Ayutthaya

And now for something completely different. Last Friday Nongnut's brother Amnart, a Bangkok traffic policeman, kindly drove us out to Ayyutthaya/Ayudhya: Thailand's answer to Angkor Wat: a ruined city about 80 km from the city. 

Amnart was a short, hearty, muscular man with a grey burr cut, and reminded us a little of Uncle Marion.  Apparently his sister sends a lot of her colleagues and visiting westerners to him to escort them to Ayutthaya, which he apparently regards as a kind of good deed he does on behalf of Nongnut, in whose accomplishments he takes enormous pride. Their father was a policeman in Trang in southern Thailand. Amnart's English was rusty, but he described his father as a kind of Godfather figure who ruled his district armed to the teeth. Amnart, unlike his sister, was no scholar, and joined his father in the constabulary, in which he was engaged in hand-to-hand combat with Moslem separatists. In his last engagement, he was hit with a ricochet from a dum-dum bullet and lay in a coma for seven days and given up for dead. He finally awoke to find one of the princesses at his bedside, thanking him on behalf of Thailand. But he had enough of combat and moved to Bangkok to direct traffic.

It's happened

Here's another example of what I'm talking about: the name of a very creditable bakery in an enormous indoor Bangkok mall that is fancier and better staffed by far than anything I've seen in Seattle or San Francisco, Palo Alto or New York. "It's happened to be." What does it mean? Do they know what it means? Didn't anyone along the way point out that it doesn't mean anything? That all it's going to do is distress people? People like me? If there are any people like me? 

Goodbye, Hat Yai

We were pretty punchy flying back to Bangkok, and in a semi stupor I experienced a kind of exaggerated form of a sense of dislocation that has afflicted me ever since coming here. And not just because I actually am dislocated, either. But there's something deeply disorienting, so to speak, about westernized Asia, and you find yourself rather hopelessly trying to separate the familiar from the strange. On the taxi ride into the airport, to take one fleeting instance, we passed a skyscraper with a big lighted sign saying Kassetart University. Now, Kassetart is probably the name of a prince or something, but I found myself trying to parse it out. Could they mean "Cassette art" perhaps, in which case the school taught recording engineering, or "case of tarts," in which case the curriculum was baking? It's strange little things like this, presented familiarly with an English word attached, juxtaposed against this mad mixture of the recognizable and the un' and multiplied by thousands that puts a running strain on my brain, which hasn't learned yet when to abandon the attempt. I am almost grateful when a sign turns up entirely in utterly inscrutable Thai, and I can relax. But then the strain goes both ways, as the above sign, posted outside a wat (a temple) -- A wat? A temple -- attests. 

The next day another of Debbie's former students, Wantanee P., escorted us around town. She is a professor of pediatrics in the nursing school and was educated at the University of Michigan and UW, where she received her PhD. 

Wantanee has a good nurse's down-to-earth manner and a good researcher's ease with people, and she proved a terrific guide: full of lore, and willing to answer all our questions about the foodstuffs, much of it worrisome-looking, that we passed on the street. So we stuck our bags in the trunk of her car, which she then parked in her husband's bank's garage for safekeeping, and we wandered the streets, perusing the food stalls and ducking into stores. We talked to a gold merchant about traditional Thai designs, a gift shop proprietor about handicrafts, and encountered an old woman and her granddaughter frying bananas in coconut batter. 

I paused at one of Thailand's ubiquitous pirated DVD outlets to ask if they had I, Claudius on hand. The woman who ran the little kiosk did not, but seemed to have everything else ever committed to celluloid, and tried to sell me a complete set of all of the BBC's nature shows to date, perhaps a hundred DVDs tucked into in an aluminum suitcase. 

We rode back into town in the nursing school van and returned to our hotel to attend the masters students' graduation party, which was in full swing when we got there. There was stage on which a Karaoke rig had been erected and two nursing students were singing Thai pop, including a cooking song that had apparently been written by one of the princesses and involved various active ingredients, including a chicken, to celebrate diversity. Apparently this is how the princesses assert themselves: later on we were shown a set of inoffensive handbags that one of them had designed.

