by Alex Gunn
He’s mumbling stuff to me like; “you like girl? You like massage? I get you girl, you like boy? I get you Es, I get you whisky, I get you nice massage, you follow me.” He’s whispering all this to me in a highly conspiratorial way like we’re best buddies whispering about team tactics at a football match.
Soon, I am surrounded by about 20 kids offering me anything you can think of. I am offered Es, Viagra, cigarettes and an assortment of pills which are pushed into my hands. There is a small girl actually sitting on my feet waving a gas lighter with a picture of a lady in a bikini on the side. She clasps the lighter between both her hands which are in a praying position and she is rocking backwards and forwards, repeating over and over again in a slightly hypnotic way “please, please, please, please.” Although when she says it sounds like “plis, plis, plis, plis.”
Boys tug at my shirt waving Lego in my face. Girls wave felt tip pens at me and there is my bestest ever chum to my right, whispering in my ear a real load of nonsense about getting in a taxi with him and going for a bath or something. I can’t really hear what he’s saying as it all drones into one blur of mumbling noise. Apart from which, it is bloody hot and I am sweating like a whole herd of pigs lying on a sunny beach.
The kids are all getting more persistent and vaguely affronted that I haven’t yet made a purchase or just walked away. I’m clearly not following street etiquette. Oh where oh where are my wife and kids? I was walking next to them just moments ago and now they have vanished.
Just before I pass out with over exposure to the sun and a black market economy my wife appears around the corner surrounded by the biggest group of kids I have ever seen. My little group, who are now completely fed up with me, dessert me instantly and run full pelt over to her. I don’t know whether to be relieved or concerned. I am both all at once.
“Hey, hey,...hey,” I call out weakly, not sure at all what I would say if one of them turned around and said “what?” I think I would say something like, “be careful, that’s my wife,” as though she was made of fragile porcelain. Thankfully nobody paid me any attention and before you could say “can I have some Lego and Viagra please” my wife was surrounded, and I mean absolutely surrounded by children.
It was like this when we travelled through India together many years ago. By the end of the trip she was having to give back all the pens and pencils and pencil sharpeners and all the other items that she had bought from them as they had run out of junk to sell her. She was like a walking stationary shop. She even brought a half used bar of soap from a girl with one leg.
“Now, now, now, one at a time,” she was saying as she knelt down to be at their level. She was now completely invisible, buried by the massed hunched backs of about 30 kids. It looked like they had eaten her, torn her to pieces and were quietly picking over the bones.
Instead though she was giving out money,...yes, you heard me, giving away our hard earned cash to kids whose idea of a good day out is selling a lighter with a nude lady on the side to a tourist for a hundred times its value or scamming some dopey back packer.
“Here you are,” she was saying, as she handed over a 10 Baht coin to one of them. “I have one for everyone so don’t push,” she said in a slightly sterner voice. They stopped pushing immediately.
“What’s, your name?” she was saying to another as she wiped some dirt from a little girl’s cheek with a tissue.
“Look at you,” she kept saying “Look at you....now here’s some money, be careful, don’t get into trouble.”
It’s like trying to walk about with Mother Theresa. After they receive their money they rush off squeaking with delight until there is only one very thin and very ill looking girl left, who moments earlier was sitting on my feet waving a lighter.
My wife is talking to her seriously and quietly for some time. All the other children have long gone and are busily enjoying the delights of whatever 10 or 20 Baht buys a street nipper in Burma these days. The girl is nodding her head and my wife is getting her purse out. Without looking she folds money up from her purse and into her hand and into the hand of the girl in one easy motion. The girl gets up, more slowly than the others and walks quietly away.
“Right, what’s next?” says my wife sounding invigorated, like she has just won a goldfish at the fair.
“Erm... Lego and Viagra” I offer, and she laughs.
Our two children had been watching from a safe distance and now sidle up to us, ready for the next stage of our visit.
