The Royal Society of the Printed Word

Wrapping Things Up

2007-05-21T19:06:00.001-07:00

Well I have been back in the United States now for some 10 days and I am just beginning to shake off some of the effects of reverse culture shock. The first few days were a little difficult, what with the wonders of drinking water straight out of the tap and toilets strong enough to flush down toilet paper. Also the clean air and green grass of New Hampshire have never felt so clean to me. I can wear my contacts again, after five months of eye irritation from pollution and smoke.

But it's not all wonderful, and I miss Thailand in small ways. I am losing my comfort with Thai, as I found yesterday as I tried to search online for the lyrics to a Thai song. I eat rice rarely if ever now, and the lack of street food in my diet has been comforting on my stomach but a wasteland for my tastebuds. The challenge will be to keep some part of this trip with me, and not to let it be subsumed by my old life, as easy as that may feel now that I am back on home soil. I have had moderate success with curry and pad thai on the family stove but it lacked some of the excitement that comes from the possibilities of miscommunication or food poisoning or both. I have also been thinking about some of my Thai friends in Chiang Mai whom I would love to bring to New Hampshire and show some of the generosity that they showed me. I keep them in mind as I drive through town, trying to see things like the town green and everyday obese Americans with their sense of astonishment. But then they probably wouldn't understand how strange it was until they returned home to Thailand and saw their home as differently as I have been seeing mine these past few days. And so it could continue back and forth.

This will be my last entry here. Now that I have returned home, for the forseeable future at least, I plan to write in different ways. This journal will remain online, at least until I find a way to put some of it in print. And if I write again online, for a different purpose or in a different guise, I will link to it here. And finally, thank you to the people who told me that they read this and felt close to me, even when I felt like I could not get any further from home.

Biking in China in the Rain

2007-04-29T23:00:00.000-07:00

I am currently in the city of Dinghai on the island of Zhoushan, a few hours away from Shanghai. I am visiting Mary and revisiting the city where I first started my trip in Asia almost seven months ago, a fitting close to my travels. She teaches during the day and I have only myself and the city to turn to for entertainment.

It has been raining for two days straight here, and yesterday I decided to brave it and explore the city a little. The only raingear I have is a one-use plastic poncho in a stark traffic orange with a picture of a bug on the back. To guard against the elements I also wore black and white cow mittens and a clear plastic visor that I found in Mary's basement. It says "SPORTS" on the front, and the visor height is adjustable.

To my surprise and pleasure, mounted on a bike in poncho and visor, I did not attract the stares of onlookers- for the first time since I've been here. Relatively with-it looking Chinese families will put down their food and watch me, open-mouthed, when I walk into a restaurant. Usually they are waiting to see how I handle my chopsticks, but other times it seems to be for the sheer spectacle of a white guy in their midst. But on the street in day-glo orange and a covered head, I just fit in with the crowd.

Most people ride a bicycle or a motorbike in Dinghai, so when it rains everyone pulls out huge tarp-like ponchos that cover their bikes from handlebars to the rack over the back wheel, rising to a head hole and a hood in the middle. And everyone seems to have their own distinct hue of raingear, so that waiting at a stoplight can feel like stepping into a TV test pattern. Some of the higher end models of poncho have a clear plastic window at chest height, so that the cyclist can see through it to their hands on the handlebars, and so that children who are squirreled away in their parents' laps can see out. I saw one mother bringing home her daughter from school. The mother wore brilliant pink and while she worked away on the bike, her daughter sat on the rack over the back wheel, sideways, in a blue poncho with silver stars.

I rode out of the city, up through the hills to a reservoir surrounded by tumble-down farmhouses. A woman passed me on a motorbike with her poncho sailing out behind her, looking like a fluorescent witch mid-swoop. I was amazed at how quickly the city turned into countryside, with little pathways climbing up off the road to precarious shacks and tiny squares of tilled soil. The whole valley smelled like it was fertilized with human waste, which may not be an exaggeration according Mary's account of the city's public toilets.

The other side of the valley drops down the sea. The coast is choked by industrial behemoths, oil rigs and great cranes and dry docks and naval bases. The seawater is brown and the air is smoky. I was almost run off the road on my way back to Dinghai by a massive front-end loader with tires taller than I was, carrying what looked like two tons of iron filings in its bucket.

It's still raining now, and some of the romance of the rain has waned after I came home from my journey with wet feet and a headache. But I sit at the window and it feels like a revelation after four months in Thailand without a single drop of it. I can hear it on the tin of the porch roof when I'm sleeping and it's a comforting sound.

photos from Songkran

2007-04-22T03:01:00.000-07:00

This City Is About To Explode

2007-04-11T04:39:00.000-07:00

The Songkran festival is only one day away and the city is arming itself. Everywhere little stands have popped up selling plastic buckets and squirtguns in bright colors. I hear the strains of Thai country music coming from the grounds of the Buddhist temples in my neighborhood. Gangs of kids move together on the streets at dusk and sit on the curb in front of restaurants. My bike was stolen from right in front of my apartment. Families have driven in from the country in the backs of pickup trucks- some have formed makeshift bands and play folk songs as they cruise the streets, others have simply stockpiled four days worth of food and beer along with their bedding and pets. The families show me toothless smiles as I bike by.

Traffic has reached near-parking-lot levels of congestion around the moat, much to the delight of the children who line the streets. This festival is a five day water fight that pits pedestrians against the traffic. Some well-prepared teams have drums of water in the back of their trucks so they can circle the city's moat road for hours. Other groups man the banks in teams, some pulling water from the moat, others loading guns, and a chosen few firing at dry-looking victims as they go by. My favorites are the two person teams that mount motorbikes, driver in a raincoat and rear-gunner in his underwear struggling with some unwieldy oversized super soaker.

Many people choose to simply sit on the banks of the moat and get drunk and go swimming. The motto there seems to be, if you don't have a tattoo of a tiger or a snake don't bother to take your shirt off. Some little kids climb the ruined walls of the ancient city and perform swan dives for the cheering crowds of stopped traffic. I am concerned at the quality of this moat water, which presumably is the same that I looked on when I first arrived here, plus whatever garbage, shit, or pollution has seeped into it. But hundreds of kids don't seem fazed, and it may be that we just celebrate the end of Songkran with the beginning of a time of rampant ear infections.

On the corner of the red light district, the ceremony of washing and purifying the Buddha has aptly become a wet T-shirt contest. Drunk shirtless farangs grope their escorts and brandish giant shoulder-mounted water cannons.

People have told me the two rules of Songkran are: pace yourself because you have five days to do it all, and carry your phone in a plastic bag. If I can hold myself to one out of two I'll be doing all right.

a description, because I didn't dare take a photo

2007-03-19T02:42:00.000-07:00

A neckless, girthy ex-football type sits astride a bike. He’s pedaling nonchalantly, no hands. He has a sleeveless shirt and a shaved head. He wears earrings in both ears and a giant dust mask across his mouth and nose. He’s Buddha vs. a biohazard, Mr. Clean doing some serious damage control.

Thanks to recent slash-and-burn efforts on the part of local farmers, Chiang Mai has been under a pallor of bluish smoke for the last two weeks. The whole city is hazy and indistinct, because of both the smog and my watery eyes. Most foreigners have taken to wearing face protection when they go out. I’ve asked some of my Thai friends why they don’t wear masks too, but they just say the smoke can’t kill them. I guess after a lifetime of sucking small-engine exhaust, you’re not really fazed by a little more air pollution.

