The area of Bangkok I live in is near the Victory Monument, or anusobari chai somonapul. It’s a major transportation hub, with a Skytrain station, bus stops, and minivan pickup points. The circle around the monument is packed full restaurants and people selling everything. Huge billboards surround the circle, and the Skytrain curves around it. The sidewalk leading down the street away from the monument towards my apartment is so full of vendors and aimlessly milling people, that the only way to get through it is to walk in the road, dodging motorcycles and people jumping off of busses.

It’s an interesting area, but the huge numbers of people are frustrating. Queues to get out of the Skytrain station are long during rush hour, and the platform is often crammed with people. The narrow skywalk is crowded with aimlessly wandering people. I usually take the other exit, which is totally deserted.

This is what the area looks like today, from VirtualTourist.com

This is a fascinating undated photo of the area a long time ago, from 2bangkok.com. The photo has no date.

To do: I’ll have to walk around with my camera sometime and take some pictures. For full effect, I’ll have to do this after work, when the crowds are at their height.

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I don’t know if it was the worst movie ever made, but the Thai film Lizard Woman is a strong contender.

Wherever you go in Thailand you will come across cute little lizards that make clicking sounds. They are about as scary as kittens, which was this horror movie’s first flaw. But more importantly was the fact that nothing made sense.

The film opens with a group of students and a professor wandering around in a forest. They come to a house and break into it. Unfortunately for them, the house is inhabited by evil lizards. One of the students immediately takes off her clothes to take a Thai-style shower (dip a cup into a cistern and pour), but a lizard comes and she screams.

The professor hears her scream and looks for her, but a ghost comes. Then he sees her, but now she is a lizard woman. Some more lizards come and jump on the students and bite them, turning them all into crazed axe-wielding lizard people. One student is able to escape for a while by accidentally poking one of the lizard people in the eye. But after running away from another ghost, he too joins the lizard person club.

Then we cut to a woman going to Chiang Mai. She buys a cursed box from a Hill Tribe woman, then goes to give a lecture. Apparently she is a famous author named Kwan, which is strange, because Thai people only read comic books.

After returning to Bangkok, Kwan starts seeing lizard crap everywhere. After chewing out her maid, the maid calls an exterminator. But the lizard crap problem continues. She also starts to see hallucinations of lizards, so her doctor boyfriend does some tests on her, but can’t find anything wrong.

Then Kwan's boss vomits blood everywhere and dies. She can’t understand why someone so young and healthy would die, but her doctor boyfriend carefully explains that sometimes people just randomly die for no reason.

Luckily, a nurse reminds the doctor that he used to be a surgeon, so he goes to the library and reads up on brain surgery. Unfortunately, Kwan went crazy and had a cat fight with a nurse, ripping off her clothes and escaping. Then she became Lizard Woman, and jumped around eating bugs.

The exterminator captures her, and takes her and her boyfriend to the country to perform a sort of Thai Exorcist ceremony to save her from the root of the problem: the cursed wooden lizard she bought in Chiang Mai. He has some women do a Thai dance, but a lizard comes and bites one of the dancer’s eyes out. Then he has some guys play drums, but the drums catch on fire. Then the wooden lizard comes alive and bites the exterminator’s finger off, and Lizard Woman rips her clothes off again and escapes.

So with the exterminator and Thai dancers out of the picture, it’s all up to the boyfriend. He goes alone into a dark room full of lizards, and tells his lizard girlfriend that he loves her. But she jumps THROUGH him and rips out his heart, then eats it.

But then BAM, she’s back at her lecture in Chiang Mai, where she explains that when she writes, she is the main character, and her friends and colleagues are the other characters. When she gets back to Bangkok, she gives her boyfriend the cursed wooden lizard she bought, and he, not surprisingly, becomes Lizard Man. The end!

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The cool season is upon us. I think. If you just got off the plane, you would think it’s damn hot. But if you lived here, you would notice a very slight decrease in temperature. The decrease is so small that it is not a cause for celebration. The important change is the occasional warm breeze, which is preferable to the normal stagnant hot air.

So, walking around outside during the day is still sweaty work. Even waling around at night isn’t fun. But if you sit down outside at night, it is downright pleasant. That is why beer gardens proliferate this time of the year, making Bangkok a nice place to spend time.

