Last Supper
The whisper of the orchids tell me
They have seen me before
I walk here my first time
Yet, in the same bound
I conquer time and continents
It is no longer passing scenery
No longer bread for a later supper
Only, another meal fried by the locals
And if I look out of place
And can not explain enough
It is because my eyes have been shaded
The wild dogs know
For they sit at my feet
As if I fed and sheltered their years
Why do I see an old friend within thy eyes
My fate has guided me long enough
So I can rest a little along the only shoreline
And share all that I have with my brethren
But not for the last time

Thailand Journel
Wednesday July 28, 2004 Bangkok, Thailand
After arriving at the Bangkok airport at about 11:30 pm, I exchanged my currency and then took my bags to the main exit. There were gates with hundreds of men standing with signs with people’s names. I continued through the narrow path to find the airport taxi stand with was outside the nicely air conditioned terminal. A blast of Bangkok heat came blowing at me and the air was dense. Then a Thai man came up to me and said “taxi?”, I said no, and pointed at the taxi stand. He said “No, no, me airport taxi” and I glanced at the long line for the taxi kiosk and estimated at least a half hour wait, then said “Ok, how much”, he said “550 bhat”, now this price I know was more expensive than the 300B that the school estimated we should pay, but I was tired and just wanted to get to my hotel. It was only about 10 bucks anyway. So I agreed and paid him then, and he took me out to the car. From there I got my first glimpse of the city and the infamous traffic, though it was only a glimpse. Pulling into the hotel down a back alley, with a outside restaurant and food market right on the side of the car I was a bit worried to the type of hotel I would be staying at. Then he pulled up to the main entrance and a bell boy came out and helped me with my bags, I checked in with no problems and he took me up to my room. It was air conditioned, and that was all I needed to sleep. I took a quick shower, which was more like standing in the rain due to the lack of water pressure. Then lights out and sleep came easily, for I had only gotten about 6 hours of sleep in 48 hours.
Thursday July 29, 2004
Woke up to sounds of construction out right out in the hallway. Turns out they are re-modeling the hotel, just my luck. It is about 8:30am, and I get dressed and contemplate what I am going to do today. I end up going down for breakfast in the hotel restaurant, this consisted of toast with strawberry jelly, watermelon, cantaloupe, and papaya, just enough to not feel hungry. I decided to venture outside the hotel and walk the city streets in search for….ah yes, an international phone to call my mom back home. I saw a 7-11 sign from my balcony at the hotel that didn’t seem too far away. I walk down these back streets and pretend like I know where I’m going. The streets has the smell as if we were in a giant wok, street vendors with carts of food, most of them fried or grilled. Dogs calmly walk the streets and eat what scraps are available. The people stare at me as I walk past their open houses and some smile. The pattern of the city streets makes no sense to me, they curve around and turn, and there are so many of them. Finally I reach the main road, and the traffic is crazy. I see 7-11 off in the distance and head for it like a bug to a porch light, it’s the only familiar sight around. Crossing the highway proved difficult, well difficulty verging on insanity. There are no traffic lights to be seen and the traffic is like a brick wall with a continous stream of motorcycles, busses, trucks, tuk-tuks, and taxis. Finally I make my way sprinting though a hole in it and make my way across the two lanes and get to the median where you have just enough room to stand and wait to cross the opposing lanes of traffic. After several minutes I make my way to the 7-11 and walk inside expecting to see familiar drinks and food, but no such luck. It all looked like a giant cartoon, with wacky figures and smiling bunnies and turtles on the packaging. I decide only to buy a phone card for 300B, which I have no clue to how many minutes I would get out of it, but whatever, I’m already sick of being the foreigner. After walking outside with my phone card in hand I search for a international phone booth. Walking down the street in Bangkok is like playing hop scotch when I was a kid. There are numerous vendors with stuff laid out on the side, and random pot holes leading to the sewer, and people you just don’t want to get near. I see a phone not too far away and make a stab at calling home. No luck, phone card doesn’t work with this type of phone, next phone please. So after trying several phones in the area I make my way back to the 7-11 to ask where I can use it at, and to my amazement I see a phone glued to the side of the 7-11 that says international, and has the same company name that is written on my card, “LENSO”. So go figure. Make the call and let everyone know I’m still alive (barely), and all that good stuff. Next I got to go to Thammasat and figure out what I’m supposed to do next. So I check out of my