Tuesday, November 30, 2021
4:30 a.m. Green Guest House
Mae Sot, Thailand
I guess this is an interesting day in my life, because this is my last day at the Green Guest House. I’ll be sleeping here in this bed in this room one last time tonight, and then I’ll be leaving. On Wednesday morning, I’ll be hopping on my scooter with my backpack strapped to the seat behind me and heading somewhere new. Though, to be honest, despite being my last day here, it doesn’t feel that terribly significant. And that’s because circumstances are such that I will be returning to Mae Sot. I’m not leaving the city completely. The plan is to go north and do the Mae Hong Son Loop by scooter and visit other places, but then I will come back to Mae Sot to get the next 60-day extension of stay. I still have ties in this city, and after six weeks, I’ll be back here. But since I’ll be gone for so long, I thought it was a good time to pack up completely and move out of this room. There is no point paying rent for the month of December when I won’t be here even a single day.
The way things are playing out, it probably doesn’t matter that much. The rent isn’t that much. The full rent for December and January would come to 7,000 baht, which is about $210 US. Now that I’m looking at that number on the page, I’m thinking I should have just kept the room. And that’s because despite my best efforts at getting ready to leave, I’m still not quite there. I could use a couple more days or even a week here in Mae Sot still. And I’ll have to find a place to stay back in Mae Sot when I come back for my next visa extension. That process always takes at least two weeks. And I could have stayed in this room during that time if I kept it.
I guess it actually doesn’t make sense. I just did the math. And even if I stayed in this room for 18 nights over that period, that amounts to around 400 baht per night. And for that, I can stay in a nice hotel. So, in terms of the amount of money it would cost, I could still be in Mae Sot for those 18 nights, pay the same amount of 7,000 baht in total, and get a nice hotel each of those nights. Or I could pay 7,000 baht for this room for the entire two months, and use it for just those 18 nights. The cost is the same. The only advantage to keeping the room would be making packing up easier for the trip. I could just leave a bunch of stuff behind. But that is just delaying the inevitable, since I would have to pack up and leave this room anyway at some point.
Okay, I just made myself feel better about my decision to give up my home here at the Green Guest House. It was the right thing to do. I think I needed that reassurance, because packing up and leaving the room has turned my departure for this trip into a somewhat more tiring and complex procedure than I’d hoped. What I mean is that they are two separate things. One big task is preparing for and packing for a big scooter adventure to northern Thailand. That is enough to keep a person busy. But I’m also packing up my entire life in this guest house room, and, essentially, leaving my home. That is another separate task entirely that would keep anyone busy. So I’m doing two things at the same time.
A funny thing is that I always seem to end up doing that. And I know from experience how exhausting it can be. I’m thinking in particular of when I left Taiwan permanently. That experience nearly killed me. It was exhausting. It was really too much. Looking back, I definitely should have done it in three stages. Stage one should have been quitting my job. That was a big enough life event on its own. Then I could have simply made the transition from being on a work visa to being on a tourist visa. I could have quit my job, flown out of Taiwan for a short holiday somewhere, and then returned to Taiwan on a brand new tourist visa. Stage two could have been leaving my apartment. I could have stayed in Taiwan for a month, and slowly packed up my life there and turned myself from an apartment dweller back into a vagabond. And then in stage three, I could have taken a month to turn myself back into a cyclist. And THEN I could have flown out of Taipei with my touring bicycle. But I tried to do it all at the same time, and it exhausted me. I was a wreck. It was too much.
And over the last few days, I’ve had a small taste of that same experience. I’ve been trying to finish the videos from my Kamphaeng Phet and Sukhothai trips. That hasn’t gone well. And I’ve been packing up my room at the Green Guest House. That involves a lot of work ranging from cleaning the room to getting rid of stuff I don’t need. And other time-consuming events pop up. Yesterday, for example, was a very tiring day. It wasn’t supposed to be. I’d actually planned ahead relatively carefully. For many days since I returned from Sukhothai and got my visa extension stamp, I’ve been dealing with stuff in my room and cleaning. I’ve been doing everything from defrosting the freezer to washing out the bathroom windows and trying to get rid of the mountains of snail and gecko poop that built up there. This rainy season was a bonanza as far as snail poop went. A vast colony of snails took up residence on the outside of the screens of my bathroom windows. And I didn’t know this about snails, but they poop like crazy. And this poop just sticks to everything. I couldn’t do anything about it because all of this was happening on the outside of the screens. I tried to remove the screens so I could clean all this up, but the screws holding it in place are all rusted in place. I figured I could do nothing but leave it for my landlords to deal with when I move out.
But this past week or two, the thought of my landlords discovering this mess bothered me, and I doubled down in my efforts to clean it up. And I ended up in the middle of one of these crazy projects that only I seem to ever find myself in. First, I just tried to use the blast of water from my bathroom’s shower hose to try to clear out the snail poop. To do this, I had to make sure that there was nothing on the outside of that window that I would be spraying with poopy water. I checked, and I was happy to see that that window just opens out onto thick bush at the back of the police station. Not only is there nothing there, nobody could even see what was happening. So I was free to try to hose down the windows as much as I wanted.
