Took My Chances on a Big Jet Plane & Nothing's Been the Same,Same

In the seven months I’ve been in Thailand, I’ve experienced more backwardness, frontwardness, upwardness and sidewayzness than one can only hope to stumble upon during their time on Earth. I try and commit it all to memory, but lezbehonest, the ole cranium aint what it used to be. But here’s a few life lessons I’ve unearthed during my stint in SEAsia.

• Embrace the butt sprayer. There’s absolutely nothing third world about a little extra cleanliness downstairs, so fear not the ass-hose, my friends.
• When in doubt, smile and wave like a lunatic.
• Time in Thailand is not measured in military time; rather in ‘I’ll get to it after my nap’ time.

• There’s really no point in showering, using perfume, or defunking your wardrobe when twenty minutes later you’ll moto through an open fire and smell like BBQ pork.
• I should’ve minored in charades. I knew I was blessed with gangly appendages for a reason.
• Deter your attention away from the woman scrubbing your chicken in a bucket, with her hands. 

• There are enough pathetic looking street pups for Sarah McLachlan to make a feature-length tear-jerker.
• In America, you find a shard of bone in your soup you complain to the chef and receive a complimentary meal. In Thailand, you find a shard of bone in your soup you contemplate the safest way around ingesting this weapon, so as to not offend anyone.
• The worst possible place in traffic when hung over is the one between the garbage truck and the fish cart. Mmm Good Morning Ladiez.

• The first time I tinkled in a squatty potty without sprinkling my toes will rival the birth of my first child on the euphoria scale. 
• Asian Marketing has zero correlation to the product being sold, yet those brilliant bastards could sell me a ham sandwich from a hardware store with that dancing rooster playing the xylophone. 

• I’m continually surprised by the objects Thai people can carry on motorbike. From generations of monks to bathtubs and goats… Tim O’Brien should write a book about that. The Things they Moto’d.
• Never pass up the opportunity to drink with a group of middle-aged Thai men. Whether sipping Thai whiskey with the neighbors or a group of hairdressers outside the pharmacy, there’s nothing uninteresting about breaking cultural barriers with a little chest burning sauce. 
• Cheese is the unifier of all food groups. Thailand refuses to recognize this fact. Currently I’d ditch appendages for some QUESOOOO.
• Taco Bell’s sales are going to skyrocket upon my return. Fourth meal? Try Fifteenth meal with a side of burrito.  
• Only here can you don tie-dyed MC Hammer pants, a shirt that reads “I LOVE POOPING” and an epic mullet and not be featured on ‘People of Wal-Mart.’ 

• Cartoon, Pancake, Soccer, Neon, Jetski, Doughnut and Arm. No, I don’t have tourettes, these are a few of my favorite names of students. Cartoon may or may not have narcolepsy.
• If a grown man named ‘Bandit’ walks into the library and proceeds to sit down and shamelessly belt out notes alongside music videos on the projector, continue marking tests like it’s nothing you haven’t seen before. No sir, this is not a place of education, this is your personal shower concert and I respect your self-assurance. 

• Those days when you don’t want to work, then you’re greeted by a mob of tiny hands reaching for you from all angles, chanting your name and you can’t help but grin. It’s a beautiful thing.
• Asian kids don’t need toys; they will successfully play with my blonde arm hair for hours on end. Teacha like white bear.
• Don’t auto-tune your ecosystem. Sometimes it’s best to ditch the headphones and listen to sounds from the ground.  

• That being said, there’s a song out there for everything and if you can’t find the right words, surely someone else can. A Zeppelin a day keeps the crazy at bay.
• If you plan on throwing down some aggressive dance moves at a stoplight, make sure you’re far enough away from school that the Principal won’t be stopped next to you.
• Appreciate connections made across the world. 

• Do something that absolutely terrifies you. This may or may not involve eating a fried insect or getting on stage in front of a graduation show and dancing to Pitbull.
• We’re either running from something or searching for something, when all we really need is to stand still with our eyes closed for a while.  

• The ocean can answer most questions.
• And this fish gets life.

