The troubling parts

I guess what gets me is that after the lengthy explanation of the hiring process and keeping teachers once they're over here, I had an even more lengthy explanation that I'd done everything recommended after my first review, that I'm a capable and able teacher and really intent on doing a great job, but I'm out of the English Program. In the English Program, you're just expected to be great and fantastic. But in the Regular Program, if you can get in and motivate kids who spend most of their days with teachers sitting in the shade eating chips and fried chicken all day, sometimes whack at the students with a ruler but otherwise just tell them to open books,it really gets noticed.

I guess the good thing is that all bets are off and my only job is to make them regret losing me. Unfortunately, I have a hunch that the "real" music teacher, the Thai lady in the classroom who is married to the director of the school, is beyond recovery, and she's the one who matters. Something about calling out the musical shortcomings doesn't sit well, I'm guessing: in the class before I was dismissed, I noticed her cringing every time I said, "What's the name of this note? .... Anyone? .... .... No, not G, how about ssssssssss.... .... ssss ssss .... YES! C!" or just gave up on, "How many beats does it get?" Whether such concepts as pitch, rhythm, or counting are simply Western affectations or gross lacunae, I would probably be somewhere between embarrassed and uncomfortable if my sixth-year students couldn't identify middle C or a quarter note.

What's more, I'll be expected to train up the person they hire based on ads for a "music teacher." Maybe that's why I haven't seen old lesson plans or spoken with former music teachers....

Another new game

Turns out that last one was just a warm up.

"I can see that you love teaching and could make a great teacher, and you're doing all the things I told you to try, so don't take it the wrong way. It's just that Teacher Lakhona just doesn't think you have that special energy we need in a music teacher, and after the observations, I can see where she's coming from. So next term I think I have a job in the regular program, which is good because it's a real self-motivating position where nobody really expects you to do anything and not many of the teachers do, so if you get anything done, it really stands out."

The good news is that I still have a job, hopefully. Contract's moot and will need to be reworked, but hopefully that doesn't mean it'll go away.

On cockfighting

The good thing about cockfighting is that the roosters know it's a national hobby, so they're darn well behaved; no crowing before dawn, and hardly a peep the rest of the day.

In praise of the long route

I take a somewhat circuitous and back route to work in the morning, even if I'm tight on time. If I'm late enough that time's an issue, the main routes are clogged and the back alleys are quicker. But what's neat is that when I'm on good time, I catch groups of monks out... I want to say “foraging” but don't know if that's permitted... for their food.

One group in particular strikes me: there's an older middle-aged man, a middle-aged man, a youngish man, and a teenage boy. Every day, they pass down a street where half a dozen ladies have set up food stands, ladling grub from hotel pans or woks of bubbling oil. And if I time it right, I catch an old, old woman—withered and wrinkled and stooped but up and about without the repose of the ancient—in a deep wai, handing a baggie of food to the boy in ochre robes. I am entranced, not the least by the fact that I'm the only one so blown away by an utterly mundane morning street scene.

Welcome to Thailand.

An interesting facet of the Thai diet

We've been playing a lot of name games in music classes—high schoolers might be receptive to, “You have one new name and face to learn mid-term, I have a hundred and eighty,” but primary kids aren't so much. What started as one of my standbys but grew absolutely fascinatng was the food game: “My name is _______ (rest) I like ___(food)____!”

A couple of students named candies, one class went for pizza, but otherwise, 95-98% of a class will name a fruit as their favorite food. One (fat) kid liked chicken, but that was the only solo protein. The rest were fruits or the sparse sprout of noodles or pizza.

New Game, New Game!

It's like Calvinball brought to life

When I got here, I received a stern lecture: our students are brilliant and need to be challenged. Most of them have been playing music since infancy and are now budding prodigies. Push them.

I found a student body mostly musically illiterate: out of all my classes, maybe three students could correctly identify all the notes on the staff or even half of the basic rhythms. So I went into remedial, get these kids learned mode.

I received another lecture, much more stern. Stop pushing notes, stop pushing rhythms, this is music. Music. Everyone passes music. It's fun singing and dancing time, not work time, not time to push or assign homework. It's time to have fun and sing songs, so back off. In fact, scrap your lesson plans. You have three weeks of regular classes before we're into review and finals. Make sure the kids love you and music class. That's all you gotta do, okay?

On the body

WARNING:

This post is very frank and personal and does not hold punches. In fact, it revels in a little bit too much info. I would strongly encourage skimming or skipping outright, if you happen to be a female blood relative.

But I post it out of optimism and hope that it's the apex and now the pendulum is going to start swinging back up.

It started with the feet, at least the most noticeable of the most recent round. Fluid flooding down and settling and stretching the skin taut, first with the toes and then working up through the knees. To be unable to squat because it asks too much flexibility of your knee, or rather it asks that the bubble of fluid behind your knee be relocated elsewhere—not impossible, but intensive in both time and massage—how does one explain this to a room full of 2^nd graders while your uber-boss, the wife of the director of the entire school, watches on? Were it not indecent to do so, flashing lymph nodes swollen to the size of large blueberries might help, or flashing the oozing, festering scabs with angry red veins spreading the joy.

And it's hard to place the physical depletion. No way to show the intestinal grinding, the wearying ache of an ever=present hunger, the body saying, “Yeah, I could go for a burger right about now; no worries, though—if I don't get one, I'll be digesting myself within an hour, and there's still some flesh hanging around.”

Showing the ribcage might work: it's disconcerting to see every bump and knurl where there should be pecs, to see the contours not of shoulder muscles but the concave spaces in the scapula.

But that just makes people say, “Eat more,” as if it were that simple and straightforward. When? How? When? If I eat to my physical satiation, it's an absurd quantity that rockets straight through. If I eat mindfully and cautiously I am hungry and regret not eating more until I have the chance to eat again, which is extremely dangerous because now I've ben thinking about eating for an unfortunately long time and am especially predisposed to wolfing down whatever comes at me.

And then there's the question of what—few things make my mouth as happy as a green papaya salad with the spicy peanut-lime-chili dressing and a fresh black crab crushed in with the mix; I'll refrain from telling stories, but say that in the battle for digestion, the papaya takes about two hours to escape relatively unscathed.

There's always a big bowl of rice, and usually something fried on top. Day after day, meal after meal, rice. The sugar rush and crash. The little spoonfuls of chili fish sauce ladeled on with salt-laden guilt. The constant search for a way to make it seem like more than about my least preferred starch.

Not to imply anything new or exciting; save for the rice, the hunger and gnawing boniness have been my life for a goodly while, at least long enough to consider them unremarkable. But here, things are different. Magnified.

On the one hand, I had a very easy time uprooting and moving 14 timezones away because I had little to keep me stateside; inversely, I have even less—namely, a job—calling me back.

And then there's the physicality of absurdly-swollen ankles, a wardrobe that no longer fits, the question of passing a physical for my work permit. How bizarre to wonder if I'm in physical condition to pass such a routine deal, what would've been borderline asinine even before it was presented as, “Show up and say you're healthy.”

While I am thankful to be in a country with superb medical care available—provided you know where to go and can get there, etc etc etc—the down side is that I've been to the good hospital in town enough times that they know me, and they still remark at my blood pressure, pulse, and weight.

It became an issue that I had not only been to the hospital but went back, followed by a prosthetics appointment with the dentist. My big boss has to sign receipts for me to get an insurance refund—teachers are insured for X amount per year—and her bootstraps are steel-belted oxhide.

“Also, I need to find a gastroenterologist. Someone who specializes in the stomach and intestines. Do you know where I can find one?”

“Why you need that? Just go hospital.”

“I did [I did not add that I had been—weekly—for the past month] and they said I need to go to a specialist.”

“But why you need?”

An awkward, embarrassed pause. “Because even though my liver, kidneys, heart, lungs, and blood are healthy, my body is not synthesizing protein and is essentially shutting down. They've run all the diagnostics they can come up with, hit me with a huge barrage of drugs, but they can't figure it out.”

“You no need special doctor, you need eat protein—more fish. Beside, it all money, and you have not so much more.”

So I was given the chance to be especially thankful for the affordable, high-quality healthcare as I decided not to say, “And here are the rest of the receipts.”

As I contemplated nuking up two bowls of egg-white with flavorful whatnots, bringing even more hardboiled eggs to campus, what clerks or vendors would think if I started buying flats of eggs every day, of going up to triple the dosage of my protein pills, or going straight for the Anabolic 5,000 powder a pharmacist offered, a coworker, the guy who lives just outside this part of reality, chimed in: “I read this book once about a lady just like you, skinny and couldn't gain weight despite eating all sorts of fast food and fatty stuff, and she started fasting and it worked. She actually gained weight once she got all the garbage out of her system, and she wrote an entire book about it. I wish I still had it so I could lend it to you.”

