GMS It’s pouring right now in Bangkok—rain as dense as a bamboo thicket. I was at the window a moment ago, looking out. Under the cantilevered tin pan roofs below I could see a few cats poking their heads out, eyeing the sky mistrustfully. Yes, it’s business as usual back in the city. TESOL classes during the day, street vendor food for lunch and dinner, and the evening rain, only a little off schedule tonight. What a Monday. It makes me glad that yesterday, Sunday, our only real day off this weekend, was fair and fine.
We’d scheduled our Sunday to meet with new friends, Sophiya and Pasha, and take a day trip out to see Ayutthaya, the ancient capital city of Thailand. Founded in 1350 A.D, Ayutthaya held the capital honor for 417 years, or as David likes to say, “until the playboy king was defeated by Burma.” The name means, “undefeatable kingdom,” and Ayutthaya saw many battles, the most epic of which was the said-to-be spectacular elephant-back battle between the Burmese prince Manchit Sra and King Naresuan (note: not the playboy king). The city is practically all ruins and modern buildings now, but here and there through the lush foliage peeks the spire of a standing temple. It all sounded quite inspiring (as well as cheap and accessible).
A quick introduction to Sophiya and Pasha. They hail originally from Russia, but like us, had an incredible swing of events in late spring. As Sophiya said to me, “I told Pasha that after we were married, I wanted to move to St. Petersburg. But after we came to Thailand in February, we said—well, why we want to move, why not Thailand?” Sophiya is lovely—small-boned like a bird but with big expressive eyes and wildly animated facial expressions. We bonded in class over (what else?) what each other was wearing. She always comes to class in enviable outfits, and on Sunday, in her batik patterned, loose-legged trousers and oversized motorscooter helmet, with bags slung over both shoulders and big sunglasses, she looked like a model in some foreign, eco-militant fashion spread. Her husband, Pasha, is of Korean descent, but born and raised in Russia. He too, was impeccably dressed, and has an easy personality and great sense of humor. They seem quite happy to have chosen Bangkok over St. Petersburg, although Sophiya bemoans the lack of cheese options in Thai fare. Win some, lose some.
Anyway. We started our day in a bit of an uproar. We were due to meet Sophie and Pasha at Bangkok’s Hua Lampong train station at 8:00 Sunday morning. We woke up in our hotel room (roughly an hour away from our target destination) at 7:40. Needless to say we weren’t going to make our train. Lucky for us, the train takes two hours, and the shuttle buses that leave from Victory Monument only take an hour. David and I booked it out of the hotel and made in time to catch the 9:00 bus. We arrived in Ayutthaya only a few minutes after the train got in.
Despite our earlier vows never to give a tuktuk driver a second glance again, David and I fell victim again. This time our driver was much better. I can say this, but please understand that better in this context means that he 1) didn’t try to take us anywhere against our will, and 2) actually obeyed the laws of traffic, both governmental and common sense-wise. Sophiya and Pasha opted out of the tuktuk and intead rented a motor scoot. We were envious (they looked pretty badass)…until it started raining.
The ruins themselves were amazing. All red-brown brick until the sweeping, smoothed, bell-shaped domes, the temples, or wais are somehow both rugged and delicate. White stone Buddhas sit calmly out front, draped in fiery orange or searing marigold. The bright sunlight dazzled the colors, saturating our views. Two of the wats we visited we home to gigantic reclining Buddhas, longer than two boxcars and absolutely gorgeous. Small stone altars tucked at their sides overflowed with incense, food offerings, and lotus blossoms. Taking it all in was like looking a picture postcard. In fact, the only reasons I knew I wasn’t were the few stray dogs itching themselves in the shade of nearby trees. That, and the unbearable heat.
After visiting some more of the wats, David declared it time to visit the elephant kraal. There, draped in red and gold, with mahouts up top in shining crimson livery, the Royal elephants trumpeted greetings. For 20 baht you could hand-feed an elephant from a basket of corn. The one I fed was dainty and patient, though a later one greedily took as many ears as it could hold, stacking them in the curl on his trunk and making pockets of his cheeks until his face looked like a chipmunk’s. David got to have his picture made with the largest one, who sat and posed like Babar himself, and the antics of the baby of the bunch had us all in stitches.
