so i was thinking about the whole housing situation, and i figured that i'd at least ask my landlord and see what happens from there...whether God wanted me to move in with chantha or stay where i was...i had actually signed a "contract" when i first moved in to stay until the end of august, but at the time that i signed it, my landlord said that i could move anytime.  i still felt bad, though, that i was breaking the contract, but i approached him about moving out earlier, and he just asked me to stay two more weeks so he could find another tenant.  no problem, right?  actually chantha thinks i got a bum deal...apparently contracts don't mean much here.  anyways, so the plan for now is to stay at my apartment for another two weeks and then move in with chantha.  it'll be a little less convenient, but i hope it will work out well. 
 
other than that, i've been out of touch with phan bun...which i think may be for the better.  chantha told me that monks aren't supposed to have friendships with women...and there are all these unspoken rules about how to interact with them.  for instance, when in company with a monk, laypeople are supposed to be at a lower level in comparison to the monk.  so when a monk sits on a chair, you're supposed to sit on the ground.  um...yeah...didn't know that.  things like that...it depends on the rules of the particular pagoda, so maybe phan bun's pagoda was lenient towards foreigners, but...
 
a few more general observations:
 
- there are geckos everywhere, and i mean everywhere.  i see them most often crawling on the walls of restaurants, stores, and buildings...for some reason, they don't scare me.  i think because my brothers used to play around with lizards a lot when we were younger...had little lizard houses, bought crickets and everything.  anyways, for some reason, my apartment actually doesn't have many geckos...i wish it did.  woulda come in handy with the cricket situation.  however, chantha doesn't like them...she heard somewhere that if geckos get on your skin, they're really hard to get off...i dunno if something got lost in the translation, but i think i understood her correctly.  (??)  having never seen a gecko stuck on someone, i don't know what to think of that...
 
- i've had numerous conversations with chantha about how most marriages here are arranged.  it's really uncommon to marry for "love" here, and if you don't marry the person your family wants you to, threats of disownment abound.  thus, there's really no reason to "date" here, though some people do.   (sn: it's led me to develop some theories about asian men...j/k)
 
- making a left turn here is...interesting.  basically, you turn left by cutting across the other side of the street and driving on the wrong side of the road for a little bit, then eventually move over when you're able...