Corn---they love it

Yes, the Thai people love corn. I love corn. Heck, everyone loves corn. Be it in cob, kernel, or syrup form. I’m more than all for it. I come form a land where we have festival s based on corn where cobs are handed out free to everyone like Mardi Gras Beads. My dad has even played basketball at the Corn Palace in South Dakota. A palace made of corn! Oh, how I’d love to rule over that throne. I would be a benevolent king, dispersing corn, butter and salt to all my loyal subjects and each day I would stroll and admire my kingdom kernel by kernel. But I digress. I love corn. But the Thai people love corn. I mean sure, you can throw a rock or cob in any major town and you’re sure to hit a vendor pedaling corn by the cob or already shucked and covered with butter in a cup. You’re all with me, right? Yum! Iknow, I know. It’s like the corn palace only bigger. But wait. The Thai people have crossed a line. I blinked when I saw corn deep fried. I flinched when I saw corn being consumed with condensed milk added to the butter/ salt combo. But it went too far with corn yogurt and corn in ice cream sundaes. Not cool.

Bicycles, Thailand, and you.

Safety tips:

1) Seeing as you have no lights and no one wears a helmet…make sure to swerve with force into the lane of traffic you will be following.

2) If you see a dog, first, pretend it’s not there. It doesn’t exist. Definitely no eye contact. If one does make eye contact pedal with all speed. Your life, or at least your heel depends on it. If said dog begins chasing you a (9 in 10 chance) try to out run it. If this does not work (as happened a few nights ago) turn around shouting “Bai! Bai!” (“Go!” “Go!”). If the dog continues at you pretend to throw a rock,
Thankfully this last strategy worked the other night. As the dog just about sank his teeth into Codie’s ankle we successfully scared it off with fake rocks but, due to the close call, we now have the baskets of our bikes lined with rocks and stay away from street we know have mean dogs (the teachers here even give some street dogs names. Like "Two Blocks" named appropriately because he will follow you barking for two blocks. There is also a particularly vicious dog downtown that can easily run down a bike and, get this, he only has two legs! He drags his hind legs behind him as he propels himself with his fangs and dog slobber going at full speed. He’s MEAN! He wants those legs back and if you’re walking or riding a bike there’s a good chance he’s eyeing yours.

3) Expect to be laughed at a lot by Thai people who think riding your bike is something quite silly when you could easily afford a motorcycle (aka murder-cycle judging by the traffic accidents). Codie and I are all for renting motorcycles in the smaller towns but not in “everyman, woman, chilld, and small puppy in the basket for themselves” towns like Surat Thani.

4) Beware the random speed bump and or pothole. Potholes happen but speed bumps here seemed to be planned to pop out at you when you least expect it presumably to help Thai people laugh at farang (foreigners) heaving over their handlebars unexpectedly.

As Thai as Pai............

As Thai as Pai............

Hey!
It's been a while since I've posted. We have been in full on relax mode since arriving in the Northern Thailand town of Pai and it has been hard to get to an internet cafe due to all the exhausting work of sitting in hammocks and floating down rivers lined with rice paddies on innertubes. I know, I know....life is hard. We're thinking this may be our final destination before we head back to start teaching.
After our beach life ended a week ago we headed back to Surat Thani to take care of some work visa issues. Mainly, we had to go to a hospital and be examined as fit and healthy to teach. This consisted of me giving a doctor about five dollars, him asking me if I was voting for Obama in broken English, followed by the question "are you sick?". That was all he needed to stamp my papers and declare me in perfect health. Yay! The fried spring rolls are going down a lot easier.
No sooner did we get declared to be in perfect health, then we were off on a night train to Bangkok. The perfect way to try anyone's health.
The night train can be a variety of experiences depending on what class ticket you want to purchase and having the right frame of mind. On our first ride up we hung out at the train station and made friends with two guys from South Africa. The overnighter was great. We paid the extra three dollars for air conditioning and slept like babies.
Things changed on the next train.
After the six dollar splurge we decided to take it down a notch and take the next 12 hour train North in the lower class. I guess its not fair to completely blame the train for my bad nights sleep. I blame Bangkok's train station.
As we were waiting for our train we decided to hit up the noodle shops just outside (again, saving money...a bowl in the train station cost, like, a buck fifty and we knew we could find an alley with noodles for fifty cents). We sat down to steaming bowls fried rice and meatball/ noodle soup and were happily digging in when I noticed a pinto bean in my soup. Weird, must be a Bangkok thing. That was until I fished the bean out with my chopsticks and realized it was an entirely different type of protein. The kind with a hard shell, legs, and twitching antennae. The same kind I found scurrying on the floor of our new house in Surat Thani that I accidentally stepped on my first night in the house. The same kind that found it's way into Codie's toothbrush holder only to leave brown stains on the bristle. The protein I'm talking about is our amigo in a nuclear holocaust. The survivor of survivors. The cockroach.
As I looked down at the tiny stewed disease carrier, I tried to shake it off like so many things you shake off here in Thailand. Dogs chasing us down our street (that I"m sure have rabies), strange smells of urine surrounding bus stations, flies buzzing over meat that has been left out in the market all day (which you are pretty sure will be in your noodle soup later). For some reason, this one got me. We handed over our 50 baht and walked out. Even watching a pirated copy of last week's Amazing Race at an internet cafe could not take my mind off the idea that this city dwelling cockroach had been the flavoring for my soup. It's strange. I've eaten tons of bags (just had silkworm larvae last night) but I know that these ones are nurtured in pristine environments. Free-range, grass-fed, organic bugs. Not city sewer living cockroaches. OK.....I'm over it.
But I wasn't during the train ride. We were in the non-air conditioned car The one that for no extra price comes complete with a wet, dirty floor (which I'm sure is somehow connected to the squat toilet in the bathroom), loud crying babies, and old Thai men who like to stay up really late drinking whiskey and smoking enough cigarettes that I am sure the train could run on their fumes alone. I don't know what it was, but I couldn't sleep. I stayed awake, train light shining in to my upper bunk, sweating, and imagining that cockroaches are surrounding me, flinching at every brush of my compartments thin screen as it hit my leg.
No sleep, but we got here. And here is beautiful. We arrived just in time for the end of Buddhist lent and the town is alive with monks getting new robes and the people form the highland villages coming to town to live it up Thai style. With tons of new foods to try (coconut mashed potatoes, tea from bamboo cups, NO COCKROACHES). The town of Pai itself is filled with musicians and artist (last night I saw a Thai band belting out Nirvana and Radiohead covers) and is surrounded outside with rivers, waterfalls, tiny adorable villages, and panoramic mountains that stretch to Burma. We have been spending each day renting a motorbike ($2.50 a day!) and cruising around to wherever sounds cool. Yesterday we spent the whole day at a waterfall with a 25 foot wall you could slide down into the pool at the bottom. Scary = fun. I think I'm going to go back and chill by the river here before the night gets started with more cool music and fun people.

