Laos leftovers

I've still got a few trip stories in the can. Rather than starve you with a diet of strict contemplation, I thought I'd spool those out over a few posts instead. Except more - hell, demand more.

Laos 1

I was walking down a Vientiane street early one evening, and there was a Lao boy of about five perched up on the corner of a pickup truck bed, humming to himself, oblivious to the world. I was taken by the simple beauty of it: here's a child entertaining himself with song. Turns out there are still places on this earth where imagination is the first toy. This made me optimistic, happy to be there. Then I got closer, and saw that he was looking down into an iPhone and trying to phonetically pick up the lyrics to Gangnam Style.

Laos 2

Vientiane gave me my first real sense of physical danger. The Lao government, frightened (like all one-party political organs) of anything reminiscent of civic disorder, shuts the city down at night. As temperatures drop and midnight draws near, the capital transforms into another Vientiane, a ghost town, eerily silent and utterly actionless. No food, nothing open, nowhere to go, no one outside. The night is turned over to a few roving, face-swaddled tuktuk drivers and a handful of frightening ladyboys prowling for johns.

These aren't your Thai ladyboys, who now and then achieve the semblance of a pretty woman. These are all boy and no lady: grotesque, low-rent crossdressers fooling no one, with tight whore dresses, stiletto heels, a thick spackle of bad makeup, and crazed, hungry eyes. Poor southeast Asian men with a vicious, fucked up profession. With barely a soul out of doors except for a few drunk tourists, you know these hemales aren't getting much business, so when they proposition you as you pass - and they do so obsessively and invariably, no matter who you are - instinct tells you that if the streets were just a little emptier, they'd put a knife to your face and just take your money.

I first saw all this on a sleepless night. My bed was crawling with bugs of three different sizes (or were they three maturity stages of the same bug?) so sleep was not an option. I went out, hoping to find somehow to pass time till daybreak. I was hungry. A ladyboy propositioned me; a whitefaced abomination of a thing. Compassionate fool that I am, I said no without immediately ignoring his existence and walking coldly away. Experience should have taught me that only a full stop makes these monomaniacs leave. Instead, I mumbled something overly pleasant about looking for a place to eat.

From that moment, he refused to leave my side. He became my own private Gollum, his high heels tap-tapping beside and behind me, sometimes at a distance, sometimes right next to me, but always going where I went. He offered to show me a place where I could buy things. I refused. Whenever I hinted bluntly that I will be going elsewhere now, and thank you and goodbye, he said "I go with you." At first I thought he was harmless, so I made the further folly of asking a bit about his life. How old is he? How'd he get into this line of work?

Curiosity isn't always wise. In his rudimentary English, the young gargoyle said he'd chosen this path because he was unschooled and had no others. A pretty lie, of course, yet one delivered at dead night on a frightening empty street in a foreign country. To him my questions meant only one thing - that I was not completely uninterested. The hungry, hopeful question never left his eyes: will I eventually break down and hire his sexual services for money? He shivered from the cold in his trannie hooker outfit. He wore a twisted, desperate smile, and rarely blinked. Must be starving or on drugs or both, I figured. Most frightening in his smile, however, was the dumb, stoned hope, an insane hint of relief as if I'd somehow already conveyed to him that we were "together." I tried ignoring him, but it was too late.

I stopped outside one of the cheaper, trashier youth hostels, where a small group of young foreigners was chatting. An oasis of sanity, I thought - the only people like me to be found outside. Among them was a young American guy with dreadlocks who, days before, inside two minutes of meeting me, asked me to promote a "bar hop" he was going to put together. He had seemed shifty then, and I disliked him. I said hi now, and he managed to recollect me with some fake camaraderie. I mentioned to the group that I was hungry, and everywhere's closed. The rasta kid said he has some cup ramen in his room that he could get.

"Thanks, I really appreciate it," I said, cup noodles being better than nothing.

For a moment he looked at me unsurely, then blurted: "15K."

"What?" said I.

"I'll let you have the noodles for fifteen thousand Kip."

This was five times their price, but still less than two US dollars. For this amount, he was willing to take advantage of my situation.

"You're out of your mind," I said and walked off at once, disgusted.

The cheap little schemster called after me, "Sorry, Raz!... I'm sorry!"

