Some sights have delayed reaction times. You see something, and it passes you by; you go: “Oh, hey!” and keep right on walking. Two nights later, you sit bolt upright in your bed and something in your mind clicks about that previous sight.
In Bangkok, I saw about five different men with white gauze patches over their left eyes. The first time, I thought: “Ah, what a klutz. He walked into a lamp-post.” The second time, I chuckled… but for some inexplicable reason, nothing in my mind made the connection between the first one-eyed man and the second. The third time and onward, I wondered if there was a secret Muay Thai Fight Club in which the favoured finishing maneuver was an Ong Bak knee to the left eye.
It was only last night, wandering the lantern-lit night market in Luang Prabang, laos, fully 8 days after Bangkok, that I realized that these men had sold their left eyes to the black market organ trade.
Does anyone else find this creepy? It’s pretty thinly veiled… you have random men, between 25 and 65, all impoverished, poorly dressed individuals in tattered sandals or ghetto bikes, each with a neat gauze patch on the same eye. I’m not sure why I did not see it before, and I cannot believe that the explanations for these one eyed jacks that kept me unthinkingly satisfied before were so utterly inadequate. I mean, really. He walked into a lamp-post? Got hit by a soccer ball? Muay Thai Fight Club? Come on, Sean… your IQ is higher than this.
But no. There is a thriving organs trade in South East Asia… Asia in general. The poor sell their organs in the backstreets to organs merchants for some pissant amount of cash. They go to a clinic up behind a pawn shop, their eye or kidney gets excised, and boom.
I’ve read about this in the papers. Whoo.
We took a two day trip down the Mekong, and we were surrounded by primieval jungle rolling up fog-shrouded highlands the entire way. The forests in BC are all made up of tall, straight trees…. in ranks like tin soldiers, disciplined like an army on parade. Not so the jungles here. It looks like something out of Jurassic Park- unruly, entangled masses of vines, roots, branches, and lush vegetation, through which you could not see past more than two metres. The pictures we have don’t do it justice, and neither will I- but it would not have looked out of place if pterodactyls swooped out of the heights, or if a big diplodocus crashed out of the trees and bent its long neck into the river to drink. We didn’t see any dinosaurs, unfortunately, but there were little Laotian villages perched on the cliffs and shores as we went by… little thatched huts on stilts inhabited by men and women in stereotypical rice-farmer conical hats.
Also, I now have an idea of what animals at the zoo feel like.
I was at a Karen village a few days ago… the Karen are a “hill tribe” people in northern Thailand. Our tour group went up there to gawk at them and take photographs as they painstakingly put together colourful scarves and tapestries on looms that they, on average, sold for two dollars. Each would take 3 days to make. 3 DAYS, and sold for 2 dollars.
As I watched the Karen go about their lives, which now revolved around growing rice for self-sustenance and making souvenirs for rich westerners, I got an uneasy feeling in my stomach. For a while, I could not put my finger on it. Then I realized that these Karen were like animals in an enclosure. I could almost imagine our tour guide putting on a safari hat and bellowing in a ringmaster voice: “NOW! Observe the Karen in his natural habitat!”
But of course, the Karen were not. They were in as fabricated an environment as a submarine. They were in their lands, of course. They lived in their own houses, bore their children, grew their rice. But their world is changing, and the one in which they live is one of limbo. They are an impoverished people dangling between assimilation in the big city, which they must move to in order to gain a proper education as the traditional terrace-farming life becomes increasingly unfeasible, and remaining in their little mountain villages, which cannot endure.
So now the Karen live in a situation that balances the old world with the new. They have their lands and their rice and their arts. But they must now commercialize their traditional lifestyles in order to get more money- hence, they must bastardize their arts to sell them to white people, and they must allow foreigners to trek through the jungles and tramp through their villages, “Ooooing” and “Aaaaahing” at their children, dogs, huts, and lives, the way small children murmer upon seeing polar bears or tiger cubs for the first time.
Imagine. The Karen operate with the outside world through Thai liaisons- Thai tour guides. They themselves know little of it. They don’t understand economics, and they don’t understand the west. They don’t know why hordes of sweating foreigners would want to descend upon them, but someone important has decreed that it will happen and so it does. And they are told to go about their daily lives so that these foreigners might observe them, but oh, by the way, would you please sell them some arts and crafts, put up a Pepsi drinks stand at the entrance of your village, and let them take pictures of you? Yes, we know you’re breast-feeding your baby. Look, those people with cameras don’t mind. After all, it’s perfectly natural. Go ahead, smile for them.
