Papa Roach

Learning the hard way has been the operative theme of the past two days. Namely, learning the hard way about life in Bangkok’s Rainy Season. This evening, for the second time in as many days, I was stupid enough to be caught in the downpour. Now, it’s not like these downpours are some sort of sudden, unexpected occurrence. For the past three or four days, every night somewhere between 6:30 and 7:30 pm the sky opens, and it remains open for an hour and a half to two hours. The Sois flood, and the water can get up to middle-shin depth in some places. As I write at 10 pm, I can see that Soi 24 is still flooded. (A Soi is like an alleyway. They branch off of major streets and are numbered. For example, my address is Ramkhamhaeng Road #24. #24 is the Soi I live on.) Considering that Bangkok is anything but a clean city and the Sois have mangy dogs, cockroaches, rats, and all sorts of nasty things running around, walking through this water is not advisable to say the least. Well, yesterday evening, after making my return to Ramkhamhaeng Hospital (where I was given more medication for my tonsillitis and told to exercise more), which I could have done at 5 pm and avoided the monsoon, I was forced to wade through Soi 23. I got home, took off my clothes, and showered, praying that I had no open wounds anywhere on my feet. Thankfully, I was wearing flip-flops. This evening, I went to the Big C to get an umbrella (ironically enough) and a few other supplies. Although cloudy, the sky didn’t look threatening when I left at 6 pm. At 7 pm when I walked out, well, the monsoon was in full effect. I was still wearing my work clothes and my backpack, and despite that umbrella I purchased, which had the same effect of wearing anti-perspirent in Bangkok or putting the Minnesota Vikings’ defense on a football field, I was pretty much soaked to the bone from my stomach down. In my backpack, I had some rather important papers for work, which are salvable but need to be dried. However, my playing cards appear to be beyond repair. And so it goes.
At the hospital yesterday, the weigh-in showed that I have dropped 9 kilograms in less than a week. For those of you not familiar with metric, that’s 19.8 lbs. A week in Bangkok, with it’s sweatbaths and smaller portions of healthier food, seems like a pretty easy diet plan…

Miss Universe was here in Bangkok today. Canada won. Bummer…

We toured the Bang Na Campus, which is the suburban portion of Assumption University. It blew my mind. It was opulent beyond opulence. Everything is made of marble, and there are beautiful bas-relief carvings, murals and even Michaelangelo-esque paintings on the ceilings of some of the buildings. The architecture is a peculiar hybrid that seems to be a hypothetical product that would be seen had the Roman Empire ever extended to Ancient Siam, with statues of St. Peter and characters of the Ramayana staring each other down. The classrooms look like miniatures of rooms that the US Senate uses for hearings. It was rather eerie, as there were no students and only a few staffers walking around these spectacular facilities. It felt like it was the palace of some dictator such is Kim Il-Sung.

Finally, to the title of this posting. Cockroaches, known as malengsaap in Thai, seem to be my new roommates. Two days ago, I found a half-dead small one in my bathroom which I promptly flushed. Tonight, as I was brushing my teeth, there was one about as big as my thumb sitting on my toilet paper. I grabbed the shower head and hosed him down. Of course he was too big to be washed down my sink. He recovered and climbed down into my shoe, which I had in there drying out as a result of the downpour described above. As the shoes were already soaked anyway, I brought out the shower again. I’m not sure where he went after he left the shoe, but he wasn’t in the shoe at least. On my next trip to Big C, I’ll be getting some sort of roach spray or repellent or something.
Hail progress!