The saying goes, “Nothing is certain in life but death and taxes.” Or something like that. All we really know for sure is that we must pay our taxes and that eventually, “to dust we shall return.”
….unless of course you prefer to be buried in a hermetically sealed coffin in which case I suppose you never shall return to dust, rather you will sit in your steel box perfectly preserved which is just creepy to think about.
Since nothing in this post really merits any photos related to anything, I’ll just insert some randomly throughout. This is us just before the Friday morning assembly where we had to introduce ourselves in front of all 2,200 students.
And I mean, I suppose we don’t HAVE to pay taxes, but I think there are some folks sitting in jail with tattoos vowing death to the IRS who would pretty emphatically tell you that you SHOULD pay taxes.
Anyways, at the risk of ending up so off topic that I’m sipping margaritas in Costa Rica while a shirtless native fans me with palm fronds…..
Too late, I’m there.
Pretend for a sec that the old lady in the middle is me and that manservants in nut-huggers are remotely attractive.
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Aaaaannnnnddd we’re back. So my point here (and I do have one) is that there is pretty much nothing that we can ever be sure of in life. However, I have spent these past 24 years with some notions of things that I’ve always been able to count on. These being:
- · Public transportation schedules
- · Efficient laundry service
- · The assurance that if you peek your head outside the folder fort and are caught copying your neighbor’s work, you will most certainly get a verbal tongue lashing and a zero on said assignment.
- · That since the end of dial-up internet (remember that horrific noise that came before “You’ve got mail!”? That sound haunts my dreams.), internet is mostly speedy and reliable.
Now, after two weeks in the Land of Smiles, I find that all of these convictions have been shaken to their very core, chewed up and loogied down the gutter.
Denali from the window of the airplane en route from Minneapolis to Tokyo as we flew over the beautiful, snowy mountains of Alaska.
I’m by no means pretending that public transportation in Pittsburgh is enjoyable. There are some real Looney Toons stinking up the air of a typical PAT bus. It’s not exactly a walk in the park taking the 33X from Crafton to Downtown, but at least you know that they arrive pretty much on schedule, follow a very specific route through our wonderful one-way mess of streets, and that if you miss one, another will follow in no time.
Here’s what happens here when we leave our home in Krabi town at 6am to get a local bus to take us to the bus terminal where we will transfer to another bus. We walk out the door and stare down the street: no buses. We walk down the street, turn left up another street, and right at the top of the hill. We sit and wait at the exact spot where the bus picked us up yesterday at 6:05am. We sit and we sit and we sit until 6:20 and when no bus has shown up, we begin to walk. We see a bus full of monks ride past us, but since women aren’t allowed to touch a monk, that one won’t stop for us. We see another bus (probably the bus from yesterday) cruise past on a perpendicular street. A man on a motorcycle taxi stops to ask if we need a ride like he thinks four people will fit on one moped. He calls for another motorcycle. In the meantime, a local bus pulls up. We thank the motorbiker, and say we’ll take the bus.
A few times, we have taken the moped route. One of us gets on with one driver while the other two squeeze on with another. It’s not a pretty sight seeing three grown people on a moped, the person in the middle straddling the driver far too close for comfort with her skirt pulled up to the top of her thighs while the wind whips our eyes into a teary frenzy and makes our mascara run down our faces (Meg, I know exactly what image runny mascara brings to mind for you, so try not to break any ribs laughing at me, please).
The buses, at least to our knowledge, appear to have no set times, no set routes, and nothing reliable about them. It’s completely infuriating that we can’t rely on anything at all to get us to the bus station on time. We spend each morning in a cold sweat of panic that we won’t make it. When we ask what time we can catch the bus to the station, the response is, “It usually comes at 6. Sometimes 6:15. Sometimes 6:20.”
HOW is that helpful?! How does anyone get where they need to be when they need to be there?!
The answer of course is that they don’t. Everyone is late for everything. Students, teachers, bus drivers. No one operates on any sort of schedule. It’s that mai pen rai attitude again. It will happen when it happens. You’ll get there when you get there. Hakuna Matata. No worries.
This would be a lovely way to exist if we weren’t uptight North Americans used to a rigid schedule, rules and consequences. And if we hadn’t promised the school administrator that we would be able to make it to school on time every day despite the fact that we’ve chosen to live 35 minutes away from the school instead of in a hovel within walking distance. Pressure’s on.
The "Shake and Vegetable Spring Roll Lady" at the local food market. She makes the best veggie spring rolls and fruit shakes around, and is way to pretty to be deep frying and blending at a market.
Speaking of no rules or consequences, this brings me to my next point. Thai students copy each other’s work like it’s a way of life. They don’t even try to be sneaky about it! Kids walk around the room, writing down other people’s answers at will, and there is no stopping them. The Thai teachers seem unbothered by it all, simply telling us, “Oh yes, they copy,” like its nothing more serious than stealing spoons instead of knowledge.
The stereotype of the Asian student does not remotely apply in Thailand. I’ve never seen such a group of students more apathetic towards school and disrespectful of teachers in my life.
It’s also worth noting though that there are some things that never change no matter the culture. Just like at home, the girls get the work done first while the boys mess around, yell, punch each other, toss balls of paper, and all around act like recently paroled juvenile delinquents. When it becomes apparent that I am collecting the worksheet, there is a mad scramble as the boys grab papers from the girls like they are entitled to copy from them because they have a penis, and the girls let them because the boy is giving them attention.
