A Few Peculiarities

As I'm sitting here in my new room, having hurriedly vacated the old one due to imminent roof collapse (or so the office told me), I'm realizing that there are a fair number of subtle differences to my new environment of which I wasn't immediately aware. I will certainly get to those differences in a moment, but I was actually led by this realization to consider some of the general peculiarities and eccentricities displayed by the camp and the country.

The first thing that I, or, I think, anyone else, would notice about Phuket at this time of year is the rain. It would be an understatement to say
that it rains every day, as the sky is rather like an asthmatic with a serious head-cold: marked by long periods of calmness, but whenever roused from stillness responding with loud and violent sneezes, followed by long periods of wheezing, howling and sniffling. At this point, I have tried to emulate the native population, and just ignore the rain as much as possible. During the sudden and frequent monsoons, I notice no decrease in the sizeable amount of motorbike traffic on the roads, and no classes are ever canceled due to inclement weather, despite the absence of a single full wall around any of the training areas. In fact, after the second or third time, I have come to rather enjoy doing pushups or hitting a punching bag in the rain; it gives one a sort of fierce inspiration at the most violent and tenacious moments, and makes me feel as though the natural world is rooting for my success, as though I had just seen an eagle fly by, carrying an electric guitar.

As pervasive as the rain, yet sometimes more subtle, is the affluence of cats in the camp. After spending a few weeks here, I'm reasonably certain that there is actually only one rather large family in residence, but they seem to enjoy making themselves obnoxious (as cats so often do). In my last room, which was situated rather close to the camp's kitchens, I was sometimes awoken by a lanky, rather stretched-looking, camel-colored feline, who would hop onto the chair outside of my window, and whine incessantly, as if I was withholding a stock of food that was rightfully hers. Once, in exasperation, I opened the door, intending to justify myself through sheer evidence of poverty, and she sauntered inside, glanced disdainfully at my box of granola bars as if they affronted her, and went to sleep on my boxing gloves.
Before I moved, I had actually struck up something of a friendship with one of these creatures. Perhaps the smallest of the bunch, a small black-and-white kitten seemed very fond of murdering the sweaty hand-wraps that I hung out to dry on the rack outside my door. I never actually fed this one either, but she seemed content to show up each evening as I returned home, attacking the heels of my sandals as I crossed the restaurant area toward my door. I admit that I grew somewhat fond of her before I was forced to relocate, but I have since seen her sleeping on the shrine kept towards the front of camp, her head resting somewhat impiously on the Buddha's right knee.
Below is a picture of her habitual evening occupation with my shoes.



Since I have moved, I am actually closer to the fringes of the camp, and in fact the back window of my room looks out into the jungle. It seems that the cats are less inclined to venture out this direction, and so our relationship has gone the way of French cinematic romances, with much sighing and staring from long distances, but little in the way of activity or complete sentences.

I have, however, discovered a new set of creatures to plague my rest, which seem equally interested in my footwear as places of repose. I have taken to keeping my tennis-shoes inside now, after one evening when I stepped outside my door in only my socks, and when I attempted to put on one of my shoes, I felt something inside, about halfway down the sole. I pulled back, and was about to reach inside to smooth down the lining, or brush away whatever had wrinkled up enough to obstruct my toes, when I paused, reminded of the hand-sized spider that I had noticed in my room about a week before. Thinking better of reaching in blind, I tapped the heel of my shoe against the ground three or four times, and, holding it by the toe, I made a quick whipping motion with my hand, flicking the heel end away from me. At this final gesture, a frog just slightly smaller than my fist was sling-shot out of my shoe, and rocketed (presumably terrified) some ten feet into the grass, where it quickly righted itself, paused, and hopped away.
Since I have moved out here, I have noticed a particular excess of reptiles, which I suppose accounts for the comparative lack of insects and arachnids about. While I value that service, it is somewhat disconcerting when, in the middle of the night, I'm making my way toward the bathrooms on an errand of doubtful import to God and Country and I realize that I am being watched from all sides by a myriad of squishy bodies in the grass and clinging to the walls. All the same, I am glad to be free from houseguests like the one pictured below (for reference, my hand, from wrist to fingertips, goes about to the top of the first hinge on the window).


Speaking of the bathrooms, I feel that a word or two is due the facilities here, as it is truly some unfortunate person's thankless, Herculean responsibility to keep them somewhat in order. Overall, I have been very impressed by the state of the camp and by the rigorous cleanliness applied to the mats, but while it is certainly something to clean off the buckets of sweat and blood which are splattered across the training areas every day, I think that the bathrooms may have been doomed from the start. Without getting too graphic, I should warn any travelers to Thailand that native Thai cuisine apparently has a reputation for causing something of a traffic jam in the bowels of newcomers. I myself somehow escaped this unsightly syndrome, but many of my colleagues did not, and as new people are constantly arriving at the gym, I have come to expect the worst from the toilets and their immediate areas. In fact, as Western Europeans seem to be particularly vulnerable to the obstructive effects of pad thai, I have come to think of the bathrooms as existing perpetually in a state akin to the beaches of Normandy on June 5th, 1944: quiet and serene, well-attended, but on the eve of being stormed by large numbers of ill-fated Englishmen.

The final eccentricity of camp on which I'll comment today is the casual nudity which seems to pervade the mats. The population of the place is predominantly men, but certainly not without exception, which to me makes the general disregard for clothing all the more striking. To be fair, one rarely encounters full frontal nakedness in men or women, but I have only to look out my window to see one of the MMA fighters disrobe in the corner of the mats in order to put on his athletic cup and supporter; an activity which, to my mind, reminds one in private of humanity's absurdity quite well enough, and in public is at best a strong kidney-punch to one's dignity. Just the same, however, I have already had several three- and four-day stretches in which I haven't once put on a shirt, due to, if nothing else, the sheer impracticality of clothing on the upper-body in this level of heat and humidity. Without any means of air-conditioning in my room, let alone on the mats, it seems prudent to me to trade in a bit of self-consciousness in exchange for sparing myself from sending in my laundry every third day.

Finally, as I've clearly only just now discovered the ease with which I can post pictures here, I'll add the photos of Dang that I promised in my last post. I somewhat wish that I could have taken more candid shots of him, as his face in training is usually very different than the grin with which you see him here, but perhaps that will come later.