Out in Ayutthaya, away from the smog and hectic streets of the capital, I began to relax. Things are settling down. It’s starting to sink in that we live here now. We live here. We have some new friends. We secured our job. We have a new apartment. We’re learning the language. It felt good to round off our first week here in such good spirits, and in such good company.
Last week, I made multiple broad unfounded generalizations. Since that time I’ve earned my “Thai Language and Culture Certificate for Foreigners.” I still stick by all my former assertions. But to show my new level of cultural appreciation and nuance I’d like to note a few other observations about Thailand and our new school.
First, Thais love KFC. Yes, Colonel Sander’s own patented blend of 11 herbs and spices. This greased-out restaurant is on every corner. Its appeal is always dubious, but it’s especially strange in a country where you can purchase mouth-watering fried chicken from street vendors for under $1 USD.
Which brings me to my second point: Thailand is a haven for the miserly. A professional Thai wage earner (meaning someone with a four-year university degree) earns about 10,000 Baht per month ($330 USD). On this wage they can feed, house and clothe themselves. If they use it responsibly, they’ll still have money left over for electronics and Hello Kitty products. How do they do this? It’s ridiculously, absurdly cheap to live in Thailand. I’ve heard of one American who is living off $2 per day. He pays $30 per month for his apartment and spends $1 for two meals. I can’t vouch for this man’s physical reality but the budget can definitely be swung if one is willing to forgo luxuries. Public buses (though not air-conditioned) provide free transportation. Clothes cost as little as $2 per garment. A new movie at the (actually very luxurious) movie theatre costs $2 on Wednesday nights; the price jumps to $3 the rest of the week. (On a side note they play the King’s anthem before every movie and play the national anthem at 8AM and 6PM every day.) A good, furnished apartment with a living, bedroom, bathroom, semi-kitchen (they don’t do stoves), fitness center and pool in downtown Bangkok costs $200 per month.
Of course, it’s fortunate that Bangkok is so cheap since Gabrielle and I are currently taking classes and not working. However, as of Saturday, we are no longer unemployed! We will officially be starting at Attaphiwat Elementary School on October 18. It’s a private elementary school located in the Samut Sakhon province about an hour outside of downtown Bangkok. The region, located where the Chao Praya River meets the Gulf of Thailand, is renowned for its fishing and shrimping. It’s also, by Thailand’s standards, very wealthy. Our school has only 300 students and more resources than most elementary schools in the United States, including a pool, garden, and an archery range. According to the school’s director, Gabrielle and I will be team teaching our classes, which should cut down the work and also make for a great straight man/funny man routine.
The director of the school is an inspiring character. After graduating from Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok (the Harvard of Thailand), he attended the University of Oklahoma on a Royal Thai scholarship. He graduated with a doctorate in chemistry and returned to work in for a chemical company in Thailand. Eventually he became managing director and retired a millionaire (in Thai and USD) at age 50. Rather than taking his retirement easy, he opened Attaphiwat. In addition to his principal duties, he still teaches 28 math classes per week. We’ll be working for his daughter, the head of the English department. Wish us luck!
DMM The guidebooks warned us to dress conservatively or risk offending the Thai sensibility. This is true in the temples where women can’t expose their knees, anything below the collarbone, or their shoulders. Men are supposed to wear long pants at the temple and the royal palace. One of my many cultural snafus was attempting to visit the royal palace while wearing shorts (and without purchasing a ticket). But outside the temples it’s anything-goes-club-wear from 6AM onward. Short shorts, miniskirts and high heels seem closer to the female Thai sensibility. The guys prefer jeans and polos, button downs. And everyone loves English T-shirts, though almost no one speaks or reads English. Some of my favorites: “Hang Out With Your Wang Out,” Levi’s spelled “Evil,” “Have Fun Just” (seen in Taiwan), and “They stuck a Garfield sticker on the front windshield of their car. It was so big that they couldn’t see out the window and crashed the car.”
Forget Buddha and peacefulness, Thais love incredibly violently graphic films. From the window of our taxi I saw half a dozen non-ironic "Piranha 3-D" posters. Also playing at every theater: "Machete," "The Expendables," "Predators" and eight other Asian chop-em-up flicks that make "Hostel 2" look like "Gremlins." None of these movies made my short-list but at 100 bahts ($3) "Piranha 3-D" sounds like a great date night.
