Planning as I go

I had been in Thailand for just five days and done so much already! I felt right at home, thanks to my hostess. But it was time to get out and see some more of Thailand. Linda had suggested I go north or south – as I read up, I decided that I could stay for three weeks instead of two and go both north and south! As I sat in Thomas the Travel Agent’s office waiting for Sukhothai tickets, I looked at the calendar on his desk and realized that Christmas was coming; all along I thought I would go north first but once I looked at the calendar I realized that I might be better off going south first, before the holiday rush.

There was an internet café near Marilee’s house, and on Monday and Wednesday evening, I went for an hour or so, to catch up on email and to make some advance plans – I didn’t necessarily need confirmed reservations but I at least wanted some options, so I could avoid what Rose used to call the bag drag. I’d had good travel luck so far but there was no sense pushing it. Thursday I designated as a day to do no sightseeing, just planning. I went to Wawee Coffee, a local chain with wifi, across from the internet café (I got into something of a routine where I went to Wawee in the morning and the internet café at night when I needed to). Thai coffee is iced, with brown sugar and condensed milk – way too sweet for me. I’m glad I tried it, but in subsequent Wawee trips I had iced cappuccino, and when available, chocolate chip cheesecake. Yeah, I missed Café Bilal and the pastries from the Escalade, but I had to make do with what was available…. It was also possible to have internet chats with friends, with a twelve-hour time difference to the Eastern time zone.

I repacked and reorganized and then went to the train station to get a ticket (which was a good move – the late train was sold out of sleeper berths so I ended up on an earlier one), using the underground Metro (two completely different systems - the Skytrain has Metrocard-like tickets, the Metro has token-like slugs – with a couple of transfer points so that you can get from one to the other). And then I had a Thai massage at Marilee’s spa-like place, Bodytune. I had time to see her to say goodbye for now (and goodbye for now to the big green suitcase) and then it was on to the overnight train, which Linda had said was a must. I had a compartment to myself (when I bought the ticket I wasn’t sure if they would put someone in with me or not); they served light meals and made my bench into a bed. I slept comfortably, though I was cold (even with the extra blanket that Air Berlin encouraged its customers to take with them). Was it a must? Not sure, but it was fun – and a good way to get a long way away without using up daylight hours! Thailand is a long country.

This isn’t the most picturesque entry, so here are a couple of random pictures:
The bathroom (raised toilet, unlike that in Morocco. Tank next to the toilet has water and a scoop to use for flushing. Note – most of the time I found public Western toilets (and every place where I stayed had one). But the squat toilets here had toilet paper in addition to hoses for those who prefer to hose their nether regions, and the sinks always had soap for hand-washing.


Offerings – these are available in the morning; Thais buy them to place on their spirit houses.



Spirit house – placed outside the house, for protection. Daily offerings to the spirit houses include food, water and flowers. My sister had me send one to her.

Sukhothai - a UNESCO World Heritage Site

December 10 was Constitution Day, another Thai holiday, and Marilee had the day off. Thanks to Thomas the Travel Agent (not his real name, but many Thais choose English names or words as nicknames; the owner of the first hotel where I stayed called himself Catman) we had round-trip air tickets to Sukhothai, home of one of Thailand’s ancient civilizations. Bangkok Air developed some boutique airports at short-haul destinations – the Sukhothai airport was a nice gateway!


We took a van past rice fields into a village – Marilee said this was similar to what the volunteers experience. The houses in the villages are spread out, not clustered, so a PCV has a lot of territory to cover, usually by bike.


Sukhothai is a UNESCO World Heritage site and was the capital of an empire from the 13th to 15th centuries. It represented an architectural leap (later in the trip I made it to Ayutthuya, which is older), showing Sri Lankan and Khmer influence, including an innovative walking Buddha (and it made me think that as long as I was “in the neighborhood” I should go to Angkor, though saying that always reminds me of a famous family story – once when I was learning to drive, I realized the street signs had changed and we were in Brooklyn. I said, “as long as we’re in Brooklyn, we should go to Junior’s and get cheesecake.” My father replied, “that’s like saying, “as long as we’re in Kansas, we should go to Nebraska.” Hm – now that I reflect on it all these years and one Drive Across America later, that might be exactly what I would say!). Anyway, Sukhothai is made up of about forty complexes of wats and temples in various states of ruin and preservation, with brick paths, moats and trees. An excellent way to see it would be by bicycle, and even then you can’t take everything in in one day, but anyway, we walked and we saw several compounds in the main complex and a couple in the north section.




At the main temple, Wat Manathat, swarms of teenagers descended upon us. They had the day off from school and had been given a project – find tourists and practice English with them. They had a list of questions to ask and recorded my answers. Where was I from? What did I like about Thailand? How old was I (I told them this was not necessarily a good question to ask tourists, especially women!)? Most of them had the questions down but I could tell that they might not be comprehending my answers; when I said something they recognized or complimented their country they were so appreciative! By the third or fourth group, though, we wanted to get going and see more temples, though it was hard to say no to these eager and earnest students.













