Monthly Archives: November 2012

Thais do it right, they have holidays all the time.  Yesterday was Loi Krathong, which is a festival to honor the Water Goddess.  It translates literally to “floating crown”.  People make krathongs which are like little rafts made from bread or bamboo tree trunks or for the environmentally conscious, styrofoam.  They put incense and candles and money on them and then float them away on some body of water.

A giant krathong

Normal size krathong

Basically, the rivers/canals/ponds all end up with a bunch of garbage in them, which I find particularly ironic for a holiday that honors a water goddess.  There’s probably like a million Baht on the bottom of the Chao Phraya river.  Ca-ching.

Loi Krathong is also a fairly romantic holiday.  According to the newspaper “many young people will have sex on this day”.  Double ca-ching.  If your krathong floats away with your significant others, you are destined to be together forever.  If one of them flips over, sinks or suffers some other equally catastrophic fate, which is almost guaranteed to happen on the river… you get the picture…

Farang party

We farangs (the Thai word for white person) went to the river in hopes that it would be filled with lots of little floating flower ships with candles etc.  But we were disappointed when we got there and saw that basically as soon as your krathong hits the water, it bounces around in the chop and then flips over and joins the rest of the raft of garbage floating down the river.

After we shot off some fireworks, ate street food and drank beers from the 7/11 bar (aka, we bought beer at 7/11 and drank it on the street), we went to celebrate with these:

How strong?

Many of us saw the sun rise.

The Thais can throw one kick ass processional.  I went to the river last weekend to check out a royal barge processional.  I was expecting it to be 2-3 boats like the ones they make those people in the Amazing Race foolishly try to row.  I was pleasantly surprised when I got to the river and there were in fact 50+ boats processing.

The information that I could glean is that there was some kind of donation going to Wat Arun (the large temple which is further down the river).  The prince was on the giant golden dragon mothership being fanned by someone else.  That’s it.

All hands on deck

The thing that was really cool is that they were somehow all in sync.  All the boats rowed at the same time.  And if they were floating faster than the boat abeam of them, they fake rowed.  They knew when to do everything without any kind of coxswain, even the lazy fake rowers.

Also, the show would have truly been complete if these guys had turned their motor on, because I bet all my Baht that this zodiac would have flipped over backwards and I think all those medals would have sank this guy right to the bottom.

They’d fit right in at the Playpen.

It was nice to watch the final election results/speeches at 2PM instead of 2AM for once.  Being abroad for a US election was an interesting experience.  In general, I think it is a common misconception that people in other parts of the world give 2 shits about America.  Much like American’s really don’t care about other countries, unless they have oil, cocaine or Beatles.

Screen shot from my live streaming stunning high def. video

However, the election was a different subject.  In the weeks leading up to it, many people from all over the world asked me who I thought was going to win.  I said I didn’t know.  And the response from every single person, no matter what their background or nationality was some variation of “I hope Barak wins”.  As an American living abroad, you can probably imagine that I was a little on edge knowing that the polls were basically at 50:50 going in to the election and every person that I had talked to was rooting for Barack.

I’m no scientist, but do you think maybe there is something about the foreign policy of a Democratic administration that makes the rest of the world not be disgusted by Americans?  I’m sure there are some people reading this and grumbling to yourself “hand outs, Democrats make America weak, grumble grumble”.  To which I would like to simply respond, how is it a weakness if people from other countries have a positive image of the leader of America?  I think there is nothing stronger.

Needless to say, I was relieved when the results came in and I knew I would be answering the question “are you excited?!” vs. “what the hell happened?”  I felt a sense of pride about America on Tuesday that I never felt when I was living abroad in 2007 (when I, on several occasions, encountered burning US flags, Bush effigies and Death to America signs).  I was Canadian more than once during that time.

I get a special feeling of joy from all the people who updated their facebook statuses after the election results saying, “That’s it!  I’m moving out of America!  Rar rar rar”.  Well friends, go for it, and you will soon be very happy that when you show your passport, that there is a Democratic president associated with it.

Pha That Luang

Laos, where the hell is that?   It’s a very poor, landlocked country bordered by Thailand and Vietnam and some other countries that are equally obscure to a non-geography bee winner.  It is a “People’s Democratic Republic”, aka Communist.  As an American, I couldn’t help but feel a little naughty spending my USDs there, but their silks and banana pancakes were too alluring.

