September 02, 2011

Days 27 - 29: "Number 1 Champion Fooood!"

I won't lie, I've been putting off blog entries intentionally. It helps the days go by slower if I don't blog haha. Anywhoooo...

Day 27: Got very little sleep the night before so I justified taking off morning training and sleeping in a tad bit. Pii A busted our chops and I made another joke about the rooster and the dogs. Pii A shot me a smile and said "Ok, Ok."

Afternoon training rolls around and I'm in the ring kicking pads with Kru Dam while Brendan is buzzing around attempting to film me when I hear Pii A call him into the kitchen area. Brendo comes back out the training area with the best 'wtf' face I've seen in a good long while...

"THEY KILLED IT. THEY KILLED THE FRIGGIN' ROOSTER. PII A TRIED TO GET ME TO CUT THE HEAD OFF."

Like. A. Pii. Boss.

Your customers being kept awake at night by a rooster? Give 'em a chance to deal the deathblow and then feed it to them.

A fitting solution. I can't say we didn't enjoy that dinner a little more than usual ;]

Aside from slaying that horrid creature, Pii A did make an effort to move P'neh's roosters further back into the backyard area making their cock-a-doodle-doos (Is there a word for that? Their crowing...or cawing...whatever.) substantially easier to deal with.

Day 28: Following the pattern last week, Doug, Brendo and myself did some morning training and Pii A took us to Wat Bang Phra for a little round 2. Of course, before the Wat, approximately 1 hour after eating a full blast Mama meal, Pii A stopped at his preferred noodle joint. Unreal how good this stuff is. He also got us some fried potatoes, fried bananas and some superbeast that resembled a grilled banana inside of a fried shell. Good heavens.

Doug and Brendo headed up to the third floor to get a tattoo of their choice done by a monk (and his apprentice) for varying prices. I went to the second floor to get my Hah Taew done by the monk who resides there. The monk on the first floor who did our Gao Yord had too many people waiting for him and waved us along. I was left all by my lonesome on this one so I kinda went with the flow. It just so happened I would be responsible for approaching the monk with the offering plate and would have no familiar Thai there to help translate if need be. Funny how not intimidating those tasks are when I type them out but I was spazzing a little while waiting. Deep breaths boy, deep breaths.

Turns out lurching forward on your knees, holding a tray full of flowers, money, cigarettes and candles isn't as hard as I made it out to be and neither is letting the monk physically move me to the appropriate position to being tattooing. The Yant Hah Taew was put on my right shoulderblade, not even remotely registering in the pain department...at least not compared to the legit spinal tapping we got last week.

I made my way outside to find the guys and Pii A as I knew they were looking for somethings to bring home. The Wat has a few booths and a bigger 'store' area to purchase amulets, bracelets, statues, charms, prayer scrolls, wooden penises of all sizes, so on and so forth.

Sign of fertility. Get ya mind outta the gutter. Next.


"I'm having such a
wonderful time!"

Doug enjoying every
second, haha.

Doug and Brendan wanted to head back to the third floor monk to get their tattoos done and after some haggling on Pii A's part (again, boss behavior...taking care of his people.), decisions were made. Doug found a Hanuman tattoo he liked and Brendan decided on Yant Paya Thao Luean (Yup, that turtle Yant he's been talking about). The third floor is a little different than the other two floors in that, well aside from the fact you have the choice of tattoo, an apprentice does the intial tattooing and the monk (who resides comfortably in a glass air conned room) finishes the Pali script and does the blessing.

There was a group of (4) Malaysian dudes (and their Thai...girlfriends...?) in there getting their Sak Yants done. In the 2 hours of being up there, I learned that:

A) Malaysian people looking nothing like what I thought they did.
B) Bullet wounds never heal quite right.
C) Grown men actually cry about things unrelated to their family and sports.

These guys looked of Pakistani decent and Brendan noticed the savage markings on a few of them. Overhearing some conversation and putting 2 and 2 together, it was determined one of the guys had 6 bullet wounds, another had a savage probably rifle-caliber bullet wound in his lower back and another had a pretty good stabbing scar in his right rib.

Do we have hard evidence? No. Does it matter? No. We also offered the idea of being attacked by a tiger...maybe a gun-toting, village ravaging tiger.




Are you crying? There's
no crying in base..sak yants...

