Laos Part I: Crossing the Border

*This entree is taking a long time so I’m going to post it in two to three parts. Here’s the first.

Who knew that inside the night train to Laos, day would keep its hold against the dark so tenaciously?

Trains, particularly those that glide through the night, have a way of turning the common A to B routine of travel into a dreamlike slide show – one not quite surreal but neither are you sure if it all really took place. And so on train number sixty-nine, car twelve, second class with a fan, I watched the scenery slide by in eerie blue earnest, as our train made its way from Bangkok to the border of Laos at Nong Khai.

The trip would be fourteen hours long, and maybe it began to all seem to surreal when the realization that I would be sitting upright the entire night hit home, or maybe because I had popped two melatonin and was on my way to a third or else I was seriously considering a bottle of putrid whiskey that the beverage man was selling from a bucket he carried as he chanted “Cold beer! Cold beer!” in Thai. Maybe the unrealness of the ride emanated from the constant clickity clack of the rails or the buzzing fluorescence of the tubes over head that were slowly but stubbornly jackhammering my corneas into atoms, after which those micro-peepers would begin to reform into a consricted blood vessel in my brain, pressuring lubrication to a stand still, in turn causing the skin to ripple and tighten against my skull, the gray matter beneath pressing up against the bone for relief.

There was also a healthy breeze, a cold metal floor, and blue vinyl seats, which rotated if you pushed them. My travel companions and I were more interested in how the seats reclined, as we wanted to be asleep as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, the lights prevented this as did the passengers in the seats next us. One big fella’ I named Pinky, because he wore nothing but a red cotton vest and jean shorts, seemed oblivious that my friend Ashley was uncomfortable with the amount of naked thigh that heartily encroached on her seat’s territory.

“His shorts are shorter than mine!” she complained after he left on one of his frequent odysseys to parts of the train unknown. And oh were Pinky’s shorts short. Epicly short. Spartan short.

Pinky had a way of returning just as Ashley had fallen asleep. She would have to rise and he would dutifully squeeze his bulk into his and her seats. At this point Ashley would wake me up to point in horror as his shorts seemed to shrink farther up his meaty thighs.

“Yep,” I’d say. “That’s attractive.”

“Switch with me?” she asked, hardly disguising her eagerness to jump ship and leave Pinky to spread eagle to his heart’s delight. To which I answered: “Zzzzz…”

“Stop it. I know you’re not sleeping. Matt! You are not sleeping!”

My sunglasses managed to dull the light to a four in the afternoon glow, rather than the high noon scorcher, so I used an extra shirt, instead. In the end they would keep the lights on until the sun peeked over the escaping horizon, and at that moment of flickering relief every passenger seemed to take a breath deeper than the last. I woke and pulled down the shirt I had used to block the light to find the car bathed in the weak gray light of a six a.m. dawn, tracks rattling harmoniously below, singing us off to sleep, like the slow rise and fall of your ear against someone’s chest, a heartbeat ticking off the moments like a gong buried deep beneath the ground.

Coconut groves appeared and blew away. Farther off red houses and thatch roofed huts that sat in the middle of the black and white toned rice paddies. Having the demon glare of the overhead lights deposed and replaced with the benign grayness of morning gave me the only real sleep that I would be allowed in that entire night. But like many periods of benevolant rule, it would be short lived. The train arrived in Nong Khai only two hours later, with the sun well on its way towards the apex of its sweat blossoming zenith. (Fancy, huh?) But Nong Khai was cooler than Bangkok, where at eight a.m. you find yourself swimming in the dog’s breath of cars, people, and charcoal grills. Here the air had a noticable coolness to it, and I even shivered a bit in my clothing which was stale with the remnants of absorbed and evaporated sweat. Beyond Nong Khai was misty Laos.

Laos is to the North East of Thailand, spreading over the crown of Thailand’s elephant shaped head like a halo. Our train puffed along a diagonal track towards Nong Khai, a sleepy hamlet with the requisite guest houses and bars to support the wandering souls passing through to the other side of the border, though something much more to those who lived there, a part of it we would never quite see, even if we had stayed. We passed through the community silently and without fan fare.

