Tuesday, August 26, 2008

#21: It's Revolution, Baby!




IT FILTERED: down to us very slowly, as usual. By the time it reached me, dripping sweat and staring at the wall from my desk, the manic shouting, the slogan-chanting, the clash of sweaty singlets against riot shields, had decreased to a murmur. The first thing I noticed was that the Thai teachers had the television on in the staffroom. The sound was off. They'd had it on occasionally when the Thai boxers were competing in the Olympics, but never otherwise. Odd, but not anything worth investigating. Then, later in the day, an email from a friend in Singapore:

Wow, Bangkok looks pretty exciting at the moment.

What? No it doesn't. I followed the links and there it was: the People's Alliance for Democracy had taken Government House and the government TV station, and blocked all highways into and out of Bangkok.

Now, I've made my thoughts on PM Samak known elsewhere in the blog; if the protesters succeed then good riddance to bad rubbish (just to recap: he's a television chef. The prime minister of a significant nation has two - count 'em - two cooking shows each week, as well as a celebrity talk show). Will it succeed though? Probably not, because the army isn't willing to back the protesters, and nothing ever happens in Thailand without the army weighing in. Let's hear it for military dictatorships posing as functioning democracies to receive millions in US funding and snap-happy tourists! Hip-hip!

But what amazes me is the Thais' deep love of a good coup.

Bear in mind, this is a land in which, if it weren't for the blare of traffic whistles and the whine of two-stroke engines, the roads would be almost silent - no-one ever, ever dares to use their car horn. A land in which people never, ever raise their voice, except via a karaoke machine. Where conflict is simply bad form and to be avoided at all times. It's simply not done. And yet, and yet: they're not just willing, but eager, to congregate en masse every couple of months to depose and behead the current political leader.

I had always wondered what it would be like to live through a coup, attempted or otherwise. I imagine that in a smaller town with a more excitable populace, say Phnom Penh or Port Moresby, that the reverberations of the revolt would ripple instantaneously throughout the city. But in a metropolis the size of Bangkok, with a people as fiercely, stubbornly calm as the Thais, the coup basically boils down to a few half-excited conversations with friends around the city:

"Hey! There was a coup today!"

"What? A coup! Really?"

"Yeah!"

"Wow."

"..."

"So..."

"How was work today?"

There's not much else to say.

We didn't make it to the jungle last weekend; instead we went out with Jen and Clarice and a few others, celebrating Jen's birthday at the Flying Chicken outside of town. This place - it is easily the restaurant most likely to end my long stint at vegetarianism.

Not because the food's particularly good, you understand - it is very good, but so are most places in Bangkok - but because when your chicken is cooked, they cover it in brandy, light it on fire, put it in a slingshot, and fire it to a waiter waiting on a unicycle, who deftly catches it with a spike on the top of his hat.

I'll wait here while you read that again.

Done? Yes, it's amazing - more amazing because there are several choices as to how your chicken is caught, including having a second waiter on top of the first waiter's shoulders (who, just to repeat, is on a motherfucking unicycle), more amazing still because we didn't get to see it at all. We missed the entire affair, as we were subjected to VIP treatment (read: locked in a karaoke room and subjected to endless balloon animals from a drunken Thai clown).

Still, it managed to be bizarre. The Thai clown was amazing with the balloons, creating really complex designs like a small piglet wearing sunglasses (!) or a poodle wearing sunglasses (!) - well, okay: the truth is he did all the standard designs and then used a small balloon to make sunglasses for them. It was pretty enthralling after a few whiskeys, though. And we chucked on a good mix of mopey Thai karaoke dirges for the Thais in attendance and the 'Ghostbusters' theme song for the rest of us ("I AIN'T AFRAID OF NO GHOST!"). And when the chickens were finally delivered to us after their flight, they were presented standing up like little dolls, with a flower where the head should be, and a little American flag in their little roast chicken arms. It was creepy.

