And Bangkok is rising from the swamp, slowly at first, in fits and starts; a collection of shacks little more than a pile of corrugated iron; the brown and green slowly shifting into black tar and grey cement, glass and traffic lights and people with old sneakers looking at their watches.
We are coming from Ayutthaya, the city of crumbling temples, the former capital sacked and ruined by Burmese armies two-hundred and fifty years ago. It is another public holiday. We are tired after a long day riding pushbikes around beautiful ruined temples poorly restored with cheap cement, tired and happy to have wind against our face after the long humid day.
We rode and looked and looked and rode that day, through the old streets, through grassland with giant millipedes the size of football hotdogs creeping past. Then an arched bridge over a river; I reached the top only to hear a snap and here is Aaron, his chain snapped, and if ever there was a face that said "How could this happen to me again what the hell did I do wrong why can't I ride a frickin' bike without something going wrong, huh?" then he was wearing it at that moment. We tried to fix it - by which I mean, he tried to fix it - but succeeded only in covering himself with grease. He tried to wash the grease off in the river but succeeded only in falling into some kind of sinkhole and losing both his thongs in the sucking mud, which he then had to dig through to find said thongs, which subsequently left him much dirtier than he had been originally, still with grease on his face and stuck in the middle of a new city with a bike with no chain (to add insult, the wheels of the bike were now covered in mud and refused to turn). He decided he wanted to be alone for a while, which I felt was quite mature, since in the same situation I would have a) blamed everybody there for what had gone wrong with much frantic gesturing and reddening of face, b) cried like a little girl, and c) shouted "I WANT TO GO HOME!!!" at the uncaring sky whilst shaking my fist in existentialist fury. So I was very impressed.
There are some places in the world that make you tremble with divine awe, send shivers down your spine, deliver on your wildest fantasies. Ayutthaya is not one of them. But it does make for a pleasant day cycling and a pleasant night of drinking with the local jazz band while bad Thai pop plays in the background and for noisily waving your beer or whiskey about while shouting "Chon dee!" (cheers) at everyone repeatedly.
But Bangkok rises always in the background, the great mother-beast whose grimy womb we must return to each week. I am still teaching; I still do not know the name of my school or of my head teacher, but that's the nature of the machine. So here's how it works: you turn up to a dusty old building, with no materials, no lesson plans, and no real idea which classes you will be teaching that day (your roster will change frequently, depending on who gets fired that week). You have no idea who will be in the staff room, because the school is notoriously fickle and tends to fire foreign staff at the drop of a hat, without reason. When I started two weeks ago, I began talking with Max, a "senior staff member" who had been at the school a whole two months. Yesterday I replaced him; he has been shifted to another school. Expect the Thai teachers to assume you know nothing of their language and to bitch about you mercilessly in front of your face. Expect not to last very long.
Unless you're an awful teacher. Then, the world is your oyster. The teacher I originally replaced had spent his six months at the school throwing things at the students and turning up to classes drunk; he gave students worksheets with questions like "Do you think I'm handsome?" (I have forty copies of this worksheet, which were in his desk, if anyone wants one), and he smoked out in the playground. They finally dumped him because too many students complained.
"It's a shame," said my head teacher, "because apart from that he was a very good teacher..."
The head teacher will tell you she wants to hear more speaking and listening in the classroom; you spend five hours doing only that and at the end of the day she'll say "No, I wanted you to do speaking and listening". You say, "But that's what I did". She says, "Do it more".
As for the kids themselves, well, it's sort of like trying to teach a lynch mob the finer points of racial sensitivity. There are fifty-odd students per class, for starters; you're handed a microphone and expected to basically just yell over the top of them. No choices for punishment: tell them to listen and they'll ignore you; tell them to stand up and they'll pretend they don't understand; ask them to move to another chair and they'll ignore you while pretending they don't understand. Tell them to leave the classroom - well, then you've got problems. Within seconds you'll hear the rumbling footsteps of a Thai teacher charging toward them, who will then proceed to cane the shit out of them.
Yes, the cane is still in force here. Another teacher at my school, Bill, was mucking about with the kids one day and saw that one of them had a basketball. So he threw it around for a bit, gave the kids a break from their learning, fair enough. But the moment he turned back to the chalkboard to begin writing, one of the Thai teachers happened to walk by and saw the kids with the basketball. She charged in and began caning everyone like a whirling dervish. The kids looked up at Bill with their big puppy-dog eyes, begging him to take the blame, but Bill was too busy shitting himself at the sight of the cane and froze up like a rabbit in headlights.
So anyway, we're surviving, Edie and I, and beginning to claw our way out of the gutters of this city. As we slowly draw to a close our time in this monstrous metropolis, I hope that I can take a more generous eye to it, but at the moment all I can think about is the wind through my hair as I hang out the window of the northbound train.
Lachie
ps, Thanks to Aaron for the photo. You can see more of his amazing photography at http://www.flickr.com/photos/adamteale/sets/72157606735957219/ and check out his much more professional blog at http://adam.lumanation.com. Wait, does that give away his real name?
pps, You can also check out more of our photos at our Flickr site, http://www.flickr.com/photos/29217988@N02. Okay, so there are only six photos there at the moment, and they're all out of date. But it will grow. What, you've got a problem with that? Sue me.
ppps, Don't sue me.
pppps, Ajarn.com has a fairly funny overview of white teachers in Thailand here: http://www.ajarn.com/Banter/farangteechers.htm. Warning: this could possibly be one of those instances where someone thinks something is funny because they're involved with it, but to everyone else it is incredibly lame. I can't tell.
