Thailand And Laos 1998: Day 7

Mr Tah, it turned out was quite an important man locally. He had been leading or assisting with treks for many years as the photographs all over the walls of his home could attest. I was getting the star guest treatment having once more travelled by truck with him. We had about an hour to wait before the others arrived and he was showing me his house. Even as we had driven up it was clear that he was very prosperous by hill tribe standards. It was built on the same basic principle as the huts with the main living area off the ground and reached by steps but that was as far as the resemblance went. Instead of a bamboo construction it was built mainly of wood and whereas the huts were raised about a yard this was more than double that providing what amounted to garage and shed space beneath it. It was also about six times as large as the largest hut I had seen. He invited me in and showed me the mementos of his years as a guide. The earliest showed him as a much younger man in a black T-shirt and sporting shoulder length hair.
"You used to be a hippy then." I commented.
He grinned.

"Yes. Hippy. That was me." he said happily.

All of the walls of the largest room were covered in photographs of him and his family. A couple of closed doors led off - presumably into bedrooms - and a third open one led out onto a balcony which from my brief examination seemed to be the kitchen. I went back downstairs, putting back on my shoes which I had left at the door as is the polite custom. We were only a few yards from the town and I walked down to find the others arriving. Soon everyone was there and we had transferred to minibuses to take us back to civilised lodgings in Chiang Rai.
The hotel, the Lan Kum, was large modern and comfortable and - most important of all - with a shower in every room.. The door of the room displayed a puzzling notice in Thai and eccentric English.

wellcome to Ian kum hotel quests are requested to co operate
withthe hotel's directions here under

1. please deposite the valve belongings with our hotel safty box-
2. we will not be responsible for any artesies lost or stolen ~
in the room
3. iffleage arties are not allowed in the room or within the
premises of the hotel
4. any danger caused to thehotel property during the pestrol of

stay shall be responsible by guests
5. gambling are prohibited in the room
6. please do not disturb your heighbours
7. check out time in 12 hours

thank you
I pondered for a while what an 'iffleage arty' might be, worried in case I might have inadvertently brought one into the room. If not for rule six I might have gone next door to ask the heighbours. 

Showered and changed into clean clothes I left the room, heedless of the artesies that I might lose and went down to the bar to ponder what I might have for lunch. Robert joined me and we decided to go on a quest for western food. Forty five minutes later we were back having failed spectacularly to find any. We had however seen the King Mengrai Monument. As King Mengrai is mostly known for moving his capital out of Chiang Rai and setting up in Chiang Mai it's curious that they honour him here so prominently. More curious still is the vast number of elephant statues that surround his likeness. I can only imagine that he was fond of them in life for he has at least a couple of dozen on hand filling up the end of the street where the monument is located.
Back at the hotel Robert and I decided to eat in and we discovered that they did western food of a sort. I had tomato soup - which was sort of pale pink and creamy but had no obvious tomatoes in it - and ham and eggs which was okay if a little nouvelle cuisine in its portions. Afterwards we wandered around the town fairly aimlessly before splitting up, Robert back to the hotel and me to continue my wanderings in the market. This was mainly a food market and had eggs and meat and bread as well as more esoteric dishes the only easily identifiable one being whole dried frogs. I paid a quick visit to a pharmacy where, with the aid of a note in Thai that I had had Wit write out for me earlier, I replenished the dwindling supplies in my first aid box but by now my foot was throbbing badly and a retreat to the hotel seemed in order so that's what I did and retired to my room with some painkillers and a paperback to spend the rest of the evening doing nothing at all.

Bored of the Dance

My girlfriend loves dancing.

She goes to dance class three evenings and one morning each week. She would really like me to love dancing too but anyone who knows me can take a guess at the likelihood of that happening. To say that I have two left feet would be to ludicrously understate the matter. I am - there is no getting away from it - one of life's clumsy buggers. Nature blessed me with the normal quantity of good qualities but a sense of rhythm and a sense of balance aren't among them. At the age of fifty-six I have barely mastered the skill of walking. I walk into things (and people), trip over paving stones, fall down holes and generally stumble through life with the grace and elegance of a three-legged hippopotamus.

