Thursday, March 24, 2022
4:17 a.m. Room 1102, Phannu House
Mae Sot, Thailand
My air conditioner story from yesterday ended well, I’m happy to say. It wasn’t too late in the afternoon when I heard a sharp little tap-tap-tap on my door and the friendly and efficient woman from the Phannu informed me that the air conditioner repairman was there. I looked out into the parking lot, and I saw a very large and very professional-looking truck easing into a parking spot. It was one of those trucks that bristled with special compartments for various tools and pieces of equipment. This was not just a guy with a twenty-year-old pickup truck and a milk crate of rusty tools. Within minutes, a confident repairman was moving in and out of my room and then to the rear of the building to work on the air conditioner. I was pleased, in an odd way, that the repairs actually took a long time. I wrote yesterday that I was nervous that even if a repairman showed up, that he would do very little. He would just tweak something and the air conditioner would putter to life and then he would leave. And I would be left with an air conditioner that technically was repaired. That is to say, it would turn on, but it still wouldn’t really work that well. And the fact that this repairman worked for quite a long time and did many things and, from what I saw, replaced a lot of parts made me feel good. He even sat in my doorway for some time with a soldering iron and wires and components and busily put things together. And the components he was assembling were all brand new and came out of nice, new packages. Therefore, it appeared that he was doing some substantial repairs. When he was finished, he turned on the air conditioner with the remote, and I could hear the main air conditioning unit out back thunk into operation. And glorious cold air began to come out of the unit on the wall in this room.
The entire episode pleased me immensely. And I have revised my opinion of the woman at the Phannu, and she is back in my view to being extremely efficient and reliable and even warm and friendly. Yesterday, when I told her about the air conditioning problem and she didn’t respond much, I was worried about her. But I think I can dismiss that as being just a simple language problem or a cross-cultural difference. She didn’t respond with any kind of apology or concern or any emotion at all, but she did spring into action and deal with it. And when the repairs were done and I was sure the air conditioner was now working, I tracked her down and thanked her for getting it fixed. I told her I was very happy. And then she responded with an apology and a face of concern and told me that she had had no idea that the air conditioner wasn’t working. Had she known, she said, she wouldn’t have rented me the room.
As I said, I was relieved that the air conditioner really was broken to such an extent that it required a professional repairman to work on it for such a long time and employ so many tools and parts. It justified my reporting that it was broken. It often happens that you report something as not working, and then the person responsible will test it themselves and then that thing will suddenly work. And they think you are crazy. In this case, that could have happened because the air conditioner occasionally would work for about thirty seconds. In all my testing of it, I noticed that if I left it completely off for an hour or two and then I turned it on, the main A/C unit would work. It would turn on. But it would function for only thirty seconds. And once it shut off after thirty seconds, it would never turn on again no matter what you did with the remote. The fan unit would keep blowing inside the room, but it would just blow around warm air.
So I was worried that after I told the Phannu people about the air conditioner being broken that they would come to see for themselves. And they would hit the button on the remote and the air conditioner would seem to work. And then I’d have to explain that they have to wait for thirty seconds and then it would turn off and not work from that point forward. To forestall that possibility, I actually left the air conditioner turned on permanently. It wasn’t producing any cold air, but I left the fan section running all day just on the off-chance that the Phannu staff would drop by to test it for themselves. And they could see that it was broken. As it turned out, the woman at the Phannu took my word for it that the A/C was broken. She never came to see for herself. That surprised me, and it got me wondering at the time if this problem was already known to them. It’s not like the air conditioner was in perfect condition and then out of nowhere it broke down. Even when I was here before, that air conditioner barely worked and was in rough shape. And when I showed up this time, it didn’t work at all. Therefore, the person who was in the room before me must have also lived without air conditioning. It’s not like the unit broke while I was using it. It was already broken when I showed up. So, I wondered if this other person reported it. Did several people? And perhaps my report was the final straw and it finally galvanized them into action. This idea was supported by how they just took my word for it that the air conditioner was broken. No one came in to test it. For all they knew, I was just being a dummy and didn’t know how to operate the remote. Or maybe the batteries in the remote were dead. So it made sense that they already knew about the problem to some extent. But she said she had no idea that the A/C unit didn’t work, and I believed her.
And that was pretty much the big event of the afternoon. Nothing else of note happened. I had my trip to immigration in the morning, and that turned out well. For the rest of the day and evening, I finalized six videos for YouTube and started working on the seventh and last one from my previous trip to the north. Working on these videos was a really strange experience because they are two months old. They all date from my first trip around the Mae Hong Son Loop. And I’ve since done everything in those videos a second time. So, in fact, as I was riding my scooter back to Mae Sot this time, I was working on the videos from the days when I did the exact same thing two months ago. I was repeating everything exactly right down to showing up in Mae Sot just in time to go to immigration. It felt so strange. I rode my scooter from Mae Sariang to Mae Sot. And while I was doing that, I was editing the video about riding from Mae Sariang to Mae Sot two months ago. There was a weird echo chamber sensation to it.
I have the seventh and final video to edit today. And then I will edit and finalize all the videos from my trip to Sukhothai last year. I still haven’t finished those. And then I have the videos from this trip to work on. Luckily, I did not try to document this entire trip. I didn’t make a video about every day of the journey. I just shot video whenever I did something interesting. I didn’t try to make a video about every day on the scooter on the road as I did last time. I’m slowly learning my limits.