We were enjoined to take part in the festivities by dancing Thai fashion, which seems to consist of swiveling around and shuffling along in a circle while twisting your wrists in the air. So we did that, and sat through various presentations and entertainments, including a trio of students dressed up like chorus girls who danced in front of a sign saying "Congratulation, Nurse Admin SU3" until Nongnut escorted us out and bid us adieu. Debbie instructs me to tell you that we had fun.

Hat Yai II

The day after we arrived in Hat Yai Debbie went off to lecture Nongnut's students about feminism. One of the talking points was the Thai Buddhist proscription against women touching monks. The conversation went on for a while about the usual stuff, that it is believed women are unclean because they bleed but do not die, until at one point during a break a young woman came up to Debbie and asked why a woman would want to touch a monk. After all, monks, she said, were no picnic themselves. A lot of them, she said, go into business for themselves, others have mistresses, still others have a fondness for boys. A man can declare himself a monk for a couple of weeks, then leave, and they can all jump ship at any time. So why, exactly, should she want to go out and touch one? 

It's like I tell my children: don't trust anybody in a robe. 

I spent a stupid day back at the hotel, venturing out for a few concentric rounds through the neighborhood, most of which was devoid of anyone except a few sleeping car mechanics and food stall operators closing up shop. Hat Yai reminded me of another Asian industry town: Kanpur, the site of the massacres I chronicled in Our Bones Are Scattered. It boasts no ancient monuments, and there was this slight whiff of menace, in this case from the Moslem separatists who later in the week would apparently set off a bomb on a highway en route to Hat Yai. Debbie and I seemed to be the only westerners in town, though a couple would later emerge at the airport: rubber executives from Australia.

That evening, however, Nongnut took us to a scenic overlook: a Buddhist temple with some Chinese annexes on a hillside overlooking the town, and by the time we got there people had gathered to watch a lovely sunset unfold. As we climbed up the stairs to admire the giant golden Buddha at the apex of the complex of effigies and pavilions, an ancient Thai lady caught up to us and asked Nongnut who we were and where we were from. Nongnut talked with her as though they were old friends, and we noticed this Thai manner of touching each other on the arm: very lightly, almost imperceptibly, when they are chatting. Nongnut did this while escorting Debbie around, and, strangely enough, so did Debbie's mother. 

The old lady told us she was 93 years old, and I told her that my mother was too. This seemed to end the conversation, though without apparent offense. Then we climbed down to gawk at some gaudy Chinese effigies, before which a trio of schoolgirls were vamping for the camera. 

.

 

Hat Yai

It's been several days since I wrote last, which is attributable to our jaunt to the southern end of this wasp-shaped country, to an industrial town called Hat Yai, the industrial heart of the Thai rubber industry and the focus of Moslem separatist bombings a couple of years ago that have scared off tourism. 

We had considered declining the invitation of one of Debbie's students, Nongnut Boonyong, for Debbie to speak at the local nursing school, but some wag who operates a Thai FAQ website advised us that we were likelier to be killed by a tuk-tuk, Thailand's ubiquitous scooter taxis in Bangkok than get killed by separatists, which reassured us somewhat about Hat Yai though not about tuk-tuks. 

The midwestern cityscape of Bangkok yielded to a deep green landscape of rubber tree and banana plantations, and we were met at the airport with great joy by Nong Nut, who was one of Debbie's most cherished students: an indomitable woman with a shy smile and a will of steel who proved to be one of the most gifted researchers Debbie ever mentored. Now she has risen into the exalted reaches of the university in Hat Yai.

This meant that in a couple of days she has to help oversee the preparations for a visit by one of the princesses who will be gracing the graduation ceremony this year. Her Highness is a chemist, and suffers from lupus, so certain flowers are forbidden, and no-one is to wear any perfume. The campus has been adorned with thousands of little pots of orange chrysanthemums: orange being her royal color. She will sit in a small anteroom, and since no one is to touch her, each diploma will be passed across her languidly stretched-out hand before being handed to each recipient, while the rest -- some six thousand students -- shuffle along outside in their silk graduation gowns. Nongnut is to see that each diploma takes no more than 28 seconds, and her colleague Noh, who also met us, was a nervous wreck in anticipation of observing all these protocols. 

