Pen Pal

Dear blog, I am so very sorry to have seriously neglected you for the past few months, but I’m back now. Almost a year ago, I wrote of how I wanted to leave Ireland and possibly nver come back. I wrote of the adventures I was looking for in Thailand and the questions I needed answered. Well, I did indeed find adventure, which I will tell you about in future posts, I also found some answers, as well as some new questions. For now, I’ll pass on to you a letter I wrote to a good friend a few months ago while I was over there that I think answers a lot of the questions people have asked me since I’ve been back. The good friend is a doctor, hence the Whitman quote, and we spoke of Hemingway in our previous letters, hence the reference to him at the beginning. As you can see from the stories, I do indeed have a few tales to tell; street hustling in Bangkok, knife fighting in biker bars, joy riding until dawn, Tuk Tuk racing, cock fights, opium dens and lots lots more, and of course trying to teach mathematics to children. More of that anon, for now, I’ll leave you with a glimpse into my private correspondance. I always joke with my email friends that after we’re dead, there’ll be no great anthologies of our letters like there was for Joyce, Thompson, Burroughs etc., let’s try and rectify that. Letter after the jump.

No, phone, no tv, no internet, no worries.

Hello there,

“I am he bringing help for the sick as they pant on their backs,
And for strong upright men I bring yet more needed help.”
Hemingway is great the first time you discover him, but I always find myself crying out for some adjectives when I read him. I think if all men were impotent, the world would be a better place.
All is well in my little slice of paradise, I forget when I last spoke to you so I’ll give you a synopsis, the TEFL course was good, it kinda gave me a crash course in getting up in front of a class and actually going about the basics of speaking for an hour, trying to relay information to a group of people who have no idea what i’m saying, which is what I needed. I intended to stay in Phuket before I came because it’s westernised and has lots of jobs, but in truth, it’s a bad place to live, it’s (comparatively) expensive, really bloody humid and full of German sex tourists seeking twelve year old boys, the beaches are nice, but it gets old after a week. So I headed north with a former Hells Angel and was living in a bamboo hut for a few weeks in a small town in the mountains surrounded by hilltribes, I intended to stay for a weekend before moving on to find a job, but got caught up in the hippie/dope/all night party scene, I also got addicted to joy riding scooters at high speeds through the forest at night while drunk with no helmet. So after about three weeks there I ended up in Chiang Mai, the Galway of Thailand, a really great little city that’s just tourist friendly enough but is still ‘real’, it’s got English language menus, great bookshops, but still has monasteries and chickens roaming in the streets and markets where they sell raw meat from a table covered in flies in the baking hot sun. So I got in with a crowd of fellow TEFL job seekers there and began half heartedly looking for a job, I was offered a few kindergarten jobs, but was determined to stick out for something involving adults. I really, really like Chaing Mai and plan to retire there as soon as possible. But I was starting to run out of money and all the websites where I was looking for jobs had hundreds in Bangkok but only one or two in Chiang Mai, so I got on a train and went 1000km south, to the capital.

I have very mixed memories and feelings about Bangkok, it can be a nice place, depending on who you’re with and how much money you have in your pocket. I didn’t know anyone there, but I got caught up in the 24 hour party lifestyle and the madness, just going from club to club with groups of random Europeans and Americans. After a particularly heavy session on the whiskey and Thai rum and an Estonian girl (quite possibly Finnish or Latvian now that I think of it) wanting to make the most of her last nights in Asia, whose name is forever lost to the sands of time, I woke up with a hangover and an empty wallet in an empty room of the Bangkok Hilton (the hotel, not the prison), I went to the ATM and it simply said Zero Baht. I had burned through all my savings quicker than I’d realised and now owed a 2000 baht hostel bill and had 50 baht in my pocket, nowhere to go and nobody to stay with.
I’m not going to lie, the next few days were pretty rough, I managed to sell nearly everything I had that was of any value except for the clothes on my back, my laptop and clothes for teaching interviews. I spent a couple of nights on the street and didn’t eat for a few days, I was hustling here and there for pennies. I’d spot a  Thai street vendor selling English books for way less than what they were worth because he didn’t know what they were, then I’d sell them on to second hand bookshops for double what I paid for them after I’d stayed up all night reading them.

I interviewed for maybe ten jobs without any luck, it’s hard without experience to get anything decent. I emailed my parents to ask for the lend of a few quid, I didn’t let on how badly off I was, that I hadn;t eaten in a couple of days, they would have freaked out. Luckily, I got a job the very next day with an agency and they were like “I’m sorry, we’ve nothing in Bangkok, but there’s a place in a school in a town near Chaing Mai.” I nearly kissed the guy, but if I did, he would have spotted that I hadn’t showered in a few days. They gave me a tenner to get a train 1,000 miles, I got the cheapest, lowest class peasant ticket you can get and spent ten hours on a bus with chickens and goats and things, but that means I had eight euro left to buy food and get a haircut before starting in school. I was glad to leave Bangkok, it’s way way too big and busy, there is such extreme poverty there that is even more shocking when compared to the extreme wealth that’s right beside it, gutters and skyscrapers. It’s not like any other mega-city I’ve been in like London or New York, those places have personalities and different areas and change with the seasons. Bangkok is just this crazy, giant single organism that is pure steel and concrete that bubbles in the heat and will chew you up with a moment’s notice. I’ve been back there since though, when I had money in my pocket and treated myself to the sights and spots I didn’t get to see last time, and it does have some good points, but only for a visit.
My wages are comparatively decent at the minute, about the same as a bank manager over here. I’m living like a poor king. What little I save though will be worth fuck-all once I try converting it back to euro when I return. I’ve got a little apartment in the only apartment building in town, beside a very nice park with a pond and outdoor yoga on the weekends, and very near my school.

