Last leisurely morning anyway.
Tomorrow I’ll be heading to the Phuket airport around 4 am. Flying to Bangkok where I’ll pick up my international flight – 25 hours long via Hong Kong to JFK.
One of the best things about flying business or first class is that you get to hang out in the cushy lounges at the various airports.
I’m going to be in Ithaca and Manhattan for June and July. Will be renting a room in FROG, the first cohousing village in the Ecovillage at Ithaca.
I’ve got a couple of events in NYC, so I’ll be staying there for around 10 days.
After that – don’t know yet! Might want to stay in the NE for a while. Any suggestions?
What will I miss about Thailand?
Visible Life
The way you see people living their lives, not screened in by garage doors or walls or closed up houses. Like the man I saw this morning when I went to pick up my laundry.
He was emerging from bathing, maybe taking a sauna. Wrapping a sarong around his waste, dripping wet.
Or the little kids sudsed up and getting scrubbed next to a large sloshing bucket, right next to cars passing by on the street.
That morning sound of sweeping …as porches, streets, beaches get swept clean of leaves, debris and trash.
Thais live in plain view. Homes are just for sleeping.
Life is public here.
The Surprising and Weird
Living in Thailand for 8 months, not speaking Thai, not having many Thai friends – I can’t say I really know much about Thailand or Thai culture.
So I’m always pondering (sometimes griping) over how they do things here. Or even wondering what they hell they’re doing. And just as often marveling at the wonderfulness.
Some varied examples…
Like last night at the Phuket night market. Fried grasshoppers for sale at the food section.
Or these water bugs at the market near my place.
The sweetness of the people, with love in their eyes, as they smeared white gunk on my face or doused me with water at Songkron water-dousing festival.
The flowing way everybody navigates the streets here. Cars, bicycles, motorbikes and people come out of anywhere, going any direction.
The motto for safe driving seems to be “Expect the unexpected and yield with peace and joy.”
I know that’s a long motto and Thai’s probably have a single word for it, but that’s the way it seems to work.
Flipping someone off, road rage or any kind of ego-driven aggressive driving would be totally out of place here.
Once I was shocked when a standing police officer looked me in the eye, pointed at me and blew his whistle. And, I got honked at by another car simultaneously.
I was shocked!
That was the most assertive and scolding thing I’d encountered since arriving in this friendly, peaceful country.
I was in the Chalong traffic circle and had been told the rule was – just go when you can.
But that’s not the rule.
The actual rule is that those already in the circle have the right of way. You can go when no one is coming from your right.
My scolding came before I “got” the real rule and I just followed the truck in front of me and cut off the guy coming around from my right.
Or the farang (foreign) men who stop along Rawai beach road every morning, bringing food to the well-loved soi dogs (street dogs) who live there.
Thai massage that’s like a combination of yoga done to you and mild torture. Especially when done by the blind people.
Driving down the street and seeing a pick up truck with the bed filled with coconuts – and picker sitting on top of them …a monkey. He picked them all and loaded them in the truck.
The language barrier – not surprising since Thai is so hard for most farangs to learn and English is so hard for Thais to learn.
Once I ordered Pad Thai with veggies – pointing to the Thai translation on the menu.
20 minutes later the waitress proudly delivered me a whole grilled fish.
The way Thais will never say “I don’t know.” If you ask them a question – do you sell _____ here? Or how do I get to _____?
They will always have an answer. ”No we don’t sell that,” and you find the item 10 seconds later. Or “Go straight and turn left,” when your desired destination is in the opposite direction.
Saying “I don’t know,” would be losing face. Can’t do that here.
Mostly I’ll miss…
Wobbly – the adopted soi dog I’ve taken care of for the last few weeks.
Dany actually adopted her, but two days later left for Australia for a week. I kept Wobbly instead of leaving her at the vert.
She’s an odd little dog and somehow escaped being put down.
She was born in a temple where her mom and siblings died of distemper. That and the tick fever left her blind in one eye, totally deaf and with balance problems.
