a gift

On Saturday night I made my way to Hualamphong train station alone to begin my trip down south. My three friends had already flown to Surat Thani that afternoon. I decided to go the less comfortable -- but more affordable -- route, taking the overnight train followed by a midmorning boat to Ko Samui.

I was in the train station food court getting some pad thai, since the train didn't have real food. I was hot and tired from walking from the bus stop to the station with a heavy backpack.

I ordered my food and flopped down into a chair, observing my fellow diners while I waited. A guy was standing in line wearing a blue polo shirt, a navy coat with big, gold buttons, and a tiny pocketwatch hanging on a chain around his neck. He asked if he could sit with me.

I said OK and asked him if he worked at the train station -- the pocketwatch made me think he was a ticket taker or conductor or something. He said no. I complimented his necklace and we had a nice chat. I learned that he was an art student from Chiang Mai attending university in Bangkok. He was going home for the break between semesters.

As I ate my pad thai, I separated the nefarious bits of tofu from the rest of my food. He eyed it and asked if I didn't like tofu. I asked if he wanted it. He nodded, so I pushed the tofu pile onto his plate.

We finished our meals and as we walked toward the platform, he took off his watch necklace. "Here, I want you to have this," he said, as he dropped it in my hand. I tried to object, but he insisted. I put it on, and he told me it looked good.

His train was at the platform. He asked for my email address and we said goodbye. I sat down to wait for my train. He came over to me a few minutes later, handed me a bag of Bugles corn snacks, and boarded his train.

That's Thai hospitality for you. You know a person for less than an hour and they give you a memento and a snack.

Hey, kids...

Saturday night was... eventful, to say the least. Mostly, Bangkok never ceases to surprise me.

I went out with five friends to check out a nearby bar featuring live folk music. It turned out to be Thai folk music. We stayed for about two and a half minutes.

We walked up the street and stopped at 7-11 so a few people could buy beers. We were standing around, discussing what to do next, when an older white man approached us.

He introduced himself as Dee Dee and said he noticed that we left pretty quick. He was there to offer us his sage advice on entertainment in the city. "I'm a professional," he said.

He asked if we were Khao San Road people. Khao San is the main backpacker strip here. I haven't been there yet, but it's supposed to be full of cheap, dirty bars. "No. Not so much," we told him. We explained that we weren't tourists.

He went on to tell us where to find the best gay sex show on Patpong (a notorious red light district). Then his Thai wife walked up.

We asked where they were going. "Back to our hotel. We just bought a big bag of ganja. You guys know; you're from California."

Erin looked at me and mouthed, "Could this get any weirder?"

"What happens if the police catch you with it?"
"Oh, come on, the police are the ones that sold it to me."

We learned that he'd lived in Bangkok for eight years with his wife before they moved to the U.S. He said something about owning a business that sold designer labels like True Religion, Seven for all Mankind, and a few others that were supposed to impress us.

Before leaving, he wished us luck and held out a downturned fist toward Ryan. Ryan obediently extended his hand, palm up, and received a fistful of pot.

"You kids have a good time."

Sensitive to the fact that we were standing right in the middle of a sidewalk in front of 7-11, Ryan quickly shoved his hand into his pocket. Dee Dee and his wife left, and we started wondering aloud whether the Thai people watching us down the street were authority figures of some kind.

We walked to Saxophone Pub for some blues music, where Ryan spent the rest of the night nervous and fidgety and wondering what would happen if he got caught with that stuff in his pocket.

Gotta love the neverending supply of old, sketchy white men that Bangkok is so ready and willing to host...

a gift

My friends and I were standing near a fruit stand waiting to get a cab tonight when a young guy walked up to buy some papaya. The vendor sliced it up and put it in a plastic bag.

The guy asked for some extra wooden skewers and gave each of us a piece of the fruit, indicating that we were too thin and should eat more. And that was the end of it.

When we got in the cab, both Alyssa and I noted our appreciation of how a guy managed to give four young women papaya in a non-hitting-on-us kind of way.

Way to not be creepy, papaya guy. We affirm you!

crime and punishment

I finished giving the speaking quizzes a few minutes early in my second period, and had nothing to do but mill about and watch Nummon teach.

Suddenly, she stopped and walked over to one of the boys. Standing over his desk, she reached for his backpack and proceeded to calmly shake its contents out all over the floor.

I watched, mouth agape.

Even more surprising -- the student didn't bat an eye. No tears. No pouting. His books, papers, and pencils lay in a heap on the floor for the rest of the period.

