#9 Dollars and Sense

Love this kid, name's Knight. I thought he'd look good in my shades. Am I a cool teacher or what?

Sometimes, as the company van takes me away from Bangkok I'm left with a familiar feeling. The faceless skyscrapers holding up the sky, our generations roman columns. Giving a caricatured context to the freeway overpasses that emote sameness, no matter in Bangkok or San Francisco these buildings feel homely to me despite their cold ever wearying stare. Is that home? Am I in the eye of a hurricane or is it really all over?

Walking down the street I see an armless beggar sitting head bowed and legs crossed, a plastic cup in front of him with miniscule amounts of currency in it. How did the cup get there? Just down the way there is another beggar, this one is faceless, scarred from left to right, burns maybe, possibly a disfigurement that was intentionally inflicted but perhaps not, gruesome certainly. At the steps of the sky train there's a legless man in a wheelchair shouting. Another memory from home, the crazies out on the streets of San Francisco, blameless pitied souls for whom there is no relief. This is the first screamer I've seen in Thailand, it's contradictory to their culture to be so loud in public, much less to allow someone who's mentally ill to roam unhindered. There's a definite line between those physically disfigured beggars and this one, the castaway captains of cup currency are almost seen as having jobs, begging is full time work here. A friend swore that they saw the same limbless individual begging in Bangkok and then two days later in a small town about an hour and a half away. I hate to think it but I wouldn't be surprised if someone actually was organizing and employing these people to beg.

A teacher threatened students with employment as a river cleaner if they didn't start paying attention in class. It's not an idle threat either. Without some amount of English or at least a good education in Thai the students we teach will quite possibly end up living in the shacks on the filthy polluted rivers around Bangkok, getting paid to fish pieces of trash out of the water as they float by. In Thailand a credential is immeasurably more valuable than any know how or actual ability. One of the Thai's at work has three masters degrees including one in education and another in linguistics. Despite this, any time she's been given a course to write for the company we've had to rewrite it in its entirety. She'll never be fired though, her credentials are paraded around in front of every new school we pick up and teach at. Her level of knowledge and certainly her manner with her co-workers warrant an entirely different job. There are people who walk up and down the streets of Bangkok with straw brooms sweeping the streets, they are literally street sweepers. I can't imagine the massive discomfort of the job, nor the miniscule pay that certainly comes with it, but I suppose someone has to do it, and I wouldn't mind if it was our resident multi-masters degree holder.

That's not the only thing that seems a bit backwards around these parts. No one in Thailand wears their seat belt except for the people in the front seat, and even they don't really want to. The people in the back seat are not required to wear their seat belt, or if they are (no one here knows the laws) then it is simply ignored. When one tries to explain to them that the force of their body smashing into my seat from behind would kill me and THAT'S WHY YOU WEAR YOUR SEAT BELT. They look at you and laugh, they really do think it's funny that we don't realize the seat will protect us. Then I ask them if they think the seat will protect them when they slam into it and they nod, that's when I start laughing. All this concern about safety is a little silly though, I ride motor scooters every day, yes that's meant to be plural, more than one. I also play with random stray dogs most of the time, really, what are the chances they'll bite? This last weekend when I was in Ang Thong, a town where I have only a dozen foreigners to blend in with, the stray dogs came running up to me and began trying to play. In Bangkok I wouldn't trust them, but out in the country they seem pretty harmless.

Also in Ang Thong we smashed three people on a motor scooter and rode it to the pool where us and our lily white skin was the talk of the town. I got into a splash fight with the local kids and then we all slid down the water slide. Ang Thong really was my first properly rural experience in Thailand, every where I went the locals waved and said hello, sometimes they'd ask us how we were doing. The three girls I went to visit, who teach there, they all said that it never changes. In the three months they've been there it's stayed exactly the same. Anytime there's a new foreigner everyone wants to know what they're doing there, foreigners don't come to Ang Thong for a vacation, they are either stranded or know someone.

We've planned my house mate Olly's birthday. It's at the end of the month. We're going to stay out all night Friday night, sleep into the evening on Saturday then take a taxi to Pattaya, probably cost about thirty dollars for the two hour ride, then we're going to party all night in Pattaya, sleep into the evening again and come home to rest before work on Monday. I'm a bit tentative to go to Pattaya with the boys, perhaps some girls will come along but I'd be surprised. The reputation of Pattaya is a rather mixed one. Notorious for its prostitution, Pattaya was first logged into the annals of tourism history when it was turned into an R&R camp for GI's during the Vietnam war. It has since boomed into a beach town that offers every kind of sin one can find. Massive transvestite shows play in the gay district, brothels of every kind dot the corners, and yet despite this there is also a large amount of family style vacation outings one could take. Somehow I don't think the boys will want to take the submarine down to see the choral reef or have a nice stroll through the zoo. With any luck though, I'll get a few good stories out of it.

