people

Most of my actual travel time getting to/from/around the south of Thailand was done solo. In my last post, I talked about the boy who gave me his watch necklace. He sent me an e-mail telling me he had worried about me riding the train alone. He also attached photos of some of his artwork. I think I have a new pen pal.

I met my second random stranger on an overnight boat from Koh Samui back to the mainland. He introduced himself as Nik -- short for Nikolai. He said he was from Russia and handed me a CD called "Guitar Sounds by Onyx: Shadow of Your Love." He plays on the streets of Moscow for money. He tried it out on Khao San Road in Bangkok, but people weren't so generous.

Nik told me he was cutting his vacation short because he wrecked a motorbike into a car on Samui and had to pay for the damages. He also shared that it was his father's lifelong dream to play music on a Mississippi riverboat. I guess I looked like the right kind of person in which to confide such factoids.

Several days later, I was waiting by the pier on Koh Phi Phi to start my trip back to Bangkok. I had a couple hours to kill before my boat arrived. A Thai man working for a tourist agency sidled up and struck up a conversation.

He was 37 years old and unmarried. I asked why, and learned that he'd spent 14 years living in a forest in the northeast as a monk. He meditated for 10 hours a day for the first seven years. Sometimes he fasted for a month at a time, surviving only on sugar water. For the next seven years, he lived in a room with a bed surrounded by a thousand books. He read them all, and people thought he was a little crazy.

He studied international relations and philosophy in college, including some Western philosophy. His favorite, though, is Indian philosophy. His dream is to move there to study. His other dream is to go to the U.S.

I'm back in the U.S. now, sitting in the Seattle airport. I suppose some sort of reflective post is in order soon. My first observations:

1. It's weird seeing fat policemen.
2. It's weird hearing English spoken without a foreign accent.

More to come.

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.

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.

soy una gringa

Spanish is turning out to be ever-so-helpful here in Bangkok. Sometimes I use it to help out a stranger. Other times I use it to avoid one.

I was standing alone at a bus stop on Sukhumvit after lunch today. Mariela and Alyssa had taken the BTS to read at Starbucks. I wanted to try out bus 2 since Navin (the tailor) told me it ran near my road.

Naturally, a woman who’s standing by herself wants to be approached by a strange man, right? After I had been standing there for two or three minutes, this guy walked up to me and asked, “Do you speak English?”

He didn’t look Thai, and I couldn’t place his accent. Ever-suspicious, I said the first thing that popped into my head.

“No, no entiendo ingles,” I replied, looking distinctly non-latina and definitely non-European.
“Ohhh. Spanish?”
“Si, si,” I said, naively thinking he’d lose interest.

But he didn’t lose interest. He said he had a friend back in New York who knew a little Spanish and he, in turn, knew un poquito.

"Does 'Si' mean 'Yes'?" he wanted to know.

Much to my amusement, he spent the next half-hour combining English, gestures, and the two or three Spanish words he knew to try to get me to understand him.

I honestly don’t know how I kept a straight face. Especially when he told me his name (“My nambre es Jason.”) and handed me a small slip of paper with his number on it.

He wanted my “nambre” and phone number. I told him, “Me llamo… Lauren.”

When I speak Spanish, I don’t sound like a total gringa. If I'd been quicker, I probably could have gotten away with being from Spain. But I gave my real name, sounding totally, 100% estadounidense.

Anyway, he must be really thick, because he didn't question it and continued trying to Spanishify his English to help me understand him.

I told him I had a novio. He didn’t understand that, so I mimed someone taller than me, and pretended to hug my invisible novio. He asked if I was married. I shook my head "No," but realized I shouldn't acknowledge that I understand English. (Incidentally, it's really rather difficult to pretend not to understand someone when you actually do.)

Unfortunately, he was waiting for the same bus I was.

When we got on the bus, he asked if I drove in Spain, pantomiming using a steering wheel. I played confused, acted as though I suddenly understood, and told him no, I didn’t drive there, because there was a metro in Madrid ("El metro, como el beh-teh-ese," I said, while pointing up to the BTS station) and people like to walk. I told him Madrid was very beautiful. Of course, the only word of it he probably understood was, “No.”

He had to get off at the same stop as me, but so did a lot of people. I let the crowd separate us, put on my sunglasses, and made a quick escape, succumbing to a fit of giggles as soon as I knew I was out of sight.

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.

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.

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!