nicole atkins and the sea:
beautiful music
i highly recommend giving a listen.

CANUCK!

p.s. CANADIAN!! what’s your email address???

its raining in indianapolis

it’s raining in Indianapolis, which is when this city is most beautiful. i’ve been back in the states for a week now, and it’s a little easier. my head doesn’t hurt, and i’ve gotten better at sleeping like a normal person. there are little, subtle things that i see creeping back into my behavior that are so characteristically American, and i cringe. the aggression on the road, the judgment of people around me, the desire to consume consume consume. i am trying to incorporate bits of the good stuff of Thailand into my daily here, most notably how i eat, the words i use, whom i speak with and how i use my free time. i made green curry for dinner yesterday night using some curry paste i picked up at the asian market up the road from my house, and it was so spicy neither my housemate nor i could finish it. and i didn’t know how to make the coconut syrup to go on mango and stickey rice (but i didn’t look, either). today i made thai iced coffee for my brother, and the condensed milk sank to the bottom of the glass, flat, garnering a bunch of laughs from the bro at my taste in beverages. i’m trying.
i have spent a lot of time with my family these few days, and it feels good. i’ve had well-spent time with my friends, as well. i’m trying to move away from the psychotic mobile compulsion that plagued me before i left the states. learning the art of actually turning off the phone, or leaving it in the car. not spending three years online before lunch, also. and cringing every time i drop an eff bomb, which is frequent. and unnecessary.
Johnny cash’s folsom prison record on itunes, about to start the hustvedt novel i picked up this afternoon. missing my new friends, looking forward to the new turns of my summer. good night!

it's 3:30 inthe morning in shaftsbury, vermont. cold and raining, as it has been since thursday. i can't sleep. it's probably about 2:30 monday afternoon in thailand. my body is so geeked it's not on thai or vermont time; i sleep 3 hours here, 13 hours there, 4 hours here, 10 there, none right now. no amount of the police or chamomile tea can get me down now, nor can i walk outside for the inclimate weather. no one's online, and i have no phone service to call.
all of this translates into a sense of bitter letdown and lonliness.
i feel pretty purposeless here. the plan was to kayak for a long weekend before facing the firing squad back home, and it has turned into an exercise in watching rain drip from the eaves of the roof. it has been good, though, to hang out with my friend vermont. she's a hoot to listen to, which is good since i'm not up for a lot of talking right now. i've been thinking about friendship after watching some new ones interact, and i want to be a good friend like that. always there, able to be supportive without judgment of the others' values, accepting of the differences. i feel as though i am operating with fewer shortcomings right now, and it feels nice, lighter. i don't have to be whatever just to be whatever. i am envious of people who can mosey around without a seeming notice to other people's judgments, while i feel ever aware of them. that, of course, translates into my own judgments, and it's no suprise then that when i judge less, i feel less judged.
i'm wearing the same blue jeans, polo shirt and brown cardigan i've been in since friday, my right foot is falling asleep, and my head is buzzing about any number of things. i don't really want to read my book of irish history, nor do i want to read the didion book i haven't started. i want to pick up the phone, to jump across the ocean, to go back to a moment, to reverse an event. to know an answer. to see dawn break, soon, and get this day going. i really want to float on the middle of lake shaftsbury, weightless in a bright red plastic kayak, and stare at the green mountains, the clouds and the sky and the trees and my feet. i want to go home, cry.

the longest wednesday

i feel so sad to be coming back to the states, to be leaving Thailand, to leave the friends i have made. i’m afraid that something will make this past month a dream, not real, all of it manufactured. the people gone, the food replaced, the sounds watered down, the culture washed out. i’m afraid to sleep lest i wake up and it’s all gone. i’ve cried a lot today, weeping in airplane fluorescent bathrooms, hot tears and stinging pain in my chest, my sinuses filling with cement at the loss if it all, even if it’s not really gone. the us has a way of ripping the soul out of things, including airplane passengers, wandering bleary-eyed around airports, yelling security guards and EVERYONE ON CELL PHONES, even me. i am heartsick and heartbroken.

thai celebrities

i seem to have landed right in the middle of some thai tv commercial outside of black canyon coffee. the other side of the block is lined with young girls with their digital cameras, or it was, and there are 10 people here to film one pretty boy drinking a cowboy coffee and having a sandwich. i think it’s all pretty amusing, but i am frustrated that i can’t get a good wireless reception.
less than one week left in Thailand, less than that in chiang mai. a white man with his arm freshly amputated at the elbow just walked by. i pray for his health. i want to go, i can no longer stand the crowd.

