The HorneBlower

Creepy white guys

Wed, 7 Nov 2007 02:11:03 -0800

When you’re in Patong, it’s hard to get your mind around all the creepy white guys who come for the girls. Almost ALL the white guys are with Thai bar girls. Occasionally they’re young and attractive guys, but the vast majority are much older and/or morbidly obese. And they walk around holding hands like they’re showing off their young, hot girlfriends. I just want to say “Dude, put your ego in check -- everyone knows she wouldn’t even look at you if you weren’t paying for sex..”
But as Gandhi said, “A hole is a hole.”
Or was it “Be the change you wish to see in the world?” Oh well - same premise.

A taste of training

Sun, 4 Nov 2007 22:04:25 -0800

OK I’ll start writing shorter entries - that will help me catch up. See? I’m learning how to be a blogger.
This is Saohin, one of my favorite trainers, doing his famous warm-up. He tries to get me all excited so I’ll jump in and join him, but I mostly just cower in the corner, watching him and complaining about my back.

It’s so funny that these guys are constantly walking around with giant bruises and black eyes and skinned knees, or just bashed up arms from wiping out on their moped, etc. I’m so not used to my body being hurt in any way. One of the trainers was wrapping my hands and I told him to wrap it high on the knuckles because I had a “boo boo” (it just came out. He didn’t speak much English. It’s a universal word.) He looked for the boo boo for a few seconds, and then asked me if that freckle was the boo boo.
“It’s not a freckle - it’s a wound. And it’s bigger than a freckle! See THIS is a freckle. This WOUND is slightly bigger...”
Like my fighter street cred wasn’t tenuous enough. Today as I was dodging coconuts on the way to Mama’s, a huge coconut branch fell out of the tree and landed next to me. Like god was saying “Think you can escape my coconut bombs? Try surviving THIS!”
Then I looked down at the ground just as my foot was stepping directly onto a 3-foot snake. Now granted the snake was dead, but let’s just say I’m not exactly proud of my reaction, and just thank Christ no one had that on video. Because if they did, I’m pretty sure “Screaming jumping snake guy” would be an internet sensation by now.

Patong Carnaval

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 22:05:30 -0700

Patong is sort of already a non-stop carnaval, but there has also been a few special celebrations where they actually close off the main street to traffic and set up booths. They also set up booths of food and drink all along the beach, along with entertainment, fireworks, and floating beach lanterns. In the video you can get a sense of the endless variety of Thai food available everywhere - the street food is the best. And it’s the reason I’m not quite yet at my goal weight (did I mention my big bones?)
The lanterns were one of my favorite things in Thailand -- they were so unexpected. Dan and I were walking along in the center of Patong, and looked up to see a sky full of glowing orange lights. We had NO idea what they were, so we made our way over to the beach to explore. The lanterns are large paper domes, and you can light a hunk of wax in the middle to make them light and begin to float upwards like a hot air balloon. Locals sell the lanterns for 100-200 baht all along the beach. It’s beautiful to watch the lighting up close, but even more amazing as one by one, hundreds of glowing balloons are set from from the beach and float up into the stars.
After a few minutes of watching in awe at the beauty of the site, the American in me kicked into gear. Where do they land? Isn’t it a fire hazard? Can the locals find them when they fall and recoup their investment? What about lawsuits?
I really need to spend more time away from America.
It’s hard to capture the magic of these lanterns on film without a great camera. To my genius photographer friend Paiwei -- you’ve got to get to Thailand to shoot this stuff.
You can also hear me yelling “shit!” every 3 minutes, because fireworks kept going off around me. I swear it was like they gave the fireworks to a bunch of blind kids with matches. No one is in charge, it’s just random giant fireworks exploding all around you -- directly over your head, under you, behind you. We were literally jumping out of the way to not die a fiery death.

