The Office

Now that I work in an office, I can understand why they made a TV show parodying such a situation. We deserve to be laughed at, I think to myself, as we shuffle around in our suits and ties, making copies and chattering over our cubicles. At face value, it all seems very western, each person at their desk working scrupulously on the task at hand. A closer look, however, reveals that things are not always as they seem…

While I cannot presume to speak for all Thai offices, I can vouch for the majority of those in my building, which is an administration building for the medical school. As I stroll down the halls running errands and stretching my legs, I notice so many computer screens tuned into youtube, booking airline tickets, perusing photographs of family and friends and reading recipes online that I begin to wonder how much work is actually done in a day. One man told me with some disdain in his voice that he has to come in to work every day. Spending time in the office with him however, I noticed much of the same that I noticed elsewhere. Picture viewing, playing online, having long, relaxed conversations with the secretary. I began to wonder whether he couldn’t shave his work week down to five days if he just focused a little. Much of the office life around me is like this, feeling more like a living room at times, with frequent offerings of food from the office ladies and soft radio a la Celine Dion. Guests often pop in and spend great amounts of time chatting and enjoying the fruit. The mood is anything but urgent, and everyone seems to prefer it that way. It doesn’t matter if you have enough to do, just be there from 9 to 5 and enjoy the view.

Sometimes Gaibi will visit the office with Isaiah, and this will slowly, magnetically draw all of the staff on my floor out of their offices to spend significant amounts of time either playing with him or adoring him from the sidelines. Eventually, all offices have emptied out and are enjoying the foreign baby show, while the unhurried workload waits in the wings. This is the gist of the Thai culture it seems, and in it one feels almost a sense of pride.

Geographically, Thailand is surrounded by areas that have all been colonized. Vietnam, Burma, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore. I have heard that in the Phillipines, all things western are fundamentally valued more than the native culture. It is as though they have been inseminated with the culture and it is flowering from underneath. Meanwhile, in Thailand, the original impulse still remains, unbroken, untamed. While modernity comes smashing it an a hundred miles-an-hour, the people carry on in their own time. It is a rare and beautiful thing that such a culture can remain in touch with its origins in this world, and I am called to remember this fact when I am sitting behind a car that has parked in the middle of the road, blocking the entire lane, to go buy some fried chicken.

I watched as a trio of confused-looking Thai women tried to make sense of the soup selection at the ‘Sizzler’ salad bar here in Hat Yai. All of the names of the soups were written in English, and things like ‘tuna cream with parsley’ are not taught in the schools. After they left, another woman gingerly stirred around in the hot and sour chicken soup, carefully looking for any remaining bits of chicken in a mostly exhausted pot with the patience of a country fisherwoman. It’s as if you can almost feel the haste with which modernity has slammed into this culture, and its inhabitants still seem to be reeling a bit from the impact.

Today I came downstairs in my boxer shorts while preparing to go out for dinner, only to find a 5 ft. Taiwanese lady standing in my living room. How did she get there? Well, the story requires a little background.

Some weeks ago while Isaiah and I were taking a walk, a short, elderly woman beckoned us into her house a few doors down. Having nothing better to do, we obliged. She lives alone in a town house, the same size as ours (too big for 3 people let alone 1). Inside it was easy to observe that she is elderly and without much help or company; there are open packets of medicine, half-used tissues and old fruits scattered about the place. Also present are odd clues that suggest family, such as video-game posters along the walls and odd photos of her with some younger looking people. It would be sensible to assume (as appears to be the case) that she is an old grandma set up in a furnished apartment by some generous family members, who she seldom sees. In addition, the woman seems to speak very little Thai, yet will consistently speak to us in long, rambling sentences in a language that we as of yet cannot identify, but take for some dialect of Chinese or Taiwanese. An old Taiwanese lady somehow dropped into a row of rather modern Thai row-homes. Now as we pass her house on walks she always invites us in and will not hear anything of our occasional declinations.

The other night as we sat eating tacos on our little dining table pushed way over into one corner of the room to prevent Isaiah from throwing food off of it, we heard a rustling at the front gate. We called out, “Helloooo?”
A little giggle. Female. Hard to discern her age.

