Recently in Thailand

B-ball with the Locals

I have been playing basketball a few days a week with some of the local guys and some of my students since mid-November. I love playing with them. I don’t love it just because I am super tall and now know what Yao Ming must have felt like. I don’t love it just because every time someone pulls off a great shot or block or move the game stops so everyone can scream. Usually everyone yells “oh my God!” or “ooohhhhhh!” and the player yells out the name of an NBA player. “Yaooooooo!” for blocks. “Koooobbbbeeee!” for a nice jumper. “Leeee bron!” for a strong move to the basket. I got them saying “Steeeeeve Nash!” for a nice pass and “Curry!” for a splash three. They also say “made in the U.S.A.!!!!!” when I hit a three or block a shot. I love playing basketball here because I am able to relate to a group of Thai guys without really speaking. We communicate all the time, but I do not feel the language isolation that exists in other social situations. I feel like I belong to this group like I have belonged to other teams in the past. We joke, we celebrate each other’s successes and we compete.

I can tell that it is time for me to move on though. Recently the temperature has been getting extremely hot and it does not cool off in the evenings. The humidity is also increasing, which leads me to sweat a truly copious amount when I am playing basketball. I sweat through anything and everything I am wearing within the first fifteen minutes. I sweat so much that other players do not want to guard me in the post and will move out of the way to avoid body contact. And the Thais barely break a sweat! I do not understand how their bodies can deal with the heat and humidity without sweating and they do not take water breaks while I guzzle down 2 liters every time we play. It is time to move on, my body can no longer deal, but it was real.

Attack of the Jungle Dogs

Thai dogs hate tall white men on bicycles. This is a ridiculous statement, but the longer I live here the more I think it is true. There are definitely some Thai dogs that like me, but the majority of the dogs in Ngao are not fond of my presence. Every day when I walk into school there are three dogs that wait at the entrance. When they first see me they start off with small muffled barks and then start howling as I walk past them. They never bark at Caroline or anyone else. I had come to expect this and I was generally accepting that the dogs here were all bark and no bite. Then came the attack of the jungle dogs.

It was Scout Day, so naturally we didn’t have class and we were wandering around town doing random tasks with the Girl Guides (Thailand’s Girl Scouts). The final tasks were team-building activities at a farm owned by Sam, our coordinator’s husband. All-in-all it was a very fun day, up until I had to bike by myself back to our house to get Caroline. Caroline and I were spilt up taking pictures and videos for the school. Caroline went home for lunch and I left Sam’s farm to go find her and lead her through the backcountry roads to the farm.

I was casually biking along some dirt roads and took a left around a corner. In the middle of the road were two small dogs. As I pedaled towards them they just sat there, right in my way. I veered clear of them and as I passed they suddenly erupted into furious barking and began chasing me. As they started chasing me I started to see the grass and bamboo moving unnaturally. I knew something was coming, but I could not imagine that it would be 10+ huge dogs with their teeth bared, barking like savages. I felt like I was in a scene from the movie Jumangi with a bunch of terrifying jungle creatures bearing down on me! This scared the crap out of me and I began to pedal as fast as I could, but I was on an old 1 speed. They caught up and started nipping at my heels. I kicked a few and kept pedaling. Eventually they stopped chasing. I have never felt so scared in my life; with adrenaline running through me I saw Caroline and told her we had to go back to the house. I had to sit down. We called a fellow teacher to come get us to go back to the farm. When I returned I told the teachers what had happened and they laughed and laughed. They said if you stop pedaling they will stop chasing. I call bologna, these dogs wanted to taste some farang.

Karaoke Bus from Hell

Karaoke and bus sounds kinda fun at first. I love karaoke and it seems like a little bit of fun singing could help break up the monotony of a long bus ride. Adding some drinking into this mix could be even better. This long boring bus ride could be like a fun karaoke bar night. A party on wheels! This logic is wrong. So, so, so wrong. Karaoke buses are the worst. Let me tell you a story.

