Trying to process

I am:
Privileged to have been able to live among real Thai families.
Over-whelmed
Trying to process my thoughts
Thinking of all the articles I want to write.

I ate:
Goat curry
Deep fried grass – a speciality of this area
Prawns – after pulling their heads off. (This will only mean anything to people who know that I am squeamish and that I don’t ‘do’ seafood or things that look like creatures.)
Fresh coconut (not old tough ‘coconut-shy’ coconuts!)
Spicy fish soup
Muslim roti
Rice soup (traditional Thai breakfast)

I saw:
Mudskippers
Ghost crabs
Fiddler crabs
Horseshoe crabs
Sand-bubbling crab
Hermit crab transferring to a new home
Sanddollars (dead and alive)
A snake (my first in the wild)
A water monitor lizard
An elephant by the side of the road
A slow loris – a night monkey
Lar Gibbons
King Crown Gibbons
A Crab eating Macaque
An egrit
A nest of mating eagles
A Brahminy kite
Buffalo
Rubber trees – collecting sap

I didn’t see:
Big spiders in the jungle (phew)

I made:
A batik print
Soap
Packaged soap

I planted:
Orchids as part of a reforestation project
Seventeen Rhizophora mangrove trees

I dressed in:
Muslim dress for the celebration of a neighbour’s upcoming trip to Mecca.
A bandana!

I declined:
To eat the egg of the horseshoe crab, there and then on the beach.

I heard:
Gibbons singing
Cicadas
Black Crested Bulbuls singing
Kingfishers
Goats bleating
Cows mooing
Cats and kittens mewling
A cat fight
Cockerels cock-a-doodle dooing
The sea

I remembered:
One of the things I loved about Husband: that he knew stuff like this. I stopped listening at some point.
Being 11 and copying a picture from an ancient encyclopaedia for a project to show how rubber was collected.

I found it hard:
To sit on the floor all the time without fidgeting.
To use the squat toilets when my legs ached from sitting on the floor