Full post coming soon, but a brief bit:
I had an itchy throttle hand and nowhere in particular to be or to go, so naturally I found myself back in the fetid saltwater swamp from which I ran the day before. Something about it called me back: it was so shocking, so alien that I had not taken any pictures. I needed to photograph and document it, that was the issue.
Back down the road, weaving through pedestrians and livestock, dodging bikes and mopeds and busses going all directions, past fruit stands and grill stands and chop shops, past farms and villas and shrines to the stank of prawn ponds and salt marshes.
Prawn farming, as it's practiced here, is one of the worst looking sports imaginable. Sewage settling bonds are nicer: they stink less, and they aim to purify the water; a prawn farm is an isolated pond that begins with the rank odor of a saltwater swamp and packs on consecutive layers of aquarium rot depending upon how long it's been since the farmer drained the pond back into the bay. Meanwhile, there are little agitators spinning a brown froth, presumably to oxygenate the mess but looking—and smelling—more like a manure spreader on a large-scale farm in Iowa.
Welcome to paradise.
It's enough to make you promise yourself that no matter what, whenever you see shrimp or prawns from Thailand, you will cook the shit out of the suckers. Pun very much intended.
In each block of shrimp ponds is a hut on bamboo stilts that hold it maybe four or five meters above the mire. Each hut is thatched with bamboo—roof, walls, floors. From inside, jaundiced eyes stare from shadows; or maybe they aren't eyes but holes in the walls. Most have a large, screaming red satellite dish for internet or TV or both. At a guess, they have a hole in the floor for sewage, and sit on bare bamboo slats to watch a wall-size plasma television.
It reminded me of some of the places I've seen in Alaska, but without the... call it righteous indignation. Certainly without the governmental support and subsistence.
Driving down the singletrack jetty between murky, dark hovels was certainly not a comfortable experience, but it lacked completely the anger and fear of walking down a street in an Alaskan tribal slum. It might not be impossible, but I don't think such poverty could exist in America: the tide washes in styrofoam bowls and clamshells and little kids pick through the packaging first for food and then for fun.
So here's a bamboo thatched bungalow over a reeking saltwater cesspool full of flotsam and jetsam and worse through which little kids in scraps of cloth grody beyond mention dig for entertainment and nourishment, and here I am on the pearl white Honda scooter, wearing a silver helmet, with a big ol camera dangling from my neck while every head turns to stare at me.
In Alaska, the stares were angry, malevolent, and I guess ultimately carried a resentment or maybe jealousy completely absent in Thailand.
Driving through the Thai countryside, I am the pitiable one who cannot kickstart his bike, who cannot read or write, who does not know how to eat right or drive right; driving down the hand-built jetty, I am the one burdened by lack and loss, the one without country or family and hiding under expensive clothing and equipment while the shadowy figures sit amid all they could ever want.
And that, I guess, is why I couldn't take photos, can't convey the experience into a series of easily digestible bytes. Maybe that's the thing with poverty and the distinction with subsistence—poverty embraces and enforces the sense of injustice and entitlement, declares that one group has something the other group wants and insists that this is as it should be. Subsistence involves neither wealth nor possessions but a sense of well-being or satisfaction; the prawn farmer in the bamboo hut has food, family, entertainment, a sense of place and culture, a means of participating in the market economy without compromising heritage, belief, tradition, or custom. Who cares if the ponds are dirty as long as they pay for the satellite? What matters the Western world when there's family gathered ot cook up a net full of fish? Who needs flashy packaging when there are all sorts of cool whatnots drifting in on the tide—especially when you can't even eat most of the stuff in a big toy box?
When I come in and see poverty, lack, loss, where I interpret my own discomfort with what would be a lack of material well-being, where I feel guilty for what I have, I inflict my own cultural values and biases on an unreceptive and indifferent audience that wouldn't have interest in spitting a prawnshell at me or my hangups. Sure, maybe someone might want to upgrade to my bike, but that's about the only enviable component of my character, and there are a lot of other bikes that are much more exciting, so I'm probably flattering myself to think I have anything to desire.
And this is why I couldn't take photos—anything I shot would seem pathetic and impoverished and desperate because it would be ramed in a Western cultural context in which it should feel guilty or apologetic or somehow lesser, when the reality is just the opposite. Whomever's eyes stare out from the shadows does not want out, the kid picking bits of noodle or whatnot from a styrofoam bowl does not want the new hand-held-electro-super-wireless-blasto, and the Western eye is wallowing in arrogance and false superiority to think otherwise.
Mayhap.
But then again, who am I to say?
On a map, a 160K roadtrip is nothing, especially with a semi-decent highway system. My WRX brain says, “Not even long enough for a pee stop.”
But then I get on my moped and start down the road, driving down the left shoulder and avoiding slower moped traffic, oncoming livestock, roadside stands, roadside picnics, people waiting for a bus, busses, oncoming moped traffic, oncoming busses, piles of manure, farm debris, piles of burning sugar cane husks, and the occasional maniacal driver intent on passing on my left. I get pummeled by wind, rain, sun, bugs, dirt, unfiltered diesel, acrid smoke, durian, fertilizer, and worse. Neither my tailbone nor my cheeks will callus over, and my arms are baked despite wearing long sleeves and the strongest sunscreen available in country.
Suddenly, a half hour is a long drive. Especially during peak bus commute time, when a bunch of psychedelic karaoke busses are vying for the fastest commute time.
So when I got to a town, I felt justified saying, “Here I am, and here I explore.”
First I took the road North out of town, following a sign toward a port. It petered into a single lane, overgrew, and opened into what must've been the port: a large cement turnaround area, presumably for ag trucks, and half a dozen empty slips. With, of course, a couple of bicycle cart vendors and a fleet of mopeds either run past the ground or completely tricked out. No saying what I was actually expecting, but that was certainly not it. And I was grateful the scooter kept idling happily with only my wildly swerving U turn on the knurled concrete.
Naturally, with the next pass I ended up on the wrong side of the river driving down an elevated soi that weaves through a swamp speckled with houses on stilts from which people barely distinguishable from the shadowy interiors watched me try to find a place wide enough to turn around without pulling into an already-occupied parking jetty.
It was too much. I couldn't look around me. I focused on the dirt strip in front of me, and through a blessing for which I will pay dearly, I'm sure, the soi came out on the road to the docks—didn't even notice it on the way in.
