There's a mouse in the room

There really is.; I just saw it scamper across a barrier and am now hearing it rustle in a plastic bag. WHat am I supposed to do about it though? Naan (my host sister) warned me that I might see mice and Geko's downstairs. One of which I'm obviously more okay with than the others, but even those green little guys I think are hiding out in my bedroom because I've heard their shrill singing at night, and it almost sounds like they're saying "nanny-nanny na-na, you can't find me". But I"m too pacified to actually seek them out to kill them or remove them; they're going to have to attack me in my sleep or get annervingly close to my bed in order for that to happen.
I'm living with my host family now and having the first thing I say about my living conditions be about mice and Geko's is probably unfair and deceiving in the sense that those things are a reality for many people here but I'm not living in squalor or anything. First off, materially, Thailand's really developed over the last decade and is considered a developing country (not developed but not undeveloped). It's a land filled with smiling faces, of easy going people who are patient with your butchered or non-existent Thai, who in fact praise you for speaking "very good Thai" when you can say as much as "Can I have fried rice" (which by the way is difficult for English speakers because the word for Can I.. and rice are almost identical save their tones. The 5 tones of Thai make things pretty tricky). Plumbing isn't as good here, but it's not unlivable and there are porcelain, Western style toilets and/or squatters everywhere. Just don't try to flush toilet paper down them, if there is any toilet paper to be found (many Thai's use a, as Ajarn Mike said, "vegetable sprayer").
I love the way meals are done here! It seems that most people eat out for dinner, unless they enjoy cooking and/or have a maid to cook for them. But their eating out isn't the fast food that we typically eat or the huge portion sizes at dine in restraunts. All over Chiang Mai there are thousands of street vendors and restraunts where you can get plates of fried, plain, sticky, and any other kind of rice there is mixed with vegetables and sauces and whatever kind of meat you'd like from whatever part of the body you'd like it from (if it's edible, they'll eat it here. My host sister just ate a little squid out of a plastic bag the other day and, as my experience with pig's blood tells us, there are even more things that American's would never think to eat). I love it because each shop is so different and each person selling the various foods have a story and here we all are on the same street for dinner. I'm still fascinated, thouh alternatively disgusted at times, at all the different kinds of foods. They loved jelly filled/based deserts here and seem to be more into candy selling than into chocolate. Portion sizes are a lot smaller too, which I love; it's so much healthier. At home, I usually just eat the whole thing of whatever size I get because it's there in front of me or I feel guilty for not finishing it when I would've been satisfied witha much smaller portion, but ehre I don't really have to worry about the portion on my plate being too big. For an example of a portion size, the one night that I got ice cream for dinner, the two scooped cone I got was no bigger than the size of a one scoop back home (if that).
One thing that does annoy me about portion sizes are their drinks; they have these really good fresh fruit drinks that are probably neutral for you considering how much dreamer and/or sugar they put in the base. The only thing is that they fill the cups up to the brim with ice and so it doesn't seem like you get very much at all. Again, maybe that's a good thing and maybe I need to adjust myself because it's healthier to drink less of that kind of thing anyways. Besides, comparatively everything's so cheap here that I really can't complain about being served that amount of drink for say 6 baht (33 baht is $1, so much less than $1).
I'll have to write more about my host family and about Ban Phansuwan later. I have class in 40 minutes and need to get ready. Every time I sit down to write things down I feel that I've only begun to scratch the surface of what we're experiencing here. It's frustrating, but not that frustrating; I guess I kind of expected it to be that way, though I didn't know that there could be this much to process or even basic things to share.