This bike-riding Papa Bear that I saw, he moves slowly through the streets. He’s confused. This was supposed to be his perfect vacation- good weather, cheap prices, what you want when you want it. And then all of a sudden the environment turned on him. He’s still watching the locals with the look of someone who’s thrown a lot of his money into this city’s darkest corners. But he’s on the defensive. He’s hiding behind a dust mask. Things aren’t quite what they seem.

the New Foods Log after 150 days in Asia

2007-03-18T04:34:00.000-07:00

New Parts of Familiar Animals I Have Eaten:

Cow Stomach
Pig Intestines
Pig Stomach
Pig Heart
Pig Liver
Pig Blood
Pig Sinews, Deep Fried with Sesame Seeds
Chicken Blood, Congealed and Cubed in Soup
Chicken Feet
Chicken Neck
Fish Entrails

New Animals I Have Eaten

Jellyfish
Snails, Pried Out of their Shells with a Toothpick
Crickets
Grasshoppers, Fried in Soysauce
Cockroaches
A Lot of New Fish

Familiar Animals, Presented Differently

Shrimp, Still Alive

Knowing For Certain

2007-03-13T17:30:00.000-07:00

I'm not someone who puts much faith in ESP or premonitions. The desire to know the future seems to be a fruitless and foolish endeavor. In light of recent events, however, I believe that there are some things that you can absolutely know. For instance, pretty much from day one in Thailand I have believed that I will run into some incidental figure out of my past. Not a close friend, just someone from the periphery of my life, like a kindergarten classmate or friend from drama camp.

Last week, this expectation was proven correct when a woman stood up from a table in a restaurant in Chiang Mai as I walked by. "Dan? Dan?" she said. I had no idea who she was, but that was not surprising if she was to be from some hidden part of my life. She introduced herself as someone who had volunteered at the Painted Turtle. At her urging, I vaguely recalled a conversation we might have had about traveling to Asia. I felt no surprise at the meeting, which I think galled her. I felt only relief that my wait was over.

Now this restaurant was the same one where a few months ago I sat and watched someone run into a friend from college that she hadn't talked to in five years. I don't want to tempt fate, but I intend on eating there more often. There are plenty of moments from my past that I would love to live through again with an old friend. I know there are people I wronged, and with a few minutes of hugging and incredulous reunion I might be able to redeem myself. If I stayed here forever I could in time relive my entire life again.

Some of the Downside of Living Alone in a Foreign Country

2007-03-11T10:19:00.000-07:00

It can be incredibly lonely. Chiang Mai is a waypoint for tourists doing longer treks through the north. So the English-speaking population in this city is for the most part transient, and several interesting friend-candidates have all moved on before we had a chance to meet up more than a few times. And my Thai is not good enough to foray blindly into social situations.

It was a stark discovery for me to realize that the language that I have spent my entire life practicing, and the language that I devoted my major in college to, can only take me a short way here. I spend a lot of my day wrapped up in a kind of restless energy that comes, I think, from constantly having to edit my English to make it more understandable to non-native speakers, or else translate that English into miserable Thai.

At home I can be articulate, funny, serious, academic with carefully worded sentences that I don't even really need to think about. Here I speak to people in my broken Thai and simplified English and feel like there are whole parts of my personality that I am just not able to express. How can they really know me if I can't communicate any complexity of emotion or critical thought? I can only talk about what they talk to every tourist about- the food, the weather, basic greetings. Much of what I like best about myself, my facility with my native tongue and the person that allows me to become, is just not available to me here.

Mae Sot

2007-03-06T16:36:00.000-08:00

In Thailand, with a Non-Immigrant B Visa, I can stay for 90 days and then I have to renew by leaving the country. Last weekend I got to do this on a trip to the Burmese border that coincided with a stay with the family of one of my students.

I traveled to Mae Sot with Kaey's family- her husband, two shrill kids, and one of Kaey's students who acted as a sometime babysitter. Kaey is a professor at a local university where she teaches developmental psych. She's going to the US in May to study English and on the weekends I help her get her conversation skils up to par.

My last border experience was crossing into Cambodia, and it included masked men with guns running down alleyways, mountains of trash, and me feeling more unsafe than I ever want to feel again. To my great relief, Mae Sot was much calmer and at times startlingly beautiful.

My favorite part of the city was its improbable collection of people. Driving through the streets I saw Burmese men, with patterned sarongs and white-painted faces. Kaey explained to me that the custom is to make a paste out of herbs to use as sunblock on the face. Some of the women wore it in designs on their cheeks and forehead. Then in another part of the city was a Muslim community, identified by the crescent and star symbols over the doors and the many mosques. There the men had long beards and I saw women wearing veils moving slowly on bicycles. There were many other people more recognizeably Thai to me, as well as the ever-present Chinese gold shops trimmed in red and yellow, and I even saw several NGO-type farangs.

We stayed with Kaey's parents in a compound that houses her brother and his wife and several of her cousins as well. The power of family is magnetic here. In a surprise move, Kaey's younger brother Boy took me under his wing for the weekend. Even though he speaks little English he made it his project to entertain me. And I think he wanted to prove to me how modern his lifestyle is.

The parents are showy about their wealth, with Boy as the shining example. He took me through the streets of Mae Sot in his brand-new pickup, blasting Akon and Snoop Dogg on a sphincter-shaking subwoofer. It was a strange kind of culture shock to hear Snoop Dogg as we waited for cows to clear off the road. He dragged me into golfing with his friends, other young businessmen from Mae Sot: a pharmacist, a motorbike salesman, a restaurant owner, etc. They said I looked like Clark Kent with my glasses and asked me if I was wearing red underwear. Several times on the golf course an old man would walk out holding a baby. And on the fifth hole I could see a woman washing her clothes in a water trap. The greenside accomodations are not so desirable there I think. Our caddies were Burmese and they spoke as little Thai as I did. And back in the clubhouse we dined on food that was American in spirit, if not in presentation or ingredients. Heavy stuff like fried crickets dipped in ketchup and squid cooked in egg yolks.

Back at the family compound I had a totally different kind of cultural experience. Kaey's husband Oak woke me up at dawn one day to go shopping with him. I followed him to the town market, where I held bags for him as he bought enough meat to rebuild a pig. We spent most of the day in the kitchen preparing laab muu, which is a traditional dish in his family. It consists of basically taking each part of a pig, preparing it in its own savory way, and then mushing it back together in a black sauce. I got to pare intestines, deep fry the heart, and best of all, tenderize the leg meat until it was as creamy as cake frosting. The whole thing was actually pretty good, prepared with a lot of spice and served with fried onions and vegetables. I get the feeling that the family likes the food, but doesn't love it. So Oak was left eating laab leftovers at the next few meals.

The actual trip into Myanmar was brief and unremarkable. I walked over the Friendship Bridge, a massive concrete causeway, sat for five minutes in Burmese customs, and then walked back into Thailand. I got to see the dry and dusty bed of the Moei River below me, and some Thai policemen catching Burmese trying to sneak into Thailand.

The weekend was three days for me without another native English speaker. I was exhausted from trying to pare down my sentences and translate into Thai. It was surprising how much Chiang Mai felt like home when I returned.

Status Update

2007-03-02T02:50:00.000-08:00

I was recently offered a job at The Painted Turtle, a summer camp in California that I have worked at in the past. It was pretty much the best job offer I've gotten since being in Thailand, and I'm also starting to think more seriously about coming home. So I took the job, and I will be returning to the US in mid-May. It's strange to think that this trip, which has been so open-ended for so long, now has a fixed end date. But I've known since I got here that the expatriate life-style is not for me, and even a stay of much longer than a few months would be more than I wanted. I've got about two more months of teaching, and then a short time to travel.

A second note is that I just turned 23. The school I teach at, The Inter Eng Club, threw me a bash with grilled shrimp, Thai crooning around a guitar, lots of whiskey, and a generous mix of my students and co-workers. It was a great time. The guests were quite generous, and several gave me presents. I received a dress-shirt, two ties (one pre-tied), and a pencil case. Proof that I'm known around these parts as all business.

the joys of housekeeping

2007-03-02T02:22:00.000-08:00

When I returned to my room at noon today I noticed a funky odor. What I had thought before was simply the general pong of me living by myself, was in fact something much more sinister. I did a nasal check of my laundry basket, the bathroom, but found the problem in a lumpy, whitish liquid that was leaking from under my fridge. I sponged it up and forget about it, as I was rushing to get back to school.

