Really? Another post about haircuts?

So there's this tiny neighborhood barber shop around the corner that Lian and I pass on our way to the good duck soup & noodle shop on Thapae Road. The owner waits expectantly at the door, casting puppy-dog eyes on passers-by. His eyes are all we can see of his face, as he wears a white surgical mask on the job. He and Lian chat briefly and the price sounds pretty decent -- did I hear him say 150 baht? What the heck, all I need is a quick clipper-cut, so I decide to give him a try.

Awaiting my turn in the chair.

After selecting my style preference from the gallery of male celebrity photos clipped from magazines and taped to the wall (I go for the close-cropped Sam Worthington look), I plop down in the chair and he sets to work. Ever ... so ... slowly. He seems to be progressing hair by hair, always asking after every snip: "Is this OK? Is this OK?" At last we are finished. Or not: this barber then proceeds to give me a scalp massage, followed by a shoulder massage. And then he breaks out the shears again for a few finicky touches.

Rising, I pull out my wallet and ask how much. He replies almost apologetically: "Ha-sip baht, khrep?" Fifty baht, roughly a buck-sixty. In other words, ten times less than a Super Cuts slash job back in Oregon. I hand him a 100-baht note and signal to keep the change. He is overcome with astonished gratitude and will not let me leave the shop until he can do more for me -- "Shampoo? I give you shampoo!" So it's into the reclining sink-chair for a long, luxurious wash-and-rinse, followed by yet another scalp massage.

Lian watches this extended pampering and announces: "I have a wash hair, too." So then it's my turn to wait and wait.

---

A haircut reminder for Lian's son.

In the Thai school system, when a teacher is dissatisfied with the length of a male students hair, he informs the parents not with a written note or a phone call, but by shaving a divot into the student's scalp! One night Dao comes home with these mangy-looking gashes cut into his hair, and I ask Lian if she is OK with this. She has no idea what I'm getting at. "Every secondary school in Thailand, children cannot long hair," she says. "Is not polite."

Thai parents do not see it as a personal violation the way most American moms and dads would. Thais simply have a different relationship to authority and it's always fascinating to note how it manifests itself, from deference to teachers to reverence for their king.

---

For the longest time I've stuck (pretty much) to a "when in Rome ..." policy about food, eschewing western cuisine in favor of noodle joints and open-air markets. I would stroll smugly past the sidewalk diners at the fancy American restaurant, The Duke's, and think: "Just look at those wide load farang in there scarfing on ribs and burgers and pizza," while on my way for a steaming, spicy bowl of tom yum or som tam or whatever Thai food name I'm forever mispronouncing. 

A dessert so huge, it requires two utensils.

But you can deny who you are and what you're made of for only so long. And lately my thoughts about The Duke's have taken on a Homer Simpson voice: "Mmm, ribs and burgers and pizza ..." Finally I relent and drag poor Lian along for a mid-afternoon American-style dessert.

Keep in mind, a Thai "dessert" comes in a small dish and might include kidney beans, water chestnuts, squash and other such salad-bar detritus, only modestly sweetened. So Lian is unprepared for the massive sugar-bomb apple pie and softball-size scoop of vanilla ice cream set before her. She gamely picks at it but prefers my carrot cake, also mega-portioned.

Am I satisfied? Not yet! A few nights later I up the ante.

Lian has a two-hour customer in the evening, so I promise to take charge of dinner. After she leaves, I ask Dao: "Ghin pizza, dai mai?" He grins and nods. I know that his mother has never tasted the stuff, but she's about to get her first opportunity.

Before ...

Waiting in the bar at The Duke's for my pie -- large pepperoni, Italian sausage and garlic chicken pizza, to go -- I bask in the Stanford's-like vibe, watching the parade of comfort food float by: medium-rare steaks and mashed potatoes, ginormous burgers and fries, racks of ribs from the real smoker out back, spaghetti and meatballs, all my favorite culinary porn. Twenty minutes later my pizza arrives and it is ridiculously huge but beautiful.

... and after.

"Oh boy, lots of leftovers for me," I think. But no: the pizza, which I doctor with sauteed onions, Thai peppers and tomatoes, is enthusiastically received. The 100-pound Thai lady and the skinny child manage to consume all but two slices; OK, I helped a little.

---

That's it for another episode. Tomorrow evening I enter the big silver cocoon once again to begin my 24-hour transformation from sweaty farang into freezing Oregonian. Sawat dii khrep, Merry Christmas and see you soon.

Festive Christmas attire from sidewalk vendor.

Dude looks like a lady-boy

One day after lunch I follow Lian to her haircut appointment -- she arrives on her motor-bike and I come huffing along on foot a few minutes later. I walk in and Lian is talking to what I think are two people at the back of the shop: a fetching young woman with flowing dark hair in a delightfully short dress, and some fellow with a booming baritone voice, just out of sight.

