Marriage, pt.1

From our porch you can hear the monsoon rains rollling in for miles. If you stretch your neck out you can see the mammoth clouds come creeping around small mountains and over endless fields. You can hear rusty bells of distant buffalo clinking in the distance. When it finally arrives, the rain often comes down in hammers, culling up all sorts of smells. Grease rises up out of the concrete, mixes with random spatters of dung and the smoke of burning rice stalks.

Much of rural/suburban southern Thailand rises at dawn with the crow of the rooster. Leather-skinned farmers pull on their huge rubber boots and take their cow herds out to field. Ochre-clad monks roam with large, bulbous alms bowls, collecting offerings from local families and businesses. Tens of pushcarts and motorized vendors hit the streets with fresh-cut fruit, steamed buns and pork dumplings. Roadside coffee vendors are legion, peddling their syrupy-sweet cups to the first wave of morning laborers: the rubber tree plantation workers, the fish factory ladies, the crude motorcycle taxis and morning market employees. Shortly thereafter the schoolchildren emerge, flooding the streets with uniformed children packed tight into pickups, loaded 5 deep on little motor scooters, with the priveleged few catching a ride in conventional cars. Among these the girls all have regulation chin-length haircuts while the boys are shaven like soldiers.

By 9 am, all of this has subsided and our small town is in full swing for the day.

However, from our isolated little campus island 10-odd kilometers from most anything, I would never have known of these phenomena had it not been for (trumpets, please) semester break! In between each semester of school we have about 1 1/2 weeks that are unofficially free, provided you finish all your grading and paperwork and are well ready for the next semester by then. For our little week we decided to take up an invitation to visit a wedding, given by our friend Sakda (previously featured in the hospital visit). His 18-year old nephew was to marry his 20-year old bride with a to-the-hilt, traditional Thai celebration ensuing and we were asked to bear witness. Prior to the event we had adequate warning that Thai weddings are not like American weddings. The have many more people. Like 800+ more. In Thailand, major events like weddings, monk intiation ceremonies and funerals become full-on fundraising events, drawing every friend, neighbor, colleague or acquaintance that has perchanced to sniff in the direction of the family into its ongoing merrymaking. In my mind I pictured something physically similar to an American wedding, only bigger. Perhaps staged in a hotel event room, filled with people all eating, drinking and carousing in the style of western nuptials. How lovely, I thought, to witness a sweet and traditional little ceremony, followed by a gay old time surrounding by crowds of friendlies and family. Surely at least a few of them will speak English, I told myself, and we will find a way to fit right in...

Thailand is teaching me to abandon this archaic notion of 'expectations'.

Much to our relief, when we get in the car that is taking us on the 2-hour drive to the site of the festivities, there is another westerner sitting there. Mark, a Canadian fellow who was never able to leave Thailand after he and his partner engaged on a world tour after one day deciding that their 9 to 5 life was ultimately unfulfilling, had been invited along by Sakda as well and was equally uninformed about what was to come.

While Sakda had mentioned that this wedding would take place in Krabi, a town significantly larger and more fun than our own, he did not mention that, well, it wasn't exactly in Krabi but a little village about an hour from Krabi where the closest ATM was a 20-minute drive and the dirt roads were covered in scrawny chickens and stray dogs. We pulled up to the house at dusk to find several large event-tents set up, under which tables have been arranged. Flourescent lights illuminate the edging darkness as we emerge from the car, our white skin almost glowing. Naturally, we feel something like a sideshow act as the family and friends numbering at least 50 gawk and stare at us in shameless, typical Thai fashion. Not that they mean anything ill by it, but the concept of discrete observance is entirely alien to them. Being that the family owns a rubber and palm plantation and spends most days in the deep country, the presence of farang (foreigners) stands somewhere in the neighborhood of seeing a unicorn on Miami beach. Add to this our cherubic child and the deal is done, we will not be without an audience for the next 60+ hours.

On the center table it is clear that something has been recently slaughtered. The extremities strung up to the tent-posts with plastic ties in the background confirm that it was something of a buffalo/cow-type creature. A man is laboriously carving shreds of meat from the dangling legs while a score of people gathered around its harvested crimson piles proceed to chop it to ribbons. An army is coming tomorrow and they must be ready to feed it.

At an adjacent table a circle of older men are drinking whiskey and smoking cigarettes with great dedication. From the texture of their skin and the delivery of their speech, they appear to be farmers and manual laborers. Mark and I gather up two chairs and plunk ourselves awkwardly off to the side of it all while Isaiah is quickly swept into the hundred hands of Thailand once again and Gaibi goes tumbling after. Without great delay, whiskey erodes the culture barrier and Markie and I find ourselves seated amongst the older gentlemen, drinking strong sodas and trying to bridge the communication gap with our small bag of functional Thai. Anyone who has ever been in such a situation can attest to the fact that, in adequate quantities, booze can be a miraculous aid to otherwise troublesome communication situations. It allows you to be more bold with the few words that you have, and moments of understanding become celebrated triumphs. Likewise, the desire to merely connect becomes more prominent and leaving the details of actual information exchange behind, you make any and every attempt to do so.

Even with the aid of the spirits however, my attempts to communicate with others at this event ranged from laborious at best to downright depressing. A possible explanation for this might be that we were deep in the countryside and even those who spoke to me in the 'central' dialect of Thai must have done so with a thick southern accent. Add to this copious amount of whiskey, beer and ear-shattering karaoke tunes blasting out of 5 foot speakers from an adjacent stage and you can pretty much count on looking like a besotted, mumbling farang in even your most earnest attempts at communication.

We made it through that night by wiggling our way toward the meat-pile to help with mincing and were eventually offered a priveleged seat at dinner: a table in the kitchen. While everyone else, including the groom just to the left of our table, sat on the ground (the preferred choice of rural Thais everywhere) we regally enjoyed our chairs and dined on organ meat curries. I was told that the organ meats were are special treat shared only with the inner circle of family and friends the night before the party.

After all of this we were shown to our room in an adjacent house: a large, tiled space with a sort of thick comforter spread out across the floor that was to be our bed. By village standards the house was rather nice, though the average westerner might be inclined to note that it was pretty much a cement box with several rooms. On the wall in the kitchen a large, muddy hornets nest clung to the wall above the gas-burner stove - a sign of good luck, I was told. In the bedroom a spider roughly the diameter of a CD was hanging out on the wall. After a while none of it is shocking or discomforting any longer. The reality of a people so hospitable that they give you, (a stranger) the biggest room in their house in the midst of a wedding while they sleep on a wooden board in the TV room, slowly sinks in and you find yourself sleeping rather fitfully, nestled amongst the lizards and the creepers.

And rest well we needed to, for the next morning would commence a string of festivities that would not relent for the next 40 hours.