On The Scene

So, where were we now? The group gathered at a predetermined location of sorts, got back on the metro, claimed our bags and headed south. The train to Trang province was fun, but the same sort of fun as I've already narrated. Mild adventure, major drinking session for some. Hell, that's what the average adventure typically is (statistics are simply under-reported). So we get of the train, dazed and confused; while the next two hours are a pointless blur, one memory rings true: we got five minutes to score food before hopping into minibuses. We exit the station, buses to the right, restaurant's to the left. We dump our crap in the back and head for the food like irritated huns. The first place I and a few others reach is a typical Thai place. The food looked decent but the woman selling it seemed more interested in explicating the racial inferiority of her neighbors food, so of course we left. GOOD GOD! I forgot for a while my craving for yellow rice and halal food. It's bad, to say the least. We gorged on food of a kind we had not eaten since America, some four or so month's prior. Sated, we trundled back to the buses and largely passed out for the further ride out to the coast. I remember seeing the coast. There was terrible Thai music playing, probably because Thai music only comes in one flavor, terrible, but the sea was beautiful.

The geography of Thailand is shaped by it's rock composition; if I recall correctly limestone is the prominent rock of the place, and limestone is shoddy stuff. It dissolves in water, so the whole country is full of enormous caverns carved from the liquid rock. Fun fact: my original writers block came from my inability to express the beauty of the massive caves we visited. This same property has given the coast-land of Thailand a peculiar shape: while the vast majority of the coastline is flatter than the Midwest, there are occasional enormous eruptions of stone, standing one hundred feet or more above their surroundings, which lend a beautiful and surreal aspect to the place. Mangrove swamp and rock eruptions are the only elements which make the landscape distinguishable. We were only on the mainland briefly though, until our boat left for the exotic islands off the coast. I use the word exotic only humorously, as it is that word which draws thousands of tourists similar to ourselves to the Andaman islands every year.

The difference with our trip of course was that it was environmentally informed and for the purpose of education. I am not going to argue with that, but I will say that regardless of the ethics it was an incredible experience. After a half hour wait we hauled our packs on-board the large boat taking us out and headed for the islands. The port we left from was the mouth of a river, and the effluent and by product of the port was nauseating. Of course, as soon as we escaped the confinement of the human waste, we found ourselves surrounded by enormous jellyfish, whose blossoming on a grand scale may be a result of anthropogenic warming. Regardless of their descent they were unnerving as hell, given that we were supposed to be snorkeling in the same water within a few days.

Within a couple hours we had reached the island chain that we had been headed for, but there was of course the typical Thai logistical clusterfuck associated with planning these sorts of operations. Ultimately we found ourselves at the appropriate bay, unloading the right equipment and students on a gorgeous if marred beach. We were at one of the ranger stations for the national park which made up the island. More on that later. We unloaded our possessions, set up camp, and relaxed. It isn't hard to relax on a tropical beach, especially when the water is as warm as a bath and more comfortable than your bathing suit. I have never been liable to overheat excepting that place. Pitching tent's and setting the night's dinner was downright enjoyable, especially when led by Pi Am and Pi Aaron, some of the most relaxed leadership at ISDSI. We found out that the plans for the week had been changed to make things easier, so our situation resembled a team-cakewalk. That sums up the situation getting to and arriving there.

Raw Mall

And so we found ourselves in Bangkok, sprawling capital of the Thai kingdom. Bangkok suffers an unfortunately whore-ridden reputation, the result of an industry fueled by half a century of horny American servicemen with shore leave and cash to burn. It's so much more than that though, there is also the filth and the smog.

There was definitely a change in air quality as we headed into the capital. It takes some time getting “into” Bangkok because Bangkok is so damned big: wikipedia claims 11 million or so but I've heard it can reach 16 million on a busy day. I'd believe it, at least from the gridlock. In any case you are talking about anywhere from one sixth to one third of the population of the country living in the capital, something Americans may find hard to comprehend. Imagine that Washington, D.C. had anywhere from fifty to one hundred million residents and you'll understand the pull of Bangkok to the rest of Thailand. It is the center of government, culture, and anything else which claims to be nation wide. This is a mixed blessing to say the least, but it makes a hell of a capital.