I had to go there last week to get my work visa from the Thai consulate.  In order to get the proper visa to work here, you have to actually leave the country and go to a consulate in another country and then re-enter Thailand, makes a lot of sense.  Vientiane (the capital of Laos) is a popular place for people to go, so I hopped on the overnight train last Tuesday and headed North.

The icebox.

Trains in the developing world are a real mixed bag.  Almost everything about them is annoying, and you just deal with it, but there is always one thing that makes you completely insane.  On this train, that one thing was the subzero air conditioning paired with a “blanket” for sleeping.  Thank god I was smart enough to get drunk in the bar car with a British guy before heading to bed otherwise I would never have fallen asleep.  Remember in Frosty the Snowman when the little girl was dying in the freezer car with Frosty?  That’s what it was like after my delicious beer blanket wore off.

I made it to Nong Khai (the Thai border town), right on time, 3 and a half hours late.   I booked it via Tuk Tuk to the border so that I could get to the embassy before 12 when they stop taking applications.  The driver stopped at a travel agency to try to get me to pay them for forms or something and I was like, just go to the border NOW.  So I got to the border and fumbled around with all my forms and got my Laotian visa and headed across the Mekong River into Laos.  Unfortunately, I missed the cut off time for submitting my visa paperwork, which doomed me to spend an extra day in Laos.

After checking into my hotel, I went to do some ‘sploring.  Vientiane has a well earned reputation for being the most boring town around, but I happened to be there on some special Buddhist holiday when magic pink light balls come out of the river (?), or so I was told, but I didn’t know that until the next day, so I missed it.  But there was a huge market/carnival going on so at least I had one day of entertainment.

Ride ’em coyboy.

A finely crafted fun machine. Of Death.

American carnivals are so “safe” and “inspected”; this one gave me the real thrill that a carnival is supposed to give you… that “this thing is coming off the rails and I am surely going to die” thrill.  They had carnival games, bumper cars, a ferris wheel and a haunted house, which probably was actually terrifying.  There were a ton of people selling all sorts of crap.  I couldn’t help but buy myself a super hippie skirt, for 30,000 kip, which is about $3 USD.  I negotiated it down to that price which I kinda feel bad about, but when I bought that skirt, within about 5 minutes, a bunch of Laotians bought the same skirt as the whitey.  Free marketing.

Thumbs up from Mickey’s evil Mexican twin

After all that fun, I headed into one of the nearby temples to get some photos and it was really beautiful, especially since I was there just before sun set.  The monks had 6 foot tall speakers set up in the courtyard and they were bumping out Ke$ha and Britney which was incongruous to say the least, but I guess  Buddha likes to get down too.

Monestary at sun set.

It also happened to be Halloween when I was there.  My costume was “a white person”.  When I got back to my hotel, I noticed many other people in costumes.  They were wearing perfectly tailored military uniforms and had very realistic automatic weapons slung over their backs.  Oh wait, no, those weren’t costumes, that was just the military putting up a camp in the empty lot next to my hotel.  Yippeee.

I got up at the crack of dawn on Thursday morning, greeted the military garrison outside and headed to the consulate so I could get the visa BS taken care of.  As I’ve mentioned many times before, there is only one thing in the world that Americans are unarguably the best at: waiting in line.  No other nationality is better than an American at waiting in line.  So being the first person at the consulate (which I was) is a very different thing than being first in line.  I ended up 4th, because other people literally came up and physically pushed me out of the way to be first.  All part of the experience… I tell myself…

I got all that stuff handed in, and it takes a day to process so I couldn’t pick it up until Friday at 1, which means that my train ticket for Thursday night was useless.  Meh.  I spent the rest of the day wandering around and went to check out the big golden temple, which is about the only thing to see in Vientiane.

So much gold.

With the exception of when I got sexually molested by a monk and had to grab him by the neck (a whole different story), the temple was really cool.  Lots of golden Buddhas everywhere, and it was a beautiful day so it looked especially cool against the bright blue sky.  The next 12 hours after that were painfully uneventful, so much so that I spent about 40 minutes dancing around my room to techno like the iPod silhouettes.

Friday, I picked up my visa and got the F outta there.  All in all, I made it out of Laos alive, with a visa, some silks, and a good story, which is the best I could hope for.