by Alex Gunn
It’s no great hardship but it would be nice once in a while to just hand over a small plastic card rather than keep having to go to the bank to extract thousands of high denomination notes from a scared looking young bank teller staring in hopeless frightened bewilderment at my “important” cheque. When I pass it across the counter it feels like they are going to burst into tears. They really don’t seem to know what to do with it.
As for the things that I have learnt...
I think the two biggest things that I have learnt over the past year are about acceptance and a glorious new attitude to rules and regulations.
Looking back towards the rolling green hills of England, and probably the “west” as a whole I can see that it is a country with a “something has to be done about it” attitude; a kind of constant disgruntled surliness about everything. This low grade muttering, and occasional high pitched screaming and rioting, seems to be ever present in the background, whether it comes from indignant headlines of the newspapers or the mumblings detectable in supermarket queues, there is a steady doomy commentary on everything, from the state of the health service to the price of butter.
It is of course completely different here . Acceptance and non-confrontation is the order of the day. If an old lady on a bicycle is teetering along in the middle of a busy main road it is better to creep along behind her at 2 mph pretending that it’s all perfectly normal, rather than honk your horn. If a tree has blown over in the middle of the road it’s no use making a fuss, just find a way around it, using the pavement if necessary.
Just the other day driving back along the Hang Dong Road (I do drive along other roads in Chiang Mai but this is the main one that leads from our house to the city centre, and it has got a great name!) I saw an old truck shunt into the expensive car in front. Nobody was hurt; it was just one of those many accidents that happen in slow moving traffic all over the world on a daily basis. I was automatically expecting a flare of tempers, or a few heated words at least. Instead the driver in the front vehicle merely took a photo of the cars with his phone. The drivers saluted each other, there was an exchange of details and that was it. No fuss, no shouting, nothing. They both got into their cars and drove off.
This constant state of acceptance is often mistaken for inertia, which I don’t think it is. It actually takes hard work, but I am slowly learning how to do it. I am learning how to put on one side the “but this can’t be right, and something has to be done” attitude and realise that life is seldom perfect and things often don’t work out how we think they should. And, so what! Does it really matter?
The second major learning curve has been adjusting, to what I would have called whilst teaching at college “a major paradigm shift,” to the role of rules and regulations in every day life.
Coming from a country where the rules are rules, as they say, it takes some getting used to, to realise that the rules are not the rules. It’s not that Thailand doesn’t have any rules and regulations, in fact you quickly learn it is a country stuffed full of them when you first try to buy a can of beer or bottle of wine outside the licensing hours. Or get stopped by the police for not wearing a crash helmet. There is also strict regulations regarding what is deemed inappropriate to publish in magazines or show on television, hence a little blurry circle that appears on TV blocking out any TV character that is smoking a cigarette while children may still be watching. There is no shortage of rules; it’s just that people don’t see them as the rules. As such there is usually quite a lot of confusion over what the rules actually are, as anyone who has talked to two different lawyers about what visa you might be entitled to, and what you have to do to qualify to get one, will quickly find out.
So, in the absence of a clear set of rules, you may wonder how everybody gets along. Why there isn’t widespread mayhem. Well, there are two answers to this. At times there is widespread mayhem. Turn up in Chiang Mai in the middle of the Songhkran Festival to get a full flavour of what the phrase “widespread mayhem” really means. But even on a daily basis, try driving home at the end of the day when a dignitary is in town and the police have taken it upon themselves to close down half the roads in the city centre. You’ll see thousands of motorbikes zooming along the pavement, pedestrians loping along the centre of the road and other traffic novelties that would automatically make you think of the phrase “widespread mayhem.”
Of course Chiang Mai isn’t like that all the time. Most of the time people respect the rules but balance them against how useful they are. If they’re not fit for purpose they go swiftly and quietly out of the window. The real power is held by the village elders and the local temple, these are the people that prevent things from falling into widespread mayhem.
It would seem that all of Thailand is made up of thousands of tiny “villages”. At the centre of each village there is a temple entirely supported by the local community. Most of the time the villages are invisible to visitors, especially in big cities where it just looks like any other big shapeless urban sprawl. But, even in cities, communities will still revolve around local temples and the monks within. Each one of these communities will have a handful of “Village Elders” (a great phrase that makes me feel like I’m living in Middle Earth) who keep their community in check and oversee the smooth running of day to day life. They are often the voices that you might hear at about 6pm bellowing out of old fashioned loud speakers positioned atop of lamp posts.
A couple of weeks ago I was standing outside our house at the end of the day talking to Son when suddenly the familiar voice started booming out of the old fashioned loud speaker in an urgent fashion. I asked Son what he was saying. He listened for a while and said he was telling everybody how Arsenal beat Tottenham Hotspur in the English Premier Football League. Now that is news worth shouting about.
