Every week is full of blogable moments.  I think every life is, too.  But sometimes we don’t recognize what the blogable moments are.  They aren’t generally things like “I ate a Big Mac and then went to the store to buy nail polish” although there are occasions when those moments are blogable.  The best blogable moments are the ones that provoke reflection, even just briefly.  It is within those moments of reflection that we can glimpse who we are inside, seeing our essence.

It is within those moments of reflection that we discover that our essence really isn’t any different from the essence of anyone else: we all want the same things and emanate the same feelings, just in different packaging.  Sure, our insecurities and ignorance can lead to coating ourselves in vitriol or banality, but that doesn’t change the commonality among each of us.

(philosophy lesson over)

Sunday morning Markus and I saddled up again for another ride, starting at the early hour of 6:30.  We drove north on the tollway past the old Don Meaung Airport, Rangsit Mall, and Thammasat University Rangsit campus, and wound up in a country road along some khlong, a stone’s throw away from a mega-wat that is similar (and similarly controversial) to the “Mega-Churches” you see sprouting in mid-American suburbs. 

Left: Markus in front of the now-closed Museum of Agriculture opened for His Majesty’s 50th Anniversary on the Throne, ten years ago.

The campus of this wat is a huge construction zone the results of which will be something akin to a convention center cum meditation retreat cum amusement park.  Size?  I’m not kidding when I tell you the main building appears to be about four times the footprint of Moscone Center in San Francisco.  It is really, really large.

Instead of trying to find a place to park at the mega-wat, we crossed the road to a hugely modest wat that has just a single ordination hall which appears to be in a half-finished state.  Or maybe it is in the midst of one of those never-ending remodels?  Preparations were underway by a group of university students for some event, with food being chopped, peeled, sliced and diced.  After confirming that it was okay to park there while we rode (I have yet to have someone at a wat say it isn’t okay) we started riding up the small road that parallels the khlong. 

Not too far away we came across a tiny village – two dozen houses – that were setting up a large tent across the road and arranging tables and chairs.  Already a speaker system was pumping out the popular Issan tunes (think country and western by way of Northeast Thailand) and the village drunk, reeking of cheap beer well before eight in the morning, stopped us to ask where we were going.

Which was a bit of a challenge to my Thai because I didn’t know quite how to explain that we weren’t particularly going anywhere.  We were just going.  Finally, I said, “bai, ma, bai, ma.”  (Roughly, there and back, there and back) and thanked him as we continued on.

We passed one community after another, this one Buddhist, that one Muslim.  Friendly people smiled, some saying hello and others waiting until we said sawatdii khrap first before responding in kind.  Traffic was light, rice paddies were green, and the weather was blissfully cool.

Above: The Thai version of “Field of Dreams”

Straying from the paved road we took what looked to be a disused road, the pavement of which became increasingly deteriorated until it gave out altogether and we found ourselves in a cul-de-sac of fields and nothing more than intuition and the sun’s location to give us an idea of where to continue.  In the distance, a slow moving tractor was coming towards us, inching along the edge of a rather stagnant-looking body of water.

Figuring that at this early hour he must be coming from somewhere civilized rather than going to it – especially since there was little civilization the direction we had pedaled from – we decided to follow his tracks in reverse.  Eventually we found another road and made our way back to the wat.

Right: A local tractor – definitely front-wheel drive!  Notice the umbrella over the driver that can be opened to keep the sun off him.  No risk of it being blown away as this baby zips down the road!

On the way home at a tollbooth just one exit away from our destination, a police officer pulled me over and explained in really broken English that we weren’t allowed to carry bicycles on a rack on a car on the tollway.  I started out following widely-held expat advice that you shouldn’t let on to whether or not (or how much) Thai you can speak, but our communication was so broken-down that I finally started speaking some Thai while Markus called Tawn on the phone.

Tawn spoke with the officer for about five minutes and by the end of it, it was clear the officer had been solidly beaten down.  Tawn’s argument, while acknowledging that the law is the law and we are subject to it whether or not we know what the law is, is that we had already been traveling on the tollway and had gone through multiple toll gates.  At any one of those, the toll booth workers should have refused admission if we were driving an unsafe vehicle.  By allowing us to enter or proceed, Tawn argued, they had given tacit approval.

Another officer, this one a little more fluent in English, came over and talked with us.  He was very friendly but explained that a bicycle rack was dangerous (but the incredibly overloaded pickup trucks and trucks with passengers sitting loose in the cargo area are, apparently, not dangerous).  I explained (er, lied) that we had asked a police officer from the Lumpini station and he had told us the rack was safe.

In either case, we were let off with a warning, no bribe paid, as we promised to take the very next exit and get off the expressway.  Which, fortunately, was the exit we wanted to take anyhow.

So I now have two incursions with the police under my belt and no bribes paid so far.

Thursday evening Ron and Kari joined us for dinner on their final night in Thailand before heading back to the United States.  A very interesting couple whom I never would have expected that we’d become friends with, which just proves why one needs to be open minded and not categorize people when you first meet them.  Let me explain:

Shortly after arriving in Thailand I started classes at Union Language School, operated by the Church of Christ in Thailand for the purpose of training missionaries from overseas in the Thai language.  The school is very reputable but I anticipated that most of the students, being evangelical Christians, would not be be very supportive of me as a gay person.

