A long way from anywhere - Thailand part 2

Log date:14 September, 21h. 2.5 days since last report.
Location: near Lamphun, Thailand
Kilos of longans eaten: probably 3 or 4



If I may be forgiven the comparison, and not as if I would actually really know, but the festival had all the suspicious markers of a church festival in a small town: the whole town was there and there was praying involved. Except this time it's at a buddhist festival of (to me) unknown import, and it happens annually. The whole congregation gathers in shaded rows of seats outside the temple, and there are baskets of what I assume are offerings or gifts (consisting of small portions of different fruits or candies or other things). The temple was of, as I would later discover, the usual style of architechture: rectangual shape, a long nave (again, forgive the comparison), and with a steep, tiled roof of whose eaves curved slightly upward where the gutters would be. The building was accessed by a broad staircase at the front, and it is this featue I find most remarkable about the building, for what would have been the handrails were the bodies of two huge and magnificant dragons, whose heads reared upwards at the base of the stairs (Naga staircase, they're called). The entire building was worked in gold and mirrors, and the interior was covered in mural panels depicting scenes from something but in altogether opulent fashion. The ceremony involved sitting and waiting, following our small group leader into the temple where one monk, seated crosslegged at the front, intoned almost a constant prayer. The crowd remained lively and talkative until at one point the entire assembly clasped hands as the monk intoned words of particular import; I, for my part, kept myself occupied by wondering whether the little kid next to me would either (a) get bored and cause a ruckus or (b) fall off his chair.



Needless to say, this is not the kind of event to which foreigners usually come; the temple served a tiny village of about 200 years and, despite its opulence, is unlikely to draw visitors from farther afield. And as i walked through the crowds, I could feel eyes following me, and curious smiles turned my way. I had said once that I always wanted to see what it's like being member of an physically obviously minority, just to see how one feels when one is automatically categorized on an ascriptive basis. True, the same was true of Egypt, but here the attention was much more subdued and perhaps much friendlier (or at least less exploitative or harassing).



Later in the afternoon we visited another temple in Lampuhn, to donate towards the completion of a toilet for the premesis. Our donation was accepted by a novice and a monk, the latter saying a blessing before tying a small bracelet for good luck around each of our arms. We were accomanied by two elder ladies of the district in our viewing of the construction of said toilets: two labourers stuccoing the walls, supervised by two or three monks with the requisite shaved tonsure and saffron robes. I wonder what it's like to be a monk; not only the daily regimen but also if monks still hold the same status they once did, if the institution of 'monkhood' is still such an integal part of society.

At one point we went to the Thai version of walmart, which means it sold any and everything (kind of like Mustafa's in Singapore but way less cool and way less random) from knickers to knicknacks and everything in between. I set off in search of deodorant, having somehow in the bustle misplaced mine, and was dismayed to be confronted with an entire wall of them: and almost all of them bearing the jaunty label "whitening". Why, pray tell, why oh why does deodorant need to be whitening?? What is there to whiten on one of the few parts of my body which see the sun as often as republicans vote for healthcare reform (almost never and only under duress)? I get the point that white is beautiful and is therefore the kind of label that should make you want to purchase any other kind of beauty product, provided it takes your genetically predispositioned mocha exterior and turns it into the tasteless but apparently desired white chocolate variety, but deodorant?? Reeeeeeally? And while we're at it, can we please have that as our standard of beauty too? (not sayin' this just 'cause I'm Irish) We'd have a whole lot less of skin cancer. And orange people. Anyways, my friend wanted bras and underwear, so appropriately we headed for the lingerie department (lingerie in french, by the way, refers to the room for cleaning linens and not racy women's underthings - at least it did in my building). We apparently needed help with something, so we were immediately descended upon by four heavily made-up young women who cooperatively managed to find us what we were looking for. Now that's service. Or overkill.



We set off this morning in a small pickup truck filled with a small possee of small women, cackling like hens and shrieking with laughter at the drop of a longan. I felt disproportionate crammed into the backseat, and except for the part where my head pretty much touched the cieling it was a comfortable ride. We were off on a Random Adventure, which wasn't actually random at all but simply undisclosed and subject to change. I felt like someone had captured three overexcited small parrots and locked them inside my head. Read: I was having trouble adjusting to conversations carried on as if the partner were standing on a distant mountaintop and not, for example, in the seat next to the speaker. And the custom of putting all cell calls on speakerphone -- such that the entire car can contribute with shrill smatterings or peals of laughter, again at full volume -- will also be more difficult for me to appreciate. Or I just had a bit of a headache. I was just along for the ride anyways. We managed to stop at another magnificent temple, similar to the others we had viewed but even more splendid, and appropriately flanked by stalls selling every tourist bauble your heart could desire. And as I was accompanied by Thais I was exempt from the entry fee (a trick which didn't work at the museum, unfortunately), leaving me to fend my way through the tourist throngs to the best picture-taking spot. Not to cheapen the experience: this temple compound is perhaps one of, if not the, most beautiful buildings I have ever seen. The opulence never seems gaudy, and on the contrary seems to highlight the extreme beauty of the place. It made me want to shave my head and become a monkess just to be able to live there.

