A Tinker in Thailand

After visiting countless Chiang Mai wats (temples) Laura and I finally gave in and hired a driver to see some out-of-town sites. The man was gentle in his sale, and gave us a good rate (150b =$3) for 3 hours of personal taxi service in exchange for our acceptance of a stop at some “handicraft factories,” which if you don’t know is a code word for tourist traps where goods available at rock-bottom prices in markets nation-wide are sold at the same price you’d pay for them retail at home. Our trip was to include two wats, one in the forest and one of Indian style, one handicraft factory stop, and one trip to the hospital to get my stitches out.

After grabbing a quick Thai meal while our driver waited, we got on the road. Our driver spoke good English and we engaged in some small talk. He was a Chiang Mai native and we learned he had three sons – age 27, 12 and two months. That day I had taken a survey being given by an Exeter graduate student to guests at the backpacker hostel we’re staying in on responsible tourism. One of the questions was have you and have you intended to patronize locally owned businesses. I felt good for hiring a local with a family.

When we arrived at our first stop, our driver dropped us off beyond all the info booths and parking lots, door-to-wat service. We went exploring and each time we came near where he was parked, he jumped out to open our doors – only to find we weren’t quite ready, to which he responded with a great big smile.

After our visit to the Indian style wat, he had two cold bottles of water ready for us. Now it was time to go the handicraft factories. On the way I asked him what exactly he got out of taking us to these places. “Gasoline coupons. Good for you, I give you low price, good for me, I get gasoline.” I was amused by this, and he could tell. “You no buy anything here, very expensive. Just look around.” I was game to play along, and he seemed happy to have it out in the open. There were countless potential stops where he could get from one to three one-liter gasoline coupons for bringing us to them. At 38b/liter, with enough stops the gasoline coupons would be worth more to him than the price we were to pay.

The first, a one-coupon stop, was a jewelery factory with a parking lot full of tour buses and white people in preppy clothes. The production facilities we quickly toured with a guide were interesting – even worth seeing. Then we were brought into the showroom, a basketball court-sized jewelery shop with at least a few million dollars worth of gold, silver and precious stones. I got to hold a $10,000 star sapphire ring. There were fish tanks with three foot long sharks. It was impressive. After seeing all the expensive stuff, we got to the end of the showroom, where there were tons of people being sold hard on the affordable items they had to offer – simple silver jewelery, small pieces of jade, knick-knacks one could buy anywhere in Thailand for cheaper, but these tourists were biting.

I saw one man darting back into the depths of the showroom with a fist full of 1000 baht notes. Another at the exit door, bag in hand, had to fend off the salesperson goading him to buy more. We left, and our driver eagerly awaited. “Next we go to Indian silk – they give me three coupons! Don’t stay long, just five minutes, very very expensive!” It was as he said – all overpriced, polite but pushy salesperson, no customers but us, and more importantly no “factory” to make it seem like a tourist attraction.

The next stop was a silk factory, and was actually worth seeing. We saw some silk worms at different stages, thread being extracted, and fabrics being woven. Next was a Kashmir carpet factory, where after going through the intricacies of the carpets and their making, the salesman assured us that there were “very affordable, this one (about three by five feet) is only $3,000.” Right… After this stop our driver gave a shot at taking us to more places, but we’d had enough. By now he had gotten six liters of gas, worth about 220b, and we were ready for the hospital. The smoothness of getting the stitches out made up for the drag of going to tourist traps – in and out in 10 minutes at a cost of 50b.

Having the driver was nice, but now that my stitches were out, we decided to look into hiring a motorcycle. Rental costs 200b/day, just over what we paid for a driver. Time to explore northern Thailand!

Being as he was dressed in hospital garb, I first assumed the kind gentleman who knocked then game into our room was there on hospital business. Wrong. There must have been some buzz about the American healing in room 513, because he had come in to practice his English. To begin the conversation he asked “Can I ask you a personal question?” None of the questions were particularly personal, so I suppose it was his way of asking if he could impose on my personal space. I didn’t mind a bit.