What would a gorilla say if he could speak? Stuck in an false environment that approximates his original home but is just alien enough to make him uncomfortable, then asked to behave naturally, as if that were possible, while large numbers of visibly different beings (us) disrupt his life with loud noises and strange behaviour.
How is this different from the Karen?
It made me damned nervous, and I was relieved when I left.
Also. Funny advertisement in Laos: “Drink like a fish for the price of water.” My god, I LAUGHED. It’s the kind of witticism that can only be constructed by someone with a poor command of English. But it’s brilliant.
Congrats to all of you who have graduated…you must have had your ceremonies by now. How did it feel chucking your hats in the air? Must have been surreal, eh? I demand the following:
Those of you who graduated in science: Develop faster-than-light space travel, or cure cancer. Those of you who graduated in economics: Go fuck yourselves. Those of you who graduated in engineering: sharks with laser beams. I will also accept flying aircraft carriers, or a device that allows me to read minds. And my fellow artsies: go out and change the fucking world.
Cheers to all.
Sunday, May 28, 2006
Thursday, May 25, 2006
Indochina 2006: Around The Riverbend
Nothing much to report. In a few hours, I will be on a bus to Chiang Rai, and from there on to the Thailand-Laos border to begin a two day journey up the Mekong river to the Laotian valley town of Luang Prabang. Luang Prabang's architecture is apparently a chaming fusion of French and native design couched into a bend of the Mekong, and I am quite looking forward to seeing it. You will not hear from me until then... it should be 3-4 days.
Yesterday, Amber and I went on a tour of the Chiang Mai countryside. It was a well-travelled tourist route, with a conspicuously touristy itinerary. For those of you who plan on doing South East Asia in the future, some advice:
1) If you want a more "local trek experience", without all the touristy bells and whistles, go up to Pai or Chiang Rai (Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai are different places... it is not a typo.)
2) Having a larger tour group on a well-travelled route minimizes your chances of getting robbed while on the trek.
Our group was seven strong: me, Amber, a prematurely-balding German from Stuttgart with the very German name of Claas Wiesel, three Indian Brits named Risha, Aisha, and Narisha who were utter carbon copies of each other, down to their 'Bend It Like Beckham" accents, braids, and flighty teenage mannerisms, and Rich, a Filipino-American from New York whose very un-New York sunny disposition was most likely due to the fact that he was gay as a basket of strawberries.
Our tour guide was a flat-nosed man named Noi who reminded me uncannily of Zhu Bajie from the Chinese epic Journey to the West. For you white people, this means he looked like a walking pig. He spoke fair English and on numerous occasions, displayed a wit that surprised me.
We did two cool things on the trek.
1) We rode elephants. Elephants are fabulous creatures. In a certain way, they are almost cute, slow, plodding, dum-dee-dum-dee-dum animals. Very Jamaican in their mannerisms- they seem to be on permanent island-time. They eat constantly and methodically, and shit with the same casual ease and regularity. Each elephant had a platform strapped across its back, which sat two people. The handler, or mahout, sat atop the elephant's head with a sharp prong that he used to indicate direction to the beast, while making incomprehensible monosyllabic grunts which presumably meant "Go!" or "Mush!"
We named our elephant Tinker Bell, and the name was strangely fitting. I'm not sure why. Elephants are strangely sure-footed, and have their own practical grace- their hind feet always tread in the spots made by their front feet. The Thais have used elephants for centuries as transports, symbols of their culture, and as instruments of war. When you sit on top of an elephant, you understand why. I mean, really. These boys can flatten trees. I'd totally go to war on one of these guys- although ideally, I wouldn't go to war at all.
2) We went bamboo rafting down rapids. This is sketchier than it sounds, and yet, not all that unsafe. Bamboo rafts are pretty self explanatory. About 10 \ stout 20-ft long poles are lashed together. Two sit in the middle, and two others, each with a long pole for propelling and guiding the craft, stand on either end. The craft goes with the current downstream, so the poles are mainly used to prevent the raft from hitting rocks and going into overly large swells. We had two rafts. Amber and I in the middle of one, with Rich poling at the back and a native at the front. The second raft had the three
Indian Brits in the middle, and Claas ze German at ze back, and ze native at ze front.