In the meantime, everyone who works for the state is expected to wear yellow this year to celebrate the king's upcoming 80th birthday. Nongnut told us more about the Thai attitude toward the king. Apparently a lot of policies are couched in terms of saving him from any sort of distress. Thus when the government required or in any case advised all motorcyclists to wear helmets, it was so that the king would not read with sorrow about another rider being killed. Every evening at 8PM there's a half-hour report on the royal family's day, showing various  princesses engaged in impressive if, to our eyes, incomprehensible formalities. 

Nongnut took us to an overlook en route to the beach, and then to a lovely restaurant on stilts set over a lagoon. So far all the food has agreed with us, and one of the best things we've had so far was a rice dish tossed with crab meat, and a baked kingfish with a honey sauce. 

But that will have to be all for tonight. We are now back in Bangkok and tomorrow Nongnut's brother is taking us to see the old city of Ayuddhya tat was destroyed by the Burmese centuries ago and is a kind of Thai Angkor, though encroached upon by the modern town.

This morning Debbie was too sick to do much of anything, so I took the city’s slick new Skyway train to the legendary Saturday Market. It was a hot morning, but the trains are clean and air conditioned and every five feet or so there’s a flats-creen TV monitor showing advertisements for everything from Nestle’s sterilized nonfat milk (cows undergoing weight reduction treatments) to obscure boxed Thai drinks being hawked by midgets. I changed trains at Siam station and rode about fifteen minutes to the end station at Mo Chit with a proliferating crowd of eager western women and their grim-faced husbands. The market lies on perhaps twenty city blocks entirely covered with little roofed-over stalls selling everything imaginable. The heat and humidity made for a choking atmosphere, especially amid wafts iof an odor I haven’t been able to trace to its source, but if it turns out to be a pile of decayed shrimp marinating in urine I will not be surprised. It’s different from India’s decidedly excretal but also smoky and heavily spiced fetor; this is fishier, more acrid, and more mysterious. Especially when you pass a food stall and there’s a pile of something bubbling in a steam tray that is as utterly unrecognizable as, say, pickled genitals from outer space. (Tonight at a Japanese restaurant they offered up a nice bowl of “preserved cuttle fish guts,” or so the menu said.)
But the market is, as advertised, one of the wonders of the shopping world. I squeezed my way past hundreds of stalls selling every conceivable beautiful Eastern thing (and a lot of Western knock-offs): carvings, statuary, old Chinese trunks and bedsteads and cabinets, Buddhist tonkas and mandalas, brassware, hand-woven silk, heaps of blue and white china, forests of antique lamps and freestanding electric fans from the forties, rows of bronze bells and gongs, old photographs and postcards, coins, used books and magazines, beads, shells, fossils, butterfly boxes, scorpions encapsulated in glass, wicker baskets, jewelry, fetishes, puppets, chimes, and on and on.
I did not buy a thing. I have this theory that you only buy trash the first month you live anywhere new, and that by the host country’s standard you always get taken. The worst stuff I bought in India forty years ago I purchased during the first weeks, when I should have saved my money for the better stuff I came upon and learned to recognize and appreciate later on.

I was assisted in sticking to my resolve by the sheer overwhelming volume of stuff for sale: selecting something to purchase would have been like trying to pluck a diamond from an avalanche. The damp, airless heat had something to do with my impecuniousness as well.
Unlike Indian vendors, the proprietors of the Saturday Market stalls don’t hawk their wares, and I was able to enter and exit various stalls without being importuned by anyone. In fact, for all their hustle and bustle, it seemed to me that Thais seem somehow to have retained their civility. Some of the girls who take our orders at bakeries and stores are so sweet that Debbie says they make tears come to her eyes. Their greetings with hands clasped are even more appealing than the Indian nemaste.

The Night Market

I returned to the hotel dripping with sweat to find Debbie feeling better, and after a dip in the hotel pool and a long nap we set out for the Night Market in our neighborhood. It did not approach the Saturday Market in scale, but we did purchase a couple of things: a Pierre Cardin belt for four dollars and a pirated DVD of the new Simpson’s movie for three dollars. So much for my resolve. I would have bought a shirt as well if they’d had it in my size, and I’ve asked the girl who ran the stall to see if she can find me one and have it on hand when I get back on Friday. But the deeper we wandered into the Night Market the civility I had appreciated at the Saturday Market gave way, and vendors began calling out, “You like?” “I got legs you size!” “Watches, sir!?” “DVD sex for you?” And that’s when we began to notice that the storefronts opposite the stalls had names like Honey Club and Pretty Pussy, and hawkers began to flash cards at us listing the various sexual acts available inside while here and there the girls themselves stood outside the clubs in schoolgirl outfits while inside, as we glimpsed through the doorways, their sisters paraded up and down a stage in their underwear.
Then we noticed that the Europeans in the Night Market now consisted mostly of men, some accompanied by rather disabused Thai women, and while all that is to be deplored, the American men, I realized, were about my age, and some looked to be vets of the Viet Nam war that not only created this trade in the first place, but so damaged their own sexuality that they return here to relive their formative assignations with yet another generation of poor, exploited Indochinese girls. And so that war of forty years ago ripples on.