hotel, and take all my bags to Thammasat, well just my backpack and a large duffel bag, and meet the International Office staff, they are all very nice and were easy to talk to. I check in with them and find out that it is up to me to find a place to stay, but no biggie eh? So I’m now homeless in Bangkok and am playing it cool with the staff, but they were very helpful in giving me all the places to stay around here. I also met Gok-kai, and Thai student that works in the international office. She greets me with a smile that also makes me smile back. She gives me suggestions of places to say and helps guide me through it on a map that they also gave me. I’d have to say she is really the first Thai girl that is just beautiful and very pleasant to talk to. She says she has to go to class, or else she could show me around. So I said it was nice to meet her and she surprised me by making me repeat her name which I had no clue at all, so I’m sure I made a good impression. She repeated her name “Gok-kai, its my nick name. Kai means chicken and gok is like the sound they make, gok-gok-gok.” Hah, now I get it, I laugh and repeat her name. Then she continues off to class while I’m stuck in the international office staring at the map wondering where I’m going to stay tonight. Then another girl comes in a she looks Thai, so I’m still staring at my map and she asks me in perfect English why I’m at Thammast. So I find out that she is also an international student from Iowa. She was staying at the Thammasat dorm and didn’t know of the other options from the apartments in the area. So we both ventured out together looking at the list that I had and the out of scale map leading us on. Luckily, as I soon found out, she had been studying the Thai language before and knew how to speak it very well. So we were able to find the apartments and talk to the Offices to find out what was available and how much it would cost, well she was able to. She was a lifesaver and it seemed like she was my tour guide. It turned out that she is from Laos, Thailand’s neighboring country. Pam is fun to walk with and good company for Bangkok, because I was starting to get lonely and depressed about this whole situation. So we find one place that is fairly close to campus and in good condition, the room is pretty big and there are beds where you can spit into two for a second person. The price was 8,000B a month, which split in half would be 4,000B which is about $100 a month. Not bad at all considering the school will be giving us 14,000B a month as a stipend. So we end up at campus again and I still don’t know where I’ll be staying for the night. They end up calling the hotel for me and setting up a room with another student who just arrived today. So that sounds good, right. Sure I’ll be staying the night with someone who I’ve never met before, well its all part of the experience. So I head back to the hotel, and leave my big duffel bag in their office for the night. I wanted to walk but I really had no clue where I was going, just the general direction. So I head off and basically stay straight and look at the crude map that the school had that I also used for searching for apartments. After about 15 minutes of walking I’m starting to feel lost, then a Tuk-tuk driver pulls over and starts yelling at me to get into his three wheeled motorcycle. Well, at first I told him I was walking to my destination and pointed at the map, but he started laughing and said “no, no, you walk right into river”, so I took that as I was going the wrong direction. So I gave up and asked how much and he said fifty bhat. I thought this was too much so I said I don’t have any bhat on me, how about one American dollar, he said two, so I agreed. Anything to get back to the hotel sometime today. So I get in and he whips into traffic, while busses and motorcycles are flying around us shooting black smoke into my lungs. That’s one thing I figured out about this city, if the traffic won’t kill you then the pollution will. So he heads in the general direction, then he turns back and yells “you see big Buddha now…you see it now, you got camera?”, “no, no back to the hotel, Samsen road”, I yell back. “Extra money, one more dollar”, I am frustrated by this point and just hand over the dollar figuring my life was already in his hands, and I didn’t want to piss him off. He takes it and continues on driving but a minute later he insists on the big Buddha, I keep saying no, no, hotel, so he eventually gives in and takes me there. That was a bit frightening because he didn’t want to take me to the place I needed to go, then as he is about a block away he says “need more money, tip, for tip”. I say get me to the hotel first, so that gave him an incentive to actually get me close enough where I could see the hotel. As he stops again near the hotel he says “pay now, more money” so I give him another dollar and jump out of the cart. Man that was deadly. It cost 4 dollars which is about 160B, three times as much if I would have just given him the 50B. So I get checked in at the hotel and meet Jason, my roommate. He’s from Atlanta, Georgia and quite a humorous character. So I get settled in and go to sleep another night.