Still, one does what one must and when she asks me to go along and sit in the corner and watch - almost certainly in the hope that I will be moved to join in - I go and sit in the corner and watch and then we go for a drink afterwards.

It's relatively painless, though pretty boring. She did it again last night - asked me to go with her to her dance class at the dance studio I haven't been to before. It was a small room and I stood (there being no chairs) at the back and waited. Occasionally I took a stroll down the dimly lit ninth floor corridor or spent a few minutes gazing out of the window at the lights of Baiyin* but the time passed slowly.

As I mused on the concept of time, I came to a realisation. While you are waiting for the expected end time of something tedious the boredom is of a manageable order. You look frequently at the clock and note with satisfaction that it is moving inexorably  towards the end of the ordeal.

From one second after the expected end time things are a hundred times worse. Now the time drags like a lead weight around your neck. You have nothing to aim for. You cannot mentally say "twenty minutes to go" and ten minutes later say "well, half way there then". They might continue dancing for another five minutes or another five hours. So last nights lesson was, in theory to finish at nine and when it passed nine I found that I was pacing like a caged animal, restlessly marching up and down that corridor, sitting on the sofa that I found tucked in an alcove halfway along, staring uncomprehending at posters written in Chinese and generally wondering what I was doing there at all.

At nine twenty she came and asked me if I was bored. I admitted that I was but assured her that I would be happy to go on waiting as long as was necessary. She said that she would be a few more minutes - twenty more to be precise and even then she was leaving primarily because she had taken pity on me - the others in her group were still dancing.

I don't think I could dance if my life depended on it so I'm hoping that eventually she'll accept that my watching her practice in a group is unlikely to change the situation.

To Put Away Childish Things: Alpine

A facebook page dedicated to seventies and eighties nostalgia posted a picture of an Alpine pop bottle. Until I saw it I had completely forgotten about those. They used to be delivered regularly on a lorry (just as milk always used to be, and still is in some places) and the pop man would take away the empties and leave the new selection. We always got through our bottles (three each week, if memory serves) by the middle of the week and eagerly awaited the next delivery like the little sugar junkies we were.

When he came we would go out and look at the array of improbably coloured liquids on offer, choose this week's flavours and my mother would pay for them. Though the page is about the seventies and eighties I remember them well back into the sixties and according to a little internet research they continued trading, though rather desperately, into the nineties.

I remember some of the flavours - the vivid pink cherryade, the not-quite-clear lemonade, the even-more-not-quite-clear cream soda, the startling yellow pineappleade and, of course the almost black dandelion  and burdock.

I'm sure that they were full of ghastly chemicals that made us into hyperactive monsters and the flavours were as bright and unlikely as the colours. The cream soda (which I think was called Ice Cream Soda) and the dandelion and burdock were, at least in my memory, particularly odd-tasting.
I can still imagine the tastes now.

What I remember especially is that it came in large chunky bottles that were too big for the fridge and were lined up on the shelf in the corner of the kitchen making a psychedelic light show of rippling stripes when the sun shone through them.
I have a vague recollection that we also bought squashes and mixers from the same lorry in the run up to Christmas, but that may just be my imagination.

Seeing it on someone else's nostalgia page brought all the memories back.

Well that's different #12: Crime And Punishment

I had a particularly bad class last week. They were noisy, difficult to control and generally badly behaved. As I sometimes do I gave them some homework as a punishment. They had to write fifty words about "Why I was bad in class today" (they're only eleven!).
On Friday the class monitor handed me a pile of papers. Later glancing through them before I threw them out (well I'm not going to punish myself by marking them, am I) I came across this in one of them

"Teacher, I am sorry I am naughty. If I am naughty again please hit me."

Interesting mindset these children have.