This evening I returned to my room to find the smell even more potent. I shifted the fridge and saw one of the feet dragged a milky trail across the floor. I remembered that about a month ago I had left a bottle of milk on its side in the fridge. I had discovered it the next day and mopped it up, congratulating myself on an unpleasant job carried out swiftly. I didn't stop to wonder why an entire bottle of spilt milk needed only a few swabs with the sponge- now an oversight with potentially problematic consequences.

I looked under the fridge and found that the whole thing was set up on a frame. I lifted the fridge off the frame, only to be confronted by a seriously stinky odor. The milk had apparently poured down through the rubber seal around the door and settled under one of the legs. Little cheesy bits of dried milk spotted the underside. So I hefted the frame out to my porch to shake off the crusty bits. But as I moved it onto the porch I heard something slosh around. This was getting almost too disgusting to bear, but I pried off a rubber cap from the bottom of the frame. Out dripped something oily and evil-smelling that went over the railing and splashed down onto the parking lot below. The milk had poured down into the frame like one of those backyard basketball hoop stands that you fill up with the hose. This disaster had been festering under the fridge for almost a month, and only now that the weather was heating up did I discover it.

I found myself thinking about the grandmotherly advise "don't cry over spilt milk." Well, what if you spilled it a month ago? And now the smell is so bad it's making your eyes water? Does that count as crying?

Simplicity and Double Entendres: Language Lessons Part 2

2007-02-18T01:01:00.000-08:00

At its most hopeless, my progress with Thai sounds something like this:

Me: What's that?
Some Patient Thai Friend: That's a dog.
Me: Ok, good now how do you say that in Thai?
Friend: Maa.
Me: Maa?
Friend: No, that's the word for horse.
Me: Maa.
Friend: No, that means come.
Me: Maa.
Friend: Maa, maa, maa. Do you understand?
Me: Maa maa maa maa maa maa, etc etc.

And if it's not some issue with tone, then it's the unique Thai letters- dt, or bp, or my favorite, eu, which sounds like someone with lockjaw who just stepped in shit.

But I have to remind myself when I'm going blind in front of the chart of 44 consonants, that beyond its sounds Thai is a very simple language. The basic vocabulary is much smaller than English and most words longer than one syllable are compounds of shorter words. For instance: "rian" means study. So classroom is "hong rian" (literally: study room) and school is rongrian (study building). And Hotel is rongraem (overnight building).

So despite my struggles to choke down the 36 vowel sounds, I've got my foot in the door with these compound words. For each short word I learn, I've learned one half of about twenty more words. Last night I used this to my great advantage, foraying for the first time into humor, long a bastion for the fluent here in Thailand. I knew the word for water, "nam" and the word for ice, "nam kaeng." But last night it was explained to me that "nam kaeng" means literally, strong water. And "kaeng" in Thai also translates to the word erect and erection. As simple as that I had my first double entendre. The stiffer the drinks the stronger the feelings, etc etc. We got about 10 minutes of laughs out of it, mainly I think out of relief that we could communicate more than just "where are you from" and "what's your name." My real personality could finally shine through. Off-color humor, long a staple of my English-speaking interactions, could once again be mine.

is, am, and are vs. the Thai people: Language Lessons Part 1

2007-02-17T17:26:00.000-08:00

Thai is a language without articles, without plurals, and very few prepositions. Verbs are not conjugated and when at all possible the subject of the sentence is dropped. The result is a language that relies heavily on context- you've got to be paying attention to know what you're talking about. One phrase can be used in different settings to wildly different ends. For instance "mai chai" (literally "not yes") can be used for "incorrect," "not yet," or simply "no."

So when Thais attempt English, it's the little words that take them for a ride. Filling in around the nouns and verbs can be a daunting task. But in English, until you can wield conjunctions and prepositions and phrasal verbs, you can only hack away at the bigger concepts- you can be "stuck" but not "stuck up." And so Thais approach these two and three and four letter words with an attitude that alternates between recklessness and fear. There are either too few helping words and my student gives me something raw and uncut like "I shopping sister at Robinsons." Or at the other end of the swing, there is my favorite internet cafe, where the sign over the toilet reads, "Please do not throw some tissue down upon the waters." An orgy of short words, where prepositions come in groups and inopportune plurals abound. It sounds almost biblical.

They are wary of "any" I think in part because they know the dangers of its misuse. "Some," on the other hand is a slippery one, cropping up in all kinds of speech, both casual and formal. I think my students believe they are protected by its ubiquity, and so they salt their language with it, figuring it will find its own way to the meaning of they say.

But for all the time I spend beating down the "He is have fun" and "Where do you go?" I occasionally get something like this: The other day, responding to a prompt for the word "record," my student Mun gave me the sentence, "You have a short record of social service." Humbling indeed.

nam prik maeng daa

2007-02-11T17:34:00.000-08:00

Nam prik maeng daa is Thai for cockroach chili sauce. I know this from experience.

I went to a market the other day just to poke around. I am not very good at putting myself into situations where I have to speak Thai. However, I can read that script although I usually don't know the meaning of the words. So I decided to walk up to a food cart, pick something off the menu and order it, come what may.

I went to a guy making nam prik, which is chili sauce ground up with a wooden mortar and pestle. I had eaten several nam priks before, including one with pork and another that you dipped fish into. This was a good place for me if I was feeling reckless with my Thai, because the guy has to constantly check in with the customer about what he's grinding up- more chilis? fish sauce? I would have to speak Thai back to him or I wouldn't get my food.

So I read "nam prik maeng daa" off the menu and they guy looked a little surprised. But I wasn't going to waver. So he leans over his cart of ingredients to a stack of dried fish. He lifts them up and underneath there is a pile of steamed cockroaches. And these are big boys, like one filled the palm of his hand. He takes one and splits it open. Inside the body is some black lozenge thing, maybe its heart or stomach apparatus. He holds this to my nose and asks me if this is really what I want. It has the funkiest odor, like a turpentine or fermented dish detergent. I've already committed myself to this though, so I say of course, yeah sure.

He proceeds to shred the bug body in his hands and toss it in the mortar along with some rotting fish carcas floating in brown liquid, and like 10 pickled chilis. The result is a greenish-black sludge that he puts in a little plastic bag. I tried to eat it later in the day, but the chilis were too much for me. But even though there were enough chilis to knock me out, that pungent cockroach flavor managed to get caught in my mouth. I was tasting it for the rest of the day, like I'd rinsed with wood stain or something.

I just read in the New York Times that according to Michael Pollan, Americans are relying on a diet that is made from fewer and fewer species, much to the detriment of our health. I would like to see him come here and flesh out his diet with some insect friends. In Thai that would be, "hiu ma-laeng," or "I'm hungry for insects." He could buy maggots fried in soy sauce on the street, or ants in chicken soup. Or maybe he wants some nam prik maeng daa?

Photo of Chiang Mai's Sunday Walking Market

2007-02-03T03:15:00.000-08:00

12/06 At 6 PM when they play the king's anthem on the city's loudspeakers, this whole scene freezes and goes silent. Then the song ends and it's like someone pressed play again.

let down by language

2007-02-03T02:57:00.000-08:00

The most foreign part of a foreign language? For me, it's at a live concert, right when the band has finished a song and the crowd is sweaty and breathless from dancing. Right then, when you're zoned in with the music and the other people, the singer throws off some one-liner, something to warm the crowd up and hold their attention during the wash of the drummer's outro and the retuning of the guitars. Right then, he says something casual and off-the-cuff, maybe about their tour or a fan's shirt in the front row.

I know what it should sound like: "Mr Michael Gordon on bass, everybody." "How you doing out there, Chicago?" "This next one's off our new album." And I know how to respond, maybe politely or with a little encouraging laughter and applause. And easy as that everybody's closer for it and primed for the next number. But in Thailand its just gibberish to me. I have absolutely no idea what he said. Right at that crucial moment, when the guy's knitting up the crowd, I'm bounced out to the edges. And again I'm a naif, unprepared, and told in so many incomprehensible words that I'm not really ready for this experience.

