Anne Frank
I’m trying to read Anne Frank’s diary at the moment (I say trying cos I find her a bit annoying and keep putting it down to read trashy thriller novels instead), and although I would never be as ridiculous as to compare this blog to that very important documentation of World War II, when I read that quote I knew exactly how she felt.
I feel like I’ve set myself a monumental task recording this year away and so it became a bit of a chore for a while: hence my being MIA for so long. But fuck it, I didn’t come away to write, I came away to do stuff that’s worth writing about. So I have been. Mad, crazy stuff that you could never do at home. But stuff that just feels normal to do here.
It felt normal to be here about three weeks in, the first week after I’d started teaching. Once I’d got my bearings with the teaching, learnt a few of the rules of living in Bangkok (how to get around, what’s cheap and what’s not, etc) and a few Thai words (learning one to 10 opened up a whole new avenue of understanding for me in terms of buying stuff), and made a few friends, I was content and settled.
And so I’ve just been getting on with living and working here. It’s been the summer holidays here, which brought summer classes and even more of a routine to my days: I teach, I eat, and I sleep. In-between the routine stuff, however, there has been plenty of little (and some big) adventures to tell you about, so rather than go through each day, here are the edited highlights of the month that has been March.
This month I have mostly been…
…teaching.
The beginning of March heralds summer here and as such the kids break from school to… have more lessons. Yep, sensible parents across the city get their kids out of their hair for at least part of the day by sending them for yet more English lessons. I get given a class of 16 to 19 year olds which goes up and down in size throughout the month. It starts off with three and at one point goes up to 10. It was a bit of a shock when I went in one Tuesday morning to see my class had tripled in size. I’m used to standing up in front of these groups of people now though, and although I get a brief flutter of nervousness when confronted with a big class, I quickly just get on with it.
I am given a new private lesson with an 18-year-old lad called Arm. He is a typical Thai student of English in that he is almost note perfect when it comes to writing, but when it comes to speaking, he struggles greatly. I try all kinds of things to help him get used to speaking, but it’s like pulling teeth.
My lessons with Nop (the 27-year-old who I teach at his house) improve greatly. I am terrible at teaching grammar (mostly cos I’m still learning all the terms and workings myself) but good at explaining vocab and teaching that, so I focus on that with Nop, with a bit of grammar thrown in. He wants to set up his own businesses so I teach him lots of vocab to do with business and finance and working. He is increasingly tired at each lesson, though. It seems like he’s having quite a stressful time at work with a new boss. Before he was left to his own devices to get on with his work; now his new boss actually sends someone with him when he goes out to meetings and stuff, like she’s spying on him or something.
I get given a new class of teenagers on Sundays, which also slowly grows in size. Although not much – it’s gone from two to four! There’s basically a surplus of teachers here in relation to students, it seems. With so many English schools opening up in the city, the competition is fierce, and a couple of the longer-serving teachers here have said there’s not as many students as there used to be.
I do a couple of fill-in lessons for a Filipino teacher called Aom. One is a bunch of seven year olds who are hilarious. There’s one little girl who absolutely loves speaking English and she introduced every other pupil to me as they came in the classroom, which helped with the remembering their names thing. Normally I draw a map of where everyone is in the class in my notebook and refer to that when I can’t remember a name, but with 10 seven year olds running around looking for a green pencil to colour in an apple with, that proved impossible. His other class was an advanced adult class. They knew more about grammar than me. So I made up for being shit by being entertaining. Binnie said they said after that they enjoyed the class. Phew.
My other outside lesson – the two teenage kids (Mine and Muang) of the famous Thai actress who I teach in their swanky house on the outskirts of Bangkok – becomes increasingly impossible. You try teaching a 14 year old brother and sister (I think they’re twins) on a Friday night in their own home. They’re tired from a week at school, they fight like cat and dog and they know they’re going to be learning English at ECC tomorrow in a full class anyway. Eventually I give up and play games with them. (Games where they’re using English, of course!) But despite my complete lack of control over them, they’re my favourite students. I’m the only teacher not to complain about having to teach them. I think it’s partly cos they remind me of my sister and I, and partly cos I never have any idea what will happen during the lesson!
