The Thailand Zone?

The Thailand Zone?
Originally uploaded by Leo III

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.