Friday July 30, 2004
Again I wake up to construction and the banging of a hammer on my inner ear. I try to sleep more and indeed I go to sleep for another half hour when I wake up to the phone ringing, this time in my other ear. It was the lady at Thammast U. She said there were two other guys there looking for apartments and I was the so called ‘expert’ since I went the day before and saw most of the ones in the area. So I talked to the guy, his name was Brandon and it turned out I had met him before on the airplane from Tokyo to Bangkok and then again at Thammast the first day, just briefly. So he came back to New World Lodge, where we were both staying, and me and Jason met up with him and Dave. Dave is from the UK but was going to college in Maine and Brandon lives and goes to college in Spokane, Washington. Both of them are good guys and easy to get along with. So I gave them a briefing on the appts. in the area. Then acquired taxi and showed them the best ones that I had thought were good close to the school. The taxi ride there was, to say the least, interesting. The driver spoke no English at all and the crude map from before was useless. He just started driving according to the picture on the map and he eventually raidoed in to the taxi headquarters and was talking and laughing on the radio for about two minutes. Us guys in the taxi, there were four of us, didn’t know what to do or say and we just all looked at each other wondering where exactly we would end up. Suddenly he just handed me the radio, because I was sitting in the passenger seat (which is actually the driver’s seat in the U.S., this is also a weird experience), so he hands me the radio and I am really speechless, I don’t know if I am supposed to say in English where we want to go or tell my life story. So I just say “Ruen Indra court apartments?!” and a thai voice comes back and I don’t know what he is saying, of course it is not in English. So he shoves the radio back in my face and I repeat it again. No luck in anyone understanding where we need to go. So the driver, who I got was a nice guy and was just laughing at the situation not at us, pulled over to ask some guys at the bus station if they could decipher the map to where we wanted to go. So we wait a few minutes then he comes back and zooms back into traffic, and it looks like he has an idea where we are headed. So we get to our destination in one piece. We check out the apts. and agree that they are pretty nice but the rest of the guys want to see the others so that they can have something to compare this place to. So I show them to the other place which was above this large food/clothing/misc. market and that in itself was crazy enough walking through that they decided not to even bother looking at a room. So we take the ferry across, which was right next to the market, the Chao Phraya river to Thammast, literally straight across the river. The river is a nice brown acid color that seems to be cemented in around the city, nothing new. We arrive at Thammast after dodging a few barges and speeding boats and then have to basically jump off the ferry to the dock. We then walk up and aim for Thammast which is about 200 yards away. I stop at the Thai Military bank and open an account there for the school to put my monthly stipend. This was no easy task, and I signed my name about eight times on pieces of paper covered in Thai writing. So yea, I probably sold my kidneys and my soul and all my possessions to the black market. After I get this done we all walk over to the International office to say hello to the nice people there. We tell them about our day and the apartments we’ve seen and we get promising reactions. Brandon and Dave had to be out of the hotel before 12 so they left their bags in our room until they found a place. So they were homeless for a bit also, until they decided on a place to stay. We met Pam there and she said she could show us the Dorm’s if we wanted to stay there. It is a 45 minute bus ride each day but the rent is cheap, 2,000B a month. So we say what the heck and head over in a taxi to check it out. Ok, now there is five of us, six including the driver, packed in a car that was tight with four passengers. I think the driver was a little mad at the situation so he preteneded like he didn’t know where he was going and drove in circles for a bit to increase our fare. Pam was yelling at him in Thai so we figured it wasn’t a good situation. At any rate we eventually arrived at our destination. The dorm was pretty big and fully furnished, so it wasn’t bad at all, just the commute was torturous. We decided to take the bus back to see what it would be like, and the amount of pollution I inhaled during that trip had to be equal to a pack of cigarettes. It was a long trip, but we saw a lot of the city and people on the way back. The traffic was horrible and that is the only reason why it takes so long. A motorcycle could probably make it to Thammasat in 10 minutes. So Dave and Brandon decide that the Ruen Indra would be our best bet, for the money and the quality it is actually decent. So they ran back to the apartments and got things squared away and then came back to the hotel to get their bags and the money they need for the deposit. Me and Jason check in for the night and decide we will also get an apt. at Ruen Indra. Later I headed out to give some of my family a call, but no one was available and I left messages with 3 different people. Then I walked back to the hotel and a street restaurant caught my eye, and my stomach. It caught it because the sign was written in English and there was vegetarian dishes available also. The place had wooden tables and chairs with an array of plants fencing of the area. There was Thai Jazz