The good part is that town--the failed industrial port—looked really nice after driving down the soi. What's cracked concrete and a thick coating of grime? Here's a town center with half a dozen food stalls in a parking area servicing a pharmacy, a dry goods shop, two bars, a 7-11, and a terminal for the river-crossing ferry. Yeah, people in once-colored clothes are staring at me, just like they do back in NST, like they did in Bangkok, Naples, Rome, or Munich (oh for a cool rain, comprehensible language, and pig shank with a vat of Andechs beer, followed by a night nippy enough to justify a downen decka!).
So, following the doc's advice, I decided to get some protein—beef. Seafood in this area is easy—usually, half a dozen varietals are displayed, and all I have to do is point. I know hot to ask for chicken and pig, but not beef—the word is one of the bad ones for a farang tongue, and it's more difficult to find on display, so I've had little practice. Which found me walking along with my fingers curled up next to my head, making mooing sounds like a cow. Which is doubly awkward because the American “Moo” is remarkably close to the Thai word for pig, and my various syllabilizations—with what consonant does a Thai cow initiate its bellow?--drew considerable attention not just from the folks already sitting around and doing nothing but from those who had previously been occupied in something ostensibly meaningful and now found pressing reason to stand behind me.
Hmm. Well. As if it wasn't awkward before, now I'm in the middle of a milling group of people who are following and laughing at me without pretense of any other activity. Great.
It gets better through: I succeeded in finding cow.
I got a big bowl of beef soup. Kinda.
It took a few stands before someone understood the mooing, and then there was much frantic pointing and directing to get me to one particular stall. A lady pulled out a styrofoam bowl and opened a steaming vat from which she pulled a few tongfuls of wide, blackish ribbons covered with some sort of fuzz.
Everyone pointed at it and made eating motions, so I took it to be my beef meal: great. But what is it?
Some of the strips had nubblins like Mexican tripa, but some of the little cilia things were close to an inch long. And then there were big, wide ribbons of it on the bigger, wider ribbons.
Another vat opened, this one a clear broth billowing waves of chili, lime, and that distinctive organ meat smell.
I paid the 20B and lead a procession to a bench at the ferry dock, where there was much muttering and pointing and sniggering while I poked through strips from various parts of the GI tract—and what else would determine inch-long ribbons vs nubbly cilia in a bowl of tripe?
I'll admit that few things scream against lovin' as loudly as a big bowl of tripe, but I was pleasantly surprised when I started in on it: the meat was tender and flavorful, if the broth was a little salty, but the chili lime gave a great punch that worked well with the salty beef offal broth. Of course, shoe leather would taste okay if cooked for a similar time under similar conditions, but this particular sort of tripe, with the rainbow range of cilia, had particular textural excitement.
And boy was it fun to watch me eat.
Within 36 hours of signing the rental agreement—I just can't use “contract” for this—my landlady swung by campus to leave a note: “Mother is with me and the house is clean. You should try moving in this weekend. Come by whenever for a key. When I did, she gave me detailed instructions for operating the water system, the water filter, which garbage goes in which bin, etcetera.
Not having wheels sufficient to get my tuba here, at least not gracefully (riding a tuk tuk will happen; driving a scooter while carrying a tuba is just dumb. Which I realize mainly because I'm two-thirds set on trying it, just for the novelty.
Exact same feeling I had when I was... 19, echoing something Heinlein, or maybe McManus wrote while sitting on the roof with my best friend—“you know that by the time you're telling yourself that something is a bad idea it's f'n moronic;” “yup;” “but that won't slow you for an instant;” “nope; you still gonna jump?” *CRACK* not broken, not broken, not broken, not broken... NOT BROKEN, DAMNIT!
And while on a non-lenear narrative, Thailand uses palm oil like America uses hyper-processed corn byproduct. I think I've heard palm is super unhealthy if you take a shot of it (because, holistically speaking, oil extracted from corn[??] is so much better for things) but it makes for some darn good potato chips. And if you render in some pork belly before adding potatoes, hot damn.
So, skipping completely past a scooter adventure that will be catching up in the near future, transport and literary gods willing, I retreated to my country house when the city dwelling was roaring under a Saturday night.
Talk about fantastic.
No stadium across the way, no kids next door, no video games or TV or movies; just a bumpkin family next door and dirisive stares from the houses across the street. (The lady next door will clean the place for 100-150 B, looks like a shriveled Dumbledore in Dobby clothing, and greeted me by hopping over the wall and watching me walk through the house by matching my pace from the outside—don't ask me how she did this on the 2nd floor. It appears that they spend weekends harvesting durians, jackfruit, and whatever else they can find, loading it into a pickup, and processing it in their front yard.)
And the bed. It's a hardwood frame with pads on it. Each pad is just as wide as the bed—a little wider than a twin, back home—and about 18” long. Altogether, the bed's maybe seven feet long and four feet wide, and the mattress is about as soft and giving as a pine branch on granite. Talk about fantastic—my first night, I dreamed I was on a backpacking trip. (Don't ask me why, but I would be both physically and mentally happier sleeping on the floor next to a feather bed fit for a princess than in the bed itself.)
And I have a cooker.
A word on buying meat: most westernized places will have styro-pack meats. Places worth buying something will have big ol stainless steel vats full of sundry and generally uniform cuts that go for the same price—chicken drums, quarters, breasts, carcasses; pork belly, neck, stomach, liver, kidneys, heart, leg; round, chuck, oxtail, neck, or offal of beef.
Something about a strip of pork belly two inches wide with less fat than a typical American ribeye is as viscerally exciting as beautiful chicken quarters for almost a buck a kilo.
Like most of the world outside of America, you bag and price everything in the department; in this case, you dig through the vat of meat with either tongs or your hands—really, if you watch for any period, it makes no difference for cross-contamination—bag it, pass the bag to a clerk, and he or she will print off a barcode. This is actually a godsend, for most of the checkers find it significant challenge in tracking down the barcode on as many items as come down the belt toward them.
And then there's the freshness factor: none of the fruit has been preserved or treated. I throw it in the chillchest to cool it off, but the cold doesn't help it last any longer than letting it sit in someone's cart. I realize I'm not getting the same varietals as back home, but it really tastes like I'm getting different species over here: I thought I enjoyed watermelon and banana, but it's like watching Star Wars on a laptop vs Imax; I generally don't care for apples or oranges, but they're encroaching on rambutan and mangosteen as my go-to snack food.
