Madness? This! Is! Thailand!

In a conversation with my friends P. and M. on Facebook, I have empirically determined the Most Thai Thing Ever.

Me:  Today I witnessed a chicken attacking the scorched remains of a floating lantern. That may be the most Thai thing that has ever happened to me.
P:  If it didn't occur on the back of a motorbike, with a dog in the basket, then there's room for improvement.
Me:  This is true. A chicken attacking a lantern, on a motorbike with four people and a dog, driving the wrong way with no lights down the highway with the driver on the phone AND drinking a bottle of Chang, the second guy eating noodles out of a styrofoam container, and the passenger at the back setting off fireworks. As they drive between a wat and a 7-11. There, fixed it.  And they're going to a mookata.
M:  No blindfolds, no gangnam style?

Me:  Oh, shit, yeah! They're all blindfolded, including the dog, and Gangnam Style is playing.
P:  And there's a baby. Preferably being breastfed.

Me:  And not a helmet in sight.
P:  There'd be one, but it'd be hanging off the handle. Maybe one on the dog.
Me:  One of the passengers should be snorting lines of MSG off the guy in front of him.  Cut with chilli.
P:  And all of their names are some variation of Porn.

Translation notes:  This last bit refers to the fact that "porn" is Thai for "beautiful".  There is actually a Porn electrolysis clinic (which, no lie, I thought was named that because they were promising to make you as attractive as a porn star), and a friend of mine has met people named Porn, Supaporn, and in one memorable instance, Pornsuk.

Obviously, you don't actually snort MSG, but we had a conversation some months back about whether cocaine would be more addictive with MSG in it.  And they do love their MSG here.  One of my colleagues says that a meal without MSG is like a marriage without love.

Finally, Chang is a cheap Thai beer.  The mixture of nausea and regret that attacks the next morning after you've drunk too much of it is known as a Changover.

The More You Know!

Falling On My Head Like A New (And Unpleasant) Emotion

It’s ironic that my walk tonight lasted longer than normal, because I got caught up in the celebrations for the end of rainy season – and that’s why I was still half an hour from home when the most violent thunderstorm I’ve seen all year hit.  In Soviet Russia, weather celebrates the end of you!

I’ve taken to walking down, some nights, to a rather lively student food market that’s about halfway between my house and the Ping river; it’s a nice long walk (anywhere from an hour to two hours depending on the route), and it gives me a chance to explore the area a little more.  I drive most places that aren’t in my immediate neighbourhood, so it can be fun to take the slow route:  poke in small shops, get to meet stallholders, try and fail to befriend the local cats.  (Moray can testify that I have very limited success making friends with Thai cats.  By the end of his trip, he was jokingly telling me off for stalking the poor things. :))  I was on my way down there tonight when I heard music near the bus station, and when I followed it, I discovered the drunkest, least organised, happiest damn parade I have ever seen in my life.

There was a truck creeping along in front with a huge money tree on it; then a procession of about forty or fifty people carrying money trees and dancing (I gotta say, elderly Thai ladies can cut a rug; must be all the tai chi); and then another truck with giant speakers and a huge, rotating disco ball.  (Money trees, by the way, if you haven’t seen them, are trees made out of sticks with 20- and 100-baht notes woven into the branches.  They’re a form of Buddhist offering.)  This was the only parade I’ve ever seen where the participants got more excited every time it was held up.  Whenever the truck in front had to stop to let a bus past, the crowd would start dancing more wildly, swigging Leo, and setting off firecrackers right under their feet.  It was kind of awesome, and I was curious about where they were going, so I kept pace with them.  I didn’t actually go over and join them, for fear of intruding or putting a damper on the proceedings (“farang present, this is weird and uncomfortable, better tone it down”)… and, because, you know, what they were doing is a good way to lose some toes. :)  But I joined the stragglers trailing after them, and we picked up more and more people as we went, with the music getting more raucous all the time, until we reached a temple I’d never noticed before, tucked behind the new bus terminal.  The music and the disco ball stopped there, letting the worshipers process in with their offerings… while a few drunken older Thais stuck around to get funky in the middle of the road, under the swirling red and green lights.