One of the guys was getting like 5 Yants done in one sitting with smoke breaks inbetween. Big money on the third floor. Seargent Stabwound was getting his Yant when I noticed his buddies pointing at him laughing. I look inside the glass room and see him legit crying while his lady was rubbing his leg attempting to get him through, haha. Sure did snap a pic.

After the yants were done, we headed back to Sitmonchai. En route, Pii A took some backroads and we hit another chow spot which he assured us was "Number 1 Champion Frog Eat!"


DEM SOME HUGE FROGS.

Sure as sugar, this place served frog and all frog related entrees. We started off with some massive fried frog legs and looked and tasted like chicken. If I could take a guess, judging by the size of these legs - the frogs must've been the size of my damn foot. Anywho, we had some spicy little bits of frogs to follow and a durian-based soup after that. I ate a chili in the spicy frog pile that apparently is just an aesthetics thing that the Thai's don't even eat. Worst 5 mins of my life. All facial orifices leaking at once makes for an embarassing time..that paired with the bloody patch of shirt on my back from the Sak Yant...yeah. Nice job, Farang.

After Pii A and I had sufficiently left small pools of sweat in our seats, we all paid the bill and left. Ah yes, I forgot to mention. Spiders in Thailand are big. Spiders in Thailand move fast. Spiders in Thailand wait till you're asleep with your head against glass to crawl within inches of your face. A humbling experience, I assure you.

Tonight was our final big market night. Bahn and I hung out for a majority of the night. Him and his half brother Jim have great English thanks to some good schooling. Apparently they practice English at school everyday. It's cool to see them get to use it and they love teaching us new Thai words as we can't pronounce em correctly for the life of us. Bahn is also very much the "little brother" of the camp in all senses of the word. He gets stuck with babysitting Pii A's kid if need be, gets picked on at a fairly regular rate by the other guys and still gets sent to his room. I implore those of you who come to the camp - make friends with everyone here but make the time to shoot the breeze with Jim and Bahn especially. They are a great source of comic relief and are very helpful with translating (especially at the market!). They are also a great resource for testing out your Thai and in turn, they get to see the fruits of their English lessons from school!

Jen left in the wee hours of Friday morning to make her way back to NY. Safe travels!

Day 29: No morning training, slept in an extra hour and watched Muu hit pads. He's got a fight on the 13th (I think) with Mapichit Sitsongpeenong. That is going to be one hell of a fight. Mapichit got KO'd at the beginning of the year in the...2nd or 3rd by a right hand from Supertop S. Prasopchoke. I'm not super familiar with Supertop but I'd put money on it that Muu hits harder. Muu is 1 - 1 in his last two fights, losing his last narrowly leaving his opponent a bloody mess and flat out KOing the opponent prior within the first 3. I hate that I won't be here to see it but Chok Dee nonetheless!

Pii A, Doug, Brendo, myself, Muu, P'neh, Apirak and Kru Dam went out for "Number 1 Super Champion Beef!" for breakfast today, giving Mama a break from cooking. Beef it was indeed...various beef parts from parts unknown? Nah, just unknown to us. Beef liver and cow intestines were on the menu today. Liver not so much but the intestines were actually decent when you paired with the sauces they had. The sauces being 'red and hot as hell' or 'kinda greenish-clear with stuff in it.' Then came the obligatory soups filled with either liver, intestines, and/or beef chunks. The Thai guys got the spicy version while we kept with the wimpy version. They did share their spicy version though which was truly not that spicy...it just looked littered with chili flakes. I unleashed the power of Fatbooth at the camp at it's a hit. Being fat is just plain funny to these guys. I agree. Fictional fat is funny. If you are on the Facebook, I threw the Fatbooth pictures and the finished Yant pictures up too.

Got some clinching in with Muu. Managed to elbow him in the head about 10 mins in. I'm just a fantastic training partner sometimes. The guys all went swimming in the dead cow river after training and came back smelling like...you guessed it...roses. Stuffed inside a deflated cow corpse.

Abigail returned to the camp today which was nice. We weren't sure if we would see her before leaving. After some facebook antics, unexpected but welcomed sugar intake, I'll be ending this right here and attempting to get some shut eye before our last day of training.

That sucked typing that. Probably about 2 or 3 more posts left...womp womp.

2 comments:

  1. Jake, thank you for writing this blog...I've read the entire site (along w/ Doug's) as I plan for my trip over to Thailand on May 25th for a month...will be doing 10 days @ Sitmonchai. What's your personal email?-Chris

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  2. Awesome Chris, thank you.

    jakebmta@gmail.com - keep me updated!

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