Emergence

I'll just cut to the fun stuff: after an hour of left-handed sawing and wrenching with a mini knife I bought mainly as a bottle opener, the cast is off without bloodshed save for a few knuckle scrapes on my left hand. Right arm is pallid and tender, and I'll be wearing a wrist brace for a while (bones don't heal as quickly as they did 20 years ago), but at least I can type and shower.

The funny part was walking around trying to find a mechanic who would let me use some tin snips, or who would simply volunteer a small saw, to separate the novelty attention-getter from the farang, who is suddenly just shy of invisible.

And the good news

While purchasing my peanut bliss, someone paid for a measure-thy-fatness deal and stepped off before her time was up.

It wasn't a real accurate measurement, what with me holding a bottle of ice tea, a bottle of water, the jug of milk, peanut butter, my bag, my camera, and my good lens, and it said my body fat (I'm guessing that's what had the percent sign on it) is critically low, but it also had me up almost ten kilos. So between the energy to stump around, the inclination to take photos, and the numbers on the rise, it looks like the rebound might take hold.

Peanut butter helps.

Maybe I should also credit a toddler-sized bag of pork cracklins. Never liked 'em back home--the last package Gram sent me had a bag of pork rinds in it, which she had thoughtfully punctured for ease of shipping and said they should be okay if I microwave them for a minute or two--but this is some good fatty pig.

bliss=

Jar of super chunky peanut butter+spoon+chocolate milk.

I almost feel guilty.

But I've already put in my daily miles (photos processing), and as long as I'm paying for an aircon room, I have an obligation to enjoy it, right?

On Bangkok

Bangkok met me with a flock of touts: three motorbike taxi drivers, two tuk-tuk jockeys, and a tour tout. It was easy to get past the tour jockey, but the drivers were tenacious.

It's a nice thing about Nakhon Si Thammarat: the songtaus just orbit their routes and honk at any pedestrians; some of the mototaxis honk and shout until you make eye contact and shake your head. Outside the BKK train station, they surrounded me and physically blocked me while demanding my destination: 200 for a tuktuk, but just a hundred for a mototaxi. Two hundred for a tuktuk, when it's 10 back home?

I should've realized what was going on when they lined up three deep to keep me from asking the cabbie his metered rate, but I relented when a mototaxi driver dropped to 80 and everyone else I could hear was saying 250 for an enclosed, air conditioned taxi.

My first impression outside of the station, and one that's upheld so far, is that traffic in Bangkok and northern Thailand is nothing. To whit:

-I've seen no cars and only seen one scooter driving on a sidewalk, and that was a teenager joyriding through a historic park.

-People honk before running yellows and don't run reds unless there's already a full intersection (going their direction).

-People honk as a courtesy, a warning that they're coming. In NST, the same courtesy is an aggressive warning, more a warning to move your ass out of the way than an announcement of your presence; people honk vigorously when merging or turning or passing; songtaus and mototaxis, which honk especially enthusiastically in any of the said situations, also honk vigorously whenever they see a pedestrian on either side of the street.

-as a pedestrian, it's possible to gauge traffic well enough that simply stepping into the flow—the only way to cross a NST street—isn't a very liveable option.

In the course of things, I ended up walking through a number of pretty highly touted guidebook destinations. But I found that out later. At the time, I was more struck by the number of English-only signs and odd bits of quirk and inconvenience—a submerged walkway, an elevated walkway, packed with tourists and overly homogenized trinkets available at considerable markup.

Maybe that's one of the benefits of all the time wandering through places where farangs shouldn't wander: I've stumbled into understanding prices and negotiations and some of the ways my kind are swindled: “MISS THIS AND YOU MAR YOUR EVERLASTING TRAVELLER'S KARMA! Not only does this place feature inferior reproductions of the products you would've been seeing for blocks had you walked via the back roads, it offers the ONCE IN A LIFETIME OPPORTUNITY to take a photo in a hackneyed Kodak Photo Zone before you spend three times as much for the chance to shop in a place too inconvenient for the locals!”

Not that I have problems with the tourist industry: I grew up on its payoffs, will probably return to its local workforce, and I would drop a lot of money and travel-weary steps for a breakfast buffet with real potatoes, eggs, Tabasco, and Heinz. And I have no doubt that I could find it in BKK.

What I dislike is that between the dingy alleys and shiny markets, there is no change in displayed prices or proprietors' attitudes, yet the products flop 100% in quality.

