When the Going Gets Tough, Get On the Bus, Gus

I had a job and then I didn't.  Much as I wanted to go back to auditing, my career came to a crashing halt after only two weeks.  Working in a sweatshop was not my lifelong dream and each day I had to kill the ants covering my desk, so maybe I need to find a new home.  The owner, my direct boss, didn't seem to know what auditors do.  He was impatient and rude with me after the first half of my first day.  After that I got food poisoning and went downhill from there.  Thus, I am back in the market for a job.

I read an article at www.ajarn.com the other day which did brighten me up some.  It talks about how one fellow taught in Asia for ten years and then decided to go back home....to Washington, the place I only left four months ago.  He discovered the job market is still terrible there and made me realize that, perhaps I should just stick it out here for a while longer.  You can see his article here.  A Teacher Goes Back Home

I went back online to search for a job at the same website, focusing mainly on where I am now, Chiang Mai.  Not much showed up, though I did get to interview and test for a pre-kindergarten job and another with a high school three hours south of here.  The latter is in a beautiful valley surrounded by mountains and tall trees.  The nearest town is a ten minute drive and when you get there the biggest store is a 7/11.  I would get a free apartment.  Unfortunately it was, to this westerner's eyes, more of a cell than an apartment.  It had three rooms, all blue concrete with blue floors, no furniture, no closets and the kitchen was just a room.  There was no sink or stove or anything to make it habitable.  The last straw was that the bathroom had no hot water.  Most of the teachers, all of whom are female, live on campus during the week and then go home on weekends.  So far only one farang teacher had been there and he only lasted on semester.  We told family that I was going to take it but then I decided I didn't care much for living without my wife for so long.  The agency has another potential school, a high school, here in town but I decided to not put all my eggs into one basket.  I have been applying to schools everywhere today.

Nee has a place down in Bangkok which lead me to apply to some work there.  Bangkok is really the population center of Thailand.  The country has many lovely places to go to but if you want a job, you really need to go to Bangkok.  We decided I could no longer fight reality.  I applied to several places and apparently they need people down there.  Most likely I will be taking the 10 hour bus ride south tomorrow to meet with people Tuesday.  When I was in the US, I applied to work everywhere and never even got a response.  At least someone actually read my emails here.

Today, we decided to do as little as possible.  Our landlord owns much of the land around us and it is filled with coconut trees and banana trees.  We have been given a few coconuts in the past and today she decided to let me harvest a few.

Angels in the Darkness

My visa was going to run out and my new employer was able to help me out.  I needed to have a letter and a stack of documents to take with me to a Thai embassy outside Thailand to get a new visa and not have to worry for a bit longer about getting deported.  Such worries are new to me.
I can't quite figure the logic of sending thousands of people outside the borders only to stand in line in front of Thai nationals to get a stamp in a passport.  Such activity could easily happen inside the country and they could gain from the travel money spent.  As it is, I had to find an embassy I could go to that wouldn't break my bank. The employer would give me the paperwork but not the cost of travel.  Two weeks earlier, I took a bus north to Myanmar but that only gave me 15 days.  I needed more time.
Embassies in Singapore and Malaysia involved getting on a plane which gets expensive.  Cambodia was too far and I don't think there is an embassy in Myanmar...besides once in Myanmar was plenty.  That left me with Laos, the nearest country to the east of here.  The embassy is in the capital city, Vientiane, which I had heard was beautiful, at least from a couple of students from my TEFL class.  Actually, I had heard quite the opposite from travel shows thus my curiosity was up.
Getting there is a bit of a challenge.  There are direct flights from Chiang Mai though more expensive than I wanted to spend.  Plus, the Thai embassy has time limits each day as to when you are able to drop off your paperwork.  Office hours are from 8:30 to noon each day.  If you arrive after that, you are locked out.  You drop off your paperwork on day one and then return the next day in the afternoon to pick up your passport with visa attached.  Thus, we were committed to spending a night there.  That gets me back to my original complaint about all this.  Sending tourists and business people out of the country to spend the night in a foreign hotel and eat the local food only takes money from Thailand.  Where is the logic?
Not flying directly leaves us with flying to the town of Udon Thani, an eastern city in Thailand.  We caught the early morning flight from Chiang Mai to arrive at 9 in Udon Thani.  The websites I read about it said there would be many different taxis and busses waiting to whisk me away to the border.  Actually there was just the one line for cabs which we caught.  The cab turned out to be the fellow's personal car which was clean and comfortable.  We drove for an hour to the border.  He couldn't cross so he left us there.