Next weekend will be a trip to the market and a foray into fish still squirming. Local custom involves a turmeric or herbed salt pack with rotisserie treatment; local custom also involves burying the entrails and rendering the fermented juice before treating with chilies. I'm hoping wrapping a tropical fish in foil with butter and lemon and cooking with potatoes and onion dos as much as back home, at least until I get the rotisserie up and running.
Anyway, this weekend was getting stocked up—the staples, the cleaning products, the sundry necessities of modern convenience in chunks the size of a scooter basket and small backpack. And Sunday brought one of the most glorious sensations I've had all trip: bleach. I found a bottle of bleach at the store, bought a bristle brush, and scrubbed the hell out of the bathrooms and kitchen. Talk about relieving! To feel something smooth and clean, without mold or growth, to walk barefoot or sit bare-assed without wondering how many microbes are gracing one's presence—this is an intense delight. And very short lived when one forgets to leave all the bathroom lights on and returns later in the afternoon to find the freshly-whitened grout black with mould.
Sigh. But at least now I have the tools and know it can be done.
One of the disconcerting things about the place is the bathroom setup: it's a new enough house to have in-wall wiring, but plumbing was an afterthought executed Thai-style, which is to say, a shower involves a big basin, a scoop, and a drainhole with a hand-held nozzle tacked on afterwards. So pretending the water pressure worked and the hand-held nozzle produced a manageable stream and was mounted at an appropriate height to allow for luxuriating under some semblance of a regular shower, you'd still be coating the bathroom with suds and spray because there's no curtain or even division in the floor—it'll just drain. Unless it stagnates and moulds.
As is, I plan on living pretty well downstairs, except for the upstairs balcony: easy enough to have my toothbrush, toothpaste, bathroom sundries downstairs next to the bed. The master bath is ostensibly the one to use—it has a bird nest in the window—but there is no hot water unit and the shower mount is knee-level to double as a spigot for the tub. The other upstairs bathroom has hot water and a workably-mounted head, as does the outside bathroom. So, if I were the average person, I'd be living in the master bedroom, showering in the guest bath, working in what is now the downstairs bedroom, and alternating between the forthcoming hammock and living room for kick-back time. But I tend to live much closer to Occam: most likely, I'll have my clothes upstairs in the armoire because it's so impressive to see and open, I'll sleep on the balcony or downstairs biscuit mattress, and I'll learn to do the sponge bath thing because if I swap shower heads for one that has more than half a dozen streams, I'll have to re-drill a wall mount, which sounds like as much work as occupying (cleaning) two bathrooms. And going outside to shower is just weird, even for me.
 |
| New Digs |
Saturday was supposed to be the start of a grand roadtrip for the four day weekend, but Friday night the swelling in my feet crept up to my knees, and when I went to a pharmacist he told me to go to the hospital. (Usually, a pharmacist is familiar with all the medications and will recommend one based upon your description of symptoms.) Until now, I've slept with my feet elevated and woken with normal ankles, but that did't happen, so I went to the hospital.
When I bought the scooter, I promised myself I would not be a cautious driver because I've heard stories about people coming back from Thai jails and I've heard stories about people coming out of Thai hospitals, but while each is life-altering, the hospital stories I've heard have universally involved a lifetime of hormone suppliments and a legal name change. Not the sort of story I'm after, really, so I'll go for the glorious sort of splattered-everywhere wreck.
But there's something about not being able to walk and waking up still swollen that scares me, so I sucked it up and went in.
Good sign #1 was that the reception desk had “RECEPTION DESK” written under the squigglies—not going to get started on Thai script right now, but suffice it to say my learning curve lies between the bunny slope and a flatline DOA.
After a brief scurry, the stately dame found the young English-speaker who determined that I was there to see a doctor.
“Right this way,” and I followed the nurse's outfit to “PATIENT RECEIVING,” where they took my passport and vitals. It flashed to a memory I've buried for years—when I was young, the year Haley's Comet passed by, we were in Tahiti visiting my brother, and I had problems with the local water—ice in my drink. Mom took me to the doctor, who prescribed a sugarless powder satchet of medication—GAG--and where they used a rectal thermometer. Wonderfully civilized here, though: a nurse strapped on a BP cuff, wrapped a normal looking digital thermometer in a cellophane sleeve, and took my temp in my armpit while measuring pulse and pressure on the other arm. Stand up, step on the scale, and they'll call me when the doctor is ready.
I guess it's to be expected that the waiting is the worst part. Banks of chairs designed to completely minimize all comfort while striving to minimize spatial presence filled the open area in front of a wall with six sliding doors of heavily frosted glass. Each room had an industrial desk next to a free-standing chair that looked even less inviting than the lobby seating, an examining table, and a matching sliding door to a back corridor full of nurses and doctors enroute somewhere more pressing.
When I showed up, no lights were on and no office doors were closed; the doctor is not in but is happy to let you wait. Then a nurse snuck through the back door and closed one office. By the time a light came on in the first, the cute girl in the traditional miniskirt-plus-cap-thingy getup was closing a second door. Twenty minutes after arriving—early, on a Saturday morning—I was called in to see the doctor.
He had one of the anti-English Thai names: lots of “ng” and “aeo” and quavering vowel inflection sounds. I was relieved to hear a solid Thai accent—no Oxford or Eton, but an uneasy competence and familiarity with English. Here's hoping I can do the same for Thai.
I described the swelling, the time in country, elevating the legs, all the walking. He poked, frowned, kept asking about pain, poked more, made intricate notes with beautiful script, pushed levels of pain and discomfort.
“No, no pain, not really much discomfort, just the swelling.”
He asked me to get on the table and palpated my abdomen as awkwardly as I would approach the 60-something red light woman who exhibited all the enthusiasm of picking a used smoke from an ashtray when she asked me if I wanted sex on the way home.
“I need to have you do a blood lab. Could be kidneys, could be liver. Okay?”
“Sure,” I smiled and nodded and sat stupidly—default position, at this point.
“So. You will go outside the office and give blood sample. Maybe thirty minutes, maybe hour later, you will come back to talk with me. Okay?”
“Somebody will show me where to go?”
“Yes, she will be right outside the door.”
He rang a little buzzer and another lady in the full nursing getup slid the door open. A few sentences later, she took me across the lobby to a desk behind a cubicle wall—the blood center.
