My First Monetary Exchange With a Lady of the Night

My father told me I would have to look out for prostitutes in Thailand.

"Albo," he said, "Every hotel in Thailand is a brothel. You'll be takin' a shower and they'll jump right in with you and you just gotta kick 'em out."

Well, times have changed a bit since he was here 30 years ago and most of my showers have been cold and lonely. But in certain areas there is definitely an aggressive swarm of professional ladies. Well, always in search of a complete cultural experience, Andrew and I decided to see how close to the sun we could fly without getting burned. The swarm fell upon us in a bar which cannot be named on this family-friendly blog. After successfully swatting most of them away, one particularly quirky girl (when she first approached me she was doing a gorilla impression, I kid you not) wrote me the note above. For those who can't quite make it out:

YOU GOOD ARE NICE
BUT WHY YOU NO GOOD
WHY YOU ARE MEAN?
YOU GAY ASS?

In an effort to get some peace I communicated to her that her suspicion was correct, and got such a kick out of the note that I bought it off of her for 100 baht (roughly three dollars). Such was my first and last monetary exchange with a lady of the night.

Puppies Nursing Are the Cutest Thing

From my time on the goat farm in Israel.

Some puppies nursing. Set cute guns to stun.

A Well Conceived Scam

So last week, before Andrew arrived in Bangkok I fell into a very well organized scam. It started like this...

I was walking around Bangkok aimlessly, and wandered into a temple. On the way out, a guy started making fun of my shoes because they are so worn. We got to talking, and after a few minutes he started telling me some places I should check out. Then he mentioned that as a thank you to everyone for celebrating his birthday so magnificently, the king (who everyone in the country LOVES, and who in turn supposedly loves everyone in his country) was sponsoring a tuk tuk (a little motor taxi, so named for the sound its uncovered engine makes) company for the day and that they would drive you pretty much anywhere you wanted to go for 20 baht (about 66 cents--really cheap for a long tuk tuk ride). He told me to look for the yellow flags, as they marked the sponsored tuk tuks. On the way out of the temple, a tuk tuk with a yellow flag was waiting and the driver approached me: "Special deal! King sponsor today! I drive you many places, 20 baht!" So my thought is of course "Well, these two are working together to get me into this tuk tuk" so I say "No thanks" and keep walking.

So after about 15 minutes I wander into another temple. I stand and stare at the Buddha for a few minutes, when a Thai man that has been kneeling there looks up at me and asks if I know how to make a wish to the lucky Buddha. I say no and he leads me through the process on my knees. Then we get to talking, he tells me he is an English teacher at the school attached to the temple, etc etc. He asks me where I'm planning to visit today, and recommends a few other places. Then he says "You know, what you should really do is get into a tuk tuk with a yellow flag, there's a special promotion, etc etc

So I walk out of the temple and I'm like, "What are the odds that two super nice people at two separate temples are working in concert to get me involved in some elaborate scam?" I decided whatever the odds were, 20 baht was a good deal for a tuk tuk adventure. So I flagged down a tuk tuk with a yellow flag and asked "Is there some sort of special deal today?" "Yes, yes! The king sponsors tuk tuk rides today! 20 baht! I take you anywhere!" So I hopped in.

After taking me to a couple of temples, he tells me he needs to go get a stamp to be reimbursed from the government. So we stop in front of a clothing store and he tells me to go in and at this point I realize I've been suckered. So I go into the shop and tell them I want to buy two suits but their price is too expensive and come back out. I ask the driver what the next stop is, and he tells me it's a temple. I figure I might as well get another temple out of the deal and go with him. On the way I ask him who is sponsoring this trip, the government or the stores, and his answer is murky (intentionally, methinks) thanks to his uncertain grasp of the English language. So we go to the temple and on my way in a man sweeping the ground tells me I can't go in yet, and directs me to a little sitting area where I can wait. There's a very friendly-looking man there and I sit and stare at the trees, counting down the seconds until he starts up a conversation that leads to talking about this amazing deal the king has going on. It takes about 8 seconds.

