There is a copy of Eat Pray Love in our villa. I picked it up the other night and sort
of skim read it (OK, I didn’t even skim read it, I just flicked through
chapters I thought were interesting.) Author Elizabeth Gilbert can write – at
times the book is very funny. It’s also very infuriating. Bear with me on this,
because I do actually have a point to reviewing this book.
A successful New Yorker in her early 30s,
married and living in her dream home, Gilbert is struck by a crippling
depression and the realisation she doesn’t want to be married anymore. She
refuses to discuss the reasons WHY she doesn’t want to be married anymore, but
does go into lengthy and excruciating detail about the divorce, mostly banging
on about what a nasty, mean, prick her husband is for making the divorce such a
tedious and long drawn out process.
Our heroine then begins an affair with a
man that unsurprisingly can’t cope with the emotional fallout of someone else’s
divorce and the relationship ends.
Poor Lizzy! She can’t cope with anymore
of this heartbreak, of this hardship! She must connect to God, and to herself.
On a work assignment in Bali, a medicine man tells her she’ll come back and
live with him for four months, it’s her destiny. (He actually tells her nothing
of the sort – I went back and checked. What he actually says is: ‘so you will
come back here to Bali and live here and teach me English. And I will teach you
everything I know,’ ) to me, this akin to bumping into someone you haven’t seen
for a while in the high street and saying, ‘pop round for a cup of tea, soon,
yeah?’
I’m guessing that she pitches this idea
to her publisher, because next thing: she’s got a sufficient enough advance to write
this piece of pseudo-spiritual word vomit, and is PAID to spend a year in
Italy, India and Indonesia with her head stuck up her own arse.
The Queen of the Me Me Me Planet troughs
her way round Italy, gaining 10 pounds in weight (but she needed to, because
she was soooooo skinny from the Divorce Diet.)
From here she goes to India, where she
spends four months in an ashram, doing yoga, meditating and scrubbing floors.
This place basically charges Westerners a fortune to scrub floors, wash their
own sheets and cook their own dinner.
She bangs on a bit about the funny idiosyncrasies
of the Indian people. Ha ha ha!! They are beautiful and brown! The way they
speak English, it’s just so cute, like they learnt it from a wartime movie!
They are so skinny!
Then she complains about how she can’t
meditate properly because she can’t keep her mind still, being such a unique
and special snowflake and all.
After India, she heads to Bali, (without
even bothering to check visa requirements – she gets round this by bribing the
immigration authorities) to find the medicine man who two years ago prophesised
she would return and teach him to speak English. When she finds him, he has no
idea who she is, and it is kind of to her credit that she includes the excruciating
exchange that follows as she tries to remind him.
When he finally realises (I suspect he
was probably bluffing) he says he didn’t recognise her because last time, she
looked so old and unhappy. Now she looks like a different person, (because
that’s what 8 months sitting on your butt eating pasta and chanting will do for
you.)
The next chapters of this book are the
ones I had the most problem with, because Lizzy just comes across as….well, a
bit of a douche. Two things: first, is she meets an Indonesian woman and
decides to raise the money to buy her a house. She emails all her wealthy
American friends, and they send money and then the poor Indonesian women has
$18,000 to buy her very own home! Then Lizzy gets pissed off, because her poor
little friend is stalling on buying land / a home and wants more money. She
goes and tells the woman that her American friends are very angry with her and
want their money back. You’re a fuck-head. She didn’t ask you for that money.
Second: Lizzy meets a man, and as soon as
this happens, she ditches the medicine man and doesn’t visit him for weeks on
end. She also describes in far too much detail the bladder infection she gets
from all the sex with the new man.
The story ends, as all trite and
predicable shit like this does, with her marrying the new man. Because you
know, now she wants to be married, she just had to do all that travelling,
eating and lazing around to find that out.
I went on Youtube and watched a couple of
interviews with Elizabeth Gilbert, and she seemed very intelligent, articulate
and nice. But maybe you can be all
those things and also be totally self-absorbed with absolutely no
self-awareness at the same time.
Anyway, this execrable pile of paper that has a cheek to call itself 'wise and rapturous' made me wonder what Thais really make of Westerners. Example; our resort
restaurant doesn't deal in cents, so they always round up (or down) your change
to the nearest 10 baht. This means that when your dinner comes to 250.70 baht,
you won’t get back 250.30 change. You get 241.00. This skimming the change
thing has only happened here, and I can only assume it is because they think we
have so much money, we don’t care. In theory, I don’t care about 9 baht.
There’s not much you can buy with that, but 9 baht over each meal soon adds up.
I guess that in comparison to the Thais,
yes, we have a lot of money. But it’s not the sort of money they THINK we have.
When you tell a Thai person you live near
London, the first thing they say is London is very cool. This is normally
followed by asking if you like Premiership football and what team you support.
(Here in Chiang Mai they are Man U / Liverpool fans.) I wonder if they have the Swingin' 60s picture of London in their heads; red double deckers, Carnaby Street, punks and hippies.
