Ups and Downs

It happened. I had the worst sort of embarrassing scenario. Rumblings started on the far side of town. In Thammarat, there are no public bathrooms; the closest relative is a dingy closet with a few pots or pissers surrounded by cracked, gray-brown stucco, under bored scruitiny from a fuard in a splotchy getup who holds his sprayer and mop like weapons.

I told my body, “YOU WILL WAIT!” and set off at a steady, non-jarring pace. Naturally, none of the ubiquitous songtaws were running; it just works that when you really could use one, you're up a creek. S Creek, in this case.

It started looking iffy, and I tried to sneak into the city stadium, which was hosting a big sports something.

When I was home, I didn't know how much I should appreciate the ability to blend in and slip notice when around anyone from fourteen to forty. Four very large men appeared around me, jabbering simultaneously, and escorted me out without ever hearing a word of why I was there. My entire lower abdomen felt like an overly-full water balloon balancing on the spiky ridges of my pelvis.

A block from my digs, I got set to dive into an alleyway. IT wouldn't take more than a few seconds, just a flash, but the alley was full of pedestrians and mopeds and people sitting on front stoops or in open rooms, staring. Would've been easier to drop drawers in downtown Naples because it's just that sort of place.

I made it almost to the guesthouse before I started getting drips. And once the drips started, I was done for. I drizzled a steady stream across the lobby, started puddling in the enclosed bathroom area, and erupted with a stream that looked much like the massaman curry we had and exploded generally over and around the toilet.

When I came out, nine pairs of eyes looked up from computers or conversations to stare at me and my soaked, off-yellow shorts and shoes.

At least it gives me impetus to take care of laundry, right? And the shoes were a painful glare of new white.

The other bit of bitching is about sleep: so far, precious little has come my way. At night, the window has to be open or the aircon has to be running nonstop lest the room turn into a sweltering coffin. But if the window's open, I get to listen to the little kid across the alley cry for his mom or a street dog bark for the fun of hearing its own voice. And there's something disquieting about running the aircon constantly, especially when I don't know what I'll be charged for electricity.

Add in the sticky, sweltering heat and a goodly dose of jetlag and it's been a week since I had any REM sleep.

Not feeling so hot, today.

But also feelin' the love—the students I've taught now run up to me with a deep wai and accompanying, “Good morning/afternoon Teacher!” In town, I saw one sixth grader sitting at a restaurant with his parents, and he stopped talking to send a wai. And while I'm around here, the little boys—only boys, because opposite genders do not touch, come running up to hug me, and they love to trace the heat-swollen veins down my arms.

It sounds sick and wrong, I know, but there are few warm fuzzies like a little kid running up and wrapping around your leg because he's happy to see you again.

Also looks likely that I'll be joining the hordes of scooter-drivers screaming around town (literally screaming, too). There's a “brand new” one available for about $700 from an American who just bought a car, and the heavily-used local sales tend to be $600, so that should be exciting. Evidently, there are tons of waterfalls and whatnots available in the nearby regions, all of which are accessible by scooter. And if I have one in the near future, it'll help greatly with moving and exploring.

It is getting frustrating being illiterate: if nothing else, you pick up shop names or categories based upon signs you come across. But the spermy little squiggles just don't do it for me; not knowing to interpret their sound, let alone meaning, I'm left to try to reconstruct a place or product with which to concretely associate them.

But I'm getting to the point of conducting basic business transactions; I can recognize ten, twenty, thirty, and forty, and know “chicken,” “pig,” and “seafood.”

Soon, the immersion will start sinking in and I'll get basic sentence structures well enough to identify what I'm asking and what it means.

Here's hoping, anyway.