Don't Worry, Be......

I am coming up on my second anniversary living in Thailand, along with my second Christmas and birthday.  When I met Nee she told me she was from Thailand and I didn't know where that was.  "It is near Vietnam, right?" I asked.  Well, sort of.  You have to get through Cambodia or Laos first, two more countries I only knew from CBS news and the war.  My picture of southeast Asia was formed from movies like "Good Morning, Vietnam" and similar fare.  I was told it was third world and my only world up until then was the US.  Here, then, are my impressions of living in a "third world" nation.

The new term I am told is "developing" nation.  A movie like, "The Gods Must Be Crazy" comes to mind with little people running around half naked, sitting in the dirt eating their dinner.  A bit like camping year around, though with camping we can always go back to our warm beds and fresh coffee.  Folks in poorer countries are already home.  If you wander around off the main highways here, you will find villages of people living in grass shacks with walls of bamboo and dirt floors.  Still, if you look closely, you might also see a refrigerator or two, motorcycles, satellite dishes and kids playing computer games.

The long metal pipe here is the drive shaft for the potters wheel.

That is a motorcycle wheel she used as a kick wheel.  She said she was too small for the wheel her husband uses.

 That said, yesterday we went looking for some pots for our garden.  The soil at our rental house is poor-quality fill that only lets weeds grow.  We have been growing what we can in pots.  In the US, you go down to Home Depot and can get a car load of pots to bring home.  Here, you have to find where they are made.  Nee heard about a village that made pots somewhere near the town of Chaiprakarn, about 20 km from us.  We decided to take a trip and find it.

 Road signs in Thailand are few and far between and often misleading.  For instance, the immigration office in town has two signs, one points to the office and the other doesn't.  At least they have a sign.  The place we were looking for was found through what I call Thai GPS.  About every few kilometers, Nee stopped anyone she saw, old ladies working in their garden, old men on motorcycles and so on, to get directions.  We drove and drove and drove.

 We passed a few small dairies each with about 40 cows.  In between, we crossed long stretches of farm lands, some already filled with onions and other greens for this growing season.

 Finally, after a few wrong turns, we found three houses together, all making pots.  These are pictures of them.

 Thailand is encouraging everyone to become more self-sufficient, something I have always attempted to live.  I am not one to go off the grid, but whenever I can make something for myself, I will, rather than buying it from a store.

 The pottery business here could be the star of the self-sufficient movement.  Potting wheels were made of car wheels, with small electric motors turning what looked like a drive shaft from a car with a long belt connected to the wheel.  Homes are wooden, unheated, and chairs are mostly the floor.

 Kilns are stacks of bricks which looked homemade, and a wood fire is underneath.  It takes a day to heat it up and another day to fire the pots.  The clay comes from a hole in the grown next to the homes, though they say they are looking for a new supply.  You can only dig so deep.

We bought a few pots and headed back home.  Everyone was friendly and welcoming.  Most of their business is wholesale so they didn't care of we bought anything or not.

 If you are looking for real Thailand, get off the road and get lost.  It is the best thing to do on an quiet afternoon.

What To Do In A Small Town

Back in 1976, I was a student at the University of California at Davis studying agricultural sciences.  I had visions of running a landscaping business though I had no knowledge of what I needed to do to start it.  Through my studies, I always avoided studying business and went to as many other classes as I could. Then I read my graduation requirements.  I had to take a class in marketing.  Disappointed as I was, I took it and it turned out to be one of the best classes I ever took and gave me knowledge that lead up to my project this weekend.

The professor required us all to form teams and to write a marketing plan.  I didn't know anyone in that class of 400 students and was wandering around the hall looking for someone to connect with.

"Are you on a project?" a young lady asked.  No, I said.  She said her dad had invented something and she wanted a team to help her set up a marketing plan.  As she was the only person who asked me, I jumped at the chance.

