I've recently been reminded that I am not, in fact, an intrepid adventurer, nor am I a crack linguist, and that perhaps I'm not actually cut out for this expat thing.

I read a book the other day (Mai Pen Rai Means Never Mind by Carol Hollinger) that was humbling, to say the least. It's a memoir by an American who lived in Bangkok during the 1960s. There are a lot of these expat memoirs, but this is the first one I've seen that didn't portray the experience of living in Thailand as a half-remembered drunken debauch. Most of these books have titles like Pattaya Princess or Bargirl, and based on what I can get from skimming their contents in the bookstore, they deal mostly with the tiresome details of their authors' sexual experiences. However, I have continued to browse the "local interest" section of the bookstore in the hope that at least one person has written about living in Bangkok who wasn't here primarily to see how many women he could pay to have sex with him.

Mai Pen Rai Means Never Mind was very enjoyable to me. The author was an English teacher at another university in Bangkok, and when she writes about work (her students, the university administration, her interactions with her colleagues) she's right on the money--she could have been describing my job. The rest of the book, in which she discusses other aspects of her life, was very interesting as well, but I've come away with a heightened sense of my own failings. This author learned not only to speak Thai, but to read it. She learned to drive in Bangkok, a Bangkok without a Skytrain or metered taxis. She deliberately left the comfort of interacting with fellow Westerners in favor of cultivating friendships with Thai people and taking trips into the rural backountry. She experienced a different Thailand than the extremely limited one I'm dealing with, and she did it (seemingly) without complaint, homesickness, or much sweating.

Mother-in-law and Father-in-law are visiting this week, and I think I'm driving them crazy. It's becoming more and more clear to me that when I first arrived in Thailand I didn't handle things well at all. I found things to be difficult that evidently aren't difficult for normal people, and I've generalized from my own experience in ways that I probably shouldn't. Case in point: I found the process of traveling back and forth from the town where I live to Bangkok to be very daunting at first. Thus, Husband and I wanted to escort his parents from their Bangkok hotel to our town. They, on the other hand, had absolutely no difficulties in doing it themselves. I guess it's not that hard after all--it was just hard for me. Oh well. I am doing the best I can. I guess there's no law saying I have to be competent at everything.