On writing, relentless rain, and the Thai attitude to death

On Sunday morning, we woke to wind hammering the non-double glazed windows of our villa. Lunch in the Mae Rim Plaza was spoiled by a gust of air as hot as a hairdryer that blew dust over our plates. (Ruined my lunch, that did!)

As we rode into Chiang Mai, it started to rain. The rain made everything feel slightly sticky, greasy and grubby. It rained all afternoon and all night and has only stopped raining for a few minutes before it starts up again. As I write this, it’s raining….it sounds like England outside. 

It’s not just spitty, half-hearted rain either, it’s full on POURING rain that’s soaking the earth and making great big puddles in the roads. It’s perfect movie watching weather, but my goal while I was here was to finish a book I’ve been writing for what feels like a hundred years, and apparently you need to ‘show up’ and not watch any movies to do that. Count this blog as a warm up to the rest of the work that needs to be done today.

I set myself a goal of 2,000 a day. You might not think 2,000 words is very much, but it is when half of those words are notes like [WHEN IS A WILL READ??] and [WHEN WERE CAR SEATS INVENTED?] 2,000 is a MISSION.

There are any number of distractions when it comes to laying down your quota for the day; the internet, in particular, YouTube, where you can get sucked into an hour long video hole of ‘research’; social media, the newspapers, the writing blog I’ve got a bit addicted to (it’s called terribleminds, all want to be writers should check it out. Once you’ve done your word quota, of course.)

Cleaning – I must empty the shit bins and the food bin, sweep the floors, change the bedding, wash up, do a load of washing, hang that up, oooh it’s time for lunch!

Reading – mmm, I need some inspiration, let’s read some authors I admire, I’ll have a coffee while I do that. Oooh, it’s dinner time! 

Work-out : never thought that doing exercise would be an excuse to get out of writing.

THE FEAR: This is shit, it’s shit, it’s shit. I am not brainy enough to be a writer. I don’t know if I can even pronounce some of these words I am using. I want to write like Nabokov. Only Nabokov can write like Nabokov, I just sound like:

THE BLOCK: For the first two weeks we were in the villa, and I was supposed to be writing, I was struck by the realisation that this whole idea was ridiculous. I gave up my job and used my savings to come here and NOT write. Everything about the idea, from actually coming here to the story I had planned out seemed ridiculous. For a few days, I just started at a blank page, and then at the blue sky with the mountains in the distance. I listened to some music – mostly Polymorphia from The Shining, Soren Juul’s ‘Ambitions’ and some Fever Ray. Listening to creepy music helps when you’re trying to write something creepy.

Sick of non- productive days, where I felt like I didn’t deserve to go out for dinner, or do some yoga, I thought that any writing was better than no writing, so I just started with a stream of consciousness. It’s working so far. Whenever I’m a bit stuck, I don’t worry about the perfect sentence or if the story is being told in a linear fashion. That can all come later. 2,000 words have to been down that day, and they cannot include the notes I make as I go along. I am slightly dreading that when I go back to edit, 90% of it isn’t going to make any sense. 

Remember I said that we met American teacher, Donal? He told us the reason why Thais drive so crazily is because they don’t care about dying. They’re thinking, ‘doesn’t matter if I die, I get to come back, so why worry about it?’ 

I don’t know if this applies to the Muslim Thais that live in Southern Thailand, (what’s their excuse for poor driving? As far as I am aware, there’s no reincarnation in Islam), so this seems like quite a sweeping generalisation. 

We were at the karaoke shake on Saturday night (they got us to sing one song, and then asked us to sing more. I suspect this is because we were so bad, they were laughing at us.) One of the men left.  He was so drunk, he couldn’t balance the clutch properly, and couldn’t get up the little slope out of the carpark. No-one stopped him from getting in the car, though they all stood in the road after he’d finally driven off, looking a bit worried. The guy couldn’t even stand up properly, so not sure how able he was to operate the car.

There’s no real reason to NOT drink and drive here if you’re of the opinion it doesn’t matter if you die while doing so. And if you get caught by the police – that’s no deterrent either. The taxi driver that picked us up from Chiang Mai airport told us it’s a 5,000 baht fine and a 5 day ban. A quick Google search doesn’t seem to come up with a definitive answer on this, so there’s no way of telling if the taxi driver is right or not. (what does seem to be uniform is that bus and taxi drivers cannot drink at all while working….that’s…. reassuring.) 

 

On the way back from Makro yesterday, I saw a car on the other side of the road hit the central reservation barriers. He was only going slowly, so not sure how this happened, but the back wheels of the car were up on the curb (the central reservations are marked by yellow fences up on raised concrete strips.) 

It’s just another mystery to add to the Mystery List of the Thai Way of Life, like, why do the girls seem to favour clothes with sparkly embellishments on them? Why do they not refrigerate the pork sandwiches in 7/11? In the market, why do they give you your purchases in TWO plastic bags? Why are there no self-service petrol stations? Why do your meals not all come out at the same time? Why are they so fond of 80s style imported jeans? And why does everyone wear face masks in shopping centres??

Some Random Ramblings

I’ve been reading back on my posts so far and feel like I haven’t really done the Thai people we’ve encountered much justice, recounting only the meetings with sullen / rude / fierce people.