You sit in a rolling office chair and put your arm on a little cushion that was last changed... don't go there.
The nurse pulls out a packaged syringe (good sign) and ties off your arm.
“You go soft” she says.
Not much danger of going hard, but okay, relax the clenched fist.
She caresses, rubs, pokes, taps, and finally slaps at the elbow. “Hooh, you make nurse work hard this early. Hole is very small.”
Is there a suitable—or even possible—response?
“Shoulda seen it before I had the 1 oz cup of Nescafe.”
And she nailed it, first shot.
Took a good long time to get enough blood in the syringe, but instead of opening the vein and loading on half a dozen phials, she filled up one and injected the rest.
“Okay you go sit. Thirty minutes or hour. Go, go go! Sit!”
When the doc called me back in, he had a handful of forms in front of him—Western medical flowcharts with neat numerals printed in blue ink in boxes next to parenthetical ranges of acceptable/normal. He went through, reading each line—for albumin your range is X and the normal range is W-Y. For the most part, I bullseyed the norms—liver and kidneys work well—but I'm low on protein, iron, and body mass.
“You like Thai food?”
“Love Thai food.” I have yet to meet a man who has not asked me this in the first volley of sentences. As of yet, the doc is the only Thai man who has not asked about my cock--”Thai food, good for make cock grow big,” or “you have much scar and vein on arms—big cock, no?” or some close relative thereof.
“Good, you eat more. Especially meat.”
So no liver or kidney disease, just swollen ankles. He gave me some exercises, pills for the swelling, two topical analgesics, and two pain killers: one codeine-based, the other a morphine something. At least now I know how I'll spend soma weekends when I'm not supposed to be on my feet, right?
And the best news: I still pee standing up!
Thursday is Lesson Plan Day. Based on my week of observing, musical lessons involve a call and request singing session followed by maybe some movement or dancing and the next page in the basic piano book.
I'm bringing in some new material, so I wrote that in where appropriate and handed the stack to my supervisor.
She didn't laugh outright, but either through blatant shock or utter disbelief.
“Lesson Plans are kind of a Big Deal.”
Okay. What does that mean?
“Here, check out these art lessons while I look for music.”
Distribute materials. Paint. Cleanup.
Discuss watercolor. Distribute materials. Paint. Cleanup.
Introduce collage. Distribute materials. Point out good examples. Cleanup.
“Well, there are no musical lesson plans, but last year's were fantastic. See, our kids are extremely musically gifted and need to be challenged. [With, say, reading music? I didn't say.] So you should do stuff like making instruments and composition and theory. I'm not good with music, so I can't really help, but you know the type of stuff I'm talking about.”
Another teacher suggested eliding song-learning with science and English and math so that they know “Wheels on the Bus” before they learn the tree bark words to the same melody. It's what the music teacher did last year.
And, well, the learning outcomes are pretty much crap—in other subjects, they detail exactly what a given grade is expected to learn in a given area—so just make sure you push the students. No more Thai music, nothing by or about the king, nothing they've already done.
The catch is, last year's music teacher left because he didn't get my supervisor's job, so this makes for an awkward situation when asking for all of last year's lesson plans. Oops.
So. To separate completely from the style of instruction the students have seen thus far, incorporate completely novel material, and challenge them based upon an amorphous but not-to-be neglected standard: cake.
We had a field trip to Walailek University, which is an ag school up by Sichon. If hippie-era Humboldt State was the lumberjack school where men were men and so were the women, Walailek is the Thai equivalent.
I should backtrack a bit—this is a week-long special event with two grades going every day. I was scheduled to leave on Wednesday with G1 and G4—fun ages. Neither of which I've had in its entirety due to SportsDay, but fun nonetheless. Scheduled progression is to load the “busses” at half past and depart by quarter of, whenever lunch is ready, in styrofoam boxes stacked in plastic bags and stashed under the wooden benches, and all the wild indians are present and accounted for. From what I know of Thai time, and more importantly what I saw on Monday and Tuesday, I would've been safe showing up at quarter to for an on-the-hour departure. So I showed up at thirty-two.
No busses.
Gone.
I walked into the teacher office--”weren't you going on the fieldtrip?”
“Looks like the new Music Teacher fucked up royally.”
“That's okay, wanna go tomorrow?”
And that was that.
Naturally, come Thursday, I stood around from 8:00 on and the busses didn't leave until just past 9:00. Go figure.
I should explain the busses: glorified songtaws. “Songtaw” means, I've been told, “two-bench,” and in the urban setting involves a pickup running on one or two cylinders and belching exhaust like a '62 Mack Truck if it's gas-powered, or blowing a Bond-worthy smokescreen if it's diesel. But those are the lightweight and efficient urban runabouts—we were in the weekender class.
Either Seattle or Portland has those amphibious tour ducks—big boat busses with orange paddle feet that quack as they enter the water for a more (I can't decide what to put here—authentic? Exorbitant? Kitschy? Memorable? Hyper-stylized?) tour of downtown—imagine if one of those mated with one of the military transports you see in convoy—the mid-engine edition with the snub-nose—and the offspring got the worst of each, with two benches down the sides of the bed and a free-standing bench down the middle. There's our ride. A dozen adults with bags, eight sixth-graders with only their mental baggage, or forty second-graders could fit in one; we had two for about eighty second-graders, forty sixth-graders, and a dozen adults. Good thing the remarkably painful wooden benches were too loud and windy to make for uncomfortable riding.
As far as campus visits go, no American would've been hooked. Nothing flashy, nothing animated, hardly even any posters.
Getting there, the kids universally pounded sugar snacks from their bottomless backpacks—I've never seen anything like it; the average kid probably had the equivalent of half a sleeve of Oreos, a Snickers, four Cokes, an ice cream cone, a torso-sized cotton candy, and a lunch of fried chicken with rice. Through some genius planning, our day started out with half an hour to visit three goats in a corral the size of a large classroom. And then there was a mixup, so the bus tour could accommodate only one of the grades. Naturally, I ended up with G6, while the G2s—probably my favorite class—went on the bus ride.