Sunday we hung with Aaron, who informed us that he is, after much debate, leaving his job and joining us on our long road north. Excellent! My dream was always to lead a communal trip, picking up people along the way - I watched The Muppet Movie far, far too often in the lead-up to this trip (sing it with me now: 'Movin' right along, dun-de-dun, dun-de-dun, footloose and fancy-free...'). Our last month in Bangkok is upon us, the road stretches before us like a dream, and soon we will be carried along it like leaves in a stream.

But for now we work, and watch events in Bangkok unfold. On Tuesday, the day of the revolt, my last class was interrupted after twenty minutes by a loudspeaker announcement; the children stood suddenly and ran out; and, mystified, I retired to the staff room, slumping in a heap behind my desk. Bill, a veteran of many years teaching in Thailand, turned around to me and smiled.

"I love it when they have a coup," he said, "We all get to go home early."

Viva la revolucion!

Lachie

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

#20: Bangkok I Love You (But You're Bringing Me Down)

Kill Time: Still the coolest bar in Bangkok



Week 20, Thailand

HAVE I: been a bit down on Bangkok, recently?

I haven't meant to be. I guess it's just something that comes with spending a long time in one place; the ugly bits tend to stick out and poke you in the eye a bit more than earlier, when you first arrive, smiling, clutching closely to your ideas of what the place should be like with the breathless optimism of migrants and Barack Obama. And being poor: being poor is a grinding dullness that can make a mockery of any city's nightlife. Add to that a boring job - a job with the kind of crushing paralysis that sees you sitting at your desk furiously trying to work out how many cents you are earning per minute, or wondering whether dogs hear sound the same way fish do, or spending hours staring at the clock trying to work out if the second hand is moving slower than it was a few hours ago. Suddenly you're trapped and bored all day by the job and trapped and bored all night by your inability to spend money. So, in the words of 90's relationship guidebooks: It's not you, Bangkok. It's me.

And I should be fair to Bangkok, even though I agree with Theroux when he calls it "a preposterous mixture of temples and brothels". This city is cool. The young guys with cigarettes hanging limply from mouths surrounded by ambitious facial hair, pouring whiskey for their friends at run-down little college bars. The old ladies doing tai chi in the morning and preparing their alms to give to the monks wandering past in a sea of wide grins, saffron robes, and hands pressed together in thanks. The fat men behind the food stalls, hazy with chili smoke and laughing with grease stains down their chest, each one a consummate master of the only dish they have ever made or will ever make. The slimy canals that criss cross the city, filled with boats; the evil laughs of tuk-tuk drivers; the hammocks over train tracks filled with labourers escaping the midday heat; the endless games of bottle-top checkers and makruk; the children shouting "Hello! I love you!" and the young guys and girls anxious to find out everything about you and all your thoughts on Thailand. And the food! There is an unspoken rule in Thailand that the more one spends on food here, the worse it will be, and vice versa. Beautiful, tongue-scorching, stomach-filling meals are available everywhere for less than the cost of a Paddle-Pop, in Sydney.

But just as Bangkok has many brilliant sights, tastes and sounds that are found only here, and nowhere else in the world, it also has its bastions of shittiness, the things that seem deliberately tailored to make your day a little harder. So, in the interests of getting everything out on the table, a few of the lamer aspects of living here:

GROUP AEROBICS:

So, even though Thais are genetically the slimmest people on earth, they nevertheless are determined to rub our faces in our own fat arses by exercising constantly. Parks come with every conceivable sporting arena - tennis, badminton, bocce, basketball, soccer, futbol, pools, running tracks - plus huge areas of free exercise equipment, weights and dumbells and stationary bikes and that one where you press your arms together and another where you spin your arms in opposite circles and another that makes you look like you're practicing having sex, which is really funny.

