On communications

The after-hours call center experience need not be elaborated--we all know the unintelligible voice with a voice-over accent-reducing machine (under optimal circumstances).
Then there's calling an Indian company in India afterhours.
Let's talk about unintelligible. Or not--you can imagine.

What's worse?
After-hours calling a Thai company. India, as a stereotype, is trying to engage in the (English-speaking) world.
Thailand could care less.

WAAAIIIIGHHHHH

On Taxes

The fun part was digging through half an hour of forms building on forms--to fill in this line, fill out form 1116, to fill out form 1116 read instructions for 1116, but to find the information for 1116 fill out form 56, which has a full instruction book requiring another form and another set of instructions...

And then it gets around to it and my foreign tax credit amounts to $25 but is negated because my foreign income--every cent I've made since July--amounts to just over $3K.  

On Pavement

I've decided that I really do like pavement, especially to walk on.
A walk in the park convinced me.

It's a few hundred square km and evidently quite old, but as things work here, it's been updated and renamed and rededicated (I almost said rechristened but that just doesn't work here) at a number of significant points of local history, so its current incarnation is not that old at all.
Regardless, it serves mainly as a swamp behind the school.  It would be fascinating to see from the air, as there are a number of canal/channel/finger lakes that fester and stagnate under a bizarre series of ever-silent water pumps hooked to half-metre pipes that run from one channel to the next.  I have no idea if there's a natural flow connecting the channels or if they're subsequent layers of backups, but for all practical purposes, they are now breeding grounds for stench, waterplants, mosquitoes, stench, Thai giant catfish, stench, more mosquitoes, and a species of carp that looks like a drunken accident between a giant catfish and a sturgeon.  (Which happens to be on the lunch table a number of times every week, and I do not think about the slogging fishermen casting nets in the slop.) And maybe one day they'll have pumps to alleviate some of the runoff issues that flood the city for a few months every year.
However it plays out, the park has levies topped with trails and connected with rusted-through bridges.  I was on one of the bridges, looking at the water and trying to figure out its consistency--I'm tempted to reference school canteen pea soup as both the swamp water and cafeteria offering look just slightly too watery to support a spoon but with the underlying risk of your spoon disappearing either to corrosive or exuberantly predatory forces as soon as it's perceivable by the surface, but the water is too brown and there are too many textures swirling like the stench wake of a bear walking outside your tent.
And then I was looking at a fish.
Not the usual shadow of a trout or koi pond type apparition, but one of the local giant catfish.  Its head was as wide as my hips and tapered at the same rate as my legs if I stand with my feet together.  Its mass disappeared into the murk, and I was especially happy about that given that I was standing on a rusted-through bridge.
It looked at me for a couple seconds until I got nervous and waved.  With what would've been a flip of a smaller tail turned into a slow-motion almost-breech as the thing disappeared.  And I promised myself to never willingly slip a finger or toe into the water.

Not long after, while on an island in a pond large enough to accommodate paddleboat rentals, something ran across the path.  Something very low-slung and fast and longer than my leg.  It took an extra click to register that I was seeing a real, live, wild version of zoo piece or plastic lizards that had terri/fascinated my childhood.
It was longer than my leg, long enough for its forelegs to be on the grass before its hind legs were on pavement, and had dark bands around its tail.  It lumbered--as with the catfish, it was too big to be called scampering--across the path, through some brush, and straight out a tree leaning over the water.  I could hear it clambering around the branches toward the "top" of the horizontal tree.
Of pressing interest was the sonic similarity between the sounds regularly heard from the brush and trees around the trail and the sounds the lizard made as it ran across the trail and out the tree, and the simple fact that a giant lizard ran out over the water--I would not expect a lizard to corner itself like that.  And how many of the innumerable rustles alongside the trail had been similar critters I would comfortably associate with only from the far side of glass or nightmares.
(Let me reiterate that I am a mountain kid accustomed to grouse exploding from under my feet, bears on the trail, cougar tracks, the occasional close encounter with a frog or night mouse.  Lizards are little horny toads or blue-stripers, and nearly sitting on one is as heart-fluttering as almost stepping on a grouse.  Seeing a coiled up rattler as big around as my arm has been one of my most traumatic hiking stories for two decades.  All of which is to say, I would really rather avoid reptiles.)
Welcome to Thailand--it was a Thai water dragon.

What relief to come across a herd of goats, even if one of the bike-mounted goatherds had a frantic chase to keep the billygoat's horns from my backside.

