Philippines Update #75

Galynn's Visit To The Philippines

Thailand versus Philippines:  We ended our one-month visit with Alana's sister, Galynn, by heading to Thailand for 10 days.  It was interesting; the Thai culture often reminded us of the Philippines and many things were also . . . oh . . . so different.  Here are a few of the highlights.

Time:  Generally, things ran on time.  Just like the Philippines, no one seemed in a rush or determined to get "there" like we've experienced back in the USA and people out in public and on the roads appeared to be peaceful.  "Road Rage" just doesn't seem like a consideration here in the Eastern world.  Unlike the Philippines, things started on time, whether participants were there are not.  If a tour van said they would come to get us at 8am, they were there at 8am.  If a program advertised it would start at noon, it started at noon.

The interesting part is there was resistance on the local people's part to predicting how long activities would take.  When asked, "How long will this cooking class be?" it was common to hear, "A few hours maybe."  Once they got going, the end was in a way . . . unpredictable.

So in general, things ran on time . . . except the trains.  No problem with the trains that had been at the station for hours or overnight waiting, yet many trains would pull into a station, drop passengers off, pick up new passengers, and continue on or head back from where it came from.  Those trains were notoriously late because once the started from their point of origin, there was no accurate prediction of how long it would take to get to it's destination.

Jacques Learning To Chill Out

For instance, we took a 9pm train out of Chiang Mai to Bangkok.  It was coming from Bangkok and turning right around and returning, scheduled to arrive back in Bangkok 11 hours later.  It ended up arriving in Chiang Mai at 10pm, leaving at 10:30pm, and arriving in Bangkok 13 hours later.  I have a lot to learn from time and the way it is perceived, honored, and used in these other non-type 'A' countries.

People:  Much like the Filipinos, the Thai people were mostly small, quiet, and reserved.  I think they are also a shame driven culture because I remember someone saying they would not in general look me in the eyes.  I found this to be true.  Maybe again, it was because we looked like giants in their country.

Street Market In Chiang Mai

They had many markets and roadside booths where they sold hand made items just like in the Philippines yet the quality of the items appeared better.  They seemed to know more about their merchandise I think because they actually produced it instead of ordering from somewhere else, taking items out of a box, and selling them to tourists for profit.

Great Thai Food

Our first night in Thailand was a Sunday in Chiang Mai.  They just happened to have a 20+ square block street market in full swing and it was a blast.  There was any kind of food, knick-knack, musical performance, or clothes you could imagine available.  It was also interesting to experience hundreds of people in the streets stopping in their tracks and launching into dead silence the second they heard their national anthem being played over the street loudspeakers in order to officially open the night market . . . very patriotic people.

Just like the Filipinos, most of the local merchandise was not marked with a price because they are also a people who value bargaining.  Alana got really good at haggling with shop and booth owners.  She heard that it is typical for them to start with a price that is up to 300% higher than what they will take and they didn't mind having tourists pay that if they were not savvy enough to haggle.  After being told the price was 299 baht ($9.64), Alana got me a quality, hand made, button down shirt for 180 baht ($5.81).  That girl is a shopping terror!

I didn't see any poor people!  We were in all types of environments (bus stations, train stations, subways) and in the Philippines we would have run into beggars by the mall as well as on the back streets.  Didn't see any in Thailand.  No one ever asked me for money.  I'm sure, like all parts of the world, they have poor people and I'm not sure where they were.  It's possible I was just living in my tourist bubble.

I also didn't see any men, who identified more with being a woman, in Thailand, called Bayotes or Baklas in the Philippines.  The girls seemed to be girls and the boys seemed to be boys.  At the end of the trip, getting on the plane in Bangkok headed back to Manila was telling when two women (from far away), wearing skimpy outfits, ended up being (from close up) two men.  It appeared they were in Thailand for breast enhancements, which they were excited to show off, along with a dozen shopping bags and flamboyant energy surrounding their entrance to the gate and boarding of the plane.  I found out after I returned to Dumaguete that there is actually a big population of these men in Thailand except they are beautiful, less flamboyant, and difficult to distinguish from other women.