Every large corporate building has a stereo system out the front and every afternoon (you guessed it) they unite in their spandex glory to do an hour of aerobics. This would be more goofy than annoying if they hadn't decided to set up one such aerobics arena right outside our window, so that now we suffer through two hours of techno remixes of "Jingle Bells" and "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" (I wish I was kidding) filtering into our apartment. I've got enough on my plate, what with all this blogger-ing (?) and surfing (?) the inter-web (?) without having to listen to music that sounds like Alvin and the Chipmunks dropping some pills and buying a drum machine. Lame!

THE WET SEASON:

Aka, the Most Disappointing Event of My Life. Each week since June, we've doubted ourselves, saying, "Oh, maybe it'll start next week", but I'm ready to call bullshit on the whole thing. Wet season? Where? I'm expecting lightning, floods, screaming, sandbags, being trapped in our apartment block, much gnashing of teeth, old men with long beards measuring things in cubits. Instead, we get a half-hour storm every couple of days. Meh? Sure, hundreds of people are dying in mudslides and flooding in Laos and Vietnam, but here? They should rename this the Mildly Damp Season. Lame!

THE WHISTLEBLOWERS:

Traffic in Bangkok is bad, it's true. But it's not so bad. It's rare that you're stuck in the one place for more than fifteen or twenty minutes; the subway and the SkyTrain have taken alot of pressure off the roads. Some roads would almost be kinda pleasant to sit by. Almost, that is, if it weren't for the Thai obsession with blowing whistles at anything that moves.

A car reverses out of its driveway - BLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP goes the security guard on his whistle.
Put your foot over the yellow line on the SkyTrain - BLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP goes the train guard.
As for traffic cops, just forget about it: they will sit on their whistle going BLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP even if they're not doing anything. It's mind-numbingly constant but no matter how much you hear it, it's always just as irritating as the first time. My "punching the goddamn whistle out of their stupid goddamn mouth" fantasies have proceeded to boiling point, but they're lucky, because these violent fantasies always start with me going "The next person I hear blowing a whistle..." and since the sound never stops, it's difficult to work out who that person is.

Plus security guards and policeman wear uniforms that are skin-tight, so even while they're irritating you, you're forced to imagine them naked. Lame!

THE EDUCATION SYSTEM:

Learning by rote is so lame. Here's how my lessons go:

"Okay, everyone, repeat: I am going to the supermarket."
"I ahm goo-ing too tha supahmahkut."
"Good. Now say: I will buy some milk."
"Guhd. Nao sae: I will bay sum mik."
"Okay, good, but we don't need to say good..."
"Oh-kay, guhd, but wee-"
"No, no, don't repeat everything I say..."
"Noh, noh, dot rupeet -"

Sometimes I want to scream "STOP COPYING ME!" like a five-year old getting picked on by an older brother. I'm totally going to have a temper tantrum soon. Lame!

FOOTPATHS

Everybody here is smaller than me. So I hit my head on everything - poles, lightbulbs, roofs, electric wires. Plus, they seem intent on making footpaths into obstacle courses of potholes, sudden steps, dead rats, dogshit, and wandering babies. I've never been what you'd call the elegant, graceful type, but over here clumsiness is a life-threatening condition. Lame!

THE DREGS OF SOCIETY

Look, I'm not one of these anti-whitey whiteys. A lot of backpackers will make a big show of trying to avoid other travellers, expats and well-known places (god forbid a place should appear in a guidebook), but it's all bullshit, really: without other English-speakers we'd have no-one to inflict our mind-numbingly boring stories on (even the Thais have limits to their 'nodding and smiling politely while white guy talks about his adventures' behaviour).

I don't mind tourists and ultra-touristed areas; they have their good sides and I won't go out of my way to avoid them. But here in Bangkok: well, it can be a struggle. Bangkok attracts a certain type of person, and, not to put too fine a point on it, that person is either:

a) a drunken, overweight Australian man in his fifties, here for the promise of free sex, no matter how ugly you are.
b) a muscular German with glasses in his mid-forties, here for the promise of free sex, no matter how boring you are.
c) a drunken, tattooed British guy in his early thirties, here for the promise of free sex, no matter what a brain-dead slobbering moron you are. [You can tell these ones by the way they drool while shouting "She showed me her booby!" to their mates on the phone.]