Lao Songtauw.  Nee sat up front and I was in back.

From there, I had to give my visa to Thai immigration where they took my exit card, charged me a fee, and sent me on my way.  Nee just walked through.  We then caught one of the oldest, most beat up bus I had seen in Asia.  That took us across the Mekong River into Laos.  I had to once again go through Lao immigration and at this point Nee was getting fed up with transportation.  She did her best to negotiate a deal into town, only to get us onto a very dilapidated songtaew, about half the size we see in Thailand.  The androgynous driver said he was a guy but looked and sounded like a girl.  Hey, this is Southeast Asia.
We rattled along for another hour making it nearly 11:00 when we arrived.  We got through the gate past a long line of more songtaews and tuktuks and entered the gate.  The crowd was several hundred people from all over the world all waiting under a steel roof in the hot sun.  The next number was 120 and mine was 286. Oh my.  I knew I was in trouble.
We waited for several hours, chatting with people from all over the world, sweating, eating over-priced street food.  That night we explored Vientiane.  Though on the surface it looks much like Thailand, it is quite poor, by comparison.  Cars and motorcycles are mostly quite old, streets are not cleaned, and locals can't afford to eat out.  The French did leave many beautiful buildings and straight roads, but maintaining them is a challenge.  Another thing the French left, though, was the bakery.
Near our hotel, I found several, all smelling wonderful in the early morning.  We went in search for breakfast, but were a bit early, so we wandered the town.  We saw more homeless than Thailand, more dirty streets, a number of temples and many hungry dogs.  The landscape was beginning to depress me and made me want to go back home.  Then for a moment, I could here the soft sound of singing; the voices of young women singing in harmony.  I turned and saw six girls riding bicycles down the quiet street, wearing matching t-shirts for the restaurant the worked at nearby.  They were singing to a radio one girl was carrying, and the voices seemed to fill the void and make the filth disappear for a moment.  As suddenly as it began, it ended as they got off their bikes to go to work.  I was impressed with how they seemed to be so comfortable with their world.

A Lao temple near our hotel

We returned to Udon Thani that night and stayed in a far better hotel without dirty sheets and buzzing mosquitos.  We ate Thai food at a street corner cafe, something so common here yet difficult to find only a few miles away in Laos.  I thought of how Laos have had to struggle for so many years and yet they still manage to sing their way to work.

Mr. Roy Gets Sick

I had planned to write about our trip to Laos a couple of weeks ago; about finding wonderful French bakeries, seeing a country far more poor than Thailand, more French food and briefly being followed by a set of angelic girls singing their way to work on their bicycles.  However, this week was far more challenging and deserves its place today.

A representation of my lower GI tract

I got food poisoning this week.  Up until now, I have managed to eat street food, home-cooked food, friend-cooked food, raw food, berries I found in the wild and even a nicely cooked cricket at the market with no ill effects.  The water here is rarely drunk straight from the tap as I did in the US, though people cook with it without fear as did I.  Wherever you fill up your gas, the station always gives you a free liter bottle of water to take home for the kiddies.  Up until last week, we had been happily living downtown within walking distance of limitless restaurants and street vendors, selling everything from fresh cooked fried rice to little balls of meat skewered on sticks.  I generally avoided the latter, though, since they also have a habit of coating all the meatballs with a sugary syrup which I find a bit nauseating.  Through it all, I managed to stay in one piece and generally erect.  That is until this week. 

