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?
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