Another weekend at home

It is unfortunately the end of the rambutan and mangosteen season, but my fingers are already stained with the stickiness from lang khang, the latest fruit crop. The fruit is quite delicious but the covering has a sticky sap similar to that of a dandelion when you open it. It has been a remarkably sunny week, which luckily started last weekend. On Friday, Ian and I joined some other volunteer teachers in Khao lak, the town about 30 minutes south of Bang sak, to celebrate a birthday at a local bar. It was a good time with lots of card games and music. We were invited back for a cook-out on Saturday, so I stuck around Bang sak and enjoyed the domestic comforts of my bungalow… hanging my new plant, washing laundry by hand, watching the frog that spends the day resting on my window, waiting for my seedlings to sprout, watching the ants that have a highway along the wall of my porch, marking the progress of the snail that crawled up my drain and into my bathroom, playing with the dogs that belong to the owner of the bungalows, etc…





I also spent quite a bit of time studying how to read and write Thai. I try to study speaking a little bit each day, but reading and writing has been a more daunting challenge that I’ve avoided diving into for a while. But I’ve made my flash cards now and will hopefully begin to recognize and correctly pronounce words soon. I think that writing Thai script is similarly difficult to Japanese and Arabic. However, the number of vowels that change form when combined with one or two other vowels, placed in a medial instead of a final position in a word, or when spoken with a particular tone make Thai much harder to read and write than either Japanese or Arabic in my opinion.

The cook-out on Saturday night was another enjoyable evening with the volunteer teachers in Khao lak. We shared many stories about life in Thailand and America as well as much good food. On Sunday morning, since the weather was so good, I drove to Phuket to surf. The drive is about 2 ½ hours, which wasn’t bad on the way down because I got to see the towns that I am usually oblivious to while riding the bus. In Thailand, there are these public rest stops about every 10 km. It’s really nice to see drivers from many different towns taking afternoon naps or eating their meals with other travelers. However, making the round-trip drive in one day was a little too much for me, which contributed to the road rage I felt by the end of the drive at the approaching cars that wouldn’t turn off their blinding high-beams! The waves were big and ultimately worth it though. I’m still only able to stand shakily, if at all, on a long board, but I’ve got many more weekends to work on it. Unfortunately, but for safety’s sake, surfing and driving don’t lend themselves to photography, so I don’t have many pictures to share with you.


My week of teaching was cut short by a couple of events. First, Ian and I had to apply for our work permits as Thai ‘aliens’ on Monday, which took most of the day. Our quest was only partially successful since we were granted our work permits but denied visa extensions. The government has recently tightened their restrictions on farang who can live and work in Thailand, so it is now not uncommon to have difficultly getting these necessary documents. However, we apparently only need one or two more pieces of signed paper work and will then be able to reapply. This week is also midterm week at R35, so classes for the Matayom (middle and high school) students were restructured for test taking. We were still able to have Tuesday puzzle and art hour though, which was highly attended. There were many more beautiful paintings! The highlight of my week though was definitively walking into my Patom 5 class on Thursday morning and having the quite boy in the front right corner of the room smile up at me with a full grill! I don’t know where he found the foil, but he was sure proud of his glimmering new smile and I couldn’t help but laugh.

