2009 Thailand # 4: In Which Reinforcements Don’t Arrive and We Sleep in Wonderland

Cute but deadly…

We ate in a streetside cafe last night – Pad Thai and Fried Rice. Yummy. I love cafes where you can watch lizards running around the walls. Lends a unique ambience, I feel. Waiting for our food, we saw our English friends from the train go by. They had just bought enormous waterguns, so we lined them up as reinforcements for Day 2 of the Great Water Battle. Back at the guesthouse, we had a brief engagement with the enemy, then a truce was put in place for the night. Gill went to bed and I went downstairs to study fricatives and alveolar plosives (grammar and stuff) for a while, then off I went for some zzz’s as well. Our bedsheets are ever so glamorous – they have characters from Alice in Wonderland all over them.

There’s a really fat, large dog living down the road at the foodmarket. It lies under the stall most the time and just breathes. Obviously it’s very good at catching falling foodscraps. This morning it came to visit artist-guy’s little terrier dog. They just kind of lay in the shade looking at each other for a while, then went back to their respective territories. It was really cute.

I got a morning hello from Thai-guy down below with a bucket of cold water at 9 a.m. Then some fireworks went off – huge skyrockets that leave trails behind them like jetplanes. About half a mile from us is a Wat (temple) with gold finials on the edges of the many-layered rooftop, glittering in the sun. A little girl from our guesthouse family had great fun sitting in a large plastic garbage bin full of water, armed and ready with a giant plastic bazooka. Also leaking lots of cuteness, yet lethal at the same time. She got me when I was unarmed, which I thought was rather unfair, but this is a warzone and we can’t expect any mercy – not after our own behaviour yesterday. Gill and I went round the corner to the shops and bought bigger, better, faster, more weapons. They suck up the water like a syphon very quickly – excellent for quick reloading – and have a brilliant range. Our English reinforcements haven’t arrived yet and it’s now 5 p.m. so we’re very disappointed in their failure to front up and help. However, we do understand that they might well be under siege on their own street, so we’re giving them the benefit of the doubt for now. However, we’ve hung our NZ flag over the balcony and are giving as good as we get so far. This is getting more and more complex as miscreants are moving in to the rooms above us and beside us, so we’re hoping someone from Aussie or NZ moves in near by so we can present a United Nations front. Wish us luck.

The latest fashion here appears to be loud Hawaiian shirts, which we are seeing Thai people wearing in droves. Just like back in the 70’s. Did I mention that already? I’m typing as quick as I can so I can get back to Gill, as the street battle is really raging now and I can’t leave her to do all the dirty work by herself for too long. So sorry if I repeat myself anywhere. Put it down to battle fatigue.

We bought the newspaper today and are very glad we escaped Bangkok and didn’t go down south. Apparently they have riots down there (Bangkok and Pataya) and they had to cancel the ASEAN Summit. Sounds like it’s really put a damper on people enjoying Songkran (pardon the pun there) and the Thai people are pretty bummed out because it’s brought shame to their country and driving the tourists away. They really don’t need that after the tsunami and the last year’s airport siege.