Thank goodness for small blessings, right?

(I'm hesitant to, but as long as I've already put so much else out there, I might as well include that this is the guy who taught himself Thai script—before he could speak the language—by copying Genesis, and who has been butting heads with our manager to use books of the Old Testament in his English classes. My listening in bemused silence has been construed as sympathy, so I get to hear all about it with great regularity. Sometimes there's a down side to being polite.)

Flash forward a bit. Here we are today, in the close-enough to here-and-now. I woke up with a different sort of pain in my ankles—just a dull, throbbing, hit-by-frying pan ache. When I looked down—or up, as it were, since I've been sleeping with my legs elevated—I saw real ankles. MY ankles, NOT the swollen, bruised, immobile ankles of an obese geriatric (consider that the below-posted photo of my ankle was taken when it looked good, for the same reason I've not taken photos of myself, which is probably the inverse of why I don't take photos of so much of Thailand).

Damn, it was a sad sight. Aching is to be expected. But I had not expected the desiccation to have spread so far.

A word on legs, I guess: I like to think of myself as physically fit and active, a hiker and skier and biker and all that. Even over the winter, when things were going sketchy, my legs were strong and able; even as my ribs jutted and my pelvis stretched skin taut, my quads were defined and solid, my calves flat and strong planes of muscle.

Skip over the Thai massage to the exact here and now==there's a goodly bit of interim, but I'll get there.

After a traditional massage, a wave of welcome circulation brought wretched feeling back to the legs. Now, just like the arms, the legs are covered in a web of veins that give the impression of honed and toned muscle but in fact indicate not the inverse so much as the absence thereof.

In the month they've spent hidden under swelling, my legs have disappeared.

Now, my legs look like a ten year old's attempts to make a jointed snowman—oddly shaped knobs connecting somewhat misshapen limbs. Most of the bruising has cleared my feet and ankles, so now it's a matter of the cysts and pustules left by sundry creams and ointments I thought would help.

One hand can reach ¾ of the way around my thigh; when I look at my calf, it's the size I think of my bicep should be (once was).

And there is no elasticity, no spring, just a geriatrically creaky immobility and skin stretched taut over bone.

But somehow I feel better. Maybe it's the two handfuls of pills I take any given day. Maybe it's the dozen or so egg whites, spiked with aromatics and spices, I eat in a day. Maybe my body is just tired of being sick and tired. Whatever it is, I'll take it.

I hurt on so many levels: I miss home, miss family, miss the mountains and trees, hurt from bone grinding on bone, muscle devouring itself to keep critical components in gear, the bike wreck, skin pinched between bone and unpadded chairs, the occasional bit of muscle trying to rebuild, from the bike wreck. Did I mention that the bike wreck still hurts prohibitively?

But underlying it all is a dull sort of post-workout ache, the one that says, “You've sure taken yourself somewhere, but it looks like we'll make it back not just in one piece but all the stronger for it.” Maybe it was just untweaking from the Thai massage, or maybe it's because of the massage, but I'll take it no matter where it's from: bottom line is that it's hope and reconstruction, it's a step in a direction other than where I've been, and I'll take it.

If absolutely nothing else, it gives me reason to go back for more massage, right?

On Dentistry

Just finding the dentist is hard enough: "It's the one with the purple sign."

"He's on the road behind Carrefour, you know, the one with all the brothels and speedbumps."

"It's the metal looking building right next to the wooden looking traditional massage place, you know, the one good place on that strip."

"He want you be there at 4, so you leave 3:30."

Half an hour to go about half a mile... sounds about right.

In practice, this meant having a Thai teacher write out the name in Thai, then driving up and down the street, cruising past the working girls while holding up the scrap of paper, trying to spot the right sort of curlicues and loopy whoops.

I decided on a place without tinted windows, next to a place with prices on the windows (hopefully for traditional massage).

Inside, there were half a dozen unpadded plastic benches with dogeared and outdated magazines on them, a TV playing soaps at a low volume, and a prettily bored looking receptionist sitting behind a mirrored desk.

I probably shouldn't be surprised by the universality, but there you go.

Something about the thick layer of dirty brown edging the hospital green vinyl chair from sometime before I was born turned up the fortitude tester: how long has it taken for the chair to get that dirty? What else has been sitting idle and grungy for such a duration?

When the assistant draped a threadbare and splotched robe over me, I went into the same place I go when I consider Thai refrigeration: if it were that dangerous, more people would be dead. Besides, laundry is easy to do, so it's probably been washed, it's just old. Blessedly, she tucked a bleachy-clean towel under my chin.

He was supposed to be the dentist with good English. I'm the doofus, so I couldn't say whether he was speaking Thai or Chinese, but I didn't get very much English as he started digging through my mouth.

"Hurt? Sensitive?"

"No, no, mai mai mai." I held up my partial with the missing tooth and broken clamps. It's a spidery bit of metal alloy that cost $2K 1996 dollars and was deemed "hella goth" at the time. It survived a lot, but not cooked rice noodles.

Two thousand USD scared me almost as much as stories about drills without Novocain, but as long as I have insurance I might as well get patched up, right?

"Oh, broken, no can fix. Make new. But no metal. Plastic."

"But I like the metal."

"No. Metal make teeth break. Or metal teeth break like this. Plastic more beautiful for you."

So we did the plastic cement molding and coated my face with the effluvia before giving me a single kleenex and pointing at the bitty little side basin.

"Tuesday." He pointed at the chair. "Tuesday back here."

"Tuesday, thank you." I gave a wai.

On the way out, I had to pay 1K Baht, cash.

Gulp. Don't think about what'll happen when it's time to pick up the partial.

And on Tuesday I returned to sit for an hour, listening to drilling and whimpering (really) before I went to the back to find a little plastic jobbie like the rainbow-hued retainers that decorate high school cafeteria tables, save that it was a dull, fleshy pink and had little nubbins of off-white instead of a metal band. And just like the minivan comes blazing from left field to take the chopper's place in the driveway, the "hella goth" metal plate with spiky arms that threatened to rip holes in things if the partial ever popped out of place at an inopportune time gave way to a strip of pink safety plastic.

As soon as I was in the chair, which still had dimples from the last occupant's clutching, I told myself that he just had to have changed gloves before slapping the new prosthesis in my mouth and cranking up the grinder. And I prayed he was grinding the plastic, not my enamel (he was). It took about three minutes, maybe five (seemed like an hour), and the assistant was stuffing a kleenex in my hand so I could wipe off the plastic shavings decorating my face.

The dentist held up a mirror and showed me teeth that fit perfectly snugly, with perfect coffee stains, and before I could do a doubletake, he waved me off with "sank you, sank you."

And on the way out, the prettily bored desk attendant waved me off--already paid.

And just like that, I'm done and out.

Welcome to Thailand.

On Caffeine

They drink instant coffee. Period. Hate the smell of real, brewed coffee. Really.

I've given up.

In the morning, I drink iced, sugar-free coffee from a can. And canned coffee comes in four basic varieties: sickly sweetened but uncreamed "black;" premixed sweet and creamy; extra sweet and creamy; or sweet and extra creamy; two places in town sell unsweetened but creamed, and I hope it's not a limited supply shipment or somesuch.

Especially disconcerting is the overwhelming presence of pre-mix "3 in 1" deals: coffee, cream, and sugar, in Thai proportion (which is to say, sugared cream with a kernel of coffee), in a little tube to rip into hot water. Good luck finding black fake-coffee.

But here's what blows me away: tea is almost impossible to find. There are boutiquey herbal infusions done up in tourist trappings, but black tea is almost impossible to find. And go figure, after so much powdered fake coffee, I've been craving a straight cup of tea; the best I've been able to do (you'd never guess) is a 3 in 1 insta-pack.

Which is to say, I'll keep looking. Sigh.

Welcome to Thailand.

On taste

Chances are, if the chocolate milk gets stuck in the straw, it will not be conducive to peeling back the lid and sucking the glop out.

On Appearances

Soi dogs can get really, really ugly. Bizarre growths, skin diseases, open sores, patchwork hair, delightful creatures that make your skin crawl for disinfectant with nothing but a glance from across the street.

These are another part of Thailand I just can't photograph because the shots would impose pathos in most Western eyes, and there is nothing pathetic or apologetic about the critters. They are dirty, mangy street dogs that would probably go mental and die if subjected to a housepet lifestyle.

So I'm riding along and think, 'I've seen some ugly ones, but that dog is hideous!' Its side is sprouting long, wiry hair on mottled gray skin, fat little legs without definition, and it's, it's, it's got puppies! And the puppies are horribly twisted and tweaked with long ears and stumpy little naked tails!

They look more like, like, oh.

They are pigs.

Living in someone's front yard.