When I leave the temple, I ask the driver what the NEXT stop is, and he says it's another sponsor. I tell him I don't want to go to any more shops, and pull out my 20 Baht. Then he levels with me, and tells me that if he takes me to three stores today, the person running the scam promotion will fill his gas tank and give him dinner. He begs me to keep going with him. I figure it's like TV commercials or ads in a magazine--sometimes you gotta put up with a little crap to get what you want. And I was enjoying the cheap ride around, so I accepted the subsidized trip and had a fine time for the rest of the day.

What amazes me is how intricate the scam was. They had friendly people planted all over the city just to plant the idea in people's heads that this government promotion was going on, so that when a select group of tuk tuk drivers, who are notoriously untrustworthy, mention the same thing it comes with a certain amount of credibility. Impressive!

Ladyboys!

Andrew and I were strolling around Bangkok last night looking for something to do, and wandered into The Asia Hotel to see if the Elvis impersonator was performing. While we were trying to figure that out, a Chinese woman walked up to us with her brother and asked if we were here for the show.

"What, the Elvis show?"
"No, the show downstairs in the cabaret. We have two extra tickets and we're trying to sell them."
"What sort of show is it?"
"It's a ladyboy show."
[Albert and Andrew start digging through their pockets for money.]

It was very fun and very strange. I have some videos that I'll get up at some point.

Video: Goats On Parade

From my time in Israel. Every day after milking and feeding, we let the goats go wandering in the hills, accompanied by a few good dogs. They would wander around and come back by the time the sun went down. There were about 220, and when some wouldn't return we'd have to go out looking for them. Some of them have bells on their necks for herd location purposes. Apparently, part of the way they find their way home is by the wind coming up through the valley. They know if they're walking into the wind, they're headed home. So if it was a particularly chaotic day windwise, they would get scattered and we'd have to send out some searchers.

Video: Escorting a Goat to Get Milked

Slava escorts a goat through the pen to the milking station. This was my favorite thing to do on the goat farm in Israel. Catching goats is a blast.

Hotel Comparison Videos: $7.50 in Jordan vs. $6.75 in Thailand

Recently I've stayed in two budget hotels. The first was the Sunrise Hotel in Amman, Jordan:

And the second was the place I've been staying in Bangkok, My House:

The Verdict:
The Sunrise Hotel in Amman was bigger and had two beds, but My House is much cleaner, has a [cold water] shower that works, and is in a much much MUCH nicer part of town than that Jordanian hole. Plus I didn't have to haggle for the Bangkok price, while the guy in Amman started the price at $22.50. After I walked out he chased me down the street and agreed to my price, then while registering asked me "Why so angry? Why you want to [punching motion] me?" He was a young guy, probably 16. Later he asked me how to get a girlfriend, and when I said "I don't know," he accused me of lying: "Don't say you don't know! You American, you have many girlfriends, I know! Tell me!"

How I Spent My First Day In Thailand

After a quick breakfast in a cafe near my guesthouse, I headed to Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya University. Luckily I didn't have to ask for directions to find it. They offer free meditation classes, and free anything is good. Especially inner peace. It was just me and a girl from Chicago named Amy in the class, and we practiced some basic sitting and walking meditation. I certainly learned some things I hadn't known before, like when you are meditating (in this particular school, at least) you don't IGNORE all the distractions, you have to be aware of them, think about them, and then cut them off. But you have to be aware of them. So most of the time you're thinking about your breathing (not controlling your breathing, just breathing naturally and being aware of how your body moves with the breath), thinking to yourself "Rising, knowing, falling, knowing, rising, knowing, falling, knowing..." as your abdomen rises and falls. The "knowing" is the moment between inhaling and exhaling. So when something else comes in, like an errant thought, you go "Rising, knowing, falling, knowing, rising, thinking, thinking, thinking, rising, knowing, falling..." Much of the time my inner voice was saying "Rising, knowing, falling, knowing, foot's asleep, foot's asleep, foot's asleep, foot's asleep..." I found walking meditation much more enjoyable, for comfort reasons as well as the hilarity of looking like a pacing mental patient.

