life is easy being a farang

September 14, 2018

farang: ฝรั่ง F̄rạ̀ng

Foreigner.

I've been going to the hospital quite often. You cannot control how your body will react to new environments. Like, no one tells you about this nor do they prepare you. But the healthcare system here is seamless and incredibly affordable, so that hasn't been an added stress. So I feel like a total mess somedays. I feel uncomfortable in my own skin, like I'm an unwelcomed guest in a home.

" i like to pretend that i am growing into a skin when i feel that way."

-Meg's consolation

Soul talks and sisterhood. That's been my medicine. Thank God for women who tell you how they think your beautiful in the exact way you need to hear it. I've been looking at flowers a lot. They don't speak Thai and I feel like I can understand them.

So there's this soi (alleyway) near my work that my friend does outreach for sextrafficking in. Its convenient for us to meet for lunch and also a very strange world to walk through after spending all morning in the corporate office. There's men with gross and steady gazes and lazy prostitutes all in it all day long, but it has the BEST chicken fried rice with pineapple and I think I could sit there all day.

I met a friend in Chinatown after work. It was pouring rain, like buckets, and I didn't have an umbrella. Someone walked me to a shelter and I negotiated some inflated price to drive me 3 km. Then I found my vice. The ultimate addiction: motorbikes. Nothing lifts me out of feeling blue like a good life-threatening, rush of exhilaration. The Bangkok Way is wet, unpaved, down back alleys, and $2 at most!

My commute to and from work is also never like anything I've done before. An overstuffed train hauling hundreds of bodies every 5 minutes. I make it to work in a record-breaking 15 minutes during peak rush hour. Everyone touching everyone, no one impolite or speaking to eachother. One day, I decided to spend the commute looking up from my phone and saw some lovely sleeping lady. I walked home another night and found myself in the hidden gold mine market located under a freeway overpass with bulks of veggies for practically nothing.

It had been two weeks since I left the city, so I was itching to get out and so was my throat: I needed fresh air. I went to the mountains of the Khao Yai National Forest with three women I has just met. Ahh, the sweet ambiguity of trusting those of kin: independent, young women from different worlds, all here for the same reason. No plan, just the desire to get amongst it. I've always found such refuge in the mountains, in the rain, and around those who have no expectations of me, so I was in good company. We saw mountains, monks, waterfalls, and leeches. We feasted in vineyards and laughed really loudly. I discovered passionfruit and new passions. These are all just my stories, just photos of moments I can't begin to describe and people I couldn't have planned to have met. It is happening wildly out of my control and beyond any sort of comprehension. I'm trying to not let it go by so fast.