It's Raining

I was talking to my Old City sponsor - who lives in Chiang Mai - about my tuk-tuk adventure at the night market.  The one where I screwed myself.  He interrupted to say: "Hey, it's always hard when you're testing out the waters in a totally new culture."  He shared a story about flagging down a driver that he has used many times, a guy who cruises the village he lives in.  He asked the fare and was given a price three times what he normally pays.  When he protested the guy smiled, pointed toward the heavens, and said: "Raining."

A service is worth what the market will bear, right?

This guy always made sure that I wasn't being too hard on myself.  I like getting feedback from multiple Program mouths because we all have a little different slant on things.  He's an old hippie - a REAL hippie - who refuses, to the best of his ability, to be too hard on himself.

Went to a morning meeting today - my third visit.  Dude annoyed me.  Must be getting calmer in my old age.  Took me three meetings to get irritated and I believe that's a record.

Ta-Daaaa!

Chaos: Any state of disorder, any confused or amorphous mixture or conglomeration.

Yesterday our friends hauled our asses up into the mountains surrounding Chiang Mai.  Very nice.  Very, very nice.  It was much cooler and it was very high mountain junglely which was spectacularly beautiful.  And it was quiet.  Chiang Mai - for all of its charms - is chaotic.  One's senses are under constant assault from cars and bikes and people and just noise, all of which must be navigated on broken pavement and non-existent sidewalks.

We get home about 7PM, happy and grateful for a nice day, the eaten ATM card escapade tucked into dark recesses of our minds.

"Let's go get the name of the bank so we can at least try to make a phone call tomorrow," I suggested.  We're wandering around the outside of the building - a Western Union office or so we thought - when a couple of other Anglos smiled at us.

"This machine ate my ATM," I quipped.  "It's on my shit list."

The guy laughed, stood up, walked around a bit.  

"Are you sure this isn't a bank?" he said.  "There's like a bank name all over the building."  (Ed. Note - Thanachart Bank - Thanon Nimmanhemin Branch.  I am not making this up.)

Hmmm.  About this time a young Thai woman working a food truck parked on the sidewalk - where else? - having overheard our conversation, comes over, taps on the window of the closed bank, and has a chat with a nice lady inside who peeks out the closed security gate.

"She's looking," she said.

 A minute later the bank women comes back, cracks open the security gate, and asks: "What is your name?"

"Seaweed the Dumbass," I reply.

She smiles, bows sweetly, and holds up the ATM card.  It was like a magician pulling a diamond ring out of rabbit's ass.  She won't, of course - hand the thing over without a passport and frankly wants to go home.  I sprint to the condo, get the passports, and make it back in short order.  Forms are signed, bows are exchanged, and the ATM is in SuperK's much more adult hands.

The whole bank card caper reminds me of a nimble-fingered adult astounding a young child by seeming to pull nickels out of her ears and then to make them go away.  God likes to have fun, too, for god's sake.

Screwing Oneself

 In the "Screw me?  Screw you!  Oh, I Screwed Myself" Department I offer this up.

Last night we went to the famous Chaing Mai Sunday Night Walking Market.  Perhaps long ago on a distant planet in a remote universe it was possible to walk in this market but last night it was more of a huge mass of clogged lanes punctuated by the occasional bottleneck where no one went anywhere, sort of vibrating in place for a while.  It was a constant struggle not to trod on someone or be trod upon so not much marketing was going on.  Lots of stuff, lots of food, lots of people.

We took a little minibus to the old city from our condo - the ride, door to door, cost 60 baht, or about $2.  After being constricted and squeezed and sweated upon for a few hours - a dinner at a Thai restaurant included where we sat just off the main street watching the trodding from a safe distance - we decided to head home.

All of those friendly minibus drivers who are always pulling up to the curb and offering cheap rides anywhere?  Not so friendly.  Scratch that - not so accommodating.  They were out in abundance and still friendly but in the environs of the market they had plenty of potential customers so not one of them was interested in hauling our asses back out to the suburbs for a couple of bucks.  One of them said something that sounded like "No, I'm going to stay parked here until I can load this mother up."  He did offer to help out - in this case hailing a little three wheeled motorcycle contraption.