One lesson their father sits in the room with us in an attempt to make them use English more in our precious hour and a half. It works, mostly, but the following week they’re back to arguing with each other in Thai. Another lesson I get Muang on his own. His English is far superior to Mine’s and he’s super intelligent. But he has ADD; so badly that he has to take drugs for it. I relish getting him on his own, though, and seeing what he can really do. And, despite his friend being present and sat on the computer the entire time (far too much of a distraction), I manage to get the idea of idioms across to him and in his head. He even remembers it the following week. Goal!
One more incident with Mine and Muang. We were playing 20 Questions one day and I was asking them the questions. The thing they were thinking of? Poo. Brilliant.
…getting to know the other teachers better.
There’s Vanda, who I’ve mentioned before – the slightly eccentric, slightly evasive, but absolutely lovely female teacher who mostly teaches the younger kids. There’s Ian, who I’ve mentioned before – an unlikely ex-army officer who’s been teaching in Bangkok for five years. I get on well with him. There’s Dermot, a middle-aged guy from Australia with a big gob on him and a usually jolly demeanour that very occasionally reveals a volcanic temper. There’s Francis, a dry-humoured and erudite American who likes to deliver one-liners then stroll out the room. He’s not very sociable but pretty interesting when you get talking to him. There’s Mark, a big-gobbed Yorkshireman who has lived here for seven years. He has a Thai wife who works here also and they have a young daughter called Angel who is anything but. He speaks to her in English in his broad Yorkshire accent and she speaks to her in Thai so God knows what accent she’s going to grow up with. There’s Jason, who looks like Harry Potter but behaves more like a teacher at Hogwarts. There’s a Japanese fella who sits in the corner of the teaching room all day and doesn’t speak to anyone. There’s Dylan, a little Chinese guy with a handsome face and a warm demeanour. I get a bit of a gay vibe from him but not sure, but whatever he’s a cool fella and likes to ask me English questions. It’s taken him ages to understand that when I say “Y’alright?” to him in the mornings I’m saying “Are you all right?”, but he’s got it now. There’s Ricky, a bloke in his early 30s (I reckon) who seems to spend all his time and money on booze and women and ALWAYS looks like he’s just got out of bed. He’s a really chilled guy though, good company. There’s Alex, a slightly strange German guy who’s quite friendly but stares at you slightly disconcertingly. He’s always moaning about the arguments he has with his Thai girlfriend as well. Get a new one mate, there’s plenty around!! And there are loads of Thai teachers, some I speak to, some I don’t really. All in all a pretty eclectic but always interesting bunch.
…trip-plannning.
Not in a ‘God I can’t wait to leave Bangkok’ way, just in a ‘God I need to be a bit organised’ way. For example, Jess and I decided to go to Ayuthaya, the old capital, for a day (see separate entry).
I also planned my trip to Chiang Mai next month. The middle weekend in April is Thai New Year, or Songkran, and the school is shut for four days. I wanted to go to the northern city of Chiang Mai because there, apparently, is where the Songkran celebrations are most enthusiastically enjoyed, and everyone heads there so I needed to get my arse in gear and sort out somewhere to stay and how I’m going to get there. The former I manage – I book a room in a guesthouse called the Smile House, which caught my eye because it is the former ‘safe-house’ of Shan-Chinese opium warlord Khan Sa. If it’s good enough for him… The latter, however, I forget about until Binnie asks me if I’ve booked my train ticket yet. I tell her no and her eyes widen in horror. “You won’t get one now,” she says. Fuck. I headed down to the station anyway to have a look. Every single seat on every single train on all the days leading up to Songkran was booked. Bugger. A lady who seemed to work at the train station came over and had a chat and I told her my situation. She told me her daughter works at a travel agent upstairs, where I might be able to get a bus seat. Binnie suggested I get a train as the traffic around Songkran is terrible and there are lots of accidents, but I thought, sod it, if I can get a bus, I will. I’m introduced to said daughter who took me upstairs and introduced me to her colleagues. They sat me down and gave me a bus ticket for 1100 baht (about 16 pounds). I didn’t care about the price. Binnie had me so panicked about getting up there, I’d have taken anything. But it was so bloody easy to get a bus ticket I wondered if maybe I should have shopped around. Then the woman behind the desk apologised for the price and told me it was because it’s the holiday. Maybe this was the best bet after all.
