The beauty of children is that they need no language to communicate. They're not fully socialized and bound by the cultural norms around them, their minds almost as innocent as can be. They speak in their own language, a language that's universal, one that can be understood by adults and children alike. My host cousin Ooeeng is my best friend here and we play together all the time. Last night before my final host family thank you dinner we played frog, where we hopped around on the floorboards, making sure only to hop on every second one. She followed me as I hopped around in my authentic Thai dress, consisting of burgundy fisherman's pants and a thin wool beige shirt, an elephant embroidered across the chest. I don't sweat much anymore, a remarkable feat in and of itself, considering my dad's genes have made it physically possible for me to dump any and all liquid from my body at the tip of the thermostat. We headed off to the dinner - our Suzuki needing to be jumpstarted, rattling and wheezing the entire way - and she climbed into the front seat with me. We played the "let's poke Leo's cheeks to make him into a fish" game, her squealing with delight each time she managed to make my lips pursed. "You have a big nose!" she said in Thai as she proceeded to poke it, not believing it was real. She's cute, so much so to the point that even when she farted she still was. Alright, well maybe not, but when she coyly said "fart," ("dohd."), it was. I know the word "fart" is in no way cute, just go with it.
We got to the dinner and sat down among the 175 other people there (33 students + all of their families), waiters serving us a variety of sticky rice, naam preeg awn (my favorite food here), fried chicken, and other authentic dishes. We gobbled the food, had some great awkward moments that involved authentic Thai dancing (some families taught their host students dances which were done with surprising skill - props to Britnee and Sam for getting up on stage by themselves). It was an all around good night, ending with a horrible rendition of a classic Thai song that all of us butchered, slaughtered, and posted on the meat hooks to let the flies have at. It was all in good fun though, and we presented our host mothers with traditional Thai flowers, which made some of the moms cry in the crowd. It really does feel like we've undergone some sped-up child development; when we got here we were like two-year-olds, unable to speak a lick of Thai and our mothers doting on our every word. Now it's like we're 18, moving out of the house and into the dorms, able to speak Thai (well, kind of - I'd classify it as being able to not have to rely on just hand gestures anymore) and communicate with the world.
So tomorrow, we move in, out from our host families and in with the new. Tomorrow's expected to be a fairly packed day, with Thai massages, getting situated in our rooms, and a solid welcoming party. Believe me, I'm sure it'll be a night worth blogging about.
This past week has been everything but slow-paced, hence the lack of posting. I've had so many things that I want to sit down and write about, but can't find the time to. I'll give a brief rundown of the week as a whole:
1. Four nights ago, I was absolutely worn out from the day, my eyes shutting and head bobbing as I brush my teeth for bed. It was 11:30, wayy past my bedtime, and my host father walked in and started rattling off in Thai. "What? Hospital?" I asked back, unable to catch everything he had said. He repeated it back to me, slower this time, and I understood the words, but what he meant, I had no idea. "You come with Paw and Mae to the hospital?" "Uhhh...go to bed?" I asked in Thai, pointing to my bedroom door. "Mai chai!" ("Not Right!", roughly) my host mom piped in, sticking her head through the bathroom door. It wasn't worth fighting. I threw on some athletic shorts and an undershirt and, half asleep, piled into the car with the two of them. We whizzed for a half-hour past rural rice fields, the crickets chirping softly into the black night, thoughts of me calling Ajaan at two in the morning to say that my family had abandoned me in Burma running fresh through my mind. We finally pulled into the hospital in which my parents both work, and my mom went inside, apparently manning the nurse night shift. My paw waved me out of the car and into the security booth, which turns out he is the head of for the hospital. After he milled around with some papers, he waved me back to the car and we drove home. Why the hell I went with them, I still don't know. Maybe my paw has narcolepsy. That's probably a legit theory because he spontaneously falls asleep on the living room floor every day, sitting upright with his legs crossed.