this one's personal

i feel very different in Thailand. i look different, i think different, it’s all very different. i’ve lost a lot of weight, it feels, and my hands have more pronounced veins and bones. i have a yellow bruise inside of my knee from a scooter crash, and i wear no makeup, nor do i have a blow dryer for my hair. my feet are crossed with sandal lines that i have never seen before, and i have a new pair of black spectacles obscuring my eyes, which seem a little bit darker to me than when i landed in Bangkok a month ago.
it feels, in chiang mai, that the frivolous daily activities from the states have no place, and here you’re either doing something constructive and interactive or you’re doing literally nothing, maybe napping or reading or writing or having an iced coffee in a café on the street. there isn’t the rush rush to do do that westerners are plagued with. this psychotic compulsion to be active. i have napped more, walked more, taken more cups of tea in this side of the world than i ever have, i think. my usual impatience is lessened, my insistence for my way is depleted. i think this comes with spending time with other westies who are calmer, but mostly the thai culture is not made to support inflated ego and western bitches.
i worry about what will happen when i go home. my mother emailed me to say she is excited to see how i am when i get back, that my writings seem a little different to her than before. i have stepped into more of who i want to be than i was before, and i have a small fear it will slip away, unnoticed, in the fervor of unimportant American activity.
i still feel very cynical, to be sure. i feel pronounced in my likes and dislikes here in Thailand. i like the heat. i like stepping down the block to have breakfast with new friends. i like that my phone doesn’t ring all the time, and i have plenty of time to write. i dislike being had for being white. i dislike bargaining with merchants and tuk-tuk drivers, i dislike loud French guys on the phone outside of my window at 2 in the morning. i dislike, on judgment, most of the plain American girls and their grad school boyfriends with packs the size of a Honda civic, or the shirtless scandanavian tourists and their tattoos, and i especially dislike the middle aged farang men with teenage asian girls. and i’d give a toe to have my blue jeans here instead of in my suitcase in Bangkok.
i think the process of becoming entirely ready has more to do with erosion than new growth. eroding away all of the frivolous to expose what truly needs removing, and then praying for that removal. in training last summer, toward the end of the week, my boss would nitpick about little things in presentation, simply because the bigger things had been removed. this has been really good for me to see what is left that i am not good with anymore. ego, not being gentle with people i meet, being American and brazen, not treading lightly. the more of the bad we remove, the less need there is to force good through.
i could live here quite happily, i imagine.

big buddha day

awakened this morning by the sounds of prayer chants and the smell of fresh flowers and fruit. today is a holy day for the thai Buddhists. last night thousands of them, dressed in white, marched to doi suthep, a wat just outside of the city. today no one is supposed to drink. today is “big Buddha day.”

peace out, aussie

the aussie has left, gone to phuket by train. it was wonderful to travel with him, and have reflected back at me some core relationship behaviors we could all use some work on. i will miss him.

best fruit shakes

there is a little café tucked into the side of the street, next to the huge fluorescent chain coffee shop, where you can have a good bowl of muesli and fruit with coffee for 50 baht, mango and sticky rice for 20 baht, or fried noodles for 70 baht. the youngest girl, with her jet hair pulled into a side ponytail, catches flies on the end of a toothpick dipped in honey while her mother and father and older sisters serve the mostly western breakfast crowd. this morning i came in early enough to watch one of the women juice halved mandarins by the bushel and pour the sweet, thin juice into plastic bottles to be sold in the front of the restaurant.
i’m sitting outside of the large coffeshop next door, it’s about 5 in the afternoon, raining, and i’m drinking a cappuccino. the owner and one of her daughters just came out of their little café, exhausted, and sat on the wall, apparently waiting for a ride. i wonder why the girls are not in school, or what would happen if the café closed, where they would go. i chuckle at the difference between thai and western cultures: in the states, a restaurant wouldn’t even be able to be thought of in the conditions this one is built. an open concrete space between two stores, covered with patchy corrugated metal, the cold counter near the street entrance where the fruit shakes and coffee is made; a kitchen hidden in the back through a doorway with broken plastic fringe separating it from the diners; a girl washing dishes in buckets of stagnant water visible around the cement-brick corner. two glass front coolers with bottles of water, soymilk, coca-cola, coconuts filled with their sweet water and flesh, 20 baht.