I was impressed to see hundreds of these lanterns floating at one time, but even more impressive is what happens during the major Thai festivals and celebrations in Thailand.
Below is a picture of a Tsunami remembrance celebration, with literally thousands of lanterns. The belief is that misfortune is carried away with the lanterns.

And here, tourists release the lanterns at Homage to the Lord Buddha during the festival of Yee Peng in Chiang Mai. Can you imagine what this looks like from a passing plane?

The Burma Run

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 19:50:27 -0700

When you arrive in Thailand you can receive a Tourist Visa upon entry that's good for a month. Unfortunately, if you're here for longer than a month, you must physically leave the country first, even if you immediately come back in. You can do this up to two times, for a total Tourist Visa stay of 3 months, and then you have to leave the country for 6 months. So there are a lot of companies here who orchestrate "Visa runs" to Malaysia, Singapore, and the most common route, Burma. You hop in a van, drive for 6 hours to the Burma border, go through Immigration, and then get right back in the van for the drive back.
This trip was a total disaster. First we had to leave at 6:30am, which means I had to get up at 6, which if you know me, is not a pretty thing. On my first attempt I was a bit too leisurely about my arrival (15 minutes late at the MOST), so the van left without me. The next day (on the day my Visa expired and I was about to become an illegal alien) I made it, and was stuffed into an older van that seated 11. Thankfully there were only 11 of us, so everyone could really stretch out and get comfortable. I was seated in the middle seat, with no arm rests, for 6 hours. I couldn't really see anything out the windows, and the driver drove like a maniac, so the whole time I had to hold onto the seat in front of me for dear life. My traveling partners were not exactly talkative -- in fact, I don't think anyone said one word the whole trip. SIX HOURS. And no one was willing to trade seats for even PART of the trip, even though I stupidly let some random girl take the front seat even though she was behind me, because I didn't want to be a dick. See mom? It never pays to be chivalrous.
When we got to the border, we went through immigration to leave Thailand, got our passports stamped, and got back on the van. Then some totally random guy came around, collected our passports, and disappeared. I probably should have asked him if he was at all affiliated with immigration, this trip, or the government in any way. The van took us to a nearby dock, where we boarded a motor boat and set off into the sea. After a half hour we arrived at another dock by a sign that said Myanmar, Burma. How did I know that name? Oh that's right, that's where all the violence in Asia has been focused on in the news. Excellent! Now I'm stuck in the most violent part of a country I've never heard of without a passport, and don't know any of the apparently deaf mutes I'm traveling with. Who wants to have unprotected sex? Is it ok if I smoke a joint here? Whose gun is this?
Another walk through another immigration office for more stamps. Again, no English anywhere -- just pointing, signing papers, and stamping. And I took pictures every once in a while so some day they could hopefully follow the trail of pictures to where I was buried and return my remains to my mother. Along with a box of porn.
On the boat trip back two guys burst onto the boat wearing ski masks, which is a GREAT way to make the American tourists feel welcome. It turns out this is how they deal with the heat... with ski masks. It seems counter-intuitive, but I guess it keeps the sun off their faces, with the added bonus of terrifying the westerners. The passport guy thankfully returned and gave us our stamped passports on the boat, and then proceeded to offer me tabs of Cialis at a highly discounted rate. When I declined this great offer, he assumed I must not know what Cialis was for, and since he didn't speak English it made sense to actually act out an erection with his finger on the fly of his pants. I thanked him for the impromptu sex show but politely declined.
After the boat ride and another quick van trip we were back at the first immigration office getting stamped back into Thailand. And at this point I realized that no one was planning on giving up their seats for the return ride, as purses, shirts, and bottles of water had all been carefully staged in the car. There was no way I was doing another 6 hours without windows, so I asked the driver of the new, spiffy van parked next to us if he had room for me on the ride back to Phuket. For another 400 baht, we had a deal. I made sure the original driver knew of the plan, and like a parking lot drug deal, the exchange was made.
The ride back was much nicer -- people on the new happy van were friendly and talkative, the A/C was strong, and I had a big window seat. We arrived in Patong at 7pm, and rather than take a cab back to Chalong where I live, I stayed in Patong for a massage and some dinner to decompress from the 12-hour nightmare. As I sat at dinner leisurely reading the email on my iPhone I saw a frantic email from Cori asking where I was. The driver of my car had been waiting for me in Burma for an hour, and finally had to leave without me. Apparently someone saw me get on the back of a moped driven by a white monk, and we had taken off in Burma.
Ummm... what the fuck?
I emailed back saying that I was actually back at home, massaged and well-fed. And while the idea of a white monk-driven road trip on the back of a moped through the streets of Myanmar is a compelling idea, it's probably not something I would have done.
Unless the monk was Wentworth Miller.
Here’s some video so you can get a sense of the Burma run:

