It’s been two weeks since I flew back into Bangkok and I probably should have made a few notes as it’s all becoming a bit of a blur.
It’s hard to put in to words my time here as one sunny day merges into another. I have had the honour to be completely immersed in Thai culture. I am the only westerner in the village, although I have seen three others in the nearby market town of Satuek. A Swede, an Aussie and a Dutch guy. They all live here or at least spend half the year here, so there are no tourists as such.
I have been welcomed with open arms by my friend’s family and been invited to numerous events. My friend’s house is rather dilapidated as it has been empty for quite a few years. So now has been a good time to help put it to rights a bit. I rewired quite a lot of it, installing additional sockets and light fixtures. There is an air conditioning unit I might tackle as well, but I’m quite happy with just the fan when needed. I’m apparently now regarded as the village electrician. The work requests haven’t started pouring in yet, but who knows.
I also repaired the motorbike, which had been in a crash and wouldn’t start. It’s useful for tootling around the village and nearby places, especially where the roads are too narrow for the beast of a 4×4 we drove around Thailand in. I picked up a brand new fairing and headlights for around £14 from the Honda dealer! I had to borrow the tools from a relative, but luckily there are many of them nearby.
My friend is definitely a sucker for poor, abandoned animals and currently has 4 dogs, 5 cats and a cow. They all live outside, so it’s not really a problem and they seem to like sticky rice and whatever left overs are going. The cow is often kept supplied by farmers dropping off spare grass or other edibles on their way past. Apparently the black dog, normally barks at newcomers and will often bite them. Fortunately she wags her tail madly at me and follows me down the street. The house is partly open in the kitchen. The wall at the back doesn’t go up to the roof, so there is a great view. This isn’t unusual though as a lot of houses in the countryside are like this.
I went to the wedding of my friends son on a couple of weeks ago. It started very early, I think we were there before 9 am. Many of the attendees had already met me at the funeral a few weeks back, but there were many more who had never met me and as the only westerner I certainly stood out and received a lot of attention.
Indeed I came second only to the bride and groom in the having bits of string tied around your wrist as a good luck blessing. I had a queue of people waiting and ended up with 17 string ‘bracelets’.
I was included in nearly all the photo’s and ceremony as the ‘+1’ of the mother of the groom. It was a bit embarrassing really to be so much in the centre of things. I even had to go on stage with the bride and groom and the parents and each of us made a short speech, me included! I said a few words in Thai and then the rest in English.
Wedding traditions are vastly different here to europe. There was a large exchange of cash, which is effectively a dowry, but also the bride and groom have money tied to their wrists by the congregation as well as put in a silver bowl in front of them. One rich local had made some kind of money necklace for them with several thousand baht in each, which they wore. We in the west would have found it tacky and possibly even distasteful, but here they think nothing of it.
There was a very long 8 page chant by a monk and I was definitely getting sore sitting on the floor. Since renovating the house I can’t do that sort of thing for long anymore. As there is a lot of sitting on the floor cross legged over here, I find it uncomfortable at times. There were about a dozen of us in the room for the ceremony, while everyone else was outside at the tables tucking in to the food and booze while listening through the speakers. The music was a real show with 6 dancers and two singers. They changed outfits on numerous occasions and provided a real show. I was grabbed by various people to go up and dance on several occasions, which I did, much to the delight of the crowds.
I got chatting to one guy who lives in Bangkok, but did live in New Zealand for 4 years. His English was pretty good and it was great to chat to him. The beer flows at a prodigeous rate here. However your glass is always kept topped up with big chunks of ice. This not only dilutes the beer, but keeps you hydrated and means that you actually drink less than you think you have.
The food kept arriving in great quantities, with local fish, soups, rice, noodles and different meats vying for space on the table with the beer.
There often seems to be a big raffia type pot full of sticky rice nearby that you just dip your hand into, pull off a chunk and dip it into whatever sauce or dish takes your fancy.
Some of the dishes, even I haven’t asked what’s in them. They don’t always look very appetizing and you wonder what they are. From rodents to barbecued intestines on new years eve, I’ve seen it all. I do have to say though that by far the vast majority of dishes look good and are really delicious and healthy as well, although they can sometimes be a bit salty.