p.m.

chiang mai at night is another world. when the streets empty of proper daytime thais, the cockroaches and packs of dogs and filth rise to the surface. the policemen stand at one corner of the block while the prostitutes trick on the other. a woman in a surgical mask crouches beside a bag of rubbish, rummaging for things to add to the load on her scooter. it’s a good time to walk under street lights, to watch your feet and your back. the cockroaches prance amber in the light, inches from the gutters, while the stray dogs lounge in gateways, tearing through trash, shitting on the brick sidewalks, barking ferociously at passersby and growling each other down. the hookers wait for rich, older farang men, who proudly walk with one on each arm on the way to their hotel. one man was even being wheeled in his wheelchair by a hooker. the police men are more concerned with unhelmeted motorcyclists running red lights than they are the sex trade. mosquitoes swarm like b-52’s, leaving exposed ankles and forearms stinging and unbearable. the moon shines directly overhead with our proximity to the equator, and those stars that can be seen in the city twinkle.

afternoon rain

it rained this afternoon, wednesday, while i sit here on the veranda of my guesthouse room at the rendez-vous guest house. the sky is so clear here i watched the dark storm clouds carry over the city, move slowly towards the wat just outside of my window, and begin to spatter a gentle rain. the wind is still rustling the leaves in the trees, and somewhere a bell tings gently in the breeze.

mae sot

mae sot is a thai-burmese border town, dark and brooding, torn by the sorrow of suffering people. at night, the dogs bark viciously, and hunt in packs. they only recede nervously from a stick thrown from the hands of a fiercely angry Australian journalist. the hotel we stayed at, the dk hotel, is run by an older man and a dozen young boys. at night, two of them drape themselves, sleeping, over furniture. one flicks his ear while watching a noisy boxing match on tv, the other sits contorted in a low chair outside, ipod headphones jammed in his ears, green tshirt twisted around his lithe body.
the hotel seems to have once been grand, perhaps the most grand in the city, but it has fallen under the morbid spell of age and strife and dirt. fluorescent bulbs and the faded, unvarnished teak carvings of massive angry fish, fangs the size of golf tees, hang from the ceilings; the marble floors polished so violently the baseboards are faded, as though pale is annexing the building from the floor up.
this whole damn city feels like a rude afterthought, as though some careless server has thrown it onto the table after you have had the coffee. there is very little sense of depth here, and even less beauty. here is all dirty concrete and corrugated rusted metal storefronts, slapped grossly onto once-beautiful, now-dilapidated teak homes. brand new colorful plaster buildings, yellows and pinks and blues, drown in the dinginess of the street. it’s as though the town is ashamed of their fabulousness and is doing all it can to kill it. people walk around vacantly, as though manipulated by some unseen forces, moved by invisible joysticks. it’s all very bewildering. accumulated years of dirt and apathy and fighting and loneliness and suffering settle into the cracks and expand, fade and consume anything in its way.
mae sot is the wrong city to look for hope, but it’s here, deeply encoded in children’s pencil and watercolor sketches that hang in the café were we took our after dinner coffees and teas and cakes. it’s there in the warm conversation with a woman who wandered into our fish café, selling string key chains for 10 baht apiece to help her ill mother—this is a woman i would barely look at, let alone give money in exchange for a waste of my time, but hope here is so precious a commodity that it must be dispensed whenever possible.
there are people who look deeper into those around them—people who see the ordinary and leave it unaccepted; the status quo is something to be analyzed, prodded, questioned, changed if found unsatisfactory. to these people, a boy begging in the street is not just a boy begging in the street. this boy has a name and a schedule, and if he is not on his beat, his absence is noted. a girl selling bags of mangoes every morning at 8 am is evidence of life swimming along as only life can, not an inconvenience in the way.


the Myanmar-thai “friendship bridge.”


a man standing on the thai-burma border, a line painted on a concrete bridge.