Another rainy day

Sat, 27 Oct 2007 07:14:46 -0700

OK what we have when we marry slow internet access with procrastination is a very slowly updated blog. I never promised you I'd be prolific (and hey -- you get what you pay for!)
Now that I've been here a month, I've kind of gone through the eye of the vagabonding needle and now I just feel like I'm living here. Which is actually a great place to be. Usually when we travel we're so busy running around and seeing everything and doing everything that we just don't have time to *be* in the place. In order to *be* in a place you have to reach that point where you have no impulse to do anything. My expectations of what I needed Thailand to be have fallen away now, and I'm able to appreciate and really experience the place, especially when I’m doing nothing.

For example, this weekend I holed up in my room to watch two seasons of Prison Break, and discover my new definition of “a can of frosting” in Wentworth Miller. Turns out each season has 24 hour-long episodes, so that was 48 hours of TV over a 4-day period. And if my thesis is correct, this helped me to really *be* in Thailand.

There are still plenty of little surreal things that happen to me of course. I saw a sign that said "Gerbil Massage," and my first thought (well, after Richard Gere) was that this was just a really extravagant service for overly caring pet owners. You bring in your gerbil and they wrap it in a tiny towel and go to work on his glutes, which have got to be tight from all that wheel running. But then I thought maybe it was a massage for people where you lay in a box and they just cover you with frisky gerbils, and their scampering is like a light massage. Although that seemed like it would lean more towards torture than a massage. It finally struck me that this was probably just a misspelling of "Herbal Massage," and well... that really made the most sense. Although if I see another ad for gerbil massages I’m going to totally give it a go.
One irritating thing with the cabbies here is that they really try to be your friend. And it's only irritating because they don't really want a friend, they want you to give them a bigger tip, and they think if they're super friendly you will. So first they try to get you to sit in the front seat, and then they talk and talk and talk, in impossibly bad scraps of English. I usually sit in the back with my iPhone earplugs on, even if I'm not listening to anything. It's actually a great trick to use all around Thailand, because I feel less guilty ignoring people who are pitching me cab rides, tailored suits, or their vagina. But yesterday I forgot to put on the earphones so he started yacking in the driver seat. Something like this:
Driver: You married?
Me: (Really? We’re going here?) No.
Driver: You date a Thai lady?
Me: (You mean am I renting one of your town whores?) No.
Driver: Where you from?
Me: (oh my god you’re still talking) LA.
Driver: Oooooohhhhhh!
This is another common thing. When you say something they don't understand, their eyes widen and they give you a very dramatic and excited "Ooooooooohhhhh!" which sounds like they finally, definitely understand you. Then they re-ask the same question seconds later.
Driver. Where you from?
Me: Ummm... LA. Los Angeles?
Driver. Ooooohhhhhhhhh!
Me: It's in California.
Driver: California? Ooooohhhhh. How long you here?
Rather than trying to distinguish the use of the imperfect tense versus present and past participles in English, I just throw out a number.
Me: One month. I study Muay Thai.
Here in a misguided and typically American attempt to communicate internationally, I revert to Tarzan speak.
Driver. Ooooooohhhhh! Muay Thai! You study Muay Thai???
Me: Yes.
Driver: How long?
Me: One month.
Driver: Ooooooooohhhhhh. Muay Thai. Muay Thai. You study Muay Thai?
Me: Yeah.
A version of this excruciating conversation loops until we arrive at the destination, and usually repeats in every cab I get into. So if you get anything from this blog, make it this: when in Thailand, bring earphones.