The quick primer on Buddhism the teacher gave made me not very interested in Buddhism. The way it is taught here, you must detach yourself from all earthly things. Attachment=bad. So you feel anger--detach yourself from it. Sadness--detach yourself from it. Happiness--detach yourself from it. But I fight every day to ATTACH myself to happiness. Detachment is what comes naturally for me, it wouldn't be a struggle for me to get there (I am the Buddha), but I'm not very interested in cutting my emotional connections to the things and people I love in this world after working so hard to build them in the first place. Granted, I know jack about Buddhism and this woman might be spouting some splinter doctrine, but this is explicitly what she said is the goal. So no one has to worry that I'll come back to the States as one of those Nuveau Buddhist assholes. Though I had previously wanted to do so just to exasperate some folks.

Anyway, Amy and I trekked to Wat Pho together. It's a temple, see?

I think Amy did quite well with this pose.

This I believe is the largest reclining Buddha in the world. It looks like a monster movie. Wat Pho also happens to house the most famous Thai massage school in all of Thailand, so Amy and I naturally got massages as well. One hour for about $12 (which is expensive compared to most of the places around town.) I've never had a Thai massage before, and had a good time with it. There are a lot of things they do that feel like wrestling moves. Leg locks, head locks, that kind of thing. Some of it really hurt. Especially when the guy tried to pull my head straight off. He tried awfully hard.

Watched the sunset behind Wat Arun (Wat means temple), and then raced home to tell you all about it!

Always and forever, more at My Flickr Page.

What I've Been Doing for 42 Days

So, it's been a while since I posted here. To blame: having a really great time in places where internet access was a rare and fleeting treat. But now I'm in Bangkok, where they shower tourists in liquid cyberspace for pennies. So, let's catch up.
Went to Jordan! First stop, Wadi Ram, a valley that Jordan sees as it's answer to the Grand Canyon. Spectacular. No Grand Canyon, mind you, but spectacular. We made arrangements with a Bedouin who called himself Desert Wolf over the 'net to camp out in the middle of the desert. He drove us out and dropped us off...
The next day we went hiking. The whole place was sandstone, which was really grippy and made for some excellent bouldering/climbing. There were a few spots where I thought we'd gotten ourselves stuck, but we always found a way out. Expected to see Desert Wolf that night. We didn't have any kindling to start a fire so we looked around for paper...and I realized I had a copy of Fahrenheit 451 with me. Sweet sweet irony. Anyway, Desert Wolf never came. Not that night, and not the next morning when he knew we needed to leave.
So we started the long hike out. About an hour or so in, we flagged down a passing Jeep that gave us a ride to the nearby village.
Spent most of the day chilling at "Ali's Place." That's Ali there on the left. Lots of tea, some tasty food, hooka smoke. We had missed the morning bus to Petra, so we had some time to kill and expressed to Ali an interest in a Jeep tour, but the asking price of the official guides was too much. So he found some young relative to drive his truck for us at a reasonable price, and off we went.
The muffler fell off pretty early into the tour. Nice guy, though, that driver. About an hour into the trip we realized we had met the night before, when I had helped repair a Bedouin tent in the dark. (Maya actually suspected it was him immediately, but I resisted)
That night Ali saw us drawing and asked us to draw something in his guest book. We left a drawing I had done of Maya sitting at Ali's Place earlier in the day. In the morning we caught a bus to Petra.
Petra! You may recognize this particular structure from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Pssh. Back to Israel!
To a goat farm! With about 220 goats (we counted every day, but no one was actually sure what number we were aiming for), from which the farm produced...
Cheese!
It was a beautiful place, in the mountains of the Galilee, looking down at Nazareth through the valley.
It was run by Amnon (pictured here with live-in grandchildren Chumba and Ta'el)...
...and Dalia (pictured here with Maya).
I spent most of my time there making a stone pillar. I finished it once with a rounded top in an effort to be different from all the flat topped pillars around, but some people thought it looked too phallic (and maybe it did), so I had to circumcise it and refinish it. It's a sturdy pillar, with a hitching post for cows/horses.
There were a few Americans there, so we organized a Thanksgiving celebration and the locals indulged us, letting us butcher one of the turkeys they had on the farm. Cooked in sheep fat, it ended up tasting a lot like sheep. Green beans, mashed potaters, POMEGRANATE sauce, stuffing, pumpkin pie (not from a can, a first for me)... It was all there.

