Life in the Flood Zone

Things not permitted in my hotel:

• Drugs
• Weapons
• Pets
• Jackfruit

“Jackfruit” gets its own sign.  With an illustration.  They are SERIOUS about the jackfruit.

Very, very lazy, jetlagged day yesterday, but I’m feeling better, physically at least.  Mentally, the sheer scale of what I’m doing is starting to trickle in.  Now I’m actually really eager to just get up to Chiang Mai and see what the situation on the ground is going to be like. 

Everyone in downtown Bangkok is leading this bizarre double existence at the moment; on the one hand, they’re all continuing as normal, but on the other, they’re all dealing with this constant fear, as the floodwaters get closer and closer, and the difficulty of predicting where and when the waters might hit isn’t helping.  I had dinner with the staff from the programme office last night, and the first thing everyone asked one another was, “How’s your house?”  One woman has eleven people staying with her right now, including her parents, her in-laws, and her sister and sister’s husband, who are newlyweds; another staff member had to salvage bricks to build a meter-high flood wall around her house (sandbags won’t do the job).  Everyone's still joking and laughing, but there's a palpable tension.

I’m on the third floor of my hotel, so I think that I may end up hosting the entire staff in my hotel room if the programme office floods. :)  It’s okay; the hotel has been stockpiling drinking water, and there are instant noodles in my minibar!

Dinner was actually very nice; I was a bit quiet, but tried very hard to make conversation, and everyone seemed to understand the new-volunteer glassiness.  It’s a very warm, friendly, relaxed group of people, and the programme manager wasn’t at all what I’d pictured (for some reason, just going by his voice, I was expecting an older, bespectacled man with formal Northern European manners; he’s actually a younger guy with a long ponytail, who arrived by motorcycle and has a gently teasing relationship with his staff).

And the food, oh dear Lord.  Pork dumplings with paper-thin, fillo-like pastry; fish fry; calamari; greens with fresh garlic and chillies; vats of sweet-and-sour fish with pineapple – I loved EVERYTHING.  People keep asking me if the food is okay, if it’s too hot, if it’s too strange for me.  Many of them find my completely besotted responses kind of hilarious. :)

Today, I had a training session at the VSO programme office, which is currently behind a wall of sandbags, and then joined a volunteer from New Zealand for lunch.  She's about halfway through a one-year placement, based at a slightly smaller city in the north, and she's loving it.  She was also absolutely terrified getting on a motorcycle for the first time - even emailed the programme office to see if she could get out of riding one - and now she adores it, which gives me a lot of hope. :)  (And she introduced me to spicy papaya salad, for which I am VERY grateful!)  A lot of people here, both staff and volunteers, have this kind of infectious calm about them.  I find myself a lot  more relaxed about things when I'm in their company.

I attempted a little bit of sightseeing in downtown Bangkok, and snapped a few pictures of one of the smaller palaces, before deciding that it was late, I was tired, fuck this noise, I was going to treat myself to a Westernised drink in one of the cafes and read. :)  (Hey, there's no harm in that occasionally.  Oreo shake FTW!) 

I also ended up being not terribly helpful to a frantic Canadian couple trying to find a place to panic-buy bottled water (a lot of the local shops are out), but I was kind of tickled that they thought I lived around here.  (She was in a state of meltdown; he shrugged and declared, "We'll just have to drink Heinekin; thanks.")

Tonight, for the first time here, lounging at an outside table and eating dinner, I felt a real contented glow; granted, that probably has a lot to do with the fact that I was sitting in a tourist area, with no real challenges immediately in front of me, by myself, with a good book and a free evening, but for once I could actually enjoy that without worrying about what was going to happen next.

(Although this ban on jackfruit better be limited to the hotel.  As Sapna can attest, I Cannot Be Having with restrictions on my jackfruit.  I may end up leading a jackfruit rebellion.)