After a really corny MTV-style confessional, you can watch one of the clips that I am most proud of. It is one of the few times that I think the music (Coldplay’s Clocks), the footage (shot on the highways outside Bangkok, and the voice-over really compliment one another well.
I’m fairly pleased with the manner in which I portrayed the floating market outside Bangkok, which is where all the footage was shot. The song is Sunchyme by Dario G.
This is definately more of a straight documentary-style clip and I didn’t really add a whole lot to it. When you have good footage of a small Thai guy doing flips and catching snakes in his mouth, you don’t really need to do much editing.
The Scot was an old man with a meaty face and tattoos on his arms. I originally mistook him for a Brit. I had returned to my hotel from my excursion into the Thai nightlife when I decided to have a drink at the hotel bar. There was a small band playing and a lovely middle-aged Thai woman singing American covers.
The man was singing along (although not quite as well as the Thai girl), and saying things like “You do it girlie!” and “Sing it girlie!”
He then requested, “Wind beneath my wings.” The Thai girl said, “Ve vill sing ‘Everything I do.’”
I compulsively shouted, “He asks for a Bette Midler song and you give him Bryan Adams! He wanted a Jewish woman and he is getting a Canadian man!”
She looked a bit disconcerted by my statement. Perhaps she did not know that Bryan Adams was Canadian.
The Scot responded to me by saying, “She is not a Jewish woman,” to which I responded: “She is!”
He then turned to the Thai singer and shouted, “Do you want me to kick his (my) ass!” To which I responded, “There you go, why are the British always trying to pick fights with Americans!”
“I’m Scottish,” he yelled back.
“Even worse, I saw Braveheart,” I shouted back.
He laughed at this for some reason and beckoned me over to his table where he began pouring full glasses of whisky. He apologized profusely for yelling at me and seemed to be very insistent on telling me that the most important think I could do in life was to listen to my heart. He kept saying, “I’m not a hard c$*t,” followed by: “If anyone in here looks at you, they’re f&#king dead.”
He claimed to be a veteran of the British army, which I accepted even though I had my doubts. He kept hugging and kissing all of the employees (even the guys), who would look at him and laugh but at times I felt as though they must have been cursing him behind his back.
He then proceeded to fluctuate between apologizing to me, telling me how many men he had killed, and telling me to follow my heart - for the next hour or so. And he insisted on telling me that I should do what was in my heart, which I took to mean skipping the early morning tour that I had signed up for, sleeping in until 4 and calling the Thai girl I met last night.
At around 1:30, I decided to head up to my room to go to sleep. He offered to buy me a Thai girl for the night, but I declined.
Yesterday when I was booking my tour of the floating market, which I ended up sleeping through thanks to the Scotsman and his whiskey, I became acquainted with the travel agent whose name was Nareh. She was gracious enough to allow me to postpone the tour a day, allowing me to catch up on some much needed sleep.
While looking through the tour options with Nareh, one tour in particular caught my eye: a Thai dinner cruise aboard a rice barge that floated down the Chao Phraya River. The only problem was that I didn’t have anyone to go with. Never being one to avoid an easy solution, I simply asked Nareh to go with me.
The dinner consisted of some curry and rice dishes as well as some fried pork. It was delicious but I think I was more preoccupied with Nareh. A constant breeze flickered through the barge, slowing the heat while it kissed her hair. Small bells hung from the roof of the boat, filling the air with silver ribbons.
We began talking and Nareh told me that she had studied business English for two years and Business Management for two years. She had been doing tour booking for the past six months.
Every morning she wakes up at 5:00, spends a half-hour getting ready, spends an hour riding an open-air bus and arrives at the hotel at 6:30 in the morning. She then works until 6:00 in the evening and takes the bus for another hour back home. After she eats dinner, she has a grand total of 1.5 hours to enjoy her life before it is time to go to bed and start the process over again. And at the end of each month, for all of her hard work she was awarded a grand total of 800 baht, the equivelant of about 160 American dollars.
The dinner tour that she booked cost 2000 baht, the equivalent of what she makes in one 50-hour week. To draw a comparison, when I was teaching in Korea, it would take me three hours of sitting and watching kids draw pictures while listening to “The Eensty-Weensty Spider,” to make the same amount of money that she made in sixty hours of waking up at 5:00 in the morning, selling tour packages all day to foreigners, and riding sweaty buses.
Sometimes I think that I understand why some women in this town resort to selling their bodies because it’s an easy way to get foreign money.
It also makes it all the more amazing that this girl refuses to buy into the filth, choosing instead to work for ten hours a day and commute for two hours every day on a raggedy old bus with no air conditioning, only to return home to a tiny apartment that she shares with one of her college friends who is an escort. Just keep going day after day.