“hello?”

From the lamps in the house we can make out her tiny frame and puffy hair. She is twinkling in her old black eyes as she proceeds to step up onto our porch and enter the house through our front door. She is holding a little bag of prawn-flavored, potato crispy snacks. As we stand she motions for us to sit, and pads cutely up to the table in her walking sandals, slacks and patterned, button-up shirt. She peruses the table, covered in strange foods. Tortillas, chopped veggies, salsa, beans. “Where is the rice?” she asks in the sparse Thai that she has.
“We don’t have any rice.” I reply.
Bursting into a hearty laugh, she slaps me on the back and says something like, “oh its in the kitchen isn’t it? ‘No rice,’ ha ha.”

She speaks at length to us in her foreign tongue, and we nod in alternating directions, trying to eke out the right responses from her. Its funny how a totally foreign language can sound like a total of four different syllables to you.
“Sher Jeen,” she says as she walks through the door. “sher jeen how fung?” she inquires about Isaiah. “Jeen jeen how cheurng ah?”
“Yes.”
I bring a spoonful of broccoli toward Isaiah’s mouth, and she stops me short. “He can eat it,” I assure her. “Jeen sher cheurng ah.”
“yeah.”

After hanging around for a bit, she pads out, refusing our attempts to stand and let her out the door. Fifteen minutes later, she appears again at the door with a little bag containing a sports drink and a straw.

“ Fung how ah?” she asks.
“yes, yes, come in,” we reply.

Her mission this time is merely to deliver the sports drink. No matter where we happen to meet her, she insists on showering us with gifts. In such cases, accepting them is what matters and not whether you happen to need them or not.

Back to our living room. Earlier that afternoon, she stopped by the house looking rather downtrodden. Her shoe was broken and she had a cut finger. It seems that whoever looks after her only does so occasionally. She came to the door where she collected Isaiah and took him off to play on our parked motorcycle. Though lately Isaiah has been going through a period of clinginess, rejecting most offers to be held by non-parental units, he never refuses grandma. After a nice visit, she left and we began to get ready to go out with some friends. While we were upstairs changing, I remembered my pair of pants downstairs on the couch and came down to find grandma standing in the living room, holding a packet of prawn crispies.
“Jeen sher ah?”
“yeah”

Looking Forward, Looking Back

Outside it is war. There are multi-colored flashes and flares throbbing against the night sky. If I didn’t know better, I’d guess that the pot had finally boiled over in Thailand and the battle horns had been sounded. Down the street an explosive firework set off a nearby car alarm – three times. Semi-automatic crackling fills the air, accented by more dominant, extravagant bursts in literally every direction visible from our porch balcony.

It was there that Gaibi and I stood barefoot on the concrete, slimy from humidity and mildew, sharing a tall beer and watching what appeared to be southern Thailand going up in flames. It was now 2009 and Isaiah was screaming something ferocious in the next room. Cheers, my darling, a quick kiss and then Isaiah needs to go back to sleep for sweet God’s sake.

We went downtown this evening to witness how the biggest city in the south celebrates the New year. What we found in this particular town was, interestingly, what can be found in most celebratory environments: vendors. Another ‘must’ is music, played at a tremendous volume through high-powered, (though not necessarily high defintion,) speakers. As you meander, shoulder to shoulder with bustling strangers, down the endless aisles of little plastic trinkets, pushcart ice-cream, pirated movies and fashionable outfits, you can’t help but wonder what it might be that compels humans to acquire so many little things in their short lives. What is it that drives us to fill our houses with keychain animals and Spiderman alarm clocks and chopstick sleeves and sequin handbags? It would seem that nothing is further from happiness than the little piles of junk that crowd our lives and the tabletops of our homes, I think to myself.

Three minutes later I am crouched down at a booth, examining some nice crocheted light-switch covers. I’m trying to decide between the Thai flag and the one that looks like Bob Marley. Five for only two dollars US? ‘These will make great gifts,’ I think.