But that, of course, wasn't it.  There had to be snakes.
It was just a skin, thank goodness.  A dark green/brown skin with a smily face on the back of the neck--one of our local cobras.  And when I held it out, it came up to my chin.

The cobra skin draped over my tuba case

So, like I said, I'm a big fan of nice, wide, paved trails.

Pre-finals wrapup

Enough people stood to gain enough merit from a successful EP Show that they all insisted on weighing in until it turned into a gala debacle that bored the kids to tears and risked the reputations of all involved.
Farang instructors were sent home immediately afterward: Congrats, you made it, now go take a long weekend before finals.
But I had an end-of-day class.
And it's that class, naturally.  The one all the Thai teachers hate for being so unmanageable.
And my Thai teacher called out.
I almost borrowed her switch.
But I didn't.
I would've used it, and I don't want to break that barrier.

The good news is that nobody was injured in the course of the class, and everyone walked out the lighter for it.
At the end, I shot a couple of photos.

Remember: this is one of the nice classrooms, with only 45 kids, windows, and working electricity.

The Thai Effect

I'm two weeks from having boots on Nepalese soil.
I'm not sure when exactly I'll get there though, because I'm not sure how soon I can leave without leaving a job to come back to.  And at this point there's no use worrying whether I leave in 8 or 12 days.
There was a bank error and money I thought was there is not there.
There was another sort of error and my W2 was not shipped, so the backup refund is a hope for retroactivity.
Too bad my vacation time didn't coincide with the finances that initially made me think it might be possible.

The good news is that I have my boots and sleeping bag, shipped from home.  The sleeping bag is vacuum packed with longjohns and wool socks, but I'm too afraid of the mold that grows quicker than cobwebs to open the packaging.
The boots have been through a summer of hiking, a summer of Alaska, a summer in Europe, all the hiking and snowshoeing in between, and have been dormant since I came to Thailand.
Boots are not designed to accommodate such changes as my physiology has undergone.  No mention of such areas of the said physiology as determine the fit of a given clothing item like boots that have been over a thousand miles.
Not that the sweet spot isn't there, it's just that my foot has moved to a different spot.

The other good news is that I have a book with a single-page line map of the places I might stay while on the Annapurna Circuit.
But it sounds pretty easy to find, so I'm planning on buying an actual map once I'm in Kathmandu.  Also a fleece, parka, gloves, hat, water bottle, pocket knife, and medical supplies.

A year ago, such a state would've been distressing.  At least.
Now?  Hell, it's more than a week out, no reason to stress.

On Interviews

Picture the 19th C ornithologist exploring an aviary with a blunderbuss: this is me applying for jobs.
"Livable salary?  Classes under 45?  Atmospheric controls?"  BLAM! Worth an application.

The call came just before midnight.

"Oh, I think it might be an inopportune time to call."
It's just before midnight.
"Well, it's just before 6 in the evening here in Turkey.  Is there a better time to call?"
Anytime after 6 and before 24 hours.
"Then I will call back in 15 hours."
Great.
"And you are still interested in the job?"
At what institution?
"Murrmumahum."
Which?
"Hummurrunum."
Yes.  Of course.
"And how soon would you be able to start?"
Depends upon the conditions of the offer.
"You could be here by the second week of March?"
More like the first week of April.
"Okay, I will call you soon."

Maybe it's not such a bad thing when there's no follow-up call.

Still learning

It gets me, still, that just getting a rise out of someone is such an integral part of this culture.
A couple days ago, walking down the street, I said hello to a student passing in the other direction.  Three steps later, I heard a frantic, "TEACHER TEACHER TEACHER!" so I stopped and turned around.  She waved me to her and said, in a timid voice, "where you go?"
And that's a perfectly legit activity: yell, scream, grunt, and holler until someone looks at you, especially a farang, and then pretend nothing happened.  Or look like a deer in the headlights of an oncoming English truck.

Odds and ends

A couple of photos to wrap up Activity Day.  By the end of the week, I'll have some classroom shots up.  

It's gone from the chilly, moldering, dank and nasty to 96 in the shade.  At 98% humidity.  And there's a month before the hot season really cranks up.

I've said little about the music programme here because that's the best thing I can do for it.
Not the rigidity of stance, dress, and formation.  Note that some of the students appear to be playing from memory and others have music on the ground.  Imagine that this is the premier group so disinclined to practice, and that each person, regardless of the presence or absence of music, is playing in whatever key seems most appealing in a tempo relatively close to that of the drummer.
You start when you're ready.  You play what you feel like, sometimes even the same piece.  And it ends when you get tired of it.  