We had no life jackets. When I realized this, I sketched mildly. I know a tree-planter who drowned in Prince George when he went canoeing without a jacket. But, what the fuck ever... we ain't come this far, right?
Best decision ever. I have never had that much fun- well, that's an exaggeration, but it was a riot. The raft floated half-underwater, and the swells from the rapids simply blanketed us after a while, so we were completely drenched. On top of that, after a little bit, the sky gave up a torrential downpour. The river was lined with verdant greenery- incredibly
lush- and the water was a suitably murky-brown that got churned into frothy white around the rapids... and when we went through those... It's one thing to do so on a kayak, and another entirely to chance rapids on a sketchy-ass raft that is already half-submerged and propelled by a chuckling guide whose greatest wish is probably to "accidentally' tip the raft and make a group of deep-fried foreigners eat river water.
But the best part about the rafting was the reactions of our fellow companions. Rich was one of the pole-men, and he was inept. I mean, fucking incompetent. I did not begrudge him this at all, as I would likely have done as poorly in his place. But Rich was utterly confused, wondering aloud what he should do with his pole, and gasping every time a branch hit him. Claas was also a pole-man, and he was game; tidily efficient in a very German way- a quick study. The three Princess Jasmine clones were hilarious. They were completely unprepared for getting drenched, and were just so... inappropriately dainty. They screeched and howled in a manner that was horrified in both a genuine and exaggerated way. The two native pole-men had great fun with them, drenching them with sprays of water by slamming their poles into the water next to them.
Well, I'm off. Also, my pee has regenerative qualities. The camera works again. Why? Who understands the ways of technology? The Machine works in mysterious ways.
Yesterday, Amber and I went on a tour of the Chiang Mai countryside. It was a well-travelled tourist route, with a conspicuously touristy itinerary. For those of you who plan on doing South East Asia in the future, some advice:
1) If you want a more "local trek experience", without all the touristy bells and whistles, go up to Pai or Chiang Rai (Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai are different places... it is not a typo.)
2) Having a larger tour group on a well-travelled route minimizes your chances of getting robbed while on the trek.
Our group was seven strong: me, Amber, a prematurely-balding German from Stuttgart with the very German name of Claas Wiesel, three Indian Brits named Risha, Aisha, and Narisha who were utter carbon copies of each other, down to their 'Bend It Like Beckham" accents, braids, and flighty teenage mannerisms, and Rich, a Filipino-American from New York whose very un-New York sunny disposition was most likely due to the fact that he was gay as a basket of strawberries.
Our tour guide was a flat-nosed man named Noi who reminded me uncannily of Zhu Bajie from the Chinese epic Journey to the West. For you white people, this means he looked like a walking pig. He spoke fair English and on numerous occasions, displayed a wit that surprised me.
We did two cool things on the trek.
1) We rode elephants. Elephants are fabulous creatures. In a certain way, they are almost cute, slow, plodding, dum-dee-dum-dee-dum animals. Very Jamaican in their mannerisms- they seem to be on permanent island-time. They eat constantly and methodically, and shit with the same casual ease and regularity. Each elephant had a platform strapped across its back, which sat two people. The handler, or mahout, sat atop the elephant's head with a sharp prong that he used to indicate direction to the beast, while making incomprehensible monosyllabic grunts which presumably meant "Go!" or "Mush!"
We named our elephant Tinker Bell, and the name was strangely fitting. I'm not sure why. Elephants are strangely sure-footed, and have their own practical grace- their hind feet always tread in the spots made by their front feet. The Thais have used elephants for centuries as transports, symbols of their culture, and as instruments of war. When you sit on top of an elephant, you understand why. I mean, really. These boys can flatten trees. I'd totally go to war on one of these guys- although ideally, I wouldn't go to war at all.
