off to thailand [Archive] - The Lone Star Command Message Boards

RazielDemon

Aug 18, 2007, @ 03:18 AM

Hm, there were no internets :(

anyway, seeing as I've already got this thread all dedicated to me and such, there's not much point in making a new one just to chat about my holiday, but anyone bored enough to read anything I've got to say go right ahead and read on right here.

To answer a 40 day old question yes, my girlfriend is half thai, the other half german. Her dad is an ex colonel from the german diplomatic core, and her mother is... well, a diplomats wife. Altogether over the top, obsessed with propriety in general and correct table etiquette in specifics, and well, loads of that sort of stuff (for instance, did you know it is considered an insult to your host to touch your potatoes with your knife? by doing so you are suggesting that they are not cooked well enough, you should be able to manage with only a fork. I shudder to think what they'd think of mashing them; one one occasion we ate spaghetti though, and I was relieved to find out that there is no official polite way to slurp up a noodle, though sound effects are frowned upon).

Dunno about thai fighter, but she likes thai kick boxing and for some reason WWF... just don't tell me that the 'thai fighter' was a 'TIE fighter' joke.

It's got to be one of the strangest cultures I've ever encountered, though I haven't been to asia beyond russia before, so it's unlikely to be the oddest around.
In the few weeks I was there I discovered 14 different words for addressing someone as 'you' depending on your own social status in relation to the person you are talking to. There are also an infinite number of variations on the 'wai' (the little bow with your hands pressed together in front of your face, mind that the inferior in social standing must wai first, and the hight of hands in relation to face, plus the depth of the bow is of vital importance). There's little saffron robed monks on every corner, carrying handbags and begging bowls, each taxi, bus and transport boat has a few seats marked 'reserved for monks', and having a monk on board is considered extremely lucky. The highest of respect greetings, accompanied by a triple deep and high wai is reserved for monks and the king, and means, litteraly translated 'the tip of the hair on my head greets the sand under the soles of your feet', as hight is closely linked to status, the head being sacred, and feet unclean.
Try to avoid stepping on the bottom of the doorframe, the official entrance line to a building or room, as one of the spirits of the home lives there and will curse you. Also take your shoes off before or immediately after entering. I first though this was some kind of hygiene linked custom, but later found that thai's for instance don't give a damn if a pet or small child craps indoors, or even on, say, the hosts lap if the child belongs to a visitor... so it's something of a mystery.
Apparently some clever chappy prime-minister in the past pressed through quite a large set of projects which lead to water cleaning and general purification, so that all thai's in big cities would have access to clean drinking water. This was a great success, what they forgot however was that the piping system to deliver that water was utter trash and so you still can't drink tap water or you'll get either copper, lead or possibly uranium poisoning, depending on your level of luck.

I had hoped to visit ankor wat, however, it's in cambodia, regardless of whether the actual ENTRANCE to the place is in thailand, and I didn't want to go through the immigration hassle. By that time I'd seen a ton of wats anyway. Also, the locals can't decide if they want to call the big pointy things pagodas, ziggurats, chedis or some unpronounceable chinese name.
Thai's seem to think that their budha is faintly smiling at them, but to be honest it looks like he's looking around with his face contorted due to a mild case of constipation. What he lacks in charming looks though, his statues make up for in sheer size... one fairly random old statue which I came across in the ruins of a former thai city-state, sukhothai, was taller than my house, and that while he was sitting cross-legged.

While I mention sukhothai, there seem to have been a lot of old little city states wiping each other out and swapping monarchs and little emerald budha statues during the last 700 years... but that's as far as it goes. Before about 1300 there was pretty much nothing in thailand, it was jungle and hilltribes.
That's another slightly odd thing really, I'm used to going around places and seeing ruins and old buildings of different ages, and seeing progress through the ages, but in thailand, there's not so much. There's a few old pottery kilns, some copper tools, but from 3600bc to 1300ad the only invention to come out of thailand was a better yak collar, and possibly a new way of seeding rice... then boom 700 years ago there's a smidgen of civilization crept in, with it's pointy roofs and houses on sticks and organised warfare and funny dancing and a couple of royal dynasties... and flop it stagnates again till the '70s of last century.

