My Brush With Angelina

At this point I’ve spent more time in Cambodia than Thailand, but Thailand is about to make a comeback!

Thailand 101:

There are two things I was told to avoid during my first day in Thailand; insulting the King, and doing offensive things with my feet. After two days in Chiang Mai, I was able to join the whole Weeks family in Bangkok for an afternoon and evening. They had been doing a tour of Thailand with Flora during Mitch’s February break. They saw many, many of the big Bangkok sites during the day and took me on a night boat-ride to see some of the famous temples and the Royal Palace lit up at night – Wat Arun (a large temple) was particularly splendid at night!

The King is revered in Thailand and everyone loves him, so it’s not hard to avoid insulting him, but one also must not insult his family…..if you are foolish enough to insult the royal family and get caught you can be thrown out of the country! (this is so very different from India, but falls in with what I’ve heard about other Asian countries like China, Cambodia, and Vietnam…..though Thailand seems to be the most touchy.) Unless I am real stupid I shouldn’t have trouble refraining from insulting a family that has done nothing wrong to me.

FEET. Feet are the lowest part of the body in Thai/Buddhist culture, and so shouldn’t be pointed at the Buddha, at any person, or waved around in the air. I don’t often wave my feet in the air. But, naturally, I waved them around a bit the first time Liz took me out in public. I was trying to help out with her English class (vocab word: sandals). Instead I offended her students to the core. Thumbs down! Mitchell Weeks apparently had his own brush with bi-ped-debauchery….he really felt like stretching while in a giant and culturally significant Temple in Bangkok. Flora tried to convince him to keep his feet under him, but he insisted that Thais like yoga, so it’s okay! He was wrong. But that’s okay, Mitch is wonderful and you’ve got to love him.

The complexity of the Thai language is depressing….especially after attempting Tamil for a few months. I’ll obviously try to learn some Thai, but first I’ll have to get past the fact that “caw” is a polite affirmation whereas in Tamil it’s a playful “up-yours!” Oh No! Last night, the four of us (Me, Tom, Flora, and Liz) played 9 holes of night-golf (a cultural experience I probably would have never experienced but for the Weeks influence). In Thailand, you are required to hire a caddy from the club when you play. (We kept our on the move by playing a rotating-two-person-scramble…) My first two big Thai language accomplishments were Hello (sao dee caw) and Thank You (cup coon caw). I thanked my caddy when she handed me clubs and cheerfully screamed hello when she replaced my divot…..whoops. But it worked out….at the end of the round she told me I was “gang mak!” or “very proficient!” She’s mistaken; I am not very proficient at either golf or Thai, but I appreciated the vote of confidence.

Cambodian Sojourn

I’m jumping ahead…..before I experience Asian golf, I experienced Cambodia. The morning after I met the Weeks family in Bangkok, Tom, Flora, and I flew off to Cambodia while Mitch and Deb had to fly home…..Mitch still has school, imagine that! The obvious attraction in Siem Reap, Cambodia is Angkor Wat – the largest temple complex in the world and one of the Ancient Wonders……we, however, took our own sweet time before we actually saw Angkor. Sure, there’s plenty else to do in the area….but I imagine few other tour groups go three days without actually going inside the Wat.

On our first day we took a boat ride to the mouth of Cambodia’s largest lake – and the center of its fishing economy. There are 160 floating villages on this vast lake, and we toured one of them. It was like Lake Union except the water’s incredibly dirty, the houses are falling apart, children jumped onto our boat every once in a while to sell bananas, the village is segregated between the poor Vietnamese immigrants and the slightly less poor local Cambodians, the houses are anchored by reeds and rope, there is a two-tiered elementary school/gymnasium, and lots of tourists have a look around every day. I’ve never seen a thing like it – pretty incredible!

In the next couple of days we saw a bunch of ancient temples in the greater Siem Reap area, went to a Kymer Rouge war museum, took a balloon ride to view Angkor from on high, got a Cambodian massage, and ate a lot. Highlights: (Mae Rice, this first one is for you!) Angelina Jolie not only adopted a child from Cambodia, but she also made a movie in one of the temples that we visited! We looked for her, and Tom tried to get our guide to arrange a date with Angie-babe, as we called her, but it fell threw. Giant trees were growing out of the walls make the Angie-Temple look pretty exotic and wild. The complex includes one temple that washes away your bad luck if you create a sonorous echo by pounding your chest. Tom caught me washing away my bad luck on film….he caught a lot of things on film including about 35 photos of the balloon we rode from various artistic positions. I’m really not exaggerating, ask Flora! We had to sit him down on several occasions to delete 25 or so blatant repeats. The Great Mystery of the whole experience was that of the identity of the fearless Cambodian guide, Janny. For the first few days we joked around, heard all about Cambodian culture and history, and got to be friends of sorts. You should know: Janny spoke with a clear but Australian accent (?!?), exclaimed, “Oh, Tom!” every third sentence, partied every night, had moments of raunchy humor, said things like, “Let’s Rock and Roll!”, never got lost or missed a beat on what we wanted to do, complained of illness on our second to last day, and has an identical twin. None of this was true on our last day, except, presumable, that our guide was Janny’s identical twin! I ran a casual exit poll as our plain left Cambodia. Three out of four respondents were convinced that we had met Janny’s “double trouble” (as Janny referred to him).

Flora and I have a lot to think about in these next few days. She spent five weeks in Chiang Mai living with Liz and trying to get some traction in the city….it was a trying five weeks. She was looking for jobs and volunteer work while getting to know the city and getting used to a new culture, and the work was extremely difficult to come by. Several weeks ago, she visited Mae Hong Son, a gorgeous 8,000 person town north of Chiang Mai that houses many NGOs. She was with the head of one NGO which works against domestic abuse in tribal communities, and fell in love with the area and the work being done there. We both feel that living in a smaller community would give us the chance to feel more connected and involved after just a few months, so if we can find meaningful work in the area, we’re thinking of renting an apartment there instead of in Chiang Mai. We’ll be working on that in the next couple of days!

I’m very, very happy to be here; I love traveling and I missed Flora this fall, so it’s been marvelous to spend time with her. I do miss India rather a lot……and go through the pictures of the kids, Deepa, and Kate that I brought whenever I have downtime. Thailand reminds me of India in some ways but is so completely different in most ways that it makes me miss all the things that make India intoxicatingly distinct. Right now I’m reading In Spite of the Gods: the Strange Rise of Modern India and loving it. I tried to read it before my trip to India and it made no sense, but now it’s relevant, and I’m rapt. Being in Thailand has made me realize how bizarre India really is. It’s so loud, contradictory, and chaotic (the obvious example being traffic, the less obvious being things like the bureaucracy). I took it for granted that I would always be stared at, and that anyone selling me something would be incredibly aggressive. I even began to take the poverty for granted – meaning – I didn’t realize that it really is more extreme than most places in the world. I also loved seeing the many faces of Hinduism wherever I turned. I am more and more certain that I will have to return to India soon; India has me in her grip and I’m glad of it. Of course I’ve also thought about Kate and Deepa quite a lot – they were a family to me this fall and it’s strange to be traveling without them. (Don’t worry mom, I love my home, too.)

Keep your emails headed my way – I love getting random little notes or big notes about whatever it is that’s going on in your lives.

Love,
~Alice