She crashes into stuff a lot.
That’s why I named her Wobbly.
She actually has 4 names, none sticking very well since she can’t hear a damn thing so doesn’t respond to verbal cues.
She has the names Milli, Lily, Coco and Wobbly.
Here’s Wobbly with her new/old family – Dany and Joey, the Australian cattle dog that every human and dog are terrified of – except Wobbly of course.
But after Dany trained her, with a hand signal, to sit before eating, I trained her to sit and let me go out the gate first.
What I didn’t manage to do, was train her to come to me, when digging into rotton food left on the beach. Once she was just about to bit into a glob of food covered with squirming magots when I snatched her away.
It’s just that Wobbly is so danged lovable! She’s so playful to other dogs and delighted with people – especially children.
And I’ll miss my great friends here: Dany – and my New Zealand friend, Keryn, Mathius, and Tim Robins, who I came here for in the first place.
I’ll miss the guy driving his little tuk tuk and selling fresh veggies.
The women on the street selling those sweet, gummy globs of goodness cooked over coals in banana leaves, closed with little wood skewers.
The beautiful Nai Harn beach.
The unexpected adventures. Like meeting these two guys who were doing a bicycling trip around Thailand. After three weeks together they were like the odd couple – each telling me stories about how impossible the other was.
The weather. I love it and I hate it. I love wearing tank tops and shorts all the time. I love the cool breezes off the ocean.
But I also hate being hot all the time. Sweating continually. Always feeling dirty.
Love the noisy birds who start up at 5 am, when it’s still dark.
The spirit houses. Still a total mystery to me.
The cloth ribbons wrapped around big old trees and around the pointed bow of the long tail boats. I’ve been told it’s to honor the spirit of the tree or boat.
The Mangled English
When I first left the US, I began a photographic collection of funny signs. But sadly, I quickly got so used to it, that they seldom seem funny to me any more. Partly it’s because of the way written Thai works.
Thai does not have official correct spelling of words. The written language is phonetic. So the way a word is spelled is the way it sounds.
That means that in different parts of Thailand, where the accents are different, the same word will be spelled differently from elsewhere in the country.
On street signs and maps, I’ve seen my favorite Phuket beach spelled Nai Harn, Nai Han, NaiHarn.
So all this leads up to – why spell English consistently? Consistency in spelling is not valued here. Hence, spelling scarf – scaft is totally cool!
Smells
The US is sanitized. Bad smells are not allowed.
We use antibacterial soap. Antiperspirant. Disinfectant. Perfume. Electronic scent machines putting out artificial chemical scents to cover up any natural odors.
So what you smell in the US is chemical cover up.
Here in Thailand the smells are very different.
People are not smelly here. If you smell a strong smelling human, it’s always a farang.
Thais often ask to take a quick shower when visiting friends. They shower many times a day, which I’ve recently adopted too.
They seldom wear any perfume or scent, except baby powder.
But on the street, lots of smells. Sewer smell is most common. And moth balls.
The smells of cooking food are everywhere. Since most markets and restaurants are open air, you smell what’s cookin’. Lots of street-side meat grilling.
Even gasoline. One type of gas station here is any shop who has a rack of glass liter bottles of gas. Motorcyclists buy them for 100 baht ($3). When the gas station owner refills the bottles, the street is filled with gas smells.
Tomorrow I fly from Phuket to NYC…
…via Bangkok and Hong Kong.
I’m flying Cathay Pacific, reported to be one of the best airlines in the world – I wouldn’t know about that, as I haven’t flown enough to compare.
But I do know the situation I’ll be sitting in on the 15 hour flight from Hong Kong to JFK. My own little travel pod, with hundreds of movies and tv shows and a seat that folds out to a flat bed, with sheets, a comforter and a pillow. Quiet and dark.
Excellent food with about 10 meal type choices.
I know because it’s the same way I flew from LAX to Manila last September.
I paid 50,000 miles for this privilege.
