Ohayo

I am in Japan now. Tokyo. Got here yesterday.
Thailand may have been boring, but Laos was torture.
Truth is, I barely enjoyed anything at all in southeast Asia.
I'll write all about it one of these days, but not right now.
Until I get better Internet access and some time for myself, this blog's on hiatus.

Being poor ain't all it's cracked up to be

I'm in Laos, after taking a bus from Chiang Mai via Khon Kaen. I'll tell you all about it, but now I'd like to take a break from reportage to share something that's bugged me for years. If you're not into all that philosophizin', skip to the photos.

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Of all the bullshit wisdom parroted by people who’ve traveled in Asia, the one that makes me want to shake them violently and slap them in the face until they start making sense is this desperately wishful idea: that the poor locals possess a superior attitude to life that makes them happier and more content than a (not poor) westerner. Strike the mystical gong. “They know what’s important. They have mastered the art of living. They’re free of our petty neuroses and material shackles. They take joy in simplicity. They don’t need the material things we have. They’re happy because they’re poor – not like us, always chasing the next rainbow yet never satisfied.”

Every time a destitute Asian cracks a smile, some westerner is convinced she saw the face of Buddha. In your country smiles are flukes; here they’re the face of oriental genius. It can’t be, of course, that these are normal humans with normal human pain using humor or positivity to deal with suffering, the way we do. Or that it happens to be a naturally sunny person, a single easygoing individual, apart from any grand collective philosophy. Or that it’s someone just having a good day. No, no, no. Their material situation is worse, so their spiritual one must be better. Because, y’know, the universe is balanced and fair.

This is the wishing away of hard truths, and such an insultingly easy mental leap: they’re poor, and have to work hard all day every day until they die, and will never enjoy a fraction of what I get to enjoy; but since large-scale misery does not exist, they must be very happy. In fact, since I have more than they do materially, let’s bestow upon them more than I have spiritually – let’s make them geniuses. (In the process, I will become a juvenile intellectual cliché and write off my own culture’s entire spiritual wealth as worthless.) I’m materially wealthy, but I can’t make them that – shit, I have only enough cash for this backpacking trip - so I’ll make them spiritually wealthy instead in order to make the world fair.

The world must be fair; that it is unfair is impossible. I will ignore the endless thousands of sad, tired, angry faces I see all around me here in Thailand or wherever. They don’t factor in. And I will ignore that they work from sunup to sundown. Who needs time for yourself when you’re already happy? And I will ignore the corruption and hustling and violence and drunkenness and hair-trigger-tempers behind the obviously fake smiles. Those are statistical deviations. And I will, of course, ignore the fake smiles, the ones so desperate for my tourist dollar. I will imagine them as real ones, even though I know better. I will ignore that I am traveling and free, and that they aren’t and never will be. That’s all just noise, you see. Their world is beautiful, at whatever cost.

But of course liberal guilt is fake, condescending, and embarrassing. These people feel about poverty and hardship the same way you would: badly. They deal with it however they can, and in a variety of ways. Some smile, some don’t. Some would kill you for ten cents, others would share their only meal with you. Just like anywhere. I am Israeli. My country is tense. My society is tense. We have problems that keep us up at night and make us cranky and hostile to one another. We chase money, we’re westernized and materialistic. Yet a lot of people smile, everywhere, every day. Not because they’re middle-eastern geniuses, but just because it’s part of Israeli mentality. A good part. I wouldn’t recommend Israel as a master course in the art of living, but I wouldn’t recommend a tour of Thailand either. I would just recommend that you open your fucking eyes, be honest, take the bad with the good, and cut the nonsense.

Alright, a final batch of photos from Chiang Mai:

The guard goose returns!

Dog polarities

The handlers tells you where to touch and where not to touch: 

Please remember where not to touch. No sudden moves - that's a no-brainer. And don't bring anything dangling into the cage, such as a necklace or a camera strap. It's catnip to these brutes.  Catnip, get it? Haha. He's been fed chicken carcasses since yesterday, so he's sated, and his long incarceration has accustomed him to humans, but even a playful swipe of his paw - say, if you brushed his arm by accident - might leave you short a trachea. Ever seen a tiger paw? You don't want to. Boy, I can tell you stories raise the hair on your-- well, anyway, just... for the love of God, remember where not to touch, okay? Did you get all that? Alright, go in, go. That, uh... that's happy purring. No cause for alarm. You can move in closer. Oh, almost forgot - don't ever look alarmed. Makes 'em jumpy.

And... say Cheese!

Yup. This one's definitely going on Facebook.

