F's and Answers and Catsup

Dear D,
I answered the questions in a comment on your "Questions" post! Sorry, next time I will do it in post form.

So where did all your F's run off to? Is that some Swedish custom for midsommars?
And do you mean one of your kidneys has been acting up? I spent a few minutes trying to puzzle out how one's key could act up.. haha

Sometimes my posts seem a little disjointed from yours because since I can't connect to the internet on my laptop, I write the posts at night in my bungalow and then bring them to the office on a thumb drive. Since I've been away in Phang Nga and Phuket I'm a little behind... I will now try to catch up.

June 20, 2010

Last Thursday evening I crossed the highway, bowed/wai-ed my way by the gatekeepers’ house and dogs and walked down a paved driveway overgrown with grasses. When the driveway turned to follow the coast, I kept straight, waded through ground vines and stepped onto a mile or so long stretch of empty white sand beach. Well not completely empty, K and M were already there sharing half of a watermelon. We sat on the beach for a couple of hours and watched ponderous flat-bottomed clouds move across the ocean. I waded in the surf a little and picked up a pretty shell only to have a very angry crab come out of it and wave its claws at me. Aside from a couple of stray dogs trotting along the beach, no one else appeared on the beach the whole time we were there.

I saw my first fly-sized mosquito that day. My instinctive response to any mosquito activity is slapping and smearing, but I’ve started to notice that in the predominantly Buddhist Thailand, no one whacks bugs, or at least not in public.

After the beach, I stopped by the large screen TV that the bungalow owners set up in the window of their mini mart. A small group of older men were sitting outside watching the game, eating peanuts, smoking and drinking Thai whisky. They offered me a seat and I sat with them for a while. One of the men kept trying to pass me his tobacco and rolling papers…and I began to wonder: did these men think I was a boy? I was wearing a plaid shirt, very conservative shorts and no jewelry. I’m almost positive they would never try and get a Thai girl to roll a cigarette, but then maybe it’s because I’m farang that the man thought I would really appreciate the gesture. Later one of the men brought out a bowl of stew with a bunch of spoons, which was also offered to me. I tried to ask what was in it and one of them said “bif!” Which sounded sort of like beef, so I ate a spoonful of something that looked like it might be bif/beef. It was certainly NOT beef, but tasted more like fish and liver, but with so many observers I kept chewing, swallowed, smiled and declared it “aloy”.

After class on Friday, I went to get my first massage in Thailand. It was an oil massage so I had to strip down to my underwear. I was with L too, so talk about a bonding moment with your boss… I was taken aback when the masseuse led us into the massage room. It was almost completely dark except for some purplish light, which gave the impression of being in an underworld drug den. The first thing I saw after my eyes adjusted was a fat, older man with a towel around his waist getting up from a long row of beds. It was sort of creepy, but L had been there before so I continued into the purple gloom. My masseuse used oil infused with some incredibly fragrant herbs and maybe menthol. Pretty soon I was feeling very out of it. And that’s when you called, D, and I felt like I was resurfacing after a long dive into a dark cave.

After the massage L and I got dinner at a floating restaurant. Yum.

Love,
L