Our move was stressful.  We were driving the pick-up in our apartment that was better set up for motorcycles.  There was no place to park out of the rain, and sometimes no place to park at all.  The rain came in bucketsfull, drenching me to the bone as I did all I could to cover things and move the truck out of the way of other trucks wishing to leave the building or move someone else.  Once moved, the rain stopped and the heat came.  Days have been drearily hot here lately; so much so that I find myself getting a bit woozy from it.  Then came the bugs.

Our first night at our new place was cool and damp.  What I didn't know was that cool and damp also brings out hordes of flying insects.  We came home from dinner out to find the kitchen filled with lacy-winged insects covering the windows, lights and filling the air.  Nee had me place a tub of water on the floor, a cure her mother used.  Sure enough, within minutes, the little devils dive-bombed the tub and they were gone.  The next morning, the back porch (aka outdoor kitchen) was covered in wings.  We also have an assortment of beetles, ants and other things that fly into your face. 

The final curse was the heat.  The rain disappeared and all last week we had heat that would melt rubber.  Excess heat makes me nauseous so this was not much fun.  Enter the food poisoning.  Somewhere around Tuesday evening I went from happy-go-lucky Roy to my-god-wheres-the-toilet Roy and I managed to lose all I had consumed for the day.  Perhaps it was the heat, or maybe the week old peanuts or anything else I may have consumed.  This followed me the rest of the week until today.  Maybe it was the tap water I made coffee with that morning, or maybe I just was born under an unlucky star.

Today we went to the hospital.  In Thailand, out-patient care usually takes place at the hospitals during the day and small clinics dotted around the area during the evenings. Both are run by the same doctors, as I have been told.  We went to McCormick Hospital, comically shown as Mcommich Hospital on the GPS in true Thainglish and was able to see a doctor in minutes.  Definitely not the American experience.  I wasn't asked about insurance and the fees were 1000 baht including four drugs...you can do the math.  When I was called to see the doctor, I was announced as Mr. Roy.  No one goes by last names here.  I received four plastic packets of pills, one I take before I eat, the other I take after, another I take in the morning and I can't remember when to take the last one.  Don't leave them out of their packets, either, or you will never know when to take them.

So far I have been referred to as Khun Roy, Mr. Roy, Teacher Roy and even briefly Ajarn Roy.  Anyone one of them would be happy to stop going through this period of deja flu (haven't I seen this toilet before?) but, alas.  I have been home for the afternoon, licking my wounds in my airconditioned bedroom and the problem is still with me.  Perhaps in a day or two the antibiotic will start to work.  Or maybe I will just dream of the lovely eclair I had in Laos and how much better I felt that day than I do at the moment.  It was filled with real chocolate cream, too.  Mmmm.

A Funny Thing Happened to Me On My Way to School

I came here three months ago to find a new life as an English teacher. Last week, I was unemployed, had a potential for working several schools to earn a small income and my visa was about to run out.  Suddenly, I got a call from someone I had applied to months ago and everything changed.  It appears that I won't be teaching English any time soon however I will be able to return to my old career and stay here in Chiang Mai.  Making this return has saved me, for the moment, though I am not sure where it will lead. A few things needed to change to make this work.

First, we needed a car.  Nee has a friend who knows a mechanic who appears to also be in the used car business.  In the US, he would need a license to sell cars but here he just needs his driveway.  He showed us a number of cars over the last few weeks until last week.  Then we found a Nissan March, a car that looks more like a fat motorcycle than anything you would want to fill with your weekend suitcases for the trip to the coast.  The Nissan dealer had one that was a year old and already had enough miles as if it were three years older.  The price was a bit too good to be true, as well.  We mentioned this to our friend and suddenly another car appeared at the mechanic's.  This time a Chevrolet, five years old and very low mileage. 

I have been driving since the early 70's and most of my cars were Japanese with the exception of 71 Buick Skylark which I loved, even if I did have to put a piece of a two-by-four in the seat to make it level.  Fast forward about 30 years and now I am in Asia looking at a Chevy.  This one looks like my Camry, though, so it isn't a far stretch from my own perceived reality.  We drove it and loved it, breaking the heart of the dealer for a few seconds.

