Ruination

After woeful attempts to sleep through the soi dog's continual yapping, I resolved to get ear plugs and stand up to start the day. It was just after 5:00, and pushing 9:00 by the time I felt animate enough to do anything (the body is sore as anything after the hours spent walking in tropical heat, humidity, and pollution-filtered sunlight).

I walked all through town, past wats and temples, and found myself in the middle of a school parade. Very few things scream, “I DON'T BELONG HERE” like a farang who, without noticing the composition of the slow-moving traffic, tries to cross the street and finds himself amid a group of high schoolers gorgeously done up in traditional garb. It's bad enough to inadvertently end up in someone else's parade; it's downright awkward when it's an ethnic celebration and you are just wrong.

Being rather Type A, I couldn't just go walking around; my goal was to find a nice-looking but affordable belt. I wound up at Tesco, “Thailand's Wal-Mart,” which seemed like an especially apt description given that the smallest of the men's belts wrapped twice around me. Who'da thunk?

Yesterday, the Tesco food court was a great option: it's enclosed, family-oriented, farang-friendly, and safe for someone as stupid as me; walk up, point, smile, and every once in a while get away with English. Today, I resolved to go more native: either figure out how to eat where a Thai would eat, or pack home with a plastic-wrapped weenie (foreshadowing: they have a great bacon-cheese German Thai sausage).

So I found myself in the weekend market, pointing at a smoked lungfish on a bamboo skewer. I went to take a bite, but the silly farang trying to eat the fish on a stick still on the stick caused such an uproar that I had to leave the market. Which was fine, because I saw the—a—belt stand on the way out, and the wares looked like (and could well have been) Goodwill rejects.

By the far end of the market, I had calmed down enough to make a couple of purchases: mangosteens and more rambutans. As I walked off, I realized that I hadn't haggled. Some part of me recoiled that I had been taken for a ride. But once I thought about it, I decided that haggling in general won't get me very far. Consider the kilo of grapes I didn't buy: red globes grown in China, 100B/kilo. Too expensive next to the mangosteens and rambutans for 80 and 30, respectively. Consider the investment in haggling: how do I make it understood that I'm interested but not at that price? How do I understand a counter offer and make the agreement amenable? It's going to take a dozen sentence, a huge amount of gesticulation, and even then it's unlikely we actually agree on what business is being conducted. By the end of the transaction, say I “win” and get the grapes for 75B. I've attracted the attention of all neighboring stall keepers and all passers-by, and consider what I've gotten out of it: a savings of about 80 cents. Is that really worth the cost?

Hence I decided not to haggle.

Really, I can't even get fresh rambutans or mangosteens back home; is it really worth arguing over spending almost a buck or even less for a kilo of either?

So that was the first step in my demise. Then came dinner.

I went across the road to a little tent where a family—maybe Mom and Dad, Aunt and Uncle, and a small gaggle of children—were selling boiled and stirfried goodness. I ordered a spicy green papaya salad with a tom yum seafood (I would be very happy to conduct a experiment to see how long I could live on papaya salad and tom yum soup) and a special stir fry (I realized later this was a one-off farang-pleaser) of BBQ pig tongue, spinach, tomato, basil, cabbage, and lime over rice.

Grand total: almost two American dollars.