Uh, my mistake: the girl and the guy turn out to be one and the same individual.

Thailand has a warm and tolerant place in its heart for its kathoey, the Thai word for transgendered or effeminate gay men, better known in English as lady-boys. Many Thais consider kathoey to be a sort of third gender.

On Thai TV, most sitcom casts include at least one screamingly flamboyant gay/cross-dressing comic-relief character. Night after night at Anusan Market, farang male tourists pose nervously with the gaudily costumed Thai lady-boys outside their nightly revue. Kathoey use the feminine polite particle of speech, ending sentences with "kaa" instead of the male "khrep," and they often work in occupations dominated by women.  Lian herself uses the pronoun "she" when referring to her lady-boy stylist.

Sure, we farang come from the land of clean drinking water at the tap, not-treacherous sidewalks and artisan bakeries. But I might not live to see red-state America ever catch up to the so-called developing world in this one cultural attitude.

---

Carrot cake and vanilla ice cream. The fifth season of "Breaking Bad." Really good pizza. Driving my own car with my kick-ass sound system reinstalled. Cooking in my own kitchen. Blu-Ray on a 92" projection screen. 21st century broadband. Conversance in the written and spoken language around me.

I am ready to come home. Home.

Fire, I'll take you to burn

Not stars -- lanterns

My iPhone camera cannot possibly capture the trippy theatricality of a night sky dotted with Thai fire lanterns – especially as they rise into the burst zone of a tremendous fireworks display alarmingly close overhead. For the hundreds of revelers packed onto the narrow Iron Bridge at the climax of Loi Krathong, there is no lag time between flash and boom as cinders rain down our upturned faces. "Gangnam Style" blasting from the Bus Bar next door totally works for this spectacle.

Everyone else is playing with fire, so we join in the fun: I buy a 40-baht paper lantern from a street vendor – there’s one every 10 feet, and they’re all mobbed with customers. He assembles the contraption for me: each lantern includes a solid fuel ring suspended by cross-wires at the base of a flame-resistant fabric hood. You ignite the fuel ring, wait for the hot air to fully inflate the hood, and then let go. The important word is “wait” – Lian and I launch our lantern off the bridge too soon and it plummets into the river, fizzling out. A while later we try our hand at the small floral Loi Krathong candle boats that people set adrift on the river to honor the water spirits. But our candles sputter out before we can even get our boats to the river’s edge. We would suck as pyromaniacs.

Awwww!

Lian is intent on not missing “the profession” and for the longest time I have no idea what she is talking about. Once again our very dog-eared Thai-English dictionary clears things up: proCESsion, i.e., parade. But she still calls it the profession.

Loi Krathong rocks Chiang Mai long into the evening, but after four days of music and pyrotechnics we can pretty much tune it out, like living near train tracks. By Friday the entire town looks like The Morning After, a landscape of fallen fire lantern carcasses strewn everywhere.

The Mae Ping River is clogged with banana-leaf floral boats. Serf-class street sweepers with their twig brooms are scraping spent bottle rockets and firecracker remains into loose piles that someone eventually will pick up, or maybe the rains will wash them away.

---

Amazing crispy fish, one of many courses.

Friday evening we meet up with our old friend Mr. Tong at the terrific open-air restaurant he turned us onto a few months back. We feast with abandon over beers and scotch. This time it’s my treat and the entire evening, including tip, comes to $24. We get home around 11 and I check email before turning in. Surprise! A client has scheduled a last-minute phone conference that begins 3:30 a.m., Thailand time, which I force myself to stay up for. I predict that there’s an afternoon nap in my future.

Happy Loi Krathong!

I should get some sleep this afternoon because I sure won't get much tonight -- not if yesterday's pre-festival partying is any indication.

It's Tuesday just before midnight and Loi Krathong isn't until tomorrow, but the sidewalks along the river are already jammed with revelers and vendors selling floral candle floats, fire lanterns and all manner of street chow. Live musical performances bleed into one another as we walk, punctuated by the bam-bam-bam of firecrackers and the occasional ka-BOOM of M-80s, which set off car alarms up and down the road. The night sky is dotted with constellations of soft orange light as fire lanterns float in unison silently southward.

Lian and I fight our way through this crush to reach the Buddhist temple across Narawat Bridge. We are toting bagfuls of nonperishable donation food for the monks, who are lined up along the sidewalk with their beggar's bowls ready to receive. (Is there a holiday in this country that doesn't  involve these moochers getting their taste?) Lian transfers the contents of our plastic Rimping Market bags into her decorative metal donation bowl -- "is polite more" -- slips off her sandals and kneels in reverence before approaching the dole line. I hang back and guard the footwear.

