Three sunrises, three continents

Monday morning I woke up  in Belmont, MA, at my brothers house, and by the time I was done showering, the sun had risen. The next time the sun rose I was approaching the airport in Frankfurt, Germany, appreciating the impending brilliance from the window of a plane. Some hours later, I have no idea how many as travelling through 13 time zones seems to have really disoriented my perspective on time, I was approaching Bangkok from a few thousand feet as another faint glow slowly became my first day in Thailand.

            After three (I think) straight days in airports, leaving the Surat Thani baggage claim area (with a woman who had been waiting for me with a “Welcom to Surat Thani Mike” sign) was fantastic. My first misstep in Thailand came when I tried to get in the passenger side and was surprised to find Wen sitting behind the wheel, I think she was a little caught off guard as well. There is a potent difference to life here, and it seems to permeate every aspect of it, though luckily this is rarely a bad thing. Traffic has a different feel to it, mainly because of the multitude of some serious motor scooters (these rock, and I aim to have one ASAP) and their seemingly tenuous connection to the traffic laws that apply to the rest of the vehicles. The entire world has a spectacularly different look and feel to it really, palm trees instead of pine, bill boards ranging in quality from similar to the US, to more akin to a high school promoting a spaghetti supper (actually as they were in Thai for all I know they were), restaurants on the side of the highway, with no parking (or walls for that matter) and giant, gold framed pictures of the king. The differences didn’t really surprise me, I expected it, what surprised me was that everything seemed to have been altered in some way.

By the time we arrived at my apartment I had almost stopped being surprised by the differences and started just noting them, but the apartment had a few legitimate surprises in store for me. To begin, the door is more akin to a shop front, with a metal garage style gate that gets pulled down and locked, and a sliding glass door behind it. Once inside, it had the frightening desolation that all residences have when they have been recently vacated by a group of previous loving tenants. The other big shock was the lack of running water. It comes every now and than, but rather than taking showers and flushing to toilette with it, we store it in trashcans so that we can shower, or flush toilettes later with out hopping everyone else in town, particularly those living down the hill from us, take a break from using water. This was, to put it kindly, a bit distressing to me, as the thing that I was most excited about after three days in airports was a shower. As I began to pack my sleep deprived self started shouting things (in my head) like “that would have been good information to have YESTERDAY!” or “What??? No fucking water?” But I was smart, and rather than staying in, and dwelling on this fact, which is unchangeable, I went out with what has so far been the highlight of the trip, my future colleagues. I took a bucket shower, put on some fresh clothes and when to play poker with some other teachers. This distraction and entertainment was the precise balm I needed, by the time the evening was over, I was tired enough that I passed out the moment I get home. The next day I woke up and went to get some pad kwap-pow for breakfast, and I had come to terms with and acknowledged that the plumbing was much more of a mild inconvenience than the uber issue it had seemed the night before. I have now switched rooms, made my bed more comfortable, unpacked and am getting legitimately comfortable and content. The lesson is settle down and sleep on it, chances are it’s not so bad as your initial reaction suggests. This city seems wonderful, strange, but wonderful. It’s going to be one hell of a year.