All this being said, the entire trip I kept thinking to myself, "The people here are more similar to Filipino people than different."  Then, at the airport in Manila, as I waited for the plane to Dumaguete, I noticed and felt just how different my Filipino brethren were.  I can't pinpoint exactly what it was . . . it just felt familiar, like when I get on the plane in Houston headed to Lafayette with a bunch of other Cajuns . . . comfortable, familiar, warm, and friendly.

Awesome Veggie Selection

Food:  Thailand seemed to have the same food resources as the Philippines yet they are skilled at putting things together differently.  There was definitely less rice options and more noodles, along with more curry.  Something about the way they cooked and put together dishes felt healthier and Alana claimed every day that the food was much better than the Philippines.  You know me . . . I'm just an eater . . . and I noticed it too . . . a little.

Thai Chef Alana Fournet

They seemed to have the same kind of local food markets and fruit stands as the Filipino people and again their roadside joints were more about skillfully wrapping food in edible leaves than cooking things in sizzling grease.  Alana got the chance to take an afternoon cooking class in Koh Samui and learned some of their well-kept, ancient secrets and recipes so we are in good shape for reproducing some Thai dishes for visitors.

Oh . . . and spicy!  Wow!  In the Philippines, food is cooked with big pieces of Sili (spicy peppers apparently from Thailand) and I can order a dish and eat around them, which leaves a perfect kick in the food.  In Thailand, food is cooked with chopped up hot peppers, which is impossible to eat around.  So in Thailand, it was crucial to order the "not-spicy" version of the meal.

Jacques And Galynn Eating In The Restaurant Train Car

During one of our all night train rides that we almost missed, we ended up in the restaurant car.  We got to drinking local brew and I was h-u-n-g-r-y!  I didn't bother trying to avoid the spiciness of the food and almost went into cardiac arrest a few times.  I've never experienced not being able to see, breath, or move for several minutes because of soup!  Boy I paid for that for the next 36 hours.

Thailand Street Signs . . . In Thai!

Language:  Experiencing the language was very different than living in the Philippines.  Most of the music was in Thai, most of the TV I heard coming from homes and businesses was in Thai, and most of the traffic signs, billboards, and shop signs were in Thai.  If English was included, I was in little tiny letters below the Thai writing . . . I loved it!

Most of the people spoke very little English.  Even in the tourist industry they spoke just enough to get by and interact with us.  We were safe if we used the 50 words they typically knew to take our order or point us to Room 3.  We went to a local eatery one night and a teenage boy confidently approached to take our order.  When Alana asked him a simple question he immediately turned around and went to get his mother.  She wasn't much more helpful in the end.

They seemed to be very proud, comfortable, and confident with their language and culture . . . seemingly different than what we have experienced in the Philippines.

Breathe In . . . Breathe Out

Religion:  Buddha versus JC . . . really from the same clothe in many ways.  Instead of copious Catholic churches, Thailand was abounding with monks, sporting their orange garb, Buddhist monasteries, and golden temples with bells, statues, and dragons (called wats).  The people seemed to be less about guilt and more about the quest for peace.

Alana and I took advantage of a two-hour meditation class put on by Buddhist monks in their home wat in Chiang Mai.  The class started with a question-answer session with a few monks and I was engrossed in learning about their lifestyles and beliefs.  Alana did notice that even though one of them had been a monk for 8 years and the other for 14, they didn't seem to have very deep or extensive answers to questions about why live the way they live or believe the things they believe.  They mainly kept referring back to, "That's the way we've been taught."  Sound familiar?

Two Monks

 Then we got to learn more about and practice meditation.  Wow!  I'm about as ADD as I thought.  Very hard to keep thoughts out of my mind and focus only on my breathing, especially with a construction crew pounding away on a building right outside the wat.  When I finally started to tune that out, it ended up being a very sleep inducing experience.  That is typically how I operate, I'm either going all out or falling asleep.  Practice, practice, practice.