I eventually peeled off and went to get dinner at the market (and also to hit my new favourite place – a laid-back bakery/manga library/internet café with fantastic chocolate pudding cake, which I would never have expected to find in such an un-touristy area).  And I’d barely turned back when the wind started up all of a sudden.  I didn’t think much of it, but all the Thai people did – they were instantly scrambling to batten down their stalls and close up the fronts of their shops.

I didn’t get far before the rain started:  big, fat drops that quickly turned into a complete downpour.  I ended up under a plastic shop awning with a middle-aged couple; a young dad and his son on their motorbike; and a young man, probably a student, who crouched near the edge of the awning and watched the rain with a surprisingly peaceful expression on his face.

And this was rain like you wouldn’t believe.  Within minutes, the streets were flooded.  It was coming down so hard that it kicked up a layer of mist a couple of feet thick, so that trying to see the road ahead of you was like peering through fog.  There was a particularly bright flash of lightning, and every light on the street went out; a few emergency lights struggled back on, but a minute later, another flash took those out, as well.  We were left with only the lightning and the headlights of a few cars that had pulled over by the side of the road; even in Thailand, where drivers are completely insane, no one was daring to move.  (Watching raindrops in headlights is the weirdest thing, by the way.  They look like they’re made with stop-go claymation.)

After maybe twenty minutes, it started to slacken a bit.  The couple were the first to leave, her clinging to his back on the motorbike so that they could wrap themselves in the same poncho.  A little while later, I decided that this was as good as it was going to get, and struck out for home.

The walk back was an adventure, let me tell you.  The fun part was balancing precariously on the curb – the only part of the sidewalk still above water – and then having the sheaves of water thrown up by passing cars soak me up to the shoulder.  (Well, that and walking by a lot of dry people smugly eating hot soup at a hotpot restaurant.  Bastards. :))  But I was doing okay… until I reached the petrol station, where the forecourt had become a lake.  The water was shin-deep; I ended up having to wade across, thinking uncomfortably about all those public-service animations from the time of the Bangkok floods, showing downed power lines and hidden sinkholes and families of crocodiles.  (Well, okay, I wasn’t really focusing on that last one.)

The rain picked up again just as I turned into my street, about five minutes from home; I finally staggered home, so drenched that the neighbour’s dog didn’t recognise my smell and practically went for me.  (Fortunately, we are talking about a miniature freaking poodle here, so I wasn’t exactly in danger. :))  I came home to a power outage, but thankfully it only lasted about an hour.  Which means that I had to shower in cold water in the dark, but I didn’t care – it just felt so good to be clean and dry.  And now I can actually heat up my dinner (which survived the walk – the Thai habit of putting everything in multiple plastic bags pays off!) and relax with some cartoons.

By the way, I did run into at least one refugee from the parade on the walk home.  She was wearing a soaked and tattered pink tulle skirt, and was trying to keep dry by holding an overturned silver offering bowl over her head.  Poor kid.  The celebrations for Loy Krathong may start a few days early, but rainy season isn’t giving up that easily.

Mystery Dumplings

A short meditation on culture and economics in Thailand:

The woman who runs my local noodle shop occasionally makes dumplings.  I still haven’t figured out why.

Don’t get me wrong – I obviously know why she MAKES dumplings.  They go in soup.  What I mean is that she doesn’t have them consistently; she tends to make one small batch a night, or maybe two.  And she doesn’t reserve them for people who specifically order dumpling soup.  Rather, she asks everyone whether they’d like some dumplings to go with their noodles.  If you say yes, you get a generous handful of them – and it’s not like she skimps on the meat or the noodles to make up for it.  Nope, it’s the same dish, at the same price.  Just with a delicious added freebie on top.

And I don’t understand why she bothers.  The dumplings are labour-intensive to make, and don’t earn her any extra cash.  If they were always on offer, I suppose they could be a way to lure in customers, and make her place stand out from the half-dozen identical noodle shops within shouting distance – but she usually doesn’t have them, and when she does, they tend to be hidden away.  They might be a treat to reward (and encourage) the loyalty of regular customers – but I remember her offering me some back when I first moved here, in the days before I had enough Thai to order food, or even to say, “I would like this,” and point.

The closest I can come is that, well, maybe she just likes to make us dumplings?