music playing, this also was very interesting and relaxing. The lights had red cloth over them so there was a glow about the place. I sat down and ordered some jasmine tea and vegetarian Pad Thai. The chef was off to the side in plain view and I watched him cook my whole meal, and once the food was set down with chopsticks I dug in. This food was amazing! Everything was fresh and crunchy. It had fried noodles and tofu which was seasoned with pepper. There was snap peas and carrots and spinach in with the noodles. There was fresh cucumber and lettuce as a garnish and little lime like citrus fruit cut on the side. It was the perfect amount to eat, enough to not be hungry but not too much as to I feel it was a chore, unlike most restaurants in the U.S. I could eat this way everyday, and I probably will too. Paid 55B, $1.40, and this also adds to the taste. Then I went back to the hotel and read a bit of Thoreau and went to bed.
Saturday July 31, 2004
Woke up at about 8am to the ever pleasant sound of construction in the hotel. This will be my last day here so I am not worried. Me and Jason made a basic plan for the day: Get breakfast, Go to bank and get money for deposit and rent-12,000B each. Then off to apartment to sign lease and set up our room. OK so off we go and we get it done without incident. Our room is actually nice though not like a regular apartment back home. It is a big room, two single beds, a TV and stand, desk, bookshelf, and wardrobe. Towards the back there is a area with a faucet and cabinets underneath. The bathroom is nice too, all of it is recently renovated and it has A/C too, definitely a plus. What I like best is that the bathroom door is the classic Asian style sliding door. All very clean and good enough for living. So we get set up and make a list of things we need to buy…
Toilet paper (a must)
Pillows and bed sheets
Towels
Food and rations
And anything else we could use for eating or drinking. Luckily the room came with 6 big bottles of water which cost us 90B. So we didn’t have to worry about carting tons of water around Bangkok. We head out and search for any one of those items. We find a small convenience store where we get six rolls of toilet paper for 40B. We keep walking and see a fruit vendor and buy a bundle of mini bananas for 25B. These taste just like their larger brother but just a quarter of the size. We decide to turn around because the distant roads don’t look to promising. We later find out it is the Buddhist lent holiday and many places are closed. So we head back to our place and as we arrive we spot Brandon and Dave walking up too. They say there’s a department store not too far away where we can get a pillow and some sheets, they basically have everything. Dave bought an acoustic guitar there for 1,100B ($27.00), which was some weird Asian brand and didn’t sound too good, but it was still cool and that kept my hopes up because I had been going through guitar withdraws. By this time Jason was tired and so he decided to go back to the room and Brandon and Dave walked with me back to the department store. They led me through the maze of vendors and citizens to the areas they found to be a good deal and they had what I needed so that was fine with me. I got 2 pillows, one for me and one for Jason, @ 89B each. Next I got a bed sheet set that had and cover and pillow case for 215B. Then Dave showed me to the guitar section where I scoped out the situation. They had some nice ones and they were pretty cheap, but I decided to hold off until I got my stipend to buy one. We then went to the Super market down at the bottom of the Department store. There was enough food items there to overwhelm me so I got the basics: Bread, strawberry jelly, peanut butter, cashews, chips, and two plastic bowls and a fork and spoon set. All this was about 340B, eight bucks. We head back and by this time it was getting dark. That’s another thing I noticed about this city, the sun rises fairly early at 6am and sets at about 6pm. So it starts feeling late at around 7pm but really that is no even close to being late. Well we arrive back without difficulty, which is a rarity, and I take my stuff up and show Jason what I got. I did pretty good for my first try at purchasing necessities. After a while we went down to get food at the restaurant in the bottom of our building. This place also has a nice atmosphere, it is roofed yet two walls are open to the outside. The rear is open to a Asian style garden with large palm trees and wooden benches, very beautiful. We sit down and I figure out what I can eat. None of it was vegetarian so I had to go with the Pad Thai which had chicken and tofu. I ordered and said “Pad Thai, mai kai.” My first attempt at speaking Thai because our waitress spoke no English, I did it correctly and there was no chicken on my plate when it was brought out. This meal was also very good and I drank regular black tea with it. A bit more expensive than I thought, but not a problem, only 100B or $2.50. So we finish and start walking and run into some more students that are staying here from Thammasat. Brandon and Dave arrive also and we all talk and introduce each other. 3 of them are from the University of California, but different locations. They said that there were also 9 others from U.C. that would be studying here. Brandon and I are trying to make plans to go to the beach before our orientation starts, in about 6 days from now. So we leave it up in the air to who ever wants to go, knowing that it is about a 3 hour bus ride but really cheap. So after a bit I said goodnight and went to get online at the computer room to send emails to people to make sure they knew I was still alive. Then up to my room to type this….then to sleep I hope.