So I just arrived in Bangkok, and I'll be bumming around for a couple of days until the Kobayashi-Downs' get here and then it'll be a whirlwind of family fun. I'm looking forward to it, and I should be able to update this blog more regularly for a while. We'll see!

I leave you with... PUPPY CAGE MATCH!!!
As always, there are more adventures photographed at My Flickr Page.

Ten Best Photos of My Trip So Far

So I realize I have like a gillion photos on my Flickr and only two of you love me enough to browse through them (hi, Craig Durkin and Dad), so I'm going to make this easy for you. Here are the ten best photos of my trip so far, in no particular order: Theron (another volunteer at Sedot Mikha), La Pantera Negra ("I am verry dangeroos") and I enjoy dessert in a Jerusalem bookstore/cafe.

Maya was another volunteer at Sedot Mikha. Here she is reading at sunset at Qalya Beach on the Dead Sea, unaware that she'll ruin her eyes carrying on like that.

Marc (the guy whose museum project I was working on for six weeks at Sedot Mikha) swimming at Ashkelon.

Me and La Pantera Negra posing under the statue I built with Marc. The photo is being taken by Melanie, another volunteer from Germany. You can see her in some of the pictures on my Flickr page, but you wouldn't know anything about that, would you?

Ben at Ein Gedi Beach on the Dead Sea. His socks had gotten so gross after weeks of no washing that they would actually stand on end. You can not imagine the stench.

Ben took this one of me in Ein Gedi. So epic! Rarely do I look so statuesque.

In Gaudix, waiting for laundry to dry. There's a companion piece with Ben on my Flickr page, but really why start caring now?

This restaurant at the Alhambra in Granada had misting jets that would spray every minute or so. Made for some positively angelic lighting.

At the Alhambra. I forget the name of this particular structure, but I like this picture of it.

A dog in Spain! He was playing with another dog in this fountain (you can see pictures of that on my Fl... you know what, you wouldn't be interested) for quite a while. I think his silhouette here is really swell.

This Is What a Memory Looks Like

In the Dead Sea again.

I leave Moshav Sedot Mikha tomorrow. I`ve had a good run, made a lot of things, re-energized my creative side. Going to spend a couple of nights in Tel Aviv with friends, then I`m off to Jordan, maybe sleep out in the desert with a Bedouin... Then to Egypt. THEN.... Thailand!

Albert Gets All Indiana Jones

The day started out normally enough, with me sneaking into some place I wasn`t supposed to be. Little did I know what wonders were in store for me...

I stumbled upon an amazing, intricate system of caves. But what made these caves REALLY special is that they were dug by humans, not nature, over 2000 years ago. If you look closely at some of these pictures you can see the marks on the wall from their tools.

I found a small opening with a long winding staircase that went down, down, down into the dark...

...past a room from the mind of MC Escher...

And into a magnificent chamber where I discovered at least four priceless artifacts from another time.

More at my Flickr page.

Check Out This Saddam Hidey Hole I Made

Actually, it`s a septic tank. Corrugated concrete, rebar, and cement.

The Completely Mundane Adventures of Albert Thrower, Chapter One: Wherein Our Hero Gives Himself a Haircut

NOLTE AND ALBERT: SEPARATED AT BIRTH?