Of course, we were only here for six hours or so. Don't be sad though, I came back later (on two occasions actually). We were intent on seeing Chatujak market, which is the largest open air bazaar in S.E. Asia, in part to see the fish. Nominally, you see, the purpose the expedition was to count the varieties of fish for sale in the market and later compare it to what was left of Thailands raped aquatic environment. Also, you could count this whole crazy time as a cultural experience which it sure as hell was, navigating around in our thai language of varying qualities. You see, we went down on own, sans teachers, for a more experiential education. For the record, I think that's the only way to do it (otherwise you're just babysitting).

Anyways, here we were in the train station with hours to kill on our vague goal so we did the most obvious thing: discount ping-pong show. Just kidding, we stored our bags and hunted down Chatujak market, which is quite easy to find if you can read English and use train schedules. Thailand has finally beaten or bribed the mountains of corrupt officials necessary to create a functioning train system, and as a result the tourist and business sections of the city are now reachable with only a short wait. Riding the train as uneventful as these things can be, and we wound up at the right stop.

Have you done LSD? I haven't, but the sensory overload of that place is likely akin to whatever you see when traveling mentally. Some will say that Chatujak has been marketed, that tourism has polluted the purity of the authenticity of the place. Those people haven't explored chatujak fully, because no-one has explored Chatujak fully. You can't really, that's just the delusion of seasoned travelers who assume every mountain can be conquered. Chatujak is only open a couple days a week, and their inventory is never quite the same.

There are more than a few subsections of the place. There's the fashion outlet, the food section (although there's food everywhere), the animal section which overlaps with the food section, the random shit section which is likely larger than the others combined, antiques, etc., and the cockfighting arena. It shames me to say that I never went to the cockfight arena, but I didn't even know that that existed 'till we had left. Apparently everyone was soaping their cocks, because a slippery cock is tricky to fight. Hurdy hur-hur.

In terms of personal experience, the market was a dazzling blaze of choice. Sure, there were certain Chinese made identical items you could find every twenty feet, but there were also innumerable and indescribable objects, some items from the everyday lives of peoples long vanished and never to be known by me. At least, that's what I assumed from the cryptic form of many objects. We had objectives too of course, in addition to the school one. People needed bathing suits (which the school recommended we buy there) and nicknack gifts for friends back home. Naturally we separated within a minute of getting there; I remember some of us stopping for cheap noodles at this one restaurant, and then seeing piles of American military related stuff, like Blackwater t-shirts. I am amused by the monstrosity of the fact that someone probably made t-shirts for a horrifically unethical military corporation with child labor. In any case, we split up and saw what we could see. I did not personally see the many specie of fish requested of us, but then again I was simply happily lost in that maze of free choice.

Being me, I had by this point run low on funds. I have the fiscal responsibility of a lobotomized hamster, so my chief amusement was finding cool things for others and looking for a suitably priced nicknack for my parents palatial bathroom. Since they didn't appear to be selling diamond encrusted golden Buddha heads, nothing seemed appropriate. That's a lie, I saw those, I just didn't know the extent of the renovation back home. Seriously, my former bedroom is now their walk in closet.

Back to the point, Max, DK, and I wandered, strangers in a strange land, for quite some time. We saw weird things, interesting things, objects beyond comprehension. We saw pipes of elephant tusk and enormous carved and gold embossed shells. Tacky swords and thousands of yards of silk cheap and peng mak (very expensive). Ultimately, we just bought t-shirt's and smoothie's and those things which fade quickly in life.

I mentioned it before, but there is no point in describing Chatujak market. It is a constantly evolving creature, and the only permanent description which holds true to time is of it's complexity. The biomass surrounding it, the creeping humanity which overflows and defines it's limits is it's only static attribute. What makes Chatujak market the market that it is is its insanity: crowds moving at a snails pace, individual stalls serving only as way-stations in the great parade of curious consumers, not sure what to buy but ready to be persuaded by one of the hundreds of thousands of items on display there. Chatujak is less a location than a dream: it always changes, and always promises what you want.