The Circus Comes to Town

2007-02-02T06:39:00.000-08:00

Tonight I met a group of traveling clowns in the minutes before an impromptu show at Tha Phae Gate, the tourist center of the city. They are the Cyclowns, so named because they travel only by bicycle. They have been on the road for six years, living off hat passing and strangers' generosity. In that time, so they claim, over one hundred musicicans and street performers have joined and left their group. Sometimes their numbers swell to as many as 15, when I saw them tonight they were 6.

With their muttonchops and whiny fiddle they gave off an air of old-world Europe, like gypsies. Their clothing featured horizontal stripes, which made their socks clownier and and their shirts more Frenchified. I spoke to one guy, the fiddler, who had been travelling with them for three years. He said they had no clear plans for the future. Half the group wanted to return to China and the other half wanted to push on to Malaysia. This wouldn't be the first time their group had separated- they keep in touch via myspace and sometimes reunite after many months in different countries.

Their act was largely non-verbal, no doubt honed during their last two years trekking across Russia and then China. The music was campy and their magic tricks watchable but unremarkable. I looked around at the audience and saw a large number of backpacker types in their twenties, people who also had been on the road for some time. I watched them watch the show, and I realized that the real entertainment for them was not the magic or the music. These clowns were people who had made the peripatetic lifestyle a sustainable thing. They were travelling the world and they didn't ever have to stop. That was as much something to stare at as any trick they might pull out of their pockets. The backpackers in the audience were probably the ones keeping the Cyclowns afloat. I imagined the travellers whose money was running out were the most generous when the hat was passed, sending with the Cyclowns their vicarious dreams of endless roaming.

I must admit I was taken with the Cyclowns' ambience, and with what seemed to me like a need for a group historian. I could play Tom Wolfe to their band of Merry Pranksters. I the young Cameron Crowe and they the hard-living rock stars. I would travel with them with my short hair and conservative dress, bearing the brunt of their anger at the man and at the close-minded, untravelled West they had left behind. But secretly they would be grateful for my documentation, for ensuring that their legacy lived beyond their myspace friends and the memory of the few who saw them. But the more I thought about that constant travel - two years through Asia! - the more it began to seem as confining as any static lifestyle. The fiddler who had been with them for three years, what else could he do now, after so long on the road? I thought of the Flying Dutchman, and Charlie on the MTA. There certainly is a romanticism to that gypsy way, but maybe it's something I see only with the clarity that comes from a rooted life.

One more tidbit

2007-01-30T22:24:00.000-08:00

I was leaving a restaurant the other day when a portly guy in a windbreaker approached me. He explained in broken Thai that he could tell I was a teacher and that he needed my help. He gestured towards a shadowy stall off the street, where he said I could do some translating for him. Pretty much all my red flags were up by now, so I asked to see what needed translating. He pulled out a much-folded computer print-out of an imdb.com page. It was a description of the newest Rambo movie, called the Eye of the Serpent or something. In about five seconds this had gone from threat of bodily harm to comedy.

The guy explained, again in barely understandable English, that he had heard that Rambo IV was being filmed in Chiang Mai next week. This guy had his hopes set on being a translator on the set, because he knows English, Thai, and the hill tribe dialect of the people being used as extras in the film. All he needed was for me to explain the premise of the movie to him. Well if he couldn't read this piece of paper, I was frankly skeptical of his chances of working with Sylvester Stallone, but I kept that opinion to myself. I guided him through the torturous plot twists of some threatened missionaries, dangerous Thai gangs, and Rambo's call out of retirement (like many other white men past their prime he has retired to Bangkok, perhaps with a young Thai girlfriend? or boyfriend? or kathoey? that's the part of the story I want to know about). Needless to say, the film looked absolutely terrible.

Expatriatism

2007-01-25T18:00:00.000-08:00

I can put most Westerner residents in Chiang Mai into one of three categories: 1) young and with a Thai girlfriend, settling down to start a new life in a cheaper country; 2) old and retired, looking for easy living; 3) backpackers of any age, pausing while on an Asian saga of undetermined length. The first two want to stay in Thailand for good, and the latter couldn't say where they'll end up.

What this means is that I am in the tiny minority of farangs in Chiang Mai with concrete plans to return to my own country. This has led to many frustrating conversations for me. I will talk to some guy at a bar, or maybe a fellow teacher, and we will agree of the cheapness of Thailand and the easy living and the great weather and the beautiful Thai girls. And then I will tell him that I don't plan on staying more than a few more months here. People will look at me with pity, like it's a shame I don't really understand Thailand. I have heard from people how they backpacked through here, returned home to make some money, and then when they were able they moved here permanently. I know right now that when I leave here it won't be to come back permanently later. I will just leave and go home.

I end up feeling defensive that even after seeing the beautiful and easy Thailand, I still prefer my own country. But I don't think that's so strange. People travel all the time and return home better for it. I'm travelling because I want to go home, because I want the life I already have to be improved by this travelling.

Guys here speak of finally finding real happiness after years of wasted time in their home countries. They talk about falling in love with Thai girls and finally getting motivated to get a job and settle down. I say take happiness where you can find it, and I've learned a lot talking to these guys, but there is still nothing that I want to escape from in my current life and that sets me apart.

Two Experiences of the "Only in Thailand" Variety

2007-01-24T18:53:00.000-08:00

1) I was biking home at like 10 o'clock and I had just stopped at a stoplight. I hear a motorbike pull up behind me and then some frantic whispering in Thai. And then some little kid squeaks "Hello how are you?" I turn around and there's a mother on a moto with a rolling squid stand attached like a sidecar. In her lap is a tiny kid, who she's prodding to speak to me. She figures, hey free English lessons from the farang for as long as the light stays red. But I'm thinking in the same moment, hey- possible Thai lesson. So they talk in English and I in Thai and we work out that we're both going home, we're both tired, and we both will be turning right when the light turns green. I bike the rest of the way home with them behind me, still trying to converse.

2) I went out to eat with the English teachers and staff from the International English Club where I tutor at night. We went to a really Thai place outside the city and had all kinds of dishes that you don't see in the farang-friendly places, and dishes that are too complicated to be made on the street. At dessert time, the Thai men at my end of the table started crowing about goong dten, and the girls were hiding their faces and saying mai chai, no. Someone told me that goong dten means dancing shrimp. So the waitress brought out a little bowl with a lid on a plate surrounded by salad. It looked pretty innocuous, so I lifted the lid to take a peep at the shrimp. And they jumped out of the bowl onto the table, because they were still alive. Dancing is a euphemism for live shrimp. People were freaking out and the shrimp were jumping everywhere. So the waitress put the lid back on, took the bowl and shook it like you would shake a martini. She uncovered it and the shrimp lay there, docile, pickling in a marinade of lemongrass and ginger. You had to pop them in your mouth and bite down before they woke up and started moving again. I had some hesitations after watching Aliens the other night, like these little guys were going to go into my stomach and then burst out my chest. But they were actually pretty good. It was a real affirmation of who's higher on the foodchain.

ALL THAT MAIL THAT"S BEEN STACKING UP, SEND IT ORIENT-WARD

2007-01-20T23:37:00.000-08:00

The pony express-spice route lanes of communication are now open:

P.T. Residence #430
51 Sirimangkalajarn Rd.
T. Suthep A. Muang
Chiang Mai, 50200 THAILAND

If you write I will write back. I have been collecting postcards while on my travels. Please specify whether you want quaint, home-made, funny/botched English, American culture four years too late, or incomprehensible. I think it's about a month travel time for postcards, maybe three weeks for letters.

If you're really concerned about it getting to me, email me and I'll send you a .jpeg of what the Thai characters for the address should look like.