Nothing gets in but sound, and every torrential downpour.

At home, long into the night we hear the muffled thump-thump from the music stage across the river ... and the not-muffled yips and coos of the young lady upstairs entertaining her gentleman caller. I should mention, the back windows in our apartment building have no glass, only bug screens and cyclone fencing for security. Do we know our neighbors? Like you wouldn't care to imagine!

---

There is a growing body of evidence that I might be a spoiled brat:




She is muttering: "You take photo MAID, la kaa?  Am maid you, chai-mai, MISTER William?"

In my own defense, I did buy her the best mop in the store.

How (and where) the other half lives

Surrounding funky, grungy old Chiang Mai roughly 5 to 10 kilometers outside the moat is an asteroid belt of modern residential construction: shiny new single-family homes clumped into pristine gated communities. Prices start around US$89K.

Because I encounter mostly service-industry folks, I sometimes forget that not everyone in this town drives a tuk-tuk or pushes a som tam cart. CM in fact has a healthy middle class of professionals who work in banks and law offices, academics at the universities, doctors, engineers, etc.  And as Lian puts it, "People who have money live outside."

"The Classic" -- 3 bed, 3 bath. Anyone want to come visit?

Our sub-studio nook down a tiny soi by the river is ... let's call it "cozy." But for those 3 a.m. client conferences on Skype, I need a better privacy option than the bathroom floor. So one afternoon we flag down a Red Car and go exploring in suburban Chiang Mai. Our first stop: The Luxury Home gated community.

Three basic house styles, all of them a bit sterile in their variations on a theme of beige. But impressive: rock-solid construction, literally, no stick framework around here, and thoughtful use of space. This being Thailand, some floor plans even include a "Buddha room," i.e., an alcove for the candles, flowers, graven images, etc. The middle-of-the-road option with the amenities we like totals 3.2 million baht, just north of one hundred grand, American.

Maybe we can rent for a little while longer?


---

Flash back to May 2010 when I am living for a month in a studio apartment in a gated community outside Bangkok, where I am studying for my English teaching certificate. My old friend and former Brookings newspaper colleague, Frann, herself now an English teacher, connects me with a delightful young Thai woman, Pan, whom she met while earning her Master's at PSU. Pan is by her own admission upper middle class Thai: her family operates an English school in Bangkok, her father is a commercial airline pilot, and she balances teaching with various business ventures. A Bangkok native, she grew up in northern California around Chico and speaks English with a flawless American accent. Pan is a work-hard, play-harder kind of girl; we hit it off well and have stayed in touch -- in fact, it is Pan who connected me with her old Chico chum Nick here in Chiang Mai, the dude who got his head bashed in a year ago in a bar fight.

Fast-forward to last week and Pan is in town to stage some software sales event or other at the hotel where I belong to its fitness center. She reminds me on Facebook that I owe her a beer. So I meet up with Pan and a friend of hers, John from Australia, and we kill the better part of the afternoon at the new Bus Bar -- literally a bar in an old red bus parked by the river. Three quarts (each) later Pan runs off to catch her flight back to Bangkok and I lumber home to explain to Lian how I missed the lunch she cooked for me because I am busy drinking with a 29-year-old Thai lady. Domestic hilarity ensues.

---

Launching fire balloon from the bridge.

Loi Krathong is still two days away and the party has already begun with a bang. And a ka-BOOM! And a krackety-POW-POW-POW-POW-POW! long into the night.

Candles for Loi Krathong

The apartment manager warns everyone that he will be shutting the entrance gate at nightfall to keep out the firecracker tossers and other riff-raff. Roadside stands have popped up to sell banana-leaf candle boats to honor the water spirits and fire balloons to illuminate the night skies like airborne jack-o-lanterns. All the stores sell these yellow candles that at first I thought were lemon tarts but in fact are used to send the fire balloons aloft.

Throngs of young people have already begun to jam the sidewalks of the Iron Bridge, and the open spaces by the river are lined with food vendors. Music is everywhere. Monday night is our reconnaissance mission to check out where all the good stuff will be -- and we're just an easy five-minute walk from all the action. So maybe there ARE some advantages to living in town.

Heffay Hears a Ho'

Tourists are pouring into Chiang Mai in advance of Loi Krathong, the big Thai festival that occurs on the evening of the full moon of the 12th month in the Thai lunar calendar -- this year, November 28. More about Loi Krathong later.

Lian is super-busy and a call to work can happen at any moment. So when we're out and about, we travel separately -- she on her motor-bike, I on foot -- in case she needs to leave in a hurry.  Which is exactly what happens after a late supper at Sunday Walking Market. So I hoof it home via my shortest route, running the bar-girl gauntlet at the seedy end of Loi Kroh Road. It is 9:30, way after dark, and the carnivores are lurking in the doorways of the go-go bars, waiting for farang man-meat to come stumbling along.

