12/9/2001 - Beach, Elephant Festival

Hello Everybody!

We wish everyone a very happy holiday season. Thais do celebrate Christmas (although they don't get the day off) because Thais are not people who would let details like religion get in the way of a party.

We left off last time in Chiang Mai, a fun-filled and lively yet picturesque city, and then we continued our travels. We were back in Surin for little more than a week before we headed off to a Peace Corps Training next to the beach. On the way down to the beach we took a day to return to the village where we had lived at the beginning of the year and visit our host family from training. Several fellow volunteers did the same, so there was a pretty big commotion in the village for a day. Denny arrived in the early afternoon and told everyone that other friends were coming (including Lisa) very soon. Unfortunately Lisa did not get into town until late in the evening (transportation in Thailand is prolific but unpredictable), and some of our friends never showed up, but we had a good time anyway.

Lest you should think that the Peace Corps is getting soft on us taking us to a training by the beach, it was a really unremarkable beach, (though perhaps our impression was dampened by the roach infested motel where we stayed), and it rained 6 out of our 7 days. And no light, fluffy, singing-in-the-rain drizzle - this was still during the full-fledged monsoon season. At one point Lisa had to run across a small parking lot to go from one building to another, (not more the 20 yards) and it literally was the same as if she'd taken a shower in her clothes. The beach itself was so unremarkable that Denny didn't take any pictures, plus, during the monsoon storms, dead fish and jellyfish are constantly washing up onto the beaches. When Denny's parents come around Christmas we plan to go find a beautiful beach (we are told there are many). However, beautiful beach or not, Thai beach style is something worthy of note. Thais are generally very lighthearted and enjoy playing and having fun, and they seem to enjoy GOING to the beach, however playing at the beach seems to be an activity pretty exclusively reserved for children. This is at least partially related to the fact that light skin is considered more beautiful here in Thailand, making Thai people, especially women, almost deathly afraid of being caught out in the sun. It is almost comical watching adult women dart from tree to tree carrying a notebook over their head to avoid the sun in Bangkok, and when you go to the beach it is even more comical that there is a wall of umbrellas about 20 feet deep (covering more than half of the beach) to allow people to visit the beach but still avoid the dreaded sunshine. While the umbrellas do nothing to help the scenery, they do provide income for the local economy, as each umbrella is owned by someone close by who wants to charge you about 50 cents to sit in the shade for the day. The beach is put further out of reach as an adult playground by the fact that Thai culture, while being very permissive in many ways, considers bare shoulders and short pants to be rude, so people who do go swimming at the beach seldom wear a swimsuit - they just wear their T-shirt and jeans (except the children under the age of 5 who wear nothing at all).

On our way back from the beach we took a day trip to Ayutthaya - a former capital of Thailand. The number of ancient temples in this city is amazing. The digital camera was missing that day, so we don't have digital pictures to show you, and not much of a story, aside from a fun day.

We got back to Surin in time for the second term of the school year to start, and have begun visiting schools again. Lisa is having a special session at the local school district office for English teachers who want to improve their English ability and teaching techniques, and Denny is looking around for other projects to pursue. One day, when the school principal was bringing Denny home for the evening, he took Denny to see how the locals catch fish. The picture here is the principal's son casting the net in a small stream that only has water (and therefore fish) during the rainy season. They taught Denny how to throw the net, but since Denny was still in his good clothes he never got far enough in the water to catch anything. The fish they were catching were all smaller than 6 inches, and were all consumed for dinner that night.

Otherwise, we have been drudging away in Surin for the last month. But wait! For a nanosecond of time, Surin became the cultural hot spot in Thailand. Surin's brief shining moment, the one time it rises from the dusty and dry earth to become a whirl-wind of excitement, is the third weekend in November: the Elephant Festival. (Incidentally, this is the first time Lisa has had people in the provincial capital speak to her in English - they always pretended not to know English before but suddenly God visited them with the gift of tongues when there was money involved). There were upwards of 200 elephants in Surin - more than we've ever seen at one time. Come to think of it, there were more white people in Surin than we've ever seen there either. Before this weekend, our total count for Surin was 7 Caucasians and 3 elephants.

So, you ask, what does one do with 200 elephants and their mahouts (a mahout is an elephant's trainer for life) in a small town? In the mornings they have a show which includes relay races, a soccer match (our personal favorite), tug-of-war with eighty guys from the local army base against one elephant (the guys held out a good 10 or 12 seconds before being dragged through the mud - they were good sports coming into it though, since the elephants haven't lost yet in the 20-year history of the event), and to finish the program, a battle reenactment from the movie "Suriyothai" in which the king and queen of Thailand battle the invading Burmese army (based on a true story).

During the afternoons the elephants wander around town, where you can hire them as taxis (although you can usually walk faster yourself). You can also pay for the privilege of feeding the elephant the food that the trainer is carrying around in the basket on the elephant's back. The elephants are of course trained to distinguish food from money so that if you put money by the end of their trunk, they will dutifully hand the bill up to their mahout. A little slimy, but still a good tip.

The day that we visited this elephant festival, a teacher from Ban Kogsai School offered to show us other parts of Surin that we had not seen before. Surin is evidently famous for silver (in spite of the fact that Thais in general prefer gold), so we stopped by a village that hand makes many different silver items, and then we went on to visit Prasat Sikoraphum in a nearby district. The prasat (castle/temple ruins) itself is similar to many that we have seen, and would have been an extremely ordinary stop, except the local village happened to be having a large celebration at the Prasat the day we visited, thus the flags and other buildings in the picture.