Next we needed a home closer to the job.  We had looked before and didn't find much.  This time, we stopped the truck in a neighborhood and Nee asked a lady who was cycling by with her baskets full of fruit to sell.  She pointed out a place behind the temple we were next to and we wandered in back.  There we found Shangri La, a beautifully landscaped resort complete with Koi carp, a fountain and hand-carved wooden doors.  The owner showed us around, offering us water, telling Nee about other houses available for rent nearby.  Finally she remembered a set of row houses that she happened to have an arrangement with and we walked in and decided we were home.  Thus, we now have a new home and a newish car.  Next I needed a visa. That is another long story which includes a trip to Laos and far too many modes of transportation.  In the meantime, we are moving tomorrow and begin the next phase of this adventure.  More about Laos later.

Long Walk Off a Short Pier

My visa ran out last week.  Thailand's rules are at best convoluted, and at worst, arbitrary.  Reading how to extend my visa is like trying to keep up with the latest version of Windows.  Several sources are out there starting with Thai immigration, moving to such websites as Thai Visa, Ajarn.com, and several blogs in numerous languages.  Being the auditor that I am, I tried following what I needed to do and found that each source contradicts the other.  My visa was good for 90 days with the hope that I would be able to walk into a teaching job and get it extended to one year.
"Roy, you are taking this TEFL course at the best of all times," I was told enthusiastically by the school owner.  School would be out for summer vacation starting in March and get back after Songkran on April 13.   That is almost true just as it is true that Christmas is after April 13, sooner or later.  The whole story is that school goes back to session May 15 and no one even wanted to talk to me until the end of April, that is, right about now.  Unfortunately, my visa ran out and I needed to fix it or leave.

There are several options available, each with its convoluted requirements, starting with the first and simplest, the tourist visa.  Anyone coming to Thailand from the US is automatically granted a 30 day visa.  Most other countries give us 90 days or more, but Thailand seems to have a steady flow of income from idiots like myself who find themselves at the end of their time too soon.  My visa is a non-immigrant visa, of which there are two types.  The first is a single entry 90 day visa which is what I had.  The second is a multiple entry that allows me a year without renewal.  Such a visa has to come from either a job or my own business.  Oh, but that business must be owned by 51% Thais with two Thai owners, blah blah blah.
Then again I could get a marriage visa.  For that I need to show that I have had an income of 40,000 baht each month which could amount to putting 40k in my wife's bank account and transferring it back to mine, then the next month sending it back to her's and then back to mine.  Are you keeping track of all this?  I didn't know these rules and didn't care at the time I got here since I was convinced I would be working.
To renew my visa I have to leave the country, get my passport stamped going out and coming back in, and then begging Thai immigration to give me at least 30 days.  The closest place to go is Myanmar to the north, a five hour bus ride.  We wanted to keep Nee employed, so we flew a friend up from Bangkok who would accompany me to the Thai border and see if she could talk some sense into the guard.  We were headed to Mae Sai in Thailand to the Myanmar border.

The ride was dull with only the excitement of the occasional roadside rest and the 3 baht pee.  Again, these were the filthiest toilets I had seen making me wonder where the 3 baht was spent.

 

A rest stop on the road to Mae Sai

Once there, I had to cross the border.

The Gate to Myanmar

The above picture is the clean side, Thailand.  Crossing over, my friend was forced to stand outside behind a dirty red curtain, while the border guards took my passport.  In his official and intimidating voice, he pointed back and said, "Back there Thailand.  Over here, Myanmar.  You can leave now, stay a few minutes or stay 90 days.  Up to you."  He took 500 baht and kept my passport. 