I planned further ahead as well. I decided I’m going to forgo the last month of teaching and travel around Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos for those last weeks before I head to Australia. I’m not sure how much of each country I’ll see in that period of time but I’m determined to do it. I’ll just focus on the important bits.
The time has also come for me to confirm the rest of my flights on my round the world ticket. So I head to the Qantas office and book my flight to Australia on Saturday July 28, New Zealand on Saturday October 27, Fiji on Saturday December 1, San Francisco on Saturday December 8, Vancouver on Friday December 21, New York on Sunday December 30, and London on Thursday January 17. Wooooo!
But the arrival of confirmation of my Australian working visa also prompted another decision. The visa starts as soon as I land in the country on Sunday July 29. It’s a year long visa on which I can travel in and out of the country at any time. In which case I can leave after my three months, go and do the rest of my trip, and then come back and work in Australia for the remaining seven months of the visa. (Which of course means I won’t be back in the UK until summer 2008.) This, at the moment, is what I want to do. I may change my mind between now and then; I may get sick of the world and want to come home. But I doubt it. This is the only time I’m going to be able to get a working visa for Australia in my life so I may as well make use of it.
But back to this year, I’m still umming and ahhing about LA. I have two weeks in San Francisco, and was thinking about going down to LA for the weekend, just to see what it’s like. I’ve heard so much negative about the place I’m not sure whether to bother. Jess has been to LA and I asked her what she did when she went there. Her response? “I left.” So still not sure. I guess I don’t have to decide until I get there.
…spending time with Jess.
We work together. Our timetables are much the same. We live in the same building. It’s a good thing I like the woman! She’s a very laid-back, funny and engaging girl. The only complaint I’d have is that she’s not very adventurous – with food or trying new things generally. Which frustrates me. I love watching people try new things. Most evenings we eat together and chat shit and moan about Bangkok. Well, not the whole city, just Pinklao, the area in which we live and work. Between the shopping mall next to where we work and the cinema complex over the road we eventually eat everywhere and get insanely bored with the place. So we start heading to Khao San Road, that backpackers haven that is only 10 minutes down the road, for a bit of variety. It works, at least for a while.
Jess has a slightly hilarious (but understandable given that she’s not got much female company over here) habit of ‘pulling’ women there. If she’s sat on her own and she spies another girl sat on her own (she doesn’t do it with blokes, she doesn’t want to give them the wrong idea), she calls them over and makes a new friend. One evening we go to Khao San to meet her friend Laura, who she met in that very way. Laura had been island-hopping down south for a couple weeks and was back in Bangkok on her way home to Blighty, after spending a year in Australia. She tells me about Oz and going up the East Coast, which is the usual backpacker route. She had a blast and tells me I’m going to love it. She’s very much the perky, blonde, blue-eyed Western backpacker though and I’m not sure her tastes are similar to mine, but hey she’s got some good stories. We all bond over teaching tales as well, hers coming from her time in Spain where they refused to call her Laura, calling her Louwra instead.
…reading some books.
I read a book about the suitors to Elizabeth I which is quite interesting but a bit frustrating cos the whole wooing thing gets a bit dull and you want to know what else is going on in her life.
I read Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, which Mengly left me. What a load of pretentious showing off. Which I suppose is the point, really. It’s an ode to style dressed up as a novel. What annoyed me most was how the main plot device – the picture bearing Dorian’s ageing self – was never explained. It just happened. The pretty boy wished it and it happened. Phff.
I read Bangkok 8, a detective thriller by John Burdett. My mate Justin was reading it before I went and suggested it but I thought I’d get to know Bangkok a bit first. It’s wicked reading it and knowing all the places he’s talking about. And it’s a good book as well. Faintly ridiculous in the way that detective thrillers always are, but it’s really sharp on how Western culture interacts with Eastern – i.e. not very well when the people involved are inexperienced of the other – and is probably more realistic than any guidebook on Bangkok you might buy.
