by Alex Gunn
I wrote back naively asking why I would want to pay so much more just for the addition of a receipt. The response I got back should be framed and a copy given to anybody wishing to settle in Thailand. It spelt out, as though I was somewhat of a dim wit (which when it comes to things like this is sadly not too far off the mark) that the first price was the proper price that would go through all the proper channels, the second price is merely “tea money” that would allow me to get our stuff, but without any paper work.
I wrote back saying, “what’s Tea Money.” Although I got the general jist of the idea I had never actually heard anyone refer to it as “Tea Money” let alone read it in print from an email address bearing the mark of an official port authority. I thought that perhaps Tea Money had some other meaning or connotation, after all everything else here does. I got the best of best responses.
I think, taking pity on me, the official patiently spelt out yet again, and I quote, “tea money is money that goes straight to workers. I believe this idea came from China where men would buy tea with their money. Today the men buy other things”. It’s this last bit that really gets me. Its good isn’t it. It imparts a sense of tradition and practical necessity, and leaves you wondering what men do actually buy these days with their tea money, i-phones, mortgages, lap tops, lap dancers? Your guess is as good as mine. Anyway, I paid the tea money and our stuff arrived in a big truck the following week.
It was all heaved into our home by about a thousand very young looking teenage boys, all smoking, with dirty clothes and ripped jeans. I got the distinct impression they lived in the back of the truck in the clothes they stood up in, only leaping into semi-life when the back doors opened. There really was a lot of them.
It was a weird feeling seeing all our old stuff suddenly in the middle of our new home. Initially it felt all wrong, like the characters in one book appearing without explanation on the pages of a completely different and unrelated book, like Miss Haversham from Great Expectations confronting Scaramanga, the arch enemy of James Bond in A Man With The Golden Gun. It all felt mixed up, besides which I can’t for the life of me remember why I thought I might want three trumpets in Thailand.
The boys looked through their boxes of toys claiming that it was all boring “kids stuff” and they didn’t want any of it. I must admit I had the same kind of feeling. It felt like looking at relics from another life, which I suppose in many ways it was; things that only a year ago must have seemed really important that now I could barely remember. It all felt like such a long time ago. A different life time. Apart from the lovely big sofa and a few other odds and sods I felt like getting the army of a thousand smoking teenage boys to load it all back up on the truck and take it away. God knows how much Tea Money that would have taken. Instead I paid the driver and the drivers boys a handsome tip and continued the unpacking and walking about the house holding trumpets and wondering where to put them.
Roughly coinciding with the arrival of our stuff was our hiring of the meanest money thieving Thai teacher in the world (certainly the meanest person in Thailand). By the third lesson she was trying to swindle us out of our sofa.
It would be fair to her to say that things started off badly and went very quickly downhill. It would however be more accurate to say that she was a complete nightmare and was the teacher from hell. She would have got along like a house on fire with Miss Benewith and Miss Black from my Primary School. She was fairly young, quite dumpy and had a very brusque, business like manner as she swept into our home with a mini white board announcing that her fees had just gone up and she wanted three months payment in advance. Wow. You have to admire her directness. She might well have said “I’m going to take you for everything you have and I’d like you to start paying up now”. I could see the Chiang Mai Laundry sign appearing in the distance.
I don’t know how much we actually paid her that first lesson but I remember her looking disappointed and saying that she would need more money next time. She was more like a grumpy drug dealer. She also said that as our Thai was so atrocious we would have to triple our lessons (and her bank balance). We were very glad when she left.
She marched back into our home a couple of days later spouting her unique mixture of demands for money and comments about how bad our Thai was. As I attempted to pronounce Thai consonants she would just shake her head tutting under her breathe. She was a little kinder to my wife, but still managed to convey her sense of hopeless pity when she attempted to repeat the dreaded vowels. By the end of our second lesson I had stopped trying to speak Thai at all and was seriously worried about how much all this meanness was costing.
Things were about to get more surreal. Between lesson two and three I had decided that we should get rid of her before I went bankrupt and was divested of my last few Thai words and shards of broken confidence. My wife, being the kindest person on earth (along with Son) said that she was okay and we should persevere. I couldn’t believe it, this woman was insane, our Thai was going backwards and she was taking money off us left right and centre.
To sway the argument with my loving and ever kindly wife I had gone out and purchased a great book called Teach Yourself Thai in Two Weeks. I loved the blatant optimism. It’s the kind of book you buy, knowing deep down, that it’s complete hog wash that you will speak Thai in two weeks, it’s as likely that you will learn French in an afternoon or fly to the moon in a shoe. It’s the fantasy you buy when you have given up on reality.
Armed with this book I said that we could manage on our own without Khun Kru (Miss Teacher, as she called herself, probably to hide her true identity from her angry students and the police) and I was prepared to sack her the next time she showed up, which felt like every other hour. My kindly wife reluctantly agreed. The plan was set. Goodbye Khun Kru.