That’s not as silly as it sounds.  Let me lay down this beat and see if you pick it up.  The Rough Guide to Thailand states that three concepts are essential to understanding the Thai mindset:  jai yen, or “cool heart”, which I’ve talked about before; mai pen rai, which means, “It’s no problem,” but is less a no-worries philosophy and more closely related to jai yen – it’s about laughing things off and rolling with the punches; and sanuk, or fun, which everything should be arranged to be, as far as possible.  At this point in my time here, I think I’d add a fourth:  jai dee, or good heart.  Thai people are very focused on doing the right thing, and being generous with their time and help – according to some of my friends here, it’s very tied in with Buddhist ideas of karma.  Having trouble getting your motorcycle out of a parking space?  Someone will come over and start helping to move the bikes around you.  Ask for help from someone who doesn’t understand, or can’t answer, your question?  They’ll call over a friend, or even approach strangers on your behalf.  Leave your helmet, your groceries, whatever in the basket of your motorcycle?  It’s extremely rare that anyone would dream of taking it (and even when it does occur, a lot of helmet theft is spur-of-the-moment “borrowing” to avoid helmet fines, not premeditated theft for profit).

So it’s not entirely bizarre that someone would make extra treats for her customers just because, without any business motivation.  To take a similar example:  at another cookshop near me, rice or dry noodle dishes usually come with a bowl of soup on the side, but it’s understood that if the shop runs out of soup, it runs out of soup.  It would be terrible form to complain that you didn’t get your soup, whereas in a Western restaurant, it would only be natural to point out that one of the sides never arrived.  That’s because in a Western restaurant, it would be treated as part of the package to which you were entitled, whereas at a Thai cookshop, it’s seen as a courtesy, almost like a gift from your hosts.

It’s kind of charming, actually.  I’ll admit, I’m a sucker for an unexpected free treat, even a rare one; the fact that you never know when it’s coming gives something as simple as going to the noodle stall a tiny added thrill.

… which, come to think of it, probably keeps me going back more often.

Huh.  Maybe noodle-shop lady is more calculating than I thought.

Adventures in Thai Boxing, or, Friends Make the Best Collateral

So, tonight I went to my first-ever Muay Thai (Thai boxing) match!  My friend Moray (who's visiting for a couple of weeks) and I got some Mexican food for dinner and then wandered over to the International Thaepae Boxing Stadium, which is basically a concrete box ringed with bars, with an older ladyboy (who, I have to say, was totally working her skintight leopard-print dress) taking tickets at the door.  The whole place is lit up in multicoloured neon and is just the right side of delightfully seedy (which might be put on for the tourists, but it's still fun).  I only regret that we went so early, because they start playing the Muay Thai music about half an hour in advance.  Unlike traditional Thai music (or modern Thai pop), Muay Thai music is weird, discordant stuff that sounds a bit like a bagpipe being run over by a motorcycle.  (In fact, Moray and I speculated that the first Muay Thai match may have occurred when a motorcycle driver got into a fistfight with a travelling Scottish bagpiper he'd just run over.)  After ten minutes of it, anyone would be on edge enough to start punching the people around them.

And then, finally, the lights went down; the first two boxers entered in their ceremonial headbands to pray at each corner of the ring, followed by an elaborate, genuflecting dance in the centre; and the music, kind of hilariously, switched to "The Final Countdown". :)

Thai boxing is very entertaining to watch - it's more about kicks and knees and grappling than it is about straight-up punching, and it's a combination of brutal and weirdly affectionate, as fighters sometimes stay locked in each others' arms for almost a minute, scrabbling for purchase.  Some of the more experienced fighters pull off acrobatic moves that would almost look more at home in capoeira.  But I meant it about the brutal - we saw one knockout, one dislocated shoulder (that the coach relocated on the spot - "Just pop your arm over the ropes there"... *CRAAAACK*), and one kick to the groin that left the boxer whimpering in pain and basically pleading with the ref to end the match even before the countdown (you have to be ready to resume fighting before the count of ten) was complete.  Owww.