Okay.

more medical lessons

Today is new teeth day. What's funny is that I lost a tooth in a noodle, broke my partial on a papaya salad, and used a water faucet to prove my zygomatic arch biologically successful.

In 10th grade, Mr. Lingle explained that the zygomatic arch--the cheek bone--is designed to bridge muscles and nerves and protect them from being crushed, and absorb a more significant trauma before it can crush underlying, more critical physiology.

Well, that crushing thing is exactly what happened. I'm pretty sure--no X rays, just poking around as the swelling and scarring abates, but the arch is not so much archlike. Teeth are okay, though, and my sense of smell is coming back.

Now to get full motion back into my right shoulder....

East and West Don't Always Meet

I'm generally pretty good with medical advice--doc says to do or take this, and I'm good about following orders. Not so good about getting to the doc, but once I'm there I stay pretty short and narrow.

But I'm erring.

Flagrantly.

"In the morning, before breakfast--you eat breakfast, yeah?--crack three eggs into a glass of whole milk and stir in some yogurt. Drink this everyday before breakfast, lunch, and dinner, okay?"

Keep in mind that they don't refrigerate anything but beverages in these parts, so about half the eggs you crack are bleeding, growing feathers, or growing some serious stank.

I just can't do it.

Shorting the cognitive dissonance circuits

It's like the sun coming out from behind a horrible-looking dark cloud at about the time the cloudburst hits and you find yourself drenched and steaming while rain pours down so hard it splashes up your nose. Quite simply, that's how it is. Stop expecting it to be otherwise.

So, picture a Buddhist temple compound: there's a sand courtyard around sundry sacred buildings for housing sermons and ceremonies and sacred relics and writings and personages. I can't really say what else—still painfully ignorant—but flip through a guidebook or give a quick Google and you get the idea well enough. Lotta incense, guys in saffron robes, that scene.

Now picture a county fair, but in one of those counties—not the one in absolute Podunk, ID, but in Lewiston, or in Ukiah, Visalia, or Bakersfield, CA: big enough to have some draw and class, more than just three tents (kill the wolves, fry the twinkie, buy the camo), but not big enough to have svelte displays or industrial draw: log rolling and skunk milking in Wasilla, AK, with pelts and jerked meats &c is a perfect example.

But with a Thai twist.

Start with the food (sorry, it's just my way). We've been over most of it: the fried meat on a stick, vats of curry, fish sauce, skewers of marinaded meat on grills, cauldrons of hot oil frying a dozen chickens at a time, big ol woks over hot flames full of charred pebbles roasting chestnuts and hazlenuts, and ladies drizzling sweet corn batter into oiled woks and then spinning it into confections that taste like cotton candy but with the body of brown sugar.

And naturally there are a few radio stations trying to out-blast their programming. Hawkers trying to drum up funds by out-screaming each other. (Sometimes I wonder in the PA renters or power company like these shindigs more.)

And then the hawkers reflect Thailand, too: kitschy touristicana, cut-rate clothing, “really real authentic designer handbags,” “Non-Pirated” CDs, “true” electronic devices, artisan leathercrafts, gorgeous fabric weavers and tailors, and the oddball one-off sorts of places: the metal field impliment maker, the wood carver, someone peddling cushions for reclining and sleeping, a sticker shop, and one of the strangest displays in the world, where a man is making traditional medicinal massage oil.

Scene: my eyes are closed as I wallow in the scent of the Penang masseur's ginger-menthol-mint-magical something oil, remembering glowing tingles along invisible lines. It's distracted me from the baggie in my hand, which holds a little baggie of the salty-sweet snack I've discovered is more enjoyable than peanuts: fresh fried grubs with kaffir lime leaves. Grasshoppers not so much because the legs poke and the wings get stuck between your teeth, but grubs are pulpy sweet on the inside, crispy salty on the outside, and I can honestly say in all good faith that I would rather reach for a handful of fresh fried grubs than a pinch of even home fried peanuts. Radio stations blare Thai music, and hawkers scream for donations while standing between statuettes and cauldrons filled with smoking incense.

Were I to open my eyes, my other hand (the one not holding the scrumptious grubs, one of which has a wooden skewer in it, just waiting for a snarf) would be holding a large-size Red Bull bottle containing 200 B of the miracle massage oil, which a knurled and shriveled man somewhee between a living prune and a bristlecone pine just ladled from a wooden tub the equivalent of maybe a quarter of a barrel in which soak large chunks of herbs and spices and half a dozen goat skulls in various states of decomposition. And around me wash a sea of saffron robes, punctuated by little kids with balloons and faces sticky from fresh fried sweet corn battered confections.

Welcome to my first monastery in town.

Welcome to Thailand.

Scooter stories: on acculturation

No value judgment, but the other day I noticed, long after the experience, that I didn't even remark on someone driving down the wrong lane of traffic, feeling—and indeed quite possibly being—entirely justified in honking at the oncoming traffic (moving in its own lane and direction; the person honking was me. Have I been here too long?

Maybe not, because I had a spot of unease when pulling an illegal right turn from a wrong-way street and cutting off a cop on a scooter.

But then again, I was driving home in the dark with my visor up, enjoying the evening, and something warm, heavy, solid, and just the right size to get stuck in my helmet hit me in the face. No surprise, no shock, just an affirmation that my left hand had a good hold of the steering and I was still upright on the road while my right hand swept what I'm guessing was a bat out of my face. '

I kept waiting for the adrenaline, the surge in heart rate, but got nothing.

On medicine

Now that it's been almost two weeks, I sometimes wake myself up when I try to roll onto my right side and get a huge jolt of pain from my ribs and shoulder.

I think I might've done more damage than I initially thought.

It's just that when it's dark and you've just peeled yourself off the pavement, functionality is extremely desireable, and your body will trick itself into believing it's in good working order. And by the time the endorphins wear off, there's enough of a sense of what's wrong that you aren't actually trying to breathe, which would cue off the rib problems. And you don't try to move your shoulder, which might start the popping noises earlier. And even as the trauma pain overwhelms the drugs you throw at it, the drugs help enough to think, well, at least I'm not feeling quite as unfunctional. So you just keep plugging until almost two weeks later you realize how much it hurts to sleep on the biscuit mattress. And that all the hype and whatnot about festering wounds in the tropics is actually true, so now I'm waking up to a full handful of horsepills: antibiotic, anti-inflammatory, anti-diarrheal, supplemental protein and vitamins, washed down with a hospital-grade food-substitute drink ordinarily reserved for feeding tube applications.

Despite everything, my legs still swell to elephantine sausages, and my blood protein levels have dropped to just under half of normal.

Cooking Lessons

One of the brocures had an ad for a cooking class from 5-8:30PM, pick 7 of about 15 dishes, cost 1200B; be in the lobby at 5:00 for the transfer. Easy.

I'm in the lobby at 4:45, still in the lobby at 5:25. Finally some lady comes running in and asks if I'm for the cooking school. She leads me to a Toyota parked across the road, still running, with a couple of big, strong, blond, and bronzed American guys in it—the class?

We take off through traffic, winding down the beach road toward who knows where, bobbing and weaving amid scooters and pedestrians and gawkers and hawkers, all with legitimate claims to the road. She turns off at an unmarked, unlit driveway that leads to a food prep area reminiscent of a large camp kitchen: bamboo thatched roof (not so American campy) with open sides, a wooden table in front for sitting and eating, a larger table with a plastic cloth and tamarind rounds for chopping, and parallel rows of low-flame burners.

A youngish, typically poised and beautiful girl waves us to the table—indeed, the class consists of us three—where there is something of an antipasto dish: betel nut leaves with toasted coconut, dried shrimp, peanuts, wedges of fine0dice lime, ginger and shallot with peppers, and a palm sugar dipping sauce. She demonstrates how to fold the leaf and construct the wrap, then hands out a brochure that looks unlikethe one at the hotel; in fact, there are no commonalities. Perhaps most notably the name of the school. And instead of a 7-dish course, we are to pick five of six offered, at a price of 800B.

Words with the hotel? Just a few.

No papaya salad, no chicken satay, no holy basil, no massaman curry, o curry paste, no... reason to complain or cheapen the present experience because I was misled at the hotel. I will learn to make tom yam soup, pad thai noodles, cashew chicken, and green curry with sticky rice pudding and mango for dessert.

Hands washed, aprons donned, we take the tamarind round, each of which has about a 6” cleaver on it. In the middle of the table is a large reed basket with a green plastic dome over it—something like an inverted strainer, Thailand's universal substitute for a veggie crisper. Chefette—she's just too cute to be Chef—walks us around the ingredients: baby eggplant, straw mushrooms, tomatoes, limes, a kaffir lime (“We only cook with the skin of this one, the rest we use for your hair; regular limes we cook with but don't eat except in the appetizer plate”), kaffir leaves, galangal, lemongrass, Thai celery (looks more like parseley--”it's called Thai celery because it's small, like Thai people”), sweet basil, coriander, garlic chives, spring onion, garliv cloves, peppers, a carrot, sprouts, a cayenne pepper, and a cucumber.