And then I try the aforementioned Anne Frank. God she’s annoying. But then a teenage girl’s diary is never going to be written with a 29 year old man in mind. I feel better knowing that her family finds her annoying as well. But then I’m sure everyone would find everyone annoying cooped up in that tiny building for years on end. I’ll stick with it. I promised myself I’d read some ‘classics’ this year, those books you always intend to read but never do. I’ve done Dorian Gray, I’m on Anne Frank…I need something less annoying next please.
…eating food.
I’d say I eat about two thirds Thai food and the rest of the time I indulge my cravings for carbs. Rice and noodles I love though so I’m all about eating Thai. I’m even slowly adding more and more chili (little by little) to each meal. Though I’ll never reach the three tablespoons level that Thais are at. They are impervious to the power of the chili. My favourite meals are chicken and basil with rice and egg, pad Thai, noodle soup, Thai omelette on rice…oh I could go on and on, it’s all amazing. But then I’ll have a craving for something ‘normal’. Jess and I have found a café on Khao San that does Western food – called Oh My Cod (yes, they do a stunning fish and chips). We went and had a baked potato with cheese and beans there one night. Absolute bliss.
…severing those lingering UK ties.
Apart from my lovely friends and family of course. Two financial commitments I was unable to end before departing are finally sorted (God, leaving the country’s complicated). Bye AOL! Bye London Underground! Bye PA!
And some gossip from home brings something nearing closure on a particular emotional issue that reared its ugly head (as these are wont to do) mere months before I left. The latter feels sad but good. I can stop looking back and look forward, knowing that my friends and family (and nothing else) will be waiting for me when I come home.
…having some drunken nights out.
Not like me, I know. See separate entries for these.
…doing some Muay Thai.
Again, see separate entry.
…making new friends.
Just when Jess and I were getting insanely bored with going to Pinklao, and also going to Khao San, along came a bunch of girls who give Bangkok a new lease of life for us.
We met them on Khao San (of course) where Jess and I had gone for a game of pool to relieve the boredom. We were in a bar called Gullivers 2, where they have winner stays on. I beat a Thai girl and was joined by a buxom blonde (she’s gonna hate me for calling her that!) from the Westcountry, near Bristol. She’s the sort of nutty, out-going personality I’m always drawn to and we soon met her friends Vicky (an Englishwoman in every way except accent, which is American – she only spent a few months there as a child and it’s stuck ever since) and Felicity, or Fliss, who is from The Wirral and definitely NOT a Scouser, okay?
Like us they’re all teachers, all here for a year, but work more normal hours (8-4, Monday to Friday) in a school further out than us in Bangkae. We played pool and by the end of the game we had swapped numbers and were firm friends in the way that only Westerners abroad together can be.
The following Thursday we were out in Patpong (famous for its go-go bars and sprawling market selling every fake item you could desire) with them, at a bar called Twilo. One of the few bars in the neighbourhood that doesn’t do sex shows or go-go girls, it instead has a couple amateur bands on each night, mostly doing the Thai favourite of R&B and hip hop covers.
We met another friend of the girls, an American called Brian who had the inevitable Thai girlfriend tagging along. The first band was really good – a Thai girl singer and a white boy rapper who did admittedly convincing impersonations of the likes of Dr Dre and Sean Paul. I pointed out to Brian that Thailand seems to be the place where any white boy can come and live out his own particular fantasy. He nodded with a grin.
Anna knows the band well, having come here on plenty of nights out already and got up to belt out her favourite song – Shakira’s Hips Don’t Lie. She’s a party animal when she gets going, a one-woman crowd.
The bar wasn’t busy but filled up later. I had a laugh with Jess about a man over the other side of the bar who, for about 30 seconds, I was convinced looked like Freddie Ljumberg. We continued to watch him for ages as he seemed caught up in a weird flirtation with a Thai girl who was quite obviously with another farang – one much older and uglier and obviously not sure how to handle the situation. We have no idea how it ended.
…watching some films.
