Archive for the 'Thailand' Category

Thursday, October 09, 2003, Bangalore, Karnataka, India

So, like, and stuff…

It was suggested to me that I start a blog. Normally I scoff at such ideas. Imagine, me keeping a blog! Well, under my current circumstances, I figured that it might not really be that bad an idea. So here I go.

I serpose I will go back to the beginning of my trip, and try to make it up to now:

My flight from SFO to Narita was uneventful. Narita was exactly the same as it was a month before that. My flight from Narita to Bangkok was, however, not uneventful. Soon after take off, I struck up conversation with the girl sitting next to me and the guy sitting next to her. Guy was from Austin, TX, and was off to go backpacking in Thailand. Girl was from Tokyo, Japan, and was off to go tour hospitals in Thailand as part of her training as a dentist. So, Guy and I initially find it rather amusing the amount of little bottles of wine Girl was drinking. Upon questioning, it turns out she is deathly afraid of flying and was drinking her worries away. (On a side note, she also said that she was deathly afraid of sky-diving… I can’t imagine some one afraid of flying to have gone skydiving, but hey, Japs are wierd.) Well, it got to the point were it was no longer amusing how much she was drinking, as she was getting way way too drunk, and acting way too friendly with Guy and me. It came to a point, in fact, where she bit both of us, quite hard – though I’m sure she meant it in the most playful of spirit. I still have a bruise! Did I mention that she was training to be a dentist? Well, she sure had some teeth on her! Guy and I had to help her off the plane, but once we got to passport control, our help for her was at an end – she had lost her passport, her English only good enough at the point to say “passupoto… foget… Narita…”

So, next day spent wandering in Bangkok. I wanted to walk around, but found it impossible, the “tuk-tuk” (little three-wheel taxi) drivers simply would not let me, I HAD to go on their little tour… I got talked into it eventually, cuz I was tired of the harassment. So, the guy who ended up driving me around was actually pretty nice, which was lucky. But, of course, maybe that’s because instead of him ripping me off, he teamed up with me to rip others off; there was that week a promotion at some stores by which the tuk-tuk driver to bring a customer to the store got free gasoline on the condition that the customer spent more than 10 minutes in the store. (I like run-on sentences and I don’t care if you suffer on account of them.) So, with his free gasoline, my driver decided that I could ride for free all day, which worked for me. Amazingly, he really didn’t demand any money at the end of the tour. That night in Bangkok was terribly depressing, just to see all the drunk westerners with their poor Thai whores climbing all over them. And then the hundred or so pimps that approached me as I walked around, showing me brochures full of pictures of naked women and telling me I could have any of them. What kind of a fucked up world is this, where simply on account of my economic level over them, I actually could “have any of them”? Well, you can see why I was depressed by it all. Perhaps I should have just gotten drunk outa my gourd like all the other Americans there.

Next half-day in Bangkok was alot better. I discovered that I was able to walk unmolested in the neighborhood of my hotel, which was nice. Also found some very grubbin’ food. Got to the airport, got on flight. Air India has better airplane food then you might expect, and it has AWESOME music on the inflight radio thingee. Couldn’t see the movie from my seat though, which made me sad. Got to Mumbai. Prepaid a taxi to my hotel while still in the airport (I thought to myself “prepaid taxi, what a wonderful idea!”). But, despite the extreme proximity to the airport of the hotel, the driver proceeded to demand 100 rupees extra “too far, too far.” I am finding out that the taxi drivers in this country tend not to be too dissimilar from this guy. Here in Bangalore, they are all on meters, so the asshole ones just drive the longest way possible in order to rip you off.

Anyway, flight from Mumbai to Bangalore went fine, had a window seat, got to see some crazy landscape b’neath me.

Met lots of other volunteers here, almost all of which are British. I was expecting the average age to be a little older than me, but it seems that the average is just about my age, which is kind of cool. My guest house is nicer than expected. Sharing a room with British kid named Alex, who is doing some sort of theatre internship here (that’s the best he can describe his work). Our guest house is the house of John and Shirley – very Indian names indeed. Shirley has hella Jesus plastered all up on the walls. Okay with me though, her cooking is super-grubbin’, and she’s really nice.

My school is on break this week, so I have not yet started work. Went in the mean time to work at a YMCA shelter for street kids, which was really an amazing experience. It’s hard to imagine what some of those kids went through, but many of them now seem to be really healthy and intelligent little brats. They were all over the place! Indian kids call all westerners Auntie/Uncle, and oh my god, the insanity! I made the mistake of playing the little pick you up and spin you game with one of the kids, and five seconds later I had 10 little Indian rugrats (sidewalkrats?) literally climbing up me screeming “uncle, uncle, uncle, uncle, uncle, uncle, uncle! Me too uncle, uncle!”

Whew.

Haven’t gone back there, though, as I got a nasty fever yesterday and was in bed all day. Feeling alot better today, but decided it would be best to rest and take it easy, hence all my internet-based things I’m doing (loading pics and making this blog).