The highlight of the north section was Wat Sri Chum, which houses Sukhothai’s largest surviving Buddha image, 11 m from knee to knee and 15 m high.







Under this civilization, Thai script was developed and Buddhism was established as the common faith, though Hindu influences are also seen in the architecture.



We saw a variety of structures and had more street food for lunch; had a snack at the airport (delicious banana chips!) and flew back to Bangkok. There have been other times when I flew somewhere just for the day and flew back – somehow those are special treats, more so than taking a bus or train or driving somewhere for a day. Marilee had been to Ayutthaya but not to Sukhothai and didn’t think she was going to get there – I am glad I enabled her seeing it. When Linda wrote her scribbled itinerary she had suggested both (I wasn’t sure at that point that I would get to both – Marilee said she was glad to have seen both but didn’t think it was a must; on the other hand, I was in the neighborhood…).

You'll Start Whistling it Too

Marilee had another day off on Wednesday and we had an adventure planned, but Tuesday she had to go to work, so I looked in my travel books for day trips I could take. I chose Kanchanaburi, site of the Bridge Over the River Kwai. I knew that the bridge was somewhere in Asia, but I don’t know much WWII Pacific Theatre history (that is, I didn’t – I learned a lot that day, and I learned some in Hawaii, and I have been reading up about the Philippines). The Thailand-Burma “Death Railway” was quite strategic, shortening supply routes, and it was largely built by POWs. An estimated 16,000 POWs (out of 60,000) and 100,000 Asian laborers (out of 200,000) died while constructing the railway.

Whistling the theme song from the movie (which was whistled by the POWs, who developed but didn’t sing lyrics mocking the Japanese – and no, their lyrics were not “Comet, it makes your mouth turn green”), I took an air-conditioned van to the city and then a pedicab to the historic part of town. I went to a Chinese cemetery – it had nothing to do with WWII, but it was interesting, with wide grave markers, as opposed to the tall stupas of the Thai cemeteries.

It was right next to the Allied cemetery, where people from several countries are buried, with understated flat tombstones marking their graves. I then went to the Death Railway Museum, where I learned about the railway and the huge offensive that the Japanese launched on December 8, 1941 (across the international date line). In addition to Pearl Harbor, they attacked many different parts of Southeast Asia and the Pacific on that one day.



I then walked over to the bridge itself – or rather, the current bridge, since it was severely damaged by Allied war bombing and rebuilt after the war. I walked across the bridge and saw my first Asian elephant (not a wild one, but he didn’t seem to be for hire, either).




On impulse, I took a boat ride along the river, stopping at another little museum that replicated POW camp conditions and at a cave that housed a Buddhist temple.



There was low clearance at a couple of points in the cave, and at one of them I hit my head and started bleeding profusely. Thankfully, there were a couple of other people in the cave; they had tissues and helped me clean off the blood that was running down my face, but I did wonder what would have happened if they hadn’t been there and I had hit myself hard enough to be knocked out. When would someone have found me? At what point would the boat driver have started to wonder? When I travel by myself I try to converse with people and to be noticed without being conspicuous – maybe someone will remember having seen me if there’s a problem. Lacking a mirror, I took a picture of my face and looked at the digital camera to make sure there wasn’t any noticeable blood, and then went back to my relaxing river ride.


I had borrowed a Thai phrase book from Marilee and used some phrases to order lunch and transact my van ride back, but I found that I kept talking in Arabic first and then had to re-focus to Thai – not easy, but I managed.

I had to get back, but there’s enough to do in the area to warrant an overnight or longer stay. Kanchanaburi has a lot of floating clubs and karaoke bars if that's your thing; apparently weekends get very noisy. In winter months, there’s a sound and light show by the bridge. One can take a train along the railway route to Hellfire Pass, the most brutal of the cuttings that were hewn by the POWs. There’s a national park with a seven-tiered waterfall nearby, a tiger adoption center (hard to pass that up!) and the Three Pagodas Pass, where you can look over the border to Burma (interestingly, all of the travel books I looked at call it Burma and not Myanmar).

From a Silk Purse to a Beggar's Bowl

Marilee had Monday off and was up for doing more in Bangkok – and I guess I wasn’t in a rush to get elsewhere in Thailand. We had Pad Thai for breakfast (there’s not what we would call breakfast food in Thailand – you eat the same thing for several meals a day)


and saw a travel agent to make plans to go away on Wednesday, which was also a day off for her. Then it was off to the Jim Thompson house. Jim Thompson was an American who had been in the OSS and is credited with reviving the Thai silk industry. His original designs are still seen in the fine and expensive silks sold in Jim Thompson boutiques. He disappeared while hiking in Malaysia’s Cameron Highlands and the mystery has never been solved. For his house in Bangkok he took seven traditional Thai teak houses and put them together, filling them with collections of porcelain, furnishings and art.



