Hello family and friends! If you read the title, you just learned the Thai word for Thailand! But before you lucky readers learn more Thai, let’s go back a couple weeks.
Bangkok was a great way to release the angst of the Mokken Village. Great shopping, (bargaining is the name of the game) and hot showers (OH MY GOD!) We even spent one night at the Lava Club night club where we drank tons of M150 (Redbull, our nonalchoholic alternative) and danced the night away with British Columbian studs and ladyboys and all sorts of exotic people! We left Bangkok about a week ago and survived the 16 hour sleeper train to get to our homestays 30 minutes outside of Chiang Mai.
Right now we’re kickin’ it in Mae Rim, a sleepy northern district with comfy rural villages and 3 internet cafes (that have made a whole lot of profit this last week) and an immesasurably nice group of friendly Thai folk kind enough to take us weary foreigners in! The days here look pretty slow on paper, but they’re exhausting nonetheless. We wake up with the chickens at sunrise and eat breakfast with our lovely Thai families (Khrop Khrua Thai). For some of us, breakfast (gin khaao dtok chao) is a full 4 course meal: chicken soups and sticky rice and grasshoppers and worms (luckily not for all of us) and a whole mess of delicious (occasionally fishy) entrees. For others, every meal is shared by the family, with all members SHARING THE SAME BOWL OF SOUP AND THE SAME GLASS OF WATER. Didn’t mean to type it in capitals, but Charley feels that the caps are appropriate.
A week of Thai classes has left us with a surprisingly decent Thai vocabulary. Everyday I have a little bit more to say to my Thai family. Yesterday we had a great big laugh about how ridiculous I sounded 6 days ago.
Thai family: Khun yaak gin khaao mai? (You want to eat meal?)
Ben: Pom chuu Ben. (my name is ben)
Thai family: Rao ruu. Ben, gin khaao? (We know. Ben eat?)
Ben: Pom chuu Ben!
It’s amazing how quickly you can pick up a language like Thai when you are forced to speak it right after you learn it.
Besides a community of English speaking people, the rest of the conditions are incredibly tolerable. Showers without hot water, toilets without seat, homes without central air conditioning, bikes without brakes (this one was a little harder to manage on downhill streets). All these things have become a typical way of life for us. A couple people visit the X Center on occasion, which is a tourist-friendly ‘extreme’ sports center several miles down (on bikes, a good 20 minute trip) and tried some pseudo-American cuisine, complete with Dave n’ Buster’s-quality pizza and burgers and chicken nuggets. I sometimes attend these excursions, I’ll admit, but the adaptation to Thai rural life has otherwise been relatively smooth here. For the most part, Thai food is the name of the game, and I know I am not the only one who goes to sleep thinking about the next day’s breakfast.
Probably the most distinct part of Mae Rim is how cozy it is. Everyone, from the 8 year old kids to the 68 year old farmers, takes a motorbike when he or she wants to go out. Going out often means going to the farm for a day’s work (something I can proudly say I did) or to a neighbor’s house for beer or noodles. Rarely do the villagers even venture out past the main street to Chiang Mai.
Lately things have picked up quite a bit. Olivia’s house is a virtual cooking school/petting zoo. One can learn to make delicious sticky rice and coconut snacks, allow beetles to crawl on his arms, even hold a rooster high into the air while singing the prideland theme from lion king!We’ve also discovered, through the wonderful generosity of Jackie and Alex’s homestay mama Pii Laa, the taste sensation sweeping the Thai nation that is Rotee. Here’s how they make it:
1: put a crepe like puff pastry on a wide black cooking surface with (canoli?) oil.
2: (personal preferance) once it has reached a light brown, craqck an egg into the concoction.
3: after the dish has reached a delicious golden brown (personal preferance again, but you’d be crazy to forget this step) slice up some bananas into the newly fluffy pastry and fold the sides to make a thick square pie.
4: Slice into 25 or so pieces, and (oh my lord) POUR CONDENSED MILK ON TOP AHH!
5: enjoy.
I don’t know if I can ever go back to french crepes.
Between going to internet cafes, eating delicious ROTEE, studying paasaa Thai, and hanging out with homestay families, there is certainly a lot of time to ponder. One can’t help but be humbled by the rural lifestyle. The lack of easy communication, the early-to-bed, early-to-rise sleep schedule, the unbelievably hospitable people, the difficulty of transportation (for us without cars or motorcycles) – all of it calms the soul and allows for great introspection. One can only wonder what 10 days at a Buddhist monestary will contribute to our self-exploration. We’re gonna be soooo spiritual when we get back to the states! Spiritual and fat if they don’t stop feeding us sticky rice.
Missing you crazy falang (meaning foreign or guava, depending on context) westerners with your strange western ways,
Ben, Charley, and the SE Asia crew!