a hill tribe boy peddles bracelets in mae salong

vomit, v 1.0

i don’t really know what happened last night. at some point, the aussie started vomiting and coughing and choking in the bathroom. then, not too much later, he did it again. i slept through most of it, until about half four, when i started to get queasy, seriously. i turned down the fan that was pumping fast and loud, moved to the bathroom, knelt at the bowl and evacuated the contents of my stomach so forcefully it felt like a freight train pumping through my esophagus. only one session like that, and i was quick to ask god if he’d help me keep it down, whatever it was that was revolting in my stomach. it did the trick for long enough to decide to go with the guys on a road trip to Mae Sot, a Thai-Burmese border town fraught with all kinds of problems of the humanitarian crisis sort.
About an hour into the car ride, i woke from a doze, feeling queasy again despite having downed a cocktail of anti-forceful-projection-from-any-given-orifice pills, and asked if we could pull over, post haste. We had barely pulled into the car park of a service station when i heaved again, all over the inside of the backseat and into my open hands. i threw open the door of the still-moving car, much to the shock of the thai gas attendants and my travel companions alike, and had flashbacks to a friend’s alcohol poisoning episode years ago, where he hung limply out of the backseat, vomiting.  only mine was soy milk and fried noodles from the night before, not cheap vodka. this time.
Thailand has been very good for me to get through any number of fears, such as spending time half a world away from my home, learning a new culture and language, meeting new people. vomiting all over myself in front of said new people, in the rental car hired by said people, watching said people clean my vomit out of my flip flops and buy me gum while i limp from the washroom, face moist with washing, carrying my vomit-covered pants in hand.

ACTUALLY wrecking the scooter

we got into chiang rai about 8:30, 9 pm, and i was dead exhausted. 90 km/h for the past hour, dark, headlights, contacts drying up, insects the size of king kong whapping my face, and i felt like an utter lunatic.
we found a market and a good-lookingplace to eat, pulled off and decided to park. i saw a nice spot on the sidewalk, sort of parallel another bike parked up there. i tried to pull my scooter over the curb, and when it wouldn’t hop, i gunned the throttle a little bit.
the following second and a half felt like an underwater dream, trying to stop the bike but pulling the throttle instead of the brake, careening into first the wall and then wedging up next to the other scooter, throwing me off behind, left with my leg pinned between the concrete wall and my neon green 150 cc beast. i vaguely remember yelling, and the fear kicked in once i had stopped. well, first the overwhelming feeling of FUCK.  
then the idiocy.
then the owner of the bike came over and began inspecting the damage to her bike. at first she seemed satisfied that it would start, all was well. i apologized profusely, the pain in my leg beginning to flow, furious at my mistake, at trying to be comforted, at the whole fucking thing. i wanted to be in chiang mai, where i was comfortable, not in chiang rai with a wrecked motorscooter. then the woman returned and began re-inspecting her bike, and i was about a millimeter away from copping fierce attitude, thinking i was about to get had for some serious cash. i noticed her kickstand was legitimately busted, the bike wouldn’t stand upright, so i pulled a 500 baht note from my wallet and handed it to her, apologizing all the way. she walked away, returning a few moments later with a handful of smaller bills. i’m thinking look lady, i didn’t just thrash your bike and then expect you to break a 500 from your papaya stand. instead, she returned 300 of the money i’d given her, motioning that the stand would only cost 200.
so, i ended the evening at the chiang rai inn after some fabulous thai food at an open restaurant, post-crash, my leg was raspberried up and bruised a little but not broken or worse, my bike had a busted fender but nothing worse, and the woman i hit had cash for a new stand, and she upheld honesty and integrity.

hello? hello?

the further north we pushed this week, the fewer falang , and the more hill tribes people we saw. dressed in heavy embroidered clothes, their headdresses shaking with the weight of the silver adornments. they didn’t smile as we passed them, only peering at us with wide, flat faces and dark eyes. my first instinct was to use the word vacant to describe their stare, but it is something very different. their eyes speak of things taken from them, stripped bare in the presence of another culture and time, one with no room for their presence.

at the markets, the women and their children peddle jewelry, opium pipes, carved fetishes and clothing. the children swarm like insects around the knees of anyone approaching the stands, shouting Hello? Hello? Ten baht! Twenty Baht! Hello? Hello? Eerily parroting the English language, they thrust handfuls of cheap beaded bracelets upward, climbing on top of each other for the business. Singly, a young girl with straight black hair chopped carelessly below her ears casually strolled by me, lilting Hello? Hello? Ten baht? Five baht? One baht? Hello! Hello! And she would walk away, singing the hollow word to herself over and over again.