A funny thing about using foreign money is that when you spend this new, colorful, monopoly-esque stuff in your wallet, it still goes away. When I was young in video-game arcades we used to exchange our quarters for tokens, and because we weren’t used to spending tokens we would pump them thoughtlessly into the machines until all of our dollars-turned-quarters-turned-tokens had been exhausted. I would have been more scrupulous with my quarters, and I find myself at times on the same slippery slope in this country.

I heard an interesting theory about the culture of Thailand and its exceedingly laid-back, unhurried manner. Living on what amounts to a great big peninsula whose weather is essentially an oscillating mix of stifling heat and rain, abundant with native fruits and vegetables, the first settlers of this land were none-too pressured to sow the grain and reap the harvest for there was no harsh cold ahead. Work was done when the rain let up, and the meantime was filled with great stretches of indulgent inactivity and finding creative ways to enjoy this time. Unlike the American pioneers, constantly waging battle against the fierce and unruly elements in the New England region where it all began, the Thais merely sat back and waited for the rain to stop. If you’ve ever been to New York or Boston, you can feel the spirit of this struggle living on in its people: work, survival, urgency. In Thailand, sometimes I find myself wishing that they had at least a little winter in their climate.

We were set to go to Malaysia two weeks ago, where I would have to re-apply for a visa in lieu of changing job locations in Thailand, a beauracratic necessity that I have yet to understand. I was told by my boss that he would arrange a van to take us on the 5 hr. ride to Penang, and island off the west coast of the country. The afternoon before leaving I walk into the office where he casually asks me, ‘What time will you leave tomorrow morning?’
I remind him that he has offered to arrange this, to which he responds, “So do you know where the bus station is?”
I reiterate my previous answer, and this time he says, “yes, ok…” He then calls to reserve seats for us on the 9:30 mini-bus and, still very casual, informs me that my whole family needs to have passport photos taken and that I will need photo copies of my marriage license, Isaiah’s birth certificate and an armful of other paperwork that had somehow escaped mention in the many weeks since I had been informed of this trip. It is in moments such as these that I am thankful that the frigid snows of Massachusetts taught our settlers the value of a little forethought.

I have learned that in when undertaking any kind of official duty in Thailand, it pays to relentlessly cross-examine the people involved, making every effort to insure that you can get a jump start on the extensive preparations. Thai culture has the strange tendency to tell you what you want to hear rather than the whole uncomfortable truth, and when it comes to preparing the documents that will insure my legal residence in a foreign country, I’m more the type who would like to hear all the gory details right up front.

Somehow, despite our earnest efforts, we end up on the wrong bus the next morning at 9:30 from the proscribed bus stop and we are spat from it onto the border of Thailand and Malaysia where we walk across, only to be swindled by motorbike taxis, short-changed by money changers and overcharged for a 4-hour cab ride through the Malaysian countryside to our destination, stopping here and there to drop off a clock radio at a friend’s restaurant and pick up the driver’s wife from the side of the road where she waited with amongst stray chickens and water buffalo. Malaysia will never get a second chance to make a first impression.

Penang however, was a very interesting little island. A one-time British colony and spice island now owned by Malaysia and populated predominantly by Malay, Chinese and Indian people, it was an incredible intersection of cultures, all living very peacefully side-by-side and within eachother. On one street you would see women in ornate saris on the sidewalk, Chinese rickshaw drivers in the street and crowds of Arab men gathered in tiny coffee stalls and shops, fervently discussing the matters of the day. Ornate mosques, elaborate Chinese and Hindu temples as well as Buddhist monasteries sat amidst the din of endless commerce. A major business center, its rich cultural heritage was still visible through the cracks of its modern veneer. We strolled its busy streets, ate dinner in ‘Little India’ and slept in a quaint guest house for about 16 bucks while waiting for my visa to process. Haggard backpackers ambled along the streets next to groups of Muslim women in ‘hijab’ headscarves, a Chinese noodle cart, and us with Isaiah feeling even further from all things remotely familiar.