I am hereby unequivocally endorsing Thai street food as the cheapest, tastiest food on the planet. (Deal with that Wendy’s.) For lunch Gabrielle and I each ordered a heaping plate of fried rice with chicken, two bottled waters, and a 20-ounce Pepsi. The price? 60 bahts or $2 flat. These street magicians offer rice and pork/chicken/beef, fried chicken, skewers of beef and pork, smoothies, iced coffee, noodle soup, roasted corn, and skewered fruit. And absolutely none of it costs more then 35 baht ($1.15). A bottled drink is 10 baht (33 cents), a bag of donuts (yes, a bag) is 20 bahts (66 cents). The only downside is that my ordering—whether in terrible, broken Thai or English—is frequently met with giggles. But for this food it’s a risk I gladly take.
GMS
“If just for the heck of it, take a tuk-tuk ride. It's like traveling around town on a convertible.” --A Thailand Culture Guide
In preparation for our arrival in Thailand, and the culture shock that was sure to set in, David and I checked out nearly every Thai Culture Guide the Boston Public Library possessed (the ones we didn’t check out were those that predated 2005, too long ago to really be accurate). We took them with us on the morning commute, we puzzled over them at lunch, read them on the couch at night, we mooned over the pictures before going to bed. The guides varied in what they discussed, and their accuracy we are now debating—for instance, spiciness of food was vastly overrated, English speakers were promised but not delivered (not that we were really expecting them), and not one of them mentioned that Thais drive on the opposite side of the road, an important thing to know when crossing the street. The one thing, however, that every guide told us was to take a tuktuk at least once, while being aware that tuktuk drivers are possibly the most corrupt everyday Thai people we would encounter. Counterintuitive? Yes. But we decided we’d see when we got there.
On our first full day in Thailand we got up early and decided to navigate our way from our TESOL course lodging (way far out) to some of the Bangkok sights. This required utilizing not one, not two, but three modes of transportation: two river ferries, and the BTS Skytrain, and took up almost an hour and a half of our day. After exploring around the Grand Palace (David couldn’t go in because he was wearing shorts, and I couldn’t go in because I was wearing a tank top, and we both had no desire to go in that day because of the long lines and incredibly steep price), we realized that we were shortly due back to the lodging for a TESOL class meeting. How best to get there? Same methods as before? Those would take a roundabout way. Taxi? We were nervous about being jipped, catching the right one, deciding on a price in our less than meager Thai. As we stood on the street corner debating, a tuktuk zoomed up. Would we like a ride? Only twenty baht, wherever we were going. Cross city? Fine, fine.
Tuktuks look like gaily painted toys when you see from the sidewalk. They are adorably compact, brightly colored, and make a put-put sound like a child’s plaything. This, combined with the fact that sitting in the back are all manners of people—business folks in suits and skirts, women with groceries, crowds of uniformed school children, sweating tourists with flashing cameras, convinced us it was safe to ride the tuktuk. We’d just be very aware of what the driver was telling us.
So, we jumped in.
As soon as we were seated our driver swiveled to us and said, “Okay, for the twenty baht price, I must take you to one store. Otherwise, 100 baht to cross the city.” Whoa, red light. But he assured us we didn’t have to buy anything. We just had to go in, look around, come back out, and he’d get us on our way again. David looked at me and shrugged. Relatively painless. We agreed.
Then we set off on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. No, literally. For a brief second I had both hands clenching the bar at what would be a window if there was glass. Then I realized that this meant that at least an inch of me was outside of the vehicle. Not that being inside of the vehicle meant that you were safe either. Definitely not—at least half of the journey was spent in the lane of oncoming traffic, only to drt back into the correct lane at the last possible second. I clutched David’s leg as we narrowly missed scooters, delivery trucks, people on bicycles, and taxis—the formerly adorable put-put sound roaring in my ears.
I monologued three stages of terror and reassurance:
The first: Oncoming traffic will kill us! Reassuring: No, everyone has to be used to tuktuks on the road, this is the way everyone drives. You’ll be fine.
I was fine.
Then! Our driver will kill us! Reassuring: No, Gabrielle. Your driver has probably been driving his entire life. He knows what he’s doing, he’s experienced, just trust him.
Okay. Okay.