Sex for sale is nothing new, and the girls here make a good living from it, with little of the shame and violence that happens elsewhere. And the way Bangkok's reputation collects all these people who couldn't make it anywhere else, like a beach collecting driftwood and dead seaweed: it's nothing new, either - Goa and Laos act as just as much a magnet for failed hippies as Bangkok does for sex-deprived middle-aged men. But none of that stops it being the most depressing sight on earth, sometimes. Plus, it makes every conversation with a Thai girl feel more like a possible transaction than a chat. Lame!

Phew, so that's all off my chest. Now I can get back to the good stuff. According to current plans, we should be heading back to the jungle this weekend. See you then.

Lachie

ps, My brother Daniel has just started his own blog, obviously looking to cash in on the limitless wealth and fame achieved by this one. Since he's five years younger than me, it will automatically be at least 17 time more dynamic, relevant, edgy and youth-y than this one (O young people! Tell me your secrets! Like, where is this so-called Timbaland, and how do I get there? Can I take the bus?).
I suggest we all jump ship immediately. http://modern-day.blogspot.com/

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Extra Juicy Midweek Pop: Hewie For President!

THAI POLITICS: is a subject I've avoided so far, because a) I don't consider myself enough of an authority to comment on it, b) it hasn't had a massive effect on our time here and c) south-east Asian politics are, in general, awful, like the best joke you've ever heard except that the punchline is the lives of millions of people - like, did you know that the 'democratically-elected' prime minister of Cambodia for the last twenty years has been a one-eyed ex-Khmer Rouge general? How funny is that! How about the fact that US Marines who are charged with rape in the Philippines can just sit at their base without fear - if they go a year without being found guilty they are considered automatically innocent! Hilarious! A laugh riot! That's what you get for letting the U.S. write your constitution for you! Zing!

But time to tackle the beast. Here's our cast of characters:

THE KING: We love the King. We love the King. Sometimes living in Thailand can remind one of that Simpsons episode with people in robes with blank eyes walking around blandly muttering "We love the leader". "We love the King" is written everywhere; it's a legal offence not to stand when the king's song is played at the cinema, before the start of a movie. No shit: this isn't one of those trivial, haha-look-how-antiquated-it-is sort of laws - people get arrested frequently for refusing to stand during the song, and you can get quite serious jail time. As a foreigner, you're unlikely to get arrested, though you will almost certainly be removed from the cinema.

But all this hardcore propagandizing is remarkable, really, because the king is actually a really cool guy. Without doubt, the coolest monarch of our time, and the only real moral force in Thai politics. It's a guarantee that you will be unable to find a Thai person willing to say a bad word about the king, who has stepped into the political realm a couple of times - with no legal power except the blinding respect and loyalty that all Thai citizens afford him - in order to "encourage" certain politicians into exile when they've done something incredibly vicious to the Thai people. Plus, he's an accomplished jazz musician who jammed with Louis Armstrong and several others during the 60's. He's in his 80's now, though, and though his influence on the Thai people remains massive, his ability to control it is waning.


THAKSIN "FRANK" SHINAWATRA: The villain of the piece, Thaksin is the ex-Prime Minister and Manchester City F.C. owner who was removed from Thai politics by force a couple of years ago. But Thaksin's not really an evil man; it's more that he's just a cold businessman who saw it as a good business move to become the leader of some sixty-million odd loyal customers - wait, did I say customers? I meant citizens.

A former corrupt police colonel turned telecommunications billionaire, Thaksin's major legacy was to make Bangkok miserable by enforcing a 1am closing time across the city, to restart the Southern Troubles (see below), and to claim the hearts and minds of taxi drivers everywhere by promising free money. During his [ahem] leadership, he announced that he would monitor surveillance tapes at the casinos along the Cambodian and Burmese borders to watch for civil servants; any he saw cavorting there would be immediately terminated. Now, of course, Thaksin owns a string of casinos along the Cambodian border.