The town i’m living in now is called Lampang (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lampang).It’s like some town in Mayo that nobody’s ever heard of, tourists go there by mistake on the way to Castlebar. There is nothing to do here (which works out fine, I behave myself during the week), the best thing about it is that it’s about an hour away from Chiang Mai so i go there most weekends and cut loose (a bit too loose sometimes, I’m actually off the drink until new years at the moment after an incident where I woke up with two naked thai girls whose names I didn’t know, a sprained and bloody nose, no passport and three hours to get to school for my first class on monday, that was a couple of months ago, I switched to soda water the next day and there’s been hardly any stupidity since, although I did fall off the sobriety wagon at the weekend and it saw me in a nightclub/brothel until ten in the morning, we had to leave after the Finnish girl I went there with passed out in one of the bedrooms, I had to kick down the door to rescue her, there was talk of arrests until I paid off the staff and carried the Finn out of there, so that’s spurred me on in my quest for sobriety.
There’ve been no hookers or ladyboys, but at the same time, taking advantage of Thai strippers who want to be your boyfriend or cruising eastern european/american girls who are sleeping their way around asia and working off their daddy issues is hardly that different than paying for it, but I’m done with that.

The teaching itself is pretty hard core, the school I’m at is one of the highest rated in the country, it’s a very strict Christian Brothers school (Thai Christian brothers, not Irish, so there’s only lip service paid to Catholicism, 99 percent of the staff and students are Buddhist, the students are sent here because it’s a good private school). It’s a combined primary/secondary school, years 1-12, six year olds to 18 year olds, mixed gender, 4,000 students in all I think, each year has a gifted class of about 30 students, they’re the classes that get the foreign teachers. I’m the homeroom teacher for the lowest grade (like Irish first class in primary school, not high infants), the kids are about 7/8 years old. I have them four times a day for an hour of English, one of maths, science and social studies, I have two assistants, a computer, projector, air-con, all that. Then for an hour a day, I teach one of the non-gifted classes. These are classes of about 50-60 students in a metal shed with no air-con or white boards, just a black wall and coloured chalk and no teaching assistant, those classes can be pretty hellish.
Dealing with the kids was the biggest learning curve, but they’ve grown to like me now so it’s a lot easier, and can be a lot of fun sometimes. The hours are long though, and I’m usually in bed by ten every night, my day starts around 6:30a.m, I have to be in school for the flag raising ceremony/king’s anthem at seven thirty and don’t leave school until four p.m. We have to really behave ourselves, the staff are quite strict here, I have a uniform to wear and if it’s not up to scratch, I’ll be hearing about it in a meeting. I’m extra busy at the moment, I’m helping direct the school play of the Sound of Music, my calss are singing My favourite things, I’ve heard the song over a thousand times by now and if someone says any sentence to me involving raindrops or roses, I’m liable to punch them square in the jaw.

The time is flying by, it’s almost Christmas already, and after that I’ll be planning my return home in March when the semester ends, preparing for my next adventure, whatever that is. I probably won’t come back to Thailand to work, the novelty has worn off and the visa restrictions are far too severe, besides, the country may not be here this time next year, with the tensions down south, up north, in the capital and both the Cambodian and Burmese borders, not to mention the King’s imminent death (seriously, don’t mention it, they’ll arrest me). I’m going to see what the scene is like in Galway in March, if it’s as bleak as they say, if so, then I may TEFL again, probably in europe (Paris/Prague maybe), or perhaps North Africa, Middle east, who knows. For now though, I seem to have found the little sweet spot in Thaland where nothing at all happens, when the headlines tell of floods in Bangkok, and I haven’t seen rain in a month or more, and the TV tells of guerilla warfare a hundred miles away, when I haven’t even heard so much as a raised voice since I got here.
Aside from that, I’m really glad I came, it was kind of a knee jerk reaction to get as far away from my childhood bed and the dole office as possible, overall I think it’s been really positive and Thailand is a really great place. The food is really overrated though, I’d kill everyone in the town just for a decent burger. I’ve been to Laos a couple of times, that’s the nearest place with anything resembling decent bread. I always find Laos makes a lot more sense than here, probably because they were colonised, they have queues there, I don’t think I’ll ever figure out how they do things here, the place is a total mystery, but everyone is lazy and happy, so I’m sure i’ll survive. It makes no sense that Thai people have visited Laos, tasted bread and didn’t go “Wow, this stuff isn’t bad, we should try making some, maybe eat it in the mornings so we don;t have to eat rice with every meal. While we’re at it, let’s bring back some of those flush toilets.” I can’t ever fully integrate into a country that has totally embraced the chilli but still has reservations about moving from the squat toilet to a cistern and flush.

I’m getting a lot of reading done, working my way through a giant reading list with the help of this list: http://thisrecording.com/today/2009/8/3/in-which-these-are-the-100-greatest-writers-of-all-time.html, still a bit slow when it comes to the writing, as always, my brain is so drained in the evenings that all i wanna do is stick in a pirate DVD and switch my brain off. Speaking of which, I’m about to do that now.

Send word of the motherland soon,
Kevin