Classes, as I think I've mentioned, are segregated by aptitude.  Somehow M6 ended up being the class that makes me want to slam my head in the door for an excuse not to attend, but M1 is generally the roughest and M15 get sent to Bangkok or Hat Yai.  These two are in M1.  On the left, wearing the backpack, is a girl who came up to me after the second or third class and said, "Teacher, teacher, I am sorry.  Is very, very bad."  I'm embarrassed to admit that I can't remember if she's Fern, Bam, Bim, Baifern, or Baitam.
One day while walking across campus under my own little stormcloud with lightning bolts of "HARRYPOTTERHARRYPOTTER" someone came up behind me and hugged me with, "I love you, teacher!"  It was Ing, the girl with the fingers.  She's since formed a coalition who like to stop me to say, "I love you, teacher!"
It's hard to express how much they've done to improve my outlook.

More on teaching

Today when I showed up I was told that I would not have any students. What I love is that I'm contractually obligated to be here for the 4:10 bell. Which translates to surfing the net until lunch, escaping to town for a couple hours, then coming back for a spot of aircon until 4:10.
I was also informed that I need to have grades in by Friday, and everybody needs to be passing. That I am a teacher and it is my moral and existential duty to help the students so they're all passing.

I almost brushed a compunctious thought as I fabricated enough points to get everyone up to 50%.

On names of things

In Thai, R and L are difficult sounds to produce-it's quite a Sino
'carr the lestelant to oldeh fly lice' place here. There is no
aspirated final consonant, and an isolated L sound turns to N: eat pad
thai nooden at the foosbon game.
Which might be part of the Harry Potter thing- my name is just
straight contrary to the Thai tongue with the worst sort of beginning
and ending.
So it might be time to recussitate my German/1st grade name and be
Teacher Rusty next year. Because how fun would it be to have a roomful
of 4th graders calling you Teacher Lusty?

Sent from Speedy the ipod.

Bad teacher moments

It's bad, I know, and I really shouldn't, but it cracks me up to have
two or three back-row kids at the board, writing basic information
(identifying happy or sad, writing the date) while a dozen of the
front-row kids try to out-shout each other with the spellings.

Sent from Speedy the ipod.

Makha Bucha

On this day, the full moon of the third lunar month, a few thousand years ago, 1,300 enlightened monks spontaneously congregated to hear Buddha deliver a seminal sermon.
Now it's one of the three high holy days, and a national holiday in Thailand.
As the schoolday drew to a close yesterday, I felt bad about not "doing" anything special for the three-day weekend.  But then I realized that I'm in Thailand, on the same road as Wat Phra Mahathat, one of the oldest and most important wats in Thailand.  It was a pain to find out when and where the observations would get underway--welcome to Thailand--as it turns out events have been happening all week and the culmination will be nearly 24 hours of different observations phasing around each other.
So I woke up early, snuck out the locked front door without waking up the gate guard, and got to Wat Mahathat before sunrise and well after everything was set up and underway.

(For the sake of a quicker load time, the photos the smallest available versions of those posted here.)

Wat Phra Mahathat's chedi just as the sun is coming up.
Tradition has that the chedi was built over a chip of Buddha's tooth

The southern entrance just after sunup 

You come through the gate and there's a hawker or five with bolts of saffron cloth for 5 Baht per rod.
You buy as much as you need to make merit--in some cases, a couple of bolts.  Then you start walking clockwise around the compound.
Some buy a certain length and cut it off to walk as a family or pilgrimage group, but most join in a train as long as the cloth lasts to walk in concentric laps of a saffron river until the bottleneck at the entrance to the holy areas.

In the foreground are the concentric rings of the saffron river.
Behind them is the bottleneck to the holy grounds.

ROTC guys join the saffron river.

ROTC guys buying flowers and incense for making merit once they get into the temple

Foreground: making merit or receiving absolution or somesuch from a monk.
Midground: a hawker bazaar
Background: Mahathat's chedi

Just inside the entrance.
Fore: displays of sundried fish (smells great)
Mid: the balloon seller talking with a monk

Just inside the gate; the tents are all hawkers.
And what better place to sell fake and ripped off and deep fried and copied and handmade and genuinely artistic stuff than on the grounds of the oldest temple in Southern Thailand on one of the holiest days of the year?

Yes, we're riding a bike with a chair strapped to the back
and we're in the middle of the bazaar

An open spot in the bazaar;
note the chedi in the background--the maze of awnings and umbrellas and press of moichendizing, of bootlegged and knocked-off and hand-made stuff to buybuybuy runs to the bank of the saffron river.