Being a Home-body

It is funny how, having lived in the Pacific Northwest, I can still be so enthralled with rain! It has been raining nonstop since Monday, alternating between light showers and thick walls of water that sweep in from the Sea. I've mentioned this to several of you now, but I've never seen rain move quite like it does here! It's truly amazing. I am fond of falling asleep to the sound of the rain and wind here, which I think is the only thing that could drown out the sound of the insects, which are both numerous and enormous, and the geckos, which have a very distinct and startling series of chirps! The undeniable presence of the rainy season here has also brought with it a full force of umbrellas, which I have watched transform into nun chucks, rocket launchers, and machine guns in the hands of some of our young male students. It is also quite funny (and a little disconcerting) to watch people try to drive their motorbikes while either they or the person(s) sitting behind them try to hold an umbrella. Most people have, however, realized that the drag force of an umbrella's large surface area is not really manageable (or safe) while riding a motor bike and sport full-length plastic ponchos that come in all colors instead.
I enjoyed a quiet two days here in Bangsak this past weekend - being a home-body, which were also remarkably sunny days. My search for a house to call my own for the rest of my stay here proved fruitless. The empty houses I inquired about are being saved for family members in the case that they should happen to come through town and need a place to stay, which is apparently a fairly common practice around here for a small house if a family is wealthy enough to move to a larger residence. So I think that despite my desire to be able to prepare my own meals, I will be in my one-room bungalow for at least another couple of months until Mark and Grace move-out of their little house in Thap Tawan, the Moken community, not far from the school.
Several of us farang teachers got together for a bonfire on the beach on Saturday night, which was a lovely time spent eating mangosteen and swapping Thai ghost stories. Ghosts and spirits are a big deal here, if you hadn’t guessed by the previous picture of the practice of having a spirit house to accompany any large house or business. Some of the ghosts are ancestor spirits that simply need to be honored with offerings of flowers and food at their spirit house.
Others are more ornery ghosts that keep you from sleeping or ride on the back of your motorbike if you’re riding alone at night. To keep ghosts out, almost all houses and businesses have a step up into or a board across the doorway, because spirits can only move on a flat plane. I’ve heard that if anyone has problems with ghosts in the area there is an old woman in the Moken community or a priest at a nearby Catholic church who can take care of it depending on their preference.



On Sunday, I went on a long run and did some grocery shopping at the local markets. It’s nice to have every day be a farmer’s market day here as opposed to only Saturdays in Tacoma’s north end! I’ve discovered that I essentially dress like an old Thai woman on the weekends, wearing a comfortable tube skirt/sarong and a conservative tank top or t-shirt. The old women in the markets seem to love it and I think it’s quite entertaining to have them come up and gush over how they like the colors or pattern I chose.

I also found the Tsunami memorial at a beach in Bangmuang, the next town to the north. It has an interesting little museum of a few pictures and descriptions, but primarily this walkway between two slabs of stone arched like a wave. There are numerous names plaques remembering both Thai and farang who died in the tsunami.


Teaching this week has been particularly rewarding. On Tuesday, in one of my M2 (8th grade) classes, which is packed with about 40 students (depending on who shows up), a boy who usually goofs around during class and doesn’t care about his work, acted out his normal routine, but stayed late into lunch in order to finish the exercise on adverbs of frequency that I had given the class. He was struggling a little so I stayed with him until he finished it and we could share a celebratory high-five. Later that afternoon I brought out watercolor paint supplies to accompany the usual hour of puzzles that Mark and I do with the students on Tuesdays. One of the first students to come over and start painting with me was a boy in my P4 (4th grade) class who is pretty distractible and had struggled to focus on the assignment that morning in class. But, he sat right down and spent the next 20 minutes patiently painting this beautiful picture.
I’ve also spent much of my time while not in class making fruit and vegetable flash cards that include the usual suspects such as apples and bananas, but also tropical varieties like mangosteen, durian, and rambutan. Using them in an interactive categorizing activity and vocabulary exercise with the P4 class was well worth the effort though. Other than that I still enjoy seeing students, mostly of the matayom (middle and high school) years, checking themselves out and grooming themselves in the very reflective windows of our office. The students seem to forget that the glass is actually a window and not a mirror, which means we can see everything they’re doing. As a result, it’s quite funny to walk out of the office in the morning after breakfast or right before lunch when most of the students stop at the windows to fix their hair or adjust their uniforms, and see them get a little flustered.
Here’s a poignant quote for all of us who are or are soon going to be working/living abroad from the book I’m reading right now (The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down- a good read if you’re into cultural anthropology and medicine)… “If you can’t see that your own culture has its own set of interests, emotions, and biases, how can you expect to deal successfully with someone else’s culture?” I suppose it is also just as applicable to everyone in the increasingly more diverse USA as well.
Much peace and love to you all,
T.
P.S. Here are some more pictures from various places over the past 7 weeks:

Monks, nuns and candles at Wat Tham Seua.


