I just bought new headphones, because my old ones had gotten all crackly and rubbish, and today I listened to my MP3 player for the first time with this brand new sound, proper sound. There's this magical moment sometimes which happens when I have my music on and I'm watching the world go by. On a train or a bus or something in motion and you create your own world, a space which is completely, totally you and it's private and comfortable and the scenes around you suddenly have a soundtrack. They were some of the best moments in India, when you could gaze out of a train window at the life going on outside and you feel like you're - for once in that country - peaceful and able to absorb your environment without you affecting it. You could be a fly on the wall... a rare moment captured in which the focus of attention is not drawn your way, and you are capable of just, well, witnessing.
Today on this long bus journey a song popped up (oh the shuffle mode, it's illuminating!) which brought me back quite sharply to sitting on a bus 4 years ago in Thailand, in the middle of the night. There were no other foreigners on it and I cocooned myself in the glow of a new album I'd bought. In a way I suppose you could call it escaping, which is a little ironic as I was going to Thailand, in many ways, to escape. Escaping from escaping. But it's not really escaping, it's just a way of connecting with something while you're in an alien world.
So four years ago it was Different. I was different. Leaving school was the most liberating thing that had happened to me, and I paid a stupid amount of money to run away to Thailand and teach kids English. I'd like to say it was for them, for the good of mankind and helping those who need it most and blah blah but it was for me. To grow, develop, learn more about myself, all the cliches.
My first day in the school was awful. I was miserable anyway - I missed my boyfriend and it had a pretty negative result on my stay there - I was reclusive, not meshing with the other volunteers as I'd have liked to. Then I was thrown into a classroom with 50 hyperactive children looking at me with wide eyes, waiting for me to enlighten them. All together there were 250 9-10 year old children under my direction for one term. I hadn't a clue what to do. I was bricking it. To hold their attention was a constant effort, physically and mentally; you had to make huge gestures with your body and face and keep talking, keeptalkingTALKING and changing your tone of voice up and down and loud and louder to have a hope of them even looking your way. I practically had to dance my way through lessons, always on the move, always alert. And, as the kids loved to point out, always sweating my face off.
Basically, it was usually chaos. And they didn't learn a lot. The textbook I had to get them through was terrible, and mostly in the past it seemed they'd just learned how to get the answers right, rather than understanding the language. It was a struggle, not helped by the fact that out of the 250 of them I could barely put a few names to the right faces. I quickly came to the conclusion that fun would have to be the main focus, so we sang English nursery rhymes and made up songs with mimes for the words. And in the end, finally, I got what I wanted: it was rewarding. Because sometimes, just sometimes you saw a spark in a kid and you knew they knew what they were doing, and that was magical. Those were pretty rare though.
After my first year of university I went back to the town where I'd been teaching and it was great, the kids in the school still went mental when they saw a foreigner, a farang. They'd yelp "faRANG faRANG!" and then rush at you with faces of pure excitement, pleasure and fascination, shouting "Halloo! Halloo!" and trying to shake your hand, before running off, delighted, to tell all their friends. I think that's pretty rare here now, especially on the tourist trails, farangs are so common place they aren't exciting any more. I don't think I'll go back this time, as the kids will have all gone to different schools and there will be nobody there to make the memories real again. But that first time stays in my memory as a serious time, a challenge to my still developing 19-year-old mind and a development in my ability to be independent. I hope somewhere along the line the kids got something out of it too.
The second time I came here it was something else entirely, and I simply learned How To Have A Good Time. And Party. It was just one big mess, and we got wrecked, my friendship with the girl I went with also got utterly wrecked. I learned about the limits of my own generosity, the power of the mind to turn against itself, and also, to my surprise, the strength of my own mental stability.
This time it's different again, of course. My boyfriend Dave is out here for two weeks and we've ridden elephants, which I did that first time but how can you not want to see elephants again? They are just so majestic and wonderful and the way they walk... it's a
plod plod plod plod plod plod plod plod
We saw hill tribes and our guide just continued to explain things almost non-stop throughout the day. The comparison to the desert trek in India is laughable - we just rode camels and saw poor desert families with no explanation whatsoever to their lifestyle or environment. I tried asking a guide what a fruit was that we saw, and he didn't even understand my question. Anyway, this Thai guide told us something I had always wondered about the hill tribe women who have black teeth which look all rotten to the gum and are a shiny, pure smooth black. Apparently they chew a combination of leaves and weird stuff stuff like crushed beetle nuts, and it turns their teeth black but means they never get tooth ache and never need a dentist. It's amazing really, this different concept of health and vanity. I still think I'd rather 3 fillings and a white set of teeth.
So the first and second time were completely different, and I'm already learning this time that I can be a right grumpy cow when I'm not here on my own, and much to my dismay I find myself itching to get to other parts of South East Asia too, because there everything will be new to my perception. But it's not over yet, and soon our friends Beth and Byron are coming to join us in Bang Cock (guffaw) and I have a feeling it'll be messy.
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