Jamison’s Misadventures In Asia

I’ve realized that I will never get around to writing an eloquent and succinct summary of my first few months here in Thailand, so in true blog spirit, I give you bits from my journal entries.  I’m sorry it’s so long, but I think it gives a pretty good idea of what my life here is like.  Also, I’ve got some pictures up now, and there should be more on the way.  I hope everyone is doing well.

-Jamie

1/15:  It’s the end of our first day in Thailand.  We arrived at the airport in Bangkok just after midnight last night.  We were greeted by a pack of screaming Peace Corps volunteers, dressed in wigs, wasted, very happy to see us.  Some highlights of the travel day:

The layover at Narita airport in Tokyo:  I can’t wait to visit Japan.  Every airport worker had a different ridiculous uniform or outfit.

Japan Airlines:  On the American Airlines flight from L.A. to Bangkok, drinks were $5 a pop.  On JAL, drinks were free.  Not only were they free, every time you asked for one drink, they gave you two.  Not only did they give you two drinks every time, but they had back to back beverage services within 5 minutes of each other.  What this means is 12 minutes after reaching our cruising altitude, I had consumed four bloody mary’s, and supplemented that buzz with an endless supply of Sapporo (that is, until they ran out and I switched to Beer Singha).  Did I mention this was a red-eye flight?

1/16:  We’re in the lobby at the training center, watching ‘Napoleon Dynamite’.  Today was our second day of Pre-service Training.   On our first day, we learned how to greet people in Thai.  In the afternoon, I played some badminton with some of the other trainees and the ajaans (language trainers).  I’ve got to work on my game.  Josh (Jiggles) and I made a less than stellar team.  In the evening, we had a welcome dinner, full with karaoke and congealed chicken blood.

1/17:  We had a good deal of language class today—somewhere around 4 or 5 hours.  We learned how to count and how to say some basic phrases.  It was great getting started with the language, but my brain felt like a big pretzel at times.  After class, I played some soccer with Ryan.  We played until I realized that some people were playing badminton.  My game was a bit more respectable today.

1/21:  So.  I now have a Thai family.  It’s been interesting so far.  My longest conversation has been with the grandfather [several days later, I learned that he was not in fact my grandfather, just one of the several village drunks].  He talked to me for ten minutes straight.  I didn’t understand a lick.  He likes to drink lao kao, which is moonshine made from rice.  Mao is the Thai word for drunk.  It’s been 3 or 4 days since I last wrote.  3 or 4 days here can feel like half a month.  I live with Tsom Nuk and his family.  Tsom Nuk farms uah (cow) and blah (fish).  His wife, Ah, runs a noodle shop out of the house.  They have a 12 year old daughter named Mook and a 15 year old son, Nu.  Nu goes to school in Bangkok during the week.  They are friendly, hospitable, and generous.  The language barrier can be stifling at times, but I’m learning bit by bit.  When all else fails, Tsom Nuk’s brother, who lives next door, can speak decent English. 

1/22 (Excerpt from a letter):  I’ve absorbed so much in the week that I’ve been here.  Today I traveled with my family to the capital of the province, Nakornpathom.  We went to the largest Wat (Thai Buddhist temple) in the world.  Or at least that’s what I understood from the communication.  There were monks all around and some beautiful statues of the Buddha.  In the afternoon, I rode my bike over to one of the nearby schools and played badminton with my friend Bryn.  We bought rackets in town yesterday.  After badminton, I went with my family to the big Sunday market.  It was filled with madness.  You can find pretty much anything you want—from a pig’s face, to designer-ish jeans for three bucks.  The food has been incredible.  I haven’t eaten anything too shocking yet, with the exception of congealed chicken blood. 

1/26:  Things are starting to settle in—the days pass more quickly, and we know our way around now.  I’m enjoying bike travel, and the weather doesn’t really phase me.  We’ll see how I feel about the weather in a couple months, during the peak of the hot season.  The past couple of days, we’ve capped our afternoons off at a little snack hut near one of our training schools.  It’s nice to sit on the bench swing and have a beer, since we’re lucky to have even an hour or two to ourselves with our hectic training schedule. 

2/1:  The first day of February already!  We’re coming up on the three-week mark.  In some ways, it feels as though we’ve been here for months, yet I still feel utterly inept with the language.  I’m losing confidence in the training program, which I think is the result of the same general sentiment bubbling from the group.  At this point, our ability to communicate is inexcusably minimal, and our time in training is not managed and utilized efficiently.  Otherwise, things are peachy.  For the most part, I’m doing a good job of being easygoing, though I feel a tension building in the periphery—a white noise of stress.  We don’t have the proper freedom to release tension in normal ways (a real day off for instance).  I was talking with Maggie, a 79 year old volunteer from Berkeley, about how here in Thailand and in training, we have so much information that we’re constantly processing, so we have no choice other than to stay in the moment.  We talked about how in the States, we fill our heads worrying about things we can’t control and will most likely never happen.  Maggie told me that worry and regret are worthless emotions because they are tied to the future and to the past—things we cannot control or change.  I liked that. 