I knew that he genuinely was. I could see his entire story in that single moment when he'd blurted out the price, almost against himself. He was a born liar who was bad at lying, a bottom-feeder who wished he could be a complete, decent human being but didn't know how. And a repugnant little creep I would have nothing to do with. I left, deciding to go home and go hungry until morning.

All the while the ladyboy had been hovering by at a short distance, waiting.

"Where you go?"

"Home. Good night."

"Where you stay?"

I didn't want to tell him. I tried leading him off down a false street, but he would not fall for it. He followed me right to my guesthouse, into which I ran, shutting the glass-paned door behind me without looking back, as if against a charging goblin. I had a feeling he was capable of anything. I rushed into the shadows of the stairwell inside the lobby, and only then allowed myself a glance back. He was still standing in the street, exactly where I'd left him, his white mask unchanged from its half-smile, staring maniacally into the guesthouse as though I was coming back out any second. I rushed upstairs and locked myself in my room without turning the lights on, so as not to give away my location. He could easily lie to the night watchboy and tell him I was his guest, and the night boy was simple enough to believe it. I made no noise. I stayed away from the windows. I did not sleep.

Laos 3

Some images.

This kid had no idea what I wanted from him.

Ten years after I last saw this sign, it still stands at the gate to Vientiane's number one landmark.
Apparently they cut and pasted from Lonely Planet without actually reading it.

Pass a grass and your ass is... you know.

Driver repairing tuktuk (see below).

Baguette and coffee place, belonging to ethnic Chinese Lao people.

Symbolism at its simplest.

Vietnamese Buddhist temple, the nicest temple I saw in Vientiane

Buddha chillaxing after a hard day at Nuremberg.

Tuktuk under repair.

Home is where

(Typed but not edited)  

As I lay sleepless in bed in a guest room in Vientiane Laos, shrouded tightly and hotly in a sheet against the local dive-bomber mosquitoes, tiny invisibles who sting painlessly but hurt like a bastard when they pull out, mustering the last ounce of my self-possession not to succumb to the maddening itch in the many red welts on my lower legs and upper arms – Had bedbugs done it? Chiggers? Or god help me, scabies? – as I stared into the ceiling fan and tried to find the right mixture of resolve and composure to suppress my anger and helplessness, a completely new thought shot into my head.

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Don’t feel fucking sorry for yourself. Ask yourself: how did you benefit by this—”

But I’m getting ahead of myself thematically. What I should do first is jump ahead chronologically – way more style to it that way. At this very moment I am in the airport in Moscow, and it is 5:17 AM. There are five hours left to my sixteen-hour, overnight wait for the connecting flight to Tel Aviv. I am going home. I had a 4-5 month trip sketched out, with the possibility of staying somewhere long-term, and instead I will be returning just shy of two months out. How did this happen?

Here’s the short version. Early in this blog, I wrote that you can’t step in the same river twice. Well, it turns out you really can’t step in the same river twice. Whatever attempt I made to revisit, relive, or even revise the adventures of yesteryear has crashed and burned. My trip began in Thailand with a stretch of boredom, disenchantment, and labored enjoyment, shifted up in Laos into misery and disgust, segued in Japan into understanding and a resolve not to take any more crap, and now ends with a newfound sense of home. Home is Israel. Israel is home.

You will notice that (with the exception of Israel) those are all descriptions of my own feelings, not of the places. From the start of this Asia trip, it was obvious that the things in which I once saw romance now seem to me largely devoid of it. I think this is due in equal measure to two reasons:

1. The trip objectively went wrong. Shitty flights, actual changes for the worse in the places I visited, higher prices everywhere, hotel bed parasites, etc., etc. I figure this is statistically inevitable: some trips will work out great, most will be okay, and some will just bomb.

2. My perspective has changed, so that even things that are still the same as ever now strike me as flat, empty, fake, meaningless, or plain not worth the trouble.

Now the long version.

