Chiang Mai

So the school year is over, and in the meantime I am living in Chiang Mai and will hopefully be teaching English for money. I actually have in interview in an hour and a half.

I got here on Thursday and spent the first day looking for work. I forget how humiliating the job walk can be. There you are, dressed in your best clothes wandering around and trying not to sweat very much. You find an TEFL place, and you walk and grinning like an idiot-- but not grinning TOO much because you want to look friendly but not desperate. Hand in your resume, the person looks you up and down with a nasty look and a fake smile and you get the feeling that you are applying for their job. They hand you an application like its a huge problems (your smiling pleasantly the entire time) and then you sit down outside (they never let you sit in the office, God forbid) and fill it out, although all that information is already in my resume. Then you turn the application in and they drop it in a drawer and give you a look like "Are you still here?" Note to secretaries and administrators: it would kill you to poke through the resume and ask a few pointless questions.

I got one interview on the spot and another interview a few days later. I got the first job but the are still working out the classes for next week, so I might have to go with this second job. Hopefully I will be teaching tomorrow.

Chiang Mai is terrifying. If Pai is Santa Cruz, and Mae Hong Son is Palo Also, then Chiang Mai is a mix between Seattle and LA. It's got a Seattle flavour because there are coffee houses everywhere, on every corner, screaming that they have mochas, espresso, etc. There is even a few Starbucks. I haven't gotten a frappichino yet, however, due to the fact that the cost of the drink is twice the amount that I pay per night at my guesthouse and also twice the amount of my average daily living expenses. It's about 200 baht, or about six dollars. It's funny how skewed your perception of money gets. I would never pay more then 150 baht (about 5 dollars) for a meal here, and in Seattle a comparable meal is around $20. Anyway, I have gone into Starbucks on more then one occasion just to sit and smell. It really does feel just like home (or smell like it anyway).

Yesterday I also found the mall. They have a movie theatre, a sushi place, Pizza Hut, KFC, Duncan Donuts, Hagan-daz, etc... Three floors. I just wandered around in a daze. They didn't even have stuff like this in Sanaa, Yemen, and quite frankly I was scared out of my skull. You could buy anything in the world and all I wanted to do was curl up in a ball somewhere. There was a fashion show and music was being blasted everywhere. I couldn't believe that I used to go to places like that on a regular basis and think nothing of it.

My room in the guesthouse is quite literally the size of Jake's place in the Blues Brothers, although I have my own bathroom. I also have my own freaks who live downstairs, including an older fellow who sits and smokes all day at the same place at a table. I have not seem him move, eat, drink, just smoke. It's very chilling to leave in the morning and see him there just to come back eight hours later and he's still there like a wax statue. I also talked to a guy last night who told me that he was Israeli. After my initial wave of distaste, I yelled at myself for being a racist and tried to talk to him with an open mind, as one being to another. As a reward I found myself being lectured five minutes later for living in Thailand for three months and not speaking the language. I finally turned away to talk to the French guy next to me after being given an impromptu vocabulary test on Thai words that he thought I should know. My stereotype of Israelis, alas, lives on.

I think that I will enjoy living here, it will be a nice vacation.

End of the Year

So, the school year is over and I experience of mixture of happiness and sadness and uneasiness, something that I think that any teacher can understand. It's happy becaues the damn kids have finally gone home and I don't have to listen to their screeching out Thai love songs on the guitar at 10 o'clock at night. It's sad because the students are leaving and many of them can not come back. A few can't come back because they finished the program, but most of them aren't returning because of the situation in their homes.

A handful of students in my most basic English class aren't coming back because they are joining their tribes army. I didn't realize when I started teaching them that they were just getting a break from toting guns around. At this moment you are probably thinking that they are all a bunch of hardened soldiers, with stone faces and cold eyes. Not at all. They barely look like their ages, which range from 18-21. Most of these kids are baby faced, thin, and very polite. (They are also the ones that like to play the guitar. To hell with guns, these kids should just mass on the border and sing. That would drive everyone away. I swear that even the mosquitoes keep their distance.)

