Impressions of Home

Two shots from town, and the view from my room.

ON PERSPECTIVE

It's rare that one has the opportunity to come home to a foreign land. I'd go as far as to wager that most movers understand the language where they're going, or at least recognize the language. I actually tried this: Thai is worse than Sanskrit. Sanskrit is much easier, much more linear, much more syllabic than Thai. What I can say for Thai is that unlike any of the Romantic languages I've tried to decipher, Thai has the same, slow cadence as English. (After 30+ hours of travel, while in a hallucinatory sort of sleep state flying south from Bangkok, I aligned the Thai announcements with English. All I remember was that it involved the poetic Ezra or Emily describing an intimate reationship with the President.)

But then we were in the landing sequence and broke under the overcast, and I ssaw my new home:
Tall, tropically volcanic mountains to the West, paradisically blue seas to the E and little farms abutting wild jungle growth.
A flock of egrets took off from the end of the runway, flew a circuit, and returned while we deboarded into an atmosphere too humid and warm to allow for the acrid scent of tarmac.
Somewhere, I missed that Nakhon Si Thammarat is a tropical paradise.

Town is laid out along parallel roads, one leading to the airport with a diversion straight through a military base, and one about half a mile E, oceanside. For some reason, the airport road which is also the school road, sticks in my head as the southbound road, the other the northbound. In reality, of course, each is both north/south and any given block has at least three other directions in active use.

ON LIVING

My digs are a block from the school/airport road, in what would be an American culdesac, on the fourth American floor, which is labeled the third here. And I've yet to distinguish whether that is universal in Thailand—ground, first, second, or first, second, third. It's a basic concrete cinderblock room with a double-decker mini fridge, a queen-size bed, a table with a TV on it, a little cabinet behind the door for a closet, and a bathroom. Reluctantly, the landlady gave me a sheet and a blanket—one of each—and a once-only towel.

I had two big surprises: the cable news channels, and the bathroom. At first, I was surprised to find western news channels, period, but especially the sequence: BBC, Fox News, Al Jazeera. Love it.

And the bathroom. It has a sink with a counter, a standard Western toilet, a small step down to the shower area, and a door with about ten inches of open air at the bottom. So much for a sense of privacy. It's solid tile somewhat reminiscent of a camp or prison setup designed to be hosed and scrubbed out, but it's not a place that's seen much scrubbing as little tiny ants course along the grout between tiles.
The shower is a standard hand-held jobbie that connects to a continuous-flow hot water heater. Evidently, a hot water heater is quite a luxury, but I have a hard time picturing a hot shower as healthy when the coolest the water gets is 78 degrees and outside it's 90 with 95% humidity.
And the toilet. Thai toilets and I are going to have some issues.
I should be grateful that it's a standard Western toilet. I know. What grates is that there's a hose with a nozzle next to it. Picture one of the sinkside spray nozzles on eight out of ten American sinks—the little hose-gun with the push button on and off. This is mounted toilet-side and replaces toilet paper. Toilet paper would overwhelm the sewage system and flood everyone out with backup and overflow. But galoshes don't necessarily sound like a bad idea when contemplating first how to use the blamed thing—do you just trust that you're done? How do you dry off? What about cleaning the sprayer?--and then how many other people have used it.
And then you go to school and see a grimy bathroom with a dirt-crusted floor on which sits a—hopefully—dirt-crusted sprayer and you resolve to make a pocket-packet of toilet paper part of your uniform.

ON WALKING

It's not necessarily that town is too large or sprawling or dangerous for walking, it's that it's a Thai town that makes walking difficult (he proclaimeth from the lofty vantage of one day's experience). See, sidewalks are public space, and when your living comes from the public, you need to get your goods where the public can see them. So if you're setting up a food cart, you set up on the nice, flat, level sidewalk where your pots can boil and your wok stands won't topple and you occupy space so that passers-by have to divert onto the street, where they can see an attractive display of your offerings. If they order, they will either sit in one of the plastic chairs you've set up with collapsible tables or you'll put everything in tough plastic bags sealed with rubber bands.
It's the same use of space if you're selling something else—get your stuff where people have to see it or they won't.

What this means for the pedestrian is that an empty stretch of sidewalk is probably too unstable to occupy—open pits, rusted-out gratings, or maybe an incoming fleet of scooters. So it's an ever-shifting balance of threats: am I more likely to run into a vat of boiling oil or open pit on the sidewalk or get taken out by a scooter taxi, songtaw fishing for riders, general driver, or bi-wheeled cart in the roadway?
Sometimes, you luck out and get a long stretch of parked scooters to weave through: little risk of collision, and great probability of solid pavement.

Incidentally, crossing the street is cake: just start walking, and if there's a string of oncoming traffic, stand in the general area where a lane line would be. While everybody might want to hit you, especialy if you're a farang—the Thai term for foreigner, which in this area is about like being Parisian in Lubbock—but nobody wants to deal with the fallout. So just walk, but don't be stupid about stepping right in front of someone. Easy.

ON DRIVING

Driving in this area is easy: generally, stay left, on the British side, and don't run into anything. Otherwise, bob and weave at will, feel free to use the opposing lanes if you're passing or turning, feel free to park on the inside lane if there's someone to talk to, and don't be too stupid about cutting someone off. It's real easy, because everyone is in the same mindset: just don't hit anything.

ON PHONES

After visiting the school, my boss took me to get a phone. We went to the nice mall—Robinson's Ocean, mecca for adolescents throughout the province—where there are, in addition to Robinson's department store, dozens and dozens of small vendors, eateries, hawkers, and a sprawling grocery store/food court.
We stopped at the first cellular phone stand we came to, and I balked. Something about the thirty hours of travel short-circuited my reasoning. Did I want a phone to send email, to take photos, to text, how many sim cards (phone numbers) did I want, what about FM radio or TV, and did I want the real Nokia or Blackberry or the Crapistani counterfit?
It took painfully long. I felt bad. And I ended up with a phone capable of taking photos, holding two sim cards simultaneously, and tuning in to both FM radio and public-broadcast television. At the time, I thought it was pretty absurd. By the next day, after discovering an appealing variety of non-jarring ethnic music, I was grateful for not having to purchase a separate radio receiver/iPod dock.