God's Sufficient Grace

an indeterminate evening

In my last semester of music theory at Stetson we studied 20th century music: including 12-tone, set theory, sound mass, impressionism, expressionism - all sorts of weird, fascinating music forms that your typical audience would consider more noise than music. During that class we listened to some indeterminate or "chance" music, made popular by John Cage (but actually a method used by Mozart!) - music which is produced by rolling dice or choosing a card or even sitting in "silence" and listening to the sounds that naturally occur around you. Very interesting stuff - always different and never predictable. That's kind of how I feel like tonight was...

This evening I went out to get dinner with my friend Jen. It has been a long week, yesterday was a super long day and now on Friday night, both of us were quite exhausted and ready for the weekend. But the weariness actually made us a bit loopy tonight. Jen is a very funny, crazy person anyway - someone who always ends up making me laugh at something or the other - and somehow the combination of being with her and not exactly having an agenda as we went to get supper made for an interesting combination. (She is not, however, the best person to shop for bed-sheets with, as I discovered tonight.)

It all started when we were in the taxi, headed (slowly through the traffic) toward the mall near our apartment. Jen asked me for change to give the taxi driver when we were still down the road a bit, predicting that she would need to give him 58 baht. I asked her how she knew it would be 58 exactly. She said she just knew. I told her that if she was wrong, we were going to get ice cream. (Side note: I've discovered that I can get a small/kid-size coffee and oreo blizzard - my all-time FAVORITE combination!! - at Dairy Queen for 15 baht – that’s roundabouts 40-45 cents!) It was 57 baht. : )

Wandering in the mall, we realized that we had never discussed where exactly we would eat. She started laughing and said that she used to play a game with one of her friends back home to pick out restaurants: they'd pick a number and say they would eat at the ___th place they saw, for example the 6th place, making conditions of course as to the types of places they counted. I said, "Ok, we'll eat at the 6th place we see." We ended up at KFC, where we had some good American-ish food after having quite the time of trying to communicate with the Thai worker as to what we wanted to order. I think he must have had a headache by the time we left, and when Jen went back later to ask for straws, he acted almost afraid to see her again!

After dinner, we ended up stopping at some tables in the middle of the mall to spend probably too much money (not as much as I spent on the sheets though!) buying yellow shirts to honor the King. [Yellow is the King's color apparently and this year is his 60th anniversary as King, so the big thing is to wear yellow polos with a Thai emblem on them. Before I arrived in Thailand, one of my friends sent me an online article talking about the shortage of yellow shirts to buy in Bangkok! You see people in them everywhere - and they are worn especially on Monday, because yellow is Monday's color. I'm sure Kim has explained this much better and more accurately in her blog, which I highly recommend reading because she knows so much more about this culture than I do!!] After buying shirts, we were going to look for some stuff for school in the main department store at the mall, but while there I got distracted with looking at sheets and pillows - which I still needed to buy - and we spent about 45 minutes looking at and feeling sheets and trying out different pillows, going back and forth about what I should buy or if I should buy them at all - so much so that by the end of it, we had about 4 Thai workers laughing at us. Well, with Jen's encouragement, I ended up spending WAY too much on an amazingly beautiful set of sheets. Now, back at my apartment, I'm thinking, "Why on earth did I spend that much money on sheets?!?!" Sigh...

After another 45 minutes of wandering, we finally made it outside around 10:00 pm. That's when it really got interesting. Jen had been telling me about her bus-riding experiences and how much cheaper they are than taxis (only 8 baht/person) and how she knew that a certain number bus (38 to be specific) went right by our soi (which, by the way, is only a few large blocks down the main street from the mall - could be walkable, sort of, but not really ideal that time of night or even during the daytime). So we decided to save money (which I no longer have because I spent all of mine on sheets) and try the bus. (Did I mention the sheets were expensive? : ) We waited by the sidewalk with many other Thai people, trying to look like we knew what we were doing, as bus after bus came and left and groups of people got on and off each of them. After about ten non-"number 38" buses, I finally said, "Ok, next bus, no matter what number it is, we're getting on." She laughed at me, not thinking I was serious. But I was: all of the buses were going in the direction we wanted to go and we both knew that there were many other "numbers" of buses that stopped near our apartment, we just didn't know what they were. After Jen stopped laughing, I said, "What's the worst that could happen? If it doesn’t stop where we want to get off, we can just get off at another place and find a taxi home." She said ok.

The next bus that came was a very nice one - and a very empty one. We got on. We were the ONLY ones who got on. We sat down in the bus and Jen commented how that was the first time she had been able to actually sit on a bus because they were always so crowded. A bus-lady came up to us and asked for money to pay the fare. I gave her 20 baht for both of us. She looked confused and dissatisfied and began talking to us in Thai. We tried to ask (in Thai) how much this bus cost, but couldn't understand her answer or even tell if she understood our question. Then we tried to ask her where this bus went. After several minutes of getting nowhere, she turned to the back of the bus where a young-ish man was sitting and we all appealed to him for help. We asked him how much it cost and he said 200 baht. "200 baht?!" Jen and I looked at each other and asked him, "Where are we going?!" "To the airport" was his response. "The AIRPORT?!" (the airport is a good 45 min. to an hour away, on the complete other side of Bangkok) "Oh NO!!" The two of us began waving our arms and protesting, then practically begging for the bus driver to somehow stop right there (we were just about to pass our street) and let us off. When all those in the bus finally understood what had happened, they just laughed and laughed at us. The bus driver did have pity and pulled over, depositing us on the side of the street and letting us off with only paying 34 baht. We also laughed - most of the walk back to the apartments. That is, until I put the sheets on my bed and it hit me not only how much I had just spent on them but also that they didn’t exactly go with the color scheme I was headed with in my apartment and they were more Meghan’s style (they are EXACTLY Meghan’s style) than my own.

So tonight I learned that Bus #554 is a good option for transportation to the airport and that it really is worth it to wait and consider a purchase before buying.

posted by Catherine Rogers @ 10:31 AM