Chapter 23
Where Are We Now
Our children are extremely happy in their new “international school” and seem to consider it a matter of great luck that they were snatched from the jaws of a huge threatening English secondary school just in the nick of time. I somehow can’t imagine them sitting outside Somerfield supermarket with their mates drinking cider, but I suppose had we stayed they might well be doing just that right now, or in a few years’ time, or worse. They really do love it here a great deal. It seems to be a perfect combination for them. As my eldest observed just the other day “ten minutes one way and I can buy a Waitrose own brand Macaroni Cheese in the Airport Plaza, ten minutes the other way and I’m in the jungle”.
Our children’s current schoolmates come from a staggering twenty eight different nationalities (an addition of 5 new nations since their first day), and thankfully none of them have even heard of cider, or Somerfields (is there yet some hope for the planet?). They do all the stuff that most children in English schools do, but also lots of things that they don’t. They are learning how to speak Thai and what I call Chinese, which my son keeps referring to rather snottily as Mandarin. They play football (which as we know Thailand is absolutely crackers about) but also Tak Kraw the famous South East Asian “football tennis” which involves them kicking a small wicker ball about, leaping into the air and practicing some junior low level swearing and destroying the garden. They are appropriately lippy in the comfort of their own home but in keeping with lots of Thai children are wonderfully and surprisingly respectful to other grown ups. They greet other adults with a kind of reverence you might ordinarily reserve for meeting the Pope or Dalai Lama.
When they sometimes meet some of our guests that have booked Life Change Holidays, they greet them with a graciousness not witnessed in the west for about 500 years, since Francis Drake offered Queen Elizabeth I a potato. I can see the guests momentarily panic, unaccustomed to this elaborate show of respect, unsure whether to bow, shake hands, curtsy or all three. Before they visit England again they will need lessons in how to act like surly pre-teens and greet adults with a snarl and an “awrig
ht” before slopping off round the side of Somerfields to neck half a can of cider.
After school every day they bomb off round to the swimming pool before making a big fuss about their homework. They lark about in the warm water, often the only people there at that time of day and getting a little too big now to play “Sink The Titanic.” I think if I told them we were going “home” to the big frightening school, the steady undercurrents of unrest and the Somerfield cider crazed bullies they would kill me on the spot and dump my body over the bamboo hedge.
They are also engaged in things that I guess are the small but important things that enable people like us to put down “roots.” The youngest is guitar mad and plays in the school band while the oldest is part of a sustainability group and goes off planting trees up mountains and generally saving the planet. They have friends of all nationalities, they go for sleep overs and are part of the local growing community and by extension so are their rather weary, not so shiny, old parents.
We have worked relentlessly over the last year to make the business work...and it’s now just beginning to show signs of ongoing life rather than the erratic roller coaster it was before. Having got this far the idea of returning to England seems impossible. Even if I survived assassination from two highly respectful pre-teens I just don’t think I could manage it. We are not really living the Pepsi Cola shiny international fantasy that I imagined outside the school on that first day, but we are living a variation of it and I, my wife and children would miss it enormously.
The one thing that I wished I had known when we arrived, apart from the fact that wearing clothes like a Yoga Teacher makes you look a prat, is just how difficult it is living in another country. Not just about setting up a business, or coping with a foreign language but just the day to day business of living in an environment where everything is strange and you are always the odd one out. It makes sense to me now why ex-pats tend to congregate and huddle together, not out of love of our home countries, but just to relieve the sense of strangeness (and of course drink beer).
Over the last year my wife and children and me have seen a surprising amount of people turn up and very quickly disappear back home. It’s always terribly sad, and goodbyes are much more common here. Sometimes money runs out and businesses fail. The amount of bars, restaurants, guest houses and small hotels that open and close within 6 months is really quite shocking. But sometimes people find that it isn’t fun like it is on holiday, that you do often have to eat someone else’s breakfast and home doesn’t seem as bad when you don’t live there.
We now know how to pay both the electricity and water bill, how to order food in restaurants, how to greet monks without causing offense, how to get a tax disc for the truck, how to drive very slowly behind old ladies on bicycles without wanting to kill them, how to behave at the immigration office, how to transpose Thai Buddhist years to western Christian years (isn’t that crazy when you discover Thailand is actually in a different year to everyone else), where to buy a toaster, where not to pay by cheque (i.e. everywhere) , where to buy the best grilled sausage, when to use the phrase “mai pen rai” (which means lots of things but commonly “ it doesn’t really matter”) and generally but most importantly, how to live in a very foreign country, even if you’re the kind of person, like me, who is more cut out to live in their own garden amongst a few old chickens, some cuddly geese, several weedy tomato plants and a good dose of familiarity.
I think we’ll be staying, for a while anyway.
Book Two;
Another Year
Chapter 1
One Way Round No Bumping
January: Dry and hot, but cool at night and the swimming pool feels cold.
“The first year is a roller coaster ride, the second year is like getting on the Pirate Boat, it’s still scary but you get a chance to see where you are.” Thom.
I’m still wondering how on earth we survived the first year, and then another year, in Chiang Mai. To be honest, I’m still wondering why we did it. Why we uprooted our two young children from their friendly little village school, why we gave up good jobs, a lovely house and all the trappings of a comfortable, middle class lifestyle to embrace a future of complete uncertainty in a hot, strange city in Northern Thailand.