To conclude I would like to give a small lesson on naming children. Thai children are almost universally given a western name upon delivery at the hospital, or wherever Thai babies come from. If you were to name your child Anfield, after your favorite football stadium in England, you might think you were being rather original. In fact you are only contributing to the massive number of children named after that very same stadium you so dearly love. I personally have three Anfields in my classes. Another thing you might want to avoid is naming your child Beer, that unfortunate little one is going to wake up one morning and realize his father is an alcoholic and now he bears the brunt of that by his namesake. Perhaps it wouldn't be wise to name your child Hor either. We have also had in the past three brothers, all one year apart and named rather smartly, Com, Pu, and Ter. I wonder what would happen if the middle brother dies, then the other two would feel even more incomplete. Another lovely thing about the western names is that the parents will often times spell the names horribly wrong. Ama is actually Emma, Aum, and Aom are said exactly the same, and despite what you might think, Oh and Oh are not said the same way, one is more like Oooooh and the other is Oy. I have a Garfield which I think is quite a nice name for a little boy provided he is a boy and isn't fat, both of which are the case for this little chubby girl. The number of boys named First is astounding, I bet that you can guess where they fall in the childbirth order, what I'm waiting to see is if the next boy is actually going to be called Second. There are a few Mints and a healthy number of Ploys and I.Q.'s though they always spell it wrong. I have one girl named Kiwi which I loved during the lesson on New Zealand. So far the best name I've had so far is a kid called Foc, pronounced fuck!

Adios amigos, and every time you see a name think of my lovely little boy who I always call on by name, “Fuck! Get up here and hold this flash card while I laugh at myself hysterically.”

This is regular traffic.
Victory Monument, commemorating Thailand's involvement in World War II, I didn't even know they were there.

This is light traffic in Bangkok.

Some kids in uniforms, aren't they adorable.

#8 Lesson Learned (and cute kids!)

I sweated the entire first two months that I was in Thailand. It's between eighty-eight and ninety- five degrees every day and the humidity is an intransigent fellow of inescapable reach and influence. After a particularly active lesson a droplet of sweat leapt off my nose and landed on one of the five or six year olds worksheet I was checking over. The student was standing right there and the grin on their face was unreal. The smile said I've got one on you because I may be in your class but you're in my country. The funny part about the heat is that the Thai's get really uncomfortable if the heat is just a nail more than they're used to. It's as though they've managed to be comfortable in the intense heat of this country but only on the condition that it never gets any hotter. One of the disciplinary methods that has been passed around and used with a class that's unruly is to turn off the fans and air conditioning and then shut the windows. The unruliest of kids will suddenly sit quietly in anticipation of a reprieve from the growing heat. For the foreigners it's already so hot that a little bit more heat really doesn't matter.

As I said though I only sweated through the first two months, recently I've managed to walk down the street without breaking a sweat, and lounging around the house I no longer require a fan on me at all times. At night it's still quite warm which makes for a great club scene, at no point do women or men have to put on any more clothes. Everyone goes from out to in at their leisure and under no circumstances are you excused from dressing like you're in the tropics. It can actually be quite a funny scene in a dance club before it's gotten really busy. The air con is on full blast in anticipation of the masses of hot bodies bouncing and swaying, but without their body heat the room is nearly a freezer and the girls and guys wearing their thinnest, sexiest, little nothings are shaking in their skin.

It was just such a night when I had made it to Cheap Charlies to meet up with a few folks. It was about nine o'clock and everyone was well on their way to drunk when I made it to this open air bar on the corner of an alley way that sports some rather nice food and the infamous Cheap Charlies. Charlies is on soi eleven, a definite tourist destination with a mix of hotels, dance clubs, bars, restaurants and all the class and seediness the comes with Bangkok. Everyone knows Charlies because, well...it's cheap. I'd been there half an hour when Mai texted me, a blonde, fifty year old Estonian who looks it, except she's very tall, very thin, and has breasts that usually announce her arrival before she's spoken. In Thailand she's a walking circus side show, amongst us we call her a friend. She arrived in a state that would have made me think she was on her way home, past the point of truly logical thought and pretty much just opening her wallet to buy drinks for everyone in hopes we would take her with us to wherever was next. Our sweet Thai friend Prang spilled a glass of white wine on her and they had a spat, drunkenness usually doesn't mix well with forgiveness but luckily they patched it up quickly.