Burma is a place that we have become quite familiar with over the course of the last two years as all foreigners that are here on a business visa have to leave the country and come back in again every three months. I suppose that at some point this must have made sense to somebody somewhere, or maybe it was just a bit of a lark at the immigration department that somehow got through unchecked.
I’m sure there are a few genuine business people based in Chiang Mai who think nothing of travelling willy nilly around the globe at least every few months, but for the rest of us plebeians running small businesses it means a one day dash over the border at Mae Sai and into Burma, which is, as you can tell, every bit as strange as it sounds.
Perhaps the strangest thing in a country which is so restrictive that residents have to have a license from the government to have a foreigner in their house overnight, is that it is a shopper’s wonderland. Everything and anything is available and everything is 10 times cheaper than anywhere else on the planet. Like what? I hear you say. Well, like everything says I.
You name it and it will be here in the maze of shopping streets just over the border; bath towels, computers, phones, toys, sun glasses, clothes, TVs, radios, jewellery, shoes, carpets and sun hats all jostle for position to be snapped up by us international jet setting business people. You can not only buy everything and anything that you can think of but also everything and anything you can’t. It’s the world’s depository for every useless, unwanted, ill conceived and out of date product. Burma is the elephants’ graveyard of consumerism. It’s where 1970s nylon “tank tops” go to die.
Just in case you never get the chance to experience the dubious delights of dashing over the Burmese border from Chiang Mai in order to comply with visa regulations, I have taken the trouble to catalogue the various bits of overpriced, and underpriced tat that you are missing out on.
In order to fully appreciate the experience I suggest that you drag out the debris from the back of your cupboards, the unwanted gifts, things that you don’t want but seem too good to throw away or donate to the charity shop, rough it all up a bit, tear the wrappings, and smear it with old cooking grease. Now turn the heating up to higher than you have ever dared. If you don’t have heating, get a hairdryer and turn it on “full heat” and blast it in your face. Either way, make sure that you are unbearably hot, to the point where it feels like you are going to pass out.
Now the next bit might be a bit tricky. Hire about 30 street children to come round your house, hand them each one of your unwanted and roughed up items from the back of your cupboard and get them to wave these items right in your face yelling “you like, you like...I get you Es, I get you nice massage,” and other assorted bits of rambling madness.
When you have arranged all of this read your way through the next bit and enter the shady catacombs of consumerism.
After you have negotiated the loitering street kids and avoided the obligatory Lego and Viagra, and shoe shine sets and pens and lighters, turn right down the steps, off the main road and into the downtown shopping area of winding backstreets and endless small shops. Each shop tends to specialise in a particular load of rubbish; electrical goods, clothes, spices and dried foods, Lego and toys, surplus promotional mechanise, plastic battery operated novelties from the 1990s, illegal contraband made from ivory, coral and crocodile skin, sea shells and sea shell related ornaments and nick nacks, lace goods and ornamental needlework items and
lastly Commemorative Tea Towels, known by some as Dish Towels, which does make more sense as you dry your dishes with them rather than your tea.
Working our way backwards through this list, most young people nowadays have no idea of the vital role that commemorative dish towels played in the education of those of us born before the 1980s.
Before the internet we had the library and dish towels. For those of us who were rather reluctant to enter the foreboding and distinctly child unfriendly local library, and not very good at listening in class at school, the only other place where we came across hard information was on commemorative dish towels.
I learnt all the kings and queens of England from a dish towel that my mum got in the gift shop from the Tower of London on an early family day out. After this I familiarised myself with the wild flowers of the hedgerows from a dish towel brought as a memento of a glorious weeks summer holiday in the English sea side town of Torquay. I also learnt all the fishing villages in the south west of England (essential information for all teenage boys), Fighter Planes of the Second World War, English Butterflies (brought by my sister from a National Trust shop), British Birds (brought for me by my hard as nails Grandfather), the obscure but fascinating “Traditional In Shore Fishing Vessels from the Devon Coast” and the not so useful but beautifully whimsical “Cornish Cottages.” Not to be confused with “cottaging” which I believe is something very different and perhaps less whimsical.