I figured I may never come back this way, so I asked my friend to join me as I walked into the market, perhaps to find some food.  As we stepped down the steps, we were greeted by two guys wearing boxes slung in front of them filled with cigarettes, knives and Viagra. 
"You want to buy?" they asked me several times, eyeing my backpack which had my laptop and a few more thousand baht, in case I need to encourage a border guard or two.  The two hustlers followed us for several feet until I finally decided that Friendly Myanmar should become a thing of the past.  Typical of border towns, this was another avoidable spot on the earth.

We retrieved my passport and then headed back to Thailand.  The best they would give me was a 15 day tourist visa, barely enough to keep me here with instructions on how to get a marriage visa.  Perhaps I need to take their advice.

Fortunately, just as I was about to give up hope, a chance for a job came up.  I may find myself employed quite soon and they are even going to help me with my visa, so long as my references approve.  Otherwise, I may have to take advantage of another 90 day pass to Myanmar.....or maybe Malaysia. 

Baby, You Can Drive My Car, or Truck in This Case

We spent a week in Bangkok two weeks ago, shopping for clothes, eating seafood, visiting friends and family and just having a bit of fun.  If you read my earlier blogs, you know that Nee's house lacked air conditioning so this trip, we added a unit to the bedroom.  You could still bake bread in the rest of the house, but at least we could sleep in frozen splendor.  The home isn't so bad when I can sit in it comfortably.  She has a desk in the bedroom, so I was working on my taxes there...with the AC on, of course.

We came down with the desire to pick up things we had shipped from the US and to buy a car.  Nee's niece had talked a friend of her's to sell us her car, a bright red Honda Jazz, for a fairly good price.  She had even added a natural gas tank as gasoline, referred to as benzene here, has become so expensive.  Benzene runs almost 40 baht a liter whereas natural gas costs about 12 baht.  But the car had over 200k on it so it was voted by the family that we should not buy it.  Instead, we are borrowing her brother's pick up with manual transmission.  I haven't driven a stick for at least 15 years and then it was a VW bus with the gearshift on the right side.

Nee learned to drive a stick here and took to it, though reluctantly, pretty quickly.  It was voted that I not drive as yet because driving in Thailand is quite treacherous and so we had her other brother help with the driving.  When he drove, I sat in the front seat and Nee in the back.  The pick up is one of those extended models with space for storage behind the seats.  Her brother added an additional chair that sits sideways.  Nee seemed content in back.  We drove our 12 hours north to Chiang Mai, with Nee occasionally driving and gaining confidence.  Unfortunately the road was full of potholes so I spent a good deal of time bouncing and having my head crash into the ceiling.  The truck solved the problem for getting Nee to work but I am still having trouble driving it. 

To add to the fun, the weekend we drove back was Songkran, the new year celebration that involves much water.  Sevee, our escorting brother, drove us around Bangkok to see hordes of children and adults with buckets, barrels, squirtguns and hoses filled with water all being directed to any passersby.  We got hit a few times, but our windows were closed.  We also saw other pick up trucks filled with more kids and adults, barrels and buckets of water and they would drive up to anyone and douse them.  As the temperature and humidity made getting wet a pleasant matter, no one seemed to mind.  When I first met Nee she told me about the event which I had never heard of.  Then at the time, I had no idea where Thailand was, either.  The night we arrived home, there was a water orgy going on our street.  Sevee chose to stay dry so Nee and I ventured out to buy pizza.  Several people threatened us with water but my glares seem to be enough to stop them.  Well, most of them.  I did get a bucket of water poured down my back but it came from a sweet-faced five-year-old, so how could I refuse?

Sewitt loaned us his truck, his main transportation and Sevee accepted our offer to fly him home even though he had never flown before.  Thus both sacrificed a great deal for us and I appreciate it very much.

I still can't drive left handed while watching for motorcycles from 360 degrees but that is a problem I will have to work on. 