A Portrait Of Our Hero

2007-01-19T09:00:00.000-08:00

In full regalia. VIP Guesthouse, Chiang Mai 12/24/06

at long last home, and a bit about authenticity

2007-01-19T08:24:00.000-08:00

I have finally moved into an apartment. Almost three months to the day of arriving in Asia, I finally stop living out of a suitcase. I live in a place called the P. T. Residence, a giant block of apartments located halfway between the old city of Chiang Mai and Chiang Mai University. A few days ago was the CMU graduate schools' graduation and a lot of students live in my apartment, so everywhere there were people walking around in robes and hoods. The ceremonies lasted five days. It made me think of Hogwarts or an abbey.

A bit about my neighborhood. I live down the street from barbershop called Hair Champions 2003. Tonight as I biked home I passed an elephant being walked down the street. And around the corner is Wat Suandok, an international Buddhist temple and university with more than 1000 monk students from every country in south-east asia. Three nights a week they have monk chats, where farangs sling questions at the monks and the monks brush up on their English.

But know too that I live around the corner from a Starbucks, three 7-11s and one of the most expensive day spas in the city. I live near Nimmanheiman Rd, which is the heart of the new rich nightlife and there are countless coffee bar/night club combinations within earshot of my porch.

I would like to take this opportunity to say that I do not believe that the traditional Thai life of elephants and monks is any more authentic or legitimate than the 7-11s that are on every street in this city. I have met a lot of tourists in the past month here, and so many of them arrive already thinking they know what the real Thailand is, and that they will find it on a trek to look at hill-tribe people or inside a wat. They are skeptical of places like the 7-11 and the malls for a variety of reasons. Like they want their vacation to be exactly the way they imagined it at home, filled with quaint images of monasteries and women with metal rings on their necks, and no trappings of Western culture or consumerism to taint that.

Why must Thailand remain a postcard to be authentic? In my short stay here I have come to find that Thai culture has many startling incongruities that Thais don't even blink at. Haute cuisine and street food side by side, loose traffic rules and looser schedules, a king that is revered beyond reason next to a prime minister who no one takes seriously, and the blend of Thai and Western consumerism that pervades daily life. The people in Thailand who moved in from outlying towns to serve the tourist population are just as real as their relatives who stayed at home.

It's naive and perhaps ethnocentric to think that America at its most real can be a melting pot or forerunner of a cultural evolution and at the same time ask that another country promote some false conception of untainted roots for the sake of your vacationing pleasure.

Just Clearing Up Some Misconceptions

2007-01-17T22:31:00.000-08:00

I've spoken to a few people from home about life in Thailand and invariably they ask me how my Thai is. I say it's getting there and they tell me to say something over the phone. I say a sentence about ordering food, and then they laugh. Yes, 90% of my Thai vocabulary is food-related, but I don't want people to be thinking, "Oh that boy's an eater all right, just listen to him talk about his food."

In truth, right now without a Thai teacher the only time in the day where I am guaranteed contact with Thai language is when I eat. I have to eat three times a day and so I can count on three different opportunities to try out my language chops. The other thing about food words is that there is a very clear relationship to what I say and what happens. I can try out small talk with someone in an elevator, but if we don't understand each other no one might ever know. But if I go into a restaurant and order khao nieaw instead of khao sawy, I will be eating sticky rice instead of white rice. And so it's like a oral quiz, three times a day. If they don't understand me, or I read the wrong thing on the menu, I either get something gross like cubed blood (leuek), or something totally bland because they assume the farang doesn't know what he's talking about. But when I pass the quiz, let me just say the results are delicious. Khao mok gai, khao kaa muu, pat ka naa, muu bping, etc, etc.

UPDATE

2007-01-09T20:01:00.000-08:00

It was recently brought to my attention that unregistered readers of my blog were not allowed to comment on it. I have changed the settings now so all you anonymous readers out there that have been itching to talk back, it's open season.

Chiang Mai Report

2007-01-05T02:20:00.000-08:00

I have finally secured employment. I have two temporary teaching jobs with language schools in Chiang Mai. Both end in a few weeks, but they are a foot in the door. One program director I talked to said Chiang Mai was the most difficult city in South-East Asia to find teaching work in. So that may have not been a great choice by me, but I will keep plugging away. In the mean time I am exploring cheaper and cheaper food options. My new favorite is a place called Khao Soy Feuan Fah, a Thai-Indian place located in Chiang Mai's miniscule Muslim neighborhood. Literally this street is like four buildings long. But they serve khao mok phae (goat biryani) along with the usual combinations of rice, chicken, and pungent sauce. It's hidden right around the corner from the city's mammoth night bazaar, but it closes right before the bazaar opens. A sign of legitimacy in my eyes, like maybe it doesn't want to act in concert with all the pirated dvd vendors and Thai boxing touts, all catering to the tourist crowd.

In other news, today I was running by the Chiang Mai University resevoir when I saw a guy in a tree with a rifle. My stomach jumped, like maybe this was some kind of spin-off from the Muslim unrest in the south where they're burning schools and killing teachers. A few days ago I saw a kid pull a pistol out of his shorts that I was 95% sure was a toy but I ran away anyway. So this guy's perfectly still, crouched about 15 feet off the ground in the branches of the tree. He sights his rifle, points it at the water and shoots. I see a writhing in the water and I realize he's gunning down fish. Like the proverbial fish in the barrel, except this doesn't look easy. There's also some kind of attachment to his gun that looks like a tin can that fires after the fish and I had this idea that he was catching live fish in tin cans or something. I'm curious so I strike up a little conversation. Here's how it goes:

Me: Sa waa dii kap.
Gunman: Kap.
Me: Are you shooting *I cock my finger and thumb* fish?
Gunman: Hello.

And then I wrack my brain for anything in Thai that could communicate my interest, confusion, or desire to shoot the gun myself.

Me: Sanouk dii (good fun).

So that's about where my language is right now. I can order goat biryani in a restaurant and I can tell fish shooters to have fun. Tomorrow's goals: the word "for" and a successful order of khao ka muu.

Pictures from Sihanoukville, Cambodia 11/28/06

2006-12-31T02:17:00.000-08:00

Riding motorbikes in a city without stoplights, speed limits, or drivers' licences.

Victory Hill, Sihanoukville. The main drag. About 40 years ago when Cambodia was ascendant, Sihanoukville was the place to vacation for wealthy Khmers. After the country's three decades of despotic rulers and financial mismaneagement, the great hotels rotted away and the town returned to its sleepy roots. The gutted hotels now house squatters. Just in the last few years the town has been rediscovered by backpackers and now internet cafes and motorbike rental shops are springing up. Re-gentrification can't be more than a year or two away.

Taking a break from a motorbike trek, I was treated to this view of the coastline.

Biking

2006-12-24T03:11:00.000-08:00

I've been biking around Chiang Mai this past week, wearing a tie and black pants and shoving my resume at English language schools. I applied to 17 the first two days I was here, but since they're all expat-run, I have to wait until after New Years to hear back from them. I have one job in January so far for 15 hours proctoring English exams for one week. It's a foot in the door and I hope things just snowball from there. Other than that, it's been boring and pretty lonely waiting for work. I cruised through the first season of Lost, pirated of course, in a matter of days.

A great pleasure has been urban biking. Besides the heinous bus fumes that cling to my nostrils even after showing, it is a wild pursuit. I enjoy taking to the streets aggressively after being taught to drive so defensively in the states. You just put yourself out in an intersection and let traffic figure its own way around you. And being on a bike means that at stoplights I can thread my way to front of the pack every time and get a jump on the green light. Thrilling stuff.

One of my favorite intersections in Chiang Mai is one that features quite prominently in the middle of the street an enormous tree. It is near a Wat so I think there must be a spiritual significance that required the tree to stay even as the highway crews paved around it. As a token gesture the bottom three feet of the trunk are painted reflective white, I guess to highlight to motorists that yes this is tree that they must swerve to avoid. A good example of the brand of Thai logic that I may never understand.