It was a good enough idea to start with—let's go cruise the moichendizing section. It would've been a great twenty minutes for the sacchrinized ones, forty for me, so we naturally had an hour. I actually enjoyed walking past all the fried and grilled things on sticks, the piles of noodles and insects—yes, I actually saw fried dragonflies, cockroaches, grasshoppers, crickets, and grubs (photos didn't come out)--and the plants were amazing. In this area, succulents and orchids don't really grow in soil, they just get thrown in large-mesh baskets so their roots have plenty of room to dangle and absorb the ambient humidity. Something about that is as cool as it is wrong—spectacular multi-tiered orchids with Martian leopard coloring need care from an OCD savant, not to be hanging in a tarp tent with dozens of close relatives all being hawked to sugared-out kids by roving carnies.
Welcome to Thailand, I guess.
End of the day (and watch how un-subtly this foreshadowing jumps straight to concluding) I couldn't buy something as beautiful and delicate as an orchid. My preconceived notions of its needs and the magnitude of the death of such beauty overwhelmed me, and I bought ferns instead. Little potted jobbies that you invert so they hang, dangling and lushly ferny, to keep your single self company. And I cringe to say it—sometimes my political correctness, racial guilt, and some sort of juvenile hangup get all entwined—but if they die, they're ferns; they're greenery, not some unique and delicate flower. Giving a fern is like saying either, “Here, just try to kill this; see if you can be that inhumane,” or “you're so sad the only hope is this thing that will live in direct spite of anything you do to it.” Giving an orchid is like handing someone a painted egg on a spoon and saying, “Yeah, the gold's real and the piece is worth millions, but don't worry, it's worthless if it's broken; hurry, though, the twister's due in as soon as the earthquake stops.”
My ferns went with a leather keychain—a hand-carved and painted image of a joker figure from Southern Thai shadow puppetry.
Guidebooks, if not local culture, will tell you that this area is big into shadow puppet theatre. Shadow puppets are made by stretching a cow hide, peeling the leather in half so it's paper thin, rolling it out until it's about to break, and then carving it into intricate figures that multiple puppeteers animate between intense lights and white stage curtains.
People were making these carvings in a huge tent encompassing what seemed to be all aspects of Thai industry. I couldn't really tell, though, because most of the exhibits were posters in Thai—end of the day impression was akin to a fair in the middle of Kansas: there's just not much going on if you're not already into it, or can at least read the language. But there were these folks carving out and painting figurines, among which were little keychains of the trickster figures, so I dropped the 10B for one.
It had potential to be the most interesting and engaging part of the day, between the interminable first and second shopping bouts, but not only was it inaccessible to me, the stares I'd been getting all day distilled into photo ops—in the hour I spent in the tent, at least six groups came up to take photos with me. Which would've been fine if they were all like the first group of cute coeds who were all dangly, but the truly dangly ones were the guys, and that just got weird.
But there's the day.
When I asked about the bus trip, the G2 teacher said, “Worthless day. Our kids have blown a few thousand baht on sugar and worthless junk and we took a tour around the campus—here's where students eat, here's where they sleep, and across the road over there you can see the pub. But tomorrow we get to spend time journaling about the unique experience.”
Probably the neatest part came on the ride back.
You read about the Thai same-sex familiarity, but it still seems odd to see little boys as touchy-huggy as little American girls. And it's just sweet when one, especially one of the challenging ones, falls asleep on your leg. Until he starts drooling, when you go “EWW” but realize that another little guy is asleep on the one on your lap, and you're rocking the whole dog pile if you move.
Signed a rental contract today.
While I sat in her private English tutoring office, the my landlady wrote on lined paper with a blue pen:
The rent of 6000 baht is due by the first of the month.
The renter will not cut down trees or plants without the landlady's permission and the renter will water all plants at least every second day
The house will be cleaned at least once a week [we'd discussed this—either 250B for a pro job or it's on my shoulders; I'll take option A, thanks]
Turn off the water pump when you leave
“Anything else?”
How do I pay electricity and rubbish bills?
The renter will pay 250 baht to the town and not more than usually 40 baht for water and electricity of 300 baht [“as my mother uses it”]
What is the mailing address?
[mailing address—am happy to provide upon request from known, if not necessarily reputable, persons]
Deposit of 6000 baht received, 21 July 2010
And we signed. I have the sheet of paper.
“What you can do for me is list the things you want me to leave.” Right now, her mother lives in the house, and she equipped the place to accommodate the remarkably aged woman: downstairs, there's what I'd call a dining room where she has a bed, a TV, a small cabinet of clothes and medicines, a stocked-up bathroom with a hot shower, and the pantry/kitchen area inside, the hot cooking area outside. There's a new water filter, so the tap is drinkable, a propane/butane stove next to a standard microwave on a large double-basin stainless sink outside, a refrigerator next to a counter and ventilated cupboards and a double-basin stainless sink across from a folding kitchen table in the pantry/patio, a better-working double-basin stainless sink on the patio across from the cooking area and next to a half bath (enclosed), a small washing machine, two ceiling mounted rotating fans, a TV, and an overstuffed (by Thai standards) chair. Upstairs, there are two empty bedrooms with one full bath (hot shower), and the master bedroom with a queen, balcony, private bath, and armoire half the size of my college dorm room.
She wanted to know what I would need—sheets? Towels? Dishes? Cooking utensils? A writing desk?
Hot damn and lucky me.
Instead, I listed what I came with—clothing, a few books, my tuba, a pair of chopsticks and a spoon—and what household goods I've bought: a water boiler, a mug, and a towel.
“Now, they won't be new, and might not be up to the standards you...”
“If you are providing them, I am grateful regardless of the state. Truly grateful. And I also understand the risk of leaving anything in a renter's hands and completely respect if you would rather not leave, say, a bed, any kitchen appliances, or any linens whatsoever.”
“Now, if you decide to get cable television, I will not provide that but you can ask me and I will set it up. Same thing with the internet. The cable would be about 600 B and the internet might run up to a throusand, so maybe you want to use the free connection on the school.”
We signed and she told me that the first month would be August but her mother would be out and the place would be cleaned up by this weekend.
Easy as that.
Waiting for the hitch....
And deffily, deffily looking forward to getting a bug net out on the balcony for sunset over the mountains.
Mai tai
(not Thai)
I heard about a place to stay—a really nice, big house in a neighborhood a few minutes from town, for 1500B more than I pay here.