Add proteins and starch and you have the gamut of Thai cooking.

Well, of course there's fish sauce.

Chefette passes out little spears of lemongrass, maybe as long as a finger with an extra knuckle. “You cut like angle, see?” Slice into long-knuckle length on a sharp angle—four slices of lemongrass. Next, pull the spine from a kaffir leaf; the halves go on a little plate with the lemongrass.

Watching the other guys makes me wonder how Chefette keeps her nerves in line—this program hosts up to 9 people, and there are no entry requirements. One of the guys is darn close to adding his pointer finger with the lemongrass—what would happen were he to try dismantling a chicken?

“Now you need one chili, maybe two, if you like it hot.” She's too cute and knows it. “We cook the whole chili but you must crush it first, otherwise none of the heat gets out. Why? The magic is on the inside, in the seeds. So crush it with the flat of your knife, like this” *THWACK* “and now don't touch your eye or your nose or go to the bathroom without washing your hands really, really well.

“Finally, take about three or four slices of the galangal—thin, maybe a little wider than your knife, and that's all you need for the herb part of your soup.”

Brief bit of foreshadowing, or outright chronology-busting, but to an end: “Thai cooking has five steps,” she explained. “First, you get the herbs going; second you add the protein, unless you're using shrimp or something else that cooks really quickly; third you add vegetables; fourth is the sauce; fifth is any garnish or something for making the plate beautiful.” Prep happens in the same sequence.

For veggies, Chefette quartered a medium wite onion and gave us ach a chunk with orders to quarter it and separate the segments. She halved some Roma-esque tomatoes with orders to quarter. We were to halve the straw mushrooms longitudinally, then cut the halves into thirds. We were given parsely, spring onion, and a seeded slice of lime. She passed out little mini bowls for sauce: a small tsp of sugar and a Chinese soupspoon of fish sauce. Finally, chop up some cilantro and spring onion. Done.

“Okay, cover your plates, now we'll prep the pad thai.”

A few cloves of crushed garlic--”it's Thai garlic so the skin is delicate and you can cook it;” cut a thin strip of tofu into fork-sized chunks, set between the garlic and some bean sprouts, and construct a sauce: a spoonful of fish sauce, a spoonful of oyster sauce, a small teaspoonful of sugar, a large pinch of dried shrimp, and a tablespoon of tamarind. Cover and let sit while we make soup.

Magically, three of the burners have pots on them, each with about a cup of water and a hint of chicken stock in it. Bring this to a boil, add the kaffir, galangal, and lemongrass. WHOA! It smells like hot and sour soup! Add the veggies—onion, tomato, mushroom. Little bowls of deveined shrimp magically appear—here's how they keep people from really hurting themselves. Stir in the sauce, squeeze in the lime, and she comes around with a little spoonful of Thai chili paste. Shrimp go in and burners go off; stir until shrimp turn pink, add the herb garnish, and pour into a bowl. Done.

While we put the soups on the table under plastic covers, the dirty dishes magically disappear and fresh woks appear on the burners, along with little cups of chicken.

For pad thai, get some oil going, brown the tofu, add garlic and chicken, noodles that have been soaking until they're malleable and a liberal douse of water, return to a boil, add sauce and cook off the fluidity; crack in an egg, break the yolk and give it a round-the-world spin of the wok until it cooks through, then add any fresh veggies and fold everything together. Garnish with ground peanuts and green onions.

Chefette left us to enjoy our first round of eating, which was probably smart of her but didn't help the awkward factor with us. We'll leave it there.

For the rest, we farangs were involved in none of the difficult prep: making good sticky rice, making good jasmine rice, making curry powder.

For cashew chicken, stirfry cashews until they're getting some color, add garlic, chicken, diced mushroom and onion; shock with some water and a sauce of oyster, fish, a little sugar, reduce to sticky. Done.

For the curry, chop eggplant, onion, and baby corn into water. Heat up some oil, add half a spoonful of curry paste, diced strips of chicken, the veggies (without water, which they bathe in for aesthetic purposes only) and about a cup of coconut milk; reduce.

Sticky rice pudding: heat coconut milk, cut in sticky rice, reduce while stirring, let stand. Done.

Ultimately, a fascinating evening. What could be construed as the “actual” cooking is stupid simple. Any actual art is in background steps, and I'd bet a limb that every single Thai person knows a gramma who did it better than anyone else in the world: the curry, shrimp paste, fish sauce, whatever. But what makes it, bottom line, is the ingredients.

No matter how carefully I try to replicate it when I get home, if I don't have galangal and lemongrass and veggies grown with Thai microbes and cooked with pure Thai tap water, it's just not going to taste like tom yam.

What I hope to bring home is a working knowledge of the sauces: I know I can get fish sauce, oyster sauce, palm sugar, and chili paste. If I know what to do with them, I should be able to make some good things happen, even without the stank of fermenting fish.

On Red Lights

Just a preface: I could use a beer, if it didn't involve going for a beer. And the American Happy Meal site says, "HEY KIDS, THIS IS ADVERTISING!" across the top; I wonder if the spermy little Thai squiggles mean the same here.

And, well, there is much percolating. Once the coffee turns local, I'll start pouring.

You know how things go in my world: they just happen. It just happens that I end up in the Penyang projects. I was looking for information on Buddhis and had been misdirected out of the Malaysia Buddhist Society's wat. I sure as heck didn't want to be in the projects—nobody wants to be in the Penyang projects, not even those who typically ply such places, because most of the tenants are devout Muslims.

So I'm at a writing impasse, I need to move my scooter, I'm getting hungry again, and there's a 24 hour McDonalds. Win, win, win. But when I park, I get distracted by live music—a couple of farangs playing rockabilly blues. And as I investigate further, I end up in the red light district.

Were I back home and in, say, Reno, this would be a remarkably uncomfortable situaition. But I'm not in Reno. I'm in an off-season global magnate of beach resort paradise in southern Thailand on a Saturday night/

Not only did I make it to the bitter, destitute end of the red light street—it's a dead end populated by women who could've been women servicing service men on leave from the war in Vietnam—I made it back to the blues bar and actually got inside because all the members of the door guard were busy gyrating with one another on a pool table.

Great, now I can drink a beer and listen to some music, right?

HA!

Someone coming up and groping me from behind has always been disconcerting, even when I had something like pecs to grope. As the woman old enough to be my mother found out, there are only ribs. She recoiled and I turned in time to catch a shocked “Eww!” face. From a Thai bar dancer. Think about that.

And there was a flurry of handwaving and an explosion of Thai and the pool table was vacated to come grope my chest. Hmm, can we invent a less comfortable situation?

How about me standing up at the same time the band stops and everyone in the house turns toward the woman screaming, “YOU HAVA NO ASS!”

Naturally, all the other girls moved in to confirm.

End result? McThai has some great addenda to the menu. Of course I'll end up in the next red light district I find—who wouldn't?--I'll just be a little more prepared.. But McThaiRonald has some great things going: a black pepper chicken sandwich that's a grilled chicken breast with a black pepper marinade, a pork snackburger that's like a plain 'ol little hamburger but the meat's been passed through a finer sieve and has the nicer taste of animals raised on a diverse—if leftover—dietf, and sauces including plum sauce, sriracha, uber-spicy barbecue, a lemony tartar closer to aioli and fish sauce for the fries “functional definition of a Thai person, regardless of skin color: they put fish sauce on fries and ketchup on pizza. And even though I feel it as unsettlingly as the spicy green papaya salad with crushed, raw crab, after a month of such clean, spicy, unrefined, unrefrigerated, utterly foreign food, processed meat in a refined bun is darn close to bliss.

Here's to the single life

What gets me is not that I have the agency to say, "I need down time; I need to go to bed; I need to stop for food; I experience a full spectrum of needs that are not weaknesses but organismal requirements," but that I am the ONLY one who can say that. Not only do I have agency to protect myself, I am the sole agent.

And beyond the challenge of accepting biological reality, I am still trying to do so at an age when, typically, I'd be married off and growing with a family.

Wait, what?

Sorry, when it's this much of a challenge keeping myself operational, I need no additional responsibilities for others, especially loved ones.

From Ao Nang

Ao Nang is your basic touristy beachfront paradise: a path along the surf wall abutting whitesand/broken shell beach with all the pre=punched touristicana, mainly imported from China. Nothing has a price unless it's on a menu or in 7-11, but even a set menu has some pretty significant wiggle room. And oh, the relief of an English base: it is assumed that anyon with white skin speaks English, and 95% of the proprietors who don't assault you with, “HelloHello! You come in for very nice ________” say, “Hello how can I help you?”