2) We went bamboo rafting down rapids. This is sketchier than it sounds, and yet, not all that unsafe. Bamboo rafts are pretty self explanatory. About 10 \ stout 20-ft long poles are lashed together. Two sit in the middle, and two others, each with a long pole for propelling and guiding the craft, stand on either end. The craft goes with the current downstream, so the poles are mainly used to prevent the raft from hitting rocks and going into overly large swells. We had two rafts. Amber and I in the middle of one, with Rich poling at the back and a native at the front. The second raft had the three
Indian Brits in the middle, and Claas ze German at ze back, and ze native at ze front.
We had no life jackets. When I realized this, I sketched mildly. I know a tree-planter who drowned in Prince George when he went canoeing without a jacket. But, what the fuck ever... we ain't come this far, right?
Best decision ever. I have never had that much fun- well, that's an exaggeration, but it was a riot. The raft floated half-underwater, and the swells from the rapids simply blanketed us after a while, so we were completely drenched. On top of that, after a little bit, the sky gave up a torrential downpour. The river was lined with verdant greenery- incredibly
lush- and the water was a suitably murky-brown that got churned into frothy white around the rapids... and when we went through those... It's one thing to do so on a kayak, and another entirely to chance rapids on a sketchy-ass raft that is already half-submerged and propelled by a chuckling guide whose greatest wish is probably to "accidentally' tip the raft and make a group of deep-fried foreigners eat river water.
But the best part about the rafting was the reactions of our fellow companions. Rich was one of the pole-men, and he was inept. I mean, fucking incompetent. I did not begrudge him this at all, as I would likely have done as poorly in his place. But Rich was utterly confused, wondering aloud what he should do with his pole, and gasping every time a branch hit him. Claas was also a pole-man, and he was game; tidily efficient in a very German way- a quick study. The three Princess Jasmine clones were hilarious. They were completely unprepared for getting drenched, and were just so... inappropriately dainty. They screeched and howled in a manner that was horrified in both a genuine and exaggerated way. The two native pole-men had great fun with them, drenching them with sprays of water by slamming their poles into the water next to them.
Well, I'm off. Also, my pee has regenerative qualities. The camera works again. Why? Who understands the ways of technology? The Machine works in mysterious ways.
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Indochina 2006: Hum Lai! Hum Lai!
Yesterday, I dropped our $300 camera into a toilet bowl of my own urine. It no longer works.
In the aftermath of the incident, I felt like tearing my shirt off, clawing my eyes out, or doing SOMETHING to tangibly express how furiously befuddled I was that I had ruined our camera by dropping it into a urinal. I cursed God and I cursed myself- then I cursed God again. If I wasn’t already bald, I would have torn part of my hairline out. In the end, I settled for being a complete grump to Amber, and fell asleep thinking about how I’m going to get the money to pay rent when I get back to Canada.
The sheer combination of factors that had to take place in order to allow me to drown our camera in piss is almost proof of the existence of God. I had a backpack over my shoulder. One armed. It had the camera and some toilet paper near the top. I did my business, washed my hands, and decided to blow my nose. I reached around for the toilet paper. It wasn’t there. I rummaged further… and as I did so, my body twisted and angled around so that the mouth of the pack dangled above the open bowl.
As the camera dislodged and plunged in ultra-painfully-slow-motion towards the toilet, all I could do, in the immortal words of Turk in Snatch, was “freeze, and pull a stupid face”.
This would never happen in Canada. First, I would have had toilet paper readily available by the side of the cubicle. But in Thailand, you are your own TP supply. Second, normally, the camera is in my pocket. It was only in the backpack because we had been riding the most ghetto penny-farthing bikes around ancient Khmer and Thai temple ruins all day, and I didn’t want the camera to fall out. Thirdly, in Canada, I would not have needed to blow my nose, because in Canada, the particles in the air and water don’t give me the nose-ticklies.
Instead, I must now buy a new $300 camera, and I will never take another piss without becoming unreasonably angry.
So, I will now describe some cool stuff I saw.
1) Bangkok sucks. The Thais call Bangkok “Krung Thep”, which means “City of Angels”. However, unless “Angels” is actually spelt “P-O-L-L-U-T-I-O-N”, the moniker is highly unaccurate. The heat and humidity is oppressive. Tyrannic, even. Reign-of-motherfucking-terror-concentration-camp-tyrannic. It suffocates you like an iron maiden; it bathes your face, your body, crawls up into your clothing and down your lungs where it bitch-slaps your alveoli. The pollution is Agent Orange-lethal. Mexico-City-lethal. Huge caterpillar lines of belching automobiles snake down every street- going NOWHERE fast-
you don’t understand traffic jams untill you have witnessed what I have. On the other hand, it costs me less than a buck to take transit, so why do I care that when the ice caps finally melt due to global warming, they should name some of the floods and typhoons that resullt after the Thais?
