A Couple Sad Endings, A Trip to Penang and Johnny Weismuller as Tarzan

An
American in Asia:

His Quest for Cosmic Truth

(or at least a Decent Espresso)

Thailand has the coolest train doors.

The big news this week is that I got a new job. I'll be writing for a tourism trade magazine starting next month.You are now reading the correspondence of a correspondent.

Friday was the last day of my former job, perhaps the last day of a 5 year teaching career. As I walked down the street at 4pm on my way to the last lesson, I passed a woman of indeterminate age kneeling on the sidewalk. She was bent over a bundle of towels and shirts. She was perfectly still as I approached and passed, and something rang in my memory. I'd seen her that morning, at 7am. I had been walking to the first class of the day and I was distracted by two mangy dogs fighting across the street. And I'm not being figurative here. They really had some pretty nasty mange. The noisier one seemed to have lost, but the other went away anyway. A few meters further on, the woman was on her knees cradling a small dog in her arms. It was one of those dogs that looks like a small doberman pinscher. That time too, she didn't move at all.

I guessed that something had happened to her dog and it had died during the day. Maybe it had been dead the first time I saw her. In either case she had spent at least 9 hours kneeling motionless by the road over the small animal wrapped in towels and shirts. I continued walking to my last lesson, but I wasn't really looking at anything. I thought about the dog and I thought about the end of teaching.

The train with the cool doors.

I have been saying goodbye to students this week and apologizing for leaving suddenly. I taught some of them through a small school and the owner asked me to lie about my reason for leaving and say that I had to leave the country for a family emergence. Of course my students asked for details and I had to make up elaborate stories all week. I felt pretty bad about doing that but I also felt bad about leaving the school in an awkward situation. It was an even trade, I guess.Teaching is an awesome job and I'm really going to miss it. No industry has nicer customers. It's a pleasant thing to spend each day talking with people who are paying to improve their minds.

Next week I'll be in Penang, wrestling a fresh visa from the Thai Embassy there. I'm taking a sleeper train down Southern Thailand, traversing half the Malay Peninsula. The trip is being paid for by my new employers. On my return I am to be a correspondent for a trade magazine for the Asian tourism industry. As near as I can gather, my job will involve cruising around Thailand, staying in nice hotels, exploring the towns they are in and writing it all down. I'm told I'll be busy.

A Slow Taxi in Bangkok

I met a taxi driver this week who drove really slow, a rare thing here. This was probably due to the fact that he was 71 years old. He'd been driving in Bangkok for 50 years. I told him I taught English to Japanese students. He told me that when he started driving, the Americans were fighting the Japanese. This reminded him of Johnny Weismuller, the American swimmer who first played Tarzan in the old black and white movies and who invented the patented Tarzan yell. In fact all the Tarzan yells you hear in later movies are just recordings of Johnny Weismuller because no one could do it as well as him. The driver was vexed by Johnny Weismuller because, he said, "I am Thai. I know elephants and crocodiles. Tarzan is American but he can speak to them," then irrelevantly, "So I study English from American movies." His English was great notwithstanding it's source.

Heh! I said 'peninsula' on the internet.

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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.