Our late afternoon stop was a market and artisan's street in Chiang Mai, where every kind of home furnishing imaginable was available for sale, probably hand carved out of teak or hardwood or woven of rattan or something else. While some evidence of tourist infrastructure existed, I had the impression that the entire place didn't see more than four score of visitors in a day, and our salesladies were certainly hiding a glint of desperation as my companions bargained for my purchases. By this point I had formed an alliance with my fellow back-seat passanger, a bird-like (or fairy-like) woman also likely in her late 40s (being a school friend of my host) with an impish smile, a strangely high voice and a childlike demeanor. She and I shared various jokes, mostly related to the ever-expanding bag which acquired all of our purchases and food throughout the day.



It's not like I ever get hungry here. Soon as breakfast is finished, I am called to the table to consume yet another dish of some persuasion, which my hosts emphatically explain has "no pork no pork," which is our accepted code for "vegetarian." As I suspected would happen, my acquiescence to eating fish here as a compromise born of the necessity of traveling has been taken to mean that I _want_ fish or seafood at all times, and frankly I am happy now when there is food without it. But it is such a part of the cuisine that finding dishes without fish, oyster sauce or shrimp paste will prove difficult. Still, refusing meat has allowed me to decline the skewered barbeque frogs without insult (though I likely would have been unable to eat them, meat or no meat, as I couldn't even stand the look of them). Dinners here have often included up to 15 people, friends and family and neighbors and other random people whose names and connection I have forgotten, and when I can no longer pretend to even half follow the conversation based on occasional translations and random guessing, I watch the lizards on the wall. There's usually around five or six of them, scattered here and there like wriggly brown blotches on the pale plaster. Their locomation is so comical as one front and the opposite hind leg advance in unison, such that the entire body curves laterally with each step. In a fluid motion it looks quite natural, but to see a lizard creep up on a fly is to watch the tiny critter bend his entire body to one side and then to the other with each step. Some of them hide behind the lightbulb, and I think that's the most sought-after place to be given the series of mini battles fought for the privilege. Two little lizards will be behind the light and a third will approach and want in; instead of accommodating him nicely, he feels the need to stage a coup. He arches his back, a bit like an inchworm, and creeps carefully a few steps forwards until he is just in position --all the while keeping his body bowed upwards-- and then he springs into action. A brief flurry of movement and he has displaced his rivals, to reign over the lamp until the next challenger comes...

The Thailand Trip - part 1

Log date: 12 September.
Location: unknown.
Food poisoning: not yet.

“Helllllllloooooooo,” came the voice from the other side. “How aaaaaaaare you?” it continued. “I’m fine,” I replied, “how are you?” “I’m gooooood,” came the answer, distance, bad cell reception and an adventurous take on English stretching the other’s words as if they were taffy. “Where aaaaaaaare you?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

I’m somewhere in Thailand. To be more specific, I’m somewhere in northern Thailand, “a half hour” (read: at least an hour) outside of Chiang Mai in some town whose name I neither know nor can pronounce. We passed an eternity of town followed by relatively secluded road—still with small shops and occasional restaurants—followed by more town and more road. The shops we passed were reminiscent of small shops in most other countries I’ve been to, selling bits of this and that, or snack food, or drinks, or clothes, narrow in width and in offerings, open ever hopefully well past the time when you would expect business. I wondered if Thailand was—like Europe—more or less completely settled, if the peoples who had been in this area, building towns and destroying others and creating kingdoms at least since the 14th century had managed to cover more or less every square mile with human civilization. I was expecting the familiar interval of town, nothing, town, nothing, town, and instead was rewarded with constant and continuous evidence of human habitation.

We were also rewarded with one dead dog and one motorcycle accident, evidence both that this country is still on the road to modernization (or at least to road safety regulations and crash helmets). Traffic is of the blithely hectic variety, as if everyone is purposefully and happily unaware that riding against traffic on a motorcycle (or on the centerline) might not be a good idea, that twenty people should perhaps not be crammed into a bus, and one would think nothing of blocking six lanes of traffic to eke a tractor trailer through a U-turn. Back forward back forward back forward back forward. Repeat.