Border crossings by land, at least this one between Laos and Old Siam, seem unnecessarily complicated to me. Once off our the train, we puttered to the first border checkpoint in a tuk tuk, where people in military-looking uniforms – the ones with the bars on the shoulders – checked to make sure we were people who really belonged there and not unregistered non-humans from the planet Argon. They checked our documents and stamped our pages, confirming that we were human and meant them no harm. Next, we took a bus to the Laos checkpoint.

You must procure an on-arrival visa at the border, requisite to further prove you’re not one of the undesirables. There is a small window where you hand the silhouette behind the glass your passport, a small picture of yourself (not having any visa size pictures of myself before we left, I took a quick Myspace shot against my white wall and had twelve printed before we left. I showed up at the border dressed in the same clothes as my picture), and forty-five dollars towards the betterment of relations between Laos and Thailand (if you want a visa before arriving, you can pay sixty dollars at the Laos embassy). Once you are paid up you can exchange money (8,600 kip to the dollar) and fill out an arrival card while they paste a shiny visa in your passport.

With a stamp and sharp slap on the ass we proceeded to another line where more people with bars on their shoulders checked to see that our stickers were all correct. More stamps and they shooed us off and we stood looking at each other, each reluctant to acknowledge one more bar-shouldered man who watched us expectantly, sitting under a sign that said in English and Thai: Please pay the border fee.

“Just grab me by my ankles!” I wanted to shout, to which he might have calmly replied:

“But then you would not have enough for chicken fee!”

“Chicken fee? I don’t have any chickens.”

“Yes, therefore we provide them. Please pay our chicken fee. It’s only fair!”

“What does that even mean?”

“It means I have bars on my shoulders and you’re dressed like a homeless wino with a backpack. Your spiritually expressive bracelets don’t scare me. Pay the fee.”

(NB: There is no such thing as a Foreigner Chicken Fee in Laos. The point is that the slow bleed is much more subtle then the dramatic highway robbery, and thus much more likely to go unnoticed if at least tolerated. For this reason, evolutionarily speaking, mosquitos are not the size of bears. Thank God.)

In all, crossing the border had taken us about two hours – like clockwork.

And then we stood unsure of what to do next, other travelers rushing past us like stream water past stones on to Vientienne, the capital, and then the interior.

While I’m in…

I’m off to Laos for a couple days. Pictures and words to follow. Happy Birthday to Brian, my most beloved brother is turning 21 on the eighteenth. Tears and cheers all around — how the years fly by.

Lush and luscious Laos

The Birthday Boy, himself.

The Old Boys

The embattled prime minister, Samak Sundaravej

St. Gabriel’s canceled the last period of school, and at 5:30 we were asked to be outside in our nicest uniform dress. The grounds of the college hummed with security guards, police, and men carrying cameras. Police stood or strut outside the gates, all dark glasses and radio squawks, blowing their whistles at passing cars with all the wild abandon of canine lunar howling. Middle aged and old men dressed in S.G. blue and white under black blazers mingled in the oppressive heat, to which they seemed aloof, like the southern men who still where full cream colored suits and hats during the unbearable summer months out of stubborn propriety. These men of blue and white are called “The Old Boys,” a network of alumnae who have kept close ties with the school, socially and financially. That evening St. Gabriel’s was holding one of the Old Boys’ annual get togethers. But the Old Boy of honor this time would be the Prime Minister of Thailand, and the administration wanted us, their foreign teachers, right up front for his arrival.

Honestly, I had little concept of what was going on when I wandered outside, my shirt wrinkled, and my eyes strained and bloodshot from watching an episode of “The Wire” in the dark. I saw all the hubub from my window, police and finely dressed people milling about on the puddled pavement, and begrudgingly concluded this would probably prevent me from going to the work out room. I decided to grab my tie from its unceremonious perch on the door handle and traipse outside to investigate.