2. I don't think I've mentioned this yet, but geckos line the walls here. Honestly, everywhere you turn there's a gecko skittering up the wall, trying to chase after some mosquito or fly. They get manage to get everywhere you could possibly imagine. I have two of them that come to join me in the shower every morning and a tail-less one that habitually lives in my room - I named him Ned. I suppose it's better than centipedes or millipedes, the latter of which decided to join me as well in the shower a few days ago. They have other things here too, some of which I got to know really personally:
3. Again, two nights ago, it was late at night, and I was running on empty. I managed to retire witthout having any spontaneous field trips to the hospital, and slapped the light off as I lied down on my mattress. I had the fan blowing on high, and actually was slightly cold for once, and so I grabbed my Mickey Mouse comforter and pulled it up over me. With it though, came something slithering, slimy, and straight up my boxer shorts. I jumped no less than eight feet, literally bounding to the top of my desk as it fell out into my pitch black room, my heart pounding with adrenaline as I was in shock at the prospect that my boys were in the direct line of fire of a snake. I flicked on the lights. It was nowhere to be seen. I scanned the room, looking under my mattress, sheets, pillow, until I spotted a black, slick tail poking out from my backpack. I kicked my bag over and it came skittering out: it was a jet black lizard with yellow stripes, slimy as can be and just shy of a foot long. Now I, not the most pleased with his surprise entrance into my life, chased him around the room, specific choice words echoing out of my window into the night. I chased him into my dresser, over of my clothes, under my mattress, and finally out of my room, his body just barely escaping beneath the crack in my door. If there's ever been any time in my life where I've actually come close to shitting my pants, this was it.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Bababobo
Bob Barker apparently never had time to come to Thailand. Stray cats and dogs roam the streets in hordes, running amok among the swerving cars as they spew exhaust into the already pollution-thick air. They appear everywhere, living in the dingy, dusty alleyways, drinking from puddles the color of brown sugar. It's sad, but often humor can be found in it, espeically when one rounds a corner, finding a sea of dogs humping each other. Little known fact: dogs get stuck after copulating. The concept has presented several very interesting conversations, particularly with application to humans. I honestly don't know why I'm trying to be politically correct right now; Dogs get stuck on each other after sex. It's hilarious. Martha continually tells of how her mother runs around, yelling "Saleet! Saleet!" while hitting the dogs with a newspaper trying to get them to stop from mounting each other. "Saleet" is not a Thai word; I think you can figure out what it is.
We only have one more week with our host families before we all move out and into the dorms. There seems to be a much deeper appreciation for family here in Thailand than in the US. A week ago, my Ajaan and the coordinator of our school came and visited my house, doing a routine checkup that they carry out with all of the families and students. They babbled in some Northern Thai, a dialect that I only know one word of (that word being "lum dee," or delicious), and I sat there and smiled politely, trying to understand the context of their conversation strictly from their expressions and gestures, failing miserably. Suddenly, tears started rolling down my mother's face, a small smile cracked as tears ran over its corners. Slightly alarmed, I asked my host brother what was up. "She think of you like her son, like a baby that can't speak Thai, and now that you can speak Thai it's like you're older and moving out of the house."
The photo attached to this blog post was a raggedy teddy bear I found on the side of the road when I went to go visit my host Aunt. I snapped it quickly, not realizing that my camera was still in black and white mode, and it turned out to be one of the most depressing photos ever. I kind of like it, though.
We only have one more week with our host families before we all move out and into the dorms. There seems to be a much deeper appreciation for family here in Thailand than in the US. A week ago, my Ajaan and the coordinator of our school came and visited my house, doing a routine checkup that they carry out with all of the families and students. They babbled in some Northern Thai, a dialect that I only know one word of (that word being "lum dee," or delicious), and I sat there and smiled politely, trying to understand the context of their conversation strictly from their expressions and gestures, failing miserably. Suddenly, tears started rolling down my mother's face, a small smile cracked as tears ran over its corners. Slightly alarmed, I asked my host brother what was up. "She think of you like her son, like a baby that can't speak Thai, and now that you can speak Thai it's like you're older and moving out of the house."
The photo attached to this blog post was a raggedy teddy bear I found on the side of the road when I went to go visit my host Aunt. I snapped it quickly, not realizing that my camera was still in black and white mode, and it turned out to be one of the most depressing photos ever. I kind of like it, though.
