The King's Birthday

I fully realize that I have not yet provided you with the description of the Loy Kathong festivities, which did, indeed involve drunkenness and fire in large quantities. However, last week was the King's Birthday which involved a whole new set of festivities, and life is sweeping me along so quickly, that there hardly seems time for me to keep my head above the water, let alone write everything down.

Khun, the young eccentric owner of the most popular ex-pat's bar in town said, "Tabasco sauce is so Western. We will drink chilies." It was Tim's birthday, the Australian author/ documentary film maker who lives in the house next to mine and I was ordering him the typical Albertan birthday drink: the Prairie Fire. A Prairie Fire is a tequila shot with Tabasco sauce.

So Khun brought out the shot glasses and found some chili peppers, the small green ones known as "mouse droppings." The smaller the chili, the more intense the flavor. He dropped a chili into each glass and crushed it in the bottom, then topped up the glass with tequila, stirred it up and let it sit for awhile. When the four of us at the bar got to drinking those tasty little shots of fire, that's when the drinking started to get serious.

I can't even remember now what it was that made me laugh, but I was in the middle of shooting another round and the tequila was already going down my throat when I started laughing. Rather then spit all over everyone I tried to restrain myself and predictably, ended up getting a great deal of tequila up my nose. If it had just been tequila, I wouldn't have any complaint, but this round had been sitting on the bar for quite some time, soaking up the chilies and getting feistier by the moment.

Let me tell you something folks: chilies are not something you want going up your nose.

For the next few moments, I couldn't even tell you what was going on in the bar. I'm told that I squeaked. I couldn't talk for a few minutes. My head was a tingling mass of fire. My nose was in serious pain. SERIOUS pain. And of course, everyone was laughing. And, of course, there were more chili tequila shots to be drunk.

Unlike Tim, the King gets a huge party to celebrate his birthday. It is a national holiday. The center of town is transformed into a huge market fair complete with Ferris wheels, dodgem cars, Thai dancing and boxing matches every night. I thought it would be a quiet night, restricted myself to only a few beers and went down with my friends to check out the scene and see my first boxing match.

The crowds down in the market were intense. The crowds around the boxing ring were even more so. It brought back memories of my mosh-pit days, pressed up against the crowd, amoung the steaming sweat of bodies, swaying together with the press of people. We got there early and had places right up close to the ring. The wait before the fight started was entertained by strange conversation with drunken Thai and Burmese men, who are always fascinated by my height, what I am doing in the crowd and my ability to drink shots (in this case, most of the men were drinking concoctions of Red Bull mixed with Whiskey). I have no idea what they are saying, they cant understand me, we just stand there gesturing and laughing and generally having a good time. It's a bit like watching a movie with the sound off, trying to guess what the characters might be saying.

The boxing was interesting, but we didn't see the best fighting in Thailand. Although there is good fighting here in Mae Sot, the night we went down was mostly younger boys in the ring. That's good because they fight with big gloves, shorter and fewer rounds and less intensely. There are rarely any knock outs. The older men fight five long rounds, sometimes bare knuckled. They either get knocked out and usually there is some blood being spilled or spat out with some teeth. There is music being played while they fight: a drum and a high pitched horn and sometimes the fighters look like they are dancing, swaying and dodging and moving to the music.

When the fighting was over, most people had already left the fair. We wandered around as people shut down their stalls and wandered home. One of the guys I was with wandered past one of the fried bug stands and popped a medium sized beetle in his mouth, crunching on it loudly. "Come here and kiss me," he said with a beetle leg stuck between his teeth. We ended up buying a bag of grubs and yes, I did pop one of them into my mouth. They are a kind of worm that lives in bamboo trees and my students talked about them with relish when I described the escapade to them. They make a light, crunchy snack, a bit like a rice crisp.

Bars were closed in respect for the King and conversation among the people I was with was interesting and nowhere near winding down, so we stopped in the only place still open and serving beer: a brothel. We stayed there talking for several hours then decided to head home for the night. We were one bike short because Tim had gotten a ride down to the fair so I gave him my bike and said that I would walk home. I wanted to clear my head from all the craziness of the weekend.

Walking home at night in Canada is, indeed, an excellent way to clear one's head. But I live in Mae Sot now and walking home at night is not something I will ever do again. I had forgotten about the Pariah Dogs.

If you are riding a speedy bicycle, motorcycle, going about in a car or walking during the day, you hardly notice the Pariah Dogs. If you do, you may think they are merely someone's pets. They sleep during the day and hide from cars and people. But at night, the Pariah Dogs rule the streets.

Almost as soon as my friend's bikes were out of sight, a few came into view and I realized what a bad decision I had made. I stepped into someone's garden and relieved them of a couple of bricks making up a flower border. Then I stepped into action. I can't even remember the number of confrontations I had with the dogs, only that I can't remember the last time I felt so scared. At one point, I made the mistake of letting one circle behind me so that they were coming at me from all sides. Where I would have been without my bricks, I do not know. Tim said he could hear me coming down the street ten minutes before I arrived. The dogs were howling all around me. I dared not run, but walked calmly and strongly among them, often growling at them, threatening to hit them with my bricks, even getting up the courage to walk towards them in confrontation. By the last three blocks though, I was swearing at the mangy mutts loudly and profusely.

I haven’t been so happy to see my bed in a long long time.

And that's just a normal night in Mae Sot: a little boxing, some grub eating, chilling in the brothel and a walk home through packs of wild dogs.

And that's not even the half of it.