baby's first homestay

so i have just come home from my first homestay, and it was definitely an experience. we were all assigned a nung sow (phonetic thai for little sister) from the school that we went to for our thai classes. mine was a third grader named view. my room was a king bed, bed being a very general term for a pallet on the floor on which you sleep, on a concrete floor covered with contact paper. there was a huge cabinet thing to create a kind of room area with one foot of room on either side of the bed. the rest of the "house" was some sort of recycling depot, i think they may have colllected bottles and stuff like that to sell back to make money, im not sure. so the whole thing was basically a garage; it had a tin roof which only came down to about five inches above the walls. which means that along with everything that came in through the doors and windows which were never closed, these huge lizards were always climbing over the walls to chill in the house. the rest of my family seemed to all be part of an extended family which i could never really get an explanation of because i dont know enough thai at this point. they all lived in this house across the "courtyard" aka mud pitt which i only saw the living room of. there were 4 kids who hung around with my little sister and me all the time, and some neighbors, so the room was always packed with crazy kids. My hong nam (bathroom) is like the majority of thai bathrooms unless you are in a western tourist hotel: a squatter. there are these two little ridged foot spots on the sides of a flat porcelen thing with a hole on one end. you squat over it. when you are done you use a bowl to scoop water out of a bucket next to the "toilet" to "flush" (move the waste products towards the hole) and also to splash yourself to get clean. i really have not yet gotten used to that and don't see it happening anytime soon. the shower is a huge basin of water with the same type of bowl which you fill with the cold water to dump on yourself. the water just goes down a drain in the corner of the room. that was actually not bad at all because it is so hot all of the time. i got ridiculously bit up by mosquitos or something, during a class i counted and i have at least 112 from the knees down. they looked pretty horrible for a while but i took a benadryl and some of the swelling went down. it has all been really interesting so far, there is about 20 minutes of down time per week which is getting exhausting, though this weekend we dont have too much. i only got about 4-6 hours of sleep a night at most in the village because my family had alot of chickens and roosters within 20 feet of my would-be-sleeping-head and dogs running around and for some reason they were always going in and out on motorcycles all night. the yie's (grandma that ran the house and did all the cooking) kitchen was two electric burners and a fire outside under a tin roof type thing, which is also where the table where we ate was. my favorite thing to eat was cow neow (sticky rice) and my yie thought that it was hilarious, she started referring to me as cow neow by the end.