Took something to get there. Yesterday, I sent a text to someone who knew someone, and this morning I missed a call from a number I didn't recognize. It was the house owner, who wanted to know when I could be there—4:30. Okay, just call her. Well, what about this morning, she had to teach then? Sure, how about 11:00. Great, call her before I leave, she's over in Rachanburi past Robinson Ocean.
Robinson—I know that place, so Rachanburi I'll find.
Call her at quarter of, and she's shopping so it'll have to be another time. Maybe six? Or, she'll call me in a few minutes.
How about I meet her at noon? Great. Her shop at Rachanburi? Ummm.... How about the 7-11 across from Robinson Ocean? Perfect. Call before I leave.
I get there at quarter of, sip from what was supposed to be a Coke Zero but gives me an instant sugar headache, and call up at ten after. She's on the way, just be a minute. Quarter past, some kid walks up to me and says, “Come this way,” then turns and walks off. Little creepy following him to a car.
A nice, older lady waves me in—retired English teacher who keeps up an EFL studio.
And the place is gorgeous—two car port, three bedrooms, four bathrooms, large living room, mud room, dining room, patio kitchen, outdoor gas wok and microwave. Fully furnished, with a massive carved armoire upstairs.
Downside: it's just over twice what I expected to be paying, a 6 or 8 K drive from town, and I will be swallowed like an eyedropper of coffee.
Problem: where I'm staying now is the next best option. Nakhon does not have condos or apartments, just hotels/converted hotels, shop houses (shop on the ground floor, bedrooms up above), and these newer houses in sizable mubans. So I can stay in a converted hotel room or double the rent and live in a really nice house. The question is what I'm missing while in a “mansion” room here in town: having a kitchen, dresser, desk, separation between sleeping, eating, working areas. But I can walk to anywhere, my commute is a matter of seconds, and it's easier to budget in exploration. Out of town, it would be easy to create my sacred space and my hidey hole, but harder to get out socializing or to take a weekend trip or go for a spa—both of which I look forward to.
Any thoughts out there, internet land?
I left campus to explore some living options, but had the foresight to look across the road at a black pillar of cloud—“Es no bueno” said the old mafioso, looking at a similar cloudburst-to-be dropping from the Alpi. I made it to my place almost dry, and about a minute and a half before the sky opened. After just over an hour—an extremely hungry one since I missed lunch on campus—the heart of the storm moved in. Visibility dropped to about a block around the time lightning struck the building. Quite an eye opener, and I wasn't even an electrical device.
Another hour and a half and things cleared out, but it was amazing to watch the street absolutely fill up with water, the world at large disappear, and lightning light up a daytime sky.
PS: the fun part was watching everything clear up until I was about three klicks from town, and then losing the debate with myself whether it's better to go faster and get it over with or slow down and not get quite the pummeling. No winning that one.
With a map, a couple cans of Coke Light, and a camera in my backpack, I headed west on the advice, “Just take any road and you'll end up at one of the waterfalls.” Which happened. Amazingly.
I ended up at Khao Luang National Park. Had I a work permit or brown skin, it would have been a 20B trip. But I am farang, so it was 200 to get in. Love it.
Up a broken dirt and gravel road, past a closed-down visitor center, the road split: cabins one way, parking and camping the other. After three tries, I figured out how to park to the attendant's satisfaction. Lotta fun, that: a middle-management sort of hefty woman standing with her chin sucked in and chest poofed out waving and pointing at where I should be. At least there are some global constants, right?
The trail is a 2K loop with a vert of about 800 to the top of the highest falls. Along the way, there's a stop at every fall with a shack for a picnic or shelter at every overlook, which is to say, there are seven stops in the kilometer to the top. And it's not that the hike is
long or grueling—it's paved, for the most part, or has stone steps—but it's a series of crazy steep climbs and relatively brief flat spots under a pummeling umbrella of equal parts heat and humidity—80/85 or 110 all around seems about right. And, given the biodiversity and density, it would be about senseless to move quickly. Or at least that's what I tell myself. Anyway, the jungle really is an amazingly dense place. On the one hand, there are what sound like tablesaws running all the time—I'm pretty sure they're giant grasshopper/cicada type things—and sundry birds and other whatnots keeping up a constant presence that borders on sitting in a cul-de-sac of DIY dads on the first nice weekend of the year.
And then there are the numbers of butterflies and lizards and strange sounding leaves blowing about, each of which flits and distracts attention. And once you're looking at a butterfly, you can't help but key into the flowers and leaves and bark and solid background wall of greenery and general vivacity that is doubly distracting through its apparent unawareness of its own remarkable existence.
As for the waterfalls, I guess I should just say that the years spent around granite and glaciers somewhat biased me. But they were nice enough for sitting and basking until I realized that it was raining—not a perceptible difference in feeling, just that the glasses speckle from the outside instead of fogging over from the inside.
Botanical density means that it's not so difficult to find something to grab as you're sliding down the rock. What becomes difficult is convincing whatever it is you grabbed—namely a thorny vine—from letting go.
This is when you're glad you don't know whether or not it's poisonous so you won't worry unless your hand turns gangrenous.
ON the way out, there were a number of piles of durians under gypsy-rainbows of cloth bags. Evidently, harvesting in national parks is okay, too, provided you're of the proper nationality.
It remains to be decided whether the larger concern is the racism or eating wild durian.
By the time I got back on my bike, the novelty had worn off. My face was dry and scummy from the baking pavement, screaming wind, and steady stream of pollution. Feeling had just returned to my hands and feet. Riding with ear plugs helped tremendously, but it would've been nice to have some music. At least the ergonomics were close enough to human to keep me sitting upright and comfortable, not some torturous bicycle configuration.
Of course, half an hour into the two-hour ride, it started to rain. Then it started to rain HARD.
Things fragged a bit:
Who'da thought that:
raindrops would bruise when you're not even going flat-out?
after not very long at all, riding through a tropical monsoon storm gets to be quite chilly.
once the rain stops and you do start going closer to flat-out, the heat is a relief and almost enough to dry you out?
Thai bike cops wouldn't have specially-colored bikes immediately distinctive and screaming for attention?
Thailand has a speed limit?
a Thai bike cop would be as stout and podgy as his stereotypically-Nebraskan brethren and on a bike graced with no more power and much more automation and hardware than mine?
a radio call could so quickly erect a barricade in the next town?
my smiling, laughing, German would get me through a police barricade in Thailand?
Really—how could some newby farang who stupidly stumbled into a bike unwittingly outrun a bike cop?