Last night was Thai Night, a cultural learning night at the training hub.  We watched the ajaans perform traditional Thai dances, ate lots of yummy food, and performed the Diarrhea Song [this was a dance and a song in English that Thai students performed when we went to visit a local school.  It was all about diarrhea and absolutely hilarious, though I don’t think it was intended to be humorous.  Jiggles brought the house down with his performance of the Thai Chicken Dance.  After Thai night, we got sauced drinking lao kao [the aforementioned rice moonshine], something I will never do again. 

2/2 (Excerpt from an email):  I am in cloudland.  I just had a 90 minute massage for $3.  It was amazing.  Things are going well.  There are some small logistical frustrations, but overall, I am very pleased.  I’m making some great friends, mostly American, but some Thai.  my best Thai friend is Chaturon, my language teacher.  He is 23, and i constantly give him a hard time.  I think that I perpetually offend him, but I’m pretty sure that he understands my humor (though he may not appreciate always it).  So, bike riding.  We ride our bikes everywhere.  I have a sweet bike:  front suspension, nice basket in the back, front and back mud guards (shocks… pegs… lucky!). I’ve gotten good at racing home at 6pm to make it home before dark.  The other day, I was riding home buzzed with my friend Bryn.  I came up to a speed bump, and tried to pop a wheelie on it.  Instead, my tire jammed against my front mud flap, stopping the tire, and I went over the handlebars.  Slow crash, painless.  Slightly embarassed, i expected to look up and find Bryn pointing and laughing.  She was not pointing or laughing; she was toppled on her side in a ditch.  She fell off the side of the road in her hysterics.  This whole scene took place in front of a Thai audience, a family sitting on their porch.  I tried to tell them ‘I am a stupid foreigner’ in Thai, but I’m sure I messed it up.  Anyways, i’ll leave you with that one.

2/12:  The days and weeks pass with increasing speed, and my life here becomes more and more busy.  Today, we visited the local wat with our language class.  We learned a little bit about Buddhism and participated in prayer.  Afterwards, I went swimming at the University.  It was a welcome recess, feeling cool and clean, without a person in sight.  Water can be so relaxing.  Tomorrow I go to Bangkok with Wi, my host cousin.  I was hoping that Jiggles would come with me, but he will be having a thrilling afternoon of asparagus harvesting.  Chinese New Year’s was this week.  We visited wats that were lit up and felt more like a carnival than a place of worship.  I saw a man riding an elephant in the street on my way home one afternoon. 

2/14 (Excerpt from a letter):  Life in Thailand is filled with more stories than I can keep up with, but I’ll do my best to remember some good ones for you.  Some of the stuff is not worth trying to explain, but each day brings small absurdities and plenty of laughs—it’s hard not to have fun here.  First I’ll give you a very brief overview of my day to day routine.  First of all, I live in a noodle shop, though I’ve only seen one person order noodles here.  Most people buy soda, candy, beer, or lao kao (rice grain moonshine, nasty stuff).  All the same, my host-mom is a great cook [a word of advice here: whenever talking to your birthmother, never ever refer to a person other than her as ‘mom’, this can create inordinate amounts of grief for many people].  At every meal, I have 3 or 4 delicious dishes from which to choose.  The breakfast dishes are the same types of food that we eat at dinner or lunch, though I suspect that I am receiving special treatment in that respect.  I think the standard breakfast is usually rice gruel or leftovers.  Enough about home.

Almost every day, I ride my bike for 15 minutes to a nearby school where I have a small language class with three other volunteers.  In the afternoon, I have a thirty minute bike ride to either of two schools.  At one of the schools, I practice teach and usually make a fool out of myself in front of a class of Thai 5^th-graders.  At the other school, our project group (25 volunteers) gathers for technical training.  Altogether, the training can seem a bit disorganized at times, but I’m confident that I’ll be fine when I’m on my own at site.  For the meantime, it helps to roll with the punches and embrace the attitude of ‘mai pen rai’, which in translation approximates ‘no problem’, ‘don’t worry about it’, ‘nevermind’, and ‘screw it’, depending on context. 