We decided it was time to go to the dance club and as we departed we managed to cajole a troupe of women we'd met that night to come with us, two Brits, one American, and one Canadian. I had med the two Brits the week before though I had only spoken to them for a moment as they were loud, obnoxious and drunk. People tell you about how big Bangkok is but when you're a foreigner it can be quite small, we all go to a host of the same places. Everyone has their favorite Thai place to go to, where you can be just about the only foreigner on any given night, but for the frequency of repeat run ins that I've had I can only believe that we are in fact a small group, a community in fact.

On the way to the club the taxi had to stop in the middle of the street as some large bovines came across the road and planted themselves on the grassy median on Chatutharit, the soi that runs beneath one of the largest toll roads in Bangkok. It was a truly shocking site in the midst of the massive metropolis of Bangkok and it was one of those moments when you say shit! I guess I'm in Asia.

We tramped into the club and it was empty and cold as ten o'clock is not nearly late enough to begin a night in Bangkok, but most of us were well into our drink and the temperature quickly became more agreeable as we began dancing. The American girl from Colorado grabbed me and started kissing me and the night continued. We'd originally headed out to see off a couple of boys from around Sheffield. They were at the club with us but we weren't too concerned with them at the moment. Eventually Mai went off to another club, one of her usual haunts full of people from every walk of life but with one thing in common, they had lots of money to spend. Claudia decided to stick around the club we were at and continue chatting with the five foot transsexual lead singer of the house band who had enamored us all with her thigh high red latex boots. This left the rest of us, about nine, to find our way to the next club. After twenty minutes one of the Brits decided her night was over and left rather hastily. She lived forty minutes away by taxi but none of her friends seemed too concerned by the state she was in so I shelved any concerns I had. About an hour after that the American girl and I decided to leave the club.

As we walked through this dance club's parking lot we came upon a girl sitting up against a car with one leg folded under her, her phone out and tears streaming down her face, low and behold it was the Brit who'd left before us. She was quite incoherent and couldn't walk. She insisted she go home but she wanted her housemate to come home with her. The poor girl didn't know that her housemate had gone home with one of our friends from Sheffield. We rang her but as anticipated we got no answer. We essentially forced her to go home to my house and sleep in the spare room, a difficult task in and of itself as she fought us tooth and nail trying to let us go to her house, which we would have happily done if she could have produced an address that made any sense at all. The American girl would have taken her home but she lived an hour and a half outside of Bangkok and was only in town for the weekend. So after being kicked out of one taxi because the driver was afraid our charity case would vomit in his cab we managed to get her home and provide her with a bucket for the impending sickness that would soon arrive.

Just as we got her in bed Ollie got home and he and I sat up telling stories and playing cards until the sun rose. It was the second Saturday in a row that I'd seen a sunrise in Bangkok, something I decided I needed to experience on a beach instead of the belly of this sky scrapered adult amusement park called Bangkok.

The next morning our charity case was so sick she couldn't sit up and despite Ollie and I trying our best to convince her to go to a clinic and get some hydration she simply laid in our guest room tossing up her guts every half hour or so. I called the American girl who was off visiting a friend in the south of the city and she offered to come help out with her but I declined. I also called the charity case's house mate who was working until five that Saturday. Ollie and I sat up in the room with her trying to make her laugh and playing songs for her including making one up about her and the night we'd just had. In the midst of one particularly tough dry heaving session Ollie chimed in, “This might not be the best time, but do you want to catch a movie some time?” She paused her heaving long enough to laugh and question his sincerity.

That evening her housemate did come to pick her up but not before I missed a get together for a friends birthday. I felt bad leaving her alone, even if she had done this to herself. The realization that she was a teeny stick figure of a girl really set in when I saw her wobble down the stairs with her arm around her friend, it left me with little doubt that she had learned a lesson, hopefully.

Now, to tie up on a completely unrelated note, gratuitous pictures of cute Thai children, yay!

These kids are K2, roughly age 4. I like the kid in the back who looks like he's not sure what's happening.

The one with the scrunchies that look like ears on her head is great but the real surprise is Cuptain in the back left. I think this may very well be the only time he's ever not been crying at school. In fact, he's smiling.

The one in my lap looks upset, but really he's just confused...trust me.

Also all aged about 4.

These are some of the youngest ones, about 3ish.

These monsters are also about 3 and after spending some time with their homeroom teacher in the back it's no wonder they want to come to English class and run around and play games. On a side note, the week after this picture was taken that kid in my lap was holding my hand while we were making a circle and all of the sudden I felt something funny on my arm and he was wiping his nose on my forearm. When I wiped it back on his shirt he said eeeewwwww, yeah I know pal, how do you think I feel? He refused to let go of my hand after that.