#mackthai

    My room at the ryokan was very traditional Japanese. I was given slippers at the door, leaving my shoes behind. The owner led me to my room, which I entered by sliding open the glass doors, leaving my slippers on the pebbled floor, and then sliding over the second set of opaque doors to enter my room. Jeremy later informed me that the room was called a “tatami room.” The floors were ride mats with dark strips on their edges -- I apparently was supposed to step over these. The bed was a mattress on the floor, which actually turned out to be super comfortable, and on the far end of the room was a table and two chairs with a teapot and small cake waiting for me. There was a heater, a sink, and a machine to make hot water for the tea. I couldn’t see it when I first arrived late at night, but I had a beautiful view of the village from my window.

    The whole thing was very zen. It was perfect.

    Waking up from one of the best sleeps of my recent days, I met up with Jeremy early. Apparently, he missed the last train to Nagano spent the night sleeping on some newspaper in a parking garage with a Japanese homeless man. “He was really well kept for a homeless guy.”

    We swapped stories over morning soba in the only open shop in town. It was a bit down the road and felt like a typical diner, with swivel chairs at the counter and booths all around, except it had Japanese touches -- like “udon” and “soba” as main dishes and lanterns hanging about. We tried to go skiing, but after renting gear and buying passes we discovered that only the bunny hill was open unfortunately due to the lack of snow. We did a couple runs and then headed back.

    Our ryokan had private bath rooms -- not bathrooms like with a toilet, but bath rooms like onsens. These were natural hot spring waters that flowed into the stone and tile baths built inside. In fact, these natural hot spring waters flowed underneath the whole village. I closed the door and stripped down, stepping into what felt like a hot tub. I had to dump some buckets of cold water in as well because it was actually so hot it burned my skin a bit. I usually get super irked by baths (I have a weird thing about still bodies of water) but the onsen made me feel like a whole new human. I emerged in the special bath robes they left behind in my room and felt more alive -- and warm which was a convenience considering the hallways had no heating.

    Jeremy and I go for dinner at a small inconspicuous side place that had been closed when we walked by earlier. We slide open the frosted glass doors and immediately feel the warmth rush into our sleeves, affectionately rubbing our dry skin. A middle-aged Japanese woman smiles and gestures to the seats on the right, a bar that wraps around the kitchen. On the left are cushions at low tables separated by screens.

    The whole place is narrow, all the way back. The woman who welcomed us hands us an English menu, but I take a minute to soak it all in, scanning the liquor bottles that line every wall. The art of Japanese writing decorates their labels and the menus and the lanterns dimly glowing above.

    “Credit?” I flash my card, but she shakes her head. Jeremy and I pull out our wallets to start counting coins. ATMs that take foreign cards are a rarity.

    “We could split a beer?” I offer. No music plays in the background, only faint sounds from a Japanese game show and clinks from the kitchen.

    “I’m no girl.” I roll my eyes at him. We order a Sapparo to split.

    Jeremy runs back to the ryokan for his camera and I fixate on the soft red glow outside the frosted glass. Behind me, foreign words are swapped back and forth between the waitress at the tap and the business men pouring sake from their cushions. I feel an interesting sense of isolation here. Alone at the bar with my half-beer, but not truly alone. I am united with all these others in both location as well as the mere essence of being human. We’re united in our solace from the cold, using the cramped nameless restaurant and a few drinks to warm our souls. They’re merely feet away, and yet, in another world. I’m in an isolation of misunderstanding. I can’t eavesdrop here -- their words just become an instrumental substitute for the music that’s not playing.

    I hear children bickering in the back, a sound recognizable no matter what the language.

    Bicycle riding through Chiangmai, I ended up in a used bookstore (of course) checking out with a couple of books I don't need (of course). The owner was at the counter marking down prices -- relatively normal build, long white hair, glasses on the tip of his nose, I waited patiently. (He seemed absorbed in what he was doing.) Then he looked up at me expectantly as if he had been waiting for me to speak. So I asked where he was from, but the Irish accent that rumbled out of his scruffy, wrinkled throat made it obvious. 