Do tigers make you sneeze if you're allergic to cats? I am, and have always wondered. In Chiang Mai you can also pay to ride an elephant, "be as a gibbon" by ziplining over the rain forest (which also has real gibbons,) and ogle long-neck hill-tribe women. So much exotica, so little time. Barely anyone notices the freely available street dogs plopped semiconsciously all over town. I've noticed this before. Dogs here are either the very picture of mange and neglect, limping bags of disease normally missing an eye, their fur, or health in general and quietly waiting to die in the tropical heat - or they're pampered display dogs whose owners carry in their arms like babies, brush to a lustrous sheen, and dress up as headwaiters with little doggy vests, bow ties, etc. I don't see much in between. You might say that Thailand's canine socioeconomics mirror its human ones.

I find Thai dogs fascinating, but since they're not a show with its own pamphlets, prices, and street-side pushers, it's not something tourists linger over. Maybe it's because they're free to watch. Just as "if the patient doesn't pay, the patient doesn't get better" (Freud?), it seems that if the tourist doesn't pay, the tourist doesn't experience anything. But is it so? Does the essence of visiting Chiang Mai, for example, subsist in the thick top-growth of manufactured thrills and pamperings through which you, the tourist, must machete your path every day? If you scraped that coating off, and didn't ride an elephant or stroke a tiger or get a massage or shop in the night bazaar or fuck a prostitute or eat a banana pancake in your guesthouse or volunteer with poor kids the way you never did back home or take a Thai cooking course or a massage course or a Tao meditation course, would you still have been "somewhere"?

I know I can be an extremist. To borrow from the Coen brothers' Barton Fink, I believe that most of travel is "the life of the mind." In other words, the only wild beast I really wish to meet is me. I want to see what my mind throws up, where it goes, what it does as I negotiate the everyday of a place far from home, where you meet lots of new people. That is the core of travel, which I once knew and am once again discovering. It's not all, but it's the core, and you have to stick with the essential or you lose yourself. I did, for a bit, and it made me feel distracted and stupid and small. It's a mental diet of confetti. So yesterday I climbed a mountain.

Mt. Doi Suthep is just outside Chiang Mai, with a famous temple at the top of a serpentine 10km road, normally reached by motorcycle or songtheaw, the red share-taxi trucks used here as public transport. For some time, I've entertained the thought of making it on foot. Not just because I wanted to do something real and defined, something with a goal rather than just hanging out all day, but also because I needed some real time with me, time to refocus: being alone with all the trivial distractions, I'd lost sight of myself. Yesterday I finally felt strong enough to try.

I had a light breakfast and headed out with nothing but water, a tube of imitation Oreos, and chutzpah. It was hard. I made the first part through the rocks and forests beside a waterfall at the bottom, panting like a tubercular old lady. The disgusting car smog here - Thai emission standards are low - has reduced my lungs to a couple of weepy scrotal sacs. I knew I had to make a powerful initial push, maybe slightly past my limit, if I was to break through my atrophy and gain momentum to reach the temple. I reached the top of the first stretch, and there under an intimate canopy of green, to the sound of the waterfall and the tweeting of the birds, had diarrhea. 

(This is not TMI!... I want you to know how hard it was.)

I rested at the waterfall, ate a couple of imitation Oreos, and continued on up using the mountain road. To the best of my knowledge, I was the only person on foot that day. Everyone else was either motorized or a race-biker. People passing me stared in confusion ("crazy farang"...) and some cheered me. The way up was tough, done almost entirely through exhaustion, and a sense that I would collapse the following day, having just now overcome a cold. Sometimes I felt weak, not just physically but mentally too. Pathetic. Sometimes I cursed myself to prod myself onward. Sometimes I sang songs. But I fucking walked. My shirt was soaked, my hat was soaked, my washcloth was soaked. The wind chilled me. I kept thinking of Woody Guthrie's hillbilly pronunciation of "hairpin turn" in the song Talking Dust Bowl Blues:

"It was a hairpin turn / I didn't make it."

I stopped at Wat Palad, a temple halfway to the famous temple, and ten times as beautiful. It was like something out of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. No, I did not take photos. They could never do it justice. I continued. I allowed myself a rest every once in a while, to sip water and eat a few more of those shitty Oreo-like discs. I'd like to say that I communed with nature, and found renewed personal insight. I can say that I saw beautiful trees for the better part of six hours, and felt a sense of accomplishment when I reached the Doi Suthep temple. My legs ached, and I was dog-tired. But I did it, and I did it alone, and I had a good time. And nothing happened, I'm fine today. And something inside is a little better, a little more correct.