Her dad was a professor at the university and had been doing research in growing mushrooms; specifically shitake mushrooms.  The only mushrooms I knew about were the button mushrooms my mom put in salads.  Picking wild mushrooms left me with chills worrying about poisoning myself.  Her dad was a charming and affable fellow who was long on research but had never sold anything.  I learned all about shitake mushrooms.

Apparently I had eaten some at a Chinese restaurant.  No one was able to grow them commercially and so they all had to be picked in the wild in China, dried and sent in bags around the world.  Good though they were, they weren't as good as fresh.  He explained how he and a fellow in Japan had come up with a process to grow them on sawdust.

We ended the class with a big party at his house with all the team members.  He fed us at least a dozen different mushrooms cooked in every way imaginable.  Years later, I saw home kits for growing them at home though I was not tempted to buy one.

Jump forward about 40 years to the present.  Nee has moved to Fang to be with me and she is looking for some way to bring in some income of her own.  While she was in Bangkok, she took a class on how to grow mushrooms.  I won't go into the details here now.  I will leave that for other blogs.  I will say that we were finally able to find a farm nearby and we spent a few hours there yesterday.

 We drove far out into the countryside to see rice being harvested and cows walking on the side of the road. After asking directions from several people we finally found this farm.  It is a cooperative farm with several growers sharing the labor and expense.  The facilities were all very low tech though they had been given much advice from a professor from a local university.  Shelves and buildings were made of locally grown bamboo.  Sawdust was shipped in from the south where they grow rubber. We were given a tour by one of the ladies working there.  It was a quiet and comfortable farm with thousands of these bags sitting on shelves like the ones I show here.

Mushroom barn with a roof of bamboo and leaves.  We were told the leaves last about three years.

 This is my interpretation of the mushroom shelving.  We bought 20 bags of two different mushrooms, though not shitake.  They do grow shitake there but we were told that they produce only once every three months.  We decided to try some others that are just as tasty and far more prolific.

I don't know if we will try to grow these for income.  We do have land we can develop.  Right now, though, I just want to learn how to do this and enjoy the fruits of our labor.

Thanks For the Memories

I am going to take you on a trip back in time.  Back to when students wore bell-bottom jeans and said words like Groovy and Far Out.  I am going to take you back to when I was in high school.  Maybe it will help you understand why I am enjoying my work so much.

Growing up in the San Francisco bay area, my father had us move to many different homes.  He was an difficult and abusive man who managed to lose his job often because he wasn't able to get along with his co-workers.  I grew up assuming that all fathers were like him and the only good dads were on TV.  When I was in the fourth grade we moved from a pleasant suburb in Santa Clara which later became the Silicon Valley.  I remember it more as a farm town that was taken over by subdivisions and strip malls.  We moved to Oakland in the mid 60s when there was much racial strife in the schools.  Black people were angry with white people and white people were angry with the black.  I had never even seen a black person until I moved to Oakland.

My parents decided to have me continue in schools run by our church and there I stayed until tenth grade.  In the meantime we moved several more times, my parents divorced and my home consisted of my brother, mother and myself.  Mom was not able to pay for my school any longer and so I had to find a school.  The high school near where we lived was already a very dangerous place to be, at least that is what people told us.  In the middle of Oakland, though, sandwiched inside three very different neighborhoods, was Oakland High.  I had to meet with the vice principal before starting as I had no history in public schools.  I think they just wanted to see if I was a trouble maker or not and I was mostly just terrified.  Officially I wasn't even supposed to go to Oakland High since it wasn't in my neighborhood but we were able to use the address of my oldest brother's in laws who lived near the school.

My first visit to the school made my heart stop.  I had never been in such a big school or a building that looked, in my eyes, so rundown.  Students were jostling everywhere and I wanted to run.  Still, I wanted to go to college and a high school diploma was the only way I could do it.  I met with the Vice Principal who was a very nice fellow.  He said that he hoped he wouldn't see me again as he only dealt with troublemakers, or words to that effect.  He said there was no majority in his school.  It was a third white, a third black and a third Chinese.  I started the next day.

