the color of its countries

The driver was a dashing young man named Lai. His English was about as good as my Thai, which is to say that between us, we got on like very charming cavemen. Luckily for us, one of the main underwater attractions -- namely, the clownfish -- has already seared its place into the vocabulary of the global media and can now transcend language barriers. He very helpfully pointed out all the spots where we could expect to find "fish Nemo," and the rest flowed from there, with even my rudimentary Thai kicking into gear: anemone became "house-fish-Nemo," for instance -- baan-plah-Nemo in Thai. I was even able to articulate our excitement at discovering several little Nemo families, complete with paired adults and smaller juveniles living in the same host anemone. "Look! Have mother-Nemo, father-Nemo, child-child-Nemo!"

In short, Koh Phi Phi was a delight.

My good friend Bill once noted that when his online life goes dead, it pretty consistently indicates that his real life is flourishing. I'd like to think that's the case here. It's been a terribly busy couple of months this summer, and I'm just starting to pull out of it -- work, love, and family lives all miraculously intact, I'll note gratefully. Social life, not so much, but I don't honestly mind.

I'll have some pictures to post in a bit of a 10-day visit from my lovely parents, but in the meantime I wanted to note that a new link has been added. You can find it in the bar to the right: it's the class website I created for my Matayom 3 (Grade 9) English class. If you happen to still be following me here and are interested in the voyeuristic thrill of watching 143 Thai students panic about their final exams, dive in. It's a nice glimpse of what I've been covering with them and what they have to say about it, charming grammar slips and all.

The idea here was just to test some YouTube embedding widget, but this is a pretty good video with my brother in it, so I think it's worth having up long-term. Matthew took it last summer when said brother visited us in Chengdu and we took a jaunt around Sichuan. Although I've been told Chongqing isn't technically in Sichuan -- it's got its own special provincial municipality something or other.

First we were picking out ugly baby clothes (which abound in China) as a gag gift for my older sister. And after that is an Olympic pride parade (they're chanting "Go China!"). The clip-clop sound in the tunnel is Matthew's wooden sandals. Apparently the Mandarin for "wooden shoes" is hilariously close to some erection joke, or so our Chinese coworkers hinted (it was hard to get them to stop giggling long enough to explain it to us). I've looked it up just now: mùxié (木鞋) for "wooden shoes," and suddenly I'm suspicious that what they taught us to say was actually "mùjī", which I suppose would be written 木鸡 and translate as "wooden chicken," the "cock" double entendre translating precisely into Chinese (if my recollection of slang hasn't left me after these nine months). Er, thanks a lot, June and Shirley.

Anyway, Mr. Gruff Voice is some patriotic drunk guy who, when we asked him directions, escorted us on a questionable short-cut through a construction site. He kept telling Matthew I was a real Chinese person because he had somehow convinced himself I spoke fluent Mandarin, although the truth is Matthew speaks much better than I do. And then that's Sichuan chili-oil hot-pot on the boil. And I'm going to presume that the rest speaks for itself, because I can't be bothered to let it all load on YouTube in order to check what's there.

So, enjoy.

Labels: China, family, food, travel

As the Bangkok temperatures rise -- we're well into the hot dry season now -- and I find myself increasingly flustered each time I leave the house and my Oxford shirts instantly cling to the film of sweat forming on my skin, I've discovered a brilliant antidote to heat-induced grumpiness.

I listen to tropical-theme music on my way out the door. I've got a lot of options: calypso is great, or merengue, or soukous, or really anything with lyrics about jungles or heat in general. (The Fern Gully soundtrack has been holding me in particularly good stead this week.)

When I take a step back and think in terms of tropical dance parties instead of business attire, the truth is that I find heat and sun and even a bit of humidity very romantic, and I'd take it over clammy cold any day. (Sorry, Chengdu.) It is yet another instance of this delightful quality of Bangkok: there's almost no complaint I can work up about the place that isn't easily dispelled through a shift of perspective. Seriously: how much would I have given for even a day of this sort of climate during the New Haven winter?