"Hello, meester! Want massage?" they sing-song. One porcine creature in a too-tight cocktail dress even takes me by the waist and tries to pull me inside, but I slip away with a polite "mai ao, khrep" (no, thanks) and continue on. The idea is to stride purposefully, smile confidently and make only fleeting eye contact -- acknowledging without engaging.

And truth be told, I wish these ladies good hunting. Life in Thailand offers them few opportunities and so they're making the best of their one god-given asset while they've still got it. If a hard-working bar girl can pluck a few thousand baht (or much more) off some drunken white whoremonger who can afford to fly here for the express purpose of diving snout-first into debauchery ... well, who am I to question divine justice?

---

When Thai property owners say "keep out," they mean it. Where in America do you ever see a barbed-wire fence flush up against a pedestrian walkway?

---

Most days around mid-morning, the local police set up a traffic checkpoint in the exact same place on Thapae Road at the east end of the Narawat Bridge. Motor-bike riders who are not wearing helmets are stopped and ticketed. This is not a sporadic enforcement; whenever I walk that way to Warorot Market, eight times out of ten I will see the helmet patrol in action. Half of Chiang Mai knows that the police will be there, and yet amazingly they catch a great number of repeat offenders, usually women who are willing to risk getting busted (or brained against a curb) because -- well, let's ask one:

"Lady have a hair make beautiful, don't want helmet," explains Lian. I ask her how many 400 baht tickets she has accrued at that one checkpoint, which every local knows about. She holds up three fingers.

---

Do I really want to spend the equivalent of $1.32 (plus the cost of milk and butter) for this little taste of home? I'm thinking no.

---

Lian and I have a lazy, free afternoon.  I want to work a crossword and goof around online. This is what she wants to do. Wants to do. We are vastly different people.

Toggling between two realities

Monday night in Chiang Mai, some 30 hours after fleeing Portland, I arrive back on Lian's doorstep. I knock. Behind the curtained window, the lights go out and a soft orange glow illuminates the room from floor level. Then the door opens.

"Sawat dii kaa! Happy birthday!" Lian greets me with a hug, ushering me in to ooh and ahh at the wonderful western-style cake and nine candles waiting for me. (The number nine is considered good luck here.) Fun fact: Thai people sing the "Happy Birthday" song, in English, and I am duly serenaded.

I had sort of hoped that Lian's homemade fried rice would be my first meal back in Thailand, but hey -- birthday cake does just fine. And the fried rice, when it comes along a few days later, is spectacular.

---

It figures that the minute I touch down in Chiang Mai, a slew of new work comes crashing in, including a Skype interview with a promising new prospect, which is set for Thursday afternoon, east coast time ... Friday 2 a.m., my time. So as not to disturb anyone's sleep, I set up my workspace on the floor of the bathroom.

Once we connect, I learn that my prospects want it to be a video conference, and the two co-owners of this agency are attending. So I quickly pull on whatever rumpled shirt is within reach and adjust the video cam so there's not a commode in the background. Even so, the tile walls are a giveaway, and eventually someone asks: "Uh, Jeff, where exactly ARE you?"

Busted. So I pick up the laptop and give them a video tour of an actual Thai bathroom: the toidy, the shower, the sink, the--

"Wait a minute," the agency president interrupts. "Did you say Thailand?" Apparently his marketing director, who knew where I was, neglected to mention it to the others. "What time is it there?" By now it is close to 3. "Oh for pete's sake!" he says. "Go back to sleep." So the meeting wraps up pretty quickly and I have not heard from them since.

Maybe work will come of it, maybe not. OK, probably not. But at least it makes for a memorable interview and anyway I've got lots of other stuff happening, work-wise.

---

If you had to bet on how soon I would return to Wat Rampoeng, the Buddhist monastery of meditation retreat infamy, the smart money would be on "never." But Lian wants to attend Donation Day, where local worshipers come to "make merit" in the eyes of their gods by forking over hard-earned baht to the vagrants-- er, the monks. But there is music and dancing, and lots of free food, and I am one of the few farang among hundreds of Thai people.



---

Wednesday morning I am hard-wired into the presidential election returns: a streaming NBC news feed, multiple live-blogging sites, the NY Times and HuffPo front pages with wildly inconsistent electoral maps, and even Thai TV, which tracks the returns much more closely than I would ever have imagined.

Only after Barack has it in the bag can I bear to turn on Fox News, where Megyn Kelly soothingly tries to explain reality to a weeping, jabbering, totally-in-denial Karl Rove. Delicious!