And what irks me is the construct: in NST, if you follow a local through a market—a regular market and not a sidewalk carnival—you won't see haggling. You might catch a, “Really?” “Well, no,” but no haggling. Once you learn to say, “Really?” or “how much?” or “X Baht? It's only Y over there,” there is no haggling, even for a farang. And even if you don't put forth that effort/have the language skills (look at me try to sound competent), you're still saving 10-20% on what you would spend in a western-influenced mall/department store/grocery mart. But in BKK and points north, my experience is that the proprietors are after as much as they can get, i.e. the price drops 100% as soon as you make a reasonable comparison (you want 100B to take me there? It cost 40 to get here), and each number is cut by a third if the transaction is in Thai.

I guess it's like reading Thai numbers around NST: if you can read the numbers on the Thai side of the sign (or take a guess and divide the Arabic numerals by 2 or 3) and offer that amount, you end up paying the local rate, which you pay if you take the time to ask or are a repeat customer. But either situation is a rarity, so the chance to haggle is as much relation-building as financial. Up north, simply asking, “really?” is enough to halve the price, and the vendor looks bored the entire time.

Vendor, songtau driver, anyone but a clerk in a department store has ripping you the hell off as a baseline reference point, and if they do defend the price, they do so voraciously and in inverse proportion to the product's worth—if it had any worth at all, you'd know it coming into the transaction, and if you haggled it would be based on some sort of comprehension, so it's a better financial plan to haggle the hell out of it before the rube sees what's on the line.

What boils down, I guess, is that people up here take my ignorance and exploitability for granted, and there's no special accord or recognition if I've figured out how to convey that I'm not quite as farang as I look.

I guess if I broke down and enjoyed it for what it's supposed to be—a paradise of shopping malls and dens of debauchery—it would be easier. But when I'm not much of a mall-crawler at home, why start here in Thailand?

To Bangkok

I'm sitting in an unlit car in a hospital-green train while men in military uniforms shine lights in people's eyes while pounding beer and spinning their holstered guns on the pockmarked tables. Five cars ahead, my stuffed dog is guarding a bunk insistently set up at 7:00 PM. Just next to me, a window large enough to dive through while wearing a sousaphone flashes with the passing nocturnal countryside—silhouetted palm trees, rubber plantations, the periodic building, and a passing train sends a tornado through the car.

I'm enroute to Bangkok from Nakhon via Surat Thani. Someone recommended taking a minivan to ST because there are more departures and cheaper fares; NST has two per day and they take the long way around the peninsula to get to the main N-S line. Sure, you drop a hundred baht on the minivan, but you save a few hundred more and about 7 hours of travel. Plus, I figured I would get to see another city, and that's always a plus. I told myself.

It was a good lesson in doing proper research.

Night train to Bangkok

Suppose the departure time mattered and getting there was important: the train left NST at 1430 or 1530, I don't quite recall, and a ticket would've been 660 with an arrival at 0515.

The noon minivan left NST at 1245 for my farang rate of 150, not 50, TB. It dropped the passenger load in a narrow sort of horrible alley somewhere in town: Surat Thani has the worst sort of dilapidated and eroded jungle rot and grime scabbing over the buildings, and the back alleys are just ugly. I was standing on the street/parking lot/sidewalk/garbage dump while the other passengers dispersed.

Eventually, a motorbike taxi driver came up. I had just set down my massive load—not that heavy, but I'm not in good shape to hoist it. I was trying to ask the slick ticket salesman how to get to the train station and trying not to see the farang surcharge putting the gloss in his hair. It was especially fun because he was not speaking English, period.

Right off, the mototaxi guy picked up what I was saying: “Oh, satanee rotfai, you go train. Two hundred baht.”

I almost didn't laugh—the 8K trip to my erstwhile digs was 40. Now it's 200 to the train station?

I pointed at passing songtau, and the mototaxi decided he'd track down a tuk tuk for me. For 200 B. Welcome to farang corner—arguing will only burn linguistic bridges and hike the price. So I sucked it up and followed the songtau driver.

Surat Thani is the port for THE party islands, and it has developed its exploitive tourist industry the way a horticulturist nurtures orchids. Every block has a travel agent or three, designer clothing, and the most ungenuine atmosphere I've seen since Naples: everything is for sale but nothing has a price. You're welcome to make an offer, but the only one that will be accepted is the “Special Rate” occasionally advertised.

In this town, I am a commodity. I am a fat, farang wallet waiting to be fleeced, petals of dollars falling from my pockets and waving around with my day-glo green cast.

How to define, to describe one's own inadvertent commodification? Perchance similar difficulties came about early in the sexual revolution: how to describe the abjectly belittling look of objectification?

It ended up being a twenty-five minute ride to the train, so I almost got over the driver kicking me out in the middle of a cloudburst of afternoon downpour.