Hey! Thailand was pretty cool

Sorry for the break folks, I was busy napping and writing unsuccessful internship applications for months. And if you believe that, have I got a bridge to sell you. Anyways, I think tonight I'll write about our trip to the south. Let me start with the mode of transit: ignoring the rotdang that took us to the station our first leg of the trip was sleeper train. I think perhaps it is in part the Agatha Christie fan in me that say so (murder on the orient express shout out!) but there is something irresistibly exciting and enjoyable about traveling long distance by train. The train that we, the students of ISDSI found ourselves on, was headed for Bangkok. There we would visit chatujak market, the largest outdoor market in Southeast Asia (china of course does everything bigger) before catching a second train even further south to our eventual destination, Trang province. The first train ride was the most fun in my opinion, as all thirty or so of us were in a single car, doing things we found fun and making friends with anyone who would talk to us. I remember, I had found a passable bottle of wine in Chiang Mai, with which I managed to lure my train neighbor, a Frenchman, into conversation. The camaraderie of a trainload of college students is downright nauseating: John had brought his guitar and Hannah her banjolele (ukelele/banjo, much better than you might imagine) and there was much rejoicing. We'd brought snacks for the train but they also served meals directly to your train seat and had a timeless dining car that might have been made in the sixties from the look of it. I mention it because in the second night of train travel a number of us ended up there ordering chang (a Thai beer) and fraternizing with Thai people in our slurred, pidgin form of their language. For all the speed that planes boast, there is an incomparable comfort in having train porters come and set up your bed for the evening. If you snagged the bottom bunk than you woke to the sight of thai countryside rushing past, occasionally mundane but regularly beautiful, so eye catching that I simply stared out and watched whatever drifted passed: farmland, towns, roads, and and the myriad of other interactions between a developing country and the land it gradually devours. Seeing firsthand the widespread effects of the systems of development I learned about in class did bring it into greater relief. I find that a little funny because when our instructors told us to do so I thought they were pompously justifying a cheaper form of travel but when it was happening I found it truly instructive. One other thing of note: the bathrooms. You didn't want to use them unless you really needed to. First of all, there was the smell. To get to the root of the issue, the plumbing consisted of a hole leading directly to the train tracks, which you could see passing rapidly underneath. It probably would be a poor idea to go when the train had stopped. Secondly, and more amusingly, there were western and thai toilets available next to each other, on the opposite sides of the train. Unfortunately there was a general lack of signage, so most of us went the length of the trip aware of one of these options, and while I did not experience it myself maintaining the squat position over a thai toilet on a bumpy train is a challenge truly deserving of the title experiential education. As most successful trips do, ours ended and we found ourselves in Bangkok.

Goddamn

Sorry, it turns out I'm bad at boasting about my personal exploits, at least in writing. This doesn't concern that, which is why I am able to write it. I think I may be depressed, which to me is a funny thing. The reason it's funny and not for a lack of a better word, depressing, is the considerations which have gone into it. I have been warned about the risk of it in my family, which I find extremely curious because I feel as if my reasons for being depressed lie in a philosophical realm. If the problem is genetic and the result of some trifling imbalance in my doubtless flawed mind than the things which I generate as a result of it seem irrelevant. Honestly, they would just be the sophist window dressing on a physiological, eminently correctable imbalance which has wrought unnecessary damage upon my family and myself.
I find that answer unsatisfying, both because it would suggest that any response I generate to my internal gloom to be fundamentally pointless and largely empty. Beyond that, it would suggest that the only reason genealogical friends (or family, to use an obligatory and unfeeling term) are depressed is because of that same predisposition. And I know that that isn't the case; that a family member has been depressed for more than genetic reasons. So therefore, I reject biological causation: because I find it incomplete and unsatisfying. It isn't a particularly scientific reason, but I will hold to it nonetheless.
I think that most people view me as optimistic, and that's a position I am happy to support. Pessimism is largely unproductive and doesn't make anyone feel better, so I try to dispel it even when things don't look particularly good. Call me duplicitous, I simply prefer people to not be sad. The problem I run into is that sometimes I think that people can be more productive when depressed. If that is the case, than there is no reason to dispel depression as it may in fact be helping. If I am in fact depressed and believing my own argument I may no longer persuade myself to optimism, because of the possibility that I can in fact do better in this state. The 'happy is better' argument I so often stand by is false and useless.
Thus I come to my present state. Still unemployed, unemployable; girlfriend-less, and undateable (not least of which because of thoughts like these). And why am I depressed? Not because of these rather depressing facts, no, but because I question my own value. Ah! you say, but that is because of the preceding conditions. Wrong, you crude bastard. While the external validation of these two issues may have distracted me from these questions retaining job and or girlfriend would do nothing to assuage the underlying issue. I know sad sacks with girlfriends and as a historian, idiots with very good jobs. The real question which remains is, what do I contribute?
I am a child of privilege, raised in supportive surroundings. I can say this with confidence because I was educated in sailing, golf, and tennis, and my family moved heaven and earth (and school districts) to improve my quality of education and character. Why did they do this? Because by sheer chance I was born to them, and had babies been un-knowingly swapped they would have raised another that way in my place. Sheer fucking luck then. So, as a result of my privilege, what have I done? I have traveled to quite a few places on my family's dime and read some rather good books. I didn't mean it that way but that's also a good description of college. I have succeeded in landing a series of internships at my fathers business, for reasons previously explained. All of this is normal for virtually every blessed child of my social strata. If they aren't upset about it, why am I? Perhaps the biological and environmental factors of my life have simply resulted in this situation, but I believe thoughtful analysis can do something for me nevertheless. I won't defend the concept of raison d'etre (reason for being) as that is exhaustive and has required centuries of philosophy. I will simply say that I believe that my life is a debt worth repaying, and that I need to do something as a result of my position. God knows I haven't yet, and maybe if I do enough in the peace corps or some such thing, the hole in me will be more full. I guess I just think the more potential you have the more of it you should realize, and that that is a responsibility, and not a privilege.
In brief Allison, that is why I signed up for envorg, but there are some serious environment related reasons as well.

