bus day

Today was an impromptu bus day. Bus day is pretty self-explanatory; you spend all day riding buses around a city. Michael and I did this once when we studied in Edinburgh. There, you could buy an all-day bus pass for £2 or so.

Here in Bangkok, there are three known species of buses.

Exhibit A: The 12 baht bus. These look like charter buses, and they have air conditioning.

Exhibit B: The seven baht bus. No A/C, so the windows are always down. Why anyone takes these buses, I'm not sure.

Exhibit C: The free bus.

The only distinguishing characteristic between the free bus and the seven baht bus is a wide blue decal with white lettering that stretches across the top of the front windshield. Free buses are more or less crammed with passengers, depending, of course, on the time of day and where the bus is in its route. There's no A/C, so the best seats are the ones next to windows, where you'll feel a nice breeze while the bus is moving.

Mariela and I took a free bus on part of our trek to church this morning. Last week, we walked the entire way and it took us about an hour. Using the bus meant that we got there in half the time, though we still had to walk for the last 20 minutes of the way. We thought going home the way we came would be easy; we'd just walk to the opposite side of the street and catch a free bus back. How naive we were!

We waited at the bus stop for 20 minutes before sighting a free bus. It didn't stop, though, because it wasn't in the right lane. The next one came about five minutes later. We jumped on, because we were hot and ready to be moving. There are several buses that drive down our apartment's street, but we soon learned that this bus wasn't one of them. It turned left right after we boarded, but we were too tired to get off and wait for another bus. We decided to ride the entire route and see a new part of the city.

It was a long ride, but lots of fun. I think we saw the Grand Palace. It looked fancy, anyway. We'll go back another day to take pictures.


Bubble gum pink taxis - another mode of transportation. You have to make sure the cab drive turns the meter on, though, or he'll try to rip you off by overcharging you. This almost happened to us once, but we jumped out of the cab before he could pull onto the road.


If you're feeling especially adventurous, you can travel
by tuk-tuk. We did this on our second night in Bangkok after that cab driver refused to use the meter. I think we still got ripped off, but we got ripped off a little less than if we had used the cab. And we had a new (if terrifying) experience!

my momma always told me...

I was walking up my street just now, wallet in hand, to buy a kilo of mangosteens from a fruit vendor. I was excited, because I’d memorized the Thai phrase for “Can I have one kilo?”

A man was coming toward me; a fellow foreigner (I know this because he was black). I smiled at him, because in Thailand - the Land of Smiles - that's what you do.

I reached the fruit cart, felt too shy to say my Thai phrase, and bought my mangosteens by just saying “Neung kilo.” Whatever, it got me my fruit.

I turned around to walk back. I hadn’t gone very far when a black Honda stopped next to me with its window rolled down. It was that guy. He asked my name. I told him. He asked if I was working in Thailand. I said yes, and asked what he was doing here. He works here, too. I asked where he was from, and he said Paris.

He has his phone in his hand, looked at it, and asked me for my contact. I told him I didn’t know my phone number, which was true. Then he asked where I was staying. In my head I envisioned responding with, “Sorry, my mom told me never to talk to strangers.” Deciding this would be too juvenile a response, I went with, “Sorry, I’m not comfortable telling you that.”

He said OK, and that maybe we’d meet again.

Thanks, but no thanks, Mr. Parisian stranger! I'm no fool; I just watched the movie “Taken” on the plane coming over here!

crocodile-proof garments

On the van ride to school this morning, one of the girls was telling a story about her former roommate's encounter with a crocodile. Specifically, she was relating how the girl screamed when she saw one two feet away from her and ran away as fast as she could.

Someone made the comment that screaming and running is probably not the best thing to do when faced with a crocodile. My question was, "What is the appropriate response?"

Then I got to thinking. This thought process normally takes place as an inner monologue. Today, however, I was thinking aloud. I said something like this:

Well, you could wear clothes made of iron. Special crocodile clothes. But then if the crocodile bit you, it's teeth might dent the clothes... and it would be like your clothes were biting you.

The girls sitting around me thought it was a really weird thing to say - probably because it was a really weird thing to say. I don't know what happened... It just came out.

buddhist ordination

On Friday at school, the Thai teachers invited us to attend the ordination of one of the teacher's sons into monastic life. From what I understand, every boy becomes a monk for at least a week or so in order to honor his family. That's how it was explained to me, anyway. I didn't see what all the hullabaloo was about if he only donned the saffron robes for 10 days.