The World Trade Center is beer garden central, with an area for each of the beers available in the Kingdom: Leo, Singha, Chang, and Heineken. Yes, Thailand is not exactly a beer lovers paradise. Each area has its own live music, and is staffed by an army of easily confused waiters and waitresses. Despite the confusion, it’s a great place to spend an evening. In a Thai venue like this, pitchers of beer are cheap, and the food is good. The Heineken garden even had sausages.

However, we did not opt for a mere pitcher of beer. We had to have the “tower of beer,” a massive tank, complete with its own tap. I think it was about three liters. Thankfully I did not have class until 2 the next day.

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Thailand has been having trouble with its three southernmost provinces intermittently for the last hundred or so years ever since the Thai-speaking Buddhist kingdom of Siam annexed the Malay-speaking Muslim provinces. Not surprisingly, the southerners, who have more in common with Malaysia, would prefer autonomy, and occasionally rise up against Bangkok.

Things haven’t been too bad, up until a few years ago, when the current Prime Minister came to power, and began following a George Bush-like shoot first and ask questions later policy. Much like Iraq, this stirred up a hornet’s nest.

At a recent protest, the government sent in the troops, forcing people onto the backs of trucks. They piled people on top of each other, and the net result was about 80 deaths. It’s become a bit of a controversy, but the Prime Minister is adept at weaseling out of this sort of thing.

Enter my university. Luckily, they have found the solution to the problem. A sign outside the office proclaims “One crane represents freedom, a million cranes will bring peace to the South.” Below this are instructions on how to make your very own paper crane, and a box to put it in.

The students have embraced the new peace process wholeheartedly, and some have made up to five cranes. During lecture time, of course.

I suppose if it keeps them quiet during class I can’t complain, right?

Read more about the Tak Bai massacre

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The university I work at may be run by idiots, but unfortunately I can’t give them credit for the hair-brained origami-for-peace scheme. This comes all the way from the top: the Thai Prime Minister himself. After killing 80 people during the latest demonstration, and 540 this year, he wants to dump planeloads of garbage on the South. Unbelievable.

But then again, it is a very Thai solution. People get to spend hours and hours doing busy work, but accomplish nothing useful in the end. Thais love their busywork, from the armies of office workers sorting and stamping the mountains of paperwork that prevent any real work from getting done, to the shopkeepers scrubbing the filthy sidewalks outside their shops that will never come clean, to the old guys sweeping puddles of water around after it rains. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing, as long as you’re doing something, and accomplishing nothing.

And, the students love it. Of the 12 out of 80 students who came to my last lecture, the six Thai students were all busy folding their cranes. They must have gotten bored, though, because after the break only the six foreign students remained.

I swear I’m not making this up

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As much as I complain about living in Thailand, I am glad I had the chance to escape, at least for awhile. This article could have been about me before I left.

Wild, Unattatched Twenties Spent at Work

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Thanksgiving som tom

Last year I went to the American-owned Bourbon Street Restaurant for Thanksgiving, which has a big buffet, complete with turkey and bread pudding. But since I don’t actually like turkey, and I was by myself, I went to the World Trade Center Beer garden this year, and ordered up a traditional Thanksgiving feast of som tom and sausages.

That som tom was the single spiciest thing I have ever eaten. And be warned: never mix beer and spicy food. I was slowly slogging through it, until I accidentally ate a chili, a near fatal mistake. My mouth and lips burned, my nose watered, I felt sick to my stomach, and I became lightheaded. The waitress kept apologizing for not asking me if I wanted phet (spicy) or mai phet (not spicy).

I actually enjoy the challenge of spicy som tom. Just avoid the chilies.

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The origami story is shaping out to be typical of Thai politics. The Prime Minister comes up with some crazy plan off the top of his head (30 baht universal healthcare, eliminate drug use, free cows for all farmers), and leaves some poor underlings to implement them, resulting in chaos (bankrupt hospitals, thousands of people executed by police, the cow scheme was so insane I don’t think anything ever came of it).

Not surprisingly, the origami-for-peace scheme, which the Prime Minster probably spent about 30 seconds thinking up, is turning out to be a logistical nightmare, which the postal service and Air Force have to deal with.

Then there’s the fact that southern leaders have declared the birds to be meaningless. Maybe if they actually worked on solving the real problem, instead of creating strange new ones.

Here is the story from The Nation.

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