Half a year later

I can eat som tam bo--green papaya salad with a lime, fish sauce, garlic, pepper, and palm sugar dressing--at local levels with only a nasal drip or two, but on the other hand I buy toothpaste with cartoon characters on it because the refreshing mint is a screaming, burning pain.

Go figure.

Things you don't see everyday

The thing about ordering frogs from a roadside cart is that the suckers are all piled up and staring at you. Granted, so are the horseshoe crabs, but at least you don't see them breathing.

And of course the frogs are delicious: chop 'em up, coat 'em with a thick batter spiked with garlic, lemongrass, chili flake, and panko, then drop them in screaming hot oil that's been cooking other such delectables all night.

Mai me ow--no more!

I was full of enough vinegar that I did concerted, focused, muscle-building exercises: I spent a goodly while curling and pressing all the muscles in my upper and lower limbs. I've been dreaming about running obstacle courses lately, and maybe if I can start recovering some muscle mass I'll one day have enough fast twitch muscles to jog and jump.

So then I went to the massage place, and my usual lady, who has learned to use the baby touch on me, was having dinner, so it was a much more... enthusiastic experience (enthusiastic in her approach, anyway) that left me limping out to the first of two songtaus.

And then it seemed prudent to stagger up to the songtau for the next leg, which had just stopped for a red light.

I should've known the light was stale, that it was dark and raining and my waving might not be noticed.

Which is about as likely as making it through an hour of sixth grade without the classroom of Thai adolescents noticing--and making great ado at the opportunity to make great ado--that your fly is down.

I had just enough weight on the back to haul myself up, but was caught under just enough surprise, just far enough from my center of gravity to drop my ass on the pavement. Especially since I was busy gloating about not having to hail one of the mototaxis, for four times the price of the songtau back.

I should've guessed, but I didn't. And when traffic thinned on the green-light direction, the songtau took the four-second jump on the red light. With me not quite on.

Initially, I was screaming to slow down so I could haul my aching self--along with a backpack holding a couple big bottles of carbonated caffeine, three litres of water, a couple bricks of cream cheese, crackers, and some pseudo-sausage--up onto the songtau: think, "WAIT!"

But then I was screaming to "AAAAAAIT STOOOOOP!" as I started to fall.

And then I was just screaming at this anit-typical, stereotype-busting, renaissance-oriented songtau driver as a backpack strap caught and I found myself on a face-down trip across the intersection.

Good news: I was up and out of the intersection before any other traffic came through.

Other good news: the taxi only charged my dripping wet, bleeding ass the local price.

Even more good news: the souvenirs are limited to deep raspberries on both knees, both elbows, both palms, up my right thumb, across my left toes, and on the top of my right foot (love the sandals).

Bad news: I'm out of happy drugs.

Funny: I could've sworn I was done waking up to the crackle of roadrash.

Is it somehow romantic that every time I come in or out the front door of my building, I see the faucet from Bike Incident the First and think, "That's the site of my First Bike Incident, and I will carry its indentation in my face forever"?

A beautiful day

I couldn't identify the neighborhood where I live. That's just how it is with farangs: unless you live in one of the big three--Smile, SP, Wassana--or a well-defined muban, you never say where you live but where it's near. Same thing in Ayutthaya, Chiang Mai, Bangkok, HatYai, Khanom, anywhere else: nobody knows where you live, or if they do they wouldn't understand your explanation--a cabbie could take a local to the end of any of the smallest, most bass-akward and overgrown singletrack walkways, but if a farang responds to a prompt with "Tesco" (which, within town, is like saying "Take me to the Taj Mahal") odds are 50-50 at best that the farang will have to shout directions.

So I don't know where I live, just that it's near this one place place and across from that other.

In American terms, the neighborhood is about the size of a SuperWalMart and its parking lot. It has one entrance from the main road, which goes one building length--mine's the building on the left--and hits a T at the place everybody knows. The T goes a block either direction--paralleling the main road--before turning "back" from the main road for three extremely short blocks.