She came up to me after class and told me the student never turns in his homework or brings his books to class. She decided to "look for his homework."

thanks, but no thanks.

I mean, I guess monks are regular people, just like everybody else. Some are with it, some aren't.

- Amy

Approaching my favorite smoothie place last night, I saw my coworker, Amy, sitting on a stool out front, chatting with a monk.

I sat down and caught snippets of their conversation. From what I could tell, the monk was trying to invite Amy to go to Las Vegas with him next week.

It was weird on a few levels. 1: Monks generally pay us little or no attention. They aren't allowed to touch or be touched by women. They can't even accept something from a woman's hand. 2: What the heck is a Thai monk going to do in Vegas?

I made a face at her and hummed the Twilight Zone theme song. Then the monk asked me to go to Vegas.

life is like a stick of fish balls...

I don't know when it happened. Perhaps it was all in a moment. Perhaps it was a gradual desensitization. I realized yesterday that the absurd has become so commonplace in my life, I often forget to write about it here. I see it, I process it, and I carry on, unfazed.

Today, I let Bangkok happen to me anew, experiencing it with the help of an Australian friend I met on New Year's Eve.

On our way to meet Mariela for a symphony concert in Lumphini Park, we were approached by a Thai jogger who struck up a conversation with the usual, "Where you come from?"

Hearing I was American, he decided to show off his knowledge of U.S. geography by naming every state and city he could.

Ohhhh... Chicago, Illinois, Utah, Vermont, Minnesota.
Wow, you've seen a lot more of the U.S. than I have...
New Jersey, Connecticut, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas.
Hey, I'm from Texas.
Houston, Dallas, Austin... Nevada, California, San Francisco.

My radar was already set to Ignore, but my friend was amused. After naming the 48 contiguous states, the man started on Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, and... I don't know what else. I stopped listening.

Things like this happen to me all the time. My coworker Amy calls it "The Twilight Zone," which is all too fitting at times.

I forget that tourists don't see this side of Bangkok -- probably because they zip from one place to the next in taxis. They miss out on the abundance of crazy moments to be had by being out there, sweaty and walking with everyone else.

Another quintessential Thailand incident I forgot to mention last week: On Friday at work, Mariela and I found ourselves sitting in a copy room singing "Puff, the Magic Dragon" while the mailman accompanied us on his acoustic guitar. Our next song was "Amazing Grace." He liked my harmonies.

Yes, this is my life.

par-tay numero dos

Just when I thought my job couldn't be any weirder...

I, along with my colleagues Amy and Erin, attended our school's New Year's party on Monday night. It included a talent show and a multi-course meal that cost 300 baht for everyone but us, we were told. Just another reason why the Thai teachers resent us; but that's another topic for another day.

The first course, a soup, came out in a great big tureen. Pikay and Sukjai offered to serve us. "What is it?" Amy asked, as she eyed the gluey, viscous brown broth with mushrooms and clear chunky bits bobbing around.

"It's made from the belly of the fish," Sukjai answered, pointing to his own torso.

Amy was able to gracefully decline. I wasn't so lucky. Pikay made sure to fill my bowl up with delightfully chunky fish belly fat. Does a body good!

I sipped some broth, carefully avoiding solid bits and trying not to think about its contents. Amy breathed slowly, looking away and trying not to "yak all over the table," according to her.

Thankfully, we were distracted by some of the male student teachers performing as sequin-bedecked drag queens. Did I mention that this was the weirdest work party ever?

100-meter dash

Some people here jog in nicely landscaped parks - little oases of green in a world made of concrete.

I, for one, prefer to take my exercise while tearing down a sidewalk in flip flops and a pencil skirt.

Today, I had in mind that I'd take a bus from work to the Suan Lum night bazaar before meeting Alyssa and Mariela to walk to our Wednesday night Bible study. The bus driver had other plans.

I found a seat and the fare collecting lady came to ask where I was going. When I told her, she started talking to me in Thai. I stared up at her with my clueless do-I-look-like-a-Thai-speaker-to-you? look. She kept talking. I gave her a helpless-sounding, "Mai ru kah" ("I don't understand"). She sighed, took my change, and handed me a ticket.

Thirty minutes into the ride, she signaled for me to get off. We were nowhere near the night bazaar and I was confused. "Go to Suan Lum??" I asked. She shook her head. What choice did I have? I couldn't ask what was happening, so I got off.