A lot, I reckon. And it means we get to grow orchids on our balcony and, if my heart desired it, even consummate my now 5-year-old longing to keep pet flower mantises, which are native to Thailand and therefore (unlike in the US) perfectly legal to buy and keep. If only they didn't need to be fed live bugs...

I should also note that one of the very most delightful things about living in Bangkok is the way there seems always to be something new and magical going on each day, if one can just leave the house with eyes open and perhaps linger a little on the daily commute.

Yesterday, it was termite mating time, and hundreds of the tiny lace-winged things were fluttering and copulating furiously around streetlights all around the city.

The day before that, I arrived at Chit Lom station to find at least fifty monks in saffron robes ringing the façade of the mall... giving blessings? Demonstrating? I wasn't sure. They looked serene, anyway.

When I went to the immigration office to extend my visa the day before that, I discovered a vegetarian sandwich shop right across the soi. They had marvelous imitation ham sandwiches, and tuna too -- if fake tuna doesn't sound delicious to you, just trust me on this. I had mine on a croissant and brought another home for Matthew. Really, the food in this city is one of its major strengths.

That and the cats. I'm starting to recognize the ones that frequent my neighborhood, although there are dozens, some with manx tails and many with siamese markings and still more with funny hybrid combinations of those traits with others. One mother cat was raising her kittens between the tin roofs just across from our entrance, and we got to watch them getting bigger and bigger every week.

And then, just a few days ago, we discovered that one of the koi in the pond downstairs would rear out of the water to nibble food off our fingertips. There are at least twenty in the pond, and while the rest of them will gobble up anything dropped in the water, none but this browny-gold one will reach above the surface. We named him Rufus.

Labels: thailand

Today is a no-work day after a long string of very busy days, and for the first Sunday in a long time Matthew is out of the house at work until 8pm. I find myself without any real distractions, and so I thought I might update this thing before I try to hunker down and write some curriculum.

In short, my life these days:

I am living in a small but sunny apartment filled with orchids. And while Matthew and I have been amassing more and more books with every gift-giving holiday, there is a lot of well-organized storage space and it hasn't felt cramped yet. (It helps, I'm sure, that the weather is consistently lovely and I tend to leave all the windows and the balcony door open to the breeze.) There's also a rather paradisiacal pool area on the fourth floor, tiled in cobalt blue and set about with palms and ferns, and a gym and a reading room and a sauna, so it really couldn't be more comfortable.

We're five minutes' walk from the Skytrain, and I take that to work every morning, sometimes stopping at a fruit stand for a bag of sliced guava or pineapple on the way.

On weekday mornings, I teach four classes in the kindergarten of a prestigious Thai Catholic girls' school downtown. It's a bit hectic, but the hugs and kisses mostly make up for it. My Thai listening is also improving a lot, since they insist on speaking to me in Thai, even when I pretend I don't understand and only respond to them in English. It doesn't hurt having the alphabet up on all the classroom walls, either. And best of all, since it's an all-girls' school, I get to teach entire units on princesses. It's pretty delightful.

In my afternoons, I'm doing academic preparation for high school students hoping to attend boarding schools or universities abroad. So far, it's been a dream: one-on-one teaching, dedicated students, and the ability to play the nice guy a little behind overbearing parents' backs. The families are mostly Thai-Chinese, which may be a contributing factor to the helicopter-parent phenomenon, but it does mean they're generally delighted rather than suspicious when they learn I was teaching in China before I came here. (Other Thais seem to wonder whether I'm just Asian-country-hopping and if I intend to stick around.)

But quite honestly, I do. I love the weather, the food, the open-air markets, the music, and the people. And while certain facets of the city make me deeply sad -- the number of disgusting Westerners with hollow-eyed prostitutes on their arms, for example -- it helps to be here with a partner who really respects women (sometimes, apparently, objectifying them even less than I do) and whom I can trust not to disappear into a massage parlor any time I work late.