The kids in my second class come from the refugee camps and I am not sure if I will be seeing them either. There is a new rule that I don't understand, but I will do my best to try and explain, so don't quote me here. Apparently if you live in a refugee camp you can either become a full-fledged refugee and accept a UNHCR card. If you do this, you can't leave the camp but you get an opportunity to go to a “third country” (a country that isn't Thailand or Burma). When and where you leave is uncertain.

We are trying to get permission for the kids in the camps to be able to attend CLC even if they choose the UNHCR card, so their future at CLC is a big maybe.

The other option for refugees will be to take a Thai ID card which will allow them to live anywhere in Thailand-- anywhere except the refugee camps, which for most kids is the only home that they have known. Plus they are not full Thai citizens, so they get all the racism that comes along from being Hill Tribe and not having a Thai passport. They also won't be able to leave Thailand, a country where their prospects are pretty grim.

Which would you choose?

Class 1 Memorial Toilet

The provisions for the Class 1 Memorial Toilet came today-- the results of much work writing proposals, buying shit in town and basically learning about what it takes to do a long term project. Here we are showing the stuff off-- we have Nehneh, E-e, Moe, Mow, Yoom, Morn, Prae and Rosy crammed around the pipe, roof, tank and toilet that will soon grace our campus. Oh yeah, and that's me in the back but you probably guessed that. No, I am not standing on anything. The girls are just really that short.

After this excitement I just needed to get away and calm down so I took Chopper for his first long ride (with me, anyway.) Chopper is my new bike, see below. It's a lot different from riding Zelda-- he has gears that are manipulated with my foot and the most scary part is the foot brake. This is scary for me because I am so used to hand brakes after 31 years of riding bikes and scooters-- I just know that my panic reaction will be to grip the hand brake which has about a tenth of the stopping power of the foot. But I practiced for about an hour and I think that I am getting the hang of it. There is a 20k road leading to the school (this is why I needed a bike) that was made for a motorbike. It's full of twists and turns and the most beautiful scenery that you can imagine. Thailand was made for two wheels.

It's a Chopper, Baby!

Well, I've done it. I have officially entered Thai society (albeit a touch prematurely-- don't have that visa yet) by buying my own moped. Yes, it's used and it may be as old as I am, but it's mine. His name is Chopper (I was going to name him Zed but then realized that no one would get it and I would just be dating my self for those who would-- do you realize that Pulp Fiction is TEN years old?!?) and he's a 100cc Honda dream. Ugly as hell, but as they say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And the fact that I hold 'er makes Chops the most beautiful bike in Thailand. Here's our picture-- you'll notice that I chopped off my hair to complete the butch dyke biker look.

Other then that, things have been pretty quiet. Still have a slight hangover from my visa run in Mae Sot this weekend. There has been a lot of shady security stuff going on. For starters, there has been a ton of helicopters buzzing CLC. Kyaw says that he likes it when they are flying around because it means that they feel safe enough to fly-- if there is fighting, they don't show up. In Mae Sot, there was a lot of stuff going on. Mostly the NGO workers were being harassed because two "activist tourists" were protesting on the Myanmar-Thailand "Friendship" bridge (the bridge I cross to get my visa) and then vanished, causing the Thai authorities to do a door-to-door looking for tourists. This has wreaked havoc in the volunteer community of Thailand, and I am terrified that it might jeopardize my visa!

See, morons like this really mess things up for people that are trying to do real work. "Activist Tourists" (a group that I belonged to in my Palestine days) are my new public enemy #1. These are the people who show up in a hot spot for a week or two, take a few pictures, get arrested, and then go back bragging about what a hero they are (sound familiar, Dylan and Sarah?). As good as their intentions might be, they really just fuck things up for people who are trying to do real work in these countries, and make it harder for us to get in and out and extend our visas.

Finally, the other bizarre thing is the forest fires. Sorry, I don't have a picture but it seems that half the jungle in Thailand is on fire. The locals (most of which who live in bamboo huts that would go up like a matchstick) aren't very concerned about it. They seem to just shrug and nod when the fires are pointed out. Today there was a fire on the other side of the road. I don't think that they are set, I think that they are natural. And it isn't even the hot season yet! Thank God that I live in a brick house with a metal roof, although I am still pretty worried about the school and the people who sleep under the leaf roofs!