What's great is that with most, once they hear your attempts to learn Thai, they lighten up considerably and prices generally plummet. I'll explain that I live in NST and teach music, and there's an almost universal gesture at the elbow--”Motocy?”

“Yeah, with the Thailand Tattoo” I reply, and lift my shirt to show the really pretty scab. What's great is that most of them laugh and either show me their own or gesture with, “same same.”

I took a day to walk the strip, orient myself to the town, attempt swimming (large swaths of cracking scabs+murky saltwater=no bueno), and revel in anonymity.

It's one of the things you don't appreciate until you lose it—blending in, melting away, or at least not being the screaming singularity; maybe someone will remember the skinny farang with the bike scabs and blue backpack, but there are a lot of farangs passing through. Hopefully one of the smiling shop owners with whom I worked out a few Thai phrases will remember me fondly, but how wonderful to not be the one white fave, the one person in weird clothes, the one person with light hair, the person with the only non-academy-emblazoned backpack, the singular instance of an outside world intruding upon someplace or some group perfectly happy in its insularity.

One of my favorite bits of touristicana back home reads, “If you're lucky enough to live in the mountains, you're lucky enough!” It would never work in Thailand: the nearest equivalent would be, “If you're lucky enough to be born Thai, you know and believe it to the innermost depths of your soul without ever thinking to appreciate or question the validity of your absolute superiority.”

Like I said, it's nice to be in a tourist trap, with people from around the globe distracting locals and engaging each other in sometimes fascinating, sometimes asinine conversation. It's nice to fade into the background, disappear from notice, exist without scrutiny. And boy has it been eye-opening for me: he-who-grew-up-in-Touristica and has always maintained a slight distaste for the kitch finds himself reveling and, maybe, if I catch myself in an overly-honest moment, seeking it out.

Teacher Ow

One of the interesting things about Thai culture is the nickname: everyone has a nickname they get when they're born or are very young, and it's frequently something fairly wild: Sadudee, Ultra, Bang, Boom, Gem, &c.

Well, to G5, I'm Teacher Ow. Which is hilarious.

To G1, I'm, "Teacher motocy! Vroom vroom!" with accompanying motions and toppling. Which is hilarious.

I'll post this shot because it doesn't involve much pasty white and bony exposure. I'm not exactly sure what happened with the ankle, but that's the side the bike fell on, so maybe it got a little crushed. As for the fingers, just imagine the shoulder, elbow/forearm, a nice bony line down my right pelvis, and the front of my right hip sharing similar stories.

What's odd was looking a couple of days afterward and recognizing what would be classic shots of trauma from the EMT training manual. At the time, the only light came from the ambulance roller bar, and what wasn't covered in gravel was bleeding too much to discern. And there was someone flat on the asphalt, which generally pulls a trump to a bloody finger.

My big problem is that I'm in whitesand tropical paradise, with nice, warm, salty water. I've tried, a number of times, but not even my most masochistic smile is enough to offset the salty burn.

So, shucky darn, I have to sit on the balcony and watch the world pass by on the main commercial drag, which is the only thing between me and the beach.

More on subsistence

It's been niggling for a while—there's a certain degree of universal lackadaisical attitude that just doesn't quite sit right: it's not really lazy so much as accepting.

Panang was instructive on this front: as I expected to see throughout SE Asia, the scooters were all hopped up and at least half the cars had mods. If an establishment had any glitz or glamour, it was proudly displayed as blatantly as possible. Frankly, it felt much more familiar than most of what I've seen in Thailand, where it's hard to distinguish between a million-dollar gold store and a little noodle shop next door unless you're looking directly into each. Panang had a drive to tweak and modify and improve and rake in approval; Thailand just doesn't. And that's where it seems lackadaisical.

Basically, if something stops working, fix it. Otherwise, don't mess with it. You have a basket on the front of your bike—why would you want one for the back of the seat or around your knees (besides holding a map, drink, or grocery bag)? (And yes, the knee-area basket with map clip will be one of my purchases next time I get to Panang.)

A house, oy, is a framework of bamboo poles with cement and tile walls, and every time something is added—running water, sewer, electricity, cable, DSL, drinkable water—it's clapped onto the outside. If it's removed, it's cut at a convenient place and stoppered. If it's reinstalled, a new line gets run. It's just how things work.

Very, very rarely, a kid will chop his bike—I've seen three. Sure, there are stickers and flashy wheels, but those are on maybe 5% of all bikes and appear regardless of the driver's gender. Otherwise, nothing gets modified until it's too broken to use.

Driving to and through Krabi reinforced this point. It's about three hours by minivan, of course in the back where the AC is dead and the ride is sufficient to jar fillings loose. But whereas the drivers coming back from Panang made every rest stop and fuel station, then charged a hundred baht for a misspelled departure card, this guy reminded me of stories I've heard about driving through the mountains in China—flat out, on the phone, gesticulating, passing on blind corners on turns already not more than a lane and a half wide.

It's a beautiful drive, too, passing around the most ruggedly mountainous parts of southern Thailand. It could also be construed as a drive through horribly impoverished areas, but there isn't the shame and guilt—these are subsistence farmers, who have been farmers for generations, inheriting half the family plot (at best) until it's now a postage stamp with a cow that grazes alongside the road, staked by the ring in its nose, while the farmer watches traffic and time pass by.

And it's not the listless blankness of the grubby toddler sitting in the middle of a street in Bovill, Idaho, who's given up on entertainment or stimulation and simply sits in the dirty street until it's time for more mac-n-cheez with some hotdog (if times are good).

It's not the stare of the bum who resents your good shoes and clean clothes, house and address and job (or whatever opportunities he misses having or thinks he would have).

It's the stare of someone who knows their needs, knows those needs are met, and is content with the manner in which it's accomplished.

Krabi is a bizarre mix of traditional and tourist cultures. It has enough infrastructure to exist on its own, inland and away from beaches and karst formations, but it happens to be a gateway to even more glorious and dramatic beaches and karst outcroppings than the postcards of tropical Thai paradise suggest.

It's the suited Ivy League grad stepping into his investment/engineering project in Wyoming if the locals didn't resent Harvard for living and simply saw him as a different person with different needs without the class judgment and envy built into our culture, or the Ivy Leaguer stepping into a dive bar in Lovelock, NV, and not passing judgment on the usual crowd of irregulars.

It's a commercially-developed street lined with big box stores that wrap around a centuries-old temple, and bronzed statues of mythic figures holding up stoplights in the next street over from the slum. And all without judgment or criticism, without the burning, bitter drive to reach or prove you've reached some fabricated and likely self-induced standard of living or conduct or accomplishment. In Thailand, there is a sense of satiation. There is a sense of enough, and that having enough is okay.

Picture the kid who drains the entire pitcher of Waffle House Pure Imitation Maple Syrup and says, “Gimme more!” to the waitress—what vehicle does his dad drive? How often and under what circumstances does that change?

Call it greed, or maybe jealousy paid forward; some form of ostentation designed to be seen and noted as a significant accomplishment.

In the “Real Thailand,” or at least “real” according to some guidebook editor, otherwise known as places where you might stop for a half day of touristing or are grateful for not having to stop, such ostentation is as foreign as the blond hair that attracts curious little petting fingers.

Maybe it's the buddhist core of Thai culture. Maybe it's part of developing from the third world.

But as soon as I started to write, “In Thailand, such pretense and ostentation is unknown,” I flashed to my first day in country, when my boss said, “In Thailand, it's all about appearances. As long as you look good, you're set.” We were in the mall, shopping for cell phones, and he waved at the girl behind the counter, who was playing on an iPhone.

“Check out this girl on the iPhone.” He said something in Thai. “Yeah, she sleeps on a mat on a dirt floor, but she's all jeweled up with the iPhone. That is Thailand, right there.”

Maybe I can revert to my standby scapegoat and point out that the girl who grew up in the city grew up with access to an extensive array of television and advertisement, while the satellite dishes in the subsistence sticks are neither universal nor even a generation old. So it's a waiting game, and I would pose this question:

Assume it's a matter of tradition v Westernization; the nationalistic pride and drive that's kept Thailand sovereign throughout its history v the inherent drive, disquietude, and unslakable greed of a capitalist economy; the shriveled farmer sitting on a table surrounded by piles of durian v the girl in the cell phone shop—assume these are the forces at work. After thousands of years of independence, how many generations will it take for the eyes peering out from the shadows to fill with want and desire for the ease and glamour streaming in through the soon-to-be-universal satellite dish?

As in real estate, so with hospitals

Location, location, location.