So here's to slower roadtripping for a while—road sauntering, maybe. Now, at least, the bike's paid for. Another week and it might be insured. Maybe a month after that, title will come. And by October, I should be eligible for a local driver's license. And if I make it that long, whoo boy howdy look out, farang's going wild on the Pan-Asia freeways.
Friday was Sports Day at AMC (American Missionary College) or Srithammarat Suska or Sueksa or wherever it is I work. It turns out, the entire student body of 4000+ is divided into four colors—white, red, yellow, and violet. It also turns out that every student has a number within their class, and who knows how many other levels of segregation and differentiation—just as monks live in perfect harmony and equality and conduct every level of activity according to seniority.
For Sports Day, each color puts on the ritz with formal dress and dooded-up costumes to parade through town and into the Provincial Sport Stadium. For all of Friday and most of Saturday, the students have athletic competitions, cheering competitions, the parade is judged—all that's missing is the awkward homecoming dance.
More kidlets
So I stood and watched from the pedestrian overpass—shady and less punishingly hot with more chance for a breeze—and made my way to the opening ceremonies at the stadium. I should've expected the hyperabundance of vendors, but I was still surprised at the non-food stalls. Of course there were deep fried whatnots of every variety, but there were also the trinkets and plushies and geegaws you would expect to see as prize rewards but without the interference of games to play—just give the guy 10B for the keychain, 30 for the plush fish, 90 for the stuffed bear.
Little Angles
After walking through the vendors and not finding either my colleagues or a comfortable place to stand and watch the
proceedings, I took a cue from the youngest marching band and decided it was time to head back to air conditioning, but just as I turned around, my music teacher boss snagged me and waved me to join her for the opening ceremonies.
She is a mother of three, could be 40 or 60, well-composed with the grace of someone who teaches traditional Thai dance but the soft comfort of a mother of three or four and kindergarten/elementary teacher of a couple of decades. She wore a leather cowboy hat—a Stetson over here would be as ostentatious as a Ferrari back home—and a loose white long-sleeved shirt over the Friday getup of athletic pants and a school polo. She had a leather backpack and exuded bubbles as she walked—smiles, laughing, shoulders bouncing, extra giddyup in each step, not just a biological mother watching her kids, but one of the founding mothers of the English Program watching her beloved-as-children students perform and parade.
What can I say? Everyone loves a parade, and she was especially infectious. I didn't even think to consider that she's married to the director of the school—boss of bosses who answers to nobody—until we emerged from a four-flight stair climb into a VIP box where a girl was crawling on her knees to offer a silver tray of water and Sprite to a row of suited men sitting on a soft leather sofa.
Oh.
And the girl shuffles over to us who sit in the stadium seats behind the leather sofa. This is awkward, now isn't it? So I thought, until I follow my model and take a water bottle, open it, and swig gratefully.
Drinking from a bottle is not done, evidently. You drink from a straw. Always. And lo, straws are calibrated to be a couple centimeters longer than the bottle is tall, so you cap off the bottle with the straw inside and it pops up whenever you open the cap. Genius, no?
What to do with the empty, how to get another, whether to get another, these are mysteries best left for later, though the string of speeches and welcomings provides ample opportunities to ponder. For now, sit and smile while school and local press take photo after photo of the biggest of the bigwigs with me in the background.
Great—exactly what I was expecting.
More Kidlets
It's not that I'm sixteen again; it's that I'm going on thirty and deliberately shirking the responsible decision making and foresight with which I was desperate to be identified when I was sixteen.
To call me a stranger in a strange land would be a criminal overstatement, but here, on what passes for an open road, I understand how things work. I am on an unlicensed, unregistered, unpaid-for Honda Wave with one CC for every pound it's hauling, and it's mine by a handshake and the promise of a girlfriend's help sorting out the title.
I have been weaving through traffic, dodging around food carts, garbage trucks, bicycles, vehicular operators from oblivious to maniacal, then to ag trucks, bicycles loaded with sugar cane, and eventually spike-horned cattle that look half waterbuffalo and live in barnyards shared with fighting cocks.
But now the road is as open as the throttle, and the speedo is bouncing on the peg. I would never drive this fast on this road in a car, but even as my helmet builds enough lift to tug at my chinstrap, despite the gritty smog of an atmosphere that's stuck in my teeth, I'm wearing the biggest shiteating grin anyone's worn since Patton met artillery.
I weave through incoming cars and carts with a veni, vidi, vici, suckas!
I am no longer Teacher Russell, greeted at the start of class by students prostrating themselves as they would for a religious icon. I am no longer the new guy who came knowing nothing about the location, people, or language. I am no longer the crazy farang upstairs who wakes up too early and keeps such an odd lifestyle.
I am the one on the new Honda, bombing the hell down the road, and this road is the only place I've seen—and I bet that roads like it are the only ones that exist in the entire country, where oncoming traffic has right of way.
Not that the other stuff doesn't count. It's just that right now, I'm coming through and we both know that it's in our mutual best interest if you stay the hell out of the way.
Last night, my boss, whose Thai girlfriend of a decade and a child is sorting out the paperwork, said, “Spend some time in the muban getting comfortable, then follow Mao on his bike. If you follow me in my truck, you'll be driving like a truck and liable to get hit. Just drive like a Thai and you should be safe.”
With that I became the proud owner of a 2009 Honda Wave 110, a little kick-start scooter that will be my lifeline to the mountains, waterfalls, and cheap housing.
And driving like a Thai is surprisingly easy:
Rule 1A: Don't hit anything or anyone.
Rule 1B: decelerating is okay, but braking should be reserved for an all-wheel lockup.
Rule 2: If you're imperviously large, ignore rule 1 entirely.
Rule 3: Give way only if it's blatantly obvious to all parties that not doing so would force someone to break Rule 1; if there's a stopsign, bob and weave; if there are pedestrians, flow around them; if there are three cars crammed into a car-and-a-half lane, or if it's a one-way divided street, just hop into the opposite lane for a while--they're minding Rule 1, too.
So now, as I scream along pushing redline—the speedo gives out at 160, and that was at least 1500 RPM back—I force Rule 1 onto others, because it's patently obvious that we'll all have problems if they get in my way.