Random update!

If you're reading this, then damn you must be bored, because this blog has been inactive for months. But no worries, because I'm most definitely going to start writing again soon, if only because I now drink coffee and need to look like I'm typing as opposed to suffering from caffeine induced finger-twitches.
Chiang Mai is as comfortable as ever and I'm feeling fine. I have this research project business which occupies my days, it involves missionaries and schools. The only problem is that my occasional social phobia has once again reappeared at a time when I need to meet new people and get them to let me interview them. On a positive note, the project is history related so I get to go to Payap University library, which is a proper and orderly bibliophile heaven. I didn't know how much I missed libraries until I went there; the library is unquestionably my natural habitat.

Since you've read this far, another thing! On the way back from the library I sat in a rotdheng and looked out the window. Rotdhang windows are maybe 1 1/2 feet tall and when you look out them you can watch the city pass by. It's the most cinematic experience I've ever had.
TTFN

Farang at the Falls

Fuck it, I'm posting whatever I can pump out in the next fifteen minutes. The "wait for inspiration" method has failed me for a week and lacking external deadlines I'm having difficulty with my own. Regardless, Thailand continues to be real and to surpass whatever fuzzy expectations I came to it with.

The weekend of the 4th of September was simply stunning. If you're reading this I presume you have access to my facebook photos (they are far from doing justice but given that each is a thousand words they're more than this blog). The weekend was a retreat, a chance for all us farang to hang out and decompress from our host families at the feet of an immense waterfall. It worked.

We left on Friday, stopping first at a lake to take our swimming test. The test is no small matter, as it determines who will be able to kayak without the encumbrance of a life vest and with their dignity. Three hundred meters of swimming followed by fifteen minutes of treading, not floating. The relativity of time becomes a lot more real when you are forced to count out fifteen minutes in leg kicks and arm swirls. Amusingly, the normal health hierarchy was somewhat reversed in the test. While I would never aspire to a claim of being remotely fit or competitive, I had a vastly easier time floating than my muscle coated, olympian peers. Frankly I think they just psyched themselves out and don't swim enough (we're a distressingly midwestern group for all my east coast mores, and god knows those people don't have the joy of a real ocean). Swim test accomplished we cleaned off the murky mucky lakewater with buckets of still more lakewater in the squat toilet restrooms. Lunch was served on elevated bamboo huts which surround the lake, perhaps a foot above the water. They creaked when we moved and the atmosphere was delightful, the scene being completed with a dozen plus cats lounging about. After lunch it was back into our plush vans for an hour or so ride to our destination: the mork fa waterfall and camp.