With the skin on my shanks swollen to capacity and my feet like fat little sausages with overboiled bangers for piggie toes, I decided the solution was to have blood drawn—anything to decrease the amount of fluid. (I barked my shins a few days ago, nice little linear cuts from a plastic bin, and they oozed clear fluid, not blood, until my shoes were soaked. Talk about bizarre.)

Nakharin Hospital is new and clean, has dual language on some of the signs, and most of the staff speak much more English than I speak Thai. When I've been, my own, personal, human comfort and dignity have been paramount concerns, save for the universally atrocious waiting room chairs.

In Nakharin, Admissions runs a triage of sorts and disperses patients to the appropriate department, in my case reception. Reception takes the paperwork vitals—name, age, passport, &c. They wave you to sit in reception and there's another layer of admissions—they take pulse, b/p, weight, &c. It's all done in the open, with no exposure or invasion or anything as untoward as would upset a culture populated by archly conservative grandmothers (grandmothers, and a great many of their progeny, save rainwater in barrels as a better option than tap water, even after installing a tens-of-thousands of Baht filtration system).

For the chest X-ray, they stand you in front of a target, the guy stands behind the lead wall, tells you to take off your shirt, and fires away. A central database gets the images, along with the input of any lab work, all of which is done onsite. What's interesting is that all labs and patient interactions are recorded longhand in beautiful Thai script with characters even I can recognize; the results of labs, exams, conversations. Not to mention the nurses—after the motorbike wreck when my right arm couldn't really extend that direction, the lady bullseyed my left vein for a blood draw on the first shot. And she was one of the young ones.

But the blood bank isn't in Nakharin. It's across town in Maharat, the big, old hospital.

Were it in America, Maharat would have rusting FALLOUT SHELTER signs hanging all over. Actually, given the climate, they'd be rusted through and mainly stains on the wall, not actual signs.

What signage exists is entirely in Thai and mostly consists of stickers generally fully peeled from plastic signboards. It's just one of those things—of course everyone knows where things are; if grammaw was born with full medical supervision, it was there.

Open breezeways connect islands I'm assuming to be specialty units—the blood, kidney, pediatric &c areas. Dirt, leaves, rust, birds, geckos everywhere. People sit in the breezeways while windows occasionally pop open with shouted calls—admissions or information centers, I'm guessing. Can't tell, of course, because NOTHING is in Western script, but pick your battles, right?

Finally I come to a building that looks promising: instead of listless people sitting outside of a blank wall granting access through a streaked glass window and door with iron bars inside—it's a grocery and feel-good shop with flowers and chocolates and whatnot. And more listless piles of humanity outside in the breezeway.

Inside, I asked about blood donation. Played human pinball finding someone who understood, who wrote down what I was after in Thai, plus the window number where I should go: Window 34. Which, when I showed up, was where I signed up for a transfusion. Donation center's two doors down, the place with all the happy stickers.

Oy.

Get there and they speak as much English as I speak Thai. But they try: we get through my name, date of birth, age, weight, take my blood pressure and pulse (Thai people must be incredibly high-strung, because EVERYONE gets excited about a pulse that sometimes hits 62 and bp that's usually 95/55 or thereabouts; and the chest x-ray was thrilling: there are neither mountains nor tubas in Thailand, and the pulmonary aftereffects of the combination is freakish or something).

After about 20 minutes, slowly and painfully making progress through the a form, they get to immunizations: yes, I've been immunized for hepatitis, mmr, and typhoid.

No, I cannot donate blood.

“Mai pen rai.”

It only took an hour to get that far, once I'd found the hospital (no big green cross, no external signs of a medical facility beyond stretchers in the parking lot). “Mai pen rai.” At least I got a damn huge appreciation for sitting in the universally uncomfortable but at least nominally padded and protected within airconditioned chambers at Nakharin.

Although, well, I do have to wonder about the cute nurse who called me back once more just so she could stab me again and test the coagulation of my blood for her medical technology project. Still, despite the twice in one arm, she finished the day three for three.

Another good teacher moment

"HALLO TEACHER!" is a really cool thing, even if it's while you're buying fried chicken, Coke Light, and toilet paper (think about that one from the local's--parent's--perspective) at the grocery megamart.

Little more awkward when you're doing the smile-grimace-doesn't-hurt-so-bad thing while having your second blood draw of the afternoon you've spent at the hospital and you hear, "HALLO TEACHER!" from a sweet little gap-toothed girl.

"Hallo! How are you?"

"I am fine, Teacher, how are you?"

Really?

"Fantastic!"

And the parents laugh before boarding the elevator.

Nothing nicer

Nothing is sweeter than a classroom full of worried second graders, right up until they're all poking and prodding at the screamingly painful roadrash. And then it's still sweet, but hard not to scream, which quickly devolves into funny as they watch your face contort, and then everyone's laughing which hurts the less tangible injuries, and it's just a big stupidly painfully silly laughing mess.

Breaking eggs

I'm in the new digs. I have a half-sized refrigerator, combination cooker/steamer, cutting board stained brown, and cupboards. Translation: I can cook. Meaning I can buy uncooked items at the gocery store—chicken breast (cheapest cut—least flavor) or that glorious pork belly or octopus tentacles, or any of the veggies I do not recognize. About three items look like kale. Four look like bamboo. I recognize galangal, chilis, garlic and ginger. What's especially cool is the end-of-day sale rack: discounts on things that are about to go bad. Great place for me to start: even if I fail horribly to turn something edible, I'm out, oh, 3 cents.

So, I went shopping. Chicken breast, pork belly, lemongrass, apatosaurus-caliber bok choy looking stuff, a bushel of bamboo-looking stuff, oh, and eggs and potatoes. How I've missed those. I bought an entire flat of eggs—half the price per unit, and I need little incentive to add an egg to anything. Plus the doc said I should eat more, so there's an excuse to add egg to anything.

It's about a 12 K cruise back, and I have the groceries in my backpack, the eggs in my front basket. About 3K from home, there's a grocery mart a long jog from a muban—translation: picture a 5 on an older digital calculator; the muban is the top arm, the grocery is the bottom.

A guy is pulling out of the grocery on his Honda bike. His wife is on the back. It's dark, but his much is obvious. And they're aged. I'm cruising home, and swerve to pass. But he's turning right. Immediately in front of me. No hole there.

He couldn't be.

It's like a dog humping your leg: there's no hole, there won't be a hole no matter how hard he tries, and the longer he's at it the more frustrated everyone's going to get.

No hole. Nobody would try to make one.

Except this guy.

I almost missed him. It was just a small jig. Mirrors ticked.

I heard my new helmet sliding over a rough something. My right shoulder told me it would hate me. I stopped moving and felt gravel—the opposite side of the road, from spread-eagled, face-down.

A grating noise.

Eyes open. Open? Wow! Eyes open!

Scooter's spinning crazy down the wrong lane. Stops, finally.

Head turns.

Better stand up before I can't. This is going to hurt.

It's a hundred yards from the shop where the guy pulled out to where my bike stopped. I'm most of the way to my bike as I stagger up, still wearing my pack. Everything works, but my left pinkie is numb. Still moves, so nothing permanent, but it's gong to be a doozie. Legs work. Arms work.

There's a Thai person yelling at me. Someone is flat on the street, still.

The Thai guy is not only not helping me move my bike, he's keeping me from doing it.

“For police!” He says“Where you live?

“Muban Farang, down that way.”

Something was wrong with my glasses: the right lens is missing.

Hmm, grades 1 &2, and I have the deep purple bruise, the missing tooth, now oozing road rash and the missing lens. What photo am I posing for this time?

Four people are crowded around me. “You call family. Need family now.

When I tell them I live alone, no family, they actually show surprise and concern.

An ambulance pulls up. I'd like to wash the gravel from my bloody hands, but nobody understands “Wash hands.” I shove the bloody appendages in someone's face and get pointed to the ambulance.
“No, no, mai, mai, mia, isopropal alcohol? Clean wound?”

They start whispering about alcohol.

I get scared and call my boss.

By the time he shows up, the road person is loaded and the other driver has disappeared. A medic is giving me an alcohol wipedown.

The only remaining evidence of an incident is me standing there dazed and the scrape marks from my bike.

“So they don't know your name, your address, your license plate or driver's license number? Man, they must know there's no possible way to fault you—he was the drunk uncle or something. Ususally I step into these and it's all, “Look at all the damage to my bike, this farang owes me!

“You sure you're okay to drive? Need tomorrow off? If so, just call.”

So tomorrow will be an Advil day. Road rash on shoulder, elbow, waist, hip, both hands, a couple fingers pretty torn up. Torso hurts like crazy. Helmet paid for itself.

The weird part is that once I got back to my place, unloaded and washed up, two of the eggs were missing from the center of the flat. None others were broken. And the two were in the bottom of the bag, under some DVDs, unbroken.