We have been going to a bar in nearby Mae
Rim – it’s run by a European guy, Si. He serves pizzas and chips and has a pool
table. Basically the sort of place Brits, Aussies and Americans want to hang
out in.
Last night we met Donal, an American who
teaches Geography at the nearby boarding school. We tell him about Trainer
Gate. He believes that an honest mistake was made – Thais do not like
confrontation, and to be accused of deliberately scamming someone would be
extremely embarrassing to them. He also says that they work on the theory that if an item works in a shop, then its good enough. If it’s delivered broken, you
won’t get your money back, because it WAS working when it left the shop. He
said to not take this personally – it is not because we are tourists, they are
not trying to fuck us over. This is just the way that things work here.
We went shopping in the city at the
weekend, and in American Eagle, I was followed round the shop. This actually
happens to me in the UK, too. I don’t know if I look shifty because I wear a
backpack, or if it’s because they (Thais) don't
see me as Western, but it made me uncomfortable. The girl following me round
the shop wasn’t even subtle about it – I’d pick up a t-shirt and I could feel
her standing behind me. In the end I paid for the t-shirt I wanted and just
left the shop, feeling like I’d done something wrong. I had been in there for a
while, mostly because TC was taking his time looking at things, but really. I
am not going to nick a t-shirt that costs less than £6.00.
We have a really basic but tasty dinner
one night in a local karaoke place. It’s basically a wooden hut at the side of
the road, and they cook your dinner on a two ring camping stove.
The battery from their digital wall clock
explodes and hits our table. They are terribly sorry about this, and rush over,
tugging at our jumper sleeves, checking for burns and apologising over and over
again.
The female owner then sings song after
song with the male half of a local couple that come in. It’s obviously an old
routine, and they look really pleased when we applaud them. The singing man
asks TC why he’s only drinking a small beer. TC mimes riding a scooter.
‘Me too!’ says he man, and points to his
large beer, shrugs, and everyone laughs.
We also did a trip to the Mae Sa
waterfall, stopping for lunch at another local roadside place. Here we got
served by the Thai female equivalent of Kevin the teenager, as she huffed
around, slamming down plates and generally being very unhappy in her work. We
questioned it – was it because we are not local? Then some locals came in and
got the same moody stare and the same plate slamming and we thought, ahh, not
just us then.
The waterfalls were beautiful, but like
everything else here, there’s the weird combination of rules (signs saying ‘the
park closes at 5. You all have to leave NOW.’ Handing over your ticket, even
after you’ve gone through two barriers to get INTO the park) and slapdashness
of not caring much about things (no bins, rubbish strewn all over the place.)
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| Mae Sa Waterfall |
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| This is the view from the path at the top of our resort |
I haven’t talked much about the landscape
round here. It’s curious – there are trees with these enormous leaves, leaves
as big as hats. There are areas of dense woodland that wind up into the hills.
Then there’s rice paddies and flat, scrubby fields. It hasn’t rained since
we’ve been here and everything outside of the well-watered resort is yellow and
dry looking.
The roads are punctuated by little
clusters of houses and shack-like shops, where they sell packet noodles, Lays
crisps and weird ‘bread and green custard’ sandwiches.
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| Leaf hat - all the rage, you know |
There is lots of what looks like half-finished
or abandoned houses. Concrete pillars and twisted metal work sticking out of
the earth, getting slowly consumed by climbing plants.
In the Tuesday night Mae Rim Plaza
Market, they sell watermelons and bags of tomatoes for less than 50p, and you can buy bag
of wild rice for about 70p. We’ve done our fruit and vegetable shopping here
for the last couple of weeks. We haven’t seen any other Western couples at the
market, but plenty of white middle-aged men.
In the house opposite our villa lives an
American woman, Claudia. We have seen her out on her push bike a few times and
she stops and says hello, but like the other Americans we’ve met here (apart
from Donal) doesn’t seem to want to give much away about herself.
They’ll ask you lots about yourself; what
you’re doing, are you married, but ask them anything like that about themselves
and they cut off the conversation and either change the subject or just walk
off. Her age and what she’s doing here
isn’t clear, but she says she lives here. We see her carrying a tennis racket a
lot and wonder where the tennis court is.
We've also been spending some time deciding where to go next - we have to go out of Thailand on 6 February for a visa run -and everyone we speak to is divided. Some, like the Spanish guy that works in the Spanish pub in Chiang Mai, says avoid Laos. Si from the pizza place says try anywhere, but they are all more expensive than Thailand. What we can't do is hire a car from Thailand and take it across a border. If anyone has any suggestions, on a postcard, please....
We've also been spending some time deciding where to go next - we have to go out of Thailand on 6 February for a visa run -and everyone we speak to is divided. Some, like the Spanish guy that works in the Spanish pub in Chiang Mai, says avoid Laos. Si from the pizza place says try anywhere, but they are all more expensive than Thailand. What we can't do is hire a car from Thailand and take it across a border. If anyone has any suggestions, on a postcard, please....
