Sunset Soccer

2. UHDP Soccer

At UHDP, we had the fortune to be able to play soccer (footbahn) every night, 5 o'clock sharp. We'd all suit up in our tennis shoes and grimiest clothes possible, storm the field with the local people there and sprint around the red clay field as the sun dove for the hills, purples and oranges spilling over the mountain's edges, us battering the ball clumsily (or at least, I did), attempting to put it in two and a half foot wide goalposts. The red clay seeped into every inch of our sweat-sopped clothing and dyed our legs blood red as Pi Arpot would shriek wildly with every close goal, a testament to having taken part on the pitch. One night I even managed to score a goal...on my own team. In my defense though...okay, it's not even worth defending; I'm a terrible soccer player but love watching and playing to death. I did redeem myself the next day partially however, as I managed to get three assists and help my team to victory.

3. Treasure Map

Before we left UHDP, Will and I decided that we wanted to leave notes for members in the other group, leaving them underneath the rungs of the top bunk so that they would find them when they flopped down onto the lower bed. Our creative ideas for how we could leave them notes grew larger and larger over the course of the whole week, and with the help of Alice and Sam, amalgamated into this elaborate, multiple cache treasure map being signed by our code names - Hawk Dahm, Otter Mae Nahm, Lion Doi, and Baby Panda. We hid our spoils - various snacks, cans of coke, and in one cache, Marks smelly soccer socks that he didn't change once the entire week he was there - inside of bamboo tubes that we harvested from the agroforest and sealed with banana leaves and bamboo ties and proceeded to hide in markable locations around the agroforest by headlamp. The map itself was burned at the edges and soiled with dirt. It was just one of the coolest maps of all time; hell, I was excited for the other group. We decided when we go to the islands we're going to do full on treasure maps in bottles, buried on separate islands beneath an X.

4. My Birthday

My birthday, as far as my other 19 ones have gone, wasn't all too exciting, although it definitely was a unique one to say the least. I woke at 4 AM, the typical time in which my koon mae (host mother - we stayed with host families while in the village of Mae Ta, an hour south of Chiang Mai, locked within the intermontagne basin) decided that she would awake and start rummaging around the house, cooking, clanging pots and pans, in turn awakening the roosters from their light slumber, who proceeded to make curdling, screeching calls until roughly 6:15, when I decided it was worthless to try and drown it out. I wandered downstairs and took a - wait...I haven't ever described how the bathroom system works here. A quick aside:

Squat toilets - also known as eastern toilets. Basically a hole in the ground in which one squats over, drops trow, and possesses a high chance of either A.) falling over or into the toilet or B.) missing entirely, and due to the lack of toilet paper entirely, this often creates significant conundrums for the bathroom dweller. These conundrums become much more probable when the foreigner is so desperate that he or she decides to sacrifice waiting for a Western toilet, creating a myriad of embarassing scenarios. For the most part, an overall unpleasant experience, flushed away by a plastic bowl sitting in a large Rubber Maid trash can full of stagnant water. I once had the misfortune to have to wash in that water, although after having gone and farmed Telapia in a fish pond where algae was propagated by feces, it was fairly welcome.

Bucket showers - similar to the squat toilets, sans toilet. Strip, scoop, pour, go into brief hypothermic shock from the cold water, repeat the last three until clean. Often times is just the same bucket in which water is scooped into the toilet, although in more urban areas is substituted for a point-heated showerhead.

Okay, in all honesty, they're not really that bad once you get used to them. By the end of the Mae Ta experience, I had completely forgotten about showerheads and toilets that you could sit on.

I digress. I wandered downstairs and took a nice bucket shower to wake up and then wolfed an enormous amount of sticky rice (kao nee-ow) and went with Caleb out to the soowan (orchard) for a while. Caleb's name fittingly became "beer" as the week progressed because my family couldn't remember for the life of them his actual name, and they thought that calling us "Leo" and "Beer" was hilarious. We eventually just became one in the same, "Leo Beer!" being called out as any of the neighbors came over to visit. In the orchard that day, Caleb and I planted onions for two and half hours in the midmorning sun, sweat pouring down our backs as we plugged each little bulb into neat rows. Although by the end of it, as we became more desperate to finish quickly, our rows looked like we had both smoked crack and taken some hallucinogens before having come, as they drunkenly zig-zagged every which way. We were so ravenous we inhaled lunch, consisting of a Thai version of ramen noodles and sticky rice, and passed out under the small bamboo hut erected in the middle of the field as the midday rains came spot on at 12:00, bringing temporary relief to the harsh sun. We laid rice husks over top of the freshly plugged onions (to deter weed growth) until 2, when we followed our dog Ga-fayh (coffee if you didn't pick up on that one) the thirty minute walk up the winding jungle road to home. Occasionally he and his brother (Maa Mahn - Maa meaning dog and Mahn meaning, well, I have no idea what the hell mahn means in Thai. The word "men" however, quite fittingly means "smells bad.") would harass the cows that litter the sides of the roads in packs, almost getting trampled from an occasional ornery bull. We got home, bucket showered quickly, then rode on the backs of motorcycles to the Co-op where all of the other ISDSI students were waiting. They brought a bunch of gas station ice cream out, along with a lone birthday candle that I blew out after they all sang happy birthday. We followed the festivities by listening to some village elders talk about organic farming for a few hours before retiring home for dinner, which, compared to all of my other meals there, was horrific. First off, they asked me before dinner if I wanted a shot of moonshine, which is fairly culturally offensive to refuse so I said sure. I kicked back one with my host father, the caustic fluid searing my throat on the way down. Now the shot alone would've been fine, but promptly after I kicked the shot, something skewered on a fork was put in front of my mouth, insisting I eat it. "Teenee arrai?" I asked, unsure of what it was. "Buffalo skin" he responded, slipping the piece of what turned out to be a thick piece of boiled fat onto my tongue and insisting I chew and swallow, causing me to almost vomit all over the place. I choked it down somehow and smiled politely. Rice moonshine with a fat chaser. As far as "welcome to Thailand" moments go, it was definitely near the top.