The elderly tribeswomen, if not stationed at their stalls, would follow us around, hanging in the background, peering through dark eyes and leather skin, grinning widely with black remains of teeth. Plied with cigarettes, she would wander away, returning later to haunt our movements.

That there are so many people who depend on falang money for their survival is depressing to me. The series of events that have forced these people from the hills and onto the streets of Maesalong, Chiang Rai, Chiang Mai, and countless other bans across Southeast Asia, has left those who cannot adapt behind to beg for cigarettes and hawk tarnished jewelry and stolen clothing. One woman, dressed in an old English-language t-shirt and basketball shorts, her long hair pulled casually from her strong face, was teaching her baby, not 2 or 3 years old, to walk up to a pair of German tourists and shout Hello? Hello?, fistfuls of bracelets held high. Everyone laughed, and I wanted to leave, my guilt at being a white American flaring up while realizing there was nothing I could do to restore any pride these people may have once had in their culture.

this is a riverboat on the mekong river, looking out from the golden triangle.

after burma, we decided to hear toward chiang suan, and found lake chiang suan. when one encounters a lake inthe middle of thailand, what is one inclined to do? go swimming, of course!



there were three boys swimming there. as well, and when they realized we weren't there to harsh their good time, they hung out with us, making fun of me and splashing eachother and throwing snails into eachother's faces. i have a great video of them singing, and i'll upload it soon.

we overshot mai sai, but found the burma border.

wednesday night we switched hotels to the shin shane guesthouse, where the bungalows offer a less spectacular view, but are less than half the previous night's rate. we pushed off thursday morning, late, to hit mae sai, chiang suan, then on to chinag rai before landing again in chiang mai.

the proprieter of our guesthouse pointed us along a route off the beaten path, but with more beauty than the highway. of course we followed his suggestion, and ended up pushing the motorbikes up red dirt paths set against the mountains at 60 degree angles. cursing and terrified of the smooth-faced hill tribes people, i pushed my scooter upward as hard as we would go; it in its neon green and i in my sandals and linen pants, and panting, we all came out at the top of the mountain, probably less than 2 km from where we started. nothing in thailand is in a straight line, i have learned.

717 steps up to a wat on top of the a mountian in maesalong, and this is what we found wednesday night..







yes, we counted the steps.

no longer growing opium, maesalong is known for its tea and tea houses, where this thai girl works. 

ALMOST wrecking the scooter.

tuesday took us north, along 107, and at some point between pissing myself at 40 km/h and finding comfort at 80 km/h, i was behind a huge dump truck barreling down the road, laden with thais and trees. not seeing it swerve suddenly in front of me, and not slowing down either, i hit a ditch in the highway at a good clip. seeing my life flash before my eyes, and seeing my bike fly into the air in some wild mission impossible stuntery, i gasped and tightened my grip on the handle bars. the contents of my handlebar basket jumped up, spilling all over the road, but my tires remained earthbound. the shettering of my red bull bottle lingering in my ears, i pulled to the side, collected my camera case and scuffed mobile, lamented the loss of a good caffeinated beverage, and resumed my flight north.

sunday sunday

i really want to apologize for skipping huge chinks of time in this blog. i’m trying to keep up as far as chronology goes, but it seems to slip away from me, and the down time i have to actually write and upload and edit photos is pretty short. so, bear with me.

sunday, my first full day here, i was goaded into renting a scooter for 200 baht a day. terrified, remembering the plight of a certain dutch friend of mine, and leery of the ominous rainclouds, i prayed and prayed and prayed to remain vertical on this damn bike, navigating through insane thai traffic through highway construction and into a national park north of chiang mai about an hour. ish. the road took us into the mountains, winding winding winding through elephant camps and orchid farms and waterfalls, but to see any of them, there was a 200 baht “Foreign Visitor” charge. Livid, I argued for 20 minutes with a man in a camouflage uniform. I finally folded when the aussie mentioned he really wanted to see this waterfall, but i bemoaned it for days. I still am, apparently.



we also visited a wat, a Buddhist temple, to which i have been responding with “what??” in my subtle American humor every time we pass one. ha ha.