Weird.

Thoughts from the first month

After a month in county, what can I say?

I miss knowing what's going on around me, not necessarily understanding the culture, but being able to read the signs, to figure out if this is the door for the happy tooth man, the botox spa, the reflexologist, or the "special” massage parlour.

I have not yet taught a “regular” week of school: observe for the first week, second week I only had about two classes with the field trip, third week had a four day weekend, fourth week I was in Malaysia on a visa run. Next week, the fifth, we have show-off for mom day on Tuesday, so no classes, and Thursday Friday are nation al holidays for mother's day, the queen's birthday. I'll be occupying a strip of white sad beach in Krabi.

I've discovered the value of health and the horrible feeling of corproreal betrayal. “Yeah, I'd love to come play ultimate, but my legs are almost too swollen to walk right now, o I'm going to have to pass. It's strange for a lifelong breast guy to be fixated on ankles, but I find myself staring at ankles and thinking, “ohh, I remember when my ankles looked like that."

I've had the chance to discover not only that Thai medicine is not scary, it makes Western practices look inhumane. But if and ONLY if you find a good care center (story forthcoming).

I miss roadtripping, or just driving. Driving here, especially in Nakhon, is a combat experience. It's a lot of fun, but sometimes it'd be really, really nice just to drive. After the fall that actually did more damage to my face than I thought, in addition to cracking my face mask, I decided to invest in a helmet with a full chin guard and ended up with one reminiscent of The Last Starfighter or something similar. (My other option was a screaming yellow flaming dragon, and I drive a white bike.)

It has been fascinating figuring out how to live in such a foreign environment, from the food to the drink to the scheduling to the navigation and customs and etiquite and set protocols, not to mention learning to do my job.

As it happens, my predecessor was a genius who raised the kids to miraculous heights and always had an absolute blast in the process. Somehow, they missed learning to read music, but boy was he ever something in the classroom. I get to hear about him quite a bit, actually.

It's also amazing to see the difference between classes: 4A just wantso to sit down and knuckle in. 4B. Would much rather st staring out the window. Adolescents in Thailand—what's to do? Followed by first graders, with a little girl who climbs up on your lap while you sing, and a little boy joins as soon as we start playing clapping games. What gives? I'm the skinny, bony, kid-avoiding one with the scary white skin and nasty looking bruise that draws stares from kids and covered faces from women, and now these kids want on my lap. Let's see, hope for the future?

After a month, I have a large house in a swank suburb. Let me reiterate: 3 ½ bed, 4 bath, with kitchen and fridge (evidently quite rare to find), furnished with TV, kitchen table, dining table, two teak cabinets, a huge teak armoire, two beds, chairs, an electric cooker, and sundry cooking gadgets, for 6K/month plus about 1K utils. Or I could live in a “Mansion” (converted hotel room) for about 5K plus about 2K utils. Hmmm... trick question?

I have a cell phone, a scooter, an address, a job, a title—a life. How did that blindside me?

Moving to Nakhorn Sri Thammarat to teach music has been, well, at a guess, maybe like a Chinese Jew taking a job teaching Judiasm and world religions at Lubbock Christian University. Nakhon is unapologetically Thai—this area is not the postcard of touristic development, upward mobility, globalization. Rumor has it that big oil companies are prospecting in the Gulf and would use NST as a base, but show me a town with kids who grow up to inherit an increasingly inadequate lot on the farm, or maybe, just maybe, dad's shrimp boat, and I'll show you a town with rumors of big money just around the corner.

Not a whole lot has been going on around here for six or eight hundred years, and it really doesn't look like things will change soon, so if you have a problem with it, you know how to get the hell out.

Part of the culture is maintaining face and appearance, and I know that there are layers upon layers of things I do not see and would not understand. For a Thai, being Thai is a driving force and atter of consciousness that a farang could never understand. So why bother with them?

I really, really wish some places would have signs up in English. Even just “S&P” or “Super Duper,” not to mention some sort of qualifier--”metalwork,” “mechanic” “herbalist” “traditional massage.” But why bother? Thanks to a fantastic governmental education program, pretty well everyone is literate, so why dumb it down for passers-through?

Puts a new spin on, “if they want to be in America, they should speak English.”

Go on, just try sounding out a Thai word. No? How about finding a single letter—hint: it could very easily have ten or twelve character marks around it. So really, if everyone already knows that, why monkey around with bizarre foreign squiggles?

In other areas, with enough tourism to necessitate dual-language, or at least make it beneficial, it's pretty easy to ask or convey that you want to know the Thai word for something. Here, it's frustrating to the point of tears to ask how to say something. Usually, if someone speaks enough English to give a number or name or otherwise convey information, they are eager to use it, and they can't seem to understand why you're going off on Thai. So what? They know it already?

And by the time you give up and hang your head, there is a crowd watching your gesticulations and you will be remembered forever more as that crazy farang.

It's embarrassing to admit that it's taken a month to learn numbers, and even those I don't have solidly down, but finding a foothold into the torrent of language has been extremely difficult,

Not to mention the linguistic characteristics of NST.

Evidently, there's a joke that the train from Nakhon collided with the train from Chiang Mai because the drivers couldn't understand each other. Whereas elsewhere in the country, the debate over “aloha” is either “Sawadee” or “Sawasdee” or “ee” v “ii,” if I were to transcribe what I hear in this area, it would be a “d'kaa” or “d'krup” depending on the gender of the speaker. It's assumed this means “Sawasdii krup,” equivalent to “aloha,” but then again, maybe it's “sabai-dii krup.”

Did I mention that now that I can pick out most numbers, essentially nobody has the same pronunciation?

Or that every single language/guidebook has its own interpretation, or that each guidebook was written for one specific accent? It helps, really, somehow, I keep telling myself.

It might also have to do with the fact that I've only seen three other farangs outside of school. No, four. Maybe if I were hanging out at the farang bars and pizza or fried chicken joints it would be a different story. Maybe this is where I'm shooting my own foot: if I didn't make a point of buying meat and produce in the markets, maybe daily living would present less of a challenge. Maybe my guts would be happier if I parked where they'd bring the local favorite: mixed fake seafood with melted slices of individually-wrapped processed cheddar flavor cheese byproduct which is to be slathered excessively with ketchup and for a personal pan size costs more than a three course street meal.

Hmm, that pizza or a fresh-in-shell horseshoe crab salad for less than half the price.... trick question?

Why this will never be a food blog

I know I veer dangerously close to it. It's just that I love food and I'm in a culture that does, too.

But I have found my computer-side snack of choice, to augment the carrots that have so much more depth and flavor than their stateside counterparts:

Mix a bag of wasabi peas with a bag of chili-lime peanuts and crispy fried anchovies. Sweet, salty, crunchy bliss.

A reminder

I do get tired of the people barking "HELLO! HELLO!" and getting stared at and the noise and dirt and traffic and exhaust &c &c ad nauseum, but there's a lot to be said when I'm biking along in a string of morning commute traffic, my wallet falls out of my pocket, and by the time I swerve to the curb, there's a guy running toward me, waving my wallet. And that's just Thailand.

Shallow, yes, but somehow just

A Thai just laughed at me after a frantic dash to and rather noisy time in the bathroom.

Right now I would give a helluva lot to bring a Thai person on a tour of greasy spoon blue plate specials--the van driver to pulled me out of the van because I couldn't tell him exactly where I was trying to go--and watch the results.

Photos from a killer dinner

An Isan family runs a dinner/latenight cart across the street; at this point, I just point at something and sometimes ask for a preparation--*crab* with "tom yam" means tom yam soup with crab; *deep fried pork belly, roasted chicken, and fresh-made sausage* with "barbecue" means a plate of grilled meat.

Tonight, I just pointed at a blue crab with mouth parts still moving and legs still twitching under the raffia tiedown, a horseshoe crab, and then asked for one surprise.

A word on the physical nature of this place: they're on the far side of a four-lane road, at the extreme northern end of town. They are the northern most of three full-service stands that offer essentially the same fare; just south of the three is a soup place--pick fish, pork, or chicken balls, narrow, wide. or ribbon rice noodles, and they blanch the goodies up before ladling on soup stock from a heater in the cart; across the street is the stick stand: skewers of all manner of forcemeat, fake meat, and non-meat, all stuck on a bamboo skewer and deep fried in blackened cooking oil (this is where you stop when you're too hungry or drunk to actually eat but want food, and it is fantastic).

On the sidewalk, they have maybe fifteen tables, fewer when it's raining and you need to sit under one of the roller-stretched tarps (think: RV patio covering, except attached to the wall behind the sidewalk. Each table is knee-high and dented from nightly stacking, most are rusted through, and you have to be careful to consider where anything will side, roll, or drip before you put it down. You sit on plastic mats that shed like a cat lady's sofa, and they bring a bucket of ice that steams in the humidity and a litre of water that takes a lot of imagination to become filtered. You get a little oval plate with dented spoon and fork, and if you're lucky you'll get a couple of napkins and not put them in a puddle.