I was lucky to have something of a guided tour round the sukhothai ruins while traveling with my gf's dad and his rotary friends, they've got some mini 'water treatment plants for schools' thing going on and they were traveling up the country to chaing mai, the seccond city, so we tagged allong. They were a strange sort of people those guys, can't say I've had much contact with rotarians here in europe, but they seemed nice enough, if somewhat snobbish, but quite an interesting bunch, being all expats of one kind or another, some old australian journalist who'd started working for alternatingly the bankok post and al-jazeera, and the former Canadian ambassador to Japan, who was a very nice guy who'd known my gf since she was little, apparently, and was very upset about the thai government banning access to YouTube (heh, it's had a military coup and pretty much all it's top polliticians have always been military, apprently some sketch about their king was all the excuse they needed), as he was addicted to watching daft little video clips, he'd recently found terrorist subtitles (http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=Si6CHruMn7c) and couldn't get back to it again now... oh the horror, meh.

So anyway, they brought us up north to near chiang mai, where we were headed, but the last 300 miles or so through the mountains we'd have to go by bus, and unfortunately it was the end of a holliday weekend so everything was booked up, except for the seccond worst type of bus... the green, or 'fan' bus. Now there's about 5 grades of bus, ranging from wooden seats to massage chair, and we got were on one step up from wooden seats... that is, wooden seats with a bit of rubber stretched over them, and a few holes cut in the ceiling with standing fans bolted through them, so we got some air inside (the orange, lowest level bus deals with air by simply not having windows). Coupled to seat quality and space, by the way, was also engine strength, so where the blue and higher busses can do the trip in 6 hours or so, our little chugger could barely manage to get up over the steeper inclines, so it took us closer to 11 hours, shuddering every step of the way.

Chiang mai had a lot to see, and there we did al sorts of things like visiting the hilltribe with the funny stretched necks with all the copper rings around them, to riding an elephant.
The hilltribes were disappointing, and doubly so as they charged us for every photo we wanted to take of them. Especialy when we shelled out for an 'authentic' ethnic meal (complete with lack of seats) accompanied by tribal dancing. Now, the guy hopping around with 6 swords in his mouth was mildly entertaining, even though he didn't fall over and kill himself, but the rest of the dances pretty much consisted of people with badly made musical instruments (and one flute was seriously made out of plastic tubing) pacing arhythmically in a circle.
The elephant riding though was much more interesting, and I was somewhat shocked to find out that they have no problem at all descending a 45 degree incline while their passengers are holding on for dear life, to their ears when necessary. Also, there's little shacks on sticks all the way around the route they take you, with little old ladies selling bunches of bananas and bundles of sugar cane, which you can feed to the elephant. We found out that this might not have been such a great idea, despite the photo ops, as it turned out our elephant caught on very fast and decided that it would stop every 20 yards and probe back with it's trunk for a bribe of a banana or cane piece before it would move again. Needless to say there were some happy little old ladies along the route that day.
A small part of the journey also happened by ox cart, and I only mention this as its means of steering seemed so quaint. For left, hit it once hard with stick. For right, hit it once harder with stick. If it doesn't respond, get off the cart and stroll alongside the ox, poking the stick into its rump until its rather slow nerves finally manage to send the message on to its little brain that it should react somehow, whereupon it does something entirely random, repeat as necessary.

When we went back to bangkok, about 450 miles, we got the vip bus, massage seats and all, a fairly good 7 hours. all of 12 euros, heh.

Well, that concludes this presentation, I hope I alleviated your boredom a little.

PS.
If you're visiting thailand, especially bangkok, and you're tempted to rent a car... don't. That is, unless you've ever driven in a warzone, or are particularly keen on your relatives getting your life insurance. Else, just rely on cabs, they're cheap as anything, and some, like the glorified rickshaw called a 'tuktuk' and the toyota pickups with big metal cages meant to transform them magically into buses, can be quite an experience. And there's always motorcycle boys (well, moped boys really) which will ferry you around, monsoon or shine, at 90 miles an hour without helmet, along the 20 meter tall raised highway without crash-barriers. I don't know how those little monks I saw on the back of those things kept their serene little faces composed.