Recently charged with tax evasion, 'Frank' was, for some reason, allowed to leave the country on bail and now refuses to come back (surprised?). Now living in England, where, apparently, the authorities consider him more significant as a Premier League club owner than as an international fugitive.


PRIME MINISTER / TV CELEBRITY SAMAK: When Thaksin was removed by the army, somehow one of his cronies was picked to replace him as prime minister.But surely they could have found a better cronie than this idiot. Samak considers it his national duty to lead these sixty-million odd viewers - wait, did I say viewers? I mean customers. No, citizens. Citizens!

Samak is a TV chef. Let me repeat for those in the back: a TV Chef. That's like letting Hewie run Australia, or letting Gordon Ramsay have a stab at Dowling St. And don't think my present tense was unintentional, either: Samak is a TV chef. As in, on top of his international obligations, he finds time to present a weekly TV show about how gorgeous the aubergines are this season. He also has two other weekly TV shows, one a typical Third World-dictator-ranting-at-his-enemies production, the other a 'classy' talk show called Talking Samak-style.

Well known for drooling during speeches and occasionally interrupting himself to give a 'bushman's blow' (gotta keep those synuses clear!), Samak is, as the old saying goes, about as useful as a one-legged man at an arse-kicking competition.

THE P.A.D.: The only real opposition, though as far as I can tell they're not so much a party as they are a group of unemployed students who congregate down near Democracy Monument everyday. Looked as if they were going to take Parliament House during a rally a couple of months ago, but they failed and the entire movement's fizzled a bit since then.

Just because they're the opposition doesn't mean they're any better, though. The PAD (People's Alliance for Democracy) shift their stance so often that they could be playing Dance Dance Revolution: they always appear wherever the poular breeze is blowing and were a main player in fuelling the ridiculous Cambodia crisis (below).

THE DEEP SOUTH: Um, does anybody realize how many people are dying in Thailand's south at the moment?

A lot. I'd almost be prepared to compare it to Baghdad. Everyday, people are shot by gunmen on the backs of motorbikes, killed by roadside bombs, kidnapped and beheaded while innocently sitting at tea-shops. It's insane. A couple of months ago, we took the train down to Hat Yai, which, despite the occasional bombing, is as far south as you can go and still be considered safe. Two weeks later the same train was ambushed by rebels who laid logs across the tracks and opened fire on the train with machine gunes, killing four people.

The reasons are the same reasons as everywhere - the people down close to the Malaysian border are of a different religion to the rest of the country and feel (with some justification) that they are being badly mistreated by the government. On top of that, however, is the fact that a lot of the violence is just teenage boys with guns, which translates into a high proportion of principals and schoolteachers being assassinated, as well as schools being torched.

The media here downplays the situation as much as possible because it's bad for tourism; but what's much worse is that politicians almost entirely ignore the issue - perhaps because they have no idea how to solve it. Several people are being killed violently every single day, yet the Thai government would prefer to focus on: The Cambodia Crisis.

THE CAMBODIA CRISIS: So exhorbitantly stupid that I can't even believe I'm wasting space writing about it, the Cambodia crisis boils down to this: Cambodia managed to get one of its temples put on the UNESCO World Heritage list. Thailand got jealous, and because the temple is close to the border, they claimed that Cambodia was trying to steal 4.6 square km of their land. Suddenly, everyone went mental.

Now, the land in question is disputable, but the Cambodians have had a market there for thirty years. Plus, did I mention it's 4.6 goddamn square km? It's jungle. Give it to them. Instead, the temple was closed and both countries amassed hundreds of armed troops at the border and started arresting each other's citizens when they crossed into the disputed zone.

The entire thing makes no sense because the big catch is: the temple is inaccessible from the Cambodian side, because of the abhorrent state of Cambodian roads. Oh, you can get there, but it'll take two or three days of hard travel from Phnom Penh, and you'll probably have to travel by ox-cart some of the way. What does this mean? That the only people to benefit from the UNESCO-listing would have been Thailand anyway, because all the tourists would have had to travel there from Bangkok. But now the temple's closed, the tourists have been scared off, and there was almost an armed conflict. Both countries lose everything.