I wrote throughout my stay in Thailand, so there’s not much need to elaborate. I’ll say only that, with a few cherished exceptions, I find the Thais to be a hostile, uppity idiots, with childishly fragile egos, high-school mental maturity, and an obnoxiously unmerited pride in themselves and their country. Political correctness and cultural relativism be damned. The people in Chiang Mai were far better mannered than anywhere else, and it was still obvious that you as a foreigner are constantly the butt of their collective private joke. To the best of my judgment, unless you’re in their country and need to court their favor (read: kiss their ass for every fucking little thing,) the joke is clearly on them. Here and there you meet a foreigner who states that Thailand is “freer” than his own country. That foreigner is willfully blind. You’re free in Thailand to do the one and only thing Thais want you to do: use money to purchase goods and services, including the vaginas of women (mysteriously) desperate to leave their country. Oh, the wonders of freedom.

From Chiang Mai I took an overnight bus to Khon Kaen, in northeast Thailand, where I spent one day and actually had fun and met nice Thai people. From there I continued to Vientiane, Laos, where I had the honor and privilege to meet an old friend, a Lao man I cherish and respect, and whom I hadn’t met for 10 years. This alone was worth the visit, which except for this was torture. I once saw Laos as a romantically rundown ex-colonial outpost (of France.) The colonial buildings and the Buddhist temples, the freshly-baked baguettes, the French street names, the lazy pace that lets you relax for days on end with a super-sweet cup of Lao coffee and watch the Mekong ooze by. In the decade or so since my last visit, Vientiane managed to become both more developed and more broken-down and backwards. The tourist infrastructure has improved – more shops, some better roads, some new amenities, a few old buildings razed for new hotels, and much higher prices everywhere. But for the rest, it was filthy, decrepit, and maddeningly difficult.

I encountered laziness and indifference on levels that would soon become painful. Indifferent cops sleeping midday in hammocks inside tuktuk drivers’ tuktuks and playing checkers with beer caps; hotel clerks that both don’t know shit, don’t give a shit, and aren’t allowed to do shit; and an almost universal lack of knowledge about directions, where to find necessities, etc. Those necessities became pressing when my body began to fill with red welts so itchy that they woke me up at night, covered new ground each day, and scared the shit out of me. The worst scenario was dengue fever, which I once had in Laos. A slightly less horrific scenario was that now my entire wardrobe and luggage was crawling with skin parasites. There is no hot laundry, which you need to kill the fuckers. There was barely a hot shower anywhere. But there was heat. The soupy, thick heat of that region, which makes any discomfort ten times worse, torture upon torture. Most of what I remember from this visit is physical misery, and constant fear that this misery will follow me for a while to come. The only saving grace, and it was a saving grace, was that I had local friends who essentially gave me shelter. Here is a good place to thank the two T’s. Thank you Tui, thank you Terry.

My next stop on the trip would have been China. That was the plan – overland from Laos to China, and in the end, if money permits, Japan and/or Taiwan. So I went to the Chinese embassy in Vientiane, Laos, and found out that their requirements there for a tourist visa, which in China’s case have always been strict, have gone ahead and become psychotic. They had stopped accepting cash payments: now you had to get a special bank slip from them, go to a bank and make a deposit to them, and return with the receipt. But you would only get that slip once you showed a return flight ticket. And a hotel reservation in China. Or if you were staying with friends, you had to get a copy of their ID, and a letter of invitation, in a specific format. Thus, to get a visa as a simple backpacker in China, I would have to make three expensive trips to the embassy, which is far outside town, to produce several documents and reservations, to bother friends, and to wait four business days. Struck with the gratuitous horror of it all (a sensation often elicited by Chinese bureaucracy,)  I rode the expensive tuktuk back to town, and on the moment had a moment of zen clarity: screw China. I’d been ambivalent about visiting anyway. I’d been many times, and had a long relationship with that country, but recently I’ve realized the obvious – that they’re bullies. People today say “China” the way they said “computers” twenty years ago, like it’s your only viable future, but China not the only country in the world, and the fact is that I simply don’t like it as much as I did. Not at all. And just like that, China was out.

When the insect bites got too much, I came to a decision: I would either cut straight to Japan or go home. I bought a non-refundable ticket to Japan, and changed my mind the next day. I almost gave up that ticket and cut to Bangkok to find a ticket home, but my friends from Japan (with whom I was to visit) called to yell at me for being an idiot. They convinced me that being in the region, this is probably my only chance to visit, and we’d have fun. Jumping through hoops to have an outbound flight reservation to show the notorious Japanese immigration officers when I came into Tokyo’s Narita airport – or otherwise they might not let me in – I went, every three hours slathering on my person what liniments I was able to find in Laos to allay my monstrous itching.

