April 30th, 2004
108408236055228493
Clover Over Dover and me over the sea
I’m on my way to Bangkok (surprise!), though this won’t be up until after I’m back on my little island again. Of course, I’m listening to bittersweet Blur and feeling the requisite sigh and choke in my heart that comes with international travel (or maybe just no sleep the night before). Again I find myself with a single rucksack and a journal to sojourn with to yet another place I have pretty much no idea about, except what I’ve gotten from movies and music. So let’s get them all out on the table before I arrive and have it all torn down:
The King and I: getting to know you, shall we dance, kiss in a shadow, etc. *
“One Night in Bangkok“….yeah *
Street Fighter: Sagat, tiger punch, giant Buddha on his side, and the Shadowloo crime syndicate *
all those wonderful mass-produced goods *
peanuts, peanuts, peanuts…bad! *
Ok, I suppose that’s about it. I spent a meager but intense few days preparing to not look one hundred percent the fool, so I skimmed some webpages for maps, sights, customs (e.g. no touching people’s heads in public or sitting with one’s feet pointed towards another). The pinnacle of my research was my “Thai rap”, an MP3 playlist of half-second long useful sayings, rhythmically placed in eight beat granules, over and over, for most of the afternoon Wednesday at work. The total sequence is about seven phrases in series for about forty-three seconds, and seeing as how I listened to it constantly for three hours, I suppose I heard “thank you” about seven thousand times. So of course now I can say perfectly (to my ear):
thank you *
yes/no *
I don’t want it *
it’s expensive *
it doesn’t matter *
how are you *
good day *
in addition to other choice things with less accuracy. Just for kicks, I got a simple Thai handbook to read on the plane. The kicker is it’s written for Japanese people, so I get double duty translating in my mind Japanese->English->Thai. Keen, huh? Fortunately this is all basic, simple stuff so it’s just slightly above my reading level, and the pictures help. Nutty.
Two quirky memories triggered by my flight: 1) A play we read in one of our English textbooks for fourth grade about food poisoning on a flight to Minnesota in bad weather. The pilots get sick and we had to figure out how to fix all the things that went wrong so people don’t die. It was like a decision-making/risk estimation kind of thing. One of those scenarios to test critical thinking in groups. I think we debated about it for an hour before we got to read the ending.
2) The way clouds were drawn in the old EGA PC game Pirates!. My dad and I used to play a lot on Sunday mornings and I remember how the clouds looked like popcorn. I lent the paper map to Gary Cooper (kid in my neighborhood, not the actor) and he drew on it with pencil marking the locations of buried treasure, but later I realized they change every time you play the game so that was pretty much useless.