Early morning Thai Time

It is now 24 hours since we landed

 here, eleven of which we

 have spent asleep.

I appear to have awoken t 4:30AM Bangkok time,.That's five hours later than Swiss time, eleven hours later than EST, 14 hours later than PST, and from this I figure that if you just keep moving westward and get all the way back around to Bangkok itself it must be 24 hours earlier here now than it is now here. 

Similarly, I figure that since there are about thirty bhat to the dollar, then a bhat is worth about three cents, so thirty US dollars must be equal to ninety Thai dollars here, roughly speaking. The rates are different at the ATMs, where you just key in the dollar amounts and out come bhats, which seems to me a bad deal, as they're only worth about a third as much. So I'm hoping to get a better deal elsewhere, maybe in Swiss francs, which are worth almost as much as a dollar, and then I can trade them in for bhats, which are worth three times as much. 

But don't try this at home. Only a lifetime of international travel makes such calculations possible.

Anyway, here are some more views of Thailand from our first bleary day. Note McDonald's ostentatious display honoring the King, the gods that have been affixed to the skyscrapers, and so on. I am prohibited by law from making any sort of fun of the Thai royal family who embody the Thai identity, so I won't. It is hard to imagine, say, the British erecting shrines to Charles and Carmella or Camelia or whatever her name is on every London block and festooning them with garlands on their way to and from work, or wearing the daily royal color -- yesterday's was yellow -- in honor of Princess Margaret.  But then they are all ninnies, and here the King is not only a sacred figure but is said to be a supremely beneficent presence, carrying on the tradition of his mid 19th century predecessor of King & I fame, who was a great social reformer and such a brilliant diplomat that Thailand, unlike its neighbors, was never colonized. 

In an unrelated story, all the blind street musicians I've encountered so far have been provided with microphones and battery-powered amplifiers.

Arrival

My vision of what my first blast of Bangkok would be like was way off. The new international airport is enormous and rivals in ostentation anything I’ve ever seen in the West. Everything was streamlined: immigration, baggage handling, customs. We were met by the hotel limo and driven into town along an equally brand new multilane highway under a dismal drizzle, flanked the whole way by an as yet uncompleted elevated tram line, and we might as well have been driving into Chicago. All we could see were enormous skyscrapers, many of them under construction, so many billboards they haven’t yet been able to fill all of them, and signs for every franchise imaginable: Casio, Minolta, Office Depot, Boston Acoustic. 

It was still raining when we pulled off the highway at breakneck speed and swerved up the driveway to the Swiss Lodge, where we were greeted sweetly by more of these gracious girls who after an hour or so of our hanging around in their business center, calling home to report our safe landing, gave us a room: a suite, really, with every imaginable comfort, where we showered and fell into a seven-hour sleep, followed by a stroll along the teeming streets lined with foodstalls of every description, up into an enormous mall, and finally back to the hotel for dinner. 

It’s warm but not uncomfortably so; it’s the humidity that gives everyone a parboiled look. Debbie has come down with a cold, but hopes to be rid of it soon, and tomorrow I hope to persuade her to accompany me to the vast Saturday market. I am already sniffing around at the Buddhist paintings they sell everywhere, some of them very beautiful, but will try to adhere to my rule of not buying anything during the first month we’re here. H

I had another of those amputated-limb feelings about Dad, pausing at a stall selling the kind of shirts he loved before remembering he has no use for one. He would be fascinated by what has become of Thailand. Despite the huge changes since I was here 50 years ago not only in Bangkok but in myself, I am already reminded of our family trips here in the 50s. But my first impression is that these people have gone from a civil indifference about the West to a ravenous hunger for the hazardous blessings of unbridled capitalism; and they are going to be very polite about eating the pitiable rest of us for breakfast.