The Prime Minister, Samak, was elected last January and has not had an easy term in office. Samak is the head of the “People’s Power Party,” a phoenix image of deposed PM Thaksin Shinawatra’s Thai Rak Thai Party which was dissolved after the coup d’etat of 2006. Samak’s victory in the polls slapped the generals who staged the coup squarely in the kisser. It effectively placed Thaksin’s cadre right back in the mantel power, a place from which nigh two years before they had been so swiftly punted. Subsequently, the political action group, People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD), which staged large scale protests before the 2006 coup, have been dogging Samak with more protests of the same scale. They shut down traffic, stage huge rallies taunting “Ok Bai Samak,” meaning Get Out Samak (two years ago it was “Ok Bai Thaksin”) and recently they’ve gone so far as to peacefully surround the Government House, which the press was calling a “siege.” (Wolf Blitzer’s beard might have screamed, “War! War! War!” ) The Bangkok Post quoted the opposition Democratic party as saying that Samak’s government has six months left. Nappodon, Samak’s Foreign Minister (Secretary of State), resigned after being threatened with impeachment and corruption charges in the Senate.

The fact that the foreign teachers were being placed up front confused me. I thought the Thai teachers, at least some of them, should be the ones to meet the Prime Minister. He is, afterall, their elected official, and it seems already that we are getting too many perks for simply being from out of town. But there we were, milling about and sweating and maybe beginning to regret this new found benefit of ours, a little. Samak was due to arrive at 5:30, so by 6:45 and still no sign of him, the prospect of escaping to our air-conditioning became more attractive than meeting the leader of the country.

“How long would you wait for President Bush?” somebody asked.

“I don’t know. And Samak isn’t President of the United States,” I said.

“I would put them on the same level.”

“Neither of them are the brightest bulb in the room,” I heard somebody else comment, but I couldn’t make out who it was.

Despite the heat, the complaining, and the obvious misjustice of placing us in front, the fact that we were going to meet the Prime Minister was still very exciting. I imagined how I might tell my parents,relatives, and random Thais that I met the Prime Minister.

“Hi random Thai person! Sawadee Kap and all that jazz. Guess who I met today? Well of course you don’t understand what I’m saying, I’m screaming at the top of my lungs at you! Oh you’re leaving now? The Prime Minister! The PM! I met him. This is the hand I shook his hand with! Don’t worry I washed it. Here. Shake my hand and then you can shake other people’s hands and you can tell them that you shook the PM’s hand, too. No seriously go ahead. Just shake my hand!”

A silver Mercedes with tinted windows would roll through the gates of St. Gabriel’s and suddenly chatter would stop and we would get into our line, backs straight and hands folded in front of us. But to our disappointment it would only be a four star general or a chief of police or something equally as mundane. Whatever not-so-VIP VIP climbed out of the luxury vehicle would wai (a pressing of the hands together as if in prayer against your mouth and a slight bow of the head) the people around him and move on to the party inside. This happened three or four times, until finally a nondescript silver van cruised through the gates and everyone became very still. As per usual I was the last person to figure out what was going on, and then only when the person next to me smacked me in the back of the head and told me to turn around. The van rolled to a halt, and for a moment nothing happened. It was just a van, and everyone stood watching it.

Then, as if this it would be the defining moment of our lives, a school administrator said in an almost whisper of unequivocal reverence, “The Prime Minister of Thailand!”

And so it was, the door opened and out stepped Samak, a portly snout faced man of orange complexion, dressed in a blazer and a St. Gabriel’s polo. He waied in our general direction and we waied back as he rushed past our line to meet the director of the school, Brother Anusak, who stood to the left of us. Before anyone could get a proper look at the man a gaggle of video cameras surrounded him in a protective press wall, and sooner than we could drop our waiing hands he proceeded into the party and we were left looking at each other, unsure of what to do next.

The entire scenario was over in 52 seconds.

“I feel so used,” someone finally said.

“It was in your contract: ‘Will occasionally be used as lawn ornaments.’ We all signed it.”

“I don’t even like flamingos.”

“Can we leave now?” I asked.