Incidentally, I want it on the record that I successfully picked the winner in five of the six fights - all of them except the main fight, in fact, which was the only one that went all five rounds and was won on points.  I obviously didn't place a bet, because VSO might frown on it, or at least on paying for new kneecaps after I got mine broken by Thai bookies.  We DID try to figure out how to break it to Moray's boss that Moray wouldn't be able to return to the office, because he'd be going to work in a Thai brothel after I lost him in a bet.  If this seems harsh, I should point out that he was contemplating selling me to pay for the cost of our dinner in Chiang Dao on Sunday. :)  (Ultimately, though, with my success rate, I don't think I would have lost Moray in the bet after all.  Possibly, I would have won some other foreigner who'd been unlucky at a previous match.)

After the first four matches, there was a break, and then five young fighters came and knelt in a circle in the middle of the ring.  One of the refs went around and, very slowly and ceremoniously, put blindfolds on each of them.  We waited with bated breath:  were they going to face off in pairs for the honour of fighting the next proper bout?  Or were there going to be some kind of blindfolded feats of martial arts?

AND THEN GANGNAM STYLE CAME ON THE SOUND SYSTEM AND ALL FIVE OF THEM KICKED THE SHIT OUT OF EACH OTHER.

This is quite possibly the best piece of entertainment I have ever seen.  The greatest bit was that the ref stayed in the ring to guide them towards each other, and sometimes one of the boxers would mistakenly attack him instead.  At one point, one fighter started hitting the ref... and then another started punching him in the head from the other side... and then all five fighters ended up in a heap on top of him.  I'm probably a bad person for laughing at that, but it was absolute gold.

We ultimately decided that the only thing in the universe that could be better would be to put Psy in the centre of the ring and have him dance Gangnam Style while five blindfolded Thai boxers tried to hit him.  We would call this divine sport of the gods "Muay Psy". :)

The Dog Days Are Not Over

This is another thing I've been meaning to post for a while:  Dog Days.

You know how people have good and bad hair days?  In Thailand, you have good and bad dog days.  (And primarily terrible hair days - thank you, motorcycle helmet! - but that's beside the point.)  I'm serious.  Some days, I can waltz past the guard dogs at the gated mansions and the soi (alley) dogs who sleep in petrol station forecourts without getting so much as a dozy "woof" out of any of them.  Other days, even my neighbours' dogs - who have known me for close to a year now, and will occasionally even play fetch with me (although their concept of fetch extends only as far as "recover thrown object, and then make off with it like a douchebag") - will suddenly charge out of their front gates at me, barking their heads off and treating me like a one-woman barbarian invasion.

I've worked out that part of it is timing.  If it's after midnight, and I'm not on a motorcycle, I'm clearly wrong for that time and place, and therefore fair game.  (Found that out the hard way during a 2 am water run - *shudders*.)  But it's been known to happen in broad daylight, too.  Is it some scent that's throwing them off, like a different shampoo?  Is it my mood on those days?  Have I eaten so much crispy pork in Thailand that I now smell of it?  Who knows?

My worst dog day - well, dog night - was the first and, so far (touch wood), only time that dogs have actually chased me while I was riding my motorbike.  I was driving down a dark street, looking for a friend's house, and at the point where the paved road turned to dirt, there was a pack of soi dogs basically sprawled halfway across the road.  Holding my breath, I eased past them... but just my luck, my friend's house wasn't actually down that turn.  So I had to turn right around, and drive past the pack again.

The first time, they had raised their heads to look narrowly at me, and there had been a couple of warning growls.  But the second time - with an apparent consensus of, "Oh hell no, that bitch thinks she's coming BACK this way?  I don't believe this!" - the entire pack sprang to their feet and started baying after me.

Now, when you're being chased by dogs, your first instinct is going to be to get out of there as fast as possible.  THIS IS THE WRONG INSTINCT.  Nothing is likely to make a dog more determined to chase you than running away, and even on a motorcycle, odds are you won't be able to make your escape fast enough.  (Plus, your legs are awfully tempting targets when you're riding.)  No, my friend taught me the best response when she was giving me driving lessons.  You slow right the hell down, and as far as possible, you act relaxed.  In fact, one of the most effective ways to disarm a dog who's coming for you is to put on a big grin, pat your thighs, and babytalk to him.  I'm dead serious here.  Dogs can sense fear, and like twitchy Cold War governments, if you're afraid and poised to defend yourself, they immediately start wondering what dodgy thing you're up to.

(Hence the world's least helpful advice:  If you're afraid of dogs, stop being afraid of dogs, because otherwise they'll do scary things to you.  I've found that this is equally applicable to dating, and just as unhelpful.)