One of my first classes was geometry.  In my last school, a private Lutheran high school, we had small classes and teachers who spent time talking to each student.  This teacher was the opposite.  He was a lazy man who sat in the back and had one of the best students write the proofs on the board.  I had never had geometry before and had no idea what a proof even was.  The fellow who was writing was named Geoff.  He was Chinese American and had a wonderful smile that never left his face.  I knew I wanted to get to know him.

Over time, I made friends with him and other friends of his as well, including Nora and Peter.  We used to all go out to San Francisco together to eat in Chinatown and ride the cable cars, things I had never done before.  Geoff's and Nora's parents were amazing people.  Where my dad was angry, they were warm and generous and thoughtful.  It was my friendship with those three and a few others who were my saviors in school.   I never would have survived without them.

Why am I writing this today?  Jump forward about 40 years and this is what happened.  After I left high school, I was able to stay friends for a few more years with all of them but then I got married and lost touch with everyone.  Decades later, we got the internet and Facebook and Skype.  In the last two years I have been able to add all three of these old friends to my Facebook and I thought, how nice.  I can see where their lives have gone and maybe we can talk for a minute or two some time.

Today, Geoff posted on Facebook that he wanted to have someone help him check his Skype account.  I had a few minutes free so, just for fun, I sent him my Skype address.  Within minutes we were talking, me on my Android phone and him on his computer.  It was 8 at night in California, Wednesday and 10 in the morning the next day here.  We talked as if it had only been yesterday when we last spoke.  He said he has been following my blog and I have been enjoying his posts.  The conversation left me feeling wonderful for the rest of the day.

Since high school, one has worked for NASA to send people to outer space, another has worked to save the environment and the other has worked to save people's souls.  They found their calling and now I have finally found mine.

Never give up on a friend or a dream.

Drinking Beer with a Jingjock

The American dream is to own a home, have a car, a family, buy all the things you can imagine and travel.  When I came here, I was only left with travel.  I started in Bangkok in Nee's two-story town house and then went north to Chiang Mai.  There we had a two-bedroom apartment overlooking a busy street, close to most anything you could want.  From there we went up and down Thailand as I looked for a job, never really knowing what I wanted.

I had done the same thing in the US for so long, I couldn't remember what I wanted to do when I grew up.  The work paid well, never worked me terribly hard, gave me good benefits and a vacation.  Yet, there was something that wasn't satisfying to me.  The easy way isn't always the best way.

Then a year ago, an agency wanted me to work in Fang, a small town north of Chiang Mai.  I had been there once and wasn't particularly excited.  Still, I needed a job and I found the school to be welcoming and comfortable.  I spent a year learning how to teach, to work with students who barely understood me and often ignored me.  I learned how to gain their attention without getting angry.  I found ways to get them excited about English and, over time, found they were beginning to like my class.  English is a required subject in Thailand and, like me with my past required subjects, is met with much resistance.

Through all that, I still didn't feel I had a home beyond my office and classroom.  I wanted a place I could sit on a front porch, listen to children play and catch the weird sound of the jingjock.  That happens to be a lizard here than makes a sound just like its name.  I thought it was some sort of odd car alarm the first time I heard it.

Tonight, I am sitting on my front porch, drinking a beer, sweating from pulling weeds in my garden.  We found a house a short distance from my school with most of the amenities I could get from a western home.  The walls are solid, the bathroom has hot water, the kitchen is inside and I get space.  I haven't done any real gardening for over a decade and today was like a tiptoe through the tulips.  I was so happy even though I hadn't really prepared.  I bought a Thai version of a hoe down on main street and rode home with it on my bike.  I didn't start until early afternoon because I had a tutoring class to give and then had to eat lunch.  The best time would have been soon after getting up so I will try to do that tomorrow, assuming my muscles aren't too sore.

