Of Coffee and Breakfast Burritos and Spaghetti and Meatballs

Expectation:  The prospect of the future; grounds upon which something excellent is expected to occur; prospect of anything good to come, especially of property or rank. 

I get myself into trouble when I try to change something or someone into something else.  This is not acceptance - this is an expectation run amok.  Whenever I have problems in my life I can usually trace it back to me trying to remake the world to my own liking.

We walk down to the morning meeting - it's a nice combination of exercise and recovery before the day gets too hot or the commotion gets to intense.  Afterwards we decide "we'll wear ourselves out and make the walk back rather than jumping into a tuk-tuk.  Coffee on the way sounds like a good idea.  We walk some back alleys and some main streets, avoiding a few options because the hygiene looks dubious and a few more that are on busy streets, opting out of a dust and diesel coating on our caffeine.

Eventually we pass a nice looking hotel restaurant with signs advertising breakfast.  We sit down and wait a bit for a server.

"Yes, coffee please?" I say.

"Oh, I'm sorry," says the young woman, bowing.  "We don't serve coffee - only food."

Off we go.  Kind of strange that there's no coffee for breakfast but what the hell.

At our next stop we get coffee ordered and also some food.  There are eight food selections.  The one SuperK orders isn't available.  No problem - she gets something else although this strikes us as a little strange, too, running out of breakfast selections during . . . you know . . . breakfast. My burrito - I know, I know, maybe not the best choice for someone from a heavily Hispanic area who is in Northern Thailand - is salsa and potatoes.  It was good but I'm still hungry.  One cup of coffee, two glasses of juice, two breakfast selections - they come out one at a time.

We eat some lunch in our room, too exhausted by the restaurant selection, ordering, and paying processes which dominate.

Our stomachs are rebelling a little from all of the exotic foods so we choose an Italian restaurant off the main drag for dinner.  Here, I order spaghetti and meatballs, probably the most stereotypical Italian food other than pizza although I do substitute penne for the spaghetti. At 7PM.  On New Year's Eve.  No meatballs.  No meatballs left.  I default to SuperK's selection, figuring that since she was successful in her ordering that I would be, too, not discounting the possibility that she snagged the very last portion in that category.

The meals come out.  Spaghetti, not penne.

I LOVE all of this.   

Jeebus, Save Me!

Gift:  Something given to another voluntarily, without charge.

This morning I look down from our 10th floor apartment onto the entryway of the complex, set in a U shape.  There are a number of tables set up flanking the walkway. Over the course of a half an hour people begin arriving, setting bags of indeterminate merchandise on the tables, then standing behind them.  Uh-oh, I think, some kind of market gauntlet to run later when I want to get out.  This is standard thinking for me - look for any possible bad in any situation.

After a bit a line of orange-robed monks begin to file out of the entrance and make their way down the line of tables.  A group of men with a pile of black garbage bags accompany them.  At each table the monks are given something - I surmise at this point that the items on the tables are the shrink-wrapped bags of food and toiletries that have been accumulating in the lobby of the building over the last week.  Again, I assumed these were impulse sale items directed to the rich inhabitants of the condo.  An annoyance for me, in other words, instead of a gift and a blessing for someone less fortunate.  God forbid I should have something taken out of my overstuffed pocket and given to someone else.

Reminds me of the Biblical story where Jeebus was watching the activity around the offering box at the entrance to the temple.  The wealthy would give large sums of money in a very public fashion, making sure everyone knew how much they were contributing and lingering so that everyone would know they were the donors.  At one point a penniless woman sidles up and drops in her few pennies.

What do you think Jeebus's lesson was?

Anyway, the monks receive enough gifts to fill the back of a small pick-up truck.  The pilgrims then kneel and face the monks who chant a small prayer before heading off.

What a nice way to start the New Year.

 

 

 

Off to Dinner

Back to the 9AM park meeting today.  It's a pretty good group - mostly men - Americans, UK natives, and a few from Australia and New Zealand.  Lots of sobriety, standard percentage of irritating personalities, a few of them on my last nerve already.  

On every trip of any length we inevitably run into a few days where we've done what the area has to offer.  We're unwilling to throw in the towel so we walk around aimlessly, not seeing much with benumbed eyes.  It's OK; a little frustrating but OK and almost impossible to avoid - we want to give ourselves time to see everything without having to sprint through it but don't want to linger too long.  Hard to calculate 8,261 miles away with only a computer and guide books to direct us.

Dinner is an authentic cultural experience for which we don't have quiiiiiiiite enough patience today.  We take a nap, clean up, and head off the busy main road down one of the side alleys or sois.  There's an open air restaurant full of Thais so we take a seat.  There's a dizzying array of menus - we need some help deciphering them, a service supplied by the waitress, who comes over none too quickly.  She's got a full restaurant so she takes KK's order, explains the menus, and says she'll come back.  She does not.  She appears, actually, to be the cook.  KK gets her food from someone else who doesn't speak English and doesn't take orders, waving vaguely to the open air kitchen.  By the time we share her meal and get my meal ordered we're both thirsty.  God help us trying to get someone over to take a drink order - fortunately, we notice bottles of mineral water and bottles of ozonated water piled onto a corner of the table.  We pop the top on one of the ozones and quaff.  It has a vaguely medicinal taste.  We pay and go home.  

It was one of those nights where we both wanted to understand how everything works instead of sitting there like a couple of dumb asses fingering greasy menus.  

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.