Inside one wing of the bazaar, where the tarps keep the sun off anything below about 64 inches

Foreground: syrup drinks
Frame right: selling shoes in baskets.
Mid: shallots
Back: clothing (either made streetside or collected from American donation agencies)
Note the CFL elements in incandescent-shaped bulbs and a rotating fan; most tents like this run off a couple of car batteries)

Real Gold!  Cheap Cheap!

Foreground: drying fish
Mid: the saffron river
Back: the ordination hall

One of the few signs to appear in English anywhere in the city
Also one of the most important (and not for, although perchance from, the product)

Foreground: dried chili, shallot and garlic
Background: a breakfast stand, selling traditional vats of sour spicy whatnot to go on noodles and rice

Foreground: traditional Thai breakfast eaten in the traditional setting
(on mats with shoots and leaves plucked off nearby trees)
Mid: the dishwashing area for the food vendor set up on the little shrine
Background: a shadow puppet play for the kidlets

looking behind the magic

A traditional dishwashing setup, running from frame left:
scrape the plates into the sewer
heavy soapy scrub
soapy rinse
final rinse
return to dish basket (which is unrinsed after bringing the dirties  back to get washed)

Dozing off behind vats of fermenting goat head oil

Another goat-oil seller

The a klick from the wat.  Of course there was no allocation for public parking or shuttle transport.

What's unusual here is that the songtaus are lined up so nicely

 

A nice gesture at controlling the detritus left by the saffron river's floodding

Shadow puppets frame left, fish hawkers frame right, flood damage in between.

Access to the chedi shut down midday.
Here's a couple hours' worth of merit

The first round of the evening: buy a bundle of flower, candle, and incense, then light the candle and incense and walk thrice around the ordination hall

Inside the ordination hall

After your three laps, you deposit your candle and flowers on a wire mesh tableau.    Kidlets--the same who hawk flowers and incense--run around collecting flowers and incense sticks.  

A monk depositing her candle while one of the hoodlums dances around

And on the way out, you can buy clothes from a heap, mangos, and anything else in the bazaar

GO LOCAL! The Haircut Edition

I'm tempted to use the Scottish term "wynd" to describe the alley, but Edinburgh has too many romantic associations, at least in my head.  It's a space between two city low-rises, connecting two N-S roads, a passageway almost wide enough for two Thais to pass without turning sideways.  Or for one motorbike to come roaring down.  God help you if you're not near one of the shophouses cut into the S side.
Based on the foot, bike, ball, dog, cat, and rat prints, plus a number of splats I try not to think about, the cement walkway was poured without warning, either posted or in advance.
None of the shops are especially remarkable: a couple of tailors, a couple of cosmetic suppliers, a couple of places that set out vats of curry and fish reek sour and pungent enough to kill even my interest.  And there are beauty shops staffed by ladies--actual ladies--doing each other up.

It's too minor a place to be known generally, even by Thais.  I found it when a motorbike came roar out of it and almost plowed me over.  I had been passing it for 6 months without paying any mind or even recognizing it as a through-way, commercial venue, passable, habitable, or simply accessible.
Were it not for the motor bike, I doubt I would've ever looked that direction.  If I had, and really paid attention, I would've seen a wall where the passage dog-legs, about 3 metres back.
Suffice to say, they don't get much through traffic.
Especially with blond hair and pink skin.

I figured it would be a great place for a haircut: get the head wash and scrub and full beautician-fussing-over.  And not that expensive.

Despite being so inconspicuous, the hallway has constant activity: kids playing ball and bike back and forth, their parents on motorbikes, and the rolling waves of the gossip continuum.
The first and the last--kids and the gossipers--would pass abruptly and unknowingly into view, glimpse the farang, and bolt offstage.  In retrospect, this created ripples of rumors and sensation that enervated anyone and everyone who witnessed them to find an excuse to walk by and say hello or simply peek in to see if the sensation was really true.

Yes, there was the shampoo with fantastic head massage from a beautiful beautician.  And the constant undertone of the rumormill surging past the window.
It was nice, and it cost half as much as comparable deals co workers have mentioned.
Still, it was enough to invigorate my "GO LOCAL" sentiments: downstairs, the nice Korean lady who's a little bit too aged and independent to bother with self-beautification will spend a quarter of the time undergoing a tiny fraction of the drama for less than a third of the cost and the same result.