It was, as my new American friend Thom said, “a real dumb ass thing to do.” But then Thom says stuff like this all the time. He also says “the only way to stay sane is to stay half drunk” and the strange and rather worrying “life’s like a dead raccoon in a car wash.”
Thom’s like Plato, but I expect a lot drunker. He is also very big and very friendly and has no censorship system. If it goes through Thom’s mind, it comes out of his mouth, which is a bit of a problem as he has a voice as loud as a ship’s fog horn. He drives a huge truck the size of Berkshire and claims that he can eat more pizza than anyone else in Chiang Mai. He is also prone to exaggeration.
But then I realise if we hadn’t moved here I would never have met Thom, or come to that, Jesse, the strongest and most unpredictable man in the world, or Khun Sonthaya our self appointed guardian angel or, indeed, my new neighbour Jerry who’s in the Hong Kong Mafia. I would never have been arrested by the Chiang Mai Water Police, enjoyed the dubious pleasure of endless visa runs over the border into Burma, become the director of my own little company, burst with pride at seeing my youngest son play the part of the Cheeky Gecko at his new “international” school assembly or any one of the delights or disasters that made up the second year of our new life in Chiang Mai. Besides which, I had just splashed out 100 Baht to buy a supermarket loyalty card (I know!) and found the BBC World Service on my radio.
By comparison, my wife and two children seemed to settle in super quick. I think they did it without me noticing, while I was still unpacking.
Our two little boys couldn’t quite believe their good luck that we had whisked them away from the brink of a large and intimidating secondary school to a land where the sun always shines, swimming pools are warm, orchids bloom in vivid techni-colour and pretty butterflies flit through shady palm trees; a land where it’s permanently the summer holidays.
They made friends at their new school in a matter of seconds, learnt Chinese, Thai and French in a few days, joined the football team and cricket team, and went camping in the jungle with some friends and other assorted outward boundy-type parents who are all called Brad, have designer stubble on their chins (even the mums), wear combat trousers covered with pockets and zips and, for reasons that I really don’t understand have more state of the art camping equipment than the Swiss Army. If all this wasn’t enough they also formed an atrocious rock band with other pop minded pre-teens, competed in swimming Galas at schools with sports facilities of truly olympic proportions and generally set about doing loads of positive sounding stuff.
In the words of Thom “they settled like love birds in a nest.”
My wife, ever the woman of action, was immersed in our small and unusual company that we had set up, and to my astonishment was busily going about setting up yet more projects with Ozzi, our Scandinavian web site wizard and self confessed entrepreneur who helped us make our business work when we first arrived. Leave them alone together for longer than five minutes and they will have set up another business. When we meet to discuss the web site I’m afraid to leave the room to go to the toilet.
In what seemed like a matter of days they had set up yet another web site for the universal free sharing of ideas and innovations, got involved with a fair trade organization that sells jewelry made by Burmese refugees, raised money and organized a volunteer network for a local orphanage, planned an information portal for all the new foreigners pouring into Chiang Mai and launched a whole load of down loadable apps designed to provide self help for people giving up smoking, cutting down drinking, increasing self esteem and overcoming negative self body image. Basically, my wife is generally involved, on a daily basis, in saving the world.
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Meanwhile, I had found an old guy down the market who sold reconditioned radios and spent the following year scanning the excitable jangle of South East Asian radio stations in a desperate attempt to find the BBC World Service.
If Salvador Dali were to come back from the dead to paint a portrait of me and my wife (now that would be truly surreal) she would be a swarm of bees and I would be a pair of carpet slippers.
But, as I often say to her “you can’t make honey without slippers” and she points out to me that you can.
So, having somehow managed to muddle through the first year, here is what it was like after that. Here we go again…
Or as Thom often bellows out for reasons that I don’t understand, “one way round no bumping”.
Chapter 2
Home is Where
the Headless Geckos are
January: Dry and hot and still cold at night. My little lawn is now nothing more than a small area of brown dust.
“You like this house (pronounced “how”), I give you good price (pronounced “pry”), this is a house (“how”) for a mister.” Fang or Flan (or something like that).
It took us nine hot and uncomfortable trips in our knackered old airconditionless truck to move all our stuff from our first gigantic and overpriced home to our second slightly less gigantic and slightly less overpriced home. It was still a fairly big house but also fairly old, which in Chiang Mai means fairly cheap, which suited me, and my new Thai bank manager Mr Somjet, just fine.
After a year earning almost nothing whilst spending our life savings as well as what remained of our overdraft we were desperate to save money and find a cheaper place to live. Although our business was beginning to show signs that it could support us, we were still spending the equivalent of the national debt of Angola each month on renting a house bigger than an averagely sized primary school. It was time, once again, to get on my little motorscooter, this time newly purchased instead of hired, and zoom around the roads of Chiang Mai looking for a suitable house to rent.