Annoyed, but needing the restroom, I walked across a granite plaza, up some steps, and through the glass doors of a shopping mall.

I took three steps inside and stopped. I felt I was forgetting something.

Cursing, I wheeled around and ran out the door, pausing on the steps to survey the traffic. I had to find that bus; it was driving away with a bag containing my brand new work shoes! I had only worn them twice.

I spotted the bus 40 yards ahead. Traffic was moving slowly. I wasn't about to let go of those shoes - not when they were within sight.

I ran as fast as my skirt would allow. My flip flops slapped the pavement. Motorcyle drivers and bystanders stared.

I swerved around pedestrians, sprinting like a mad woman, praying the traffic wouldn't pick up speed, and wondering how long I should commit to chasing a pair of shoes that only cost me $4.50.

Traffic stopped and I caught up. I dodged taxis, cars, and motorbikes and ran to the doors, knocking and gesturing wildly. The ticket lady looked at me as if to say, "You again?!"

She and the driver shook their heads. I kept waving until they opened the door. I pointed to my feet - "Shoes!!" - and pointed back to where I had been sitting. The lady walked back with me and laughed when she realized what I was on about. I retrieved my cheap footgear and panted all the way back to the mall.

respect the earth, or else

Today, the primary grades participated in Environment Day.

Like most other things that happen at this school, I spent half of the time trying to figure out the point, and the other half laughing at how ridiculously executed things were.

Case in point: At one station, students learned how to turn perfectly good garbage bags into worthless bits of trash by cutting them up to make shirts and skirts. Good for the environment? Nope. Good for keeping little monkey children preoccupied for 30 minutes? Yep!

The English department covered the five Rs –- Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Repair, and Reject. Students were meant to file through the station, learning about one R at each stop. At the end, they’d take a 15-question quiz of environment dos and don’ts. Ideally, learning would take place.

The Thai teachers in the English department believe the best and most effective way to convince children to learn is to bribe them with crappy, Chinese-made toys.

When the children stopped at our posters, we were supposed to make them answer a question in return for a plastic quarter, penny, nickel, or dime.

They would proceed to the prize table, where they could exchange their coins to pluck a paper leaf from one of hundreds of strings hanging overhead. Each leaf had a letter. They could find out what their mystery letter was and take a piece of junk from the corresponding prize table.

My station was “Repair.”

It started out OK. I read the definition of repair and gave the students examples of things that could be fixed rather than replaced. After about the second or third time I gave my spiel, I could clearly see that they didn’t understand or care.

Then Michael Jackson's "Heal the World" started blaring from one end of the English station. It was all downhill after that.

I couldn't help but feel like I was in theater of the absurd at times: Kristy at my left, trying to explain "hazardous waste" to first graders, Sukjai at my right, yelling in Thai on a megaphone, and some club song on the mix CD singing the word sexy over and over again. Appropriate for schoolchildren? Nope. Appropriate for Environment Day? Nope. Hilarious? Sure was.

We manned our stations from 9:00 to 11:30 this morning, and then after lunch from 1:00 to 2:50.

In the afternoon, my exchange with younger students generally went something like this:

“Repair.”
*silence, and a blank stare*
“Can you say, ‘Repair’? Re-paaaair.”
…
“Repair. Repair. Repair!”
…
“OK, kid, take your plastic dime and go.”



Or,



"Name two things you can repair."
...
"Two things... any two things."
...
"OK, just say a word."
...
"...Or, conversely, do a dance."
...


By the end, I was asking older kids to name a Michael Jackson song to get their token. And then I zoned out and started mentally rewriting "R-E-S-P-E-C-T."

R-E-C-Y-C-L-E,
Find out what it means to me,
R-E-C-Y-C-L-E,
Go on, save a tree!

Sort it for me, sort it for me, sort it for me, sort it for me
Sort it for me, sort it for me, sort it for me, sort it for me...

all i have to say is, "why??"

Ant problems, again.

I was cleaning my room today and picked up my camera battery charger. I noticed some suspicious white lint around the holes and metal prongs where the battery connects to the charger.

I removed the lint and an ant crawled out. And another. And three more. These **** ants are nesting in my camera battery charger!!

One crawled out holding what looked like an egg.

[Insert a long string of profanities]

They keep poking their anty little antennae out. I'm sitting here on the edge of my bed, peering into the hole, cursing, and waiting to annihilate each one.

