Day One, Semester Two

(N.B. There will be a post about my trekking, I promise.)

A new Dan (we had one already) arrived in Bangkok the night before, a Tuesday, (rumors of his arrival trickled down into the lounge coffee/tea gathering the next morning) and on Wednesday most of my students wanted nothing of the riddles that I was giving them on the white board. “First day,” an Eighth grader complained, and I could see that the zero he received last semester had faded from his memory like the English that we hadn’t taught him might have over the October break, if he had learned it.

Keeping consistent the quality of the Matt Lindeboom brand, I spent the entire morning messing up the two riddles I had memorized — only one of which I could solve without clues — and my kids responded to the internationally recognized Brand in kind by correcting my mistakes for me once they had solved the riddles despite them.

“Mr. Matthew the farmer went across the river four times, not three.”

“I know,” I said, gazing nonchalantly at the white board, stuffing my panic back down into my intestines with a swallow. “It’s what we like to call a riddle wrapped in conundrum. I was just testing you.”

An important lesson of being a teacher is never admitting to your students that you’re fallible. Because once you show even the most intangible iota of weakness, you will be eaten. Not in the hyperbolic sense, like you say you’ll be eaten when they are actually just going to make fun of you. No. Your students will actually consume you for nutrients — bone marrow in particular.

I taught three sections in the morning and I let my fourth period class out ten minutes early for lunch. Ms. Pat took me and Steve to a local place to eat. Two other Thai teachers were in the restaurant and one remarked on the way Steve and I looked upon returning from our month vacation.

“Steven you look older, but the same!”

To me: “You look younger, but you are fatter.”

Straight forward no fuss and with that they glided out the door and shortly after new Dan came through the door, visibly overwhelmed, but I was still contemplating being fatter despite having actually lost more weight in October.

Dan worked with another man named Dan who was a teacher at St. Gabes last year. New Dan heard Last-Year Dan’s stories and decided this life sounded pretty good, so he quit his job and flew out here with about a couple shirts, some pants, and no toiletries whatsoever. His first questions were about where to find soap and shampoo.

“I also need shaving cream,” he said, rubbing in his five ‘clock shadow in the manner one who has been inside a pressurized tube for twenty-two hours.

This-Year Dan (who had only arrived September) told him he should secure a cell phone. Steve and I did our best to tell him where he could find supplies. We explained how the class schedules worked, places to scavenge for food, bus routes, night life, and some basic Thai which he had studied from a book and CD for a month before he arrived. New Dan took it all in and seemed to grasp it well. In his own words he never been outside the country except for Canada. “This isn’t Canada,” he observed and I could only agree with him.

After school New Dan (I will shed the “New” here and he will just be known as Dan) and I went for a stroll down Samsen Road to give Dan a sense of the scene. We walked down to a large intersection called Thewet, and we caught the number 30 bus to Khao Sarn Road, the backpacker haven. We sat down and immediately a woman in the seat next to us began motioning frantically to Dan’s wrist and then her own, which supported a watch. Dan realized before I did that a watch he borrowed from me must have fallen off his wrist as we got on the bus. Before I could tell him don’t worry about it, it’s a cheap watch I don’t really need, Dan headed for the door and it was all I could do to leap from the bus at the same time as him. What followed was a moment which reminded me of the first days of my own arrival here, which I have mostly forgotten, but I remember their franticness, living up to some set of expectations I’m not even really sure exists, of constant first impressions and needing to make them right. So as I watched Dan run down the crowded street, buses and motorbikes and cars to his left and throngs of carts and covered stalls selling fruit and fish to his right, to retrieve my cheap watch which fell off his wrist, I wondered if he too would forget this first-day-in-country moment as I have forgotten many of my own.

Where I am

Mae Hong Song Province

Pai

At request of concerned parties, here is a vague representation of where I may or may not be at any given time. I’m on my eighth or ninth day in the north. Tomorrow, I jump into one more five day trek before returning back to surly Bangkok, where the trumpets of the once smoldering confrontation between the democratic government and monarchist reformers are spitting fire again. I would easily stay up here for longer, mingling with the linen clad expats over green tea and the free world, but ole’ mister wallet is feeling the strain — echoes of the conflagration back home, perhaps. More likely the lightening of my monetary load is due to my undisciplined spending habits when some of the American teachers came to Chiang Mai for a few days: coca cola, whiskey and beer, oh my… A spartan lifestyle will resume once I’m engrossed in the big B again, no doubt.

I’m doing my best to keep a notebook on this trip –  I was good in the beginning — but now I’m leaving more and more to memory, a writing strategy which never fails to leave me grasping the air for necessary details. I’ll leave you with my impressions on my first day in Chiang Mai.