Monday, September 14, 2009
My Heart Will Go On, Asian Karaoke Rendition
My Heart Will Go On, Asian Karaoke Rendition
Originally uploaded by Leo III
Every day after school, I ride home in my host brother's rickety white Suzuki, the thumping bass from the subwoofer in the trunk rattling the dashboard as we weave in and out of traffic on the left side of the road, dodging the swarms of erratic motorcycles that own the Chiang Mai streets. When I get home I usually do homework under the ceiling fan to stay cool until dinner, during which I wolf down some unknown concoction of sticky rice and meat - I still don't know half of what I'm eating after three weeks; I'm not sure I want to know - and then work on more homework with my mother until "Love Trail, Sin Trail" comes on at 9:00, during which I iron my clothes. By that point in the night, I'm exhausted, and usually just decide to retire to bed after having talked to Sam (my girlfriend) for a while via skype.
However, that schedule only applies Monday through Thursday and makes it sound like there is little variation in my days. Actually, that summation is probably borderline of being a lie, for every day here is almost impossible to predict. After school on Thursday, my host mother and father picked Claire and I up, randomly deciding that they were going to take us to my Aunt's house, whom I had never met previously. Now in Thailand, it's common for households to own small businesses that aren't defined as "businesses" in the sense we know them as. Usually they just consist of knick-knack shops that are attached to the side of their homes, selling anything from groceries to fauna and usually operate without paying taxes (illegally, of course, but the legal system here is not what it is at home - I'll get to that later). My family owns an internet cafe across the street that has about 8 computers, all of which are filled with Thai children on a 24/7 basis, glued to the screen, playing none other than "World of Warcraft." We rumble into my Aunt's compound, and through the scratched windshield I can see people in bleach white clothes, mouthes covered with surgical masks . . . making muffins. Claire and I look at each other quizically, not really understanding why the hell we're here. "Come, come!" my father says in Thai, waving for us to follow him. He leads us over to a concrete pit with a shoddily erected tin roof, and at the bottom are about 500 frogs, sloshing in the algae-ridden water as they jump on top of each other. My dad waves a woman from the muffin factory over and she pulls out a giant tub of pelleted frog diet, throwing cup after cup in, causing the frogs to go absolutely berserk as they scrambled for every last piece. "You like frahg?" He asked, a huge smile strewn across his face. "Chai kraab," I replied, returning the smile. We watched the frogs for a little bit and then as we left, I realized that the compound was not only a joint muffin/frog leg selling operation, but beneath her house was a shop selling fauna. Wouldn't be my choice for industry, but hey, someone has to do it.
I completely forgot a story from the weekend retreat. After the swimming assessment, a group of us were standing by this spirit shrine, watching as hordes upon hordes of ants descended upon the offering of food and whiskey (a spirit's gotta get his drink on too, I guess). Pi Ben came over and was telling us about the spirit shrines and how we should respect them, emphasizing that we shouldn't stand too close to them, "like Farrangotang over there," he said, pointing at me standing no less than two feet away from it, still oogling at the swarm of ants. In Thai culture, the word "Farrang" is slang for a foreigner, the name derived from a popular type of fruit the locals eat. Obviously, the 'otang came from orangutaun, a reference to my tall, lanky self. The name has stuck slightly, and Martha now calls me it all the time. That’s okay though, because seeing that the Thai can’t say an “arth” sound, her name is just Maa-taa and I don’t let her live it down.
We’re all still learning to tread carefully in the dangerous world of a tonal language. Today in class, Martha asked “Koon chawb geen kee…” pausing as she tried to figure out the next word. Our Ajaan broke out in laughter, our class confused as to what was so funny. “Kee with falling tone mean manure!” The phrase she was asking was “How much do you eat?” which, as it stood was instead “You like to eat shit?” I made a similar mistake later as well, as I went to high-five Kyle and say “Awesome!” in Thai, but just ended up yelling the Thai word for “Plate!” Epic language failures were the theme of today.