“Well we can leave, but you have to stay here. That’s in the contract, too.”

“Ah, I see.”

And that’s how I met the Prime Minister.

Bears and Pickpockets

I know, I know! I haven’t written in about two weeks; but I’ve been working to get the respect of my students back, and time to spend on reflection and verbal merriment has been rare. Earning respect is challenging work, but earning it back — after dancing to West Side Story in front of the entire school on the soccer field — is flippin’ absurd.

Our story begins two weeks ago. Hours before we left to enjoy a beach weekend in Hua Hin, our director Ms. Pat let us know that Intensive English (I.E.) Month was set to begin in a week. Lovely, mild and always ready with a smile, Ms. Pat wants the best for us. Accordingly, she does her best to make us aware of important information when we need it. But like everything to do with time in Asia, getting this information is like running underwater, the massive fluid weight of Mai Bhen Rai working against you. There is a consistent equilibrium of the Thais knowing exactly what to do and foreigners wandering around bumping into walls and being swallowed by large birds. Eventually, somebody feels bad enough for us that they tell us what’s going on or they shoo the birds away.

“Have you prepared anything for I.E. Month?” Ms. Pat asked, I imagine — I wasn’t there. But Ashley, an American teacher in her second year, was…and she was confused.

“I.E. Month?” she asked

“Yes,” Ms. Pat affirmed.

“For the entire month?”

“Yes, just the opening ceremony.”

“Did we do this last year?”

“Oh. No. Maybe! Yes. I think maybe you did. Do you remember what you did?”

“No. Do you remember?”

“Um, no. No. But maybe we can find somebody who does and you can do that. Yes, you should find someone.”

“I don’t think we did anything for the opening ceremony last year.”

“Yes. You didn’t. I remember.”

In a rush, the decision was made that we would do a dance. Yes, a dance would be quick, clean, and we had done one when we were at ABAC. Therefore we knew what we were doing. Therefore we wouldn’t suck. Ha ha, see me laughing?

I should tell you what exactly I.E. month is. The month of I.E. is in actuality almost two-and-a-half months, during which time we American teachers are taken out of class to do English speaking activities with every grade. Each grade has one week of English activities — bingo, scavenger hunts, songs, lots of posters — then a closing ceremony, after which they go back to class. The first week is primary three (third grade), then third and fourth so on and so forth, forever and ever, Amen. Already two of the guys made a list of animals and included the cockroach, just so they could yell “Cock!” pause, then “Roach!” to the kids and have them repeat it without a nary young mind aware of what just transpired…ideally.

Bingo, scavenger hunts, songs, and posters. No dancing. There was nothing about dancing in my contract. But it’s Thailand, right? What the hay? Mai Bhen Rai. Ha ha.

Dance practice began on Tuesday.

Tina and Ashley, as the trained dancers of the bunch, bravely took stewardship over the choreography and practice schedule. Letters were posted on the common room door: Dance Practice at 7:00 pm. Attendance MANDATORY. I was napping when my door rattled with the morse code of somebody’s fist against the wood. It was one of those naps where I was so glad to be asleep I dreamed my body was flying. So good, in fact, that when my door began jumping on its hinges those simple knocks turned into death gongs and the sky below me ripped open to reveal a tar black vortex. And as I was sucked down into blackness, I remember thinking, “How predictable. Of course I would be sucked into a vortex just as soon as I learned to freakin’ ¬¬FLY!”

But I woke in my bed with its sheets that needed to be changed and sounds of the boys playing even though school had been over for two hours. Tina peeked inside my room: “Practice is at seven. Don’t forget!”

“Never,” I croaked and almost fell out of bed trying to get up. My body does the opposite of what I tell it. How am I supposed to dance?

Two years ago we did a dance to the same West Side Story song, “America,” for International Night in front of hundreds of spectators. We had been nervous then, too. So nervous someone decided it would be a good idea to drink a little before hand just to get the knots out our wooden limbs.