• We all want a connection; to someone or something. But the greatest connection is the one you find with yourself.
• But it's okay to let the drawbridge down every once in awhile. Concrete castles get lonely after awhile... let someone in. 

• People come and people go, but that’s life. The trick is to hold onto the few who lift you up and force you to be a better version of yourself; and I’m so thankful for those people in my life, near and far. Couldn’t have made this journey without your support!

Slow Boatin' Laos Style

After Songkran little Jameson and I packed our things to set out on a three day journey to Luang Prabong, Laos. That night, Jamie woke up with the yaks continuing until the next morning when we awoke bright and early to catch a mini-bus for a winding ride through the mountains. My own flood of nausea accompanied the early morning rays and I fought back bile burps, believing I can think my way out of vomiting, considering it’s been years since I’ve puked—sober or intoxicated. I’ve got a steel stomach.

I manage to sleep all 8 hours of this hellish bus ride, a nominal feat for a terrible sleeper. Jamie and I forced sprites down our throats at the first rest stop and couldn’t even find the physical strength to walk a block to take pictures of the amazing White Wat in Chiang Rai; something I’ve wanted to see forever. Finally we’re dropped at a random guesthouse where the driver instructs the entire van that we’re to stay until tomorrow morning when we board the slow boat.

With the departure of the van drivers went the last shred of informed people with English language, leaving us alone at this Psycho-esque motel 6. After 20 exhausting minutes of sweaty charades, I manage to get Jamie and I into a private aircon room, where we immediately crash for another five hours. Jamie showers as I flip between our two available tv channels—Thai soap operas or Thai game shows. I settle on more sleep. An hour later, I decide it’s my turn to shower the travel grime from my body, when I realize our water ceased flowing. Weak to the point of forgoing cleansing my filthy body for another 20 hours until the boat docks, I lay back in bed. But the insight that my hair has enough grease in it to power a KFC factory, rises my zombie body from the bed.

I ask one of the Thai women where I can shower and she points to a bathroom down a creepy alleyway, but I grab my toiletries, now determined to find running water. I soon discover this bathroom hasn’t any water either, save the butt sprayer that trickles a decent stream when operated low to the dirt-encrusted tile. So here I am, more physically weak than an osteoporosis patient, Asian squatting in the middle of a disturbing commode, whose wallpaper was no paper at all, but imprints of the carcasses of jungle creatures as well as shadows of living ones. At this point, I’m close to my low point in traveling and Thailand in general fighting back tears and the urge to rip this ass hose out of the wall and choke someone with it.

The next morning, we saunter down to the boat dock and are shuffled into this wooden arc filled with people who’d managed to get their sleepy asses up to stake claim on some seats. Seats being the wobbly old mini-van benches some shyster stripped from a junkyard to set precariously on the running boards of an already questionably secure “watercraft.” Apparently, slow boat is code for Farang Slave Ship. 

We’re herded with the other stray sheep to the back of the boat, behind the engine, where we realize we’re being forced to sit Indian style for the next 8 hours behind this massive, toxin-emitting engine. After avoiding a near-death conversation with creepy Chem Trails man, I occupied my time with journaling and staring out the square portal to the past. Through that window, I watched tiny villages pass where children dance and swim at the bank of the muddy river, wearing little beyond a smile, simply enjoying the company of other kids just all being real kiddy. And as much as I sound like a predator, I yearned for that innocence, to be swimming stark naked in a river in the middle of the woods.

 

These little mountain goat children hop from cliff to cliff on quartz moon rocks, their padded jungle feet adhering to the slippery surface like tiny Velcro shoes. I gave a wave to a small boy fishing and he countered by raising his trophy—a tiny fish barely visible—pride glowing on his tiny face. These scenes transported my mind to a much simpler time, where a lone fisherman fastens a blue tarp into his blue shelter on his deserted strip of heaven. And as sun dips below the mountains, a flaming raspberry hanging above the jagged space crystals and paints the mountains as pink as those strangely pigmented buffalo littered along the riverbank, I’m thankful for this rickety boat, gas fumes and Laos.