On the way down I took a red share taxi. So easy. I watched the mountain, my mountain that I had taken step by step, reel backwards in some sort of instant replay. I'm no Edmund Hillary, but I am me, and to that I took a step closer. Paying to pet a tiger wouldn't get me there.

Street dog begging - very rare.
Has a collar though.

Chiang Mai zoo has an amazing gateway with suchlike
animal statues.

Derelict dogs everywhere. This is at the cable car house
at Doi Suthep. That little girl was very friendly.

Couple of Thai mooks having their photo taken
at the waterfall

First time I went to the waterfall, not the big climb.
These Thais gave me some food and water.

Exhaust and Exhaustion

Apropos of nothing, here's an early Louis C.K. bit that's been cracking me up for the past month.

After two weeks here, I've changed rooms - from the last room on the 3rd floor to the room next door, which the Italian and his girlfriend of the previous post vacated today. There are subtle improvements from my previous room, adding up to a 15% increase in quality of life. It's got a better layout - call it feng shui. Less creak in the bed. Fewer ants in the shower. The fixtures less dilapidated (was I living in the 'shit' room?) Most importantly, I no longer border the late-late-night whore club next door, which every 1am-to-4am has agitated my air molecules with the thumping bass of Gangam Style-style music, the clatter of dishes, the manufactured merriment of paid girlfriends, and the drunken harangues of the old men who purchase them - all not loud enough to be horrible, yet not quiet enough to go unnoticed. I knew that couple was moving out, so even though I'm ill, I jumped out of bed early today and secured their room. 

The wood doors are a bit warped, allowing outsiders a sliver of insight into my nude lounging (yes, I do) - so I taped some paper over the crevice, and now the room's pretty much perfect. I've spent most of the day laying in bed with the laptop just-so on the chair next to me, reading and watching old episodes of Northern Exposure and King of the Hill. I felt like a king.

Oh yes, I'm ill. Two trajectories - the physical and the psychical - have at last peaked, both at the same time. Mentally, I feel that I've finally overcome the sensory and cognitive overload of the beginning. I feel myself becoming calmer and more lucid, enjoying a greater number of clear, balanced, rational thoughts. I'm getting me again. Bodily, I have finally crashed from weeks of endless walking, late nights, tension, car exhaust, irregular eating, and bold food experimentation. Air-wise, Chiang Mai is full of exhaust fumes, Thai vehicles being not too clean, it seems. My eyes itch from it. I've taken to choosing back alleys over main thoroughfares just so I don't have to swallow all that dreck. Food-wise, I had conceived the idea that 1. if I eat all the spicy foods I'll get used to it, and 2. I should try every unknown dish I come across. I was 1. wrong, and 2. obviously an idiot. I'm sick now, but as soon as I regain my vigor, I will relaunch myself full-throttle into hanging out and doing nothing.

This week was the local three-day Loi Krathong festival, a massive to-do with parades, fairgrounds, quaint rituals (floating candle-heated khom loi paper balloons into the night air, and prayer-bearing crowns of leaf onto the river.) And my favorite: a ceaseless, sporadic, diarrhea-like detonation of fireworks. For three days they made Chiang Mai sound like Beirut on a bad day and smell like a deliberately saved-up fart. By they I mean retarded males of all ages who find explosions awesome. These are the same macho idiots you see in every party zone, who don't know how to drink, or have a good time, or be. But they know how to get drunk, and ruin everyone else's fun, and use lighters. And they just would not give it a rest.  From just-for-noise firecrackers, squibs, and Catherine wheels; to cheap rockets pitched haphazardly into awnings and eyeballs; to Roman candles billowing sulfurous clouds into unsuspecting crowds accustomed to oxygen; to starter pistols that shoot actual low-blasting fireworks (this is Thailand, safety isn't); to real sky-high fireworks, blown at random intervals by god-knows-who, deafening whatever else is going on with blast waves. Then, for a day or two after the festivities officially ended, they burned through the remaining ordnance, giving you late-night cracks and bombings to leaven the usual sounds of their drunk.

I know what you're thinking. Raz is a spoilsport who just doesn't like festivals. Well, you may be right. On a whole, I found the festival boring. But I did my best to find little points of interest and fun. I noticed how the paper balloons painted the night with new, ever shifting constellations in yellow. And how schoolchildren made their own simple Loy Krathong rafts to release into the river. But also how, as the crowds lined the streets on the third day watching the intricate parade floats file past from the various schools and civic organizations, a different crowd was busy working behind them. The pickpockets.