Unfortunately, this snail poop had stuck to everything like cement, and it took a long time to even get started with clearing it out. It took many attacks spread out over a few days. I sprayed everything for a long time on the first day, and some of the snail poop came free. That was encouraging, but most of it remained. So I just sprayed it until it was all soaked. And then I let it sit for a while and kind of get soft. And then I would return and grab the shower hose and spray it all down again and dislodge some more. I did this over many days and slowly started to clear it out in stages.
However, most of it just fell to the bottom of the window frame, and large piles of snail poop started to pile up there, and it was difficult to get it out because there was a ridge there. And all of this led to another project, because over the months that I’ve lived here, I had slowly jammed tissue paper into the gaps between the screen and the window frame. There were wide gaps all the way around, and all manner of insects came in through those gaps, everything from ants to beetles to mosquitoes to geckos to giant cockroaches. And I wanted to buy some caulk and caulk up the whole thing, but I couldn’t do that. So I just carefully folded and twisted tissue into the right shape and width and length, and using various sharp implements, I pushed it into the cracks to seal it up. I was only going to do this at the widest spots at first. But every time I blocked one opening, all the ants and other creatures would just start pouring through other cracks. And over the space of weeks, I ended up sealing the entire perimeter of both windows. And now that I was spraying the windows with water, I was soaking that tissue, and it was turning into a mess. And now I had to also remove all the tissue paper that I had so carefully inserted. And that took a lot longer and required much more effort than you’d think. And a funny and very gross thing is that once I had removed all this tissue paper from the cracks, when I sprayed the snail poop loose, it would now squirt through these cracks and come right into the bathroom and end up all over the walls, all over the floor, and in the sink. So every time I went into the bathroom for another session of spraying the snail poop to get it free, I would have to clean the bathroom of all the snail poop that came inside.
This went on for many more days than you’d expect. And eventually I reached a point where no amount of spraying of water would dislodge the snail poop. What snail poop was left was cemented in place it seemed. Luckily, this poop was highly concentrated, like rabbit poop pellets. There were just dozens of little snail poop pellets stuck to the inside of the cement window frame. And after thinking about how to deal with this, I wondered if I could find a very thin implement to stick through the window screen and use it to dislodge this poop. The only thing that would work was a sewing needle. So I got my last remaining needle from my sewing kit, and I stuck it through the screen and into the first little snail poop pellet. And with the needle, I was able to pop it off the wall. The water wouldn’t dislodge it, but I was able to free it with the needle. And that began a long process of removing every poop pellet one by one with the needle. This was actually very tiring because I had to hold my arms above my head to do this, and there were a lot of these poop pellets left. It was a long and precise procedure. Luckily, it is the kind of thing I’m good at. And after a few return trips with my needle and lots more spraying and cleaning, I had finally removed the scourge of the snail poop.
And this whole snail poop project is just an example of the type of unexpected and time-consuming jobs that pop up when you try to do something big like move out of a room or apartment that has been your home for over a year. You think that to prepare for your big trip, you just have to pack up your stuff in a backpack and leave, and you think you can do this easily in a morning, but the actual work that needs to be done can end up taking up entire days and many of those days in a row.
So, as I started to explain, I had a certain plan for yesterday. And I had been building up to that day for a long time. Yesterday was a full two days before my departure. And yet, I had set myself the goal of being 100% ready to leave on that day. Basically, I was going to treat the day as if I was really leaving that day. I was going to do a full pre-pack test. I was going to break down everything in my room and pack it up in my backpacks exactly as I would as if I was leaving that day. And I don’t mean some halfway effort. I don’t mean some fake pretending I’m leaving nonsense. I was going to go all the way. And I thought I could film the process as a packing video for YouTube.
And by doing this, I hoped to get a jump on my actual departure. Instead of leaving all the stress and effort and work until the last minute, I was going to do it a full two days early. And THEN I would have two full days to completely relax, knowing that I was completely ready to go. And my actual departure would be easy. And the idea was to do all this in the morning. I woke up very early as I often do, and I just started packing up. I didn’t even shower. I just got straight to work. And the idea was to get it all done in the morning. And then I was going to switch over to working on the videos. It was going to be a very productive day. It was going to be the key day. That was the plan.
But then things started to interfere. My landlady, for example, came to speak to me, and she said that her family was going to have a certain chicken and rice dish for lunch, and she said she would like to bring me some. And we made arrangements that she would drop off this food at one o’clock. And I kind of arranged my day and my activities around that. She didn’t actually show up at one. I think it was after two when I started to hear some unusual noises from outside my room. I had an inkling of what was going on, and I wasn’t exactly thrilled at the thought.
And then after a few minutes of this noise, there was a knock on my door, and I opened it to see that my landlady had not just brought me some rice and chicken in a Tupperware container. She had brought a full meal of many dishes, and she had laid a complete dinner for two on the table outside my room. Apparently, her idea was for the two of us to sit down together and have a farewell meal. This was, obviously, very nice of her. And a normal person would think only of what a wonderful thing this was for her to do and how delicious the food would be. But I’m not always normal, of course, and my heart sank a little bit. I hadn’t eaten anything all day, and I had been working hard, and I was so flustered and stressed out that I didn’t have the energy to face a long, social meal like that. And I didn’t have the time either. I had so much that I still needed to do, and I had only so much energy left. But I had no choice, of course, and I sat down with my landlady to enjoy this meal.