The language is coming along steadily, though slowly.  Thai language is fascinating.  Their language is far more simple in word length (nearly all words are monosyllabic), sentence structure, the lack of articles, the lack of conjugations, and the absence of distinction between subjects and objects.  That said, the nuances in tone are difficult for my English-trained ears to distinguish and for my Farang (Thai for foreigner) tongue to pronounce.  It seems like every fifth word I learn is “Maa”, but depending on the tone it can mean five different things.  On top of that, a small change in the vowel sound can bring five more meanings into play.  On more than one occasion, I’ve said a bad word to my family when trying to say something completely different.

Okay.  Now I can’t remember the funny stuff…  The other day I saw a man riding an elephant on my way home from school.  I realize this is Thailand and, for some, that may seem expected in the country, but elephants certainly don’t belong in the town where I live.  At the same time I took the sighting in stride.  It’s funny how seeing an elephant in the street can seem normal. 

On Friday, I had some time, so I went to get a haircut.  I waited for the barber to finish up with a customer and watched as he gave the customer a straight edge shave.  The barber was sure not to miss the hair on the man’s forehead nor on his closed eyelids.  He shaved the guy’s eyelids!  I was next, and with some guidance was able to spare myself a wretched haircut.  When it was time for my shave, I pointed to my upper lip and said, “Ti ni, cha cha,” which means, “Here slowly,” so he would be careful when shaving around a scar.  In shaving, he spared my forehead, eyelids, and upper lip.  So I was left with a buzz and a horrible moustache.  When I looked up, I couldn’t bite my lip hard enough to hold back my laugh.  The haircut was not over.  He cleaned my ears, snipped my nostril hairs, and massaged my shoulders.  Not bad for a buck.

So there’s a glimpse.  Emotionally, there’s always a veil of stress as I struggle with the language, try my best not to offend, and train 40+ hours each week.  I miss home less than I would have imagined, but there’s so much to process and look forward to every day that my mind never sits idle long enough to think about anything other than the immediate.

2/22:  I will be spending the next two years in the town of Thoeng, in Chiang Rai province.  I arrived in Thoeng by bus this morning and met my supervisor at the educational office, Satian.  She is a wonderful lady, and it looks like I will be calling her ‘maa’ during my time in Thoeng.  One of my co-teachers, Dr. Something-or-other, is a wacko.  He’s very enthused to be working with me, but I think things might get weird.  Not too much to say about my other co-teacher.  Thoeng is beautiful. 

I spent the last couple days visiting Beth, an outgoing volunteer from Kent, WA.  She has spent the last two years on the outskirts of the provincial center of Chiang Rai.  It was a mellow visit and a much-needed vacation from training.  I ate mac & cheese and learned the ins and outs of life as a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand.  Tomorrow, I leave the North and head to Bangkok for a few days.

2/28:  Recovering from 3 nights in Bangkok.  Not much else to say.  Bangkok is both a terrific and horrible place—somewhere to find the comforts of life in the States, but filled with pollution, people, and prices outside of my budget. 

3/1 (Excerpt from a letter):  Almost everything about my Thai experience thus far has exceeded my expectations—the amount of learning, the amount of fun, and the wonderful people I’ve met, both American and Thai.  Every day brings new adventures, large and small, from gulping down congealed chicken blood to devising a plan to allow us to stay out past dark.  The past weeks have been filled with learning Thai, trying to put my limited Thai to use, riding my bike from school to school, attending Thai gatherings, visiting temples for Chinese New Year’s celebrations, playing badminton, trying to figure out how to teach English to Thai kids, badgering my Thai language teacher with an incessant barrage of obscure cultural questions, trying and failing to communicate with my host-family mother, escaping to the local pool whenever possible, teaching English to and playing games with the neighborhood kids, avoiding dogs that chase us on our bikes, and finding time to unwind between all of these activities.  It’s hard to explain how tiring life can be when the only time to relax is while alone in my room or if we get out of a training session early and have some time to kill.  Otherwise, my evenings at home can be the most demanding part of my day, constantly concentrating in an effort to communicate and an effort not to offend.  Taking all of this into account, in many ways my life here is very easy.  I don’t have to cook, clean, or make plans—everything is taken care of for me.  All in all, I am very happy and am sure that I’ll miss this chapter of my Peace Corps experience.

3/11 (Excerpt from a letter):  Only two weeks until Swearing In.  It’s hard to believe that two months have gone by so quickly.  Even though the time has flown, I’m eager to leave training and get to my site in Chiang Rai.  It seems like we’ve learned as much as we are going to learn from our training program, which is far less than I would have hoped.  I will certainly miss seeing other volunteers every day and will miss my host family, but I think I’m ready to move on.

3/25:  Our last day in Kampangsaen.  We’ve spent the past couple days having a conference with co-workers from our permanent sites.  I’m excited for Thoeng and the possibility which my situation holds. 