2) Ong Bak Reloaded. FUCK. I thought Italian was an irritating language. Thai. I don’t even now how to respond to it. TIM HUCK WANG CHA LONG GO PIM PO LAM WHAT THE FUCK EVER in the most nasal, yet high-pitched fairy-drone you can conceive of. You know that bitch in Ong Bak that screeches “HUM LAI! HUM LAI!” Yeah. Multiply her by 60 million.
HUM LAI! HUM LAI!
3) The Grand Palace and Ayuthaya. Okay, the Grand Palace compound in Bangkok is a straight-up wonder of the world. When I was in Europe, I thought their churches could not POSSIBLY be surpassed. But no. This race of screeching jungle moneys wrote the book on how to decorate houses of worship. The temples are topped by these soaring spires that mimic the coronets worn by their kings and royalty and decorated with patterns of porcelain, gold, and coloured stone that from afar, they look like shattered rainbows poured into the mold of a spire. Flowers, flames, horned ridges, dragon heads, garudas garlanded each spire, and I saw about 20. In one of the temples, the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, a two-ft Buddha made
of jasper sat robed in cloth of diamonds and gold surrounded by a dais so encrusted with gold that in the dark lighting of the temple, the sunlight bouncing off the gold looked like fires in a cave.
Oh. They also change the Buddha’s clothing. He was wearing his summer outfit. They have two other gold-and-diamond wardrobes for him, one for the rainy season, and the last for the winter season. Jesus only gets to hang nearly-naked from two planks of wood in the shape of a plus sign. Who’s getting gyped here?
Ayuthaya is the former capital of the Thais, before the City of Carbon Monoxide became it. This is because two centuries ago, the Burmese came down like a plague and flattened it. Now, around the ruins, a typically filthy Thai city has grown up around it. But the temples remain as a testament that at one point, the Thai people were useful. The gold and ivory has been looted, and many of the Buddha statues no longer have heads. Foliage grows out of the cracks of these imposing brick-red ruins of minarets and temples. Birds nest in the cracks of the walls, and pilgrims still come by to lay offerings to the half-broken remnants of the Buddha statues. We got around Ayuthaya by bike, and I can honestly say that if I had not filled the camera with piss at the end of the day, it would have been one of the most surreal and satisfying days of my life.
Now I am in Chiang Mai, the city of Bookstores. It is not even 12 am and I have seen 5 English language bookstores. Tonight I will go to a bazaar and see if the Thais can bargain any better than the Turks or if my Asian genes will triumph once again in finding sweet bargains.
In the aftermath of the incident, I felt like tearing my shirt off, clawing my eyes out, or doing SOMETHING to tangibly express how furiously befuddled I was that I had ruined our camera by dropping it into a urinal. I cursed God and I cursed myself- then I cursed God again. If I wasn’t already bald, I would have torn part of my hairline out. In the end, I settled for being a complete grump to Amber, and fell asleep thinking about how I’m going to get the money to pay rent when I get back to Canada.
The sheer combination of factors that had to take place in order to allow me to drown our camera in piss is almost proof of the existence of God. I had a backpack over my shoulder. One armed. It had the camera and some toilet paper near the top. I did my business, washed my hands, and decided to blow my nose. I reached around for the toilet paper. It wasn’t there. I rummaged further… and as I did so, my body twisted and angled around so that the mouth of the pack dangled above the open bowl.
As the camera dislodged and plunged in ultra-painfully-slow-motion towards the toilet, all I could do, in the immortal words of Turk in Snatch, was “freeze, and pull a stupid face”.
This would never happen in Canada. First, I would have had toilet paper readily available by the side of the cubicle. But in Thailand, you are your own TP supply. Second, normally, the camera is in my pocket. It was only in the backpack because we had been riding the most ghetto penny-farthing bikes around ancient Khmer and Thai temple ruins all day, and I didn’t want the camera to fall out. Thirdly, in Canada, I would not have needed to blow my nose, because in Canada, the particles in the air and water don’t give me the nose-ticklies.
