Thung Wua Laen - Part Three

A few nights ago we spent several hours, and shared a meal with Gail, an astoundingly kindred spirit from inland Western Canada. She spent several months here at the Albatross last year, and is just now back for more. What a delight to talk and share and laugh and discover so many striking parallels in our lives: Gail has trained and worked as an art therapist; is a cancer survivor; is “retired” and renting out her house; is like minded in areas of healing, eating, discovering, growing and being. And she's a great and easy and familiar person. She feels like good family.

(By special request {I'm mean it}, I'm including some photos and a video of our room with balcony at the Albatross Guesthouse. We were quite comfortable here for our two week stay. Cost, about 550baht/$16 a night)

 And then the next morning-ish we met Sidney, Gail's friend from last year, who lives permanently in a beautiful jungle neighborhood just around the corner, so to speak, from Thung Wua Laen Beach. An old boy from Brooklyn! So he and I have that certain instant Jewish New Yorker familiarity. A lovely mathematician retiree with a kind of soft hearted curmungeonliness and a ready smile of self deprecation that makes laughing with him quite easy. He agrees, for example, that we ought to ignore almost everything he says about anything. Also a fount of information about Thailand's ways and means, having been here for 12 years.

THEN, that night, we had dinner with some other friends of Gail from last year, John and Jane, also American expats from Seattle, now living in this area for the past 4 ½ years and loving it. This was a high octane, compressed, concentrated evening of all kinds of information, 97.8 % of which I have already forgotten or had never assimilated to begin with, but they were good people to spend some time with and hear from about Thai food options – they introduced us to a couple of wonderful dishes that we wouldn't have known about, both of which could easily be made vegetarian: massaman, a dark curry, and a different coconut milk curry – living in Thailand, diving (they're both enthusiastic divers, and Jane does underwater photography), and just a lot about their experience of moving to Thung Wua Laen. They're near neighbors of Sidney, and after renting for three years, and making lots of Thai connections, they had a house built.

So as I was saying in a previous post, even the other farangs here don't seem to have any interest in relating or connecting. Hmm. Maybe it just takes a little time in a place....................

News Flash!

(I'm not sure how to relate with the following just yet. I'm wondering about it, and, well, leaving my conclusions open).

Nancy is now a biker chick!

And apparently I'm a crazy, reckless, devil may care biker dude.

By this I mean that we did end up renting a little 125cc motorbike (we call them, usually with a derogatory bias, “scooters” in the US), and riding hither and yon around the surrounding areas of our rural beach location. Little, rather meaningless, I think, really, helmets, and no other safety or protective gear. I've violated my own dedicated American commitment to riding safety, AND, I've exposed my beloved wife to the same madness, which she now actually likes! What's going on here!?

After at first declining to rent a bike, and then Nancy riding several miles on the back of Pon's bike to the little town of Saphli to get some fresh fruit, and not returning traumatized by the experience, we decided to get one for ourselves and do a little exploring around the jungle surrounding Thang Wua Laen Beach. Going slowly, carefully, in an area with very little traffic and a leisurely pace of things, the fact that we were wearing shorts and sandals and no gloves or jacket became acceptable in a way that I can't imagine it being in the States. When in Rome...........etc.? I think the fact that I have motorcycle experience and training allows me to think that at least I'm not entirely unprepared for the potential risks. We're not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy.

So farewell for now to our little beach haven, and on to Cha Am, a 3 hour train ride north. I thought Cha Am would be much smaller than it is, based on people's descriptions of the place as “pretty small and quiet”, but it turns out that my definition of “small and quiet” is based on our lives on Cerro Chato, where our nearest town, Madrid, is what I'd call “pretty small and quiet”, and not relative to a big city. Cha Am is in fact a “small” city on the gulf coast, and not exactly what I would call small and quiet at all, although we arrived on a Saturday, and the weekends are busier and noisier with Bangkok Thais coming here routinely for weekend get-away's and it just so happened that this Saturday night there is another BLARINGLY LOUD THAI AMPLIFIED MUSIC corporate party right down the street from us at the main courtyard/bandstand on the beach. I'm told that weekdays are truly quiet. We'll see.