More random photos of life here so far...

Random photos of life here so far

More Veggie Fest pics

Veggie Fest Pics

MOre Picture of the festival

Veggie fest

Mai ben rai.....
This means go with the flow, no worries, chill out dude.....etc
This Thai phrase was pushed to the limit earlier this week when we attended the Vegetarian festival in Krabi.
Now, from the pictures above one may think there is a contradiction at play here. What's with all the bloody flesh if we're supposed to be celebrating vegetables.
Well....Veggie Tales this is not.
The idea behind this is that every year many Chinese Thais in the South of Thailand believe that nine deities can enter people's bodies but only if they have abstained from eating meat and have not had sex for....brace yourself....TEN WHOLE DAYS!!!! That means that half of Eugene should be able to take part in this festival of piercing, slicing, and exploding. The idea behind the festival is said to originate from a group of CHinese fishermen who were starving and by fasting and repenting through abusing their bodies they were saved by the gods.
SO...if you don't do these two things for ten days, and believe me, as a voracious omnivore the veggie thing is pretty cake here in Thailand. With skewers of fried tofu, gilled corn, squash curry, fresh OJ, pineapples falling of trucks, and papaya salad that I could happily feast on for weeks we're definitely not suffering. But, apparently this is the only sacrifice needed. Just don't eat the roasting ducks, pig intestines, and deep fried cockroaches for ten days and voila, you are susceptible to the spirits.
On the day of possession, CHinese people line up outside of homes and businesses with fresh fruit, rice, candy, and rice wine. Then you wait...and wait...eat some fried tofu and sticky rice....wait......and then you hear the first pops in the distance. Like the sound of machine gun fire the procession makes its way up the street being led by poles with M-80s tied to them blowing up at every intersection. As we saw these fireworks being held up in the distance all we could see were dancing figures below. As they got closer, things got really intense. With firecrackers in your ears, people walked up to each of the tables carrying the offerings and threw them in to the crowd or handed them to the people bowing to them at the offerring tables (I caught a Halls cough drop). But these were not just people throwing hard candy in a a parade. The people were possessed by the deities. As they walked up to each table some people who were waiting for them would go into seizures and join them in the parade (we saw two girls about 12 years old almost crack their head sopen as they threw themselves back in a frenzy). One in the tracne, the most popular look was to have your eyes rolled back, head shaking from side to side, fingers up in a mudra, and spittle dripping down your chin.
That was just the bare minimum. For the really hardcore, the truly possessed you would have to bleed. You could:
a) shove a sharp object through your cheek, ear, head, or arm
b) find a sword, knife, axe, or razor blade and use it to cut your tongue over and over again until you were covered with blood, or
c) use any of the above objects to shove, pound, or pierce into you as you danced around the M-80s, which, on more than one occasion caused people to bleed and/or have their clothes burned through. Yay!

It seemed you got extra cred the more outlandish your piercing item or pounding item was hence we were able to witness tire rims, fire extinguishers, tree limbs, deer skulls, and countless other objects go through people. This whole deal lasted about four hours as the procession made its way to the CHinese temple where someone would talk people out of the trance while others stayed in it so later that evening they could focus their energy climbing knife ladders or walking across burning coals. And finally, free veggie Phad Thai for everyone (icluding us farang....aka foreigners).
I'm beginning to think our parades in the US are kind of weak. When we get back there will be no more idly sitting on the float waiving like Miss America for me....I'm taking things a step further. Maybe I'll wear a bracelet really tight or cinch my belt a notch to far as I get pulled along by a pick up .....all I know is that I have some stepping up to do.

No beard

Stop laughing......and no. I'm not 14.