It is an experience which is at once refreshing and disorienting. You gain your footing in life a little more when you are forced to temporarily lose it. Malaysia is just different enough from Thailand so as to feel weird. In a strange way, its easy to relax and be a little more yourself when you realize you have virtually no control over what is going on around you. In certain foreign situations, such as travel, you merely have to surrender your fate to whatever gods may be around in that particular country and trust that there is a system in place that will effectively transport you from A to B without any significant physical or fiscal injury. This plan, and a lot of walking, worked out just fine for us in Penang. Good news is, we escaped unscathed with a new visa for me and lots of new friends for Isaiah.

Marriage, pt.2

Thai people can get very excited about babies.

At 5:30 am, Sakda is in our room playing peek-a-boo with Isaiah, who has recently begun stirring for his early-morning nurse. He wants to take Isaiah to go bathe and play with the family. Ahem...Sakda? Thank you...

After shooing Sakda away a few more times so that Isaiah can get a proper sleep in before the festivities begin, we slowly and drowsily rise. We can hear Markie gasping and shivering from the next room where he is taking a bucket shower, pouring cold bowlfuls of water over his head. Sakda has prepared a sweet little breakfast instant coffee packets, bread, jam, sweet rice bites and fried doughnuts, all laid out in array on the kitchen counter. We sit blankly on chairs in the kitchen, drinking instant coffee out of tiny, ceramic cups and munching toast and jam until we come to our senses. Meanwhile, the party 'staff' are bustling busily in and out of the house and a commotion is audibly growing in the house next door where the party is to happen.

Eventually, we make our way toward the scene where we find a full-on restaurant materializing. Women are stirring rice in gigantic steel pots over blazing coals. Single gas burners are flared in an adjacent garage with woks sizzling up curries and stir-fries. Meanwhile, in the tent-covered dining area, tens of tables are fully set with dishes, silverware, beverages and buckets of ice. Sakda informs me that a woman is being paid $9 to wash dishes all day. Later he tells me that they are expecting in upwards of 1000 people.

The atmosphere is vibrating with activity. Friends and family are constantly running about, gathering this food or that decoration. It seems that the majority of the working are women, their men standing idly by smoking coconut-leaf cigarettes and drinking beer with ice. Children scurry along as a circle of elderly women shell astringent betel nuts to chew like gum, staining their teeth and gums bright red.

Around noon, the masses descend upon the site. Pickups kick up dust as the rumble down the rocky road, parking in an adjacent field. Families of all sizes emerge, sitting down beneath the tent where they are served a few large dishes of curried meat, stir fry and fish soup by the party 'staff'. The effect can be dizzying. Through all of this, the groom's job is to meander about the party, chatting up guests and making known his leather hip-pack which he is using to collect his bounty. The deal is, if you come and gorge yourself at this thing, you are obligated to give a little to the groom and his family. An average family might give 200-300 baht ($7-10) and at something around 1000 guests, (divided into families) the groom ends up making off with a cool wad. In return, he distributes little pink trinkets (pink is the official color, ugh) to his guests and thanks them cordially. The groom, I notice, is strangely made into a background detail in the hullabaloo of the event. Wandering quietly throughout the party, here-and-there sitting down on the edge of a group, his presence is humble and without the kind of focus you might expect from a western 'bachelor party'. However, a western bachelor party this is not. This is a fundraiser, sponsored by family and friends with the hopes of collecting a generous nest egg for the newly weds. I was told that down the road, the bride-to-be was doing the same thing.

For the rest of the day, heaps of food continue marching out to a continuous crowd of guests. At one point a torrential storm rolls in, threatening the stability of the food tents. As water begins to stream down through the gaps, washing out the very ground underneath the tables and chairs, no one appears phased and the whiskey and sodas keep a' comin'.

By sunset the karaoke has begun at a deafening volume. The tunes are very Thai, very cheap-keyboard sounding, and very popular.

