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  hardie karges 8:48 am on August 3, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Thailand   

  Thai DJ’s play a song on the radio, and then repeat it. 

  Somehow that seems to ensure that you’ll not be able to get it out of your head, short of psychological or divine intervention. This is like subtle brainwashing, though for no apparent benefit nor reason, just an unwillingness to say, “it’s over”. My wife Tang will go to a party of her friends, mostly fellow ‘wives of foreigners’, and not only will it typically last at least half the day, but they’ll move it somewhere else the next day. Talk about a moveable feast! There’s just no proportion to much of their activities and little sense of partaking of diversity in little doses regularly. Tang’s father will stop at a soymilk stall on the way home and buy a liter or two for four people and it will be gone within hours if not minutes. If I do the same, it’ll last a week or so. Refrigeration is still a relatively new concept, and though appreciated for its chilling esthetic enhancement, is little thought of as a way to delay the spoilage of food. Don’t even think about putting a real dairy product in a Thai person’s coffee. ‘Cream’ is a white powder that comes in a can.

   

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  hardie karges 7:37 am on August 2, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Thailand   

  In Thailand, you’re supposed to leave your shoes outside, 

  
  a religious thing to be sure, but also presumably to keep the floors inside clean.  Of course, as just mentioned, sometimes it’s difficult to know just where ‘outside’ begins. I’ve had the maid follow me down the hallway with a mop in some guest houses because I didn’t remove my shoes at the steps, whereas elsewhere that would be absurd. Once inside, if footwear is needed, you’ll need another pair, usually something slippery, rubbery, in the bathroom. This is not so bad if weather necessitates nothing more than sandals on a typical day. Why all the fuss, though, for something considered low, therefore dirty, anyway? Tang frequently throws things on the floor for the morning sweep rather than bother with trash baskets, which I’ve had to introduce. Nevertheless, leave the hiking boots at home, though cowboy boots aren’t bad, since non-laceable, and do work well with motorcycles, especially if you’re riding a fully-chopped 100cc Honda and want to facilitate the pretense.

  Matthew C is discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    Matthew C 1:46 pm on August 28, 2008 Permalink | Reply

    I think the Thai custom of removing shoes is excellent.

    I have dedicated an whole blog to the subject of removing shoes: Shoes Off at the Door, Please You might want to take a look.

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  hardie karges 8:00 am on August 1, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Thailand   

  Thailand is a fairy tale, a children’s story, a parallel reality, 

  a mirror image where everything is the opposite of the ‘real world’. In Thailand most houses are surrounded by a permanent fence with a lockable gate. In Thailand, when you’re home the gate usually stays closed to keep you from slipping out unbeknownst to anyone. When you’re gone, of course, the gate is usually wide open. “We’re gone now; y’all come on in! Be sure to leave us cab fare!” In defense of the ‘at home’ system, the entire yard could be seen as an extension of the house, so that those doors can be left open, but that negates any defense of the ‘we’re gone’ system. In Thailand, people will enter a house unannounced, also, particularly friends, but will usually respect a closed gate. Tang says it keeps the salesmen at bay.

   
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  hardie karges 8:58 am on July 31, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: conspiracy theory ( 10 ), Thailand   

  Along the lines of good ‘conspiracy theory’, 

  or maybe the ‘world of opposites’ like ‘The Matrix’ or ‘Vanilla Sky’ or ‘Truman Show’, maybe SE Asia doesn’t even really exist at all. Maybe this is all a set-up and my vitals are being monitored for their responses to given stimuli or my body’s in cold storage somewhere and I’m just being fed images for continuity while my brain’s working nights doing basic computing for NASA. How would we ever know anymore? A lot is taken on faith these days. You step on a plane, pop some Valiums, cop some ZZZZ’s, and the next thing you know you’re going through Customs at Bangkok International. It’s almost as if the intervening space wasn’t even really crossed. You just entered a time-and-space machine and came out again a day later out the other end of a long wormhole. No one takes the long surface route anymore, so how would you know? The fact that we’re losing touch, literally, with the very earth under our feet makes stories of conspiracy and ‘misplaced reality’ not only feasible, but attractive, especially to the disenchanted. Conspiracy theory is more of a danger than conspiracy itself. Conspiracy lurks around every corner. Conspiracy theory follows a logic that attempts to transcend the ordinary, but there’s a logic that transcends conspiracy, i.e. produce the evidence.

   
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  hardie karges 7:36 am on July 28, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: citizenship, IMMIGRATION ( 4 ), Thailand   

  If it’s shocking that there are stateless people in the modern world, 

  it’s even more shocking that it’s not uncommon at all. You would expect it in refugee situations of outright war, of course, but not otherwise. This is part of the problem, of course. Nations aren’t anxious to hand out citizenship and its benefits to casual wanderers. The world has only recently had firm borders, lines on a map defining states. They’ve never played much of a role in the lives of tribal people. Tribal people don’t get stamps in their passports when they cross borders. Most don’t even know the exact date of their birth, nor the full extent of their families. Morals break down easily in the outback, as do nationalities. In Thailand you have to prove your citizenship constantly, in the form of a national identification card and house registration. This promotes home ownership, of course, rendering anything else ‘not official’. Did I mention that rental rates are very reasonable in Thailand? Of course, now that Thailand has moved up the economic ladder, illegals do much of the work that Thai nationals won’t, or at least not for cheap. More than anything else, it seems that governments must constantly justify their existence by enforcing the rules and reinforcing the boundaries. Only an innate love of bureaucracy threatens freedom more than Communism or Islam. The political choice has always been freedom vs. control; the only question is ‘whose’?

   
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  hardie karges 8:40 am on July 27, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Thailand, women ( 5 )   

  In northern Thailand there are more stateless girls than girl-less states. 