So I slowed to a crawl, and started calling out in a high voice, "Puppy-puppy!  Here puppy!"  And most of the dogs started giving me puzzled or contemptuous looks, and left off the chase.  A couple of them hung on a little longer, one even taking a couple of snaps at my heels, but when I didn't react, even he got bored.

Point:  Humanity, I think. :)

However, I was pretty shaken up, and it didn't help much when one of my local dogs decided to start playing a little game with me.  He likes to run up behind me and suddenly lunge for my ankles, like he's going to bite me - and then stop just short, huffing hot air on my feet, before running away with his tail wagging.  The first time he did this, I leapt six feet in the air, so now of course he things it's the Greatest Prank Ever.  I have dubbed him Asshat Dog.  (Actually, I had named in James Dean because he was always hanging around the motorcycle carpark, but as far as I'm concerned, he's Asshat Dog now.)

It could be a lot worse, though.  Chiang Mai dogs are comparatively mild.  One of my friends in the border town of Mae Sot is currently on a course of rabies shots after a dog there took a chunk out of her leg; they play for KEEPS in the smaller towns.

With the neighbourhood cats, I seem to be making steadier, although slower, progress.  Most of the cats who live along my route home have apparently decided that I'm okay now.  The main way I know this is that I'm now seeing them everywhere, instead of just a glimpse of a tail here and there as they dart away over fences.  The ginger cat belonging to my downstairs neighbour will actually demand ear-skritches, and occasionally lie down on my feet if I don't oblige for long enough.  My neighbours down the road have two kittens who actively tried to follow me home the other night (to be fair, I had fed them some of my fried chicken).  It makes me ridiculously happy.

All this makes a nice change from the boot-faced cat who lives at the house next to my office and hates me with the fire of a thousand suns.  I don't know whether it's the farang thing, or what the hell I did to him in a past life, but the resentment is palpable.  I even tried to bribe him with chicken.  This Did Not Go Well.

Me:  Kitteh want some chicken?  Yummy chicken!
Cat:  FUCK YOU.
Me:  *quails*
Cat:  *glares*
Me:  I'll... just leave it right here at a safe distance for you, yeah?
Cat:  DIE IN A FIRE.

It's one of those things you don't automatically expect to be different between cultures, but of course it is:  Thai people treat their animals differently than people in, say, the UK, so obviously the animals behave differently.

Incidentally, now that it's almost cold season, everyone is going to start putting shirts on their dogs again.  I can't wait. :)

I'd Sit in the Quad, and Think, "Oh My God!"

My landlady has installed a coffee and cocoa dispenser outside her office.

That's it.  Thailand is officially just like university.  My room is equipped with flat-pack furniture and a minifridge; everyone finds it weird that I drink tea and not coffee; I do laundry in my pajamas, because I need to wash everything I own; I almost never cook for myself; and there's a great social scene available, but you have to look past the parade of drunken 18-year-olds to find it.

And again like university, I can't get the cocoa dispenser to work.

Now, speaking of Thai cultural peculiarities, I'm going to tell you a little story.  Gather 'round, children, and you shall hear the tale of A. and his Mullet Adventures!


Some time ago, my colleague A. decided to cut his hair.  (You might remember that this is what would later lead to people being completely unable to recognise him.)  Ever since I’d known him, A. had had a kind of softer version of a white-boy ’fro – a shock of hair that reached almost down to his shoulders, or would if it didn’t prefer to shoot out in all directions, in that, “I don’t want to be a hair!  I want to be a DRAGON!” way that I’m all too familiar with, myself. :)  (With apologies to Edward Monckton.)

On this particular evening, there was a house party to say goodbye to two of the fast-dwindling Chiang Mai contingent.  I was just rolling up when a man I’d never seen before approached and asked how I was.

I did a double take.  “A.?”

The halo of hair I was used to seeing was gone, and in its place – instead of the traditional, close-cropped style I’d expected – was the most classic, sharply-cut mullet I’d ever seen.

