from up close how beautiful they actually look. Nature that lively and noisy is not a total surprise to a brazilian, but geckos that loud, and big, and fat are :) (at least to a Brazilian from Sao Paulo)

Non Nan lives here in our house. Her mother abandoned her when she was born, and her father does not care about her, so Horm ( I have all this time been misspelling her name it is with a M and not N) took her in. She lives here, goes to the same school where I volunteer and is quite lovely. Before I came to Thailand, one of my very dear friends in England, who is actually Polish, gave me two little books with pictures from Brazil, when I showed my surprise he explained me it was to show the Thai "nothing better than pictures when you cant communicate!". I have written about how moved I was in my Blog, but only now can I actually understand how right he was! Only Maciek could think about that. I showed Non Nan as we can barely communicate, and you know what she looked at the most? Not the cities, not the people, not the beaches, but the fruits and animals. We have so many alike. I thought it was just beautiful to look at her looking so attentively to the herbs, and fruits, and animals, from such a distant continent and smiling when recognizing them. Non Nan is 12 and is in the last year of our primary school, she is the one who teaches PE. In Thailand parents are obliged to send their kids to school from when they are 4 till 15. School provides meals, and i guess a somehow nationalistic feeling, and some Buddhist teaching as we do go to temple and do a short meditation before school starts. I am in a part of Thailand called Isaan. It is in the northeastern part of Thailand, and I just learned that what they speak home is actually something much closer to Laos than to Thai. In school they learn Thai and English.

They have names and nicknames. And the calling thing goes as folllow: everyone who is younger than you you should call Non and then nickname. So for instance older people call me Non Ju ( sounding more like Non tchu) Everyone that is older you should call Pi. Non means little sister, and Pi older. So that basically means people always ask your age when they first meet you. If you are the same age you just say the nickname. I have been by the way been given a longer name : Kunkrun Ju ( Tchu) LaiArat, which literally means teacher Ju the lovely lady :)

The sky is going pink again, the sun is setting. I should not miss that.