As time went by, and as I stood in the kitchen helping my mum with the washing up, I learnt important facts from dish towels entitled The Queen’s Silver Jubilee, Princess Diana, Traditional Scottish Recipes and Star Wars. Admittedly the last one was less educational but had a great picture of the Millennium Falcon. In fact my entire life and much of what I know can be traced back through a pile of fading and tatty old dish towels containing useful but totally “random” information.
No wonder my generation feel so ill equipped to deal with so much of what is around us (“Global Warming...it wasn’t on a dish towel, it can’t be important”). I have been educated by the school of commemorative dish towels and have therefore graduated from the Tea Towel University.
The sum total of this rather weird education is that, unlike most people younger than me, I am now totally prepared for a country walk in South West England, ideally near a fishing village, nibbling on a haggis and discussing aircraft from the Second World War with any British Monarch from history. I could, for example, explain the difference between a Spitfire and Hawker Hurricane fighter plane to Henry VIII, or perhaps more helpfully, correctly identify wild thyme from the hedgerows for Elizabeth I. Every situation, apart from these sort of scenarios, is beyond me, which, come to think of it, explains a great deal.
Perhaps successful and confident people grow up drying dishes with towels with better topics and relevant information. Instead of memorising little known wild birds and archaic fishing vessels they were probably drying up expensive dishes in beautifully clean and expansive kitchens with towels containing useful stuff like How To Get A Job In Something You Like, or How To Make Money And Keep It with little pictures of offshore trust funds and snappy information about tax avoidance. Still, I bet they can’t tell the difference between a Hawker Hurricane and Spitfire.
If the whole sub culture of Dish Towels has passed you by (in which case the last page or so must have been incredibly boring, so my apologies) you might want to take a trip to Burma. Unwittingly and probably unknowingly, Burma holds the international collection of unwanted commemorative dish towels. I guess because so much stuff is manufactured in China and elsewhere in South East Asia a lot of unwanted stock and discontinued lines of tat get washed up here. If it can’t be flogged off in Shanghai, Hong Kong or Bangkok this is the final refuge of unsaleable nonsense, and unwanted, out of date commemorative dish towels.
To this end I am now the proud owner of a fascinating dish towel which rather morbidly outlines the life of Nelson Mandela. It looks like it was designed by a manic depressive on a downward bender. For some reason it fails to mention the incredible positive impact that he had on South Africa and the world and simply chronicles all the bad things that happened to him in little pictures and sound bite sentences like, “when Nelson was only 9 years old his father died.” Then there’s a picture of him being punched in the face with the caption “he took an interest in sports including boxing.” There’s a picture of him in prison and in chains and then again looking very old. It must have been a limited run before someone realised that it looked like he was just repeatedly, and chronically unlucky.
As I was leaving the shop I also snapped up a bargain for 20 Baht. A mint condition towel of the little known early 1980s TV series The Dukes of Hazzard (not the hideous film re-make) with a buxom picture of Daisy Duke in the middle surrounded by her blue eyed cousins Luke and Bo and Uncle Jessie with the wonderful Boss Hogg snarling in the background.
Alongside the dish towels there is an unlikely range of ornamental lace tablecloths, and small lace mats that I find myself staring at imagining who, apart from Miss Havisham, might want to buy these things, and indeed, what they are actually used for. I think, think they are rather lightweight table mats; the kind of thing you might put under a small vase of flowers, or an Aspidistra pot plant if you were a 19th century house keeper from a middle sized stately home.
There are also sets of arm rest covers that my grandmother used to put over the arm rests of her sofa so that we wouldn’t get our mucky hands on the upholstery. I expect that if you went out shopping in London or Milan or New York to purchase such a thing you would be hard pressed to find them. In Burma they are clearly every bit as paranoid about the quality of their upholstery as my grandmother was in 1977. I wander out of the shop strangely pleased by this thought.