If I could speak Thai, I would love to take those girls aside and tell them that they’ve got to put a swift end to the copying epidemic or before they know it, this generation of boys will continue the trend of grown men who think they’re so deserving of female attention and servitude that they’ll expect a blow job from every drunk coed in every sleazy college bar bathroom…
Oh, wait….
As for the internet. Simply put, it sucks harder than suck has ever sucked.
Sorry mom, but that’s the only appropriate word to use in this scenario.
Soup my orientation roommate, Christine, and I got for dinner. No clue what it was, but it tasted phenomenal. Came with its own little packet of spices that were so hot, it nearly killed us.
The laundry service lost my underwear.
Yup, you read that right. Three quarters of the underwear I brought with me is gone (and before you ask, I’ve checked – American Eagle “happily” ships internationally for a small fee of $50!).
As everyone knows from the saga of “Patrick,” the Sri Lankan dry cleaner in Galway who so hilariously shrunk my sweater dress so that Jane and Eddie could only look at me in horror as I walked into their bedroom all “what am I going to do about this?!” – I hardly seem to have good luck with other people doing my laundry.
Unless it’s my mom, that is. She rocks.
All we were looking for was a place to do our own laundry. When you sweat through your clothes so profusely every day that wearing something twice would be a public health hazard, it’s imperative to wash, stat. Instead of giving us an idea where we could find the Thai equivalent of a laundromat though, our coordinator set us up with a laundry service.
As with everything in Thailand, this came with its fair share of quirks. She would pick our stuff up weekly, and we could only have 60 pieces.
Who counts their dirty laundry?!
Quirk 2: She would not wash our underwear.
Huh?!
K, the counting I could live with, but to not wash our underwear? The things closest to our sweaty bodies that were in most desperate need of a good cleaning? The things that no matter how bad it got, I would never wear twice? Holy Ricky Ricardo, she wouldn’t wash our underwear. I’m still not sure why. I can’t figure out if they say it’s because of embarrassment, or shyness, or what because all they say is: “Thais don’t do.” Awesome..
Our coordinator came to the rescue though, and negotiated with her and eventually she agreed to do our underwear, an agreement I would later come to regret.
On Saturday morning, we three gave the laundry lady three laundry bags (Yes, we have laundry bags. They came with our sheet sets. Top sheets didn’t come with our sheet sets, but laundry bags did. Fitted sheet, pillow cases….and laundry bags. It’s a waste of my time trying to figure out things like this.) with our room numbers drawn on in Sharpie, and she said she would return them by Sunday afternoon.
We came back from our trip to the beach to find our laundry clean and folded in bags waiting for us at the front desk. We opened everything, and my underwear was gone.
In all fairness, ALL of my underwear wasn’t gone, just about 15 of 17 pairs. So, y’know….MOST of it.
Nearly all of it.
I checked with Carlyn and Stacy. All of their clothes, underwear included, were accounted for. I double-checked my things. Still no underwear.
The saga that ensued between the owner of our hotel, our coordinator, and the laundry lady is mostly unknown to me since it was all by phone conversations in Thai, but basically what I got from the (almost total lack of) explanations over the course of four days is this: It’s gone. Never coming back. Sayonara. I can kiss those pretty, lacy, brandy new panties goodbye.
It was like pulling teeth from a hippo to even get that much. I must have asked fifteen times, “Where is my underwear?” “Am I getting it back?” “What happened to it?” “Is it gone for good?” and got nothing but smiles and grunts in response.
According to our coordinator, the lady who owns the hotel was very helpful in the whole matter and even went to the laundry place to find out what was up, and I can attest that despite the fact that she knows zero English, we can very clearly get a read on her personality and she is a terrifically warm, wonderful woman, so I have no doubt that she tried everything in her power to find my underwear.
It doesn’t help matters I suppose that Thais really don’t like talking about underwear. Also, it seems that when the laundry lady realized what she had done, “she wanted to run away.” I’m not sure if that’s a euphemism for something, or she really did want to physically run away, but either way it’s a drastic response.
Don’t run lady, find my damn underwear!
I mean, really. How did it disappear? And why only mine? And why did I get two pairs back? She claimed to have mixed all three of ours together and washed it separate from anything else which must be false since Carlyn and Stacy have all theirs accounted for, and there’s no way the lady would have been able to separate them for us had she actually mixed them up like she said.
Big. Fat. Lie.
Your nose is growing Pinocchio.
I can’t be sure what’s been said, but from the nothing everyone is telling me, I guess I’m just to assume that the underwear disappeared of their own volition. One minute they were drying on the line in the Thai sun and the next I suppose decided they wanted to see the rest of the country so they hopped a bus to Phuket and are now sitting on the beach somewhere flirting with some runaway boxer briefs.
I just hope they’re sexy boxer briefs and not the kind with holes and exposed elastic. Next, I imagine my underwear will head north to Chaing Mai, possibly to celebrate the King’s birthday or possibly to go elephant trekking. One will never know.
What I do know is this: I’m doing my own damn laundry.
And I’ve gotta get some more underwear.
The students at the Friday morning assembly. They normally wear uniforms that are either purple pants with a light purple shirt or dark blue skirt and light blue blouse. On Thursdays, they wear scout uniforms, and on Friday they can wear other colors in accordance with their grade and levels. Teachers wear yellow on Monday, pink on Tuesday (in honor of the Queen), green on Wednesdays and purple on Thursdays.
This kid raised the flag in perfect timing with the little girl behind him to was singing the National Anthem.
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