And now I'm on a bridge. Well, to be technical, I'm above a bridge, flying toward a landing on the other side. Something's really wrong as “Peter Gunn” starts playing in my head at the same time I think, did that sign back there mean slow down, jump ahead? But it takes a moment to place what's wrong—the bike has good balance with pressure on the front end, I'm in a good place for a smooth landing, but, but...
THERE IS AN ELEPHANT IN THE ROAD.
THERE IS AN ELEPHANT WALKING TOWARD ME IN THE LANE THAT WOULD BE MINE WERE MY WHEELS ATTACHED TO THE GROUND.
THIS IS A LIVE ELEPHANT.
IT IS IN THE ROAD.
bad news
It's an Indian elephant, not more than six or seven feet at the shoulder, but it's an elephant. In my lane. It's carrying sugarcane and munching on something.
And as I land, standing on the brakes, and fishtail around a huge golden-brown eye almost as wide and scared as mine, I snap back to my reality: the farang in Thailand who probably mans well but just doesn't get it, and probably never will.
People know a Baht, know their audience, and the food carts have it dialed.
When I walk to work at 7:00. I step from my culdesac onto the main road and the first stand has a huge wok of oil boiling little fried donuts the proprietrix and her son flip with lengthy chopsticks. The next cart does ried chicken and side pork: think about this and it's a perfect start, an inch-thick slab of uncured bacon fried to crispy golden and served on a bed of sticky rice; or I might've said the only breakfast better than leftover pizza is leftover fried chicken until I had fresh fried chicken with a ginger-lime-chili drizzle. Some places do a fairly typical pho noodle soup, and some do noodles.
Of course, Mr. Farang here usually has a banana, orange, mangosteen, and maybe a rambutan. Some part of me keeps saying, “Fried chicken will never change, but fresh fruit will be gone come October.” Silly, I know, but give me credit for spending my life thus far in the depths of snow country.
When I get to school, a line of students wearing either yellow and purple AMC jerseys (American Missionary College) or Srithammarat buttondowns is lined up out the gate and down the walkway. When they come on campus, the students wai to the senior execs to show good faith and respect. It's somewhat awkward as I'm about the only teacher who walks; everyone else drives in through a back entrance and I cut through the line of students making bow-steps.
When I leave, stepping out of the gate is like stepping onto the food strip at the Nebraska State Fair: solid vendor stands for a block and a half, and each has a display of fried whatnots on a stick—half a dozen varieties of hotdogs sliced to curl in characteristic ways (the chili ones are cut in thirds to look like chicken feet, the ones with diagonal hashes are Vietnamese style, the ones with diamond checks are Thai German &c), white sausage and fish balls and thick slices of forcemeat (olive and chilli and cheese bits in different types of meats). One place does seafood in a nearly tempura style, so you have a prawn, fillet of fresh riverfish you would never want to meet but tastes like delectable cod, skewered calamari, fish balls (as mild as a good weisswurst—bockwurst--but with just a hint not so much of fishiness but ocean), maybe some tofu, and a hunk of another sort of fish that you would never want to meet but tastes like grouper. There's a falafel sort of fritter that has corn, garlic chives, probably cilantro and maybe some chilies.
What am I saying—of course there's lime and chili. And once I tried what looked like a healthy sort of somesuch—I pointed at a big vat of corn kernels. Ha! Turns out, they're sitting in a bath of water sweeter than the sea is salty, and they're finished with a big dollop of what looks like orange sorbet but tastes like it might be a granular distillation of the raw sugarcane people grind in market stalls; which is to say, the nice, healthy vegetative option is sweet enough to pucker teeth.
By dinner, the stick stands have moved out and rice stands set up—rice and soup in individual carts or stands, the sort pushed by pedal or hand. And my friends the dinner folks have moved in—multiple stands transported by trucks with the backdrop of plastic cleaning bins of questionable cleanliness. And these are where you can get sahm tahm, spicy green papaya salad, tom yum swimming with seafood, grilled clams the younger daughter opens after taking pity on the poor farang who can't crack the suckers. And it varies daily, based on the market's availability. One day's tom yum has carrots and
mushrooms,the next has tomato and broccoli. And one of the most exciting things I've ever seen, they once had horseshoe crabs. I'm sure they do more with them, but when I pointed enthusiastically, they peeled up one side of the thing and tossed its eggs into the papaya salad where there usually would've been a small black crab.
Went shopping for the final components of my school uniform—polo shirts. And I told myself I'd be going to one of the local shops, not the department store.
Wow.
The polo shop/sport clothing shop is next to the ladies clothing shops, but upstairs above a bookshop. They sell sports uniforms, cleats, pool cues, ping pong and other racquets, guitars and drums with associated ephemera, packed into one wing of the horseshoe-shaped store in crazy stacks in glass cases. The other branch of the horseshoe holds even more glass cases—just enough room between them for me to squeeze—each stacked full with plastic wrapped shirts/shorts/pants, and stacked on top to above my eye level. In a couple of places, towers had collapsed and filled the walkway to knee-deep.
Rather than search, I asked, as best I could, for a white polo for myself: pointed at me, held up a white shirt, shrugged my shoulders. Nothing but blank stares. Point at the size, at me, and I ended up with an XL supertechy Adidas cooling shirt for about ten bucks. Might've been ripped off, but really, how bad is that? Except for the XL thing—I might be a farang, but not of that caliber.
(A typical songtaw driving down the street)
I should be getting over it, but the density of life still amazes me—town does sprawl, but such is to be expected of a place more than a thousand years old. But within the development, everything goes vertical: live above the shop, add a new roof for more living room, stack the new product on the old. I think the only bit of horizontal spread I've seen was in the market—the fish ladies spread plastic bins of fish around them. Everything else has been vertical without apparent order or logic: the clothing shop next to the brake and grease shop next to the printer's and behind the fruit cart.
(The street outside my school)
Every shop has a sign, of course, a garish color with text of a wildly contrasting color, and entirely faded by humidity, oxidation, and general pollution. Everything on the street—buildings, cars, signs, dogs, people—has a general wear; at home, it would remind me of gray April snow, but here it's a matter of too much unregulated diesel, direct tropical sunlight, crushing humidity. Anything manufactured crumples and withers, and somehow people and soi dogs fall into this category. Everything else in the organic world thrives: trees, flowers, grasses, punishingly dense forests, fantastically rich streambeds, pervasive swarms of bitty little ants, and I don't even want to think about microbes.
(A wat in the S part of town; riding in a songtaw)