And I was an eensy bit peeved that the next train was from NST: better to wait and take the next train, the one that'll arrive after sunrise, I told myself. Especially when the ticket agent went prattling off about something and charged me 760, cash, for my fare in a second-class aircon sleeper. So, o save a couple hundred and get there sooner with the bonus of seeing the next largest town in the province, or maybe the largest (which somehow glorifies it?) I was down just over 1K B and going to arrive an hour later, But I was in a corner. Welcome to farang country.

I had an hour-plus to kill, so it was time to walk around town: nothing to dispel my original impression, and plenty to instill gratitude for the unapologetic character of NST: it might be unfair, but it is more equitable in so being. Anywhere a farang goes in Surat Thani, expect to get raped.

My train was only 80 minutes late. While reading the travel guide, I realized that I just have no interest in visiting Bangkok. It's big, it's busy, it's expensive, it's commercial, it's wild shopping and foreign food and the sex trade and hells-yeah, full throttle on the debauchery! Or it's the ultimate in luxury and convenience and carries a matching price.

I just don't care. Mexican food? Great—the lard here is beautiful, so refried beans should be absolutely fantastic.

“He said the nachos were the most expensive single dish he'd ever eaten, but that they were completely worth it.” Nachos? Really?

And accommodation, well, places with descriptions that would send me running from the potential of roaches and crabs cost as much as an establishment that would send me running from its extravagance.

Do I really want to drop that kind of money on creature comforts so I can visit a meditation retreat and specialist medical care? How much is a night in the hospital? H1N1 be damned, maybe I'll check in.

Or I could just pass.

A few K north of BKK is a town with prices akin to what I'd pay and a pace along what I'm after. Done and done: I'll get to BKK around sunrise, stash my bag at the train station, find the wat that hosts retreats and fill out an application, find a hospital with a gastroenterologist and make an appointment, and beat it out of the bustle.

Okay, I'll confess: I would like to see a pingpong show, but such glorious debauchery hardly has appeal when one's blood isn't thick enough to properly circulate unless one's feet are elevated.

So I'm again the freakshow farang, now among a singing crowd of armned, drunken railway policemen. And boy is a laptop exciting. Good thing, too, bcause if the lights came on the attention would be on me and my cast, not the gadgets.

Take what you can, right? Especially when it's a victory, which you should probably accept without questioning, especially when such things are oddities to the point of remarkability.

At least enough time has passed for everyone to fall asleep.

Save for a preteen girl surreptitiously snapping my bunk curtain open and closed at passers-by, everyone was asleep. Mai pen rai, right? At least it's quiet (a couple of men having a heated debate while thumping Quar'ans justified the unexpected price of a berth in the aircon class). And save for the frequent stops and regular passers-by, I joined them almost all they way to the 6:00 wakeup, when one of the guys, considerably worse for wear than when I'd last seen him—cackling so merrily about the farang—came through slamming open the bunks.

An Odd Sort of Homecoming

Halfway down the "off the beaten" drag, hang a left into a fantastically dense hallway. Squeeze past the tea stand, between Gucki and Parada accoutrements, past electronics and swords and knives so obviously inferior they don't even sport a knockoff brand name, and you'll begin glimpsing the worthwhile. Don't stop, though; if you're too oblivious to catch the glares, they do not want you here where the locals shop, just close enough to the touristicana's gravitation to pick up some monetary velocity but not so close the stench of scam can't be avoided. You might've come halfway around the world to see something just like this, but you are the problem with the world, the thorn in every eye that sees you because you are the tourist in the turf locals who deal with tourists call their own. You are global warming. You are crop spoilage. You are the sick kid at home. The broken parents. Aching back.

Smile and wave with the conviction that the scowls carry the same meaning as an invitation to a special dinner granny cooked. You might have to come back, perchance hastily, and you want it to be on the least antipathetic terms possible. And whatever you do, keep moving.

You'll eventually hit open air of sorts--the garden inside an apartment block, an alleyway between tenements, a onetime temple or park or otherwise reduced erstwhile sanctuary. Here you'll find the twisted wretches shunned by the lowest levels of society and shat upon by time. Here, where the maze leading off a minor route in the labyrinth off the beaten, you'll emerge into the culture, find the people, who find you as inherently interesting and bizarre as you find them.

You'll find incentive to get your lazy ass in language-learning gear, too.