Instead, I must now buy a new $300 camera, and I will never take another piss without becoming unreasonably angry.
So, I will now describe some cool stuff I saw.
1) Bangkok sucks. The Thais call Bangkok “Krung Thep”, which means “City of Angels”. However, unless “Angels” is actually spelt “P-O-L-L-U-T-I-O-N”, the moniker is highly unaccurate. The heat and humidity is oppressive. Tyrannic, even. Reign-of-motherfucking-terror-concentration-camp-tyrannic. It suffocates you like an iron maiden; it bathes your face, your body, crawls up into your clothing and down your lungs where it bitch-slaps your alveoli. The pollution is Agent Orange-lethal. Mexico-City-lethal. Huge caterpillar lines of belching automobiles snake down every street- going NOWHERE fast-
you don’t understand traffic jams untill you have witnessed what I have. On the other hand, it costs me less than a buck to take transit, so why do I care that when the ice caps finally melt due to global warming, they should name some of the floods and typhoons that resullt after the Thais?
2) Ong Bak Reloaded. FUCK. I thought Italian was an irritating language. Thai. I don’t even now how to respond to it. TIM HUCK WANG CHA LONG GO PIM PO LAM WHAT THE FUCK EVER in the most nasal, yet high-pitched fairy-drone you can conceive of. You know that bitch in Ong Bak that screeches “HUM LAI! HUM LAI!” Yeah. Multiply her by 60 million.
HUM LAI! HUM LAI!
3) The Grand Palace and Ayuthaya. Okay, the Grand Palace compound in Bangkok is a straight-up wonder of the world. When I was in Europe, I thought their churches could not POSSIBLY be surpassed. But no. This race of screeching jungle moneys wrote the book on how to decorate houses of worship. The temples are topped by these soaring spires that mimic the coronets worn by their kings and royalty and decorated with patterns of porcelain, gold, and coloured stone that from afar, they look like shattered rainbows poured into the mold of a spire. Flowers, flames, horned ridges, dragon heads, garudas garlanded each spire, and I saw about 20. In one of the temples, the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, a two-ft Buddha made
of jasper sat robed in cloth of diamonds and gold surrounded by a dais so encrusted with gold that in the dark lighting of the temple, the sunlight bouncing off the gold looked like fires in a cave.
Oh. They also change the Buddha’s clothing. He was wearing his summer outfit. They have two other gold-and-diamond wardrobes for him, one for the rainy season, and the last for the winter season. Jesus only gets to hang nearly-naked from two planks of wood in the shape of a plus sign. Who’s getting gyped here?
Ayuthaya is the former capital of the Thais, before the City of Carbon Monoxide became it. This is because two centuries ago, the Burmese came down like a plague and flattened it. Now, around the ruins, a typically filthy Thai city has grown up around it. But the temples remain as a testament that at one point, the Thai people were useful. The gold and ivory has been looted, and many of the Buddha statues no longer have heads. Foliage grows out of the cracks of these imposing brick-red ruins of minarets and temples. Birds nest in the cracks of the walls, and pilgrims still come by to lay offerings to the half-broken remnants of the Buddha statues. We got around Ayuthaya by bike, and I can honestly say that if I had not filled the camera with piss at the end of the day, it would have been one of the most surreal and satisfying days of my life.
Now I am in Chiang Mai, the city of Bookstores. It is not even 12 am and I have seen 5 English language bookstores. Tonight I will go to a bazaar and see if the Thais can bargain any better than the Turks or if my Asian genes will triumph once again in finding sweet bargains.
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Indochina 2006: Deep Fried Farang
I’ll save the funnies for a couple of days from now. Instead, I’m going to give you a, by my standards, lightly cynical account of the “dark side of travelling”.
Yesterday, I got cheated so badly that even now, the shame and anger I feel over the incident is nearly unfathomable.
Amber and I were walking over to the compund of the Grand Palace, a series of temples and buildings whose spires and roofs were encrusted with gold and mosaic tiles in such intricate and extravagant patterns as to defy belief. More on this another time.