Japan was freezing cold, which was excellent for the itch. Like stepping into a freezer. It was fine by me. Japan was also prohibitively expensive, and beset at every turn with restrictions, rules, and impossibilities. This is the same as ten years ago – in fact, Tokyo seems not to have changed at all from what I remember. But here again the difference is me. I found that I could not put up with this shit. When, carefully calculating my money for one month’s rent on a tiny room, I was told I could not bring overnight guests there, something in me reared up in anger. Pay all this scratch and be bossed around like a child? Not this time. Tokyo is heaven, but it can also be the other place. Again, all money. But a LOT. To Japan, more than to any other place, you must come on your knees, humbly prostrating yourself and accepting all dictates. And boy, are there dictates. And boy, could I care less about those. Or there’s the option of cheating, sneaking around, slinking around the rules, lying. I didn’t want that either. Ten years ago, in my first visit, I took their shit and broke a few rules, all so I could have fun. Now, for some sick reason, my fun consists in being true to myself, and being true to myself, I decided I cannot stay in Japan for a month. I got the flight ticket I am now en route on, and spent the rest of my time meeting old friends from way-back-when, eating like a pig (mmm! éclairs! ), and shopping for souvenirs. Here too the best aspect was meeting my friends.

So, as I lay miserable on my last night in Laos, in a guest room given me by my friend and saving me from another night in a guesthouse bed potentially infested, I had this thought:

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Don’t feel fucking sorry for yourself. Ask yourself: how did you benefit by this trip? What did you learn?”

I learned that my nostalgia is now good and dead. RIP nostalgia, 2001-2012. I learned that I love my friends and family. That I am Israeli, and this is my identity. That not only is my own culture good, but it is better. That thrills do grow old. That, with age, I’ve grown unwilling to put up with the massive childish egos of East Asian cultures, or with any gratuitous bullshit for that matter. That next time I’ll choose a single destination and bring more money, especially if it’s Japan, so I could enjoy myself like a gentleman. That all the magnificent glories the big places I’ve seen feel less real to me than strolling on a boring Netanya street with my best friend, or laughing with my brother in our small town, or sitting on a secondhand couch on the outskirts of Tel Aviv looking at a smile that knows me, and whom I know, and who speaks my language. I learned that I love you. But of course, I knew that.

I’ll post a bunch of pictures later. Don’t worry.

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.

- -

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.

Hey, drink, rerax

This is a long post. Take your time.

*

There is a tendency among certain long-time travelers to educate you spiritually. Having cracked the sorcerer's formula of earning money in a rich country and spending it in a poor one, they conceive the notion that they've unlocked the mysteries of life, which they now "live better" than you do. They dispense philosophical advice - unasked, idiotically simple, and obnoxiously stated - to enlighten you. Having become experts in human nature who've freed themselves of ego, they want to make sure you know just how smarter they are than you.

This is repugnant enough without ulterior motives, such as those held by my guesthouse neighbor. He is an Italian man traveling with his funeral-faced Chilean-or-something girlfriend. Through either a mistake or a calculation by the owner of the guesthouse, an old Thai lady, I received a room that he thought they would, a third-floor sunny room. They, having prepaid for a month, received a rather dank one downstairs - one I once lived in with a girlfriend, about a decade ago. This greasy wop (hold it, I'll explain,) who "needs sunshine in the morning," disturbed my afternoon rest the other day with rude knocking.

I went out to speak to him, and learned in full of his room booking predicament, which was neither my fault nor my concern. Leaning over the parapet and listening to him, I also learned that I am living in the same guesthouse with a rather sleazy character. First, as soon as I got a good look at him, I was reminded of a film director I'd worked with. That man was a transparent asshole, and so was this one. The Italian probed me not-too-subtly about my plans, which of course had direct bearing on his - if I were to check out, he and his farbissina latina could move into this room, which they had been promised.

"Perhaps she just made a mistake," I noted of the guesthouse owner. "She's old."

