Walking in Bangkok

An
American in Asia:

His Quest for Cosmic Truth

(or at least a Decent Espresso)

It's raining cats and big snarling dogs these days. Almost every evening the sky is full of ravening, untamed electrical amperage. Around the fall of dusk the wind sweeps the stifling heat out and clouds roll in like violent drunks.

The canals are all swollen and when the boat pulls up to the pier I have to make a timed vault over the waves that deluge the dock. Far from inconvenient, it's a lot of fun. Especially for a big kid who has to wear a tie and act like a grownup every day. But I'd hate to manage it in high heels and a business skirt.

Walking down the street is not much different than the canal except that I do it without the benefit of a boat. I keep my eyes on the cars and puddles, ready to turn my umbrella sideways to ward off gallons of sewer water. I keep my other eyes out for dangling electrical wires and ill-placed sign posts.

These wires come loose regularly and swing around my head

Unlike the rain in Seattle, it's warm here. Kind of a soft, harmless, even therapeutic rain. Though it's no good for a respectable sensei to show up for class like a wet dog. They make me take off my socks and give me a bath towel before they'll let me through the front door.

Another Buddhist Holiday

This weekend was another holiday for Buddha. The guy really knows how to relax. To be a truly devout believer you are required to take as many days off as possible. This time friends took me to a temple out in the sticks. It was not one that appears in the tourist guides. I was the only foreigner there and I got the usual stares and amused glances as my friends talked me through the rituals.

In one building we approached a well-fed monk with a pock-marked face on our knees, pushing a bucket of gifts which we had bought outside. I wondered how he got so big on a vegetarian diet. He laid out a flap of his robe on the ground before him and we placed the gifts on it. Then, hands held in prayer, we bowed our heads to the ground three times. He chanted the lines of a prayer and we repeated. Or rather my friends repeated it......god knows what I said. After the prayer he dipped a big bamboo brush into holy water and flicked it on each of us.

In front of the next building, blessed and a little damp, we bought a dozen small squares of gold leaf, a candle, some incense and a bundle of flowers. We placed the candles around a bowl of sand and stuck the lit incense sticks into it. Inside, after bowing three times to the statues of Buddha in the room, we placed the flowers on a platform in front of them. Then we approached each statue and stuck a piece of gold leaf somewhere on its surface. It was tricky getting the gold leaf off of your finger and onto the Buddha, and we all ended up with flecks of gold on our hands and faces.

The room was ringed with a long row of metal bowls. We bought a bunch of coins and went around the ring, dropping a coin in each bowl. I went kind of slow, I guess, because it was my first time and it seemed to me that the point was to give a little thought to each act of giving. But when there were a dozen bowls left an old woman and a couple of kids came roaring up behind me in some kind of coin-dropping drag race. I got a little tense but I had a nice rhythm going so I just continued to drop them slowly until the end, where I dumped the rest of my bowl of coins in. The kids didn't seem to mind waiting too much since they had probably never seen a tall gangly White guy paying respects to Buddha there.

After that, we all piled into the pickup and headed off to watch Arnold Schwarzenegger blast away at evil machines in Terminator 3. A humorless movie and pretty much a waste of 90 precious minutes of my life. Buddha would have found a way to enjoy it, but I'm just not that enlightened yet.

Tomorrow and Tuesday are both holidays as well and I have been forbidden to eat meat until Wednesday. I didn't eat it for 15 years or so in the US so it ought not to be a problem.

Jeffrey Studebaker has been (in no particular order) a SE Asian correspondent for a Singaporean travel magazine, a teacher, consultant and translator in Japan, a guitarist with the band, Swoon 23 in every city of the US of A, a coffee roaster in Seattle, a bike messenger in Portland, a marine fire system repairman in Seattle, an osteoporosis clinic researcher in Providence, a mental ward counsellor on the night shift in Portland, a brief success in New York, and he has now returned to the US after nearly a decade in Asia to pursue a publishing career.