I first noticed it when I cut through an alley to get home. I passed by a local professional beggar, a repugnant woman who trolls all the night spots, aggressively cornering foreigners with an overgrown toddler asleep in a sling on her back. It is clearly a toddler past his bedtime, not an infant, and she is clearly using him to guilt westerners into misappropriating their compassion. I've seen her odious face a thousand times, and have not and will not give her a cent. When I saw her in the alley, she was accompanied by another woman and a little girl, and her bearing was not the supplicating sham she uses to beg, but her real, off-hours one. The little girl walked in front of her swaying in a dreamy dance, supposedly as kids do, but as she passed me, her little hand quickly and casually patted my pants pocket. With the ugly shrew in tow, I had no doubt what it was. The little girl is trained to pick pockets. And indeed, as I stood watching the parade floats at night, another small hand checked my pocket in passing. It was an empty pocket, but I felt it. I turned my head and saw them walk away. A boy this time, his poorly-dressed parents walking to the front and back of him, signaling him where and what to check. They were not watching the parade; they were watching those who watched.

I met two Buddhist monks, a sincere young one and an older asshole. The young one was at a temple yard that I drifted into to listen to some beautiful recording of a chant. He's eighteen, and has been a monk for three years, ever since he surprised his Christian Thai parents by converting to Buddhism. He had excellent English, but spoke with a stammer, which he says started only a year ago, also when he speaks Thai. He was soft-spoken and gentle, and described himself pre-monkhood as a strange boy who kept to himself. Ironically, becoming a monk has opened up his social life. But he'd like to quit soon. He asked me a bit about Japanese girls; said he'd like to find out about girls when he becomes a layman. No pun here. He also told me he doesn't like ladyboys - "You are a man! Why are you be like a woman?" He had some in his school, and there are also ladyboy monks! This I would not imagine. Watching the parade later, I did however notice a monk that, in bearing and speech, outdid a three-dollar bill in one key regard.

On that subject, I've noticed that gayness in Thailand, while it seems to be more openly accepted, also seems to be more outwardly stereotypical. When I think of gays and lesbians in the West, I see a gamut of external behaviors, from the low-key and subtle to the flamingly obvious. You often need a person to tell you they're gay. Here, however, categories rule: the gay boys pose like teapots and smile suggestively, and the gay girls have a crew cut and dress like lumberjacks. For all the misty subtlety (i.e., fictional bullshit) of Asian culture, in Thailand, at least, it seems they prefer their identities cut and dry.

The other monk is the one I saw today, eating at this guesthouse. I've seen him before. He might be a family member. He was gabbing on his cellphone and sitting imperiously over a rice-and-whatever dish in the lobby. He reminded me of the haredi wheeler-and-dealers I see gabbing on their cellphones in Israel: his vibe was unholy and fake. I was looking for one of the staff, and asked him where she was. The monk responded disinterestedly, eyeing me with cold disdain, and I could tell at a glance that he was simply an asshole. He had a hard, arrogant, bad face - nothing at all like that young monk, who desires to translate his hard-earned lessons of monkhood to lay life. Here was the first monk I ever saw who I knew, just knew, was a putz.

Back to the parade. 

I met Iranians, in town to discuss the medical benefits of saffron. This is always a treat. So close are Iranians to Israel, and so far away, but whenever I meet them I feel a kinship, an easy familiarity. Needless to say, the opinion of Iranian citizens on their own government is not stellar, but it is in foreign lands that they can express it. I told them I love Iran's people - "We love Iran." A lady replied, "We love Israel, we love USA." I asked a guy about festivals in Iran. He said they have some, but they're sad affairs. "Muslim festivals, sad. Not like this."

As soon as the last of the parade floats vanished, the nearby girly bar cranked up the music. Back to business as usual. The first song, with dictionary-definition irony, was Roxanne by The Police. I drifted off to Tha Pae square, where late at night two ladies of the night handed out free (small Thai) condoms, I assume as part of an anti-HIV initiative among the local sex workers. Impressed with this selfless positivity, I asked if I could take a photo of them with the condom boxes.

The prostitute looked me in the face and said: "Photo, twenty baht."

Here are some images and videos.

Chang Moi road features traditional crafts,
Loi Kroh road is a whore street. The concern here
is that encroaching nightlife might turn the former
into the latter.

More foot injuries. French. Motorcycle.

At a temple, launching candle balloons

My favorite shot of the festival. 
A mythical princess with pink braces.

These two invited me to send off the Loy Krathong
together with them. I wished them success, health, etc., and
true love. The girl jumped up: "No! He's not my boyfriend!"
"So I wish you true love separately," I said.

The sky lit up by the candle balloons.