Month: August 2016

Posted on in chiang mai, commentary, thailand, travel

What A Day


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What a day this has turned out to be!  We had to go to Hua Hin, about an hour up the coast, to take a plane back to Chiang Mai. Our plan was to take a mini-van, because they leave every hour and are air-conditioned.

 

Last night and again this morning, bombs went off in Hua Hin, killing one person and injuring several. The mini-bus people said Hua Hin was shut down, and they were not allowed to send busses there. We walked to the train station and they sold us tickets for a 3 pm train, but had no information whether it would arrive or not. The airline had heard nothing about the bombings, and as far as they were concerned, everything was running on schedule.

 

By now I had run out of money and had to find an ATM for my bank. Leaving Wipa at the restaurant, I walked for a half an hour until I found at ATM. On the way, I passed a little Thai man who motioned for me to come to him. He was standing inside a garage, in the shadows. I had seen him before when we walked from the hotel, and had asked Wipa what he wanted. He had been motioning to me then, as well, making circular motions with his hands over his stomach.

 

It turns out that he was telling me that I have a pot belly, and that he had the cure for it, an herbal compound that he would sell me for one dollar a bag. I had just that amount of money on me so I gave it to him and he gave me a little plastic bag of black things, about the size and color of currants. He said they were “strawberry,” and that I should take one in the morning and one at night.

 

After visiting the ATM I walked back to the restaurant and told Wipa about the man and the herbs. She shared the story with all the women at the restaurant and they all started laughing. They were aware of this man, they said he was crazy and that I would be crazy to eat these herbs. As there is a hill full of maybe ten thousand monkeys nearby, maybe it was monkey shit. I still wanted to try the herbal pills, if that’s what they were, but the lady in charge of the restaurant threw the bag in the garbage without first consulting me. There were two five-year old boys nearby and Wipa pointed to them saying “even children know not to eat things given to them by a crazy man!” The children laughed loudly, even though I’m not sure they knew what they were laughing about.

 

The train arrived, we got to Hua Hin in a short hour, and since I had never been there before, thought to avoid the taxi drivers at the train station who wanted two hundred baht to take us to the airport, and see some of the city. Turns out I was mistaken yet again, for due to the bombing, the downtown was deserted. Police were stopping cars along the major road, looking for explosives. It Fortunately, I was able to pay a motorcycle taxi twenty baht to find us a tuk tuk, who charged us two hundred baht, a fee I discovered was universal when applied to the airport, whether you journeyed ten meters or ten kilometers to get there.

 

As I write this, we are waiting in the departure lounge of an airport that sees one flight per day to one place, Chiang Mai, which happens to be where we live. The TV is playing a bunch of monks chanting, which at first I thought was doo-wop music from America. Never a dull moment here in Thailand.

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Posted on in commentary, Uncategorized

Do What You Want, Have Fun


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The things that are worth caring about and striving for don’t have to do with fads or whatever happens to be the current topic of conversation. Those constructs are largely illusory anyway. Most of the buzz on the street is no more than traffic noise.

 

George Orwell defined journalism as “writing something that somebody doesn’t want to see printed. All the rest is public relations.” Most of the messages we see are advertising, calls to shop. If we don’t want to fill our time with shopping, we’ll have to find something else with which to occupy ourselves. As you can see, I’ve gone to great lengths not to end that last sentence with a conjunction.

 

I enjoy writing both because I think I’m pretty good at it, and because I think I have something to say. Many people find writing a tedious activity and have little to say. I’m always happy when these people don’t write. After years of reading English Composition essays at the college level, I think there is no more tortuous activity that reading a commenting on the writing of someone who didn’t want to write in the first place.

 

One of the biggest disservices schooling provides is to demand that people learn to do things for which they have even less aptitude than interest. Even if they do manage to struggle through some required course work, they will never have any fun doing so, nor will anyone else enjoy the outcome. It will be purgatory on Earth, hoping for a payoff in the Great Beyond. This is folly, a transparent hoax, a confidence game to justify the existence of schools.

 

People should do things they enjoy, and in doing so they might please both themselves and others. Why this simple concept has eluded us for the last couple of centuries is a real mystery. The notion of mandatory public schooling probably comes from Northern European capitalism and the desire to train a compliant workforce.