Sure enough, there were a few occasions when in the course of discussion (the common question being, “what brings you to Thailand?”) I would answer that I was here in Thailand to live with my partner.  The response to which would be, “oh, your business partner?” 

When I clarified that misunderstanding the response would be a bit of an uncertain “oh…” followed by something between avoidance and polite distance for the remainder of the term.

So when Kari and I met in class and went through that exchange, I was pleasantly surprised when she continued to talk with me and to ask questions about Tawn over the following days.  Likewise, her husband Ron was very open as well and when they met Tawn at a class get-together at an Italian restaurant, Ron suggested that we should socialize, which we subsequently have many times.

There are many people I know who are very prejudiced against religious people, especially Christians.  Sometimes I hear some really extreme statements made about them that paints them with the same wide brush with which some fundamentalists tar the gay community.  It strikes me that this “big brush” approach to defining people just results in us not getting to know people as individuals, meaning we miss out on many interesting and valuable relationships, as well as missing out on getting know know and understand the different viewpoints and opinions that people hold and what informs those opinions.

Prejudices on both sides can only be broken down as we have the opportunity to dispel misconceptions, which only happens when we can see the human side of things; when we can see the human beings.

Ron and Kari have been up in Ayutthaya doing missionary work and are now heading back to the United States in preparation of a new assignment in Nairobi, Kenya.  Kari has previously worked in Africa and really looks forward to going back.  They’ll be there in about six months for at least three years, so I think Tawn and I will be looking at taking a trip there to visit at some point.

Above: The beautiful Alpine town of Lugano, Switzerland.  Nikolaus, an airliners.net friend, mentioned that his friend is moving to Lugano.  I didn’t know where it was so googled it and found the tourism authority website that had this beautiful picture.  It reminds me a bit of Lago Como (Lake Como) in northern Italy.  Add that to the list of places to visit.  Question: do you actually keep a list of places where you want to visit, or is it just a list in your head?

Last night Tawn, Tod and I joined Markus and Tam for dinner at their place.  Markus prepared some wonderful German food including the German version of egg drop soup, spaetzle with lentils and sausage, and quark (a type of soft unripened cheese with the texture and flavor of sour cream) with strawberries.  Frankly, I ate too much of the cheese and crackers beforehand and was stuffed after the soup was served.  But since I didn’t want to miss out on this culinary adventure I went ahead and had small servings of the other items. 

Delicious but I have really got to pay more attention to when I’m eating, the habit I have of just nibbling away on things without regards to whether I’m really hungry.  Most of the time I’m conscious of it, but especially when I’m in a social setting I’ll just keep nibbling and nibbling and before you know it, I’m really stuffed.  Yuck.

Interesting read: Tae (aka Sagicaprio) just turned thirty-two and wrote a very profound and insightful entry to his blog on that occasion.  Read his January 4th post here.

Back in, what was it, late October my Seagate external hard drive crashed and I lost all of the pictures I had taken in my first year of living in Thailand.  Other than the ones loaded to this blog and a few others on Shutterfly, my photo memories had evaporated.

After several people helpfully provided suggestions of where to go to attempt recovery, I sent the drive home to Indiana with my parents and they forwarded it to Data Recovery Corporation.

Today I received an email from them explaining that there has been extensive physical damage to the hard drive itself and the read/write head.  The quote to attempt data extraction, with no guarantees of success: $1239.

Ouch.

Before I sent the drive, I set myself a maximum budget of $400 to pay for the data figuring that was about what the memories were worth to me.  While I’d really like to have those pictures back, $1200 is too much to pay just for a chance.  Besides, I still have the writings on the blog and that will have to suffice.

Sadly, though, I had planned to take the pictures and some of the blog entries and create a bound album as a gift for family members.  When the drive crashed I had only completed the first three months of the project.  It looks like it will not be a completed project after all.

So the question is, how much would you pay for your memories?

First, I’m excited that we received our first picture of Anne Marie and Brad’s new daughter, Harper Kathleen.  The picture has older sister Sydney Claire holding her baby sister. 

Anne Marie’s explanation for her early delivery (about a month) is that Sydney just kept pleading with the baby, “Please come out baby!” and she finally obliged.

Tawn and I are excited to be going to the Bay Area in March and have a chance to visit the newest addition to their family.

Yesterday was a special “integrated learning” day at Bangkhonthiinai.  Which means that the children spent most of the day working on a project where they helped prepare the lunch, learned about food, nutrition, math and science along the way, and then ate the lunch and had a follow-up lesson around the things they learned.  Somewhere in all that, English was supposed to be integrated but that didn’t end up happening.

Left: Ajarn Yai, the director, and Tod watching the mayhem… ahem, learning activity.

Right: Khruu Somchai, he of the frequent use of amplified voice, taught the children in the food room.

The menu was giiaw (wontons) with moo daeng (Chinese-style barbeque pork) and vegetables.  The children helped prepare the wontons then helped cook them.  Which means that there were a whole mess of children standing in the kitchen right next to a wok of boiling broth.  Of course there was the usual messing around, shoving and jostling that one expects with young children. 