We had a nice tour and then a delicious lunch; the menu had options from various regions of the country (for example, some areas have more Indian influence, some more Malaysian – all delicious). And I bought a hat (cotton) and a cell phone case (silk) at the boutique.


Then we took a water taxi to another part of town – unlike the river boat, which seemed to be filled with tourists, this was all locals and us, speeding along a canal.


The route ended near the Golden Mount, a temple high on a hill – Marilee waited at the bottom while I climbed the steps to the temple and the magnificent panoramic view (the most exciting part of which, for me, was a newish cable-stay bridge – I may not have been a civil engineer for very long, but I do like a good bridge).




Then we took a walk to Chinatown, via Ban Baht, an area known for hand-made beggars’ bowls. Monks use these for their pre-dawn rounds, gathering food. They rely on food offerings and don’t cook on their own; they have to eat everything before noon. In Thai Buddhism there are a lot of ways to “make merit,” and one of them is giving food to monks. But – as with so much else, it seems – the art of hand-making the alms bowls is getting lost.



These are really just for tourists now; the monks themselves use factory-made (even imported!) bowls. I didn’t buy one a the time, but I kept thinking about it, and I did go back for one towards the end of my stay – and one for my sister, who joked that in this economy, it might come in handy! Chinatown was crowded and crazy, with a lot of stalls and shops – that is, Chinatown-like. We looked for a place to eat that Marilee knew of, but couldn’t find it, so opted for Vietnamese food near her house instead. We were close enough to the water that we took the river boat back to the Skytrain, and on the way home I took one of my favorite photos of the trip – one of four monks in the monks-only standing area (monks also get priority seating on public transportation).


After dinner, we had Thai foot massages at a fancy spa-like place (as compared to a storefront – but the massages were still the equivalent of about $10!). After the sensory overload of Chinatown – not to mention all the walking we did – that was great.

Getting Settled and/or Settling

It’s hard to believe I’ve been (back) in Southampton for a month now. It still feels as though I just got here, but at this point it feels as if I’ve been here for a while. I’ve made myself at home and developed an ever-changing but nonetheless comfortable routine. The only thing I do every day is empty the dehumidifiers – I take that task seriously. On most days I do yoga or run or bike or walk or some combination thereof; as it’s warmed up I’ve gone into town more. I tune my sister’s harp. I check email, I usually read some, I often write some. I watch the ocean and the rain and the growing leaves – and now in addition to the deer and birds I see a fair number of bunnies. I also had a friend come to visit! A friend from Girl Scouts who I hadn’t seen in decades – she lives in Connecticut, which is closer than I would have thought. We had lunch in town, went to a nearby winery for a tasting, and took a walk along the beach. How fun to have a friend visit! I also proposed an independent study to take the place of the class that was cancelled last month – that got approved, so I have been working on that.


I tried to do something job-related every day, and now that I have accepted the offer, there’s still something to do every day – last week it was reading the welcome book; this week it was fill out forms and make medical appointments. Eye issues diagnosed in Rabat and evaluated here could jeopardize my medical clearance – I called the doctor to have him write a note categorically stating I would need no treatment while I am gone. But before that – filling out applications for Peace Corps and other federal jobs, sending out resumes to federal contractors and non-profits, two Peace Corps career-related webinars. I had an interview for a paying job in addition to the Peace Corps Response job – that would have taken me out of the country for about three years, just so you know. I took myself out of the running before I found out whether I was going on to their next step; I was impressed with the company so it’s something I might still consider when I return.

It seems that people in my stage are just now getting jobs and getting settled. Most of them came back a couple of months before I did, so this is about how long it’s taking in this economy. They’re not all happy with what they’re taking, and I haven’t heard from anyone who isn’t having trouble adjusting to getting back to a working world, but at least they’re getting settled. Linda had a job that she came back to, with her former employer; her husband Bob went to France for three months and will start looking now. Rob was about to accept an offer when I saw him last month, back in his old field. Frank just got a job in his old field – though he said that putting Peace Corps in his cover letter helped – and starts Tuesday. Rose is still looking, back in her old field, but she’s pretty specific in what she wants. Jong will go to law school in the fall and is looking for something to do between now and then. Rachel and her brother and father are bicycling across the country – I’m impressed. Josh and Sabrina are teaching English in Korea, Kareem and Leslie just moved to DC, where she got a non-profit office job and I think he is still looking. Connie is working as an AmeriCorps volunteer, helping seniors with financial literacy (I think; I considered AmeriCorps too – after all, there are so many needs here, not just internationally), and may look into doing Peace Corps Response next winter after spending the holidays with her family. Margaret is teaching jewelry-making, I think – something she had done before. Gavin just got a job in Washington, but I’m not sure what he’s doing. Kristina got a job right away at an art gallery, Jessica moved to Seattle after I saw her in Iowa and is sewing while looking for other things, Janeila I haven’t heard from (she said she isn’t much for keeping in touch) but I hear she’s making art. We’re all feeling our way, still. I hope to stay in touch – I like our group.