There is another shop which sells only ornaments and gimmicky novelties from the 1990s. A time when we all had so much money they had to invent useless stuff for us to buy. We’d bought everything else that was useful; computers, TVs, houses, cars, second houses, second cars, a motorbike, yachts and golf sets and now we demanded stuff that had no value and was completely useless.
Surely you remember the dancing pot plants (gaily coloured plastic flowers with smiley faces in a pot plant that would wiggle to music), and the “singing fish” (a plastic fish mounted on a trophy board that would sing and flop backwards and forwards), a Father Christmas that would dance and wiggle his bum while singing “Let it Snow” and what about the realistic looking parrot that would talk to you from its perch as you walked by?
Along with these novelties there are ornaments, which, out of context are so wonderfully meaningless and surreal. Why, for example, would you come to Burma and buy yourself a small porcelain model of what looks like a Mediterranean fishing harbour, or a lighthouse or a beautifully made scaled down model of a wooden fishing boat, or a Scottish mountain scene, or a Cornish thatched cottage? There are shelves of this stuff; crazy, misplaced curios that somehow never got out of Asia to the tourist shops for which they were destined. Ships in bottles forever trapped in Burma.
Well, if you weren’t lucky enough to have lived through the 90s and made a squillion dollars to spend upon junk or had run out of time to buy trinkets and mementos from your holiday in the Caribbean or Mediterranean, you know where to come.
The shopping is not over yet, but I can feel you flagging. How much more is there left to buy, I hear you ask. Have you still got the heating on full blast? Well, there’s a lot more, but I will just pass on the edited highlights.
Walking out of the ornaments and novelty shop you swiftly come across a shop which sells kitchen sets. Yes, it needs some explaining. Basically, the idea is that if it’s in a set and you might reasonably keep it in your kitchen then this shop sells it. It’s a strange idea. At the front of the shop are the more normal “sets,” such as pepper pots with salt shakers, and cutlery sets and little boxes with sets of drinking glasses and ra
ther fancy sets of wine glasses and sherry glasses. The further inside the shop that you venture (and I went right to the back, much to the shop keepers alarm) the more useless and bizarre the sets. Would you have guessed, for example, that you could buy a Turkish Coffee Set in Burma? It looked very nice with tiny drinking glasses and little ornate glass coffee pot. I was almost tempted, but was put off by the shop owner who took it out of my hand and put it back on the shelf. It was one of those shops where they don’t really like customers, and certainly don’t like you picking anything up. It’s one of those shops which is open fronted, and as you walk from the front to the back of the store, the guy has to turn on some lights, which, they really don’t like doing. They should provide you with a torch, and just do guided tours like in a cave.
Towards the back of the shop, covered in dust there are hundreds of cellophane wrapped sets of Greek Retsina Drinking Glasses! My favourite though is a brass Moroccan Tea Set. As I walk along the isle the guy is following me, smoking, looking at me intensely. It’s a little unnerving. It’s like in a minute he knows I am going to steal something and he’s getting ready to bundle me to the floor. He’s a little aggressive and I wonder whether he’s fed up that I am in his shop browsing his sets while he has to pay for the electricity that is powering his 40 Watt light bulb. I smile at him and he glares back. It’s as though I have been having an affair with his wife and he’s just about to confront me. He’s smoulderingly angry like a pile of embers in a cotton mill.
I attempt to pick up the Moroccan Tea Set to look at the price and the guy waves me away, and picks it up himself. He’s obviously used to some terribly clumsy customers. He wipes off the dust with his hand and shows me the price. It’s really expensive. I say “that’s expensive,” and he glares at me. While he is laboriously returning the set to the shelf I decide to make a run for it and get out of the shop before he gives me an invoice for the electricity.