These kinds of freak things happen to me more than the other teachers. Although, another girl did find mold in her wardrobe recently. It made me feel a little better to have someone to commiserate with.

que dios te bendiga!

Sometimes you want a fruit smoothie and a quiet walk home. Sometimes you get a fruit smoothie and a frantic Peruvian man instead.

I was minding my own business at a corner smoothie shop, sipping on some pineapple-banana deliciousness, when a man walked up.

"Do you speak English?"
"Yes."
"Hablas español?"
"...Si..."

And then a rush of rapid-fire Spanish that I didn't understand.

"Señor, mi español no es tan bueno. Necesita hablar más despacio."

So he slowed down. Kind of. He needed to make a phone call to Kuala Lumpur and was having trouble with the international calling card he'd bought. I told him I had never used a card like that before. There were no instructions on it, which didn't matter, because he didn't know any English.

I spent the next hour figuring out how exactly I could help him make this oh-so-essential phone call. Turns out, he had the country codes written down incorrectly.

After a few failed attempts at finding this information (including calling a Thai phone number he had on a scrap of paper and subsequently leaving some Thai lady thoroughly confused on the other end), we wound up in the lobby of a nearby hotel.

There, I told the concierge about our problem (because by this point, it was my problem, too), she made a couple of phone calls, and 10 minutes later we had country codes for Peru and Malaysia.

We walked outside where I tried no fewer than 12 different combinations of adding or taking away plus signs and zeros from the phone number.

When I finally got through to Kuala Lumpur, I handed him the phone. He talked for three or four minutes without taking a breath, hung up, and thanked me effusively, asking if he owed me anything.

"No, no, it's perfectly all right..."
"Gracias, gracias," etc.
"De nada. Que Dios te bendiga!"

He strode away and I walked home, thinking about how surprising life can be and thanking God that my parents convinced me to take Spanish in high school instead of Latin.

pomegranate

I love how Thai people are thoughtful in really random ways.

I was eating lunch on Friday in the teacher lunchroom, as always. Ekapol came in and sat down at the opposite end of the table, as always. He never sits next to us, for some reason, but he'll carry on a conversation with us from the other end of the table, or even from the next table over.

I was chatting with Mariela and Alyssa when he asked me if I saw the pomegranate.

"Pomegranate? Out there on the lunch table? No, I didn't see it... Where was it?"

No, he told me, not on the lunch buffet table - on my desk. I hadn't seen a pomegranate on my desk, I told him, but I hadn't been at my desk for a few hours.

"Oh, I bought a pomegranate yesterday at a vendor, and he wanted to go home, so I bought another one for you. Have you tried it?"

I told him I'd never eaten pomegranate before, and that I was looking forward to it.

act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

It's generally considered bad manners to let bodily fluids leave the body in public. I assumed this was a universal. Not in Southeast Asia, apparently.

This morning on our way to church Alyssa saw a man stop by a tree, put a finger on one nostril, and blow snot onto the tree with the other nostril.

I know, right?! Gross.

I've also read about people peeing on the sidewalks in Vietnam. Businesspeople, too, in suits. I'll report on this after our October trip.

I don't know about you, but I think the no-releasing-bodily-fluids-in-public rule stands up to the categorical imperative.

they're called strangers because they're strange

Mariela, Alyssa, and I spent our day on Thong Lo Street, visiting wedding gown shops.

Around lunchtime, we were standing on a sidewalk, looking for a restaurant Mariela had heard about, when an American walks by. He stops, turns around, and asks us where we're from, shaking our hands all the while. He asks if we've seen the movie Bangkok Dangerous, starring Nicolas Cage. We say we've heard of it.

He tells us he played the part of Michigan in the movie, which meant absolutely nothing to me. Then he goes on about how he used the money he made from the film to purchase some apartments in Bangkok that were opening in November.

"There'll be a big opening party. You girls should come. Nicolas Cage will be there; it'll be great PR for you girls." (Great PR? What??) Then he asks for our phone numbers. Excuses are made, and I ask what working with Nicolas Cage was like. Apparently, he's swell.

Anyway, this man, Steve, asks our names, shakes our hands again, and writes down his Bangkok cell phone number. He tells us he's heading back to San Francisco soon, but that he'll be back in Thailand for the party. He tells us to call him in November, and that we'll be invited.

I checked IMDb when we got back, and he's legitimate. His name is Steve Baldocchi. I hope he makes it big, so I can say I met him in Bangkok once.

It was, by far, one of the most random things that has happened to me since I've been here.