I remember from a previous wedding many years ago in Thailand, I was given the dubious honour of carrying the pigs head. Luckily there was not one in sight at this wedding. When I mentioned it my friend said that it is common at Thai/Khmer weddings, but this was Thai/Laos. I was at another wedding a few days later where there was a pigs head in attendance. Luckily I was far down the pecking order at this do and so avoided the ’honour’ of carrying it.
Apparently this whole part of Thailand is called Isan and consists of around 20 provinces, making it the largest area of the country. The people here are mostly ethnically Laotian, but are distinguished from the people of Laos and call themselves Thai Isan. There is a bit of a dialect here which, as I am learning Thai from a local, means some of the words I use would be a giveaway to Thai’s from elsewhere in the country. Perhaps I should give them a blast of Ch’ti. They also have their own drink that they call Isan ’whisky’. It is in fact a rice wine, similar to saki and not really all that strong, but quite nice.
When I was cooking one time I asked for some salt and was handed a largish chunk of rock. Literally a rock of salt. None of your namby-pamby rock salt from the supermarket. This I had to chip a few bits off with the blade of my cooks knife.
I’ve decided I prefer noodles to rice in general, but I am now on friendly terms with sticky rice, which I used to not care much for. I also like Laab as well, particularly Laab Moo a type of spicy pork salad. Moo actually means pork in thai. For your info Gai is chicken and Neua is beef. Chicken is dirt cheap here, you can buy 2 large chicken breasts for less than one euro.
Electrical wire is very cheap as well, at less than 50 pence a metre for 2.5mm twin solid core. ‘Not a lot of people know that’!
On another occasion I went to see some friends and family and made a great new friend called Pol. He decided that by the end of the day that I am his Bak xiao, ‘best buddy’. He lives in Bangkok with his family and makes and sells noodles to the restaurants and supermarkets.
I’ve no idea how you write or spell Bak xiao. That is my phonetic interpretation of the thai word. In fact my whole notebook of thai vocabulary would be useless to anyone else as it is entirely written in my phonetic interpretation of each word and phrase.
For example ‘hee oh nid noy’ means a little bit hungry. The phrase what are you doing? is pronounced ‘coun tam a rye u’ in my book. (The ou in coun is like the oo in book and the a is like a in apple. So there you have it. It seems to work as people understand me well enough. If you think you can do better here is the phrase in actual thai. คุณกำลังทำอะไรอยู่
I go off to the local market town on my own sometimes and there is a Tesco Lotus there, although it doesn’t have much that’s more western than anywhere else in my opinion. There are dozens of market stalls selling everything that I get lost wandering around in. I finally tracked down some knives as in cutlery type knives. Everywhere I tried, including major supermarkets have plenty of forks and spoons, but never any knives. I bought some durian fruit for my friend as it is her favourite. It stinks and is banned on most public transport, but it apparently tastes divine. I wasn’t that impressed, it’s ok, but has a weird after taste and certainly not worth the cost. It is the most expensive fruit in Thailand.
There are a lot of elephants in this region and one morning while making a cup of tea, I heard some noise coming from the road. Walking around to the front, I saw a procession of elephants walking by. There were quite a few all carrying people. I understand that it was for the ordination ceremony of a new monk.
If that’s the case there must be a lot of these ceremonies as the monks here are very numerous. For those of you that followed my old blogs, you might remember that I was impressed at seeing the monks doing all manner of things you don’t normally see monks in europe doing. I had the full set of seeing monks riding motorbikes, driving cars, splashing in rivers, driving a train etc etc. To this I can now add riding an elephant and even better I think, wedding photographer. The monks here clearly have jobs on the side!
I went to a local elephant village the other day, which was interesting, but in need of a good refurbishment. They could do a lot more with it and it looked like they’d spent no money on the infrastructure in many many years. Despite charging double the entry fee for foreigners, Grrr. they provided no translation of any of the descriptions or on the map.
I did meet one elephant who used to be the poster boy for Chang beer (Chang is thai for elephant) and various others. One of whom was over 80 years old.
I finish writing this update sitting on the train from Bangkok to Penang. I’ve decided to tootle down to Malaysia for a week or two, which I’m really excited about as I’ve never been before and Penang gai is one of my favourite curries! The journey will take 18 hours, but it’s a sleeper train so quite a lot will be through the night. In any case it’s a lot less than the 30 hour journey I had from New York to New Orleans. The only down side is that it is the same train as when I was last here in 2007 and it wasn’t new then. In other words no power sockets or any other modern touches.
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