Most of his questions related to the ease or difficulty of finding work in America, and of getting a visa to come to the US. It is extremely difficult for Vietnamese people to get visas to the US, he explained, and while he would very much like to move to the US and work, he is still unable to. Furthermore, learning English in Vietnam is very difficult for him, as his teachers are all Vietnamese, not native English speakers. His English showed this, as his grammar and vocabulary aptitude were leaps and bounds above his pronunciation accuracy. He had been studying English for many many years.

This guest to our room wasn’t the only English language student in the hospital. The entire staff is in some stage of learning English, and this aspect of the quality of service is the subject of at least four points on the customer satisfaction survey I was given at the end of my stay at FVH. This is interesting as the vast majority of the hospital’s clientele are rich Vietnamese, not English speakers.

 Besides the man who tended to me immediately after surgery who was interested in talking politics, we had one other eager language student. Her daughter was working in Washington DC, and she met Laura waiting in line at the hospital coffee shop. She was checked in to the hospital for some sort of nasal surgery. After complimenting Laura for her beauty, she found her way to me while I was online and proceeded to ask every question she could – how long have you been in Vietnam, are you married (the answer to which was “yes” as Laura and I were faking it so she could be with me at the hospital), do you have children, what do you do for a living, etc. This was all well and good except I was trying to work out getting new flights back to Bangkok and quite frustrated at the time. Laura got back up to the floor with the computers and the woman assaulted her with questions too. It got awkward as we were frantically trying to get our flight worked out before our 30 minute internet pass expired. 

Nearly everyone we interacted with in Vietnam seemed eager to speak and learn English, much different than Bangkok. For a country that only one generation ago was raped and pillaged by the United States, the Vietnamese people were incredibly warm, welcoming and eager to make us Americans feel at ease. 

If I ever do decide to go abroad and teach English, Vietnam will be at the top of my list of possible locations.

For those of you who haven’t been to Bangkok, a “Tuk Tuk” is a motorcycle with a bench for a back seat and a roof over the whole thing. Riding a tuk tuk is one of many things we would consider unsafe and completely unacceptable in the West, but is an essential part of daily life here in Bangkok. I rode in a Tuk Tuk for the first (two) time(s) tonight; it was everything I expected – hazard a given, haggling a must.

The first ride was a freebie – myself and a Frank, a British classmate, hitched a free ride from Pang Pong to “Spicy,” a very hip night club with a 300b cover charge. Taxi and tuk-tuk drivers somehow get paid to drag people to this club, and others, all over town. The ride was hair raising – weaving in and out of traffic on a bench sans seatbelt, drunk at night in an unknown territory. Treacherous as it may have seemed, we made it to the destination quickly and unharmed.

The night club was nothing special, just the usual loud music, flashy lights and drunken twenty somethings. This one was very different from the last one we went to in that it was populated by about one quarter Westerners by my count. Mostly what that means is more testosterone. I’m not sure what the circumstances were, but Frank got a table shoved into him and forcefully shoved it back. Somehow it didn’t result in any serious confrontation. At this point I figure we should go, Frank thought otherwise, so I was left to find my ow way home.

The first tuk-tuk ride was fun, but the ride home was really a treat. By this time, four AM or so, the streets were more or less empty. The ride between the club and where I stay was also mostly on main thoroughfares, meaning we got to go fast! (Pretend you aren’t reading this Mom…) It’s hard to say how fast these things actually go – slower than the taxis on the road, but much much louder. The thick, hot, humid polluted air almost beats the sterile a/c of a taxi when you’re zipping through the Bangkok streets by tuk tuk. Aside from having to cover my mouth whenever we stopped, and one big bump that almost knocked me out the back, after which the driver checked to be sure he still had a passenger, it was quite a thrill.

Well worth the 100b I paid for the ride. Paying for a tuk tuk is another unique part of the experience. When we went out (four Westerners and two Thai in one taxi) we had our native speakers to negotiate a fare. The taxis are metered, but when you’re piling six people in, the meter goes off. We went from 200 down to 150, a great deal split six ways. On my way out of the night club, the taxi and tuk tuk mafia representative asked where I was going (bai ratchada, soi sip hok) and said “four hundred.” I laughed, “no, one fifty,” he laughed back said okay and ushered me towards a line of tuk tuks.

