New Digs

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 2^nd 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