All night it will continue like this. The karaoke will get louder and progressively less tonal. A man will fall out of his chair and be carried off on the shoulders of his friends, leaving his shoes behind. Another man with whiskey eyes, stumbling and toothless, will proceed to hit on our friend Markie before he is dragged off by a crew of friendly but protective gentlemen. Half an hour later he is dominating the karaoke stage. I put the baby under my arm and amble off to bed, but Gaibi and Markie stay behind to wash dishes in the moonlight. They stood in deep mud, later moving to squatty little benches on a raised platform, scrubbing up the last of the greasy curry pots and fry pans in a gigantic plastic bucket, filled with soap and ice-cold water. The best part of being involved was that it never managed to feel like work. Everyone was family and friends, and merely to be a part of the experience was fun enough.

Soon, Gaibi was crawling in to bed next to us, smelling like dish soap. Tomorrow the wedding would start at 9 o'clock, we were told. In Thailand, 9 is a lucky number. There are no unlucky numbers.

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.

Making Friends

Being in the ethnic minority can be a refreshing and humbling experience for a pair of Caucasian Americans. It is very possible to go a full day (perhaps weeks) in the town of Trang, Thailand without seeing a single white-skinned being. Likewise, you will nary hear an English word other than the adorable shrieks of 'hello!' from toddlers and school children as you go zooming by on a motorbike. Moving to a small town in another country, we have elected to be foreigners in a very distinct way.

However, having a baby very much de-claws us in our capacity as ambassadors of the first world. With an infant strapped to our chest, people are quickly made aware that we are not here to swill beer and make ugly American mischief. The Thais have a particular place in their hearts for foreign youngsters, and even the steeliest of gazes melts when our bright eyed little boy reveals his cherubic face. We are quickly identified then as honest travelers and our reception is warm and inviting. With Isaiah's one foot in the door, we further pry it open with the few Thai phrases we can manage. Before long, we are engulfed in a crowd of beautiful dark skin and eager eyes, straining to catch a glimpse or touch the foot of our little ice-breaker. If Gaibi and I separate in the market, I can easily find them again by looking for the mass of people clumped into one area, all making high pitched noises and shuffling about, trying to get a touch of that squishy pale infant. Equally, Isaiah provides an in-road for conversation with even the most timid. The common, almost standard questions that always come up are,


"Boy or girl?" (this is ALWAYS first. The majority of people guess that he is a girl.)


"How much does he weigh?"


This quickly segues into a little game of peek-a-boo, which segues into a little hand-gesture that essentially means, 'give him to me'. Usually we oblige, albeit under tight scrutiny, while Isaiah gets a tour of the market, restaurant, bank, museum or whatever the establisment of the time may be. By the time we get him back he has charmed the whole of the establishment, making rather certain that we will be welcomed back any time. He often returns with a chewing souvenir of some sort- a straw or plastic spoon or other such prize. In most restaurants the waitresses are happy to provide an impromptu babysitting service, free of charge while we dine. This is a tremendous and unexpected boon for two weary parents such as ourselves.


A little cafe in the center of town we have a special friend named 'Sakda' who speaks English quite well and always give Isaiah the royal treatment. One day, we found ourselves in a very unexpected cirumstance.

"My sister is in the hospital," Sakda tells us, "She has to get (gestures a large, spherical formation roughly the size of a cantaloupe) taken out of (cuts across his abdomen with his fingers). 7 o'clock tonight, (it is now 4)."

Meanwhile, Gaibi and I are firing off guesses in an attempt to better understand the situation,

"Tumor?"

"Gall stone?"

"Is she getting an organ removed?"

"Yes, yes, yes," Sakda replies, "today I go see her in the hospital."

"That's nice of you," we reply unpatronizingly.

"You come with me?" he casually asks.

"..."

"I go today, five o'clock, you come with me!"

Surely he notices that we are reeling from a sort of cultural left-hook. Our jaws gyrate slightly, seraching for a response or at the very least a stalling strategy while we gather our senses.

"Sure, its ok!" he reassures us.

Our eyes remain focused, determined.

"Well, I don't know...what are we doing today, honey?" I pass the buck to Gaibi.

"I'm not suuure..." she drops it.

Somehow, from the back of our minds a notion creeps in, suggesting that perhaps we should consider going with this guy to the hospital to meet his sister two hours before her as-yet unspecified major surgical extraction procedure. After all, we came to Thailand to witness authentic Thai culture and what could be less tourism-fabricated than a trip to the hospital?