The initial entrance to mork fa is far from novel: a small parking lot and ranger station next to a stream and a welcome sign. The true attraction of the place is 350 metres down a trail, and a bit out of hearing range. We unloaded our packs and walked to the sala, our dining, lecture, and general congregating room; though covered patio gives a closer picture. Had to listen to some quickly forgotten rules and regulation (no drinking, never any drinking) and then went to the third barrack on the left. We trotted across the stream over a vine coated and picturesque bridge and dumped our belongings in our building, a large single room with long rows of mattresses. I think after that we visited the falls for the first time.

The falls were the crowning element of the weekend, although other parts were of course life changing as well. Mork Fa waterfall is infinitely more beautiful than it's name sounds, at least to me. You hear it first of course, like most waterfalls I've visited. Then you feel it, the droplets thrown into the air landing forty or fifty feet away and slowly soaking any bag you leave too close. The falls are perhaps eighty feet tall, muddy some days and crystal the next. The river splits, falling on two sides of the rock precipice above. You can swim behind the wall of water on one side, or climb into a sort of cave behind the other. Jamie managed to find a particularly comfortable perch behind the fall, and sitting there was for both my classmates and myself a deeply calming experience. Rather zen, how calm you feel inside a waterfall. Strangely enough in that small space the water droplets rebound and bounce upwards.Playing in the falls was equally rewarding, and possibly the most fun I've had in two weeks. Once you've actually gotten into the pool at the base the spray gets more and more intense to the point that you can't turn towards the falls and open your eyes. It was lovely.

The highlight of Saturday was our wilderness emergency exercise. In it, the group was divided in two and given an emergency scenario to deal with in the jungle. We were told that two of our classmates had disappeared into the jungle, were handed a map, and then told to come back with them in an hour and a half. Both groups had the same goal but carried the exercise out separately (it may have proved two easy if we had our full complement of thirty two out to rescue two). It turned out one of our classmates had broken both legs while the other had injured an ankle or leg. It wasn't entirely clear.It's fascinating to watch mob psychology and panic run through a group you are personally familiar with. People act significantly different even in simulated emergencies. While scenarios like this may be intended to foster trust and faith I favored drugging the injured and fireman carrying them out. We opted for carrying the victim in a hammock instead. An hour and a half of pure sweat later we made it back to camp. I would have liked to compare the sequence of events of both groups but the lesson was in other areas than behavioral psychology.

After that more swimming, and then dinner and activities. It was Taylor's 21st birthday and we had banana bread or mana from heaven, the reviews were good enough for either. Sunday was spent on a hike up the mountain, a brief little jaunt showing the local environment. We saw the spring of a stream, enormous stands of bamboo, and wild banana trees,  as well as a tree whose sap indigenous groups coat their arrows in when they want to be thorough. The whole weekend left me relaxed and comfortable with the thought of three more weeks of host family life. Huh, I guess you can force inspiration if you want to. More to come when I fancy it...