"Oh no," he said. "She's..." he gave a snaking hand gesture. "She knows every baht, everything you do, when you go, when you come." He described her as an innocent-faced manipulator, which was exactly him, except I did not find him innocent-faced at all. His face is plainly dishonest. When he learned that my plans are indefinite, and that I might be staying for a month, he changed tack and became my spiritual buddy. He spoke in sage tones of Pai, the popular backpacker village resort several hours from Chiang Mai. I said I rather like Chiang Mai, a city with a village feel.

"Yeahhh, the city is okay..." he dismissed, "but first you need to go to Pai, to detox. Clean yourself from inside. No internet, no television, just you. This is the way to do it." He went on in this transparent vein of condescending self-interest, in a fucking Italian accent, and I wanted to throw him over the parapet and make him a paraplegic. The only thing I needed to detox of was him. Later he graciously gave me business cards to long-term rental places. (I checked them out and all were shit. I decided to keep paying daily rates and just enjoy myself here.)

I find it ironic that he alone of all guests padlocks his door when he leaves (if there's anyone I'm worried might steal something from my room, it's him,) and that he so readily sniffs out the duplicity in the guesthouse owner. Sometimes what you see is what you are. He's just one example of spiritual-advice-dispenser - but a rather repulsive and specific one.

In a potentially related episode, I had the pleasure of sitting with an Englishwoman who works as a psychiatrist in an mental institution. She told me at length of psychopaths, their manipulations and their compulsive giveaways. It goes roughly as follows, and forgive my layman's understanding: psychopaths are always manipulating, always playing for power over others; and while normal adults can simply keep a secret or withhold information, a psychopath practices a strange double game - he thinks he's smarter than you, so he will tell you the truth of what he did or plans, but in code. For example, a female psychopath told the psychiatrist that she would buy flowers on the weekend for her sister while her husband was away; this in fact meant that she planned to kill her sister's husband. See, psychopaths assume (sometimes correctly) that you're too dumb to understand the code, and therefore that they're toying with you. However, their weakness is that they're unable to just say nothing. They're compelled to say something. Thus everything they say is meaningful. No data is random. I felt this way with this Italian schmuck, who, as we leaned over the parapet, was certain that he was craftily pressing my buttons with his experienced travel advice. He doesn't know that I've traveled for years, or that I have a fucking mind of my own, but neither does he care.

*

There are Muslims in Thailand. I passed by a car with an English sticker of "In the Name of Allah" across the windshield. I don't know what gives props to Allah in this car - the glossy paintwork, perhaps? - but it did give me the feeling of "Oh, great. Here too." I mention this because of the recent war in Israel, which worried and saddened me as much as if I'd been there; and because of a brilliant quote I read in Good Omens:

"You think wars get started because some old duke gets shot, or someone cuts off someone's ear, or someone's sited their missiles in the wrong place. It's not like that. That's just, well, just reasons, which haven't got anything to do with it. What really causes wars is two sides that can't stand the sight of one another and the pressure builds up and up and then anything will cause it. Anything at all."

(emphasis mine)

I don't need to start a political debate here, so don't.

*

I've sung in karaoke several times. People here and this and are surprised, but it's right up my alley, and it's a lot of fun. I generally don't drink alcohol, and don't enjoy cigarette-choked discos (or their music,) so this is a great venue for me. Plus I get to show off.

But yesterday I got an interesting warning. I passed by the bar where, on my first night out in Chiang Mai, I saw a Thai man torture English songs. It's where I met the Michael Caine lookalike (see earlier post.) The Thai performer was a thirtysomething man with long hair and a floppy hat, who cut a buffoonish figure - mangling songs, injecting the word "fuck" into them as punctuation, making endless sexual innuendos to women, and giggling at his own brilliance throughout. Yet there was something about him that seemed not funny at all. Violent, in fact. You see this a lot in Thailand. These musicians, entertainers though they are, earn their living and their standing through music, and there's nothing funny about that. If you were dumb enough to upstage them and make them lose face - say, in a jam session - you might put yourself in harm's way. You'd also be cutting into their territory and livelihood. I had a complete sense of this, so when (out of a sheer need to touch a guitar) I borrowed the "clown's" guitar after the show, I played quietly and tried not to draw attention. I knew I was better than him. I played a few songs with Michael Caine, but felt at a certain point that enough was enough, and moved on.