But it only serves to demonstrate Thailand's complete inability to lead by example. Thailand is a wealthy country surrounded by some of the poorest countries in the world, but instead of being a guiding light for Southeast Asia it prefers to keep its neighbours poor so that they don't provide threats. When cyclone Nargis battered Burma, the Thai response was a gigantic, lazy "Meh". They provided supplies to the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia throughout the 80's and 90's because it suited them to keep Cambodia weak.

Really, Thailand just wants to keep things the way they are. They want a weak, pliant Cambodia as a buffer between themselves and Vietnam; they want a weak, pliant Laos as a buffer between themselves and China; they want a weak, closed-off Burma as a buffer between themselves and India. And they want Malaysia and Singapore to do what they've always done, which is to say, to stay out of regional politics altogether and try to make everyone believe that they're not really part of Southeast Asia.

I guess that we don't have the same sense of history as peoples in other parts of the world. Nobody in Thailand has lived under Burmese occupation, much less under Cambodian control - but still they remember, they remember that those things happened before and could well happen again. During recent negotiations with Cambodia, the Cambodian leadership reminded everyone that "We must be good neighbours for many tens of thousands of years to come".

Tens of thousands of years? Has anyone ever heard Kevin Rudd saying that to Helen Clark? That's the way things are considered over here, though, as one long continuum.

No beginnings, and no endings.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

#19: Bangkok Rising





AND BUT: so we are hanging out the windows of the southbound train, the wind is rushing through my hair, our clothes are getting stained with all the many varieties of black gunk that line the windowsills but god who the fuck cares because the wind is in our hair and we are hanging out the windows of the southbound train. We are smiling and this is what we're here for and the train is crowded with no room to sit and so we are sitting on the windowsills, leaning out. Aaron gets slapped in the face by a big wet fern charging toward him at 80km/hr; Edie and I manage to duck inside. We are alive and it is fantastic.

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.

Thursday, August 7, 2008

#18: The Universal Dream



Week 18, Laos

JUST DON'T: shit on the train. That's the main lesson I'm taking away from southeast Asia. See, we can debate all day about whether or not squat toilets are good (I'll win: they're not) but they're generally a pretty minor part of the day. Unless we've just eaten a burning-hot papaya salad followed by something warm and squishy and milky and are stuck in snarling traffic in Bangkok, in which case the squat toilet may become the most important thing in our day - it may even become our makeshift home for the next few nights.

Edie likes them, for some obscure reason which I haven't yet determined (when she tries to tell me I stick my fingers in my ears and shout 'Lalala! Lalala! Not listening! Not listening!'). For me, the whole having-to-exercise-while-shitting rubs me the wrong way, as does the never-being-entirely-sure-whether-you've-got-yourself-aimed-over-the-bowl-rather-than,-say,-the-floor,-or-your-leg factor. But I deal with it.

But catching the train back from beautiful Vientiane, flush with our new visas ensuring us another three months of stressed-out bliss in Bangkok, I found myself running with exquisite fervour to the squats at the back of the carriage, where the hole opens directly on the tracks below. I lowered myself tactfully. Remember when I first described Thai trains several months ago as 'jangly'? Well, let's replace that with Beijing-earthquake-esque. The train tossed and turned like an insomniac, bouncing over each piece of track and jerking dramatically in wide zigzags. It was impossible to keep my ass still and I quickly became a garden sprinkler, a poo helicopter spreading the fruits of my labour in all directions.

I repeat: don't shit on the trains.