We are somewhere over Turkmanestan en route to Thailand on a half empty Thai Airways flight, and so far it’s been pretty comfortable except for the malodorous Swiss obesity in the seat in front of me who likes to sleep with one chunky wing upraised, the better to air his left armpit. Not that it doesn’t need airing, mind you, but perhaps he might have chosen to do it al fresco, like the Matterhorn, perhaps. Thai Airways is one of that growing number of airlines that reserves its exit rows not for those of us with long legs but for people they call Gold Star members, tiny creatures whose stockinged feet barely brush the floor. On the other hand we’ve got a row of four seats to ourselves: ourselves and the occasional whiff from Herr Schweitzerman up in front. We got completely screwed up at the Zurich airport when they declared that our check-in luggage was 20 kilos overweight. Instead of transferring those kilos (most of it gifts for our Thai hosts and hostesses) to our carry-on bags we idiotically sent it to Thailand parcel post for an ungodly amount of money and without the slightest confidence that we will ever see it again. We needed a calm brain like one of our children’s to figure this out before we laid our money down. But then the hotel in Zurich did not charge us for a double room, so all we’ve done is take those savings and spent them on freight, which brings us out to about even. We will land in Bangkok at about 5:30, trudge through customs, get taken in more ways than one by a cab driver to the Swiss Lodge, and beg them to let us into our room. Failing that, we will spend a few bleary hours in a coffee shop somewhere, or stumbling through the streets, adjusting to the blossoming melée of an early Friday morning in Bangkok.
Our fellow passengers are mostly Swiss, including several muscle-bound gays for whom Bangkok has become a congenial destination. Many of the married couples look to be recently retired and on tour with a very glossy Thai guide who circulates among them with his purse, speaking a lilting Switzer Deutsch and fetching them drinks with a flourish. The stewardesses are graceful, aristocratic looking girls in silk outfits with long necks upon which their heads seem almost to wobble as they mince up and down the aisles, passing out hot towels, mixed nuts, entrées, brandy, and glass after glass of juice and water. They are so delicate-looking and elegant that I think we with our wide backsides and rumpled clothes should be serving them, or more appropriately, digging potatos and ditches..
It’s strange, though, how in mid flight the familiarity of a wide-body jet takes a little of the adventurous feeling out of travel, as if we were taking a shuttered (and very slow) monorail from one Disneyland exhibit to another. But I anticipate that as we step off the plane and get hit by the first blast of hot, humid air, carrying with it the unadulterated smell of teeming human habitation, and submit to customs, and fumble with the currency, and puzzle over the signage, and pass among crowds of slender Thais and ride past the glossy, prehistoric-seeming vegetation of palms and banana trees – that Swiss Lodge or no Swiss Lodge, Switzerland itself will seem farther away even than it actually is.

Zurich snapshots

So here's lunch near the Hotel Storchen, a Schnapps distillery, a condom store, a view up the river, and lunch at the Liguria restaurant yesterday. Not that I think any of this is interesting, but apparently this is the kind of stuff a blog demands. Tomorrow we fly to Thailand, where we hope we'll have more to show and tell. 

We spent a couple of evenings out on the terrace at the Zurichberg, Debbie eavesdropping with her characteristic live-and-let-live look of non judgmental acceptance. Today as Debbie gave her paper I went downtown to a local radio station to be interviewed via satellite by Radio Three of the BBC, which is producing a radio documentary about the Jubilee Singers to be aired on October 27 and will apparently be available on their website as well. Being interviewed by a journalist in London (she's the daughter of Tim Jeal the biographer of Gladstone, Livingston and now Stanley) in a radio studio in Zurich about a book I wrote eight years ago was an out-of-body experience. Anyway, here are some views of Zurich from my aimless wanderings.

Yesterday I was drawn into the vortex of Debbie's professional life, and accompanied her to the dinner in honor of the various speakers at the conference that has footed the bill for our stay here in Zurich. So I donned my jacket and tie and met a coterie of her colleagues: a nice Irishman from Birmingham named Jim who looked like Jim Broadbent's little brother, a very serious Dutchman named Jeert, and Ruth, Debbie's pal from UW, and we all set off on the tram. The dinner was held in an old shipyard building that had been converted into a kind of multipurpose visitors center, where we drank wine,m ate dinner, and headed home.

