Ninja

As many of you know, we have a ninja. Not our personal ninja to do our bidding, like an awesome monkey, rather a security guard ninja who hangs out in front of our building every night to make sure people don't come in and steal our stuff. Now, you may ask, how do you know he's a ninja. Have you ever witnessed ninja moves or anything awesome? The answer is simply no. But we know he is. He exudes ninja.

We decided it would be in our best interest to befriend ninja, as we call him. Since he is there every day, if anyone messes with us ninja is a good ally to have on our side, plus he speaks Thai and Burmese and Hill Tribe language, but no English, so he's good for our Thai practice. Every day when leaving and coming home between 6pm and 6am, ninja is there, so we talk to him.

Now, I use the terminology of "talk" lightly. We speak a little Thai, and have incredible control and use of the 25 words we know. This is, however, as far as our vocabulary reaches, so our conversations require a lot of hand-gestures and acting. We do, however manage to communicate. Ninja, Katie and I have talked of home, cars, girlfriends, children, travel, jobs, and a myriad of other topics with our profuse gesturing and bad pronunciation.

We recently learned that ninja is going home for 4 months to be with his daughter and help with the rice farming. Tonight is, in fact, his last night as our ninja. We made a plan a while ago regarding a potential gift for our ninja, as he has been so friendly to us, and he likely rarely gets any appreciation for his job. We chose to buy him a trophy in appreciation. Luck would have it, that a trophy store is literally across the road from our building. With some help from my Thai student, I had them engrave the trophy in Thai, saying, "Thank you, security guard, for you to have being been thank you our Thai teacher." (more or less a direct translation). Here is a photo of the trophy. (we had a photo on the computer, which turned out AWESOME on the top)




















And, here is the photo of Katie and I giving it to him. Despite his rather placid expression, he did seem to enjoy it, and has been quire robust when we inevitably pass by him in the evening.