And the crazy thing was, it actually kind of suited him.  I’ve often wondered who the hell the mullet was designed for, since it usually looks uniformly crappy on everyone, but on A., it framed his features in such a way that it almost worked.  (A., like me, is from Joisey, so that explains a lot.)  I complimented him on it, and he laughed, a bit embarrassed.  “Oh, yeah, my girlfriend was cutting my hair, and when she got to this point, I asked her to stop and leave it like that.  It’s kinda silly – it’s just for the party tonight.”

But it wasn’t.

Over the next week or so, it was clear that A. had fallen in love with his mullet.  He not only kept it, he changed his profile picture on Facebook to a joking shot of him in a muscle tee, kissing his bicep.  And the fascinating thing is, A. wasn’t the only one enjoying his new look.

“Thai people love the mullet,” he announced, strutting into a meeting one morning.

“Seriously?”

“Yeah!  I mean, they think it’s funny, but I swear, I have people opening up to me more now than with my old hair.  They trust me more.”

It sounded insane at the time, but if the Thai people he talked to were anything like our Burmese colleagues, then I could see what A. meant.  Everyone in the office spent ages cooing over his hair – giggling at it, touching it, wanting to know more about the cultural meaning that we Westerners were clearly attaching to it.  (When A. tried to explain the concept of “redneck”, they nodded sagely.  Yes, there were people in the more provincial parts of central Burma who behaved like this.  Although with fewer guns.)  Whenever someone new came by for a meeting, the whole process would start over.  I could see why A. was getting a kick out of it.

Apparently, outside the office, the attention was even friendlier – although not quite as platonic.  A. reported one day that he’d never had so many Thai women hitting on him.  He put it down to the fact that he looked more harmless and approachable with a silly haircut, but given some of the elaborately spiky styles – influenced largely by Korean pop bands – that I’ve seen on fashionable young Thai men, it’s equally possible that these women thought he was a trendsetter. :)  Sadly, I think that was the death knell of the mullet.  A few days later, A.’s girlfriend apparently had Words with him, and he came into work with a classic short haircut instead.

I missed the mullet, though.

I think A. did, too.

Nice Soap, Redux

Let me just start out by saying that I'm very sorry.  I've let this blog languish for a lot longer than I intended.  July and early August were pretty insane, with travel, friends visiting, and a bout of food poisoning that left me in bed for the better part of a week (luckily, I have friends in Chiang Mai who will rock up with rehydration salts and an Xbox and play Soul Caliber with me when I'm too weak to get up).  Still, I meant to get back to it after a few weeks - 

- and then there was a sudden death in my family.  And work started going nuts (every company and international financial institution in existence is trying to get its claws into Burma right now).  And it was suddenly Very Important that I go to all the border towns and teach training sessions on sustainable development - usually with only one or two days' notice.

So by the time I lifted my head, it had been more than two months since I'd posted.  I promise to do better from now on.

Time to get back to posting about the train of crazy that is my life.  In no particular order.  Much like my life.
And speaking of which, I never realised that the thematic phrase that would crop up again and again in this particular plot arc of my life would be “Nice Soap”.
The other day, I met a work associate’s wife and daughter, a friend of theirs, and the friend’s dead husband.  They were all pretty awesome, although I think the dead guy probably came off the coolest.  (No pun intended.)

About a week ago, you see, I was asked to go down to Mae Sot - a town right on the Thai-Burma border - and run a two-day training on sustainable development for a group of youth leaders.  After the second day, the head of the organisation running the training took me out to dinner, saying he wanted to introduce me to his wife (which is unusual, but when I found out she was a Westerner it made sense – “Hey, you, honky, meet my honky spouse,” is a lot more common than, “Meet my Burmese spouse, with whom you may or may not share a language”).  She was a lovely, extravagantly warm South African woman with her three-year-old in tow – a plump, sleepy bundle of pink and curls.  We went to one of Mae Sot’s roughly four Western restaurants (for the second time during this trip – the very sweet young American volunteer who picked me up from the bus station took me there the first night, as well).  Mae Sot, while it isn’t tiny, still feels like a ridiculously small town to me.  I mean, comparatively, it is:  on top of the four Western restaurants, they have one supermarket, a couple of large street markets, and really just one main street.  I don’t think I’ve driven/been driven anywhere here that took longer than ten minutes, as opposed to the minimum half hour it takes to get from my house to anywhere in central Chiang Mai.