More monkeys!


The Thai bird that is the equivalent of the Seattle pigeon or starling.


A funny shirt at the traveling fair and a beautiful disaster.


Mangrove trees (my favorite!) and climbers doing their thing at Railay.

Holiday Recap

It has been such a full week of preparing lessons and teaching classes that the time has just slipped away. I have two classes that are now entirely my own, which is a challenge to prepare the curriculum and lesson plans as well as manage the class with as much English and as little Thai as possible. However, it is incredibly exciting and satisfying as well. The classes are roughly 5^th and 6^th grade, which means they are mostly 11 and 12 year olds who are full of energy and mischief. For example, in my last 4^th grade class I was doing a review of the body with a lively couple sets of ‘head, shoulder, knees, and toes.’ On one of our faster rounds, a boy runs up the front to join in and strategically grabs his chest for ‘shoulders,’ his butt for ‘knees,’ and his crotch for ‘toes.’ Perhaps I should have taken the opportunity as a teachable moment and enlightened this clever lad on the English he needs to properly sing his new version of the song ‘head, breasts, butt, and crotch’ and still keep it rated G.

I am striving to collaborate more with the co-teachers for my other classes more, so I have been researching grammar exercises, creating worksheets, and planning more activities as well.

Despite the work extra work, I was ready to be back to my home routine after being away on holiday for a week, and traveling pretty much nonstop. Last Wednesday was the beginning of Khao Phan Saa (Buddhist lent), so we did not have any classes and the school sent the students home to their immediate families or distant relatives for the holiday. Based on the explanations I got from Thais while traveling, Phan Saa is a time to be with family, go to the local wat (temple), and give more than the usual donation to monks. There were lots of images of the queen giving new robes to the highest order monks in Thailand on television all week.

Be warned, this is a long-winded re-cap, so feel free to take it in more manageable chunks as you see fit.
I started off my holiday in Phang nga, where I went on a lovely day-long bike ride with Grace and Mark. We passed many rubber tree farms along the way.

Grace, who has been temporarily filling a PiA teaching position in Phang nga until the hired teacher could arrive, took us to Sa Nang Manora Forest Park as the destination of our bike ride. It is a fantastic park full of low waterfalls and pools where we saw many Thai teenagers lounging and bathing. It also has some good hiking and fascinating flora.

On my second day, we checked out an obscure little wat. This was the first wat I had entered and was, despite the heat, wearing a conservative t-shirt long pants as is recommended to show respect. This wat is called the ‘temple of heaven and hell,’ which didn’t really make sense to me because in traditional Theravada Buddhism, which is the most widely followed religion in Thailand. From what I can recall, in Buddhism, a person continues on the cycle of re-birth and re-death (samsara) until he or she can achieve enlightenment or nirvana, an extinction of the self and therefore an end to suffering. This doesn’t really jive with the finality of heaven and hell. Anyway, this was an eclectic wat full of bigger than life-size figurines of rotting corpses of men and women as well as ghastly half animal-half human creatures. I assume these were to remind visitors of the impermanence of all things and to discourage desire. There was also a horrific depiction of what must have been hell, where people were being tortured in every possible way… a hook through the tongue, being crewed on by dogs, boiled in a pot, wrung through a maniacal old-school laundry press, speared while climbing up a thorny tree trying to reach someone who is being pecked at by giant birds… it was quite horrifying. The other interesting thing about this depiction of hell was that the torturers were either half human-half animal creatures or very big black men. Seeing this reminded me of the race issue in Thailand, which I think has similarities to American race issues (let me know your thoughts on this please…).attributed superiority and blackness inferiority in Thailand primarily because of social class – if you were dark it was because you were outside working in the sun all day and therefore of a lower class. Conversely, if you were pale it was because you were of a wealthy class and sat inside all day. Whiteness is an obsession here, because it is considered the height of beauty - the paler the better. There are numerous creams and powders available to whiten one's skin, which are advertised mostly to women, but are used by men as well. I am no longer startled by seeing my students running down the hall with a ghostly white layer of powder on their faces or having my own face accosted by the powder bearing hands of students and emerging much paler to the explanatory, ‘beautiful beautiful,’ coos of the students. However, I’ve heard that blackness or the word “black” is used to describe someone as another word for dumb. Other words used to describe such a person include “buffalo,” “Moken,” or “Burmese” (both the sea gypsy population and the Burmese migrant populations are discriminated against). So, there are complicated race issues here, like there are all over the world, I was just particularly surprised to see ‘blackness’ depicted as it was in this Buddhist temple. There was also a ‘heaven’ to this temple, or at least what I think was heaven for this temple’s purposes.

