Week 26 - Bangkok, Thailand
AND WE'RE: out, out of our nice little apartment with our shit stuffed into baskets and backpacks, and on into Adam's apartment, where we sleep on the couch and eat all his food and piss in the bathtub and play the music too loud and set fire to the rug and drink the milk straight from the carton and generally just make good housemates of ourselves. Erin's very sick with the flu and spends most of her time expelling greenish-tinted bodily fluids at high speeds across the room. It's great.
It's nearly over, all this Bangkok stuff: we leave next week. It's the most confused schedule of all time: Erin finishes work today (the 3rd) but has to restart on the 3rd of November and finish again on the 5th; I finished on the 19th but started again on the 1st and finish on the 10th (possibly the 8th); Adam finishes on the 7th (possibly the 4th) but starts again on the 12th and finishes on the 15th... Good times. But we are going to Cambodia, and that's all that matters.
Of course, as is the way of things, everything gets good the moment you're ready to leave; I'm now working at a wonderful school with fantastic teacher and absolutely no work to be done. They sit around and talk shit all day until they think they've stayed in the staff room long enough to go home. I tells ya, it's a revelation.
We have lived a pretty charmed life here, for all my bitching, but the stasis keeps us miserable. We came over here to move, continuously, and more and more we've found ourselves bound to Bangkok because of money or friends, and though it thrives during the night, this city, during the day it can be a very dull place to be, little more than an unpleasant melange of humidity and traffic noise and crowds and cracked pavements. Having to wade up to your knees across a streets when it's raining: that kind of thing is awesome fun when you're here for a holiday, but when you're coming home from work it's usually just frustrating and kinda gross. And so you get petty and notice the little details (like the peculiar Thai habit of stopping for absolutely no reason at the top and bottom of crowded escalators) and forget the big picture.
The big picture is that this city is surreal and fantastic, a never-ending carnival dedicated to the gods of paid sex and cheap whiskey. Nothing about it makes sense, and so at times you fail to notice just how ridiculous the whole thing is. Like: a telegraph pole exploded above me today while I was on the motorbike ride to work. And when I say exploded, I mean it; a massive blast of light and sound, followed by the burning sensation on my neck and shoulder as a fountain of sparks poured down upon my un-helmeted head.
That doesn't happen elsewhere, right?
And: Adam's disembodied voice haunting us each day on the train. Somehow, a few months ago, Adam sort of fell into doing a voiceover for a commercial. How? Who knows? In any case the ad was picked up by the SkyTrain company, who have televisions on all their carriages playing ads. Now, every day we get:
Paul (Adam's boss): Your talent is a gift! The whole world is depending on you!
Adam (in a deep, throaty yell filled with sincere longing and desperation): I'll never do this to you again!
Thai lady whom we don't know, but apparently represents Kasikorn Bank: Yaht min koo doo let min khat...
This kind of thing is odd, right? It shouldn't be the case that in a city of ten million people who all speak another language that our friend should be the one on television, right?
Last week I was electrocuted by an egg (long story, the moral of which is not to pour eggs into a sandwich press, even if they do make awesome triangular shaped eggs). Erin is being stalked by a girl who is trying to force her to take a well-paying job at a Thai university (long story, the moral of which is never to be nice to anyone. Ever.). Wait, have I mentioned the being-chased-by-wild-elephants-while-hitchhiking-with-a-gun-toting-golf-player story? What about the nearly-dead-through-tropical-fever-induced-liver-failure story?
This stuff is happening, every day. Except this week, for some reason, which is why this is such a meandering email with no real point. Next week we will be gone! I'll write again then. Hope you're all well.
Lachlan
