Catching Up II

When we first arrived in Chiang Mai we stayed at a picturesque little hotel not far from where we were eventually to find our apartment. It was run by a thin Englishman with bottle bottom glasses and his Thai companion. We were not typical of their clientel and felt a little anachronistic as we made our way to our room, past fountains consisting of rotating marble balls, little boys urinating, grown men wrestling, and so on. But the room itself was tastefully appointed, and as I walked out the hotel's soi, the Thai word for cross-street or alleyway, I walked amidst a swarm of butterflies. • By then we had already encountered Debbie's students in Bangkok as they came dribbling in from Seattle and moved into rooms in the YWCA, among them a Moslem woman of Thai extraction who had just visited her grandparents back in Viet Nam, from whence she and her family had fled when she was a baby. Debbie's class seemed to us very promising and congenial, and eager to see as much of Thailand as possible. • But back to the hotel of rotating balls. Debbie and I and her students had lunch with the dean of the nursing school at the local university: a very canny and self confident woman whom I found myself grilling about education in Thailand, as though my father's ghost had found the ventriloquist's string on the back of my shirt and had me in his thrall. Debbie's colleague Michael had instructed us that Thai's always pick their teeth after a meal, albeit behind a napkin, which has the odd effect of making everyone appear as though they were playing the comb. Nevertheless I winced when Debbie began to pick at her teeth beside the dean, until I looked over and saw that the dean too was working something from between a couple of molars. • As Debbie began her classes, I went out hunting for an apartment. I was shown a room in a dismal establishment called Hillside Four, with its abandoned lobby and empty stores, like a 1950s Asian hotel that had fallen on hard times. So we decided on Apartment 801 in Srithana Condo 2 beside the shopping mall, which looks like the apartment of a minor drug dealer in an episode of Miami Vice. It's quite spacious, and situated on the corner of the building so there's nice cross ventilation in the event of a breeze. • The weather has been hot and humid, but it has cooled down considerably since we got here. I sweat more when I enter an airconditioned establishment, but sweat plenty walking the hot streets. We were like mad dogs and Englishmen as we made our first expeditions through the town, walking great distances in the midday heat. But now we take the three-wheeled tuktuks or the roofed and benched minitrucks called seelaws on most trips. The seelaws cost about fifty cents to take you anywhere, and pick up multiple passengers along the way. Nevertheless I prefer the somewhat pricier tuk-tuks, which bump and swerve through traffic like rodeo bulls and give me a headlong sense of adventure, even if it's just a run to an ATM. We also time our lives differently: getting up early to take advantage of the cooler temperatures, retiring to the apartment in the middle of the day, then proceeding to a nearby hotel pool or out to a restaurant in the afternoon or evening.