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.
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