Moving Ahead Slowly

Nee quit her job last week.  That same day, they called her and told her she could have some time off, without pay, to get herself a car.  With that, she decided to take their offer.  She couldn't get to work without a car and taking her so far on a motorcycle was beyond my abilities.  I prefer to have us both in one piece.
We spent Thursday and Friday looking at used cars, some at lots with others supplied to us by our friends in Sun Sai.  Getting out there involved again another two songtauws and then something called a rote peung or bumblebee car.  It turned out to be an old man with a crutch riding a motorcycle attached to a roofed steel-tubed side car with a bench for two to sit on.  I had to help him jump start the bike as he couldn't due to his poor leg.  Our friend said we should pay 10 baht per person except when he saw me the price went up to 15.  We chugged through the countryside at the breakneck speed of 30 kph until we came to the house.

Our friends had called a local mechanic who knew of a couple of used cars he could show us.  Both were older model Toyotas, in good shape though the prices were too high for us.  I wanted to look under the hood of the last car so I pulled what I thought was the hood lever only to find it was an anti-theft lock and the mechanic hadn't brought the key.  He never showed annoyance, though I knew he was.  Thais rarely show anger.
We ended up both riding on the back of our friend's motorcycle, three of us rolling among the banana and mango trees.  She had ridden since she was 17 and now is retired.  She never wobbled or showed any difficulty I had suffered riding alone earlier in the week. 
Next week is the Thai New Year celebration, Songkran, and Nee's employer is closed for the week, so we decided it was time to finally go back to Bangkok and retrieve some of our belongings.  I also need to see immigration as my visa will run out before I might get hired and I need an extension.  Going south is done by plane, bus, train or car.  The plane was too expensive, and I had had a bad experience on a long bus ride here a few years ago; we have no car and thus we decided on taking the train.  It was a slow lumbering ride through miles and miles and miles of rice fields and banana orchards, with towns so small that Mayberry would look like New York City by comparison.  Nee overheard a conversation where she heard that the train was running 2 hours late.  We had already been on for 12 hours so we bailed out at the old airport and took a cab ride to her niece's place.
The next day we had to go honor her deceased parents at an annual ceremony and then were whisked away to the neighborhood with many clothing vendors along the street.  The neighborhood reminded me of Chiang Mai with all the tourists and junk for sale and we were able to find plenty of good clothes to pick up at great prices.
To thank Nee's family for all they have done for us since we started this journey, we took them all out to dinner.  We wanted someplace next to the water and were taken to a restaurant that was built in piers over a man-made lake.  There were piers without cover, more near shore with a Quonset hut type roof and then more rooms out of the weather completely.  We began dinner with beer and some appetizers when I noticed lightning south of us.  Suddenly, large drops of rain came falling that quickly turned into a wind-swept downpour.  Everyone ran for the Quonset hut dining are to start their meal over.  We began to drink beer again when the wind came up and blew the rain well inside the cover.  We all retired to one of the rooms and finished our meal together as a big family.  We also had much beer.
Today, I am back at our house in Bangkok, the one I mentioned before without air conditioning.  We agreed to have it installed today and then Nee ran off with her brother while I stayed home to unpack.  Strangely, going through all the boxes we so carefully packed and repacked last January looked foreign.  I opened one box after another wondering why I would bring such things.  I found sweaters and coats and wool socks and gloves which are all worthless here.  I found out baking gear and cookbooks and now we have no oven.  I found my tools though I have nothing to fix and endless other things I could have just as easily left in Washington and never seen again.  One box I avoided at first, not wanting to break into it until finally I got my knife and cut the tape.  Inside I found what I had missed most about moving.  Not my bike, though it is also sitting in its box here in the living room.  Not my books or tools or anything like that.  I found my baby Taylor guitar.  I pulled it out of the box, opened the case and held it for a time.  I tuned it by ear as my tuner is in a box somewhere.  And then I just started playing.  I am not good at remembering songs so I usually cheat with a book, but I couldn't find them, either.  So I played what I could remember, sang what I knew and lost myself in it.
I gave up so much to be here.  This small box of wood with it taught six strings has brought me back home.  I know I can make it if I have music.
Our neice, Nong, talked her girlfriend into selling us her 6 year old Honda Jazz.  The car has a lot of miles on it but she obviously took great care of it so we decided to buy it.
Now I have a machine to carry my guitar.