Wait a minute, what the hell are we-


The next thing we know we are on the motorbike, due for the hospital with Sakda zooming along beside us. While stopped at a red light, he informs us that his family has arranged a VIP room for his sister in the hospital. "700 per night," he tells us with a certain twinkle in his eye. (About $28 per day for those of you keeping score.)


We arrive at the hospital and park our motorbike amongst the others clustered along the curb outside the entrance. Inside it is tidy but not extravagant. Due to limited groundspace, the building goes more upward than outward. Ascending the stairway, I notice that the pharmacy on the ground floor has been built to resemble a small hut, perhaps reminiscent of the simple buildings you see in the countryside. Each floor looks out onto the ground floor/lobby/pharmacy area. On the 4th floor where Sakda's sister is located, an ornate Buddha image sits adorned with offerings of flowers, incense and a small plate of fresh food and water.


Expecting to enter the room and find ourselves awkwardly situated around the bed with our friend, enduring long silences, fairly frozen by our own ignorance of how to act appropriately in such a situation, we are pleasantly surprised by a very different scene: the room is packed with family. Four ladies from three generations are seated on a grass mat at the bedside. Throughout the room men of all ages are seated and standing, some eating fruit, others on their phones, the rest talking casually. In walk three foreigners, (us,) and Sakda. To put it lightly, they notice.
However, they are quick to welcome us with no shortage of generosity and soon our apprehensions have fully dissolved. An elderly woman promptly hops off the couch and insists that we take her place. Arguing, we find, will not assuage her. A large bag of fruit is quickly brought before us and we are more expected than invited to partake heartily. We soon find out that Sakda is the youngest of eight. His sister (aka, the patient) is the eldest and says very little but continuously twinkles at us through her bright, dark eyes. (yes, i mean bright, dark eyes) Far from ruffled by a few strangers prancing in a few hours before her surgery, she apologizes for her appearance and thanks us generously for coming. Shortly Isaiah is in the hands of the family and we are answering all of the rudimentary questions. Shortly thereafter, another elderly woman enters the room (putting the headcount up to around 14 in a regular-sized hospital room). "This is my other mom," Sakda informs us. I vaguely remember hearing in some cases, additional wives are taken into the family to fulfill such family duties as childbearing and householding when for some reason one is not sufficient. "Its ok," Sakda reassures us, "both my moms love eachother. Everybody loves eachother."

Slowly, people begin to trickle out of the room to the balcony (VIP rooms have balconies) where they are seated on another grass mat, having dinner.
The few remaining in the room disappear rapidly when they sense that Gaibi is about to nurse Isaiah. Despite Gaibi's best efforts to stay decent, hiding the whole operation under a red shawl, everyone left either shifts to the opposite side of the bed or exits to the balcony. Meanwhile nurses begin to appear, taking pre-surgical measurements and administering various medicines and swabs. Surgery is in 45 minutes and we suggest to Sakda that maybe we had better go. After a very warm send-off from the entire family, his sister again thanks us abundantly for our visit and all but demands that we promise to return (with the baby) in the coming week during her recovery period. We leave still completely unaware of exactly what is about to take place and really it is quite beside the point. Unexpectedly, we walk out of the hospital feeling quite glad that we agreed to come.

Later we are eating at a restaurant with Sakda and we remark to him how warm and loving it felt in the hospital room, surrounded by family sitting comfortably in the presence of their ailing sister. "Yes, whenever someone in my family becomes sick or has problem, my whole family will come to be with them," he replies with that unshakable smile of his. "That's my kind of health-care coverage," I think to myself.

We have scarcely seen Sakda since then, but the one time he did he told us that his sister was so happy to have met us and hopes that soon we will be able to visit her at her house in a neighboring province. Its nice to have friends.

