Welcome to the Gateway to the North

This is me writing in Uttaradit, said ooo tara dit. It is about three hours from Lampang (Google maps lies) and it is nestled into the mountains. After a twenty minute discussion, my teacher coworkers came up with my Thai name. I am no maa lie ee with a rising tone. It means a necklace made out of flowers. I have a flat now. It is on the fourth floor of a building with no elevator (always my luck, right?). My apartment is pretty large and they decorated it for me. I even have a large deck. I went on a rampage last night killing ants and spiders. Right now I am slightly scared of my bathroom due to the large numbers of spiders, but hopefully I scared them all away. If geckos weren't so fast you would definitely see me trying to catch one so it can eat the bugs. The shower here is the same as the bathroom floor and the air conditioning is only in my bedroom. The security system for my apartment is a finger scan followed by locks, locks, locks. In a day I inherited a lot of keys. Oh and there is a soccer field across the street from my apartment.
My coworkers are great. They took my to a place last night for dinner that served American food because they thought I might miss home. So far I have met a number of the female teachers as well as the teacher assigned to be my companion. Today I get to do laundry and get some final things from the market as well as observe the school.
So my school. It is a demonstration school as part of a University. They do kindergarten through high school and I will be teaching all grades. Schools here are very open. Only classrooms are closed in and even then, with lots of windows.  I am sure I will have more comments after today about that.
In the past few days a few little snippets were left out so I wanted to catch them up. First, during the fire, my roommate and I left our keys in the room. After all of our RA training, we still did it. Though to be honest, keys are not normally left in slits in the wall (no key in slit, no air conditioning or lights). Oh and on Valentines day you can get married or remarried on an elephant. Or the fact that we went to a club in Lampang and met some embarrassing other American teachers who nearly got us kicked out of the club. And my biggest fact: they have snickers here!