I may have actually passed that point, because yesterday, as I passed that bar again, and said hello to the owner, he mentioned to me the dangers to a foreigner of randomly playing onstage. I am quite sure that although I'd seen him once, over a week ago, he remembered me and chose to tell me this information for a reason. He never said it, but I got a feeling that I'd ruffled some feathers - floppy-hatted asshole feathers - and should know it. Until three years ago, he said, it was okay. Foreigners would jam anywhere, go onstage with their instruments, etc. But three years ago "something" happened, he didn't quite say what. A group of foreigners had run afoul of local Thai musicians by engaging full-time in musical displays. This had earned them a visit from Thai immigration, who raised the suspicion of unlicensed work, and may have also earned them a few cuts from a razor. This he didn't say, but it was between the lines. 

I'll stick to karaoke, and to swaying gently to Bob Marley - who, for some reason, is still believed in southeast Asia to be white people's favorite sound. And now they have ambient covers of his hits, bossa nova covers, et al. You go anywhere round here, and I promise you will hear Nesta. The phenomenon as a whole is, as one hilariously drunk Brit girl put it, Thairible. (She also went around saying "Thai five!" - just thought I'd mention.)

*

Things you see a lot of Chiang Mai:

- Tattoos. Far too many original thinkers walking around with their original ink tastefully half-concealed by hippie clothes.

- Western girls with foot injuries. Either due to trekking or due to the cracked pavements. See photos below.

- French people. It happens every time. I see swarthy, unshaven tourists and think they're Israeli, and then I pass them and hear that horrible language. I cannot make politically acceptable excuses for this, but my gut reaction each time is to mutter to myself, "fuckin' French."

*

There's a pattern to many of the western guy/Asian girl couples. Namely, the pattern of a business transaction. Even most of the "legitimate" ones, i.e., long term, similar ages, and not a girlfriend-for-hire situation, seem to contain a kernel of this. Oftentimes it will be a sheepish western guy, not necessarily but often less attractive than his girlfriend, performing obeisances to some deep-brown Asian hottie with a pouty, cranky disposition. I met such a guy some nights ago at the night noodle stalls outside a 7-11. 

He was standing at a distance from his Malaysian(?) girlfriend, as if on leave from her. He was a likeable, chubby young guy who earns good money as a ship navigator. He gets to all ports, and has seen many countries. At a certain point he met her, and now he's vacationing with her in Thailand. Asking about my own trip, he danced around the subject of meeting new girls. I could see the man was in a predicament.

"These Thai girls are amazing," he said.

"I'm not really interested," I told him. "Was once, but not anymore. They all seem to be working an angle."

"You know, if I was single..." he finally blurted.

"Oh, I know. I got that when you were asking all those questions."

He finally went back to his girlfriend's table. I could see instantly what the deal was. She was hot and demanding. He ingratiated her and she eyed him humorlessly, cowing him into submission as she no doubt has done since day one. What her end of the deal is, I can only surmise, but it probably isn't a shipload of personal attraction - although she might work just hard enough to make it appear so in his mind.

I presented myself, to some tepid recognition from her.

"Raj?"

"No. R - A - Z. I keep having to do the zorro thing when telling people my name," I told the guy.

"Do you wave your little sword around?" he asked.

"In a manner of speaking," I told him. It was a pleasure to make him laugh. I had the feeling he didn't do much of it, made though he supposedly was in the tropical shade.

*

Postscript: walking around today after posting this, I saw a French girl with an injured foot. Motorcycle accident. When will this end? Also, I've realized that the Italian guy's silent girlfriend, who neither talks nor smiles nor makes eye contact, might actually be a battered woman. I wouldn't put it past him.

*

Here is a crapload of pictures and videos. Click photos to enlarge.

Versailles

Dutch girl with a foot injury

Aussie girl with a foot injury

A GUARD GOOSE. No joke. Geese are mean bastards.

The guy made clear that this is NOT Pennywise from "It."

A canal float with jutting fluorescent tube lights. Very safe.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

A bit of wisdom from Buddha at Wat Chedi Luang.
Some stories attributed to Buddha are insightful and deep.
This isn't one of those stories.

Before entering a temple.

Warnings at a temple. Oh, the serenity and the holiness.

What indeed?

Fifi?

Guard goose!!!