#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.