 How long have you been here? "Too long." He mumbles back. 

    Although originally from Ireland, he moved to India for a while and then packed up for Guatemala. Somehow, he got off track and ended up in Chiangmai. He never made it to Guatemala, but he's been in the same spot in Thailand for 25 years. He has a book storage house in New Jersey somewhere, but he doesn't care to ever go visit. 

 "It doesn't matter where you go, your head comes with you. It doesn't matter where you rest your hat."

    He's not quite grumpy, but he's very serious. Not much eye contact, not too loud. He seems like he has a million stories to tell, but would be perfectly content if he never got the chance to utter a word about it. He's not interested in everyone else; he's only interested in what he's doing right now.

"You can't be too happy... you can’t be too happy. You need a bit of a challenge, something to work towards day to day. Otherwise life gets boring."

    He tells me that every day is a new day -- yesterday is already the past. It's gone. It doesn’t touch us anymore.

"Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery."  The classic line, I comment, taking my books from him. 

     Simran sits next to me in my Intro to Communications class (the one where I’m the only American). Immediately we started talking on the first day -- it was a comfort to find someone who spoke English so well. She is the second generation of an Indian family relocated to Thailand (her parents were born in Bangkok as well).

     Technically, she’s a “freshman” even though she’s only a year younger than I am because she skipped a year before going to school. Both her grandparents died that year and in India culture, there’s a long period of mourning. Instead of spending that year aimlessly in college classes, she took culinary classes instead and focused on her YouTube channel AKA singing career: https://www.youtube.com/user/simrankaurartist --> where she performs beautiful covers of Indian music.

    Simran is in a world between cultures. Much of her Indian holidays are still celebrated even in Thailand. This past weekend she celebrated Raksha Bandhan with her family, a holiday that celebrates the love between siblings and “cousin brothers” or “cousin sisters.” AKA an official sibling day for the Indian culture. But a lot of other things she misses out on, like Holi, the color festival, which she claims is even more fun than Songkran -- which is basically a holiday during which the entire city of Bangkok has a watergun battle. She’s actually closer with her cousins who still live in India -- she says, you know how you appreciate things more when they’re far away. Definitely accurate.

    Lizzy is gone now, but on her last day, we made an unfortunate attempt to go to floating markets, only to be informed that they're not open in the PM. Despite this, we had a successful shopping afternoon, rode a motorbike home, and are a mak mak arroi dinner, almost entirely of meat that we cooked at our own table. In between, there was a cab driver who tried to have a conversation with one of my apps, some rollie pollie monks, and plenty of bonding time with my childhood best friend. 

    After she left, it finally rained, as it hadn't done so in a while (usual because we're in rainy season). I guess it was holding out, keeping in the storm until Lizzy got done with Bangkok. 

    The storms over the city are beautiful. From the vantage point of C Building, you can see the clouds move in, skirting the sky, then drowning the city in misty rain. It's a different kind of storm than in New York which is a different kind of storm than in Fire Island. The way it radiates and changes the landscape is all so different. Here, it's not flooded streets and orange skies. People are just used it, splashing through in flip flops till it clears up once again -- as it always does. But it's beautiful no matter where you are. 

    This storm was rough enough to cause a blackout in C Building, my first one in the whole time I've been here. We all sat out in the hall, hearing Christian's retelling of his own ghost story and playing with shadows and flashlights. Later, as it was nearing 1 AM, I stood out on the balcony of a room across the hall, watching the lightning slice the sky and bouncing around a different kind of age-old tale -- not ghosts, but gods. Zeus, Achilles, Hector, Athena, Agamemnon, Helen of Troy. We wondered which ones were interfering with the direction of Zeus' bolts this evening. Probably Athena. 

    She's always doing shit like that.