It was actually the first time that I’d sat down in a social setting with anyone from the family. We’d never had a snack or a meal or a drink or a coffee together. This is related to something I think about quite a bit. Living as long as I have in Asia, I’m often told how friendly everyone is and how much they value guests and hospitality and friendships and family relationships. This is always told to me in such a way that is meant to contrast with how they perceive people in the west to be unfriendly and selfish. My landlady, in fact, told me several times that she had made a special effort to come back to Mae Sot to be here when I left. And she told me that I was like part of their family. Yet, in all this time, I’ve never been inside their home. Not once. I’ve never even been on their front porch. I’ve never sat down at any of the tables with them at the front of the guest house where they are always sitting and eating and drinking. I don’t know anything about anyone in the family. I don’t even know who actually lives in the house and what they do. I don’t know how many children they have or where all these children are. I see these big, hulking sons all the time. But I don’t know exactly which ones live here and which ones don’t. They walk around in their underwear outside all the time, as is a normal habit here. But I’ve never had a conversation or an interaction with any of them. It’s kind of hard to have a chat when they’re walking past you in their boxer shorts with their butt crack hanging out.
And even during the meal, my landlady kept steering our conversation back towards subjects meant to show how what she was doing for me was superior to what people in the West do. She has actually been to quite a few countries, including Australia. And she talked about how in Australia, people would have their own meals, even when they ate as a group. Even when a group of friends ate together, they would each have a separate meal on their plate. This is as opposed to the Asian style of having multiple communal dishes on the table, and everyone helping themselves from the same dishes. I’ve heard this story many, many times. And it is always told to me to convey how we Westerners are so selfish and focus only on ourselves. The story is meant to illustrate how things are better in Asia. It comes up almost every time I have a meal with someone. They feel they have to point out how much better it is to order a bunch of communal plates and then all of us get our food from those plates. And they point out how weird it is for Westerners to order complete meals for themselves in restaurants.
I always let it go, of course. It annoys me, and I have a dozen counter arguments I could present. And I often want to point out the problems in their position and attitude. But I don’t. I just listen and nod politely.
To be honest, these meals are often a good illustration of the clash of cultures. My landlady, for example, kept telling me about all these wonderful things about Asian culture and how well they treat guests and foreigners like me. Yet, almost everything she did made me uncomfortable. She said, for example, that she was going to drop off a simple rice and chicken snack for me. But, instead, and without any warning at all, she sprung a full and formal meal on me where we were expected to sit together. I didn’t know she was going to do this, and it ended up disrupting my entire day. She also said she would be bringing some food at one o’clock. But she was over an hour late. And all through the meal, she kept telling me everything I was doing wrong. I couldn’t touch a single dish without a long lecture about how I was supposed to eat it. She just would not leave me alone to enjoy my meal. If the guest is so important, why not let the guest relax and enjoy the meal as they like? Instead, she told me which utensil I was supposed to use. She told me how I was supposed to add all the spices and sauces. She told me what order I was supposed to eat the dishes in. She told me which dishes were supposed to be combined. And every time I tried to eat something as I wanted to, she would interrupt and tell me that I was doing it wrong. She had brought some skewers of some kind of meat, for example, and this was meant to be eaten with a bowl of a kind of peanut sauce. I took a spoonful of this peanut sauce and put it on my plate so that I could dip the skewer of meat into it. But she told me this was wrong. I was supposed to dip my skewer of meat into the main bowl of peanut sauce, and she showed me how.
But I didn’t want to do that, because I would take a bite of the meat. And then I would dip it back into the peanut sauce and take another bite. And, of course, since I had already taken a bite, I didn’t want to put the meat back into the communal bowl of sauce. It was better to put the sauce on my plate. But she told me that was wrong. And she showed me how you are supposed to take the entire skewer of meat and put the whole thing into the communal bowl of peanut space and roll it around and move it around until the whole thing was covered. And THEN you can eat it. You wouldn’t put it back in the bowl, so you didn’t have to worry.
But I didn’t want to eat the skewers that way. It makes a mess. The skewer of meat is dripping with this peanut sauce and it falls all over the table as you try to move it back to your plate. I prefer to have the sauce on my plate. And then I dip the skewer back into the sauce bit by bit as I slowly eat it. If the guest is so important, why not let the guest enjoy their food in their own way? But that isn’t how things are, and she kept telling me to do it the right way. It was the same with every dish on the table. The whole meal was very uncomfortable for me for that reason. I couldn’t relax and enjoy the food because I was being told all the time about how I was eating it wrong.
It’s a silly example, but I compare this to how I would behave if I were treating a foreign visitor to some classic American food, like pizza. I’d order the pizza and let them eat it. And that’s it. If they want to peel all the cheese off the top and eat that first, I’d just let them do it. I wouldn’t stop them and tell them how they’re supposed to eat pizza. They can eat it any way they like.