Crooning

2006-12-22T21:53:00.000-08:00

There is a style of pop music in Thailand sung by men that shoots for a kind of aural heartbreak. Whispery verses and weepy drawn-out choruses. And men, all over the place, sing along to it loudly and in public. It surprises me every time. Picture this, Americans. You're at Stop n Shop. A Kenny G song comes over the loudspeaker. And then your bagger, some local tough, is belting out the saxophone solo in perfect time. He's still bagging but with his eyes closed. On the high note he scrunches up his face and when it's over he breathes out slowly. Then it's done. He's back to doing what he does and he's still cool. He probably doesn't even realize what just happened. Sure it sounds out of place in the US but I'm surrounded by these crooners all the time here. It just takes a Rain or a Labaa Nuun song and they're off. At a gas station, at a restaurant, in line for the movies. It's liberating.

Movies Part Deux

2006-12-18T00:26:00.000-08:00

Just a note. In my one week in Bangkok I went to the movies four times. It's my thing. I saw, in chronological order:

Casino Royale
Deja Vu
Happy Feet
Casino Royale

I wouldn't have seen the Bond flick again but I was in Bangkok with Louise, my host, and she wanted to know just what the movie theater looked like. Once we were inside...I couldn't hold back.

I noticed that on the second viewing the special effects were less interesting, but the acting really came through. I was particularly impressed with the supporting cast. Jeffrey Wright really needs some more big roles, especially now that he's proved his chops to a wider audience with Syriana.

Cambo

2006-12-17T23:48:00.000-08:00

I spend the week after Thanksgiving traveling through Cambodia with the other Languagecorps students. We entered the country on foot, which I would not recommend. They call the border towns "border towns" for a reason. Going from Thailand at Aranya Prathet into Poipet on the Cambodian side of customs was like getting punched in the face. All of a sudden the pavement, which had formerly graced the road, was now piled in clumps by gutters and in the back of rickshaws. The streets were made of red dusty clay with potholes big enough to hide a child. All kinds of adaptive rickshaws were there, each individually tailored to a victim of landmines with a specific combination of missing limbs. We walked over a dried up river bed that was almost flowing again with plastic bottles.

The facemasks that Thais wear to protect from the street pollution had seemed sensible, if a little quaint. The Cambodians wearing facemasks looked as if they were about to pull out a gun.

We went to a bus station but were told that no buses were running from the border to Siem Reab, the city near the Angkor temples. I knew that the map had said this road was a national highway, and this was the only way from the border to the interior. I was pretty sure they were pulling a fast one on us, because the only other option was a private taxi driven by the bus driver. I watched as four backpackers pooled their money to buy a ride to Siem Reab. They piled into a car without a licence plate and shutters on all the windows. The back windshield was cracked, and I watched the car almost get in an accident right out of the front gate. Only when I ran into these backpackers again by chance in Angkor Wat was I totally certain they had not been simply driven around the corner and shot.

We ended up taking two taxis over three hours of the most bumpy roads imaginable. The entire trip went by grass huts built up on stilts with farm animals underneath and the family out working the rice fields. I saw many many children not in school, fishing with nets around the edges of the rice paddies. Occasionally we would pass a coconut plantation or a lotus pond, choked with pink and white lotus flowers. The scene repeated itself over and over.

Cambodia was an exhausting country to travel through, in large part because of the extreme poverty I saw. Everywhere I went people approached me as a source of money. I could see it in their eyes and in the way they asked for my money first, and then spoke to me second. Just navigating through the streets filled with trash and bad drivers in Phnom Penh was a task, and then coming to terms with the wild extremes of the country- the horror the country's legacy of genocide and the cities' stark poverty contrasted with the beauty of the country side and the beaches.

It's hard for me to figure out the most appropriate way to travel through a country like that. I don't want to feel guilty for the money I have, but I also want to know that I have spent my time and money in a way that not only benefits me but helps the people I interact with too. Because of these thoughts, there were a few rules I held myself to there. I never bought anything from a kid. I didn't like the idea of them working rather than being from school, and I had no idea of the circumstances of their business. They were most likely brought to the tourist areas by human traffickers, the same people who collected the money they made. So I traded things like bracelets with them, something that they would be more likely to keep and that would have a different value for them than money. I also never gave beggars money, which was hard because so many of them really looked like they needed it. But I decided that I was not in that country just to give away my money. And so I felt fine paying the people who performed services for me, like cooked my food and provided transportation and shelter. But the ones who did nothing but beg, I did not want to reward them. Besides, I think donation to a cause would be more helpful and more fair than money to just one person on the street.

I'm looking forward to settling down in one place, as I've said before because I've spent enough time leaving traces on other places while travelling- financially, culturally, etc. I want to stay still long enough for Thailand to leave its traces on me- with some language, cultural competency, maybe even some new friends.

all that I heard about it, it's true

2006-12-11T09:12:00.000-08:00

So two major rumors about Thai movie theaters were confirmed for me tonight. First, when you buy your ticket, a schematic of the theater comes up on a screen and you get to select your seat. I was boggled by the choices, so the clerk chose me a corner seat with plenty of legroom. An argument for getting there early. Second, the national anthem does indeed play before the start of the movie, and a short montage of unabashed devotion for the king is shown. The king taking pictures, the king playing a saxophone, the king in uniform, the king helping up a cripple. And all with those coke-bottle glasses. Seriously, I see men in the street wearing big chunky glasses and I wonder if they're trying to riff on the king's signature look.

And a short bit on Bangkok. I'm staying here waiting for some job applications to ripen, and while I do I'm staying in the dingiest guest house imaginable. To put things in perspective, at the pharmacy today I paid more for some soap and a stick of chapstick than I did for the night before. I checked in there at midnight after my flight from China and I haven't been able to find another room nearby yet. It's peak season in Bangkok for the nappy-dread cheap-living hippie crowd and the shower that I share with ten people on my hall hasn't been used yet. I didn't realize that the funk that trails them was a carefully cultivated odeur. It's just one of the merit badges that belongs on the chest of the backpacker Eagle Scout. Along with a knock-off shirt of the local beer of every country you've traveled in, a camera that cost more than the month you spent in a Burmese fishing village, and a tired schtick about the number of Americans who even own a passport (20% according to the sarong-wrapped globetrotter who accosted me at Angkor Wat. Well 100% of the Americans in Cambodia have one, I replied, and isn't that a start? She told me that wasn't the point).

The saving grace of my day was the movies- almost empty airconditioned theater, orange Fanta sucked out of a plastic bag with a straw, and Daniel Craig far exceeding my expectations as the newest James Bond.

2006-11-26T17:27:00.000-08:00

Back in Thailand now after more than two weeks of travel in Cambodia and China. There is much to tell about those trips but first-

I want to tell the honest story of my time in South-East Asia. So it wouldn't be complete without a story of the sex show that I saw in Pattaya a few weeks ago. But I will preface it with some background on the sex industry in Thailand.

After living Pattaya I am extremely critical of the prostitution industry. It feels predatory, like all these gross old men are using their wealth to take advantage of young women. I also feel uncomfortable around such blatant objectification. Sex and obscenity are paraded around Walking Street and Beach Road in a numbing profusion.

But I have learned something about the Thai perspective since I arrived, after talking to some former bargirls who work at Languagecorps and also doing some reading on my own. Many of the girls move to Pattaya from the north-eastern provinces, an area known as Esarn and comparable to rural Appalachia in the US. At as young as 15 they can quickly make huge sums of money, most of which they mail home to support their family. They come and live above a bar with the other dancers in a strange sorority. They learn rudimentary English, how to smoke a cigarette, and the art wrapping men around their finger. What they are really looking for is someone who will support them for the rest of their life. Ideally the bargirl will find a farang who falls in love with her, someone who even after he leaves Thailand will continue to send checks. Some men never really believe the girl is a prostitute; they just pay for her apartment and food and for her family's tractor repairs.