3/30 (Excerpt from a letter):  Last week we concluded our 10-week training, which means that this week I am settling into my permanent site in Chiang Rai, the country’s northernmost province.  For the past couple days, I’ve been getting to know my co-workers and becoming familiar with my new town, Thoeng.  Adjusting to life here has not been very difficult.  With some exceptions, my basic amenities are available and similar to those at home.  The food is delicious, the country is beautiful, and the people are welcoming and friendly.

4/1:  It’s Friday, the end of my first work week at site.  It’s been tough dragging myself out of bed at 7 o’clock in the morning b/c there really isn’t anything to do at the office.  School is out of session until mid-May.  I’m looking forward to a Big C (Thai version of K-Mart) visit, so I can start getting settled into my new home. Right now, it’s a big mess.

4/6:  I’m in the middle of my second week at site, and I finally am feeling more settled.  Having my own place has been great, but after the first couple of days, the novelty wore off due to a lack of clean clothes and no place to put my stuff.  I also have little space to hang my drying clothes after I wash them, so I can only clean a day’s worth of clothes at a time.  This circumstance makes each morning a little hectic when I scramble to iron my socks dry and press my shirt and pants on my make-shift ironing board, also know as a towel laid on the floor.  This week, my supervisor returned from a week-long meeting in the South, so I was able to work out some of the details of living here.  I now have a lady who picks up my laundry every day and brings it back the next, clean and pressed.  I’ve also figured out the best way to go about furnishing my home—a decision in limbo for various reasons.  So after ten days of waiting, I went and bought some furniture today and have since been able to organize my house more.  It feels better to have a home now, rather than a couple rooms, a bed, and boxes and bags spilling my stuff all over the floors. 

It’s strange how different it is being at site versus training.  There are certainly some aspects which I enjoy more, such as the increased free time and autonomy.  However, these benefits bring more opportunity for boredom and loneliness.

4/19:  It’s the week after Songkran (Thai New Year’s—a week long water fight and party), and I’m finally recovering.  Songkran officially started on Wednesday, the 13^th, though many people started celebrating much earlier.  On Wednesday, I went to a celebration with Pee Noy, one of my co-teachers, in her village.  Everyone started drinking at 9:00 a.m., but I held out until 10:00.  From there, I got a little drunk, danced with 70 year-old ladies who told me they loved me, and played with water, all while avoiding the drunk 23 year-old guy who became creepily attached to me in our nascent friendship.  On Thursday, I went to Phayao, the neighboring province, with my supervisor and her family.  We went to a grand water fight by a lake.  In the evening, I went to another community party near my home, and had to do my best to avoid the absurd amount of attention given to foreigners at these types of gatherings.  Seeing foreigners in Thailand is fairly commonplace, depending on where you are, but out in the countryside, it still seems to be a big deal to interact with one.  On Friday, I went to Chiang Mai, the epicenter of Songkran festivities.  I got an early start and arrived in Chiang Mai at 11:00 a.m and commenced to ‘len nam’ (play with water).  I bought a bucket and took to the streets, eventually joining up with an internationally diverse group of strangers, made up of folks from Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Japan.  I was the undercover Asian of the group. After having my fun with this group, I headed of to meet up with some Peace Corps friends.  After a little down-time, we headed to the Songkran parade.  The parade was great—many different Hill Tribes, dressed in their beautiful clothing, bands in the back of trucks, people dancing and playing drums.  The beauty of this parade is that disturbing the parade seems to take on as much importance as the parade itself.  The on-lookers participate as much as those in the parade, constantly squirting, splashing, and dousing the marchers.  In my case, I would halt the parade, greet them with a wai (a formal Thai bow with hands held together in a prayer position), say ‘khor thod, krap’ (excuse me), then cover them in water.  I also got in the habit of borrowing instruments from marchers, dancing alongside Thai dancers, and hitting up the marchers for lao kao.  After the first time, I told myself I would never drink lao kao again.  I lied.  But this time I mean it.  I will never drink lao kao again.

Hello and Welcome to my blog.  A year ago, I didn’t know what a blog was.  I knew it was short for weblog, and I didn’t know what a weblog was.  Now I have my own blog.  How things change in a year. 

Actually, I don’t know that things have changed that much.  I now have an idea of what a blog is, but I don’t understand what the big deal is.  The only reason why people might want to read my babble is because I’m in Thailand, and even then, I’m sure you’ll all get over that after one or two visits.  That’s all fine with me.  This whole act seems rather self-serving, and though I enjoy attention as much as the next person, I think this theater of attention focuses too brightly on me.  Nonetheless, I will press on and share the details of my life in Thailand, so you folks can live vicariously. 

Thanks for your time.  I hope not to disappoint.

-Jamie