Activity Day

Today was Activity Day.  Students have spent most of the week preparing.



In Mattayom, the students had tents with foodstuffs and low-investment games.  




 The English Department's Nation Culture club presenting a typical Thai snack: take a leaf from the tree outside and fold it into a cup; add slivers of ginger, shallot, lime, toasted peanut and coconut, birdseye chili, and condensed palm sugar, and pop it down the hatch.
   
Eat For Health at the Coke-Float stand, and the only recycling I've seen in Thailand: turn used cans into noisemakers.


Prattom students cruised the tents and made a bus circuit to a museum or other hoopla in the park.

English Programme students had a "Kiddie Mart" where each class sold stuff--ice cream, popsicles, syrupy-milk drinks, sauteed fishballs, fried partridge eggs, smoothies, bracelets.  

 

Based on the lunchtime rumor mill, there was tremendous pressure on the farangs to come up with an idea, purchase supplies, and demonstrate the workings.  Then, once everything was set up and students--and administrators and photographers--were circulating, the Thai teacher took over.   

I realize this could be construed as a slight to the individual Thai teachers, who work much longer hours doing much more difficult work for less pay, accolade, admiration, and aplomb than the farang counterparts, but it's intended as a critique of Thai culture in general: the concept of "farang" has no place in conjunction with the concept of "property."  Thailand and its population are immensely proud of never falling under colonial rule--Thailand guarantees twelve years of free education, of which nine are compulsory, and English is instructed in grammar, spelling, conversation, literary, and business forms; a movement to make English an official second language was vetoed for fear that it might give the impression that Thailand had once been colonized.  No matter how minor a brainfart or wispy a pipedream, anything a farang comes up with belongs to the first Thai to make use of it.  Don't even think about owning land, Thai relics, Thai gold, Thai gems, or anything else that could be construed as more monetarily or culturally significant than cut-rate Chinese imports.
Of course the Thai teachers took credit for the actual work: farangs are for sitting fat and lazy and radiating whiteness in the tropical sun.

On Rafting

I've had a pathological respect for rivers and the terms "white water" and "rapids" since spending a nearly-eternal few seconds completely disoriented while swirling around in an eddy after the raft flipped on a runoff-engorged IV+ rapid on the American River.  But I have never imagined the excitement, thrill, and sheer volume of what could be considered a mild riffle while being shot by a group of Thais.

All told, there were seventeen of us--three guides, two kids, one farang, and 11 locals--in 8 sit-on kayaks shooting 6 km of lazy rapids.  In a couple of places the reservoir-drainage river was squeezed into what could be called a minor riffle, with a few large boulders just shallow enough to disturb the otherwise calm surface.  And each cranked the gale of wheedling guffaws into screams at the existential peril.

As we were floating down a stretch of river as lazy as the third mint julep, a guide would splash past in an absurd display of effort.  Not long after, the gentle breeze of current would whisper through the air.  Rounding a bend, a guide or two would be stationed along the rapid, gesticulating with a degree of frenetic that put the Saturday afternoon parking lot attendants to shame.

Inevitably, despite the guides burning a month's worth of heartbeats in a few seconds of directions, one of the first boats down would get stuck.  If they somehow avoided flipping, the next boat would T-bone them with paddles held defiantly overhead while the third boat took the leisurely plummet into the fray.  And EVERYONE, client or guide, upstream or down, paddle held overhead or drifting with the current, would be screaming with hilarity.

The trip was six kilometers.  It took three hours.  And there was only one snackbreak, which didn't come until hour two and consisted of no fewer than three and up to six boiled eggs (I felt good about finishing three runoff-marinaded ovums, but I was put to shame by the big guy's 5 and the 3rd grader's 6), a quad-pack of seasoned seaweed, and a chocolate bar EACH.

Stateside, I had a single-person sit-in pond/lake kayak with a carbon-fiber paddle.  This was an industrial-grade two-person sit-on manufactured to endure generations of Thais paddling over and around rocks with no more instruction than "paddle on this side to go that way, that side to go this side, okay?"
Imagine upgrading from a CJ 5 to a fully-armored Humvee.
With an engine downgraded to a squirrel with just enough oomph to keep the emergency systems running.
And a Thai lady paddling hell-for-leather in any given direction at any given time.

Somehow, we were the only client boat to make it down without flipping.  (My ego--or is it my id?--wants to credit a pigheaded insistence on being either the second or the last boat down the riffle, but it could've been pretty well anything, especially as we were the lightest-weight boat on the water.)  Despite that, I don't think anyone had more fun.