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.
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