mountain fun

Clean Food Good Tast

ACTUALLY, I am going to forfeit my ticket and take the best job I could hope for at a great school. I will be helping a Thai teacher do a grade 2 class, age 7-8. Lots of mask making and pretending to be animals. SO! I can stay in Chiang Mai , I can go to Critical Mass on the 28th, I can go to another Sunday walking street and eat  fried things at the temple, I can train to cycle up Doi Suthep, 13 km  no problem. Come visit me sometime  eh?

You will be denied boarding once gate closes

So I'm off now, taking an airplane, not a 40 hour bus journey, way way down south almost to the Malaysian border - no fighting, trouble not - to Songkhla province to the rubber factory transport hub of Hat Yai. What awaits me there? Buildings, roads, Chinese food, Malaysian tourists, not a lot of falang folk to Starbucks up the place. I have a job at the International School of Hat Yai, starting Tuesday.
woo!
Pumpkins are in season, the tastiest vegetable on this earth. Raw chocolate cake and veg soup tomorrow night at Giant Guesthouse, all us mucky hippy intellectual types will be scarfing down the deliciousness in the communal kitchen after a Doi Suthep wonder tour.

Nature Will Bitch You Up

After recess, the naughty nine-year olds were all like, "teacher, teacher!" and pointing at the table. A big, black, shiny, round, hairy, spike-leggedy beetle, with big chompy jaws. Poor creature, I thought, trapped inside horrid human classroom. So I let this huge bastard climb onto my hand, which it gripped with disproportionate strength. I whisked it away downstairs to the garden by the parking lot, tailed by two of the boys from class. I'll just let it down gently in the shrubbery, I thought kindly, but when I tried to pluck it off my hand, it HISSED AT ME. I have never heard myself scream like that, a wail of sheer terror, thinking this monster tightening its grip around my wrist was going to sever it, and I'm screaming and it's hissing and the boys are pointing and laughing at me, and I must regain my teacherly composure, so I coaxed it off with a dry leaf on the ground, each of its barbed legs unfastening themselves from my skin.

I found out later that they do not spit poison and kill, but they will pinch you like crabs do.

Big Flood Time

I am eating nice hot and sour coconut soup with chicken, noodles, a bit of boiled egg, and a disc of vegetable that is similar but nothing like potato. There is a hideous soap opera on TV behind me.

I have just said goodbye to a new and most excellent friend, esteemed musician, cardplayer and adventurer, Mr Nick Rocco. I think that's his name.

I will tell you of my day, from the very beginning. There are four things.

1. 4am, I am woken up, as I am every night, by the temple bell and the howling dogs. Someone is playing music that sounds like Cat Power, but just voice. Somehwere, a machine is on that sounds like a snoring basoon. It's raining. It's a good little soundscape, but I wish it was cool enough to close the balcony door.

2. 7am, it's still raining. I put on my plastic rain mac from 7-11 over my office clothes, and cycle to an interview at the Chiang Mai University Language Institute. BUT! What is this? Upon turning off the busy Huay Kaew road onto Sirimankalajarn, I am landed in six inches of water, which gets deeper as I go further along the street. I have never seen such a puddle. Every car is splashing me on my right, and my knuckles are white from fear of falling into one of the many potholes camoflagued under the brown water. I got really wet yeh. The interview was fine, and they're going to call me before December.
2.5. Later, after a sneaky full English breakfast, I comply with a sixteen-year-old Thai girl's approved request to have a lesson on how to flirt with foreign boys - I draw on my vast well of experience here: "So what do you think about you and me?" "Hi cutie." "You're so handsome." "I like your hair/ clothes/ music." Still, despite my efforts, she is concentrating on her phone and the clock on the wall.

3. I meet with Nick and Michael and Panisa, we have lunch and talk about when rascist jokes are appropriate and 80's teen movies. Then, then, Nick and I walk and walk, past the cabaret costume shop to the northwest corner of Old Town,  to this crazy Narnia building covered in white stone sculptures of lions, gorillas, and Greek boy gods, totally abandoned, half built and deteriorating. We walk up three flights of hazardous stairs, peeking in tiny empty rooms with floor to ceiling stained glass windows, until we get to the very top and out onto a big balcony, all of Chiang Mai presented to us. We poke around a little wooden house, empty but for a stool and two big knives. A woman starts following us around, pretending to sweep the concrete. Okay, sorry, we go now.

4. We want coffee, dammit, where can we get something like that in this town? Isn't it a Wednesday? In the middle of the afternoon? Where's the service? The service is currently under five feet of dirty water, sorry, closed today. And the next day. And most of the weekend. We hitch up our shorts and wade through. Thai people are stil smiling, heaving water with buckets from behind sandbanks, taking pictures of each other. Someone released a dam that was looking ready to burst, so rather than mess up the entire province, they just ruined a few homes and businesses by the river. Sabai sabai. It's pretty much okay now.