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.
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