I had never sacked anyone before and had worked out a little speech which put the blame more on our inability to learn language and quickly dwindling bank balance (both of which were not untrue) rather than her ability to be a complete money grabbing bitch. When she arrived I had hardly got half way through my little speech, with my extra serious face on, when she unexpectedly burst into tears and collapsed in a heap of uncontrollable sobs across the table. My wife and I looked at each other. Now what?
My wife consoled her as I made us all a nice cup of tea in the Thunderbird mugs. I gave her Thunderbird 3 as it is my least favourite. I had Thunderbird 2, as usual, and gave my wife Thunderbird 5 (the space station). After she stopped sobbing, which went on for a surprisingly long time, and ignoring my tea, she told my wife a tale of sorry woe.
By this time she must have worked out that I was the bad cop with the sacking speech and secret self help book, so she was just pretending that I wasn’t there. She told my wife that her sister or it could have been her cousin or best friend or even her best friends sister, it all sounded a bit jumbled, had cancer and would die unless she had immediate surgery that would cost a lot of money. I weakly said that we didn’t have a great deal of money ourselves. On hearing this she eyed our sofa and announced that she could sell it to a friend she knew and was certain that it would cover the costs of the operation. It wasn’t exactly an offer that we couldn’t refuse, so I said no. Well actually I said that as urgent as it all sounded we would have to think about it as it not only cost us a lot of money but also had great sentimental value and we had just had it sent at considerable expense across the world. Bearing all this in mind I think she realized she was onto a loser. At that moment I reckoned that if she could have picked it up and run off with it she would have done. She skulked out of our house, and our lives, trailing her mini white board, multi coloured pens and vitriol behind her. Whether the story was true or not I have no idea. I some how doubt that it was. Thankfully I’ve never seen her since to find out…the thieving old trout.
The experience proved that we were at least serious about learning Thai, and serious about staying. Besides, how far would we get
with Leonard Elmhirst’s armchair, a sofa and three trumpets.
Chapter 22
What’s Different –
A Year Long Lesson
I was recently reading an article in a local paper about how westerners traditionally and alternately feel “dazzled” and “dismayed” by Thailand. The article traced this phenomenon back to obscure accounts by various intrepid explorers who over the last 200 years have attempted to understand and explain the land of smiles. I suppose I have unwittingly joined this merry, and at times thoroughly un-merry bunch.
On reflection the past year has probably been the most difficult year of my life. I guess giving up comfortable English middle class life to arrive with two small children in a remote “jungle city” in northern Thailand, with no connections, no language, no work and limited money is always going to be a challenge. Had I realized exactly how challenging, I would have been a lot more hesitant to ditch good jobs and burn anything that looked like a bridge.
The past year really has come and gone in a blink of an eye. It feels like we’ve just arrived from the airport. It’s difficult to sum it all up. What’s more I seem to be suffering from a rare condition whereby I suddenly think of the perfect way to sum up this past year and tell you everything that I want to tell you whilst at the local market, only to dash home and stare blankly at a computer screen.
There have certainly been good and not so good along the way and so many things learnt, and surreal moments experienced that would not have been if we had remained in our cosy lives back home.
One thing that has become very clear is who our friends are. If you are in any doubt who your friends actually are, try moving to the other side of the world, stay there for a year and see who you are still in touch with.
Some people who we thought we would be life long friends with, have disappeared like the morning mist, they just drifted away into nothingness after several unanswered emails. Conversely some people who previously we had only a limited friendship with suddenly take centre stage. We therefore found ourselves on Christmas Day talking, via the magic of Skype, not to life long friends but to the mother of our youngest son’s best friend, who we had got to know briefly before we left England.
We are also working much harder now than we ever have done before. Although we left jobs that felt pressured and stressful we were still able to have things like days off when we were ill. I actually can’t remember what it’s like to have a proper day off like we used to have. Apart from our holiday down south we have worked more or less every day over the past year to get our business up and running; a constant struggle to beat the moment when our limited borrowed money runs out.
I remember a wonderful evening just before we left England when my wife and I were working out how often and how little I would have to work in our new business in order to make ends meet. I think we said that I would need to work something like 4 weeks out of every 6, or something equally deluded. If anyone thinks that it is a less stressful option to move overseas and set up and run a little business, please think again, very hard. Unless you are currently working in a Siberian salt mine I promise it won’t get any easier. As Paul from The Rachamankha wisely said, “the trouble is with moving overseas is that you take yourself with you.”
We are now on our third web site and Ozzi has taught us how a web site has to function and Glen has passed on the dark art of web marketing and Search Engine Optimization. Despite this I still get regular emails from SEO “experts” all very ready to take large sums of money off me for doing, what I now understand by its technical name as, “bugger all.”
Having become a lot closer acquainted with our friends in this parallel cyber universe I have lived through what I like to call “key word density hell”. The loony psychiatric nurse who we were paying to rescue our web site advised me to re-write several important pages, mentioning particular “key words” at a density of between 5% and 10%. In this case the phrase was “mid life anxiety.” Try doing it without sounding like a complete nutter. I think he was just making it up as he went along.