Our hotel turns out to be on a hillside overlooking the lake, with a long sloping lawn leading down to a venerable residential area. We feel a little over our heads in the Hotel Zurichberg, which Debbie’s hosts are treating us to. The room comes with a kind of catalogue of the designers who produced the furniture. For instance, I am apparently seated on a “Charles Sofa” by Atnonio Citterio, half watching General Petreas defending the indefensible on my BEO Vision 6 while enjoying complimnewntary fruit set out on my Atlas Table from Jasper Morrison. The desk, incidentally, is finished with linen lacquer by Italian reformed drug addicts from the Fondazione San Patrignano. We are still trying to figure out how to operate the lamps. The whole place makes us feel lumpy.

Goodbye Basel

We left Basel for Zurich on Monday after a tearful farewell to the Nissens with whom we feel more bonded than ever. The day before we gathered with almost the entire clan to celebrate what seems to be Catherine's successful neck surgery. Zurich is about an hour’s train ride east. The two cities sit in relationship to each other much like Edinburgh and Glasgow, except the contrast is not so dramatic. For though Basel is as prim as Edinburgh, Zurich doesn’t have the working man feel of Glasgow. I haven’t been able to observe too much about the SWwiss, but when did that ever discourage me from making sweeping generalizatiolns? In fact, how can you make truily sweeping generalizations when you’ve got hard data to back you up? They seem to me a curious combination of things. The smoking bans that obtain in Italy and the US have not penetrated Switzerland, and a lot of people sit around after work at the outdoor cafes smoking. They seem a little sun-shy. Most of the cafes in Basel and Lausanne are on the afternoon-shady side of the street. They have sophisticated sweet teeth, and over and over again – that is, maybe twice – I saw otherwise unposted matrons brought up short by displays of sacher tortes, bonbons, mousses, in shop windows. The old guard in Basel hold their noses at a certain tilt, as thought alert for some offensive whiff to report to the canton authorities. The Swiss have an ability to look icily disapproving that would put an English lord to shame. The country continues to look to my eyes like a model train set. Even the construction machinery is kept spanking clean, and the names on factories and malls and stations look as though they’d been invented by some toy company functionary: SPU, Kronin, HAFF, etc. The tidiness of things accentuates this impression, and for a country bankrolled by such criminal entities as international banks and pharmaceutical companies, it’s remarkably civil. Debbie finds the cultural of efficiency and punctuality rather soothing. I find it conducive to work: inspiring, even, but then I always get a lot of vaunted ideas wherever I don’t speak the language, maybe because it confers on me a sort of uniqueness. But then it’s also the influence of our dear and cultivated friends the Nissens who have unaccountably befriended us Philistines.

On Monday, on our return trip from Zurich, we also stopped at an Augustan Roman town, complete with amphitheater and Roman temple set on the slope of a hill about ten miles from Basel. Hard to imagine all those Italians huddled here in winter time, but apparently it was an important place during the Roman campaigns in France and Germany. They intend to start using the amphitheater again for performances of some kind, and have restored the seats by lining them in gravel jammed into cages, like you see sometimes along a mountain highway, which ought to make for a comfortable evening sometime in the future.

I also admire all the drinking fountains the Swiss have  

installed that take advantage of the steady supply of water from the Alpine glaciers. I'm not much of a fan of the beer stein aesthetic on their multi-colored monuments to largely irrelevant Swiss military heros (apparently the Swiss tried to outlaw Swiss mercenaries without much success until two phalanxes encountered each other on opposing sides of some French/Italian imbroglio and refused to fight each other, whereupon the rest of Europe ceased hiring them except for show.) But every couple of blocks there are these beautiful stone fountains with brass fittings and the steady gurgle of water that Debbie and I used to dip our handkerchiefs into during our heat-waved sojourn here five years ago. 

Here are three I came upon in

Rheinfelden. Made me wonder what I might hang outside my place of business. A gilded keyboard, perhaps, or a gel pen, spectacles, or an editor hanged in effigy. 

One of the town's splendors was this old former Jewish fish house with murals on its facade that put William Morris to shame. I got fascinated by the gilded ironwork shingles they hang around here with logos of suns and castles and fish.