Begin

From the moment you touch down in Bangkok, a distinct smell inhabits your nose. The recipe for this smell is specific and unchanging, at least in the last 20 years. All wrapped up in this saturated aroma is the pollution of a city whose highrises stretch as far as the eye can see, jammed with cars, buses, motorbikes, diesel trucks and three-wheel taxis (tuk-tuks, for those familiar) puffing a cloying haze into the air at all hours, unhindered by the burden of emission standards. Add to this the greasy smell of a million little food carts perched on every corner peddling everything from fresh fruit to chicken feet, the stench of thousands of stray animals running loose on the streets and finally pinches of sweet incense burning from the early morning hours in every temple and spirit house for miles. All of this remains suspended in the balmy air as you make your entrance, zipping through the maze of concrete and flashy lights to your destination.


We made our way quickly through Thai customs, a very unimposing process of shortly showing our passports, answering a few standard questions and looking right into the digital camera for a glamorous shot after 20+ hours of travel with an infant. We were hastily approached by some very friendly ladies in bright gold outfits who worked for a leading taxi service in the Bangkok airport. Perhaps part of the secret of their success lies in the fact that they refer to their taxis as 'limousines'. I held Isaiah and began what would unfold into a legacy of ogling and child-adoration in this country while Gaibi rifled through paperwork at the desk of the taxi company. Shortly we were climbing into a stout SUV with air-conditioning and a very kind driver who greeted us with a well enunciated 'sawasDEE krap!' and 'welcome to Thailand'. Immediately upon arrival in a new country, one is faced with certain cultural adjustment quandaries. Do you tip the taxis around here? What is a good rate for Bangkok taxis these days anyway? Could it have been that we shouldn't have gone for the first one to approach us in the airport? Shrewdly, the taxi service knows that such capacities of reason and judgement are considerably hindered after international flights. This, they know, is the time to strike.


Arriving at our destination, another moment of potentially serious trouble: the driver does not seem able to locate the address of our hotel. More panicky thoughts begin to flutter through your mind, oh God...all I have is this address scrawled in Thai on a little piece of paper that I have scrupulously kept by my side since our departure...if he can't find the place then what are we supposed to do? How do we go about choosing another place? Surely if we ask him he'll take us to a safe place to sleep...but this is just the kind of scam they warn you about in Lonely Planets and internet tour blogs: "Beware of taxi scams in the city in which the driver will seem not to be able to find your hotel, offering instead to take you to a pre-arranged, overpriced guesthouse where you will spend the night with rats that have been trained to steal your passport..."


Soon thereafter our taxi driver realizes that the address is actually an alley, kicks the taxi into reverse and drives us to the door of the hotel. He quickly unloads our 100+ pounds of luggage and waits by the car. Still unresolved about the tip issue, i rather clumsily ask if i should, to which he responds, "Very kindly, sir," and i ask to see the tab. With a modicum of confusion, we finally go to the cab and he produces a receipt which says something like 750 baht (or around $25 for a 30 min ride.) This is extremely steep by Thai standards, with the average cab fare for a 30 minute ride rounding out to less than half this price. This is what we get for biting the 'limo' bait. I hmm and hah a bit and produce a 1000 note, telling him to keep the change as I am thoroughly exhausted and can't imagine trying to think it over. His face explodes into a generous smile as he accepts the bill, bows politely and speeds off in his Rav4. Walking into the hotel Gaibi asks, "How much did you tip him?"

"About 250," I reply. "So 1000 altogether."

"You paid him again?" She asks.

"What?"

"I already paid at the desk in the airport."

"Well we just made a new friend, I guess."

Too tired to lament, the very friendly hotel staff again proceed to haul our belongings to the elevator without the benefit of a cart, and we go to our room.

Jet lag leaves you in a strange universe. At four AM we find ourselves in a 7-11 down the street from the hotel. It is raining outside and we stand in the distinctly flourescent light of the convenience mart, perusing the selection of snacks. Shrimp crisps, dried fish strips, sponge cake rolls, crab-flavored corn trumpets, chocolate wafers...

We collect an armful of foil-bagged munchies and make for the register. On the way out we grab a few tiny juice boxes and by 5:30 am we are passed out on the bed, garnished with wrappers. It was the only sustenance available at that hour, and only the hard-lagged brain can only take so much Thai soap-opera in the earliest hours of the day.

At 8:30 am we awaken again, feeling like we haven't had our V8.