This guy was happy to take us home.

"How much?" I asked.

150 baht.  Maybe 5 bucks.

"No, too much," I said.

"How much? he said.

I said that I wanted to pay what I did to get down to the market in the first place.  He waved dismissively and drove off.  Fine, you dick.  SuperK and I begin to trudge in the general direction of home.  About a half an hour later - well off the track I had intended to take and with a couple of terrifying street crossings, all kinds of traffic boiling around us thrown in - we finally manage to hire a minitruck to get us home.  This guy makes a stop at a gas station and then pitches us off his vehicle a couple of blocks from home.

I believe that I had what you might call a genuine cultural experience.

Now . . . Where Did I Put That . . .

เพิ่ม Gmail ลงในบัญชี Google ของคุณ

This is the command I got when I logged into to my home page today.  Take that, Seaweed.

And in the "There is a god and he has a hell of a sense of humor department" I offer up this . . . 

We stopped to eat lunch yesterday - stir-fried snow peas, pad Thai with chicken, red chili rice with tofu, two mineral waters for the princely sum of $8.  I pulled out my wallet to try to get my money organized - the highly colored bills with huge numbers on them can be disorienting when one is trying to deal with someone who speaks very little English - when I noticed I was one plastic card short of a full Seaweed deck.

"Where's my ATM card?" I said to no one in particular.  I sat there a minute, going through my very small wallet over and over, hoping that the plastic would miraculously reappear, SuperK sitting there with a blank look on her face.  Both of us are very good partners when we're trying to deal with a screw-up not of our own making - I could see irritation flash across her face before she quickly transitioned into problem-solving mode.  It doesn't help to pile on invective when someone feels bad enough about the screw-up.  And she knows that I handle all of the money exchanges with vendors and cab drivers and the like so I guess that earns me a little capital.

We went back to the apartment and looked through everything we owned about 100 times before deciding that I had either left the damn thing in the ATM at the airport or it flopped out of my wallet during some other money transaction.  I'm sure my Higher Power was in "how about you quit bitching about credit card" mode at this point, and enjoying himself immensely.  I made a few hilarious cultural-experience trips back to two grocery stores I had visited where I had to pantomime losing a credit card to non-English speaking clerks - the technique that seemed to work was to drop my card on the ground and walk away.  "Oh," they'd say.  It made me feel better that both stores had a big stack of lost credit cards for me to shuffle through.

Anyway, we did manage to get through to a customer service clerk in India who cancelled the care, verifying that there were no unauthorized transactions on our account.  The whole thing was frustrating but no harm, no foul, really.

No Credit Cards? Barbaric!

So our trip from Saigon to Chiang Mai takes us through Bangkok.  We're on Asiana Air.  I've never heard of this airline but they had the lowest price which is, of course, the most important thing to consider before getting on a supersonic jet flying at an altitude of seven miles.  I really don't care if they wreck a lot of planes or have like an 85% hijacking rate as long as I don't have to spend too much money to be wedged into a seat fit for a contortionist.

Because we're no longer in Vietnam I don't have any of their money left - the Dong for those of us who think that kind of stuff is funny - and because we haven't got to Thailand yet I don't have any of their money, either - the Baht which isn't as funny but is still pretty funny.  On the plane I find out Asiana is a low-cost carrier.  Whatever.  Don't crash and let me pee if I want to and I'm good to go.  

When the food tray comes around I decide to order some food off of the huge menu they provide. I understand I have to pay for this food.  Cheap seats = buy your own $%## food.  I order some noodles and hand her my credit card.  No credit cards.  Cash only.

"I don't have any cash," I said. "I've been in Vietnam and we're going to Thailand.  Where am I going to get money?  Is there an ATM on the plane?"

"I'm so sorry," the attendant says.

I'm also thirsty but water is not free, either.

