Adventures in Extortion

Recently I was on a bus to Chiang Mai, my head swimming with thoughts of what a beautiful place and I love it here and there are so many opportunities to really enjoy life here. Here's 13 seconds of my happy place:

I realized that I’d been swooning for weeks, constantly vomiting mental rainbows of pure joy.

OMG THAT RICE PADDY IS THE GREENEST GREEN I'VE EVER SEEN!

The heaving has subsided. 

Right now it’s the worst time of the year in northern Thailand. People are burning crops to make room for the next growing season (I think?). It’s supposed to be illegal to burn open fires here, but it’s Thailand, so illegal-shmegal. They’re everywhere, and so is the smoke. It’s also coming in from Myanmar and Laos. Couple that with a long lack of rain, and today’s air quality index was 258. In the US, people are advised to stay indoors when it’s over 50. It’s not fun. Apparently, last year was worse.

We got an e-mail from our former landlord a few days ago detailing damage we supposedly left in the Miami Vice pimp house. No proof as of yet, so I don’t feel defeated, but we’re kind of legally adrift here as foreigners. The upside is that we’ve had people coming out of the woodwork to help with promising local legal advice, so we might be okay. [Passage removed pending legal action... ours, not his.] Nothing angers me more than injustice, so needless to say, I am livid. 

And remember the crappy car, sold to us by the woman who hired us (and no longer lives here)? The currency won’t mean anything to you, but the numbers will. She said they paid 110,000 baht for it. We paid her 90,000 baht. When I questioned her about the price, she gave me a slightly scoldy e-mail about how used car prices in Thailand are higher than they are elsewhere. I’d read this in a few other places too, so we paid. 

I just found out this afternoon that she did not buy the car for 110,000 baht. She paid FIFTY thousand. And now we can’t sell the albatross for more than 30. I was so angry I couldn’t breathe for a few hours. It blows my mind that there are people out there who are that deceitful. I know that makes me naïve; I accept that. There is not a single thing we can do but share our revenge fantasies and wait for karma to burn their house down. (Again.)

There is a small part of me that is actually grateful for these blights on our experience. I’ve spent months feeling a little twinge of dread about having to leave next year, a panicky fear that I will go home and be a miserable gray blob again, wrapped up in monotony and stress and cake. That twinge is fading. Nick and I talk about the genuine, honest, scandal-free straight-talkers we know and love back in New England. We laugh about their inappropriate senses of humor, a kind that we have yet to encounter here. We are left to mumble offensive Bill Burr quotes only to each other. 

I’ve started to keep a list of things I miss. Most is food: IPAs, artichoke hearts, dolmades, cannolis, good Caesar salads (the ones here are always green leaf lettuce, mayonnaise, hard-boiled egg & bacon… nope), good seafood (it’s mostly funky-smelling river fish here), good cheap wine, frozen waffles, and string cheese. Man, our kids lived on frozen waffles and string cheese. I’ve gotten used to living without them, and we are eating plenty of good stuff we won’t be able to get in the US. Besides, I can’t complain about the weight loss that has resulted from not being around my favorite foods. I can make a great Caesar salad, but anchovies are hard to come by. I found a jar in one store for about $18… I think I can wait. I also miss my Water Pik. Jeopardy. NPR. I used to listen to NPR every morning in my kitchen. I could probably stream it, but it’s not the same. 

I miss clean public bathrooms. Toilet paper is not really a thing here. Nor is soap at the sinks, or paper towels for drying. 

Over it. Especially when taking a handsy five-year-old to use it. She has touched far worse than what's in this picture.

I can’t say I don’t still love Thailand, because I love it. In so many ways, this place is a dream come true for me. There are cheap massages, constant travel opportunities, and a chance to avoid most holiday hype and responsibilities for two whole years. St. Patrick’s Day came and went without a single peep. No leprechaun traps at school or gaudy green glitter or any of that malarkey. No commercials on TV screaming about holiday-related sales of crap. Easter is this Sunday, and I feel no awkward pressure to do anything for it in spite of my complete lack of religion (although we are planning to surprise the girls with little baskets on Sunday, because, candy). Decorating for anything? That concept has vanished. Some people thrive on all of that, but to me it’s always been Just More Stuff to Do. I could not be happier. Call me Captain Buzzkill. No gifts to buy, no parties to attend, so much less celebrating. It is a Pinterest-free world, and my underachieving behind is breathing a big lazy sigh of relief. I am excused. Squatting over a hole is worth it.

And? Since we’ve moved into the cheaper house, we changed our vacation plans for April. We only have 15 months left here and I want to make the most of every trip, so… we are going to Bali. You guys. BALI. We’ll spend two nights in an Ubud villa with our own private pool that costs about the same as a nicotine-stained Days Inn on the New Jersey turnpike.

I'm going to get vitamin D in places where the sun don't shine.

Then for three nights we’ll go to a big resort with an over-the-top kids’ club to thoroughly wear out the girls. I had to buy the tickets in person at an airline office (credit card issues with their site), and when I walked out of the building I was surprised to feel an involuntary tightening in my throat. Tears of joy and disbelief threatened for a few seconds. I have over two decades’ worth of pent-up travel jones. Back home we couldn’t even afford to go to a Florida strip mall on vacation, and now we’re going to Bali for the same price it used to cost us to go to Omaha. 

The amount of money we’ve lost from the bad car rip-off and the landlord extortion might have covered a trip to Bali from Boston. Well… at least a week in Florida, eating at the Tampa Chili’s instead of the Lowell Chili’s. But we wouldn’t have had zero credit card debt. And we wouldn’t have had all this time with each other. Besides, the wisdom we’re gaining is priceless, and that’s the whole reason I wanted to do this in the first place. 

We’re taking the girls to Chiang Mai this weekend to have some fun. We’ll ice skate, maybe see a movie, go to the aquarium, eat at a robot restaurant. We just didn’t do this stuff back home. On the weekends we were too exhausted, had to work on the house, had too many plans. Driving three hours in any direction would require an expensive hotel stay, something that was hard to enjoy when ¼ of our income was going to daycare. So yeah, the bugs, fuzzy air, car rip-off, and landlord situation? They suck. A lot. And they’re making my mental tantrum of I never ever wanna go home everrrr turn ever-so-slightly in my head. Hopefully those feelings will manage to balance out in the next 15 months. 

Post-script:

On the way back from Chiang Mai now. It’s very hard for me to blog, because I really only have the chance to do it when the kids are leaving me alone. If they are leaving me alone, it’s because they’re using my laptop. I can type in the car, but there’s no internet. 

Anyway, the robot restaurant super-sucked, and Sophie puked all over the hotel room last night (I’m surprised this doesn’t happen more often considering how many things she puts her mouth on… she would turn a germophobe to stone), but overall it was still a great time. We swam in the hotel pool, gorged ourselves on Indian food, and had a mini-adventure on our way to breakfast walking down a side street peppered with drunks and bleating prostitutes left over from the night before. I introduced the girls to gardenias, which were growing fresh all over our hotel grounds. Sascha got to ice skate. I got to run. And the girls were totally cool with their new little Easter purses full of chocolate!