There’s the couple that run the laundry opposite the resort who will wash your 2kg load of dirty sheets for about £1.20. I think he’s blind, (or partially sighted) they have a little dog that sits outside and barks when you walk up to the shop. I don’t know if the dog is just a pet, or employed as some kind of alarm / doorbell for the blind man when customers come along and he’s there alone. 

He took my washing from me yesterday, then who I think must have been his wife came along, weighed it and told me it would be ready to collect at 5pm. I don’t know what washing powder they use here, but it reminds me of one of my favourite perfumes. ‘Pure Grace’ by Philosophy. If you haven’t smelled it, it’s hard to describe – it just smells really fresh, clean and slightly floral / sandalwood-ish.  

Every hotel receptionist we have met has been very sweet, friendly and helpful. There was Noon, from the Sea @ Lanta, with her excellent local knowledge and A, from the posh villas we stayed in over Christmas – the sweetest, loveliest lady who would come and chat to us every day at breakfast.

 A was married to an Englishman, but said he was lazy and didn’t want to come to Thailand to work, only ‘for holiday’ and she didn’t like living in his hometown of Southampton, which she found depressing and dreary. She had a business buying and selling plots of land before starting her holiday villa venture – we were the second guests to stay there. 

The woman on the rice stall at the Tuesday night Mae Rim Plaza Market that finds it really funny we just want to buy one container of rice and scoops extra handfuls in the bag for no extra cost. 

The girl that works in Si’s bar, (where excellent, homemade, authentic pizza is to be had) recognised us the second time we went in there and greeted us with a cheerful, warm, ‘welcome back!’ 

Across the road from Si’s there is a quirky little café (I made a note of the name of it so I could review it and then promptly forgot what is is) that serves perfectly prepared calamari, fried in crispy batter, melt in the mouth, not even a tiny bit chewy. It seems to be a ‘family’ meeting place – they have a TV in the indoor section, and kids sit round a tiny round table, doing their homework, eating their tea and watching the TV.

The couple and their daughters in the karaoke shack down the road; despite our laughable attempts to use Google translate to try and relay that I don’t eat chicken or pork, they didn’t get pissed off or impatient and served us excellent Khao Pad and cold beers for the princely sum of roughly less than £5.00. 

I also love the fact that if you go through any type of barrier, anywhere – out of the resort, into the shopping centre; the guard on the barrier always gives you a jaunty little salute. 

In my last post, I talked a lot about Eat Pray Love. I felt I’d gone on long enough in that particular post about certain Western attitudes towards funny little brown people, but we find it here. There tends to be an idealisation of Thai people from some Westerners, who refuse to see Thais as anything other than innocent, non-confrontational, sweet and smiley. I think this does both parties a great disservice, and I think it’s kind of patronising. 

Imagine that you are a country that hosts millions of tourists each year – you depend on them hugely for your income. You’re always expected to be laid-back, placid, friendly, kind and affable. I don’t know about you, but I’d find that pretty hard to live up to, especially when you may encounter some people that probably irritate you, or look down on you. 

Some things I’ve heard about Thai behaviour, values and customs that might not always be strictly true:

1)      They don’t shout: Yes they do! The women in Koh Lanta National Park café were having a HIGH old time yelling across the room at each other. OK, it wasn’t in anger, but still. Raised voices all round.

2)     They always smile: also not true. This is because, one would rationally assume, they are human beings that have bad days just like er, everyone else in the world does. Or maybe they are annoyed that I’m too lazy (read: actually afraid of causing offence) to use the Thai thankyou Kaa.

3)     Always barter in markets: not always. Tried to barter on some dresses in Koh Lanta Old Town and it was made pretty clear that the woman knew the value of her stock and wasn’t going to sell it any cheaper. You have to judge this for yourself, but I’d say if they don’t budge on the first time you ask, don’t push it. The price they say is the price you have to pay.

4)     Feet are dirty, take off your shoes when going into shops: this one is true, though lots of shops don’t mind if you keep your shoes on. I take mine off if there’s a mat by the entrance. The default, I guess, is to worry that your shoes might get stolen, but it’s not happened yet. Probably because no-one wants a pair of filthy old Jesus sandals that smell like Brie.

5)     The ‘Shit Bins’ (as we have fondly named them): are not actually for shitty loo roll. ALL toilets here have ‘bum guns’. Some are just the basic cold water nozzle; some are DIGITAL bidets, like the ones in the Maya Plaza. You’re supposed to use the bum gun, and then pat yourself dry with the loo roll. I’ve not got my head round this yet and emptying the bins makes me gag a bit. Best not to think about it, or maybe start doing things the done way. When in Rome…..

To sum up: we’ve met some rude, sulky Thai people (Kevin-The-Teenager, I mean YOU) and we’ve met some happy people. ‘Same same, but different’ as the Thai saying goes. You can actually apply it to lots of things, once you get into the habit of saying it. It’s become one of my most frequently used sayings, apart from ‘OK, then’ in a Fargo-style accent.

We’re still undecided on where to head to next. Laos looks difficult as we can’t seem to find any month-long let options, so we’re looking at Cambodia….watch this space.

She's a Waterfall

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.)

Mae Sa Waterfall

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. 

Leaf hat - all the rage, you know

There are dogs EVERYWHERE, and most of them look mangy and unkempt – patches of fur missing, weeping eyes. They lie by the roadside, and even though they have collars on, they don’t seem to belong to anyone in particular. 

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....