King President Bhumibol Adulyadej

Their seemed to be less corruption in their country (I have no idea if that has anything to do with their spiritual beliefs I just needed somewhere to mention that), which is run under a constitutional monarchy.  They have had a king for the past 55+ years, Bhumibol Adulyadej, and apparently he is the world's longest-serving current head of state and the longest-reigning monarch in Thai history.  I don't really know much about it, just that his picture and videos of him and his wife were everywhere so the people must love him or he has access to a lot of grant money . . . long live the king!

Animals:  There was a stark contrast in the animal scene in Thailand compared to the Philippines.  I didn't see (or hear) any chickens, roosters, pigs, or cows hanging out in people's yards, empty fields, or on the edge of roads.

Water Buffalo Whisperer

There was no indication of a cock fighting culture although we saw on a Kho Samui Island map two Buffalo Fighting Arenas.  Never visited nor inquired about them yet the internet says this local sport was traditionally held as entertainment after the rice harvest and now is a regular gig with sometimes millions of baht changing hands over the course of a day.  Apparently it is a tradition only on Kho Samui.  Their buffalo are what I would call a water buffalo, plentiful in the Philippines (they call them caribou) and used for working fields, of which I didn't see many in Thailand, maybe because they aren't such a rice producing culture.

Good Lookin', Well Fed, Happy, Healthy, Thai Dog

The cats and dogs in Thailand were significantly fewer than the Philippines and the ones I did see looked much healthier.  They had all their hair and appeared well fed.  Just like the Philippines though, the dogs were good at hanging around the roadsides without getting tangled up in traffic.  I even saw a young pup just feet from the highway, watching big trucks roll on past without budging from his sitting position, and not mindlessly stepping into the road to get squished.  Maybe these Thai animals are into meditation also.

Galynn & Alana At Elephant Nature Park

The hands down significant difference in the animal world between the Philippines and Thailand is the existence and use of the Asian elephant.  The elephant is revered and honored in Thailand.  Even though it was often said that the country was built on the backs of elephants and they are the symbol of the nation, we also became painfully aware of the fact that 50 years ago there were over 100,000 of them and today only around 2,500 remain, mostly because of lack of forest that they were prominent figures in helping to log.

Galynn Feeding Mae Kaew

With all this in mind, we went the elephant education route.  We paid more than double the money NOT to ride an elephant.  The scores of other tours included a one hour elephant ride (much of it on concrete), a half hour ox-drawn cart ride, buffet lunch, river rafting on traditional bamboo rafts, visit to the local Karen Hill People's tribe, heck, I think some even threw in a zipline experience for the American and European adrenaline junkies.

We saw the concrete and dirt facilities for those tours on our way further up the mountain to the Elephant Nature Park & Rescue Center (www.elephantnaturepark.org) where all 34 elephant residents there had been rescued from sometimes decades of abuse and deadly environments.  Many of them were blind and cripple in some manner and most of them were 60-80 years old and had worked decades in the logging (legal and illegal) and trekking industries in Thailand.

Time For Mae Kaew's Bath

Getting A Closer Look

Adopted Baby Hope Leading The Way To Baths

Hope's Group's Afternoon Snack

Both of those industries typically treat the elephant more like livestock in the way they 'break' and maintain them, using them mostly as a tool to make money.  We learned tons from the 2+ hours of documentaries we watched that day, as well as were in awe when we got to participate in feeding them, bathing them , and watching them socialize in as normal of a natural environment as possible.  We learned most of their stories and I personally walked away with a few more heroes in my life :-)  It was an inspiring and moving experience.

Infrastructure:  Thailand must be a country with more resources and I bet it is tons easier to build and maintain infrastructure in a country that does not have over 7000 islands (the Philippines), because the infrastructure was modern, well kept, and reliable, much like the USA.  We didn't experience any brownouts (loss of electricity) while in Thailand and their power lines didn't seem disorganized or scary, like in the Philippines.

Public toilets were generally working and clean.  I only saw one man during our stay peeing in public, a common daily occurrence in the Philippines.  The sidewalks and public spaces were clean.  Trashcans were everywhere.  The morning after the huge street market in Chiang Mai there wasn't a piece of trash to be found.  At one point riding the train Alana turned to me and said, "I just saw four trashcans in a hundred meter stretch on the road next to the railway."