10/1/2008

“Clouds have the run of things in Chiang Mai, this morning. I’m holed up in a budget place, a room with a fan called Supreme Guest House that isn’t without its pleasantries. The bed is big enough for two people and I’ve horded both pillows the center of this expansive mattress with hedonistic glee. Downstairs, a woman who mans the desk is very nice and she’s willing to speak in Thai with me. She could be thirty for fifty, I can’t tell. Thais age so differently from what I’m used to. Forever young isn’t just a song lyric here. Shelves of old, bedraggled books in the lobby invite the lonely bibliophile. The entrance hangs a great sign: “No Entrance for Drug Dealers, Missionaries or Pedophiles.”  I chuckle, imagining that unfortunate missionary who learns, upon seeing the sign, that he’s fallen in with a lot of drug dealers and pedophiles, and all the requisite praying that would follow. My room is on the the third floor with a nice view of the surrounding neighborhood. Roofs are tiled red and gray, strewn with discarded bricks, satellite dishes, and rusted water reservoirs. Buildings are painted pink and the clear green-blue hue of the Caribbean water you see in calendars but never quite believe. Of course, the color of the buildings is not so naturally stunning, rather, vague and neutral beneath the harshly burnt red of the roof tiles above. Earthy cafes advertising western breakfast and espresso, wilted-looking used book stores, and garish travel offices populate the street below. Supreme House is nested away in a pocket of lanes off the main road where most budget guest houses tend to be found. My budget is BHT 150 a night, or about $4.50.

Chiang Mai itself can be explored by foot, and I obliged it for the first few hours after my train arrived this morning — two hours late — and I can assure you if you don’t like walking, plenty of taxi and tuk tuk drivers will solicit you as you walk. When it gets dark, you can be equally as sure, that certain woman (even men dressed as women) will solicit you for a different kind of ride.

Night is quiet. What I think were fireworks crackled off in the distance somewhere, but only briefly. In an era past I might have called them bombs.

My wandering took me past the night bazaar. For some obnoxious reason the night bazaar, a brightly lit wonderland of silk, wood carvings and paintings on thin strips of canvas of Buddha and Bodhi Trees; elephants and serene Buddha faces, eyes closed and mouth formed into an easy, satisfied smile; stone and metal amulets, fake jade, fake rubies, fake Adidas, fake watches and authentically pirated DVDs; jewelry that dangles, bracelets of wood, rainbow knit caps, t-shirts with pithy catch phrases that make your teeth grind, Billabong shorts, and Von Dutch trucker hats; bamboo lamps, bamboo walking sticks, bamboo mirrors, bamboo picture frames bamboo bath tubs, bamboo bamboo, and bamboo bamboo inlaid with exotic gold leafed bamboo; what of the people? sweaty pits, beat pink faces beaded with heat, charcoal burning stoves and chicken flavored smoke where foreign children want grilled poultry on a stick, breath on breath, hands on hands, fabric against fabric, and a nauseating amble by stall after countless stall, pressed up against the sidewalks and the buildings on either side of the main street for a mile or more; the merchants and merchants’ salutations, exultation, manipulation, meditation, begging, jostling, giggling, smiling, calling, and finally you either buy or you shove away saying, “Sorry, sorry, sorry” as a desperate sounding woman drops the price lower and lower, made me depressed.

But I had been to this bazaar before, when I was a student at the very end of my semester in Asia. In this bazaar, I felt as if I had been brought back to Chiang Mai merely to observe, or asked to meditate on what had been here in my memory. I found myself seeking out the guest house where we stayed. I spent an hour peeking in and out of lanes off the main road, looking for familiar land marks. I just wanted to see it. It found me, finally. Like a musical resonance a few of the familiar landmarks vibrated a little louder as I passed them. Mad Dog’s Bar: Pizza and Beer. 5 pm – Midnight, a tailor shop next to a beauty parlor that situated next to each other too perfectly to be coincidence. Then the lane itself curved off the the left as soon as you entered it. I had memorized these features so I didn’t get lost in the dark. My sense of direction is infamous. It was dark by now and I walked into the lane and I felt strange, as if these memories had perched themselves on my shoulder and were watching with me. A few bars and a laundry shop to the left, including a place called, “The Smallest Bar in the World” which announced that it was not recommended by Lonely Planet, the backpacker bible. I passed the sports bar where Falko, Dylan, and I played Joeys and I beat a man who had once been a woman, who called himself Tay, at darts. I was proud because I have never played a full game of darts.  On the right around another corner was an italian restaurant we ate at and found the food cold, but the service completely unpleasant. Once more left and the guest house came into view, for the most part unchanged, but there nonetheless.

What had I expected to find here? Us, sitting by the pool as we did? Unchanged and together against times blind march? No, of course, not. Nor did I expect to find myself in some silly new age way. Revisiting the past does what it is supposed to do: reminds you of what was, but affirms that it is gone from the present. We are gone, some of us back here but not in the same way. Others are blown to the wind, finding themselves in deeper than they expected, as I do now. But that’s life outside of college maybe.”