Sunday August 1, 2004
“Crash!! Oh crap.” I’m now deciding weather I should ignore what I just heard or go back to sleep. I look over towards the noise and I see a broken glass cup on the floor and Jason standing by the bathroom. He accidentally knocked off the glass that I set on the counter by the bathroom. See this is the thing about Jason, he doesn’t have good use of his lower extremities and his coordination is quite poor. He had put his hand on the counter to balance himself while attempting to reach to bathroom. I look over and it’s about 9:30am, at least it’s not too early, so I get up to help him clean it up. We improvise and use a cloth to sweep and a piece of paper as a dust pan. So we get that cleaned up and I get ready for the day ahead. We made plans to search for some fresh fruit to buy and something where we can heat up water for tea or noodles. We first head out towards the boat dock where there is a market. The walk is about 15 minutes and we always see something new. I took many pictures this time of everything that stood out. I must really seem like a tourist now, camera in hand, snapping photos at the people and children smiling and laughing at us. As we approach to market we see a nice bakery and dessert store that we seem to wander into. It’s a nice place and everything looks edible, which for me is quite a challenge to find. I find a long skinny loaf of bread that looks good, it was full raisins and spices. So I buy it for 25B and we head out to the market. I start eating the bread and it was really good, the raisins ended up to be prunes but that was still alright with me. We reach the market and start aimlessly wandering through the maze of carts and vendors that are half indoor and half outdoor. Its really hard to explain how these places are set up. There are a lot of women’s clothes, purses and shoes, and random gadgets. I saw a man with a cloth set out with jade carvings on it. This caught my eye, he had square light green jade carvings for a necklace and also just smooth circle ones. I then saw a smaller carving that was a Buddhist mudra, a religious hand gesture usually used on statues of Buddha. I ended up buying the jade green one for 80 B, about 2 bucks. Then we continued on until we got overloaded with too much, we sat down and got something to drink and then headed back to our apartment. On the way back we stopped at a fruit vendor and got a watermelon for 25B. We continued back over the bridge and looked down at the river and saw these boys swimming in the river, they were have a great time of it. I took pictures and then we got back to the Apt. After great thought we decided to use Jason’s little pocket knife to cut up this watermelon. The size is about the same of a cantaloupe, not gigantic like the ones back home. We managed to get it open and scooped some out into the bowls we got the day before. This was good stuff and just what we needed after the long walk. The temperature is a lot like a hot day in Richmond, but a lot more humid. The sun shows no mercy and the pollution seems to open the atmosphere and doubles the intensity. I have yet to find sun tan lotion, yet I’ve heard they have SPF of up to 120. Anyway, we ate some melon and then made some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Then a half hour later Brandon knocks on our door to see what we had been up to. We talk for a bit and there is word about heading out to Ko Chang, an Island off the coast and about a three hour bus ride. This sounds promising but anything can happen so I keep my schedule open. Brandon says he’s going lay down for a bit because he is still trying to get use to the time difference. So I hang out for a bit and then Jason and I decide to go to the department store, the one I had visited the day before. We head down and get Brandon, then start on our way to the stores. We start walking but then notice one of the girls we met was about a hundred yards behind us. We waited to talk and it turned out to be Ellen, a Swedish student. She is a sweet girl, about my height, but defiantly Swedish. Her English is not good, but not bad either. I think she can understand it better than she can speak it. She joins our party, and off we head to the Department store. It is about a 15 minute walk and once we get close the congestion and walking traffic increases. There are many people selling random items on the sidewalk and, of course, food. Almost everything sold on the streets here are fried or grilled. The things I had found appealing would be the grilled bananas, and grilled corn. Everything else was unidentifiable and some of it made me gag. We get to the Department store, which is about