  They’re stuck in their lot, waiting for Prince Charming to come rescue them from the oblivion of life in the boondocks. Born into a bummer of a Burmese state and gone by the fourth summer of debate, they migrate southward on ancient paths of forgiveness. They look for a daddy to take them in, these bastard children of the primordial race. This is the gene pool, vast but shallow, only just deep enough that you can see your reflection in it. They’re everywhere you go, yet everywhere you look, the image looking back is yourself, naked and unadorned.

   
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  hardie karges 7:51 am on July 26, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: love ( 49 ), Thailand   

  Ignorance that acknowledges itself is not so ignorant after all. 

  It’s the ignorance pretending to be intelligence that’s truly dangerous, sometimes life-threateningly so. INTENT is the difference between mindlessness and ignorance, prescendence and transcendence. Roger says he’s the smartest person here, mostly to spite me of course, but bookishly intelligent enough, to be sure. When it comes to living a life, though, you’d be hard pressed to find someone stupider, complete with bankruptcy, the whole works, all THEIR fault, of course, and he’s not even a conspiracy person. He’s a freeloader. When you become a friend with Roger, there’s no doubt about who’s treating whom. When the little Thai girl, or whatever she is, dumped him, I think it injured his ego more than his heart. Though neither he nor the others would ever admit to it, how can you truly forge a marriage with someone you’ve never had a real conversation with? That, of course, is the problem with all marriages of convenience. They make up with money what they lack in understanding. Welcome to Thailand.

   
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  hardie karges 2:58 pm on July 25, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Farang ( 5 ), love ( 49 ), Thailand   

  Many Farangs wash up on the beach in Thailand, 

  get a little girl to yank their little weenie, and think they’ve landed in paradise. “Fantasy” is probably the more operable concept, though I’m not sure who is the more guilty of deception, female Thais or male Farangs. Like a junkie increasing the dose to try and maintain the original exhilarating effect, so these little girls fresh out of the village quickly appraise their value on the international market. Then typically they will float their currency, letting it seek its own level while hedging their bets on multiple false fronts. A little tissue in the bra always helps get the juices flowing. More than people’s savings can get hurt in a period of rapid inflation. When Roger’s wife dumped him to take a better offer, he didn’t even see it coming, though she’d been fucking the Farang down the street for a month or so. She wasn’t a prostitute or even a bar girl, please note. She was a good girl, just looking for someone to support her… and buy her a nation. Roger thought he was getting a bargain on a stateless girl. Her married her then got fucked, by himself of course, guilty of negligence and massive ignorance. Her father was Indian, they say. Her mother, well, you know. I hear she’s Cambodian now, citizen of a state she’d never even visited.

   
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  hardie karges 9:01 am on July 24, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: housewife, Thailand   

  Desperate housewifery is still alive and well in Thailand. 

  It’s a fairy tale, husbands going to work and wives staying at home. Many even have maids, supplied from the legions of illegals from the neighboring pathetic countries and hill-tribes from within the country who exist without citizenship. In Thailand to have citizenship someone’s got to own a house that’s legal and registered. Anything official, from buying a car to registering a kid at school, has to be accompanied by a house registration form, which presumably form a paper trail to time immemorial. If you don’t have one, you have to show relationship to someone who does. Immigrant Chinese seem to get special consideration. Hill-tribes don’t, notwithstanding Thailand’s own tribal roots, always in cahoots with Chinese merchants. Thais don’t acknowledge their tribal roots, despite the presence of tribal Thais to this day, speaking languages mutually comprehensible. Even Laos curse local ‘black’ Tais as if they were talking about a lower form of life, their first cousins only one step removed. Tang doesn’t believe that there are no housewives in America, any more than she believes that parents might support their children until late in life. In a developing country, it’s the opposite. Kids support the parents in old age. Resident Westerners in Thailand have got the fairy tale ending to their story, but it’s the Chinese Thais who’ve got the killer deal. Farangs have no rights; Chinese do, and after a generation, Chinese ‘become’ Thai, and have full rights and economic potential. They know how to manage their money, too, so succeed rapidly. After a full generation, most Farang half-breeds probably have full rights, too. We’ll see if firewalls get erected to prevent a bedroom-door full-Farang ‘takeover’.

  Laos Travel is discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    Laos Travel 9:57 am on August 11, 2008 Permalink | Reply

    i love Laos,
    Laos is one of the poorest and least visited countries in the world.

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  hardie karges 8:07 am on July 23, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: massage, tarot, Thailand   

  My wife’s father is a fortune teller, 

  actually a star-reader, though he has recently branched out into what the Thais call ‘Gypsy’ cards, i.e. ‘Tarot’ cards. Hey, you gotta’ stay current in your field. I can remember the first time a Thai traditional massage parlor started offering the foot Reflexology that a Farang taught them. Now, not only do they all have it, but it’s getting hard to find the original back-cracking style. That’s demographics, I guess for aging populations. Of course, the footsie style now claims Thai ancestry, as logic seeks holes to fill. Closer to home, the wooden croaking frog that I brought from Vietnam to mass-produce in Thailand, now not only takes bows for Thai ingenuity, but is also found in Indonesia, Peru, and Bolivia, at least. All of them are traceable to ‘friends’ of mine in the world handicrafts industry looking for a piece of the action. Such is evolution. But I digress. The first time Tang’s father read my stars, he warned me against getting involved with a Thai woman, assuring me that there was a 50-year-old Farang woman who was a potential ‘sponsor’. He was probably right. I should get him the Crowley deck of Tarot cards; that’ll wow ‘em in the Honglee district of ChiangRai. Every time anything important is in the works, Tang’s parents want to check the stars first. That’s cool, I guess, but that sort of determinism can hold you back, also.