So tonight, they brought the crab first: they cracked the shell, cleaned it, and tossed the body meat in with some leafy greens that were frying on about 200000 btus; the rest of the crab went in screaming hot oil while they tossed some curry powder on the veg and scrambled in some eggs. The egg-crab-veg curry goes back in the cavity, shell goes back on top, done.

Next came the horseshoe crab: take an in-season crab (I think this means a female with full egg sacks), throw it on coals until the eggs are cooked, then pop the shell; run around the edge

and you get the egg sacks, then peel until the muscles--which just connect the legs with the top of the shell--give way. Scrape the eggs into a som tam salad--the lime-chili green papaya salad, with extra cashews and baby shrimp (fresh fried)--where it would be typical to add a half-dollar sized softshell crab, mix it around in a quart-capacity wooden mortar and pestle, then scrape the lot back into the inverted dinosaur shell.

For the "surprise me" bit, they brought a fruit salad. Halved grapes, pineapple, asian pear, which would be pretty yawn except that they grow fresh and wild and without genetic alteration or pest preservation or spray or refrigeration, which is to say, "Oh, that's what happened when man fell from Eden: cold-storage apples!"

But then there were cukes, shredded carrot, shredded green papaya, jackfruit, green beans, tomato, and raw shrimp curing in a chili-lime dressing. Did I mention that a carrot over here tastes about as succulent as a Fallon mellon over there? (PS: Be certain you buy a genuine Fallon melon--generally, the muskmelons are accepted as the best, but it's hard to go wrong with the extremely hot and dry desert soil.)

For one, thank goodness I have nothing against refrigeration, and the fruit and horseshoe crab salads will marinade well.

For two, match that with a litre of beer for about $13.25 (which is about as much as I've spent on a meal over here).

Penang street food

Penang Street Food

Pork belly broke me. I've been assiduously reminding myself that this is not a food blog, but that was before thin strips of lean pork belly with paper thin skin, braised with some mirin, ginger, star anise, and a dash of soy, then reduced until the fat was almost completely rendered, and ladled over rice. I've just gotta go there.

Penang is all about street food. For me. It's the first place in a month where I could go to a restaurant and order off the menu, but why do that and spend 18-20 MR for a nice, plated version of something I can get for less than 10 if I walk up and point the cook toward what I want? Even better, I get to watch the magic happen.

And street food is by its nature open and exposed, but by the culture of operators divided into close cliques. Not so much in the tourist hubs, where vendors gather in food courts that are absolutely antithetical to the lackluster American mall experience, although even locals stop enroute to or from work or if that's simply the easiest place to go, but once you get a block from the tourist drags you get into the local subdivisions where ethnicities or professions can hang out and talk common talk. Even while cruising down the main drag, every dingy little alley too narrow to accommodate vending has chairs or stools wedged in and a crowd of cabbies, bike peddlers, tour hawkers or whatever else squished onto the sitting arrangements, eating whatever's frying on the cart and drinking the amazingly sweet and rich local coffee. And as it pushes toward tomorrow, the faces might have changed but it's the same guys talkin the same shop and arguing about the same plays. Eventually, when the last of his boys have gone home or petered out, the guy (or lady, but frequently a large man) packs things away so he can catch up on the world for tomorrow's events.

I just kinda dig it—these people hang out with friends making food or drink and small talk; looks like a lot of fun as long as I don't have to live it day in and day out.

Aside from traditional restaurants, of which I can say nothing, there are funky little family-run sort of “restaurans,” the street cart cookers, and then coffee carts that sell goodies baked and packaged elsewhere.

A restauran is a sitting area with plastic tables and chairs managed by people who sell drinks. At the periphery, either of the building or alleyway or courtyard, the folks who do the cooking—of homogenous ethnicity—set up carts. Each cart does something different—one is stirfry, one is soup, one is deep fry &c. (Food courts operate the same way.) You order from the cart, sit, someone comes and either takes your drink order or charges you for space, and then someone else brings the food and collects the fee. And in most places, each cook has a separate till, so if you get soup and stirfry, you pay from whichever comes; in some places, there's a central don who totals up everything and collects all the food money from everybody (drinks are always separate).

For the most part, restaurans are either Indian or generic Malaysian, which is about half Chinese-style and half Chinese flavors with Indian preparations. Each has a noodle station, where you can get maggi noodles or mama noodles (think: packaged ramen with additives of nutritional merit), rice noodles or egg noodles, stir fried with a leafy green and some protein.

An Indian cook will most likely start off with oil, aromatics, and the noodles, add some broth even more salty and concentrated than the packet of stock, a big dollop of oyster sauce, and the protein. Don't watch: the protein comes from a vat that's been sitting since it was made, and most likely it was made to last the day. Finish by cracking in an egg, scraping the lot onto a plastic sheet on a sheet of newspaper, and folding it into a modified burrito cone.

Roti is a different beast. Depending on how farang-friendly the operator is, saying, “Roti? One,” will bring a slice of dry bread, garlic toast with egg, or an amazingly lush seared egg dough like a thick, savory crepe with a bowl of meat and gravy.

And here's a good place for a word on curries. Yes, yes, there is no true “curry” in Indian cooking: curry is English for “I don't know what all they're doing or how to tell the difference, so let's call anything saucy a curry and leave it at that.” But at home, you order specific varieties: beef, lamb, chicken, or dal. In Penang, the curry is mainly about the sauce. When you order from the guy working the steam table section, you get a pile of rice, and then he dollops on your protein choices—beef, mutton (which I've grown tremendously fond of), chicken, sundry fish—and finishes it with a few scoops from this, a few scoops from that curry: maybe you like spicy, so he uses a ladle of the spicy beef, a hefty scoop of the dal, and a little of the mutton for color. There's nothing to do with actually eating the curry in and of itself, it's lube for the mole mountain of rice at the center of every plate.

Malay restaurans are similar deals: a quick-fry noodle station, a soup station, and a steamtable without the steam. Somewhere in the back, probably right next to where they do the dishes, there are big pots or woks or vats where they cook up the hotel-pans of food, which range anywhere from pepper-stuffed lungfish to full grouper heads to veggies to big stacks of fried eggs and generally as soupy as their Indian counterparts. This is where we met the glorious, glorious pork belly of perfectly-balanced gastronomic bliss: mainly lean meat with some fibrous texture in the skin, barely-salted sweetness, and lots of slow-cooked-pig-fat love.

So you place your order, or get your plate of rice and get doled out your selections, and go sit in one of the plastic chair/table setups while someone gets a drink order and food arrives with a bill.

And this is where the magic happens: the cooks and waiters, dishwashers and grandkids and grannies and decrepit uncles and polished businessmen cousins all come through, all sit around chatting, all intermingle with the ordinary customers in such a way that you really can't tell who's customer and who's employee. People on the street swing by for a word or mill about as they were, which is to say, the people-watching is phenomenal.

And the only difference with the carts is that you'll sit on chairs on the sidewalk, Thai style, or go takeaway. Nut carts were pretty cool: nutmeg, hazelnuts, chestnuts, peanuts, and corn, either boiled or roasted in screaming hot woks to order. So were the fruit stands: big plastic tubs a kid would fill with toys or art scraps holding pre-peeled and sliced fruits of every variety, at which you point and say how much you'd like to spend. And the variety is mind-bending. We generally don't think of savory fruits, but nutmeg is fantastic. I think there was ginseng and similar things I associate with herbal teas, and as I went poking through them—the proprietor gave me a wooden poker for sampling—they turned spicy and savory until a pearl onion, which surprised me for its familiarity as much as its presence in a fruit stand, tasted nice and sweet.

It goes without saying that asian pears, lychees, pineapple, mangosteen, mango, papaya, dragonfruit &c. are not to be compared with any of their American derivatives.

And I have to mention the burger: pre-formed frozen turkey whatnots thrown on a hot griddle with a dollop of both crisco and Parkay. Cook until the grease comes out, pressing and flipping frequently, then cut in half thin-ways and make sure it's cooked to death. Slap a piece of individually-wrapped processed cheese byproduct between the halves and set aside. Crack an egg into the grease, scramble and spread thin. Put the patty on the egg, swizzle with mayo, and fold up the package into a buttered but untoasted bun with cucumber and shredded cabbage. Burger special.

For a burger delux, add slices of spam.

And pretty well everyone approached the cart with an evasive bob-n-weave, although I bet most thought they were walking straight. And I'll applaud the judgment: what better food for after drinking or treating a hangover?