The Mind-Blowing Vegetarian Festival

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 07:47:00 -0700

I had heard the Phuket Vegetarian Festival was a big celebration here, but I was in no way prepared for what was to come... Of course I assumed there would just be lots of good food, innovative ways to use tofu, vegetarian versions of traditional Thai dishes, etc. Then I was invited by a TMT staffer to actually join in and walk in the procession through the streets, rather than watch from the sidelines, so I was all about it. We were going to follow and "support" Noon, who was a staff friend and actual participant. Again, a bit nebulous, but whatever.
Because it was apparently a religious ceremony and we needed to be "purified," we were told we had to prepare for the week before by abstaining from meat (done!), sex (done!), and alcohol (doh!). So it turns out the thing has nothing to do with promoting a vegan lifestyle - it's just called the Vegetarian Festival because giving up meat is one of the things people do to participate. And what do the participants do? Prepare yourself -- this one was tough to film and even tougher to edit.
It starts off with an early visit to a Buddhist temple, where devotees known as "Ma Song" begin praying until they go into a serious trance. We're talking hooting, shaking, jumping, and muttering -- what to Westerners might seem like speaking in tongues. The trance means they've got the spirit in them, and that allows them to do seemingly impossible feats like walking over hot coals, ascending ladders of bladed rungs, or some impossibly frightening body piercings. We're not talking about the regrettable earring you got in high school, or even the no longer hip eyebrow, lip, or nose piercing. We're talking about putting giant needles, blades, chains, and anything else you can find through your cheeks. How about a large serrated knife through your tongue? Noon put a knife and a gun through his cheeks. A KNIFE AND A GUN THROUGH HIS CHEEKS. Kind of calls out the whole self-flagellation thing for Jesus. I mean flagellation is ok, but if you’re seriously devoted, put A GUN AND A KNIFE THROUGH YOUR FACE and get back to me.
There were also giant swords, umbrellas, poles with pineapples or mirror balls on the end, even musical instruments. Through their faces! It was horrifying at first, but somehow we got used to it, and it was so fascinating watching them actually do it that we couldn't turn away (although I will tell you I had to turn away while editing the footage -- it can be pretty shocking).
We also had to wear all white in the procession, and with a sexless, meatless, wineless week under my belt, Buddha was totally my homeboy on this day. After everyone was all pierced up, the giant white crowd spilled out of the shrine and began a long, LONG walk through Phuket town. Thousands and thousands of people lined the streets to watch the parade, and it's hard to express the feeling of a 4 hour walk with thousands of people bowing at you and taking pictures and just treating you with total reverence as you pass. The pierced ones walking among us were clearly "touched by the spirit" so they were able to bless the crowd as they passed. There were thousands of small personal shrines set up in front of homes and offices offering blessings of incense and fruit and tea. Every once in a while Noon would stop to bless a child or accept an offering or bless a shrine. The air was thick with incense and firecrackers were thrown at our feet for all four hours. It was really loud but after a while I could tune out the deafening sound of firecrackers and just take in all the blessings and reverence from the crowd. It's really the way I want to be treated when I go anywhere now.
After 4 hours I was drenched in sweat and thought the parade would never end, but finally we arrived at a sort of lake/reservoir that signified the final stop. The firecrackers went absolutely crazy there (and with a 30% Muslim population let's just say the sound of constant gunfire and explosives isn't the most relaxing sound to my American ears...).
The whole thing was just extraordinary - definitely one of the most memorable days of my life. Take a look.