I couldn't find money dropped in the streets anywhere!  The roads were well built and well maintained and the highways were wide and big with many lanes, lines, and landscape, again, much different than the rough and rugged Philippines.

The only unnerving part of much of the transportation was that they drove on the left side of the road.  I can't tell you how many times it looked to me like there was a runaway vehicle because there was no one at the wheel.  Alana kept getting in the driver's side of our taxis and vans and one time it looked like she was determined to drive the bus.

There was not nearly as much construction going on in Thailand, which in the Philippines could be the sign of a young developing nation.  The few construction crews I saw looked like they were working with much more sophisticated tools and machinery than what I've seen in the Philippines.  It was comforting though to see a huge building going up totally surrounded by bamboo scaffolding.  Now that reminded me of Filipinos technology.

Innovative Bamboo Technology

Transportation:  While in Thailand, we traveled by foot, elevator, escalator, zipline, scooter, tuk-tuk, car taxi, van taxi, subway, overhead railway, bus, ferry, train, and plane.  They didn't have any colorful jeepneys like in the Philippines and I have to admit that I missed the character of such vehicles and the way the jeepney transportation operates.

Cold Cold Train Rides

Like I mentioned before, most everything was efficient and on time, with the exception of some of the trains.  We had a 36-hour train experience from northern mountain city of Chiang Mai to Bangkok and then Bangkok to the mid-southern island called Kho Samui.  It was cold!  It was common for temperatures on long bus and train rides to drop down to 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahreneit) and not one person would complain or ask for it to be changed.  I figure they enjoyed the cold when they could get it and I wasn't going to play "entitled tourist" and rob them of their "cold time."

Similarly to the Philippines, public transportation in general was cheap and the tuk-tuk and taxi drivers always worked to con and overcharge us.  Alana stayed in Thailand a few extra days with Galynn so I took the bus from Kho Samui to Bangkok. When the bus arrived in Bangkok a very nice gentleman was happy to give me all sort of information about how the only way to the airport was to take a 450 baht ($14.52) taxi ride to the skyway train then a 40 baht ($1.29) skyway ride to the airport, which apparently was another 70 kilometers (43.5 miles) away.

He survived my barrage of questions about, "How do people get to the airport if they don't have 450 baht? Isn't there a subway or bus or shuttle van? Don't a lot of people go from this bus terminal to the airport?"  Finally, after much scrutiny, I asked where the taxi stands were and he kindly offered to walk me there.  He walked me to an abandoned lot next to the bus station and proceeded to open the door of HIS taxi for me.  I said, "You are the taxi driver?  I'm not getting in your taxi!  You are the one who was giving me all the information.  What if you were lying to me to get my money?"

I calmly walked away and ignored all his explanations and further warnings of how difficult it was to get to the airport.  I went straight to an information booth (why hadn't I done that to start with?) and they pointed and walked me to the shuttle van that cost 35 baht ($1.13).  I wanted to find that taxi driver and say, "Shame on you!"

The shuttle van ended up meandering the Bangkok highway system for 45 minutes (45 minutes) and went from Bangkok's west bus terminal to Bangkok's east bus terminal.  When I asked the van driver how to get to the airport he just pointed to the terminal.  I went in, searched around, unsuccessfully asked a few people how to get to the airport, no one knew (Kriminy!  Doesn't anyone go from the bus terminal to the airport!), and finally a nice man behind a ticket counter told me I had to take a taxi!

The taxi driver outside wanted 500 baht ($16.13) yet finally agreed on the meter as I walked away.  After another 45 minute (45 minutes) ride, a 70 baht ($2.26) toll road fee, and the 230 baht ($7.42) taxi meter fee I was finally at the airport.  Yeah . . . you can do the math . . . even though the trip probably took an extra hour . . . I saved a whole 155 baht ($5).  Supertourist I am . . . don't I feel like the fool . . . such is the life :-)

SUPERTOURIST!

InHarmony,

- Jaco

J Jacques Fournet II

US Peace Corps Volunteer

Philippines Batch 269

Daro, Dumaguete City

Negros Oriental

NORSU

LCP