A giant cave with a monk sitting outside it was located towards the back of the temple grounds. It was full of beautiful rock formations and completely empty except for a few bridges over quiet pools of dark water. This ‘heaven’ fit much more with the Buddhist theology that I am familiar with because it represented the emptiness – freedom from desire and therefore suffering- that is attributed to enlightenment.

Ok, so that was my time in Phang nga. It’s a nice little town. After visiting the temple, I hopped on a bus to Krabi. After finding a room for the night I hired a motorcycle taxi to take me to Wat Tham Seua, which is quite a ways from the town. It was well worth the trip though because it is a stunning temple. I’m not sure if there were more people visiting the wat than usually because of the approaching holiday, but there were many Thai people milling about taking photos of family giving candle or incense offerings and watching the monkeys play. I had seen monks, in their recognizable orange robes many times before – walking around town, riding the bus, etc – but this was the first time I had seen mae chii, or Buddhist nuns. They shave their heads and take vows of ordination similar to the monks, but wear white robes instead of orange. When the first women became Buddhist monastics, they had to adhere to 311 precepts as ordered by the Buddha, while monks adhered to 227. However, the community of fully ordained Theravada nuns (bhikkhuni sangha), has not been restored in Thailand and the Thai mae chii are eight-precept nuns. I found a statistic that the ratio of monks to nuns in Thailand is 46:1. It is fairly common in Thai society for a young man to join the sangha for one week to three months between the time he finishes his schooling and either starts a job or marries. This is a way for the man and his family to earn merit. I’m not sure if young women can also become nuns for a short amount of time, but I’m going to find out. The other way lay-Buddhist can earn merit besides having their sons join the monk-hood is to give donations to the monks, however, because nuns do not perform ceremonies on behalf of laypeople, they are not considered as prestigious and do not receive a similar amount of offerings with which to sustain themselves. It was interesting though, I got to sit and watch both the nuns and monks talk with laypeople visiting the temple and see their modest housing.

The best parts about this temple are a series of caves with various little shrines and a 1200+ staircase that leads to the top of a roughly 600m peak. I made the trek and was thankful it was an overcast day! I joined many Thai and some farang who were also climbing the stairs. I also saw a nun and two monks doing walking meditation (or maybe it was just some exercise) on the stairs as well. At the top there is a giant golden Buddha and several other Buddha statues. It was a stunning view as well despite being a little cloudy.



On the way down the stairs I intercepted a troupe of monkeys. I set down my nalgene to take pictures of all the monkey-business they were up to - surfing down the handrails, swinging from branches, jumping all over and chasing each other - until I felt some fur brush the my back. I turned around to see a big male monkey staring right back at me with my nalgene in his hands. Like an idiot I tried to grab it from him and he jumped back and snarled at me. I figured if he wanted it that bad he could have it, but I watched him and he didn’t run. He just tried with increasing furry and frustration to open the nalgene to get what he must have thought was a real treat. I just snapped pictures while he struggled until he finally tossed my
bottle aside and took off down the stairs. Later that night I got some excellent (and cheap!) food at a night market then hunkered down in my room as some heavy rains came in from the west.



The next morning I caught a long tail boat to Railay, a gorgeous place with fantastic limestone formations (think some of the best rock climbing in the world!) and no motorized transportation… it is accessible only by boat because it is located behind a layer of impenetrable cliffs.