I would put ZERO stake in it, but at a guess there are fifteen hundred people living here. And it's one of the nicer--which is to say, more spacious--areas.

I've mentioned my laundry lady. She's a very large, very solid, broke-no-argument mother. You know she has your best interests in mind, but that doesn't change the fact that the merest shade of her discontent scares the hell out of you. And she's the mother of anywhere from 1 to 6 of my students (it's hard to tell with Thai kids--they move like shoals of sardines and herd half as well). I tell myself they're used to seeing people's skimpies hanging out to dry, or waiting to be pressed. And I pointedly ignore that mine are the only skivvies in this hemisphere to sport Monty Python, Superman, and tye-dye patterns (although not concurrently).

It's almost intimidating: I have to pick up my laundry promptly or she gets worried. And there is no waiting until I have a full load of dirty clothes--it takes two calendar days to get a load all washed and pressed, and if I don't have a new bag of dirties by the following morning, she gets worried.

I should backtrack some.

Laundry and I don't get along in terms that would meet my grandmother's approval. Option 1 is to let the stuff pile up until I've run out of key components of my wardrobe, and then go on a laundry bender. Option 2--from a couple of glorious schoolyears--was having a washer and dryer in the bathroom and fluffing what begins the week as seven or eight shirts, boxers, pairs of socks, and a few pairs of pants for a few minutes while brushing teeth, then just dressing straight from the dryer.

I also get in trouble for dropping off laundry without enough hangers.

But I've run out of hangers: somehow, when all but three day's wash is regularly done, hangars become as precious as fresh socks once were.

When I come home from school, there's food most days: a pot of rice with some sort of searing curry. If I do partake, there are frozen yogurt bars and packs of napkins. (No tangent, but it gets old being unable to eat an affordable meal without the skin being burned off my inner cheeks and tongue, not to mention the other cheeks....)

Two doors down is a place where I can buy ramen noodles, packets of deepfried whatnots, and recharge the minutes on my cell phone.

And then there are the ladies who live in between. They do haircutting and reflexology: 60 baht for about an hour with a straight razor flying around your head and terrifying every loose hair into perfect order. Or it's 100 baht for a session with a reflexologist who squeezes your feet and says, "you hurt in your XYZ and BCD, right? Is very bad down here."

There are other farangs here, I think. There have been, anyway, enough that kids don't stare unless I do something wild like walk around without shoes on. And I'm three long blocks from campus, or up to ten minutes from anywhere in town, if it takes that long to flag down a songtau or mototaxi.

Welcome to Thailand?

Here's hoping I get to spend a while in this part of the country.

Game swap

Getting to work no longer involves Super Mario Kart IN REAL LIVING PERIL! I am extremely relieved. Usually. Overall, anyway.

But crossing the street this morning provided some key context.

Start on "my" side, directly across from the main entrance to the school. You can't really stand on the sidewalk because it's full of stackable/folding tables and chairs for the triple-decker breakfast stand. One cart fries chicken and pig, slices it and packs it on rice. Another cart does intestine and betle leaf soup (slow-cooked chicken stock with pig internals and a handful of betel leaves; this is one of my favorite things) or jok (rice porridge) with ginger, scallion, garlic, piggy shallot cracklins, and parsley. The third does kick-your-teeth sweet coffee or tea. And they do both sit down and takeout, so instead of a narrow strip of walkway, the gutter is clogged with either standing students or idling bikes waiting for a bag of breakfast. So there's no comfortable place to either sit or stand without being in the way of someone trying to get through exactly where you are, farang. Just get out of the way as soon as you can, okay?

Well, the nearest lane (which technically goes right to left, remember) holds bikes parked two rows deep, so to walk past, you have to be pushing one shoulder into the second official lane of traffic. But you can't just turn and walk with the flow, because there's the bike traffic: someone on a scooter is almost guaranteed to be driving the wrong way to either park or merge.