Another theme of this past weekend was my family’s desire to show me a variety of retirement parties, as I have been to three in the past four days. First off, let me say (having just gotten back from one), damn the Japanese for inventing karaoke. In America, we find karaoke fun for an hour, maybe two if you’re pushing it, but tonight after four and a half straight hours of Thai karaoke, I was praying that my 47th glass of water would induce hyponatremia and I would have to leave seizing on a stretcher. Unfortunately, its only effect was causing me to have to piss like a racehorse. In the middle of the marathon, my mother passed me a note, the letters “Ama” already drawn on it. “Write song name!” she said to me in Thai, and so, logically thinking that she meant finish the song name, I wrote “Amazing Grace.” Good idea? Nay. She grabbed the note and ran up to the front of the room and scrolled through the karaoke machine, slapping the microphone triumphantly in my hand when she finally found it. “Sing!” she proclaimed. Oh good. I thought. I get to sing Amazing Grace for these 25 high-status Thai people. For those who have never heard me sing, it’s not a far cry from an asthmatic honking goose who’s pharynx has tangoed with far too many cigarettes. Not wanting to offend them, however, I was treated to the wondrous extended edition of Amazing Grace, and six and a half arduous minutes later, I was surprisingly met with applause.
Now while karaoke was a unifying theme for all three of the parties I went to, it was about the only unifying theme, aside from the copious amount of whole fried fish. The one I attended to on Friday was a free-for-all karaoke theme, with person after person trying their hand at Thai songs for another three hours. A great comedic relief was met with a great rendition of Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.” I knew words wouldn’t be able to do it justice, so I took a video that you all can enjoy above.
Now the retirement party I attended on Sunday was quite possibly the most interesting of three. As I walked into the banquet hall, no less than 300 pairs of eyes were turned and fixed on me, the words tall foreigner (soong farrang) poking from the dull murmur of the crowd as I followed my father. I took my seat at the VIP table (apparently my host dad is well connected), front and center of the entire crowd, and I took a seat facing forward, sandwiched to my mother on my left and father on my right. We dug into the food and watched the ceremony unfold. Overall, it was very dignified, presentable, and well put together, except when my family failed to understand why I was close to tears when they played the Star Wars Imperial Death March and Rocky theme song as the professors received their awards. I used the word dignified deliberately, as the entertainment that followed was anything but. As soon as the Ajaan left the stage, it was seized by coke-bottle women, singing Thai pop songs and gyrating their hips seductively, scantily clad being a conservative term for their dress. A huge cultural paradox began to form in my mind, as I kept iterating “What the hell? This is a collegiate function. . .for old people.” It was furthered by the amount of men getting even more plastered off of whiskey and soda, air-thrusting the exotic dancers as they stumbled around drunkenly in front of the stage, the dancers returning the motion, the crowd squealing in laughter and approval. I looked to my mother for an answer and found none in the smile across her face, attentively sitting with her legs crossed and laughing at each drunken antic. “Sanook mai?” I asked her, seeing if she really enjoying herself. “Mai sanook. I no like.” What?! Then why are we still watching? Over the next hour, I reached a new personal record for awkwardness, rating about a 12.5 on a 1-10 scale, particularly exacerbated by one of the drunken men grabbing my arm, insisting that I shove some of my American money in her bra and/or thong (I declined, but he and several other men offered their own money in my stead), or when my host father, having the time of his life, 5 or 6 glasses of whiskey deep, leaned over and asked me, “Sexy, yah?” In short, specific expletive-ridden phrases are about the only thing adequate to describe the confusion was coursing through my mind when we finally decided to leave around 10:30. Yes, welcome to Thailand.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
The Thailand Zone?
Laughter, I've found, is medicine for the soul. When times are hard here, all I can do is laugh, most of the time at myself. Or, in the case of right now, laughing at my father as he tries to sing John Mayer's cover of "Free Fallin'," sounding uncannily like an arfing seal. I have to laugh as I still try to shed cultural norms that have been so deeply ingrained in me. The first example that comes to mind is that in America, we say thank you for everything, even if a person is simply doing the job they're required to do. Thank you (kawb koon kraab) carries a lot more weight here and is reserved only for tasks that were dones out of spontaneous courtesy and not requirement; my family laughs at me a lot because I say thank you when my brother drives me to school, for making me dinner, or for giving me the Johnson's lotion that helps pacify my mosquito-molested feet. Particularly after a heavy rain, mosquitoes like to drift around the house absentmindedly, brought in on the draft through an open door, biting me when I sleep or falling victim to my new-found best friend: the electrical bug-zapping tennis racquet that spits and sizzles when it meets one.