I met a couple (the guy from Chile and the gal from Norway) and we decided to join a group that was going climbing that afternoon. It was a refresher course for me for sure! It’s been quite a while since I’ve done any top rope climbing on real rock, but it was an excellent afternoon with 5 solid routes working up to a 5.10. The woman I took the climbing course with is awesome too. She owns her own rock climbing store and has been climbing with groups in Railay for many years.

I went with one of the guys who works for her the next morning too and he took me to a spot over the water where we switched off on belay first hour until a few other people showed up to climb. There were people climbing in the same spot that we were from Singapore, Australia, and America, so it was quite a festive place to spend the morning.

I got in another solid 5 climbs, one with a cave at the top that had a stunning view out over the water, but by the end my arms and calves were pumped and my hands raw with a couple of open calluses. I intend to get stronger and toughen up my hands a bit more these next couple of weeks and head back to Railay for some more climbing if we get a sustained dry spell. One of my new goals is to learn how to lead climb by the end of my time here in Thailand.



Since I was in no shape to keep climbing, I decided to beach bum around a couple of the many gorgeous beaches that Railay is also known for. I met some excellent people on the beach, including a Thai English teacher and her brother who stayed to chat for the better part of an
hour. My nights in Railay were spent with my friends from Chile and Norway at a local bar where we played cards and solved various mind puzzles that the guys who worked the bar would give us. Both nights I was in Railay, I talked with one guy who worked at the bar and he told me that he and his friend who is the DJ were going to Ko Phan nga for the full moon party at the end of the week to help at a friends bar. He invited me to go with them, and after looking at the lunar calendar in my journal and seeing that there wasn’t going to be another full moon that I could feasible travel for any month soon, I decided to join them (this is the biggest beach party in the world we’re talking about here… dancing on the beach from 9 at night till 9 in the morning!!).

We traveled by bus and boat all day crossing the country from the Andaman Sea to the Gulf of Thailand. We got there pretty worn out but in good spirits. I got to meet everyone at the bar and hung out while the guys set up. They managed to find me a modest bungalow to stay in despite most guest houses being full (one of the benefits of local connections!) I walked the beach that first night to see the fire shows then took pictures of the lightening over the town and spent most of my time in the bar, which was a really mellow place.

The day of the full moon party, I lounged and swam at one of the most beautiful beaches I’ve seen yet. However, I also succeeded in giving myself what later turned into the worst sunburn I have ever had.

During the full moon party I spent most of the night at the bar dancing while the DJ played music that progressed from pop to electronic. By midnight I had most of my body painted with neon paint and we headed down to the beach to dance. It seemed like just about everyone, Thai and farang alike, were having a good time. I danced until about 3am and the guys danced the night away till 7am!

When I woke up the next morning, the guys at the bar were celebrating with morning beers – it was a pretty lucrative night! We said goodbye to everyone and I received a thoughtful invitation to come back to the bar for the next full moon party, an offer I think was a result of not doing what they see most farang women doing – stumbling around wearing half as many clothes as they should according to modest Thai standards. I slept on the ferry ride and again on the bus ride after saying goodbye to the guys. However, when I got to Phang nga where I was supposed to catch a bus up the coast to Bang sak, I was told that they had finished. So, I hopped back on the bus that was going to a town called Kok loi, where there was a better chance of catching a bus. It turned out that there wasn’t a bus going through this town either, so around 10pm a traffic cop came by and told me and the group of UCLA students on study abroad, who were also coming back from the full moon party and similarly stranded, that there would not be another bus till morning and handed us a room key. We thought “great! A free room for waylaid travelers!” … but it turned out be just one room in a three room joint that is where the local prostitutes will bring their clients… so I spent an unexpected and uncomfortable night on the floor with 8 college students in one of the dirtiest rooms I have ever been in – complete with giant box of condoms (at least they’re using protection!).

We did in fact catch the morning bus out of Kok loi, and I made it back to Bang sak without being too late to the advanced English camp I signed up to teach at a school in Takuapa.

The End ... a long winded saga.