eight stories tall. This place is more like a mall without the individual stores. Probably like a giant Wal-mart shortened and stacked up on each other. The vendors are have their own people and you pay in that area. There is always a person standing eight feet off watching you and seeing if you need any help. Other shoppers where filtering through the small aisles and people were everywhere. We picked up some groceries in the food store at the bottom of the building, we got some corn flakes and I bought soy milk while Jason got regular milk. We also bought a big knife for future melons and some jasmine tea. We needed something to heat water so we went to the appliance section and I wandered into some watches that were 199B, so I got a basic one, it says Sottas on the band and it is dark green. Good enough to know what time it is in Bangkok. We also found an “automatic kettle” that is electric and is just what we needed, for 255B. By now we about ready to hit the eject button because the amount of energy and people that surrounds us. We try to exit but we end up going out the back, and had to walk though another street market to get back to the entrance from which we started. We decide to take a taxi back because Jason has yet to get acclimated to this much walking. It is difficult for him, with so many people around it is hard for him to maneuver his walking sticks so as not to crush anyone. The steps kill him also, but sill I commend him for even making the trip. We look into our empty wallets and find all we have is 50B, all in coins. So we figure it should be enough, if not we would tell him to stop if it get close to our fare limit. I show him the apartment card where we live, which is written in Thai and is our lifesaver. He looks at it for a bit then starts off. We make it there and the fare is only 37B. We pay him and we go back up to the room to chill and decompress. We test out the water kettle and it seems to hold up just fine. We munch on some lays chips and some cashews. Its about six now and the sun is starting to go down. Brandon knocks on our door and says he just got back from the department store, we ended up getting split up, but not biggie. We talk more about this island adventure, and not much seems to be known about how we can get on a bus and go there for a day or so. Brandon leaves to get some food and says he will try to find out more….then I go to typing….Ok back again. Went out to get some cash in case I actually go to the island tomorrow. It was dark out and my first trip alone at night in Bangkok. This was a little intimidating, but I managed to survive. Of course I got more stares and random shoutings in Thai than usual, but I survived and am back to tell. I also saw some tentacles on a stick for sale, like a kabob, interesting to say the least. I withdrew 2,000B, and walked carefully with my wallet in my front pocket. I stopped at a 7-11 and got some bottled green tea with honey, this was surprisingly tasty because my last bottled tea that I got in Japan while I was waiting for my connecting flight tasted like liquid rice. So I leave and enter another little store where I finally get a lighter to light my incense. Then I decide to walk further down this road where I had not previously traveled, looking but not expecting to find a decent restaurant where some signs were in English. No such luck. I head back and then turn down another road to see if there was anything. There were many people who were saying things in Thai to me and I just smiled and walked on, some shouted out loud then I would hear others laughing behind me. I’m sure it would be easy to make fun of me in my face and I would have no idea what they were saying, in fact I’m positive that’s what they were doing. Well, I continue on until I reach an area where the street lights stop, so I figured that I should also. I turn around and head back to my place. I of course make it just fine, although I was a bit nervous. I tried out the lighter and it shoots a flame 2 feet in the air on the lowest setting, I almost burned my eyebrows off. I ended up going down to use the internet but found out they had turned the computers all off, but Brandon was down there on his way up, so we talked about tomorrow. The plans are a little clearer but still very uncertain. He looked some stuff up on the internet earlier and found where the bus station was and how much it would cost. He wasn’t sure about places to stay but claimed there were a lot of bungalows that are easily rented. We would probably stay for only one night, but who really knows. We made plans to wake up at 7am and meet at 7:30 downstairs. So off I go to discover another day.