Count on finding what you would least expect. Anything you see is available and relatively affordable; everything has a price, and if you weren't so oblivious you'd know it. And if you don't mind sticking through being the spectacle, you might luck into the sublime: someone considered too wretched to join the streetside world, to be part of the public reality, engaged in a private act so routine and unconscious it is done with complete and unconscious perfection; beauty: the octogenarian pounding fish paste, the septuagenarian stirring fried chicken with half the remaining eye while yelling at grandchildren scrutinized over the shoulder with the other; the man with a forlorn basset hound of a torso sagging over a stained-brown sarong sinking into the worn-through cushion of what was once a proud new leather sofa in his living room/shop floor or the way his wife seems to defy all laws of physics as she navigates what must be an anti-gravity toothpick around her vacant maw; a mother corralling her kid who's fascinated by the grate in the street; an early adolescent who grew up idolizing dad leaning back on his bike and taking a drag of Marlborough; dad wrenching on a bike and pretending not to notice; something so small it is unconscious, and in that disregard absolutely perfect: beautiful.

And halfway down the block, I found it: the rippled and dented pockmark tin tables that no longer fold with stackable plastic chairs twined intact with cellophane baggies (which are for Thailand what the union of duct tape and bailing wire would produce for America), the cart with off-round wheels and no pretense of refrigeration around a mirror-polished wok resting in a smooth lake of grease splatter and a knurled mangrove root o a woman operating the works.

Instead of sitting down and waiting for her to hobble her club-footed way over to me, as is the local custom, I hobbled my edema-swelled legs to the cart and pointed, as is my custom. When she saw me about to say something, the lady spoke magic: "Pad thai, chai mai?" Pad Thai, yes or no?

I have never before found pad thai noodles in Thailand.

It's as if they're too commonplace for photo slots on menu-boards (cartsides), and my illiterate luck has a knack for picking out either pho noodle or bizarre local favorites (funny thing, perspective: just as I was about to mention how happy I was to find an offal cart and getting little bits of everything, someone else in the lunch room me==went raving about how disgusting it is to see intestines anywhere near food).

Lots of nods, eager smiles, thumbs up: pad thai, all the way back here. Pad thai in the heart of a Thai area: this is not the tourist version. I sit as she heats oil in the pan, tosses in a handful of noodles without paying attention to measuring the absolutely perfect amount of oil, noodle, sauce, and water.

Pinches and ladelfuls and finally a couple of cracked eggs: here come my pad thai noodles.

And I know that smell.

There's an odd scent in the meet. An odd meat, actually.

Last time I encountered it was a little town in the Italian alps.

It might take a minute to recall, but you don't forget the smell of overcooked and salted horse.

I haven't seen a horse since I was last in Nevada, haven't seem horse meat since Italy, but I ate horse in some of the only pad thai I've had in Thailand. What is there to do but enjoy it and move on?

And somehow, as I made my way around the cramped square, hoping to find a less overpacked retreat route and started noticing the roar and honk of traffic outside the square, it feels like a return home: tired feet scraping as they drag me to and through places frequented by few farangs, the pasted-on smile as I choke down something few farangs attempt, and the attempt at a dignified retreat as my stomach reminds me why few farangs eat such things.

Three Month Review

A story of numbers

3 months in Thailand, and so far I've:

lost my music gig

trained in Reiki

driven 4500 kliks

visited 3 other cities

moved 3 times

made it through 3 wrecks

totaled the bike (T-boned in a hit and run)

collapsed my zygomatic arch (1st scooter incident)

popped a couple of ribs, tweaked my diaphragm, damaged my rotator cuff, collected significant abrasions (2nd scooter incident)

fell down a concrete stairway with one scrape and no bruises

eaten some fantastic and fantastically bizarre food

lost 15 kilos

My authorial side can't take it, so let the numbers break into narrative:

After the third scooter incident, I was bleeding on the asphalt while a crowd--including a significant number of my students' parents--watched an ambulance come and haul my 40 kilos of defeat to a hospital, where they said nothing was wrong and gave me Tylenol. When I went back, the morning doctor confirmed a fractured thumb, wrapped me in a cast, and sent me home with mild narcotics.

It broke me.

I would've come home, was told I could go home, was encouraged to leave, but I love the potential of what I have here, and if I were to go home, I can't imagine what would happen after I could stand upright without my blood separating. Another 6 month search for a dead-end job? Why would I leave a respectable job with a respectable salary in a fascinating culture in a spectacular country for the chance to fight my way back into the American economy?

I hit bottom, but there was still enough resilience, still enough incentive to bounce, if only slightly.

Bad luck, injury, illness, so?

I'm in Thailand. I have a job. I have friends. I can practice Reiki and will learn Thai massage--in Thailand, while staying in a beachside bungalow.

And damn it, I've given a helluva lot to be here, and now that I'm enroute to enjoying it again, no way in hell do I want to leave. It might be inappropriately close to reality, but since it did come so close, I'll venture to say "over my dead body" will I leave Thailand before I'm either ready to or am back on a gurney. And if that happens, all I ask is for enough morphine to sleep until the coming of a new economy.