But we've got our visas. Like I said: nothing stands in the way of Destiny. Not only did we get the visas and keep our jobs, but a delay at the Thai Embassy dealt us five tough days of chilling out by the Mekong with a Beerlao in hand. Vientiane is a beautiful city - it perches on the Mekong, hugs right up to its banks. The buildings are low and spacious and from a third-storey bar you can see out across the rooftops of the entire city. And everything's so French: is it wrong to talk about colonialism like it was a good thing? Who cares: French food and culture mixes so well with the south-east Asian mindset that it's a match made in heaven. Waking up to fresh baguettes with poached eggs and wine and going to bed with a spicy-hot curry washed down with beer: surely this is the Universal Dream.

It's getting chock-full of tourists now, little Laos, but the people are still wonderful. And naive. In the centre of town is a massive monument based on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris - it looks just like it, from a distance, though up close it's basically just blank concrete. The Laos call it 'the Vertical Runway' because the government used all the concrete that was supposed to go towards a runway for the airport, in its construction. The best thing about it, though, is the marketing: on the biggest and most tourist drawcard-y attraction in their town, the Laos have erected a plaque which says, among other things, 'From a closer distance it is even less impressive, like a monster of concrete'. Genius.

So, times were tough. We hired a motorbike ('that'll be $7, please), got a hotel room on the Mekong ('that'll be $6, please'), went for a herbal sauna ('that'll be $1, please') and massage ('that'll be $3, please') at the forest temple on the outskirts of town, and generally just toughed it out eating French food and drinking the Lao moonshine (called lao-lao) mixed with lemon juice and warm honey.

Vientiane's odd in the fact that there are almost zero beggars, absolutely zero child beggars, no touts, no mahouts walking their poor mistreated elephants about the town, few yaa baa addicts, and few prostitutes (in fact, it is illegal for a foreigner to sleep with a Lao without marriage or special dispensation from the police). Odd because it is by far the poorest country in the region, and odd because it's been a fact of life in Thailand, Cambodia, even (to a far, far, lesser extent) in Malaysia. Odd, also, because Laos has just the kind of burgeoning tourism scene that attracts alot of those people to the city. Maybe it happens up in Vang Vieng, where backpackers tube down the river from beer stall to beer stall. We'll wait and find out.

Everything's working out, now. We have visas; we have jobs. As of Tuesday, we've been paid our monthly wage and gotten our first new money into the bank accounts since March. So now we can look ahead. By the end of September, we will have left Bangkok to hit the long road north; by mid-October, we should have left Thailand altogether. And then? Laos, Vietnam, China perhaps? We haven't decided. But right now, everything's good. Hope everything's good with you.

Lachie

Monday, August 4, 2008

Extra Juicy Midweek Pop: Photo-a-Go-Go!

ALRIGHT SO: this is the first of what will probably be a whole lot of midweek Pops, generally covering things more esoteric, obtuse, irrelevant, dull or self-obsessed than the subjects I'm generally covering, and really serving only to add to the giant pile of informational refuse that is the Internet.

But first: photos! Credit where credit's due - I'm a standard point-n-clicker if every there was one, so most of the great photos that have been taken so far have been Edie's, who has a great eye for a shot and is generally a far superior photographer/artist/person than me in every respect. Here are a few of our favourites that I haven't yet had an excuse to insert into the blog:



Okay, so you'll have to turn your monitor on its side - fucked if I can be bothered learning how to make it display the right way, right now, it's really goddamn hot here, you know, and I'm tired - but here in all its glory is Phanom Rung, the ancient Khmer temple atop an extinct volcano.


On the train to the Laotian border. Check out the size of those windows.



Okay, so this would only be notable in assessing how completely ridiculous my Indiana Jones delusions have become (a straw fedora? Really?) except for that moped in the back of the canoe, which they drove - drove, mind you, not pushed - into the middle of the Mekong, with water up to the rider's knees and the motor somehow not flooding with river scum, at which point German Mark and the Thai rider lifted it into the canoe and took it to the mainland. How lame is the entire rest of the world? This is in Si Phan Dom, Laos.

From now on there will be a steady, if irregular, flow of photos to the Flickr site that I've just set up right now, literally right now as you were sitting here reading this. It's here:
You're welcome.
Lachie