Before

During

I am re-reading Bill Bryson's book, "I'm A Stranger Here," a series of articles he wrote about returning to live in America after living in England for many years.  I read it wondering if I will find myself in a similar situation whenever I happen to return to the US.  For now, though, I want to see if I can grow tomatoes and maybe make my own salsa.  Home is where you make it, not where you are.

Don't Panic

At the end of this week, I will start again where I left many years ago.  I will be living in a house.  The difference this time is that the house will be in Thailand.  I spent a good portion of my younger years caring and tending a house and the garden around it as well as raising two sons.  Now, after so much has gone by, I will recover a life I have missed.

Nee is still in Bangkok, getting classes on farming, as we are also buying a piece of land here in town.  My town is Fang, Chiang Mai, a farming community 150 kilometers north of the city of Chiang Mai.  I am only a few kilometers from the Myanmar border.  For the last year, I have been teaching English in a large private school across the street from my one-room apartment.  Starting next week, I will be in a house just behind the school in a very modern neighborhood, similar to one I might find in an American suburb.  If I had stayed in the US, I might have been able to regain my momentum and gotten another house.  My luck looked like it was more likely I was going to be living in my car, though, and so I am here.

My new home starting this weekend

Meanwhile, I continue to teach.  This year started quite differently from last.  The first time I walked into a classroom then, I had never been responsible for teaching a class before.  I had been through brief teacher training, though most of that was in front of nursery school children.  My first job long-lasting job was at my current school.  I had done a brief assignment in the south deep inside a rubber plantation and far from any shopping or entertainment and rain fell every day, all day, leaving all I owned damp and miserable to wear.  I knew I wanted to go back north.

As of this writing, I have one more month of teaching until I end the first semester of my second year here.  I feel as if it only just began.  Teaching here is exhausting, occasionally frustrating, challenging, but most of all, it is great fun.  Each day I come into one of my 16 classes of 50 students each to see their smiles.  Whenever some personal matter came up that left me feeling depressed, I would go to a class and all would be forgotten.  My only thoughts are of my students and how I can get them to speak more clearly and feel confident in their own abilities.

I will continue to write my adventures as it looks like we may be heading in directions I had never considered before.  Stay tuned.

My Adventure Continues

I came to Thailand a year and a half ago for a new beginning.  My wife is Thai, I was out of work in the US, the economy was in terrible shape, I had lost my home and all I had was a rented house full of my furniture.  When I came here, I had many plans, many different ideas of how I was going to regain my western lifestyle. None of them worked.  Strangely, at least for me, the longer I am here, the less I miss the life I had before.

This is my story of leaving everything that I was familiar with and coming to a foreign country to make a life for myself and my wife.  Before I came here, I wrote a weekly blog of my joys and struggles, and this will be a continuation of that story, though the theme has changed.  At first, I resisted change and yet change was forced on me every day.  I think I am changing.

A view from land we are buying

My blog is not a travel journal, though I do talk about my travels when I take them.  I avoid complaining about Thailand as it is pointless to complain about a place I chose to be that is so entirely different from where I came from.  I am also not a night clubber, so don't expect tales of escapades in various wild hangouts.  I am still basically the same person I was a few years ago, though my eyes have been opened to possibilities I had not considered seriously for a very long time.

In the US, I was an auditor.  I spent most of my days reviewing work done by other people and reporting my results to their managers.  The managers appreciated me when I gave them good news and ignored me when I gave them bad news.  The work paid well, though I found I was able to do it in my sleep after so many years.

The first major change that was thrust upon me was losing my job.  This particular management only wanted happy news and that isn't what auditors are very good at.  They gave me a nice check and sent me on my way.

What I liked most about the work was that it was mostly unstructured.  I had a method that I applied to each review, but what I reviewed was up to me.  I apply that flexibility to my new work as an English teacher to 800 Thai high school students.  Surprisingly to me is that I both like teaching and find I am getting better at it.  Thus my story is about teaching and living in Thailand.  Feel free to drop me comments and suggestions.  As the title of this says, my adventure continues.