Er… yeah it’s been a while – May 31, 2007

Hello, ok so technically it hasn’t been a while since I posted something yesterday, but it has been a while since I posted anything to let anybody know how things are and what’s been going on, so it’s probably time I made the effort to catch up with everything.

Well, I guess I should start with April, since the most recent update was about March.

Well, when I think back to April last year, it was a really horrible time. Apartment contract, visa and money all ran out at the same time, I didn’t have a job, and in the middle of all this was Songkran, which included an epic 12 hour overnight car journey to Chiang Mai, which was stressful. Man, some of the car crashes I saw on the way up there were horrific… pools of blood and people lying in the middle of the road… But everything sorted itself out in the end - for me anyway.

April this year was also pretty horrible, but for different reasons, and I suppose it wasn’t quite as shit as last April. Quite early on in the month my girlfriend’s freind’s fiance was killed in a car crash. I new the guy, not too well, but I went to Koh Samui with him. Not a nice way to lose someone you’re about to marry, really, and the funeral was pretty tough. The circumstances surrounding the whole event are incredibly wierd too, but best not speak ill of the dead, specially not in a country this superstitious. 

Things continued on a fairly crappy note this April mainly because my job was driving me into the ground. Not that I’m going to go on about that this time, save to say it involved those fucking holiday classes which still hadn’t finished (9-12 Mon-Fri) and not finishing till 8 in the evening most days. Miserable.

Then on top of all this, I got handed “Banana A”, the Saturday morning kids’ class that included amongst other little bastards, August, the delinquent 6 year-old who for reasons only known to the Thai staff is put in a class with other kids who barely know the alphabet, while he speaks near fluent English. As his “teacher” you are both his servant and climbing frame – a combination that led me to nearly tear him limb from limb on several occassions. And I got handed Amy, Bill and Boat, a family of spoilt and not-to-dissimilar-to-August kinda children. And being a family of spoilt children they spend the whole 2 hours trying to cause as much misery to each other as possible. Fuck trying to teach them anything.

And then, my superstar student Nitiporn Munark cancelled on me for the whole month, something about her having to go to France for an indeterminate amount of time for her radio show…. obviously France and a radio dj career are more important than me! Ha! Well…. that’s just fine because I don’t care. Absolutely not. Not… much anyway. Btw is anyone else getting sick of the italics? Sorry.     

So this is was the general… outlay, if you like, of April. And apologies, I guess I did bang on about my fucking job again. If only I could stop writing everything in italics!!!!  

The main event of April, as with every April in Thailand was of course Songkran. I usually look forward to Songkran with a feeling of dread and misery, and usually end up actually enjoying it, and this was true this year. The aim was to have a traditional Songkran with Looksorn’s family up in North east Thailand, also known as Isan. To sum up the whole experience, I would probably choose the word “hardcore”. Isan in a nutshell is a pretty hardcore place.

It started with a 15 hour car journey from Bangkok overnight to Looksorn’s home village in Si Sa Ket province, with Looksorn and her sisters Aey, Oh and Moo. That was pretty tough.

We got to Isan and went straight to her mum’s (and her original) home which was I guess simple but had a really idyllic “rural Thailand” feel to it, complete with pigs, ducks and chickens in the back yard. The village consisted of a couple of roads, a temple, a school and a whole lot of Isan people who probably hadn’t seen a white person in a very long time. Speaking English was definitely not going to be an option for the next few days.

The first day was really spent recovering, and meeting more of the family at her grandad’s home. He’s 93, and he’s having his house renovated. So where is he living? In his house, on his own. Out of choice of course! Like I said before, Isan = hardcore, no two ways about it.

The next day was spent with the family again, eating honest to God the most amazing food I’ve ever eaten and driving around having buckets of water thrown at the car by very, very drunk Songkran revellers. Two other things that you notice immediately about people from Isan (after hardcore-ness) is their love of drink and their love of their own brand of Thai music, which they were playing on huge soundsystems dragged out to the side of the road, and is for the most part much better than the music you find elsewhere in Thailand. Other Thai people dismiss Isan as being backwards and poverty stricken which is such a shame since I think in terms of modern culture its certainly the most exciting and dynamic part of the country.

The highlight of the visit was, after performing all the traditional bathing all the family elders (alive and passed on) in scented water, going out to ‘play Songkran’ – riding around in the back of a pickup having lots of water thrown at you while you (ideally) throw somw back too. Only we didn’t have any, so it was really a lot of getting wet and being really, really uncomfortable squashed in the back of the truck. Fortunately though we had a ladyboy with us, so even though I was a white guy, I wasn’t everyone’s main target. A relief to be sure.

After a journey of about 2-4 hours we ’apparently’ (this being Thailand nobody told me where we were going, obviously) made it to the Cambodian border to visit Wat Phra Vinhear, an ancient Khmer temple built by the same fellow who commissioned Angkor Wat, and built at the top of a ridge that allows you to see for miles and miles beyond into Cambodia. I guess what made the visit even more amazing was that the temple had been turned into a hill-top fortress by some Khmer Rouge twat-or-other and they had laid down minefields for miles in every direction. Every few 100 metres you were carefully reminded by French government-donated signs that you were ok, but if you left the path you would have your nuts (amongst other things) blown sky high.

By the end of all this everyone was pretty tired and we headed home, through more deluges of water and this time went through downtown Si Sa Ket where lots and lots of other pick ups also were and lots and lots of drunk Isan people throwing lots of water and listening to lots of music also were. By this stage I was too tired and too wet to do anything but just ‘go with it’ and ended up having a really good, if slightly surreal, time. Songkran in Isan (at least where I was) has a real carnival feel to it that made it really pleasant and enjoyable. In Chiang Mai, like most other places these days it’s more about a water ‘fight’ and getting everyone as wet as possible and winning the fight and being a cunt to everyone - in Pattaya there were people on the street (Thai and white) actually pissing into their water pistols and spraying them at passers by. Utter shite.

After all this it was time to go home (it took only 12 hours on the way back which seemed like nothing tbh) and back to civilised Bangkok, and work the very next day at 9am, which wasn’t so fun.

Blody hell, rambled again! Anyway, there’s a good time to finish I think. That was April, I’ve got to go and teach now. I’ll add something about May sometime before I go back to the UK.