I’ve also become familiar with the importance of image download time, use of white space, back end organisation, indirect and social media marketing, affiliated marketing, internal link structure, external feed back links, the three click rule and the great phrase “content is king”. I reckon I could now have a pretty good stab at building a pretty good functional web site for somebody from scratch. I also reckon, from the experience gained from our UK web site company that I could quote some really ridiculously large sums of money without killing myself laughing.
I’m very proud of our little web site now, it still needs constant attention but has kind of taken the place of my goats and geese; always getting into trouble, can’t be left alone too long but capable of being very rewarding.
In a recent interview about our strange business, by a very nice Australian journalist for an Australian health magazine (she found our web site through a Google search, well done Glen and Ozzi and all your external feedback links). She asked me what I miss about “back home”. She really caught me on the hop. I really hadn’t given it a lot of thought. All I could think of saying was “affordable good cheese” and “BBC Radio 4”. She responded with some surprise pointing out that I could listen to Radio 4 very easily on the internet, which, I kind of knew anyway but it just feels different. I can’t listen to it in the truck as I rumble about Chiang Mai, so I’m stuck with Frank Zappa and Don Giovanni on the CD player, which isn’t so bad actually. We all get along quite well.
Since I was asked this question I have thought a lot more about what I miss from “home” and what I don’t. So,here goes...
Apart from Radio 4 and good cheese I realise that I miss a sense of familiarity. There is no longer a plan to life, a bigger structure that I fit neatly into. We have no pension plans, no family visits at Christmas, no bad weather to grumble about, no career path, no 2 weeks off in the summer to sit in the sun, no Sunday roast, no Easter bunny, no greenhouse with tomato plants, no Chinese Take Away, no neighbours that speak the same language; there is very little in our lives that provides a sense of familiarity or structure. It still feels like everything is new and different everyday.
This is not particularly bad, in fact it’s quite liberating but it does feel very bewildering. It’s a bit like returning home after a holiday, suffering from mild amnesia, and also finding that your house has been re-decorated and moved around. It feels familiar but you don’t know where anything is or how it works.
Everything is wonderfully temporary. We live in a rented house on a short term lease and we have to apply each year for an extension of our non resident visas. We don’t really have anything that we couldn’t walk away from. The biggest thing we own is the old truck, which if we walked away from would be a loss but not the end of the world. It’s quite the opposite when we lived in England which was all geared up to provide the illusion that everything is permanent and secure; lifetime insurance cover, Gold Card membership, never ending mortgage payments, the Christmas rush and all the other yearly rituals and familiar patterns which provide the illusion of security and permanence. Instead we now inhabit a world which we make up as we go along, which although is often strange and bewildering is also vibrant and exciting.
We can go swimming everyday in a beautiful and warm freeform swimming pool surrounded by orchids and colourful butterflies and eat out in restaurants that serve exquisite food at equally exquisite low prices. I’m afraid that even after a year my childish excitement about low prices has not worn off.
One of the last restaurant meals we had in Devon was unfortunately at Pizza Hut. It cost me the best part of one hundred pounds and really was a dreadful and depressing experience. I can still remember the smell and taste of the doughy greasy pizza and gloopy chemical enhanced dips. In comparison, the last family meal we ate recently cost me 600 Baht which included steamed Tab Tim fish with lemon gr
ass and ginger, stir fried squid with chilli and shallots, something which is locally called “prawn toast” which our children love, vegetable spring rolls, stir fried noodles with vegetables and rice, and beer and cokes and big ice creams all round. All this was enjoyed in a simple but pretty little restaurant within walking distance of our house, sitting in the warm, scented air underneath the stars. It was a Wednesday night and it wasn’t anybodies’ birthday. It felt great, and goes a long way towards the trade off with familiarity.
The other thing I miss here is a functional banking system. Actually that’s not true. The banking system here works fine, it’s just that it feels a bit like stepping back into the fifties, or what I imagine it was like banking in the fifties.
When we set up our bank accounts at the local bank in Chiang Mai I was given a cheque book. It was presented to me as though it was the original manuscript of Hamlet. My account number had been hand stamped onto every cheque by a nice lady who told me that cheque books are very important and I was to pay her 300 Baht every time I wanted a new one. In fact I have learnt over the past year that they are so important I can’t get anyone in Chiang Mai to accept one. They often don’t know what it is and just look at it frowning as though I’m trying to pass them off with an “I owe you” note, which I suppose in a way it is.
Everything here is done with cash, the world of cheques, let alone plastic cards, has yet to arrive. It’s not unusual for people to pay cash for big things, like houses and cars. If you hang out at my local bank along the Hang Dong Road it is not unusual to see people arriving depositing and withdrawing huge bundles of cash, the like of which you would only see in films about bank robberies back home.