Knowing that tuk tuks should be much cheaper than taxis, and that there was no real communication between the driver and the broker, I worked up the nerve during the ride to hold firm to paying less than 150b. When we arrived at my destination, I gave the driver a 100b note. “No, no, one FIFTY” he said.

I insisted, “No, he said ONE HUNDRED. Korp-koon krap! (thank you)”

“One fifty, one fifty, I am very poor!”

“No, no, one hundred, I am very poor too! Korp koon krap!”

He grabbed my hand, “Ok, thank you, korp koon krap!”

We had a good two-hand shake and thanked each other repeatedly.

Two weeks from today I’ll be heading to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Of the many attractions there, I’m anticipating the War Remnants Museum (formerly American War Crimes Museum) the most. I’m thinking of it as a right of passage to begin my second quarter-century as an American. Reading about the museum, and Vietnamese history in general in preparation for the trip, has renewed my awareness of the country I come from.

The Brits in my ESL class have asked a few times what I think about the election, particularly after Hillary’s win in Pennsylvania. They think Hillary will win because America is more ready for a white woman than a Black man. I think she’ll win because I am fundamentally cynical about anything good happening through the American electoral system, and President Obama would be a good thing. In any case, the conversation finishes with me saying the only way the Democrats could lose the general election is if Hillary is their nominee, which means McCain will assume the throne, we’ll promptly invade Iran, and be in Iraq for at least another generation.

Here in Thailand, neighbor to Vietnam, the Iraq of my parents’ generation, I can see the other American war unfolding. Perhaps calling it American is unfair, as it is being perpetrated by a coalition of forces – American, English, French. The open-market world means that foreign investment can go just about anywhere. In Bangkok it takes the form of monumental shopping malls full of internationally branded stores most Thai could never afford to shop in. For that matter, neither can I.

As an American English teacher I met this week put it “They are really trying to not be a third world country.” Of course, while development proceeds at a break-neck speed, most Thai still live in poverty. My favorite place to eat so far is a Carrefour shopping center. Carrefour is sort of a French Wal-Mart, and this shopping center has a wonderful food court with a wide selection of Thai and Asian food and beverage for an affordable price. I usually pay about 60 baht ($2) for a meal with beverage and dessert. While that seems great to me, I realize that it’s at least double what a meal costs at a street stall, and is enough to be out of reach for most Thai.

On my way home from lunch today, I passed two severely maimed individuals, one with four half-limbs laying on his belly on the sidewalk writhing, one in a wheelchair with a completely burned face and eyes that looked like open wounds. Their age was right, and while their wounds had probably not been caused by the American war of the 60’s and early 70’s, I couldn’t help but wonder. That war is over (save the land mines an unexploded ordinance that still cause casualties today), but the economic war continues. Wealth is being extracted from this country by foreign and multinational corporations every second.

All this stirs around in my head with the uncomfortable truth that America is spiraling downward. The neo-fascist Bush regime is eroding democracy and civil rights, our dollar is losing value daily, we have less access to health care than Iraqis did before the US invaded, and our cultural influence is weaker than it has been since the end of the cold war.

I hope that some time soon we’ll find a way to make our country something to be proud of again. I hope that someday soon there will be no American War abroad, but rather a struggle at home, a mobilization to re-build ourselves and our country.

The international date line really messes with my head. The West coast is earlier than the East coast, Hawaii is earlier than the West coast, but some how when you go far enough west, it’s all of a sudden later instead of earlier.

Why does this matter? I’ll be flying, technically, for two days, and since I’m determined to write something each day during this trip, this will be my last chance (unless Tokyo Narita, the airport I’m transferring through, has free wireless, which it probably does) to get online until Friday.

Never got the extra battery and memory cards I wanted to have for my camera, thank you USPS. Other than that, I’m confident that I am materially prepared for the trip. Psychologically, who knows?

This trip will be a lot of things for me, among them four weeks of TESOL training, ten days of pure vacation and most importantly, six weeks outside of the USA.

Here is a selection of the advice I have received:

DO NOT:

Get suckered into the gem smuggling hustle. You will get ripped off. (guide book)

Have sex with proffesionals, because 50% them have HIV. (Paris)

DO:

Go see the musical elephants up North (Kenny)

Get a tailored suit (Janet)

Buy gems to bring them back and make money (Paris)

I’m late a flight!