The van came to pick us up at our apartment at 6:15 this morning. The temple was about an hour away. There was no traffic that early, and it was really, really nice to get away from the dirty city for a change.

My freshman year, I visited a Hindu temple with the BIC program at Baylor. I remember expecting to see a lot of red and gold, and was surprised when everything was painted in pastel colors. The Buddhist temple today looked like what I had envisioned. It was all red and gold with polished granite steps leading up to the entrance. The roofs were so tall, and steeply slanted.

We looked around the temple a bit and then headed to a pavilion nearby to sit and eat breakfast. Rice, of course, was the main part of the meal. I drank coconut milk straight from a coconut. And there was a bowl of fruit - including my personal favorite: land urchins (also known as rambutan).

After breakfast, we walked, bounced, and danced in a procession back to the temple to the beat of drums and the rhythm of family and friends singing. Some of the Thai teachers showed us hand motions that go with Thai dancing. I tried my best, but it required a good bit of coordination. We circled the temple three times and then dragged our sweat-soaked selves up the steps to the entrance. There, the monk-to-be tossed handfuls of flowers, coins, and folded origami-like flowers into the crowd. Then he went inside to go through some kind of ceremony.

Several of us stayed outside and sat down. One of the Thai teachers, Nummon, taught us the colors and numbers in Thai while we were waiting.

After the ordination, the crowd headed back to the food pavilion, where it was time for lunch. It started out with pieces of pomelo and crispy orange rice chips that looked similar to pork rinds. Then we had a plate of rice noodles, a couple of bowls of soup, and some curry. They kept bringing plates every 10 minutes or so for the next hour and a half. Every time we sat back in our chairs and thought the meal was finished, they'd bring out something new. At noon, when lunch was completely through, we counted 17 different plates of food.

We loaded the bus to go to the floating market. I learned that I'm going to need a better mastery of Thai numbers if I really want to haggle over prices.

costs

I'd like to give everyone an idea of what life here costs. Firstly, the Thai currency is called the baht. The going rate is about 35 baht to one dollar.

35฿ will buy you a fresh fruit smoothie.
40฿ will buy a 1.5 gallon bottle of water.
44฿ ($1.25) will buy a dinner of rice and chicken with garlic sauce, plus a glass bottle of water, in the restaurant in my apartment building.
50฿ will get you into the apartment pool, after you've used up your four free visits each month.
60฿, on days when I'm too exhausted to walk for 40 minutes, will buy a ride home from work in a taxi. A good option for splitting between three people.
100฿ gets you into the movies. I haven't done this yet, but I've heard a lot of hearsay and conjecture about the luxuriousness of their theaters compared with ours.
180฿ will buy you a ONE HOUR Thai massage in the massage parlor in my apartment building. Five dollars an hour. Yeah - I know!
900฿ will buy you a nice used cell phone.

Dehydration, sweating, and sunburns, however, are free for the taking.

culture shock

Hello, friends!

I've been in Bangkok for three days now. My impressions of the city (or the small part of it I've seen, so far): dirty, crowded, awful traffic, full of smells (both savory and foul), loud, and polluted. I'm fully aware that the city will seem better as I get used to it, but right now I'm kind of missing clean air.

Adjusting to everything is hard. I suppose I've got culture shock. I don't know what's going on, I can't communicate or read, I don't know the cultural norms... I'm foreign. Today at the school, for example, one of the Thai teachers came up to the English office to ask us (very apologetically) if we'd come to the nurse's office to have our temperature taken. They wanted to make sure none of us was sick, because one or two of the girls had been feeling ill the day before. This teacher seemed to think we'd be offended by having such an intrusive device as a thermometer placed in our ears for 10 seconds. We told her it was fine, really. I think she believed us, but she said Thais don't like being asked to have their temperature taken. There are lots of little things, I'm sure, that we have no clue about. We've probably offended everyone many times by now.

One of my books said Thais think it's weird and gross to put your fork in your mouth. At every meal, they have a large spoon and a fork. The fork is used to push food onto the spoon, or to hold meat down while you cut it with the spoon. I learned this by watching Star, a Baylor grad who taught last year and signed up for a second term. I've adopted this method to avoid seeming uncouth.

I'll tell you all more about daily life later, but for now, I'm tired and still getting over the jet lag. I miss you all!