Sex is not given such a sacred treatment as it is in Western culture. I have heard it compared to scratching an itch. From the Thai point of view the girls are the ones doing the exploitation. It is they who are taking advantage of the weak-willed, wealthy farangs for their own gain. There is a legend of the "Swedish village" in eastern Thailand where several enterprising bargirls built themselves mansions for themselves and their families, all funded by a group of Swedish sex tourists.

This doesn't make what happens acceptable to me, for it can still be dangerous and traumatic business and one that a 16 year old should never even know about. However, I feel humbled to have my cultural assumptions put into perspective.

So our randy Languagecorps teacher took us out to a sex show, claiming it was a part of Pattaya that we couldn't miss out on. It was on the second floor of a bar on Walking Street, somewhat calmer than the frenzied beer bars that border the street.

The first thing I noticed was that the crowd was not all men, but largely couples and mixed-gender groups. The crowd felt more like an audience than a pack of wolves. The show was as raunchy as I had expected, but I was surprised by its gaudy glamor. In between acts like Popping Balloons with Darts Shot from Vagina a team of ladyboys pranced out and did lipsynch to 80s hits. There were five of them, bedecked with rhinestones and animal print thongs and I could just picture them up late practicing their choreography while one of them worked a sewing machine, adding ruffles to their matching skirts.

The show had the low-budget charm of a travelling vaudeville act or a Wild West burlesque hour. The same few girls came out over and over in different costumes and inserted and popped and squeezed a veritable buffet of food and drink with their vaginas. If it had been printed on a piece of broadsheet with exciting fonts about 100 years ago, this is how I imagine some of the acts would have been described.

Smoking Cigarette with Vagina!
Opening Coke Bottle with Vagina!
Blowing Out Birthday Candles with Vagina!
Putting Egg in Vagina, Slamming Body to Floor, Removing Unbroken Egg!

The crowd gasped and shouted encouragement at the right times. They ate and drank in their seats and yelled at the girls and the girls yelled right back. Props failed and costumes got caught in fans, but that was all part of the low-budget nature of the show. It was like a body tricks talent night with a focus on the crotch. It tied together for me a lot of the stunning inconsistencies I see sometimes in Thai culture- the effortless blend of high and low culture, of seriousness and hilarity, and of sexuality and everyday occurance.

Chiang Mai

2006-11-21T07:18:00.000-08:00

Languagecorps took a trip this weekend up to Chiang Mai, via overnight train. I liked the experience of travelling under the cover of darkness, sleeping in a tiny room with three strangers. It felt equal parts Some Like it Hot and Murder on the Orient Express.

I was relieved to see that not all of Thailand is as seedy as Pattaya. Prices there were a shade more expensive, which I imagine go hand in hand with the streets not smelling like feces. The Thais were a little less aggressive and a little more self-confident. I sensed that this was because they were living lives that depended less directly on the tourist dollar. I ate lunch at a place where I had a hard time communicating my wants and ended up with liver soup. But given the choice I'd rather eat at a place where I'm ignored than where my every need is catered to hungrily. I felt a little more independent there, as if my trip was less defined by stereotypical tourist traps. There were of course hundreds of tourists in the city but the farang-Thai experience seems a little more casual, more human. I am thinking seriously of moving up there in mid-December to look for work. There several universities in the city and several libraries and museums too, so I would not be starved for culture.

My favorite part of the trip was a night excursion that we made almost on a whim. We had been told by someone in Pattaya to look into the Royal Flower Celebration while we were up in Chiang Mai. We asked around and discovered that the celebration was 8 km outside of the city. Confused, we hired a songtauw to bring us out there. The celebration was larger than I could possibly have imagined. The space took up many acres, like the size of an amusement park, all in celebration of this, the King's 60th year on the throne. And the entire thing was for flowers. Great sculpted fields of flowers planted so as to spell out Chiang Mai, or Long Live the King. Some thirty countries entered the show with pavillions celebrating their agricultural heritage. As many corporations had exhibits on the future of farming, bioengineering and food. All together it looked something like an agricultural World's Fair. In the center of the park was a giant temple and a massive photo of the king, wearing his signature coke-bottle glasses.

The thing that boggled my mind about it was the number of people there. In my estimation there might have been as many as 50,000 people and possibly many more. And more surprising, almost every single one was Thai. The popular clothing this year is a yellow polo shirt with the king's insignia on the breast pocket. A good two thirds of the crowd was wearing these lucky shirts.

Becky and I went wandering around the park, and got lost in the back near the rubber tree farm. There were few lights, but we heard music. I thought it was live music, because after all this park had restaurants, an art gallery, and a theater. Why not. So we pushed through the trees and stumbled on the park's daycare center. Only it was 8 PM and about 8 of the park employees had taken it over for an impromptu karaoke session. They had set up the monitor on the train set and the singer was dancing around a pile of building blocks. They called us over and before we knew it we were singing the Eagles with them. I beat out a rhythm on a toy xylophone while another guy drummed on a dollhouse. They glanced around occassionally and I imagined that if their boss had found them they might have been in some trouble. On the other hand karaoke is such an obsession here their boss was probably the one shoving the microphone in my face, telling me to sing backup for him on Hotel California.

The Art of Traffic

2006-11-14T02:44:00.000-08:00

Known to foreigners as baht buses, songtauw serve as Pattaya’s primary means of public transportation. These modified pick-up trucks run a proscribed route through the city, and you can flag any one down and ride it through all the major streets.

The name songtauw refers to the two benches running lengthwise in the bed of the pickup. Passengers sit on the benches covered by a metal awning that is wired with several doorbells. When you are ready to get off you simply push the button and a bell rings in the cabin of the truck. The driver pulls over to the side of the street and you put 10 baht into his hand- about 30 cents.

I go to my practice teaching job at Pattaya Memorial Hospital at 3:30 in the afternoon. The baht buses that come by are going downtown filled with uniformed kids just out of school, hookers just woken up and still adjusting their makeup, and sweaty old expats heading down to the beach for an early happy hour. I do my best to flag down one that is almost full but not quite. If you pick the right one, all the seats will be taken. The only option then is to cling to the back, standing on the metal bar that old women use to step up into the truck. And if the ride is meant to be a truly great one, the songtauw will have a metal rail that wraps around its sides and back. Then you can lean against it and feel like the traffic is all around you.

There is an art to pretending that the Brownian motion of Pattaya traffic does not promise a collision at each blink. I am learning this composure from a girl who rides sidesaddle on the back of a moped, holding a cell phone to her boyfriend’s ear while he drives. And I discovered from the street vendors who run back and forth across the busiest streets, pick your line and hold to it, and traffic will work around you.

So when I’m leaning off the back of the baht bus, watching the pavement under my shoes and the roiling wake of mopeds behind me, I can now lean back against the railing, canted against the movement of the truck, and rest my hands behind my head in a picture of calm. I’m not in the full lotus position but I think of Buddha anyway, the standout example of composure around these parts.

Cultural Literacy

2006-11-09T08:26:00.001-08:00

Last weekend was Loy Krathong, a traditional Thai festival where they weave rafts out of banana leaves and float them out to sea in the evening. The krathong (raft) is covered in flowers and garnished with a candle and a few baht coins. As it floats away you are meant to let go of the bad things from the past year and think good thoughts for the future.

I came back to Languagecorps the day of Loy Krathong to find some of the girls who work at the bar making their own krathongs. I managed to communicate my curiosity and they invited me to make my own, a "farang krathong" if you will. I and another Languagecorps student Joe sat down to create our masterpiece together. It came out rather lopsided, with a layer of folded banana leaves, a layer of flowers, and then a second tier of folded leaves with the candle and some insense. I thought it had a certain naive panache. Joe described it as "when you hit a grand slam on your first at-bat." We were very proud of it, but the girls kept laughing at us when we tried to talk to them. They finally took a picture of us with our krathong, and Joe the surfer flashed the hang-loose thumb and pinky wave. This made the girls laugh even harder.