Tony Jaa And The Furious Dancing Shrimp

Update #3, I'm on a roll! Soon I may actually be keeping current.
Friday was a good day, which is curious because I suspect that I may come to have an opposite view of weekends than at home. That is to say, at home I look forward to weekends as a time of indulgence and fun with friends. Here weekends will certainly still be interesting, but they'll also be long spaces without a friendly westerner to talk to. It'll be interesting.
This is an entry about my friday though, not my entitled self pity blog. That one's still under construction. Friday was the day of the ISDSI (I love that its a palindrome, by the way) trip to a sustainable fish farm. On thursday our fearless leader Ajaan Mark told us we would be waist deep in fish ponds rife with fish shit. I suspected him  to be guilty of exaggeration. I was certainly wrong. It got up to neck deep once we were pulling a seive net.
I should proceed chronologically though: first we had to get there. So at 8:00 we were gathered at the ISDSI campus, a marvelously air conditioned two level with a pair of patios on each side, in order to leave for the fish farm. The lot of us piled into several luxurious vans and set off. Our mighty chariot was an 11 seater with a tv and largwe number of karaoke songs. Sadly we are not yet as talented at thai as to easily sing their tongue twisting tunes, so we switched to a movie. I don't know you (or maybe I do) but if you haven't seen a Tony Jaa movie the rest of this paragraph is of vital importance. Who is Tony Jaa, you may be asking yourself. Tony Jaa is everything that chuck norris should be, including being an actually asian martial artist. I'm not saying that white guys can't do kung fu, I'm just saying that given the relative numbers of the asian and caucasian martial arts communities there are probably better asian ones than  audience friendly white ones. Anyway, Tony Jaa is the highest profile practitioner of muay thai, a position he gained because of an epic movie called Ong Bak: Thai Warrior. Summarized, Tony Jaa kills everyone. It's a great film and if you haven't seen it you cannot obtain a visa to Thailand. The movie we saw on the trip there and back was another instant classic. In America it was called the protector, I believe. The name in Thailand translates to spicy shrimp soup, the spicyness foreshadowing the burning ass-whupping to come. There is a five minute scene of hime breaking dozens of arms in different ways. There are only 6 people who are a significant challenge to Tony Jaa, and of them one is a Thai ladyboy criminal mastermind and 4 are his/her enormous redneck minions who he fights with the bones of his slain elephant strapped to his arms. If you don't want to watch this you are probably made of tofu. The drive was fun to say the least.
On arrival we strapped on water shoes and listened to an informative lecture on northern thai fisheries and the tilapia fish from a genial expat named Randy. Ajaan Randy then led us out to the hatchery, which sits in the midst of eight or so fish ponds. Apparently the fish babies get an extra bit of testosterone in infancy, making them physically male, in order to prevent them from getting randy and disrupting the efficiency of the process. hurhurhur
The day was not about mental education though, it was a object lesson in learning about how fish farms work. And learn we did. The first hour or so was spent emptying nets in one of the ponds and transporting the fish to another home. The ponds become deoxygenated  in time and also require periodic cleaning and digging out. Not to belittle the difficulty that the actual farmhands who do this daily, but we had a lot of fun in our one day. A lifetime may not be quite so fun. We must have looked a funny sight though: one of the bus drivers spent the day in a hammock photographing us and laughing.
In brief, this is how you empty a net: first you run a bamboo pole most of the net, herding the fish into a small area. Then you get a bunch of small, hand held nets and start scooping. Once you empty it you take out the poles holding the net in place and drag it ashore. There are maybe 16 nets to a pond. To do all of this you have to get real wet though, because the fish pond is a big damn pond and decently deep. The smell could dishonestly be described as loamy, but soggy manure is sometimes closer to the mark. It really depends on the pond.
It was while we were emptying the nets that Randy pointed out the shrimp: there were hundreds of shrimp clinging to the insides of the nets (which are the normal crinkly blue tarps you find in the US). Apparently they're called dancing shrimp, and a great delicacy in a number of countries. Then he grabbed and ate one. Out of the fish pond. The fish pond full of fish shit, to be precise. And then we did it too. It actually wasn't bad, just sort of tasteless and crunchy.
Then came seive netting. Seive netting is the second stage of clearing a pond of fish, because some always get out of the nets and Randy maintains an polyculture (multiple fish in the pond) to keep everything balanced. In seive netting the net is stretched as far across the pond as it can go, and then pulled the length of it... like a giant seive. In order to catch the fish people hold the net as low in the water as possible. It gets interesting because those people are in the firing line of the escaping fish. Have you ever felt fish, some of them large, squirm between your limbs and across your stomach? It's freaky, notably so. They also jumped with every once of desperate fish might. Ironic and stupid, given that they were "escaping" to a soon to be drained pond and an early death. Let's keep it light though.
Seive netting turned up some interesting fish. There were some big snakehead fish, an air breathing fish that crawls on the land to reach new ponds, and an enormous, beautiful red carp that was round with baby fish.
We ate the fish for lunch, did some more sieve netting, and then got to check for eggs. Egg checking is really fun. You grab fish and look in their mouths, and if there are eggs you steal them! Some may have found my methods... objectionable, but they are weak and their fish farms would fail! Regardless, it was absurdly fun and undoubtedly the best school day ever, ever.
Oh, and Randy collects Thai musical instruments which some people played at lunch and the girls danced. It was awesome!
That's all for friday, the weekend will be a double entry 'cause I'm writing this in one day. I never write like this unless there's a grade on the line.