These are the videos that I could make from this last trip:
Arrival in Ban Tha Song Yang
Hike up to the Tha Song Yang Viewpoint
Tha Song Yang Room Tour
Arrival in Pang Mapha
Visit to Ban Jabo for Sunrise
Revisiting Nam Lod Cave
Arrival in Chiang Dao (Pronto Coffee)
Chiang Dao Cave Zone 1
Tham Pha Plong Temple Hike
Chiang Dao Cave Zone 2
A couple of them are probably not worth editing. So I will likely make eight videos from this latest trip. Maybe as few as six or seven. And none of them are about any days spent on the road. I didn’t even try to shoot any video of the scenery and riding my scooter.
I feel much better today. I woke up feeling refreshed and full of energy. For whatever reason, I slept well last night. I wish I felt like this every day. I guess I will be settling up with the Phannu today and paying for the full month to come. And since the air conditioner has been repaired, I will stay in this room. A new room would come with too many unknowns. And I’d have to spend the first day cleaning it. This room has already been given the Planet Doug treatment. Who knows what condition a different room would be in?
Also on the docket for today is returning the scooter. I’ll probably ride out to Tesco on the scooter this morning and do a bit of shopping. I might as well do that while I still have the scooter. And then I’ll return it this afternoon. And then I have to make a massive to-do list for this month. I feel like I have a lot to do as I get ready to leave Thailand and go to Malaysia.
For my life of pop culture, I’ve been watching a couple of movies that were nominated for Best Picture at the upcoming Oscars. I often find that I’ve watched nearly all the movies that were nominated each year. And then I can deliberately watch the two or three that I haven’t seen. But this year, I haven’t watched many movies. And a lot of the movies that were nominated don’t have a lot of interest for me.
These are the Best Picture nominees this year:
Belfast
Coda
Don’t Look Up
Drive My Car
Dune
King Richard
Licorice Pizza
Nightmare Alley
The Power of the Dog
West Side Story
A number of them are based on topics that don’t appeal to me. I’m not excited about watching yet another movie about the troubles in Ireland, so Belfast doesn’t clamor for my attention. Drive My Car is probably a great movie, but I also can’t get that excited about a movie that focuses on a man listening to tapes made by his dead wife. I’m just not in the mood for that kind of sadness. And I’m not thrilled at yet another movie about millionaire athletes and an abusive egomaniac of a father who drives his children to succeed. And that means it’s hard for me to get excited about watching King Richard. Maybe if it didn’t star Will Smith I’d be more interested. I have the feeling that I’d be distracted by Will Smith in that role. I’d keep seeing Will Smith and thinking about Will Smith rather than the character he is supposed to be playing. Nightmare Alley just looks inaccessible to me. I could be wrong, but it seems like the movie could largely be just Guillermo del Toro trying to live up to his own reputation as a stylish filmmaker. And the idea of watching another Bradley Cooper movie doesn’t excite me. And then we’ve got West Side Story. I’m sure it’s fine, but why would I want to watch a movie that has already been done when there are so many new stories out there to watch?
And that leaves the movies that I have watched:
Coda
Don’t Look Up
Dune
Licorice Pizza
The Power of the Dog
Coda is fine, but I didn’t think it was anything to get excited about. It feels like I’ve seen that movie a thousand times already. It’s been done over and over. I think the only reason it is popular is because of its focus on the deaf community and deaf culture. It’s not really that great a movie. It feels like any other movie-of-the-week you’d see on the Hallmark channel. I’m sure the ending makes everyone cry, but it’s nothing special.
I actually enjoyed Don’t Look Up quite a bit. But I can also see that it isn’t really Oscar-worthy. It’s fun, but it’s not a great film. Dune is also fine. But I didn’t think it was anything special. Licorice Pizza is an interesting move on that list. It would normally be the type of movie that would appeal to me a great deal. I can see what is good in it. It is one of the few on this list that seems deserving of an Oscar nomination. Yet, it did kind of lose me. It didn’t grab me in the way that you might expect a Paul Thomas Anderson film to do. I think the characters didn’t do much for me.
And that leaves the one movie that made an impression: The Power of the Dog. Of the movies I’ve seen, this is the only one that seems worthy of a Best Picture nomination and win. Yet, even this film isn’t without its problems. It’s very predictable, in my humble opinion. Everything that happened was telegraphed. And the emotional core of the film was not new. We’ve seen this same situation so many times in movies and TV shows that it is a cliche. It is such a cliche, in fact, that it hardly seems worth getting excited about it. It feels so dated and ordinary. It’s such a cliche, in fact, that Key and Peele even made an entire sketch about it. It feels like a storyline that you’d see in a Saturday Night Live sketch as a joke. But at the same time, I loved the performances. And I loved the tone and the pacing. The characters are memorable.
I honestly can’t imagine watching any of the remaining movies except for Drive My Car. That one I’ll probably watch despite the depressing story. I’ll give it a chance, anyway, largely because it is Japanese. That might make it interesting enough that I can get over the whole sad story. That kind of story usually breaks me, but maybe it won’t be that tough to watch.