Since I am a teacher, and thus am looked at as a role model, I’ll just say we were drinking milk. We began with only a little milk — just enough so a few people could get relaxed. A few brought coke to mix with our milk because sometimes milk doesn’t taste that great alone. When we ran out of milk a few more of us made a trip to Seven Eleven to get more milk. By the time we had to go on stage we had so much milk a few dancers were holding hands just to get up the stairs without tipping over. The house lights dimmed, stage lights flashed, and the music qeued, and we showed the world what a dairy soaked rendition of “America” looked like. What did we care? We thought we were great.

Until they showed us the video.

They say the evil things you do will come back to you. In the list of evil acts, the Bible says nothing of dancing badly…and yet:

2006 Loyola students dance to “America.”

2008 Loyola teachers dance to “America,” again.

2010 Loyola alumnae trampled to death by rogue Rockettes in freak accident?

Tina and Ashley, despite being great dancers (or because of it), understood our limitations, a fact which made them good choreographers. The dance moves they tried to teach us were not overly complicated or needlessly intricate. A few simple twirls, some posing and maybe a well-placed mambo. The whole premise of the dance (and the song “America”) is that two opposing groups of Puerto Ricans are facing off: one that wants to go back to the island and the other that wants to stay in America. Accordingly we broke into two rag tag collections and danced off, with one section of the song has each group yelling disses back and forth to each other followed by the necessary poses of “Did dey just say dat?” and “Oh, Dey said dat. Ooh shit!”

At practice, others must have been napping and subsequently sucked into their own dream vortexes because many looked and acted as if they had just been urinated on. Colin wore a beater and boardshorts and wondered aloud what the hell he was doing there in regular five minutes intervals; though, his lamentations seemed more aimed at getting a rise out of Tina or Ashley than it resembled actual complaining. Others simply wandered, sat and studied their toes, or spun in circles to their own, lopsided choreography. At the time, I thought a lot of milk would be needed, lest the entire endeavor suffer a sobering failure. (Haha, get it? Yeah, shut up.)

Despite everything practice was always fun, if not only slightly terrifying by the end. The thought that we would have to actually perform this little dance in front of thousands of boys whom we teach everyday was the most tiring part. Dancing with each other was fun, but the pressure to perform was exhausting. No wonder dance clubs are always dark.

Sunday night was our last practice. By then we were relatively comfortable with ourselves and at the end of each successful completion of the routine we clapped and cheered. We broke off and went our separate ways for the night: some to bed, others to eat, still more to lament, “I can’t believe we have to do this in front of people tomorrow.”

That night, I woke to sounds outside my door which were too proximate, too easily carried by the air than I was used to, so I got out of bed to investigate. My door was wide open. I must have stupidly left it open before I went to sleep. I do things like this: careless things that could potentially be damaging, like leaving my door wide open or leaving my car unlocked in Washinton D.C., so punks can steal my typewriter and leave broken watches behind as a call sign. But things have a way of working out. Mai Bhen Rai, somehow disaster is always averted.

In the morning I came downstairs dressed in my oxford shirt and khakis, clean, pressed and ready to be eaten by a thousand stinky fifteen-year-olds. Have I mentioned that they smell?

But Nuan, the woman who works in our building, stopped me and pointed towards the double glass doors that lead into the building’s lobby next to the common room. Doors that are usually locked. Doors that were now wide open.

“I don’t know what happened. I came this morning and the gate outside was broken and the doors were open. Very bad,” she said. She pointed at the camera, which was ripped out of the wall and now dangled like a dead vine. She pointed next to the common room.

“It is all gone.”

Indeed everything that could be taken easily was missing. The intruders left with the computer, the cable box, and a broken DVD player (suckers). The bulky television and computer monitor remained in their places, but they stood dark and blank, dead without their respective brains.

Perhaps worse, the intruders were on our floors as well. We met at 8:00 am to watch the first performances and to prepare for ours. In discussing the night’s events, it came to light that people’s shoes had been taken. In Thailand shoes are traditionally left outside the room as to cut down on the dust and dirt that accumulates on tiled floors. Some of us took this lesson to heart and while it keeps the floors tidy, unfortunately your shoes are also left out in the open, vulnerable to theft. Fortunately, I keep my shoes inside, not because I want to make a point, rather, I’m lazy and opening a door to get my shoes is just too much strain…. It’s hot in Thailand; leave me alone.