sunset over the valley on the way to maesalong 

the road to maesalong

tuesday morning, i woke early, packed, checked out and went for a coffee and breakfast after picking up another motorbike. just after our coffee arrived, the tall, casual bloke from the previous night’s meeting walked in so casually i had assumed the aussie called him to join us. a few moments behind was his irish friend, and the four of us ate breakfast and laughed hysterically while the tall aussie pointed up to another town, away from our original destination of chinag rai. aw yea, mae salong is soo much nisah than chiang rai, knowwhatimean? it’s this old sor!- of Chinese influenced town, and they used to grow opium, but when the yanks wanted them to stop, they started growing tea. so now all they do is grow tea. it’s so much nicer than chiang rai. it’s only about 3 or 4 hours up there, you’ll get a map and head in that direction.
so, ambitious and excited, we spent an hour locating the primary highway to take us north. finally on 107, opening up the motorbikes to 90, 100 km/h, my helmet lifting off my head with every gust of wind, the sun shining and grit coating out faces. hours we rode like this, up winding mountain switch backs, straight on long stretches of highway, weaving around pedestrians and slower bikes, getting passed by pickups and small sedans, through a brief but stinging rainstorm, blinded on a dusty choke of mountain road. stopping only for a toilet or a photograph, once to buy a pomelo and some deep green, fragrant oranges from roadside stands. sweaty, gritty, hands vibrating from gripping the handlebars, ankles stinging from sun and wind. hours on the road, optimistic that in a moment or two we’d see the signs. no, it’s only an hour up the road; no, fang’s just a bit from it. at one more last stop for prawn crackers and a sweet cake, the woman said “two. two,” when we said “maesalong? mea-mae salong?” exhausted, we sat at a table and ate out snacks, saving energy for the daunting road. already 5 hours from chiang mai, there was no way to turn back, neither of us wanted to, but a meal and a hot shower was the only thing on my mind. seeing our disappointment, the woman brought us a liter bottle of chilled water and two glasses, and waved kindly when we sped off.
not wasting any time, soaring over highway at 85, 90 km/h, scanning any sign in Thai or English for MaeSalong. Finally I crossed a bridge and the white woman walking it, the first westerner I’d seen since Chiang Mai, followed closely by a sing for MaeSalong, 43 km ahead. Winding ever deeper into the mountains, and the sun sinking, the air became cooler, moist and sweetly fragrant. The valley opened into the most beautiful, breathtaking sight I have ever seen. Words fail to capture the vast green fields, protected by craggy mountains carpeted in trees. A grey buffalo grazed in one, and the trucks and motorbikes we passed beeped their horns and waved cheerfully as we sped by.
I was beginning to think MaeSalong didn’t exist, that we would never find it, that this was some bizarre journey into the surreal with an indeterminate ending. At the hand-pumped gas station, the owner assured us that the village was on the other side of the mountain, and a sign spelled 13 km ahead.



gassing up.

Dark now, the air cooler and heavy, I pulled on a jacket and braced for the steep rise and fall of the road, the sharp corners and hidden bumps. seeing lights in a mountain seemingly forever away, I prayed that our destination was inhabited, let alone lit with electricity. Determined, pressing forward, delirious from the long ride, the reality of motorbiking through the mountains of northern thialand, the intoxicating beauty of the sunset, finally MaeSalong appeared. After visiting 3 different hotels and guesthouses, we settled on a little bungalow for 800 Baht, overlooking the valley.
An adequate curry and a hot shower later, falling exhausted into my hard twin mattress on the floor of my little bamboo bungalow, still mad from the reality of the present, feeling a little uneasy that for the first time, I am a stranger, isolated from the world I know, now cracking open another window onto the globe, another look into the lives of people a world away from my familiar soy milk and beat up jeep and family and comfort.



view from bungalow one.

the begging bowl, answered

monday night, i went to wat something or other to Monk Chat. Every other day, the Wat offers an open session to foreigners to talk with novice monks about the principles of Buddhism. Determined at first not to speak, our monk opened up to us about some basic principles of Buddhism, the 5 rules: we try not kill anything, we try not to steal, etc.. and the three causes of suffering, anger greed and delusion. Suffering is of the mind, the speech or the body. The mind, when thinking impure or evil thoughts, for example, manifests that thought in everything it is.
I asked this monk about compassion. I asked him what the Buddhist does when encountering a beggar in the street, and if the ones who shout at passersby can differ from those who hold their request silent, stoic in their vigil. He replied that to have compassion is to have wisdom, and it is good to give of yourself to others. If one has wisdom, however, one would not give to someone who would hurt them. Be wise about whom you give compassion. When one is compassionate, one is not being unkind to others.