I had visions of a scene I witnessed at a fresh market near Jatujak Market where a wok of boiling oil had been knocked over from its tripod base and spilled all over a man.  People were racing around pouring water on him to cool off what looked to be second- or third-degree burns over most of his torso.  Someone got a car and they hustled him in with more bottles of water to cool him off, driving to the nearest hospital. 

Thankfully nothing dramatic happened in the kitchen yesterday, but I couldn’t quite relieve myself from thoughts of how this type of learning would never be allowed in the litigation littered United States.  Small children next to boiling woks?  Never!

Left: The dining hall where students sit patiently, hungrily, bored as they wait for their food.

Other students were in charge of cutting the pork (they didn’t barbeque it themselves) and the preparing the vegetables.  Finally, some of the older girls put all the dishes together and the food was finally served. 

The food was tasty; the teachers were provided with a wider range of dishes to choose from as one cannot teach on wontons and red pork alone.

I served a loaf of homemade banana bread to the teachers, who said they enjoyed it although Thais will say that just to be nice so who knows what they really thought.  My opinion is that the center of the bread was just slightly undercooked; another minute or two in the oven would have firmed it up a bit.  But it was tasty, and I say that as someone who doesn’t particularly enjoy bananas.

The result of this integrated learning event was that I didn’t really get much teaching done.  Maybe 90 minutes in the morning and an hour in the afternoon, with the young children completely spaced out in the afternoon.  Finally, to induce some sort of activity, we played a game where we reviewed the different names of animals we know and then, when I called out the name of an animal, the students would pretend to be that animal.

What a disaster!  Even with the most benign of animals the young boys brought the Nature Channel’s best footage – fighting and procreation – to life as fish became predatory, lions got the kill, and koalas mated. 

Within just a few minutes, chaos ensued and most of the girls were standing off to the sidelines looking on with dismay at their male classmates.  So much for trying to bring learning to life!

Left: the children pretending to be elephants (note the arms/trunks) 

Two Saturdays from now is Children’s Day in Thailand.  The Friday before (the 12th) there will be some events at the school so next week Tod and I will swap our normal Wednesday teaching for Friday and go to the school to participate.

In the Buddhist calendar we just started the year 2550, a nice round number although I think 2552 will be even more interesting.  So the Buddhist calendar started 543 years before the Christian calendar.  Some think that Jesus was perhaps influenced by Buddhism and given the trade routes stretching across Asia to the Middle East it sounds plausible that people in that region would be aware of philosophies and religions from further east.

There is the joke about a young monk who is telling an older monk about the teachings of Jesus, to which the older monk replies, “He sounds like a good Buddhist.”

Certainly we’ve seen in the past forty-eight hours that even the veneer of Buddhism isn’t a vaccination against violence, as the death toll from the New Year’s Eve bombings reached three.  It seems inconceivable that we would experience that sort of violence here in a place where even with the worst traffic jams you never hear horns honked in anger, let alone shorts fired by road rage fueled drivers.

But maybe it is a bit naive to think that there is anywhere immune from the twisted acts of desperate and deranged people.

Well, here’s wishing for peace in 2550.

New Year’s Day Part 2

Today was a holiday in Thailand.  I hadn’t realized this beforehand and so when on Monday evening Tawn said he was going to sleep in on Tuesday I thought he was deciding to play hookey from work.  Not the case, though, as nearly everyone else in the Kingdom was doing the same thing.  Traffic was wonderfully light for a second day.

Getting back into the swing of things, I met Khruu Kitiya for Thai lessons.  We spent nearly the entire class in dictation and writing and after two hours my wrist was very tired and my brain was coming unglued.  It is very taught but rewarding when I can read something in Thai and actually understand it.  No time to rest on my laurels, though, as I have a serious amount of work remaining until I can really function effectively.  Need to reach at least a sixth grade level in speaking, reading and writing – and the goal is the end of 2550.

More Baking Adventures

Banana bread was my latest thing to tackle: three small loafs last night and a large loaf tonight to take to school tomorrow for the teachers.  If I understand Khruu Ajarn Yai correctly, tomorrow is a special activity day for the children: they will be learning to cook their food.  She wants me to teach the English terms for them along the way, so it will be a little unstructured.  Thankfully Tod is coming with me and Markus will join, too.

Stay tuned for what could be some mighty interesting coverage of Bangkhonthiinai tomorrow.

Final thoughts:

I think I need to moderate the use of my oven or else ensure that the things I bake are given to others.  There’s a lot of additional calories lurking about that I don’t need to be consuming.

Lots of people in town.  Paul is in from SF visiting Aori, his girlfriend.  Will, an acquaintance from United who is now living here part time, has returned from the holidays and would like to meet up with Tawn and me.  Bill and Kom will be back from Bali soon.  And Jak, a Thai a.netter who has been corresponding with me from time to time, is back in town from London.  So lots of people to see.  Oh, and dinner with Ron and Kari tomorrow as they count down their final days before leaving for the US and, ultimately, Africa for their new missionary assignment.