A little gap toothed old lady accosted us on the way. She was dirty, squat as a marsupial, and vaguely reminded me of a side-show attraction- very dwarf-like in her appearance and as about aesthetically pleasing. She was feeding the pidgeons… hordes of emaciated, fluttering feathered vermin- not at all like our plump specimens. She literally threw packets of bird
seed at me, instructing me to feed the birds. A pair of equally grungy street rats accosted Amber and did the same.
Some of you know doubt know what is coming next.
We threw the seed, flinging whole packets into the the air, watching the birds fly up and down. I found it fun, and of course I felt that vaguely nagging alarm in the back of my head… the one that sticks like a thorn in
your mind… that uneasy feeling that something is out of the ordinary. But I did nothing. Humans are quick to react to what they know to be familiar and damned slow to react to the new- and this situation was so novel that I simply scattered bird seed in the most amused and unthinking way.
Afterward, the lady demanded money. I had expected this. She demanded 150 Thai baht. This is about 5 US dollars- maybe less. I did NOT know this at the time… I was unused to the exchange rate and thought it amounted to 50 cents or something… my North American mind simply could not comprehend the possibility that a beggar could have the sheer audacity to demand 5 US bucks for throwing bird seed at tourists.
She saw I had 500 baht in my hand, snatched it, and told me she had change. She gave my 20 baht in return and said smugly: ” Now, you go.”
This is where my brain clicked, and in a slow, almost casual way, my brain said: “You witless son of a whore. You just got swindled by a beggar so low on the social hierarchy that you would not allow her to haul away your garbage.”
I started to bellow at her, demanding my money back. She backpeddled, giving me more and more change back, until she had given me a bunch of smaller notes back that amounted to 220 baht. But my 500 baht note was still in her hand, and I did not have the presence of mind to grab it out of her palm. I was so befuddled and shell-shocked by the entire proceedings that I could not think straight, and was happy- YES, HAPPY- to get out of the whole affair having lost 280 baht for NO REASON.
The worse part is that I retreated from her. Yes. I turned my back on a woman who had CHEATED ME and LEFT. If I told my father this, he would demand that I change my skin colour (probably by ripping it off with his own hands) and disown me. I’m not even sure why. Maybe it was because we were being hounded into utter submission by three filthy street people who kept
demanding MORE money from us. Maybe it was because I thought I had already been robbed, knew it, and decided to fold my cards while I could. Maybe I was afraid of being stabbed or clawed by someone with possible HIV. But I was accosted with an infantile scheme, lost money, and ran away.
Oh. I know a lot of you think I’m rather dreamy and am prone to getting gyped in things like this. Amber fell for it too. She lost 400 baht.
The thing about the 3rd world and the dark side of travelling is this. To the locals, you are a walking wallet. You can allow this to sully your experience of a new culture and locale, or you can deal with it as a simple byproduct of a free-market world where people like us own the machine and people like them turn the cogs. We have turned them into paupers, low wage labour, and souvenir shop owners, and then we come and take pictures of their monuments and dare to object when their climate is too hot or their beggars are too unsightly.
I am slowly getting used to the fact that “friendliness” in non OECD countries means that the people being “friendly” are trying to get your money- often in very unscrupulous ways. When I get back, I will detail the scams that businesses try to lay on you, without a HINT of shame or self-reproachment in their demeanor, just because you have a backpack and therefore are from places with money.
This is something you don’t read about in Lonely Planet travel guides, let me tell you. I hate the locals who constantly try to get me to ride their overpriced taxis. I hate the locals who try to sell me postcards and watches I don’t want or need. I hate the locals who show attention on me before crowds of their gawking peers in the hopes that they can force me to shell out some money to them by the sheer weight of insistence.
At the same time, I understand that by going to work at Moby Dick Fish and Chips, by having an IPod, and by taking this holiday, I have directly participated in a socioeconomic leviathan that has made it impossible for these people to live without trying to cheat me.
Now, I am going to eat some delicious Thai food. In two days, I will be in Chiang Mai, and you will get to hear about some of the mind-blowing shit that has thoroughly shattered my senses over the last few days.
Yesterday, I got cheated so badly that even now, the shame and anger I feel over the incident is nearly unfathomable.