train to chiang mai

not a wireless network in sight. sunburned arms, neck and shoulders. fan oscillating, neighborhood bars clanging on poorly skinned drums. hair wet, hot showered for the first since yesterday morning. yesterday, saturday, it feels like a week ago. that day started with a hot shower and a cup of instant coffee, followed by a jaunt down to soi 11 for a coffee, croissant and a bowl of fruit for breakfast while i waited for the exchanges to open. after cashing a cashier’s checque, i got an hour long thai massage, where this girl pulled and prodded and twisted my poor body back into proper alignment. after checking out of the hotel, i chatted up Zennitt, my Nepalese friend who tried to sell me suits for a day or two until he got the hint. i then lugged my heavy pack to the metro station and on to Hua Lamphong Railway Station for the 2:30 to Chiang Mai, destroying all the work my lovely Thai woman had done to my back.



the train ride was my first ever, let alone in a sleeper to northern Thailand. i was expecting something worthy of a hogwart’s entrance, but for 700 baht, it was not bad. i sat in the train for the hour i had cushioned my arrival, watching monks and soldiers and a vendor poke at his bandaged lip. out train pushed off promptly, and we slowly clacked out way north, passing through bangkok’s outskirts and smaller surrounding cities, picking up more passengers as we went. i dozed off and on in the sunlight, while vendors walked up and down the aisle, shouting their wares. a little before sundown i made my way to the dining car, sitting down across from a single thai woman who smiled and offered me some of her meal. i picked my way back through the crowded cars, smiling people making way for me to clunk down the aisles. instead of going back to my seat, i sat in the open stairwell, overlooking the tracks below us. hypnotized, i sat there until we slowed for another station. returning to my car, no. 15, the attendant was pulling our seats into beds, whereupon i promptly climbed in, pulled the curtain, and despite our frequent stops, slept rather restfully until 5:30 am, when we pulled into Chaing Mai.

the chiang mai train toilet

the chiang mai train toilet.

at some point into our trip north, i stepped toward the toilet to relieve myself. after latching the warped metal door behind me, i turned and confronted a rimless metal bowl protruding from the ground, two 3 ½” grooved metal platforms on either side. i stared at this for about 4 minutes, dumbfounded at what i was being asked to do. am I supposed to place my ass on that?? it then occurred to me that i was to stand on the metal platform flanking this medieval device. well, squat rather. and hold onto the handle attached to the wall. this last piece seemed the most indispensable, as one good lurch from the train would send said urinatrix sprawling across the toilet, bum- or head-first into the unnamable liquid sloshing in the corners.  

the begging bowl

there are beggars all over the place in Bangkok, crouched low on the sidewalk with their cups extended. some are crippled, some are deformed, some are young children or young mothers. they shout their pleas for charity, and i can’t bring myself to give because of the look in their eyes. it is not a look i feel charity towards. this has caused me some strife this week, because every trip inches away from one of these destitutes fills my heads with shouts of who are you to determine who deserves charity? what would god suggest you do? you have ample, these people don’t even have feet. selfish, self seeking, self centered. but ultimately i don’t believe them. i believe they see themselves as victims of their fate, and i for all of my warring voices, cannot support victimization, even of the self.
then yesterday, i happened upon someone quite different. an older, square-faced woman with close-cropped grey hair. she crouched on the sidewalk, silently extending her flimsy clear plastic cup towards the sky. her face was calm, not pained, and she uttered not one word. immediately the book the begging bowl filtered into my mind. this is a woman, Buddhist, who is accepting graciously whatever we passersby place in her begging bowl, or cup, in her case. the action was the same, but the tangible motives were very different. i walked a few meters past her, bewildered by what she meant to me in the split second we shared air, then doubled back and gave. even now, reliving it, i hear that it wasn’t enough, i should have given her everything i had and more, she is more spiritually advanced than i am, i would trade places with her for a day so she could feel my comfort. but is mine actually comfort? here is a woman whose very existence and sustenance rely on the gifts of the universe through us human vehicles. all she has is god and the gifts therein. i have complicated my relationship with god, and there are now several layers between the two of us. this woman, to me, seems to be an unadulterated vision of spirituality. and she never even looked at me, her face remained serene and grateful. i wonder where she goes at night?