Another cultural difference that I've found hard to shed is the act of sighing. To us, a sigh is purely contextual. You can sigh when you're full, if you're tired, if you're out of breath . . . whatever it is, we have about 100 different ways to sigh. Here in Thailand, the only time someone sighs is when they're taking on a burdensome task, so whenever I sigh after dinner, after being stuffed to the brim with fried pork, sticky rice, and a slurry of insects, it comes off like I'm saying "Jesus...do I have to do this?" My family points it out every time, and all I can do is laugh.
I also get my chance to laugh while I try to teach Mae Noi English, the two of us syllabically stuttering through phrases like "Organizational Structure of Multinational Enterprise." Why the hell she's learning about overseas corporate management, I have no idea. I now understand why English is such a hard language to master; if you haven't grown up with it, learning all the irregular conjugation rules, massive amounts of slang we use from day to day, contractions, and unnatural mouth movements to form letters like L, X, Z, and S is almost an impossible task.
Miraculously, Thai culture is slowly becoming familiar to me. I'm no longer hypersensitive to everything around me; I don't stop to stare at a pile of elephant shit on the side of the road as if it's some sort amazing novelty, nor do I oogle at the foreign glyphs on the gas station sign. I can now read them, at least phonetically, and occasionally a triumph will occur when I can read a random word somewhere and know what it means.
Speaking of elephants, I got home from school the other day, and as I stepped out of the car, my host parents started yelling "Chaang! Chaang!," pointing wildly across the street. I thought they were pulling my leg, as Chaang is Thai for elephant, but as I turned around, there was a man, walking his baby elephant through the neighborhood as if it were a dog. I paid 20 baht for some celery sticks, and one by one, its long trunk reached out and wrapped around them with surprising force, tossing them in his mouth to be gobbled down. I tried to buy some time for my host father (Boon-Seumm) by breaking the celery sticks in half as he struggled with my camera, the elephant's deep round eyes following me attentively. I gave it the first half, pausing as it held it in its trunk. It let out a trumpet so loud I jumped about eight feet in the air, as if it was saying "You bitch. Give me the other half." They're terribly smart...I might be doing a month-long independent project with them at a conservation center at the end of my time here. Here's to hoping.
So anyway, enough with the theme following and asides about elephants. I apologize it's taken so long to update since my last post. The 33 of us were up in Northern Thailand for a weekend retreat.
On Friday morning at 7 AM, we piled, gear and all, into some swanky-ass silver vans and trucked north of Chiang Mai to a lake to take a swimming assessment. Now normally, a swimming assessment would consist of swimming 100 yards around some buoys, with camp kids floundering in their water weenies as you swam by, splashing you as you inhale the Giardia-infested water. Not so much the case with this swim test, except for possibly the Giardia, along with a plethora of other parasites. We swam roughly 400 meters, the 100 degree heat of the water making it feel like a viscous sludge, dragging heavily against me as my muscles made discombobulated attempts to synchronize themselves in a freestyle motion and pull me out to the buoy and back, followed by treading water for 15 minutes. We all sluggishly crawled out of the water, exhausted, 10:30 AM reading on our watches. We threw the frisbee around for a few hours, followed We then ate lunch, which consisted of a whole fish that had been dropped in boiling oil and shrimp, very much alive and jumping, that we got to perform genocide on with concentrated lemon juice.
After lunch, we piled back into the vans and trekked north about an hour to Mo Fak National Park, the potholes tossing us around like ragdolls as the engine groaned up the steep mountain side. After unpacking into our hospital ward style bunkhouses, six guys and I decided to go exploring downstream. Not more than 50 meters in did we find a waterfall, so picturesque that it was like something straight out of The Jungle Book. We swung from the vines like Mogli, our toes skimming over the water's surface before we let go and came crashing down, soaking wet.