It makes me look at my life differently. It makes me realize that I’m fortunate to have been born and raised in a country that is so wealthy that my complaints are that my Dad won’t get the dent in my car fixed or that my family goes to Hilton Head instead of the Bahamas over Spring break.
A stark contrast to the previous evening, I spent my second day visiting all of the Buddhist temples in Bangkok. I wrote the VO for this clip during a time I was arguing with a Buddhist friend of mine, so it may seem overbearing. On the bright side, there is footage of a Buddhist monk picking his nose. The video was shot in the Buddhist temples throughout Bangkok.
The Swede was an interesting little man who I originally mistook for a German. He called me gentleman on the shuttle in the airport. I was seated next to him when I offered my seat to some small Malaysian girl. He called me a gentleman and we began to talk.
He told me how he had just come from a conference in Australia where he had listened to the Maharaja speak. He told me that the message was that one should always enjoy their life in the present. Not a change in lifestyle necessarily, but more of a change in perspective. He reminded me a bit of one of the aloof teachers at my Hawkwan in Korean.
I met the Sri Lankan on a tour bus that was taking us to a number of temples around the city. He was a youthful looking 36-year-old man with a pointy nose and glasses, which for some reason gave me the impression that he was an accountant. As it turns out, he was a factory inspection agent.
I told him that I was heading to Sri Lanka after I left Bangkok and we immediately began talking. He had a very thick accent that made it difficult to understand 100% of what he was saying, but I did my best. I soon found him to be a very amiable person who insisted that I get a hold of him when I arrive in his country.
When the tour had ended and we were heading back to our respective hotels, he asked me if I had noticed his limp. I answered in the negative and he pulled something out of his jacket pocket: It was a picture of a white Peugeot that was so mangled it looked like a crushed soda can.
He told me that a train had smashed into his car, which contained his 2-year-old daughter, his pregnant wife, his son-in-law, and himself. Miraculously, his daughter and wife survived, as did the fetus in his wife’s womb. His son-in-law died instantaneously.
He told me that if he had been driving a Japanese car with the steering wheel on the left, instead of a European car with the steering wheel on the right, it would have been him that died instantaneously.
It is disconcerting to me how sex is sold like a commodity in Bangkok. Bought and traded, sold and negotiated.
It bothers me how so many Thai girls seem induced to move to Bangkok and sell their youth and beauty for nickels and dimes, learning not only how to smile and moan, but also how to wheedle and deal, reveal and steal with their looks, their fingers, their soft thighs gently caressing your back as they ask the simple question.
It’s disturbing but at the same time I feel like it is so easy to just accept it as a fact of life, their strife not mine maybe next lifetime things will be the other way around it’ll be me that runs aground and succumbs to temptations.
Although my heart and my mind say it is wrong, there is another part of me which feels inclined to accept it - The part of me that gets drawn in is what allows people to digest anything their peers serve, riding a torrent of a wave instead of living against it.
I’m happy that I haven’t bought into it yet which isn’t something I should be that proud of I guess.
It’s so hot here I walk around and feel like I’m stuck inside a baseball glove, breathing in pollution and smog amongst fallen angels and wandering spirits, wondering if their smiles and cheap wiles are figments of my imagination or worse, a smile gilded gold.
I took a Buddhism class during my Junior year of College and I can still clearly remember how I became enamored with the concept of liberation from suffering.
If what I remember is correct, Samsara is the eternal cycle of birth, death, and reincarnation, like a wheel spinning around and around.
The most fundamental truth of Buddhism is that life is suffering, stemming from the urge to cling onto things which are ephemeral by nature. Only by relinquishing the attachment and dissolving the ego may one reach Nirvana - a state of nothingness and freedom from Samsara.
It made so much sense to me at the time and I set about trying to detach myself from my various humanly thirsts that were keeping me in Samsara: Drinking keg beer, trying to chat girls up, smoking cigarettes.
After several painful weeks had passed I decided that maybe Samsara wasn’t so bad after all and resigned myself to the fact that I might never reach Nirvana.
But sometimes I wonder.
Relinquishing attachment and dissolving the ego go hand-in-hand, but why do you have to necessarily dissolve the ego into nothing.
What if you can dissolve it into something? Or someone?
Maybe by giving yourself onto another, you wouldn’t have that dreaded self-awareness because there wouldn’t be a self to be aware of. Those self-obssessed thoughts would have evolved into a feeling of love.
You would have dissolved into another person and that person into you and the consumnation of your love would be a phenomenon that liberates you.
And when you thought of the transient things that you once clung to, you would begin to see how unimportant they were in light of the love that you have found.
A Buddhist would probably respond to this rubbish by saying that ultimately, in the process of losing your sense of ego, you come to love everything and everyone around you equally.
But I don’t like to share and anyway, isn’t it Buddhism that preaches not clinging to any beliefs, even Buddhist ones?