We went to beach and floated it away, which would have been peaceful if there hadn't been several thousand tourists doing it at the same time, and setting firecrackers off in the process. It felt like a warzone. Some kind of kratongs are actually plastic bags tied to sterno cans that lifted off the ground like hot air balloons. Those were particularly dangerous when they caught fire several hundred feet in the air and then began to descend into the street.

Anyway, the next day in Thai class our teacher Jam taught us, at our request, some Thai slang and some words about Loy Krathong. To my great embarassment I discovered that the word for banana (gluay) is just a tone mark away from the word for the male member. All the time while making my krathong I had asked for more banana leaves and the girls had giggled uncontrollably. Bow I suspected why. Also, I discovered, I had been using the word for transvestite- kathoey- and krathong interchangeably. And to top it all off, Joe's hang-loose hand in the girl's photo in Thai signaled water buffalo horns- extreme stupidity. Not the smooth assimilation into Thai culture that we imagined it to be.

2006-11-03T10:13:00.000-08:00

The karaoke bar behind my apartment burned down the other night. At around 11:30 I heard singing and laughing from my room, which all of a sudden got louder. I assumed the party was just picking up steam until I heard shouts and screams. I went to the window and saw flames. I didn't know how much trust to put in the Pattaya Fire Department. If the fire got bigger, I thought, it could easily jump from the tree over the bar to the tree behind the Language Corps building. So I filled my backpack with irreplaceables and went up to the roof to watch. Eventually the firemen came and put out the fire. One of the bargirls on my street told me the next morning that the fire had started when a lantern was knocked loose and spilled on a wall. The flames quickly reached a propane tank, which exploded. Amazingly, nobody was hurt.

Pattaya

2006-10-31T07:09:00.000-08:00

The city of male fantasy made manifest. Sweaty salty heat rolls through the streets in the evenings as the expats take their newfound girlfriends to dinner for two dollar Thai barbeque. One end of the buffet line thronged with farangs, foreigners, with chicken, ice cream, potato salad. The other end with squid, tripe, liver, cabbage. Paunchy man and mincing girl meet again at the table to roast their food over a bucket of hot coals and to eke out small talk.

Farangs who’ve lived here for years don’t know the language. It’s too hard to learn, they say, particularly to read. They are illiterate and simply let their money speak for them. It seems to have spoken persuasively, for bartenders and shopkeepers all know rudimentary English and The Economist and orange marmalade are on the shelves of the grocery store.

Islands off the coast feature uzi firing ranges and KFC delivers anywhere in the city. For the right price foreign criminals can purchase the golden visa- 10 years time here uninterrupted. The nexus of it all is Walking Street. There you can hire a bargirl for a ping-pong ball show or a basket f--- or just to talk down the price of a fake Rolex for you in the street. Lady-boys that you can’t tell until you look at the adam’s apple. Sixteen year olds swimming naked in a fish tank in Boy Town. It’s all in your price range.

My street is a holding pen for farangs, a European playground with rooms rented for as long as a tourist visa lasts. To the left of Language Corps is Jensen’s Danish Bar. To the right, Big Joe’s British Sausage. Everywhere are bilingual signs, saying Tourist Food, Not Too Spicy. My favorite is Rian’s Restaurant. 75 cent green curry chicken with mint, lime, figs, and coconut milk but with Foster’s posters on the wall to draw in the Australians. I eat lunch there everyday.

“We’ll get that movie from Blockbuster,” someone says after dinner. A man nicknamed Blockbuster walks by and pulls out a satchel full of burned DVDs. A woman on a motorcycle slows down outside my door and points to her sidecar, outfitted with a gas grill for roasting pork while she drives. I wave her on. It's all affordable but there's too much to buy.

Daddy's Cafeteria

2006-10-29T02:12:00.000-08:00

I am grateful for the time that I got to spend in China- a week in Dinghai where Mary teaches bookended by short stints in Shanghai. I spend most of my first three days there inside, reading and watching movies. But in the evenings, Mary and her roommate Tyler would come home from work and we went to the market to buy food for dinner. The butcher was my favorite part, a wizened old woman who hacked at the pork with an axe. At the edge of her cutting board was a tray of kidneys, uncovered, and people passing by would shuffle through them idly.

One day Mary took me to her school Zhoushan Zhong Xue to eat lunch. The food was mediocre, but I learned how to say one important thing- naga shi baba da shi tong (this is Daddy's cafeteria).

Travelling the streets of Dinghai was my favorite part of the day. All manner of bicycles, rickshaws, mopeds, and various crossbreeds choke the road. Anyone changing lanes or anyone who witnesses someone changing lanes rings their bell furiously and the street is filled with a tinny chatter. At every stop light the bicycles line up so that I was reminded of my time as a skier in a mass start.

Another curious part of life is that every night in the city square, maybe 1000 people gather to dance in unison. Mary and I went one night to watch. One man working a pushcart full of speakers plays the music and somehow everyone seems to know the moves to song after song. I wondered how everyone came to know these dances until I saw at the preschool near Mary's apartment about 150 four year olds doing a similar morning workout. On Friday at Mary's school they had a day off for a school-wide track and field event. At the opening ceremonies many groups of several hundred students put on dances. It's a lifetime thing apparently.

Beijing Airport

2006-10-22T19:17:00.000-07:00

Before my program starts in Thailand, I am spending a week in China visiting Mary. My first experience with China was a trying one.

After a 14 hour flight from JFK, I arrived in the Beijing Airport to find that my flight was delayed by two hours. I couldn't fall asleep, however, because a group of businessmen were growing angry about the delayed flight. As I watched, they circled around the desk at the gate and started pounding on it. Some of them started shouting and one guy even begin running through the crowd. He would point and people and shout, and they would shout back. Finally someone explained to me that the flight was going to arrive in Shanghai after the buses stopped running and he wanted compensation for the taxi home. Others seemed to agree with him and crowd became restless. Eventually the plane arrived, and we boarded only to sit there for 45 minutes. An announcement on the intercom said that because of mechanical difficulties the flight was cancelled all together.

Back in the terminal, things turned to total pandemonium. Many more people thronged the desk shouting, and as I watched incredulous, one businessman took a swing at a airline steward and had to be restrained. Finally an older passenger stood up and gave an impassioned speech, with much pointing and fist pumping. The crowd ate it up, egging him on and clapping. I was relieved, thinking that he had secured a flight for us, but the guy next to me said that the man had secured a meeting with Air China and needed a ten person delegation to represent the passengers in the presentation of our demands.

What followed was like something like a talk show popularity contest. Anyone in the crowd could stand up, and if the applause was loud enough he or she would run to the front of the room, hands clasped in victory. When ten people had been assembled the crowd gave one final cheer of support, and they retreated to the boarding tunnel for a summit. I could see a few other people as incredulous as I around the edge of the room- some pretended to be asleep while others watched warily. But the crowd on the whole seemed to be really into it.

Several hours later, at around 2 AM, the delegation emerged from the tunnel to much applause and the leader spoke again. I thought, now finally we have a flight. But someone next to me explained that the delegation had drafted a formal letter of complaint to Air China with three demands: a flight to Shanghai, 500 RMB (about $65 US) in compensation, and a personalized apology from a member of the Air China administration. Several volunteers circled the crowd gathering signatures of approval and then the delegation disappeared again.

I had now been awake for 21 of the last 24 hours and could hardly see. I think I feel asleep because I awoke to someone shaking me, saying it was time to collect my bucks. At around 4 AM the delegation had reached a decision with Air China, and all three stipulations had been met. I joined a line of passengers dutifully collecting their money, booed with the rest of the crowd as a wizened old woman apologized on behalf of Air China and the Beijing Airport, and finally boarded a plane some time after 5 AM.

Welcome to my Soapbox

2006-10-21T13:10:00.000-07:00

Here I will write about my experiences in South-East Asia without having to send mass emails. I may also include the occasional opinion piece, or include photos.