Partly so as not to end on a dark note, I want to say one other thing. For all the moaning expatriates seem to do wherever they are, it's become clear in the last few months that I actually really love the Thai way of doing things. People seem polite, very relaxed, quite socially liberal, and with a pretty cool aesthetic that comes through in fashion, architecture, and music. In fact, the only times I ever really feel frustrated with Thai society are at some of its intersections with the West: for example, the stereotypical Western man - Thai woman relationship dynamic. But that sets me and mine at the heart of the problem, which makes me feel a lot more empowered to fix it, and leaves me liking Thai culture quite a lot.

So I'm here for the long haul, as far as I can tell, and if only my family weren't so far away, I could totally see myself settling down and starting a family here in the somewhat distant future. In the meantime, though, there's a lot of traveling I still want to do, so I anticipate years off here and there to account for that. Not to mention grad school... but I did say I wanted to end on a bright note, so I'm going to go peel some mysterious apricot-colored fruits I bought yesterday and cook myself some eggs and rice vermicelli and start in on a valentine template for the kindergarten.

Love to all.

Labels: thailand

It's been a while since I've updated. A lot has happened, not least of which was the occupation of the Suvarnabhumi International Airport by PAD protesters. It's bad in the sense of absurd inconvenience -- lots of everyday people are getting stuck, if not actually threatened. My partner, Josh, got stuck in Singapore and had to change his flight to Phuket and ride a bus for most of a day to get home. Thai Muslim Hajj pilgrims who've sold their rice fields to fund the journey are stranded. All around, it's a ridiculous situation. But the Supreme Court ruled that the party in power was guilty of electoral fraud (I'm reserving judgment on that one) and will proceed to disband the coalitions, so with a bit of luck that will calm the protestors down before anybody really gets hurt.

In the meantime, I'm safe and sound, and for my part I can't think of a much nicer place to be stranded than Thailand.

I'm working away happily at two and a half jobs, one of which is teaching kindergarten at Mater Dei, a prestigious Catholic all-girls school in the middle of town. I was a little reluctant to take the job at first; I had some negative experiences teaching little kids in China, and was also secretly a little worried that the sisters would discover I was living in sin (gasp!). It turns out Thai Catholics are really laid back, though, and most of the people here are Buddhist anyway, predictably enough. It's a wildly disorganized environment from a bureaucratic standpoint, but I don't really mind being bumped around from classroom to classroom without any warning. If my teaching suffers, I think it's their loss, not mine. At least, usually.

Anyway, today was another one of those "Surprise!" days. As I finished teaching my first of four periods, the head English teacher rushed in to apologize and tell me that one of the classrooms had organized a visit and demonstration with some soldiers, and the other classes had all decided to participate at the last minute. It seems to be part of the ongoing series of "stop everything, Kotchaporn's mom the chef is here to teach us how to make smoothies" / "Natcha's mom the air hostess is here to look pretty and give us airplane snack boxes" / etc. It's like an ongoing impromptu career day month. The upside: suddenly having an extra hour to sit in the computer lab and print out animal pictures. The downside: one of the girls is inevitably tearful when her parent has to leave to go back to work.

They're cuties, these girls. I get more hugs than I can handle every day. It's awfully good for morale, though I've taken to carrying hand sanitizer in my bag, since they're still growing out of nose-picking.

I have a lot of adorable photos to share from last Sunday's school exhibition. They're on Matthew's computer, since for the third time in five years I left my camera cable behind in North America and have had to stick my memory card in his camera to retrieve any photos. I'll post them soon, I promise.

In the meantime, I think I'm going to creep back downstairs and spy on these soldiers. While their uniforms aren't nearly as sexy as the semi-ridiculous skintight Thai cop uniforms, I did catch a glimpse of them going through their paces, and they appear to have added a rather saucy move that involves planting a fist on a cocked hip. Silly. I love it.

Labels: teaching, thailand