The night after my drunken escapades with James in Spicy I emerged from my bed about 6pm and went to the cinema, just so the day was not a complete write-off. I went to see 300, a film I’d been excited about for some time. It had just come out here in Thailand so the controversy surrounding it (Is it designed to piss off the Iranians or not? Of course not. Who knows enough about ancient Middle Eastern history to connect the Persians with the Iranians??) hadn’t really kicked off yet and I get to enjoy it as a fresh and exciting new film. It’s beautifully shot – brilliant eye candy even without the 300 perfectly honed and barely-clothed Spartan warriors that feature. It’s also shockingly violent in a way that’s hard to do these days when we’re so desensitised to it all, but it’s still highly stylized and retains the feel of the graphic novel that inspired it. (Each scene is lifted directly from the book and each shot built around it.) And you feel like you’re in the thick of battle for the whole thing as well. As my fellow teacher here Ricky put it, “You stride out of that theatre.”
Jess buys a dodgy DVD of Hot Fuzz, the new film from the Shaun of the Dead guys. It’s excellent. The copy we watch was filmed in a cinema so not great quality and there’s a lot of shifting of the camera at the beginning, but the film’s funny and entertaining enough to get over that. There are so many film references in it, and it’s like a Who’s Who of British acting talent, that me and Jess (who’s a self-confessed film addict) can’t keep up.
Then, one bored Saturday evening, I go and see Ghost Rider, with Nicolas Cage. It’s shit.
…going to a scary museum.
Before Mengly left, she spent a bored afternoon in a morbid-sounding museum called, to give it its full title, the Songkran Niyosane Forensic Medical Museum. She told me about it and it sounded absolutely disgusting, so of course I had to go and have a look.
It’s in the Siriraj Hospital, by the river down the end of the road on which I work, and is nigh on impossible to find. I got told to leave numerous buildings by Thai security guards before I found the right one. Thankfully they all realised I was there for the museum so each gave me vague directions until I stumbled upon it.
There’s lots of different mini-museums all situated together – one about tropical diseases, another about the Thai King’s own medical work – but the one of real interest is the forensic museum, most notably for the display featuring the leathery corpse of Thai’s infamous serial killer Si Ouey, a man executed for killing and eating young boys and girls in the 1950s.
Before you get to him, however, you’re greeted by the skeleton of the museum’s original curator, the titular Songkran Niyosane, and from there on in it’s a relentless showcase of the human body at its most damaged. Photos of car crash victims and violent murder victims with massive head wounds greet you, followed by a display telling the story of the tsunami in 2004 and the devastating effect it had on those present (and their bodies). It’s an interesting, if grisly, look at the medical response to the tragedy, which is praised endlessly.
But of course the main point of interest is the four cadavers (including Si Ouey) that greet you after the tsunami display. These executed criminals (murderers and rapists alike) are all in phone booth-like boxes, balanced in trays with their heads leaning against the glass. The browny-black skin is waxed to stop the mould and they look like human-shaped raisins. Brought up on a diet of horror movies I of course expected them to start moving at any moment and chase me down the corridor. I checked around me for routes of escape and possible weapons.
The horror film feel to the situation was added by the fact I was only accompanied in the museum by three teenage school girls, who stood around amongst the cadavers, incongruously gossiping and texting. They seemed totally unmoved by what they saw.
I wandered around some more and saw lots of babies and fetuses in formaldehyde (on and around which visitors have touchingly placed sweets and coins and toys for the unfortunate child). There is a display which shows two halves of a man’s head and the gun shot wound through his brain that killed him. As I took turns looking in each eye and trying to imagine what he looked like alive, I wondered what on earth happened to him. There are lots of bloody clothes and murder weapons as well, evidence in various murders. There are smoke-ravaged lungs (so stressful you need a cigarette after seeing them), and appendages with tattoos in formaldehyde as well.
The whole place shows you how fragile and unimportant we are, how easily we can be snuffed out, how easily we can end up a display in a museum, our souls long gone and long forgotten. It’s a relief to get outside and feel the sun on my skin. To feel alive.
…going to Samut Prakan crocodile farm.
See separate entry.
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