This Is Thailand

Bill has taught me a new acronym: TIT.  No scurrilous meaning at all. It stands for "This Is Thailand," sometimes also expressed as "it's the Thai way."

To sum up TIT with an incident from our previous visit to Thailand, ten years ago: We were dining in an upscale restaurant in Chiang Mai. I asked the waitress for salt, which apparently confused her, and we never saw her again. For one reason or another, she had lost face and simply disappeared.

We're experiencing this sort of thing less often here in Pattaya, perhaps because it has become so westernized in the last decade. Whereas, before, one could find no wine or Coke Zero here, which might have caused a waitress to vanish in shame, now both are abundant.

In fact, the Pattaya locals are remarkably good natured. None of them has disappeared on us, though TIT incidents are beginning to accumulate.

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A common form of taxi transportation here is the open-air "baht bus"--a sturdy pickup truck outfitted with benches in the back, to inexpensively and conveniently carry as many as eight to ten customers, some of them clinging to the steps. 

Riding the baht bus

One day, after a long walk downtown, we lazily decided to hire a baht bus from the Walking Street area of Pattaya back to our hotel, a journey of only about four blocks. This particular taxi stand had a woman coordinating the drivers, so we told her where our hotel was and set off with our driver, a goofy, gap-toothed kid. At some point, Bill noticed that the driver had left the side streets behind and was now barreling down the highway.

"This guy's going out of town!" he said.

We knocked on the partition behind the driver's seat, gesticulating wildly, and he pulled over.

"Kap [Thai equivalent of "dude"], you're going to Jomtien. We wanted Areca Lodge," Bill explained.

It seems that the boss lady, for her own unfathomable reasons, had told him we wanted to go to Jomtien. He happily turned around and took us home instead, grateful that we had spared him an eight-mile drive. 

When we passed the taxi stand on our way back, he beeped and gestured vigorously at his colleague. They would have words later, I was sure.

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And then there was the laundry. You'll note a laundry theme running through this blog.  Laundry becomes as important as wifi on a trip of this length, so you'll likely read about it again.  Unlike our Prague hotel, Areca Lodge offers laundry service.  This time, though, we would be smart about this. The hotel, we found, charges three to fives times more than a laundry/cafe right across the street.  It's convenient, it's cheap, and it gets the job done.  Why spend more?

When I went to pick up our clothes, I spotted an unmistakably garish pair of my panties in someone else's sealed plastic laundry bag. Another pair of mine lay forlorn on the folding counter. The laundress presented them and a pair of socks to me, asking if they might be mine. Shouldn't she know? I thought. Alarmed, I pawed through all the clean-laundry bags, spotted Bill's trousers and shorts, and indicated, "This is our laundry."  The laundress reviewed the itemized checklist with me, pointed out seven items in the bag and on the list, and sent me on my way, for a ridiculously low charge.  I didn't dare claim my bright, flowered undies. When I got to the adjacent family bar where Bill had been waiting for me, I scrutinized the checklist, looked at those socks closely, and realized that we were indeed missing a pair of my underwear and that the socks were not mine.

I returned and pointed out to the laundress that there could be no other pair of panties like these in the entire kingdom of Thailand, returned the socks, and straightened things out. Both laundry workers were unfailingly pleasant and, I have to hand it to them, did not disappear. Still, this is a textbook example of TIT.  I will return when we need laundry done again. At this point, they have some face saving to do, and they appear to think that I am now their friend.

See how they smile at me when I pass by. Maybe they're laughing at me.

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Yesterday was the big Loy Krathong festival in Thailand, a sweet celebration of the harvest, for which people light candles on little boats made of banana leaves and flowers, make a wish, and set the boats, called krathongs, afloat on rivers, streams, even puddles or swimming pools if that's all they have. There's even a catchy tune for the occasion: "Loy, loy, krathong! Loy, loy, krathong!" ("Float, float, float your boat! Float, float, float your boat!") And our hotel had announced that, for a fee of $13 each, we could enjoy a vast buffet, listen to entertainment, and receive our very own krathongs to float in the pool. How could we resist?





The hotel staff were dressed to 
the nines, and all of them were 
working the event, hard. 








We dressed up ourselves and eagerly appeared at the hour when the event was to begin. What fun this would be!

We were the only ones there.

The buffet was indeed vast, and the staff, attentive. But it was so dark that we couldn't really tell what we had selected to eat. The hotel photographer came round to take our picture--free of charge, he said, because the hotel would use it, if that was okay with us. They were anxious to prove that someone had attended the event.

"Areca Lodge celebrated Loy Krathong with a festive gala, attended by esteemed guests Mr. and Mrs. William Wade, among too many others to name."

After dinner, we went out on the town for a while, then returned at the usual time for launching krathongs. Just like the Fourth of July, this is 9:00.  Down at Pattaya Beach, partygoers were sending aerial luminaries into the sky.  They dotted the night air like fireflies, as seen from our hotel.  Making the best of things, we lit our krathongs, made our wishes, and set our little boats adrift in the pool. 

Once a krathong has burnt down, it shrivels into a sad, charred clump, then joins a black mass of burnt krathongs at the other end of whatever body of water it has found itself in. 

It was an appropriate statement about the whole awkward TIT event.

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Within the next ten years, many TIT quirks may well have disappeared, which will make Thailand a far less entertaining place for tourists.

But you know it's still TIT when a public toilet is stingy with its toilet paper rolls. A female traveler once had to carry a scrunched-up roll in her purse, as well as have particularly sound knees, in case she encountered only a "squat toilet" on ground level. This proved particularly challenging on an overnight train hurtling over uneven tracks. Thankfully, this is changing.

Hotel water temperature used to be dependent on whether the sun was out, to heat the water tank atop the roof.  The Areca Lodge has no such problem, though its water pressure changes dramatically in the course of a single shower.

The infrastructure still hasn't seen professional work in quite a long time. Sidewalks are heavily potholed and often disappear entirely; randomly tangled electrical wires dangle alarmingly low over pedestrians' heads.

One street vendor obliged Bill by polishing his shoes. The only TIT part of this is that Bill's shoes are sneakers made of brown canvas which is now black.

And you really know TIT when you sit down to grab a quick meal at a restaurant, then notice the waitresses taking turns grooming each other at the back of the house, removing from their hair what one hopes are not living things.