Then! We’re turning! I’ll fall out! Other cars will smash into me! Grind me into a pulp! I’ll sizzle on the hot Bangkok blacktop and tourists will take my picture and the guidebooks will write about the travesty that was my passing with all the apology they can muster for ever having insinuated that hopping into one of these things was a fine idea. Reassuring: Gabrielle! Pull yourself together! Just hold on tight and you won’t fall out!
Okay! Okay! ARE WE THERE YET? I was terrified still, but the exhilaration of having survived was setting in. I was good. I was golden. I had reached a new level of life—it was like graduating, it was like achieving some sort of Nirvana, a new plane of existence—silly worries about perishing in a foreign city swept away, long gone, I was grooving, I was relaxed, I was smiling at David, thinking about taking a picture…but the tuktuk was going faster all of the sudden. Up an incline. We were whizzing past shopkeepers and passersby. We were keeping pace with the taxis. We were going at least forty-five miles an hour in a rinky-dink little automobile with no seatbelts, no definable sides, and no health insurance. And that’s when the fourth stage of terror hit me like a tuktuk running into a concrete wall:
MECHANICAL FAILURE.
This tuktuk was built almost fifty years ago. It was a Japanese delivery vehicle. It was deemed unsuitable for deliveries and then brought to Thailand to use as a taxi. What state of repair (or disrepair!!) could such a vehicle possibly be in. We were racing downhill. I could see our driver fumbling with the gear shift, could smell the scent of burning rubber as we screamed down the grade, and then our driver was mashing the brake. We were drifting Tokyo-style into a turn, we puttered for a second, leapt into a drive way, and slammed to a halt. …In front of a gem store?
Our driver leapt nimbly out and said to us, “Okay, ten minute. Go shop.” David and I exchanged glances. We’re living on about 200 baht a day here (about six dollars). We’re currently not making any money. We already know, just by looking at the grand façade of this store, that we will not be able to afford a single thing, nor do we want or need fine jewelry.
I try to avoid going inside, but the driver follows us, frowning. He says something in Thai, and, worried that we’ll be stranded, we allow ourselves to be shooed inside. What ensues is an awkward five minutes of negotiating with the gem store staff—no, we cannot buy anything. Please please please do not say we have to. As we let ourselves out David notices a sign:
IF YOU HAVE BEEN BROUGHT HERE AGAINST YOUR WILL PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL ARRANGE TRANSPORT TO YOUR HOTEL
Well, now we know. And just so you know, traveling around town in a tuktuk is only comparable to traveling in a convertible if that convertible was actually possessed by demon spirits smoking heroin.
The two-part flight to Bangkok started out of San Francisco at 2AM on Friday morning. One would assume on a 2AM flight that breakfast would the first meal served, ostensibly at 7 or 8AM. Then around 12PM lunch would follow. On China Air they served dinner at 3AM—while I was sound asleep. This would have been fine except breakfast didn’t follow for another 8 hours. Equally inexplicably, China Air screened Furry Vengeance—Brendan Fraser in a realtor’s nightmare with CG animals galore—twice. Otherwise the flight over, despite clocking in at a grueling 13 hours, was relatively comfortable.
After crossing myriad time zones, the entire Pacific, and the International Date Line, Gabrielle and I landed in Taipei, Taiwan at 6AM on Saturday. By leaving at night and flying West, we effectively outran the sun for 13 hours. It rose only as we arrived. (Technically I suppose I lived through a full day without the sun either rising or setting.)
Upon landing in Taiwan for a 7-hour layover, Gabrielle and I noticed free half-day tours for people with a long layover. In an effort to bolster tourism (read “shopping”) the Republic of China offers these tours out to the oldest temple in Taiwan, Zushih Temple, and to a street packed with ceramic shops known colloquially at “Pottery Heaven.” The Buddhist temple dripped in ornate, gilded figurines; warriors mounted on elephants battled one another along every column and in every crevice. Great golden corners swept up in beautiful angles all along the roof while incense poured in clouds from the altars. “Pottery Heaven” failed to evoke as much wonder, although I’ll grant that it would indeed be paradise for anyone with surplus $300 and a hankering for figurine elephants, painted vases, or golden Buddhas. I'd rather be in Pottery Heaven than the Pottery Barn. But not by a huge margin.
Our arrival in Bangkok is a whirlwind experience. Stay tuned for that next post!