Just past the scooter parking lane, straddling the dashed line dividing the two near-side lanes is the songtau lane. It's not quite a through-going lane because any given songtau is prone to stop at any given time for no reason whatsoever. For a goodly while, it was like playing "spot the deer" in the car with Dad--how quickly after screeching, jerking, or slamming to a halt could I spot the foot-going potential john? But I've come to realize, if not necessarily accept, that they stop for nothing more than the driver's whim--a promising shadow, a group of cronies parked and hoping for a load, a group of cronies parked and lounging, an enticing patch of shade, crosstraffic, the lack thereof, any sort of tremor in the force.

Generally, I find that it's a safe place to walk provided I want to flag down a songtau, but if I'm trying to hoof from here thence, it's like standing in a gutter during kindergarten bowling. Except a songtau, whether moving in a brisk reverse, creeping unmindfully forward, or racing at breakneck, hurts a helluva lot more than even a well-thrown three-pound bowling ball.

But the songtaus aren't alone, by any means.

Scooters, as much as they can be said to adhere to lanes, stick to fringe areas. For the sake of argument, assume you're driving a scooter south: your options, on this road, are 1) far left along the parked bikes if you're moving slowly and trying to park or merge; 2) a half-length from the parked bikes if you're in the slower lane, but watch out for merging songtaus or songtaus flying past or against traffic; 3) toward the middle line, if you're intent on getting there more quickly, but watch out for merging and passing traffic from either direction, especially traffic 4) screaming through a brief gap in the oncoming traffic; 5) in the far right, going against the main stream of traffic, just behind the scooter parking zone. So pretty much anywhere but down the middle of the opposing lane, unless there's a really big hole, say, made by a U turn. But a recap is in order, before joining that stream:

You're on the E curb of a N-S road, crossing directly W to the main entrance of a school. You've just been handed an open-topped two-handle baggie full of coffee syrup, a styrofoam clamshell with deep-fried pig belly, and change, so you're juggling the money, pig, coffee, and wallet at the same time. There's no standing where you're standing because there are two opposing streams of people after their coffee/tea syrup and deep fried wakeup, there's no standing on the sidewalk because it's become what in Europe would be called a bistro, there's no standing just off the sidewalk because it's a busy scooter parking/staging area, and there's not enough room to squeeze even my skinny butt between the back of the scooters and active traffic, which thus far consists of half a lane of scooter traffic, and a lane-plus for songtaus. But it's a two-lane road, so there are two lanes of southbound cars squeezed between the parked mopeds and the area within a quick swerve of being back in the southbound lane.

And the northbound traffic is an exact mirror: bike traffic just past the parked bikes, then two lanes of northbound traffic beginning halfway into the center southbound lane, followed by the songtau/bike lane, two lanes of parking traffic, bikes parked two-deep, and a solid press of people trying to get from the road to the sidewalk or back while singlemindedly charging through the crowd.

Don't forget the school busses--decommissioned Cold War troop-moveres--that roar through with lane-and-a-half widths that give way to no other vehicles, that stop almost as randomly as songtaus, minivan school busses that run the local routes, parents dropping off kidlets, and police standing in the middle of the road tweeting whistles.

It WAS Mario Kart. Now it's Frogger.

What's terrifying is that the safest place to stand while crossing is on the center line--usually, anyone driving down the middle has their eyes open, and nobody wants to hit a farang in front of a school.

in the nethers between manly and lazy

I'm not good about shaving. It took moving to Thailand to replace a razor blade after six months of bi-daily use, and that was with a blade that'd sat since, erm, the Mach 1 first came out--late 90s.

So I was proactive and proud of it, shaving BEFORE the "oops, really shoulda shaved before getting into such proximity with X" stage.

And one of my cheeks turned red.

Great.

Oh, wait, just the rusty blade. It'll rinse off and be good for another week or two.

For once--NOT BLOOD!