Amber and I were walking over to the compund of the Grand Palace, a series of temples and buildings whose spires and roofs were encrusted with gold and mosaic tiles in such intricate and extravagant patterns as to defy belief. More on this another time.
A little gap toothed old lady accosted us on the way. She was dirty, squat as a marsupial, and vaguely reminded me of a side-show attraction- very dwarf-like in her appearance and as about aesthetically pleasing. She was feeding the pidgeons… hordes of emaciated, fluttering feathered vermin- not at all like our plump specimens. She literally threw packets of bird
seed at me, instructing me to feed the birds. A pair of equally grungy street rats accosted Amber and did the same.
Some of you know doubt know what is coming next.
We threw the seed, flinging whole packets into the the air, watching the birds fly up and down. I found it fun, and of course I felt that vaguely nagging alarm in the back of my head… the one that sticks like a thorn in
your mind… that uneasy feeling that something is out of the ordinary. But I did nothing. Humans are quick to react to what they know to be familiar and damned slow to react to the new- and this situation was so novel that I simply scattered bird seed in the most amused and unthinking way.
Afterward, the lady demanded money. I had expected this. She demanded 150 Thai baht. This is about 5 US dollars- maybe less. I did NOT know this at the time… I was unused to the exchange rate and thought it amounted to 50 cents or something… my North American mind simply could not comprehend the possibility that a beggar could have the sheer audacity to demand 5 US bucks for throwing bird seed at tourists.
She saw I had 500 baht in my hand, snatched it, and told me she had change. She gave my 20 baht in return and said smugly: ” Now, you go.”
This is where my brain clicked, and in a slow, almost casual way, my brain said: “You witless son of a whore. You just got swindled by a beggar so low on the social hierarchy that you would not allow her to haul away your garbage.”
I started to bellow at her, demanding my money back. She backpeddled, giving me more and more change back, until she had given me a bunch of smaller notes back that amounted to 220 baht. But my 500 baht note was still in her hand, and I did not have the presence of mind to grab it out of her palm. I was so befuddled and shell-shocked by the entire proceedings that I could not think straight, and was happy- YES, HAPPY- to get out of the whole affair having lost 280 baht for NO REASON.
The worse part is that I retreated from her. Yes. I turned my back on a woman who had CHEATED ME and LEFT. If I told my father this, he would demand that I change my skin colour (probably by ripping it off with his own hands) and disown me. I’m not even sure why. Maybe it was because we were being hounded into utter submission by three filthy street people who kept
demanding MORE money from us. Maybe it was because I thought I had already been robbed, knew it, and decided to fold my cards while I could. Maybe I was afraid of being stabbed or clawed by someone with possible HIV. But I was accosted with an infantile scheme, lost money, and ran away.
Oh. I know a lot of you think I’m rather dreamy and am prone to getting gyped in things like this. Amber fell for it too. She lost 400 baht.
The thing about the 3rd world and the dark side of travelling is this. To the locals, you are a walking wallet. You can allow this to sully your experience of a new culture and locale, or you can deal with it as a simple byproduct of a free-market world where people like us own the machine and people like them turn the cogs. We have turned them into paupers, low wage labour, and souvenir shop owners, and then we come and take pictures of their monuments and dare to object when their climate is too hot or their beggars are too unsightly.
I am slowly getting used to the fact that “friendliness” in non OECD countries means that the people being “friendly” are trying to get your money- often in very unscrupulous ways. When I get back, I will detail the scams that businesses try to lay on you, without a HINT of shame or self-reproachment in their demeanor, just because you have a backpack and therefore are from places with money.
This is something you don’t read about in Lonely Planet travel guides, let me tell you. I hate the locals who constantly try to get me to ride their overpriced taxis. I hate the locals who try to sell me postcards and watches I don’t want or need. I hate the locals who show attention on me before crowds of their gawking peers in the hopes that they can force me to shell out some money to them by the sheer weight of insistence.
At the same time, I understand that by going to work at Moby Dick Fish and Chips, by having an IPod, and by taking this holiday, I have directly participated in a socioeconomic leviathan that has made it impossible for these people to live without trying to cheat me.
Now, I am going to eat some delicious Thai food. In two days, I will be in Chiang Mai, and you will get to hear about some of the mind-blowing shit that has thoroughly shattered my senses over the last few days.
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