"I NEED A HAIRCUT, BUT I HAVE NO CLIPPERS!"

"BE AT EASE, MY CHILD. TAKE THESE SCISSORS AND DO GOOD WORKS."

"GOD? I DON'T KNOW IF I CAN CUT MY OWN HAIR WITH SCISSORS..."

"...BUT I TRUST YOU! LET'S DO IT!"

...an hour and a half of cutting and taking pictures of the back of my head and cutting more...

OH NICE

"WHAT'S OVER THERE? A GOOD HAIRCUT?"

"HUH? THAT WAY TOO?"

Debrief: My father warned me not to try cutting my own hair. I usually take my father's advice, but I ignored him on this one, and the results ain't bad. Definitely some strange quirks to my hair now, it isn't cut like a pro would do it, but I'm pretty pleased with myself. I would post some pics of the back, but... Nobody wants to see that. I'm still working on that technique. Taking pictures of it, then feeling around for what I think are the bits I see sticking out... Maybe not the best way to do it.

Video: Coyote Hunting Practice

There's also something of an extended cut on YouTube. It's a bit more... abstract.

Come See a Sculpture I'm Making

Most of this week I've been helping Marc build a sculpture out of mud on the Western end of his property. Last week it was a base and a wooden frame. Now we've filled it with tires, rocks, and old construction waste and slapped many many pounds of mud on top (1 bucket dirt, 1 bucket sand, 1 bucket manure, some pinestraw, water, and a super secret ingredient) to make it the still-in-progress beauty it is today. It's tall--ten feet or more. The basic forms are done, Marc is going to spend some time on the faces and then that'll be that. I'll take some more pics when it's all done.

I also let slip that I was a filmmaker in a previous life, and I've been recruited to make a documentary of sorts for the place. I thought I didn't want to do this until the camera was in my hands and then I remembered what fun it is. Shooting a conversation happening in a language you don't understand is like deflecting a remote droid's lasers with your blast shield down.

Albo: "But in Hebrew, I can't even understand, how am I supposed to shoot?"
OWK: "Your ears can deceive you, don't trust them. Stretch out with your feelings."
[Albo calmly zooms and pans, capturing like three great decisive moments.]
Han: "I call it luck."

This is Your Brain On Shuffle, Pt. 2

The feature formally known as "Songs I've Found Myself Singing"

Without an iPod, the music is all in your head. Some songs, you bring to mind intentionally. But sometimes... Your subconcious takes control. These are songs that I have found myself singing aloud or in my head, without the faintest idea why.

Jens Lekman - Pocketful of Money (quickly amended to "Pocketful of Shekels")
Foo Fighters - Learn to Fly (I really don't like this song)
Soul Asylum - Runaway Train (Never comin' back...)
Francis Scott Key and John Stafford Smith - Star Spangled Banner
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five - The Message (Don't push me 'cause I'm close to the edge...)
Spoon - Stay Don't Go
Lykke Li - Tonight
Blondie - One Way Or Another
Phish - The Wolfman's Brother (for some reason I was singing it as "Wolfman's Daughter")
Of Montreal - The Past is a Grotesque Animal
Bright Eyes - Everything Must Belong Somewhere
Wicked - Popular (quickly amended to "Secular"--worked out alright)

Where Do They Get These Wonderful Toys?

There is a playground in Tel Aviv full of cool stuff, and this structure is the highlight. After making this video I actually came up with a better way to do it, if height is your goal--standing in the middle and swinging from there can get you just about flush with the ropes.

What I Did Today

I rode a tortoise!

I willfully ignored signs I couldn't read! "Bor... Patu'akh... Sakhanah?" *SHRUG*

I thanked a shepherd for clearing the trail of his sheep!

I lounged happily underneath homemade arches!

I pretended I was Goliath on the very spot he once stood! "I do taunt the armies of Israel this day; give me a man, that we may fight together!"

I was like "Would you look at that view!"

More at my Flickr page.