The next day we went to the waterfall and got to swim in it for a while. I'm not going to try and describe it so I'll wait for pictures to get posted later.
Another cultural difference that I've found hard to shed is the act of sighing. To us, a sigh is purely contextual. You can sigh when you're full, if you're tired, if you're out of breath . . . whatever it is, we have about 100 different ways to sigh. Here in Thailand, the only time someone sighs is when they're taking on a burdensome task, so whenever I sigh after dinner, after being stuffed to the brim with fried pork, sticky rice, and a slurry of insects, it comes off like I'm saying "Jesus...do I have to do this?" My family points it out every time, and all I can do is laugh.
I also get my chance to laugh while I try to teach Mae Noi English, the two of us syllabically stuttering through phrases like "Organizational Structure of Multinational Enterprise." Why the hell she's learning about overseas corporate management, I have no idea. I now understand why English is such a hard language to master; if you haven't grown up with it, learning all the irregular conjugation rules, massive amounts of slang we use from day to day, contractions, and unnatural mouth movements to form letters like L, X, Z, and S is almost an impossible task.
Miraculously, Thai culture is slowly becoming familiar to me. I'm no longer hypersensitive to everything around me; I don't stop to stare at a pile of elephant shit on the side of the road as if it's some sort amazing novelty, nor do I oogle at the foreign glyphs on the gas station sign. I can now read them, at least phonetically, and occasionally a triumph will occur when I can read a random word somewhere and know what it means.
Speaking of elephants, I got home from school the other day, and as I stepped out of the car, my host parents started yelling "Chaang! Chaang!," pointing wildly across the street. I thought they were pulling my leg, as Chaang is Thai for elephant, but as I turned around, there was a man, walking his baby elephant through the neighborhood as if it were a dog. I paid 20 baht for some celery sticks, and one by one, its long trunk reached out and wrapped around them with surprising force, tossing them in his mouth to be gobbled down. I tried to buy some time for my host father (Boon-Seumm) by breaking the celery sticks in half as he struggled with my camera, the elephant's deep round eyes following me attentively. I gave it the first half, pausing as it held it in its trunk. It let out a trumpet so loud I jumped about eight feet in the air, as if it was saying "You bitch. Give me the other half." They're terribly smart...I might be doing a month-long independent project with them at a conservation center at the end of my time here. Here's to hoping.
So anyway, enough with the theme following and asides about elephants. I apologize it's taken so long to update since my last post. The 33 of us were up in Northern Thailand for a weekend retreat.
On Friday morning at 7 AM, we piled, gear and all, into some swanky-ass silver vans and trucked north of Chiang Mai to a lake to take a swimming assessment. Now normally, a swimming assessment would consist of swimming 100 yards around some buoys, with camp kids floundering in their water weenies as you swam by, splashing you as you inhale the Giardia-infested water. Not so much the case with this swim test, except for possibly the Giardia, along with a plethora of other parasites. We swam roughly 400 meters, the 100 degree heat of the water making it feel like a viscous sludge, dragging heavily against me as my muscles made discombobulated attempts to synchronize themselves in a freestyle motion and pull me out to the buoy and back, followed by treading water for 15 minutes. We all sluggishly crawled out of the water, exhausted, 10:30 AM reading on our watches. We threw the frisbee around for a few hours, followed We then ate lunch, which consisted of a whole fish that had been dropped in boiling oil and shrimp, very much alive and jumping, that we got to perform genocide on with concentrated lemon juice.
After lunch, we piled back into the vans and trekked north about an hour to Mo Fak National Park, the potholes tossing us around like ragdolls as the engine groaned up the steep mountain side. After unpacking into our hospital ward style bunkhouses, six guys and I decided to go exploring downstream. Not more than 50 meters in did we find a waterfall, so picturesque that it was like something straight out of The Jungle Book. We swung from the vines like Mogli, our toes skimming over the water's surface before we let go and came crashing down, soaking wet.
The next day we went to the waterfall and got to swim in it for a while. I'm not going to try and describe it so I'll wait for pictures to get posted later.
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