We land in the international terminal, shuttle through a maze-like warren of corridors, clear immigration, and are barfed into the domestic terminal for the final leg of the flight.  Short on time, I flash into a 7-11 and load up on drinks, food, and snacks.  The kid runs it all through the scanner, filling two bags up, and then looks at me blankly when I hand him my credit card.

"I'm sorry but we only take cash," he says.

I'm starting to get miffed.  I walk the terminal, stopping in every fucking shop and restaurant in the whole thing - including MAC Donalds, Pizza Hut, and Burger King, food I normally wouldn't feed a dog - and NOBODY takes credit.  This is the domestic terminal of the largest city and capital of an entire country.  Finally, finally, we get to buy two weird mushroom pastry puff things at Starbucks.  These are wolfed.

I want to tell someone about this, that it's stupid.  They undoubtedly want to hear this from me.  They are eager to hear my opinion about why I had to stand in line at immigration for 45 minutes only to hear a very nice immigration agent say: "Why have you been standing here?  You could have just gone through and got your luggage."  They're looking for good reasons to throw people into jail.  I recall the phrase "restraint of tongue and pen."  It is a powerful and useful phrase.  For instance, right now I'm in a comfortable condominium and not in jail.  This is a good thing.

 

Seaweed, Behavior Arbiter

And because I haven't shown the spiritual growth that I would like to be able to show . . . 

There was a group of people on the boat that I didn't like particularly if by "didn't like" you mean "detested."  These were the people that bitched continuously about tipping while dressing up in elaborate costumes for dinner.  On the boat.  Where there was no one there except other similar people.

I was at a gift shop that was stationed right after one of the little handicrafts workshops that we visited.  One of these women had some items she wanted to purchase.

"Eight dollars," said the little man behind the counter, smiling broadly.

"I'll give you five," she said.

"No, ma'am," he replied, smile in place.  "Eight dollars."

She took seven dollars out of her purse, laid them on the counter, and grabbed the items.  The man continued to smile.

"Eight dollars, ma'am," he said.

I took a dollar out of my purse and gave it to the guy.

The woman glared at me.  "It was never eight dollars," she said, forgetting, apparently, that I was standing right there the whole time.  Then she mumbled something about fifty cents and gave the man a buck.

"But thank you," she said to me.

"I thought you didn't have the right change," I said.

Needless to say I didn't talk to her the rest of the trip.

The thing is that this was really not my business.  It's not up to me to be the arbiter of someone else's behavior, no matter how deplorable it is, so I didn't feel that great about what I did.  I felt a little too smug as if I'm a great example of good behavior.

Still glad I did it, the bitch.

Buying Another Yacht

And back in the land of internet access.  Boy, talk about getting used to something then not having it.  Boy.

I'll tell you this after hanging out for 10 days with a lot of really wealthy people: they are some of the most dissatisfied, bitchy, discontented people I've ever been around.  These people are blessed with as much material stuff as anyone in the world and they're consistently no happier than anyone I've run into on this trip, and I've run into some people who don't have very much going for them in the stuff department.  I mean a lot of these folks have money and the casual mention of second homes and boats and high-end travel is tossed out too casually to be anything but calculated.

And then I'll stand there in amazement, jaw slackening in amazement, as they try to stonewall a vendor down an extra dollar on a four dollar pair of elephant pants.  It makes no sense.  It is a disconnect.

There's a guy here who bought something in a market.  "$4," said the vendor.  He handed her a five.  "How about $5?" he asked.  That's what I aspire to.

There's a lot of looking through the staff.  I suspect the company that runs this high-end cruise - an American company - doesn't pay the foreign employees very well and is probably pretty wealthy.  

On one of the days the Federal Reserve raised interest rates.  I try to get as far away from the humdrum of everyday news as I can when I travel and don't have much interest in something that affects very few people, mostly those buying something expensive like a home.  One of my fellow passengers complained to me, a man standing there trying my best to blot out her very existence.

"Yeah, I'm upset," I said.  "Right when I"m in the middle of buying a yacht."

"Oh, you're buying a yacht," she said, clearly impressed.

Earned me some cheap respect.