At the restaurant, we met up with a friend of the couple’s – a force-of-nature older American who works with groups of Burmese women to help them develop traditional weaving into viable livelihoods.  We were chatting idly, and I asked what had brought her to Thailand in the first place.

She sat back a little, and her sharp blue eyes softened and blurred, but her voice was steady as she told me, “Well, my husband was diagnosed with terminal cancer.”

Apparently, the doctors kept giving him different prognoses – he had one year left, no, maybe three, no – until, one day, in the middle of a discussion about something else completely, he turned to his wife and said, “Why don’t we just go to Thailand?”  They both had strong ties here from previous NGO work, but no real plans for what they would do when they arrived; connections to a good grassroots charity helped them land on their feet, though.  And that was the beginning of what this woman described as the best part of their forty-plus-year marriage.  And damn, the way she talked about her husband made me wish I could have known him.  He apparently had a deliciously evil sense of humour, and took great delight in basically trolling reality:  he once tried to convince a local Burmese group of the advantages of growing a new kind of cash crop by enthusing about how well it worked, then whispering conspiratorially, “Don’t tell anyone this, but my [seventy-odd-year-old] wife has been eating them, and now she’s pregnant!”  And when he sprained his knee and was asked to lie on a gurney in the hospital corridor for a few minutes before it could be examined, he passed the time gasping to strangers, “Help me!  I don’t know what’s wrong with me!  I’ve been here for three days!” :)

His great project – one that he’d started on a trip to Thailand many years before – was nice soap.  That is, he wanted to help train Burmese communities in the manufacture of fancy soaps to sell.  The project kept running into problems – difficulty packaging and marketing the stuff, difficulty finding markets, and the number of tries it took to work the kinks out of the process didn’t help.  He ended up with a lot of bog-standard, not-so-nice soap along the way.  But the thing was, while the nice soap had trouble getting off the ground, the bog-standard soap was a hit – it was cheap for rural communities to manufacture for their own use.  They could buy the inexpensive oils nearby and mix the soap inside bamboo, slicing the soap-filled bamboo stalk into round cakes once it hardened.  For remote villages struggling with health and hygiene, it was brilliant.

Eventually, his wife said to him, “Are you sure that this isn’t what you’re supposed to do?”

The man passed away two years ago, at the age of seventy-four, thirteen years after his diagnosis.  His loved ones still talk and laugh about him as if he were alive, which I think is a great tribute.

We had a really nice meal, actually – all ridiculous stories instead of Very Serious Conversations About Burma, which puts it way ahead of other work functions in my book.  Not that Very Serious Conversations About Burma don’t have their place, but that place is when you’re making very serious decisions, not trying to impress people (and yes, I fall into that trap sometimes).  And the American friend actually works in Chiang Mai, so we swapped numbers.  Which reminds me that I really need to get some business cards printed.  Even getting the two sets I’d need (personal and professional) would be cheap enough; I’m just being lazy about it.  But seriously, the time in my life when torn-off scraps of paper with my number on them were acceptable ended when I graduated from university.

I’m beginning to think that they should read:  “Catherine Martin, Researcher, Writer, Soap Enthusiast”.


(Speaking of soap, I got some lovely stuff for 10 baht this past weekend at a brilliant market I didn't even know existed.  Behind the big Western supermarket on the Superhighway, it turns out that there's a WAREHOUSE-SIZED market full of food - vats of delicious curries, loads of fruit, a huge variety of sweets (many of which I'd never seen before), buckets with live eels, spit-roasted frogs, it's awesome.  It's hard to believe that I've been living a ten-minute drive away for almost a year without even knowing it was there.  Then again, it's possible that this market is new.  A while back, I was stuck for the entire drive into town behind one of the many trucks with loudspeakers that drive slowly around, blaring advertisements - this one was yelling about a new "Organic CommuniTEE Market Talaad!" (yes, with exactly that inflection, over and over) at this particular supermarket plaza.  Which, for those of you who aren't up on your Thai, is an organic community market... market.  If this was the market (the market market?) in question, then that slow, torturous drive was well worth it.  And, as I said, they also had some beautiful soaps - I picked up a bar of honey and lime, and one of jasmine and almond milk.  They're supposedly whitening, as well, but occasionally I just need to surrender to Thailand's conspiracy to make me whiter than I already am.)