As we pass the little shops and the hawker-center style restaurants, the dingy buildings and the scrubby little cars, I realize I am not surprised. I don’t think abject poverty would surprise me much either, and I wonder at my equanimity. Nor am I struck by any feature particularly ‘Thai’ of the arrangement, simply that I am in an area not quite so rich as that to which I am perhaps accustomed – though the signs are identical wherever you go. Both here and in my home town, junked vehicles, bits of trash lying around, overgrown gardens and half-feral animals are signs of less well-off areas.

I sit in the back and chat with my colleague, a Thai friend whom I met when I was an intern at the UN agency where she works in Geneva. And I realize how vastly different our backgrounds are, and how incredible it is for her to have achieved what she has. My circumstances will qualify me for the kind of job I want to have, but for those born of average means in the northern corner of a country like Thailand have a lot longer of a road than mine to get to a place like Geneva. Her English has always been quite good, but the contrast of most of the people we have met—who do not speak much beyond “how are you?”—only underlines her ability.

One week ago I was in Malaysia, one day ago I had just arrived in Thailand from Singapore, and one hour ago I was learning the word for Gecko in Thai and wondering if the shrimps were staring at me.

Upon my arrival in Bangkok, I was whisked away to the home of my colleague’s friends, apparently a well-known Thai singer and movie star, who seems to be enamored of me and was surprised to find that not only am I not married (his son, at 21, is soon to be made a father by his wife of two years), I don’t even have a boyfriend. He thought he might arrange something, but I declined. We dined on lobster, drank wine, swam in the pool, and drank wine _while_ swimming in the pool. He, his wife, his daughter, his son, his son’s pregnant wife, his brother, the brother’s wife and their three children all apparently live in the same massive and labyrinthine house, which I suspect was originally two houses somehow connected together by way of a purple-carpeted, mirrored walkway. There are at least three or four living-room-type-areas I could discern, each with a flatscreen TV, plus winter gardens and kitchens and bars and eating areas. I got lost twice looking for my room. Despite their apparent status they welcomed me warmly, fed me well and tried out their English. The daughter, an 11-year-old budding soap opera star, taught me the words for pool, water, leaf, tree, glass, hand, and other things. Which I have since forgotten. Our morning consisted of breakfast, a massage, curried crab for lunch, and a trip to the airport. Life is horribly hard.

I sat on the plane and forced myself through forty pages on Indonesia’s history and politics, catching up on missed work for a class on the region and its politics. I realize (well, I knew this before but now it is even more apparent) I know nothing about this place, or any other place over here. I knew almost next to nothing about either Suharto or Marcos, about where Mindano was or that Malasyian Borneo was ruled by a white guy for over a hundred years. I feel ignorance should be remedied and not bragged about, and so I attack my readings with at least the intention of fervor (which, alas, was conquered by the confusion of a multiplicity of acronyms and the quiet desperation arising in contemplation of the inch-thick stack remaining to me. But nevertheless, I wonder what kind of place these countries today would be if they had been run not quite so kleptocratically, if the leaders had taken just a little instead of everything. I also wonder what it’s like to be in a place like Indonesia when riots are going on, when police fire on protesters, when protesters attack bystanders, when a coup happens. I can’t imagine that.

We land in Chaing Mai amid a trickle (it would be a flood if the plane had been full but it wasn’t) of slightly grubby backpackers, who were all dutifully collected at the gate by an enthusiastic sign-waver. After our hour or so of winding roads and small villages, we arrived at what would be home for the next few days. My colleague’s family has lived in this house for over fifty years. I wonder how many generations have lived in that house, and how many joys and sorrows that house has seen, silent against the passage of time.

I still don’t speak Thai. My vocabulary consists of about five words, and most of that is passive. Therefore, conversation is difficult. My friend’s father is 82 years old, has to more or less gum things rather than chew them, and apparently when he speaks in Thai he’s not always easily understood. But he and I have learned to communicate: he sees me, holds up whatever it is he’s eating or doing, and announces its name. The only time I ever understand him, however, is when the thing happens to be a banana. “Banana!” he calls happily, and I smile and reply, “banana”. My conversation with the rest of my colleague’s family, however, is more limited, as no one can speak much more than a sentence of two of the “where are you from?” and “how old are you?” variety.


(Coolest kitchen ever)