We sat with the other teachers beside the field to watch the ceremony. The first act climbed onto the stage, and two third graders began by having a small conversation in English about how the other was doing. I was too concerned with why both were dressed like American farmers to understand what they said completely. Either way, the conversation collapsed as more thirdgraders dressed in bear outfits – complete with ear and eye adorned headgear – began dancing behind them. The speakers rushed over to the end of the stage where teachers frantically undressed them and shoved bear costumes over their heads, the dance carrying on behind them in careless delight. By the time they were dressed the dance was over and they all posed, paws raised in the air, each one looking at the other to make sure they were in the right spot. I clapped till my hands hurt. For god’s sake they were dressed like bears! I would have clapped if they just stood around and sneezed on each other for ten minutes.

The next act was much like the first: a conversation in English which crashed and burned as more students dressed in red and blue rain ponchos danced to Maroon 5. Before I even got the chance to clap we were shooed away from our chairs and onto the field. We were on next.

The stage was a raised wooden platform in the center of the field around which every single one of my students sat, I noticed, and suddenly we all began to wonder aloud if they had tested this platform for sturdiness. Eight dancing bears is one thing. But eighteen stomping, shuffling Americans is another.

After that everything becomes blurry. Here’s what I remember: We got on stage and did our poses, the music started too low and the queues were off so I just began clapping and moving my butt from side to side in an attempt to look like I wasn’t panicking. Suddenly someone grabbed my hand and I was spinning in a circle, which quickly broke off and I was posing again. One of the girls came up to me and I spun her and another came up and I spun her too. A kickline formed to which I thought, “Oh okay we’re kicking now. Now, we’re leaning aaaand okay we’re back up! Bow time? Yes? Okay, go!”

Here’s the part of our performance, which must have revealed one of two things about us: one, that Americans are epecially fond of chaos, or two, that eighteen foreign teachers had just taken a hallucinatory drug which made them run around the field flailing and yelling nonsense.

“America” was not long enough to fill our time requirement, so for the last minute and a half, we would jump off stage and try to get the Thai students to dance with us as “Shout” by the Isley Brothers played in the background. Unfortunately, but not unpredictably none of the Thai students would dance with us, so for a full minute and a half we ran around grabbing at children who shied away from us as if we had the mange and managed to make St. Gabriel’s director, Brother Anusek, and everyone else very confused, and quite uncomfortable.

And then the music stopped. It was over. We left and they clapped, mercifully and perhaps with a moment’s hesitation.

In my second period class, my first after the performance, we gave the boys a worksheet titled “The Pickpocket,” (students had to describe a picture of a pickpocket and answer questions) and I couldn’t help but chuckle at the irony of the timing. After all a pocket is just a place to store things, as is a room, and sometimes both get picked. As I passed out sheets I noticed an unusual amount of giggling going on behind me. So in my most authoritarian way I turned to find the culprits and I was met with a boy standing mid clap in perfect flamenco pose.

He grinned: “Teachah! You dance good today!”

At which he started to clap and shake his butt back and forth like a lady of the night who had her hips removed. Laughter erupted from all corners of the room and all I could do was tell him to sit down and start on the work sheet. I had to admit it was probably a perfect imitation of my panic dance. I accepted that I would see clapping students for the next two weeks. What else could I do? Mai Bhen Rai.

As he students finished the worksheet I began grading their answers at the desk in the front of the room. The picture made me think of the things taken from our common room, and I was less upset that they had taken the computer or the cable box (I was glad they got the broken DVD player – karma biatches); but they had also taken some security away from us. One girl asked to move to a different room from hers on the second floor, because she figured if they could climb the gate outside they can scale her balcony. So she moved. Others complained of the similar feelings. I just thought of my door, wide open in the middle of the night, and I wondered if they had been in my room. I don’t know. Honestly I don’t care to.