Thailand

I just got back from almost 3 weeks in Thailand. I was working long hours for the majority of the time, but I took a few days off on the back end and was able to hang out a bit.

What my room looks like when someone else is paying for it.


What my room looks like when I am paying for it.

The first place I went to was Pattaya. That is a place worth missing. I'm not big into crowds or nightlife and those were two things that Pattaya had a lot of. I did get a bunch of people to go to a transvestite cabaret with me, but I ended up falling asleep. I love trannies just as much as the next guy, but the lip syncing wasn't synced and the dancing was pretty poor. Add to that the fact that the show started at about my bed time and you end up with napping.

You're not fooling anyone, tranny.

I went up to Bangkok after less than a day in Pattaya. Getting from the hotel to the bus station was a bit of an ordeal. Something that was more or less a theme of this trip was difficulty in communication. I'm not saying that everyone in the world should learn English or that people weren't trying, but to be fair, people that have jobs catering to international clients should be able to communicate with them in the clients' language. Long story short, the lady at the counter misquoted me about the cost of getting to the bus station by a factor of 10. The really annoying part is that I simply asked her to write "bus station" on a piece of paper for me so that I could give it to a cab driver. No, no, no; she will just have the hotel car take me...

The miscommunication continued in Bangkok. I went to get a wool jacket made at a tailor for when I move to England. I was thinking about getting a black suit as well since I don't have one, so of course the sales guy was able to talk me in to it. Long story short, everything came back wrong. The style was wrong, the material was wrong, the sleeves were too short, the chest too tight, and the guy didn't make the jacket out of three layers of material, for which I paid extra. I went through the whole five stages of the Kübler-Ross model of grief pretty quickly and was at the acceptance stage by the time I got to the airport. That's what I get for trying to do everything on the cheap, I suppose.

Bangkok was the same as it was 4 1/2 years ago. Dirty, loud, and congested. I didn't necessarily want to stay in Bangkok, but I only had 5 days and I had to keep trying to fix the tailoring situation. I did get to spend one day in a somewhat rural setting. I really wanted to ride an elephant, so I went on a day trip to the bridge over the river Kwai. The trip included the bridge itself as well as admission to the most run down and random "museum" I have ever been to. Everything was dusty and weird. The English placards were very humorous, but the fact that they were talking about so much death and destruction made laughing inappropriate. Sometimes I couldn't help myself. The description of the atomic bomb killing 130,000 people "in a Jiffy" (their capitalization, not mine). Or the prisoners getting mowed down my machine gun fire "in the twinkle of an eye." Another one had a bunch of descriptions of people trying to escape death, but every paragraph ended with three periods and "in vain."

After the museum, I got to ride the elephant. I was supposed to sit in the chair, but I took off my sandals and kept touching the elephant with my feet. The handler let me switch seats with him, so I get to ride on the elephants neck. Something new I learned that day was that elephants have the ability to cool themselves off by gathering their spit in their snout and spraying it on themselves. Since I was the cause of the overheating, I got sprayed down pretty good. It wasn't as refreshing as it sounds. Another tidbit about the elephant riding is that I'm pretty sure mine was a girl and possibly in heat. I say that because the handler steered the elephant to a male elephant tightly chained to a tree. As the chained elephant became more and more interested in us, the guide giggled in his broken English, "phallic... elephant phallic." Kind of a cruel joke to play on the elephants.


Along the previous topic of difficulty in communication, I have to mention the old German guy. He was probably in his late sixties and didn't speak a word of English. He kept talking to the guides in German, but in full sentences as if he was talking to a friend back home. The guide would look to us, we would shrug our shoulders and give him a confused look, and he would then look back to the German guy, smile, say yes, and then take him by the arm and get him in motion. I have the feeling that happened to me quite a bit on this trip as well.

Being back in Hawaii is nice. The air and water here are so much cleaner than anywhere else I have been in the Pacific. Right now I am sitting in my room listening to the crickets chirping and waves on the beach. Usually I can't hear the water, but it is midnight and not much else is going on in the world. I love Hawaii and it is time to try to sleep.