This past week we went on a trip with our entire school staff. Maintenance people, administrators, teachers, everyone who works at our school were packed onto two buses for a three night, two day excursion to explore the area southwest of Bangkok. The company that produces the notebooks the students use invited us to stay at their “hotel”. The hotel turned out to be abandoned workers quarters in the company’s factory headquarters (I slept on the floor). The night we stayed there Caroline and I competed in a super embarrassing beach couple competition, ate some very questionable seafood, and drank lots of whiskey. Other than that we saw two floating markets and spent some time at the beach. But I am getting off track because this story is about the karaoke bus from hell.

We were gone from Ngao for 66 hours; 45 of those hours were spent on the bus with a 15-minute food and bathroom break every 3 hours. Those other activities were just quick stops. 45 hours on a bus does not seem that bad, but this was 45 hours on a karaoke bus blaring Thai karaoke music. When I saw blaring I mean so loud that your body shakes, it takes intense focus to even think and you feel as though someone is violating your mind. We could not even hear the few TV shows we put on our tablets with ear buds in and the volume all the way up. Thais absolutely love karaoke. They love karaoke as a whole in the way that UW students love football, an insane amount. There was always someone singing, even at 2 A.M. The volume was never turned down. Most of the singers were those drinking whiskey non-stop, but some were simply drunk on karaoke. People were up out of their seats dancing and singing along nearly the entire time. I hated it, but I was also amazed by the stamina. No one in the states can compete with this sort of undying devotion to karaoke. In addition they rotated through the same 30 songs, with 10 being repeated a particularly frequent amount. It was maddening, yet beautiful.

Caroline and I could not sleep, could barely think and were starting to go deaf. Everyone else was loving the karaoke so much that we stopped multiple times on the side of the road because the karaoke computer wasn’t working properly. We waited for over an hour and a half for another bus to come at a pit stop because the battery that runs the electronics on our bus had been drained from all the non-stop karaoke. We were only 3 hours from Ngao at that point and it was 6 AM. We did not arrive until 12:30 because we stopped to fix the karaoke machine or just stopped so we would have more time on the bus because everyone else was having so much fun. It was hell for us, the Filipino teacher and a few Thai teachers, but heaven for everyone else. I will never again ride on a karaoke bus and I will never forget those songs, permanently echoing in my skull. I will be forever in awe of the karaoke greatness of the Thais. I thought I was hardcore into karaoke, but I am simply an amateur.

Friends Around the World

The past few weeks we have had a few visitors from back home and their presence was wonderful. Caroline’s sister and brother, Meghan and Chuck visited, as well as our friends Christie and her brother Blake and TJ. I was on the same school team, the David and Julia Uihlein Charitable Foundation Team at Alexander Mitchell Integrated Schools of the Arts, with Christie at City Year in Milwaukee. Yes that is an incredibly long team name that we always had to say when introducing ourselves to those outside of City Year. Christie and her brother, Blake, are ESL teachers in Taiwan. TJ was one of my co-workers while I worked at Nature’s Classroom last year. He is doing some serious backpack traveling around southeast Asia and spent time in Vietnam and Cambodia before meeting up with us for a weekend.

We met Christie and Blake in Chiang Mai and had a great time showing them a city we have come to enjoy so much. They were visiting Thailand because they had time off from teaching in Taiwan for Chinese New Year. Caroline and I learned a lot about Taiwan from them. Their experience teaching has been very different from ours. In Taiwan, school is just a lot more serious and structured than in Thailand. We compared the cultures and the food. Christie and Blake love Thai food, so they were having a great time with us. It was so great to be able to talk to other people who understood our situation very well, but also had a very different perspective. It made me feel lucky to have the opportunity to live and teach in Thailand.

We saw TJ in a town called Phayao, about 45 minutes north of our town. Phayao is very unique because it is located on a huge marshy lake called Kwan Phayao and there is a University there. It is a really cool mix of traditional Thai culture mixed with young Thai culture with a little bit of western tourism sprinkled in. There are loads of bars and restaurants. We took off on mopeds around the lake and ate along the way. We really enjoyed talking to TJ about his travels and about our views of Thailand. We met up with a few other teacher friends at night and had a great time drinking and eating delicious Thai food. Caroline and I feel so lucky to have been able to meet up with some people from back home.