Stories

    While I'm in Thailand early next year, the Curmudgeonette has plans to spend some time in Arizona.  She's recruited her college roommate, J.J., as a traveling companion.  As plans for this trip were being developed discussion turned to possible contingencies.  J.J, said "Well if it doesn't go according to plan it will be an adventure.  Adventures will give us stories to tell."   I thought, 'now there's a wise woman with a great attitude.'   Of course I knew that before, but it reinforced my opinion of her.
    Yes, stories!  Recently I heard a discussion of traveling on National Public Radio.  One of the speakers spoke of car trips he takes with his wife and children.  He said that when they begin the day he reminds his family it's about creating stories.  This turns the unexpected into fodder for story telling.  It would set the expectation that the surprises are to be eagerly anticipated and not seen as frustrating interruptions of the day's planned activities.
    In one of my travel books the author makes the point that there is a significant difference between a traveler and tourist.  Much of the difference is in the reaction to the unexpected.  The tourist heads for the safe, known, popular places where he/she is likely to be surrounded by other persons much like him/her.  The traveler, on the other hand, is interested in experiencing the culture and life in a new place and the unexpected, the different, the unfamiliarity is the point to travel.
    Thailand, and especially Bangkok and Ayutthaya, are now very familiar to me...my home away from home.  Therefore, it is more difficult for me to be surprised and have the data for stories. Seeing pigs on motorcycles, goats on the street, elephants walking home after work (when the Curmudgeonette read this she thought I meant "when I was walking home" but it's the elephants that are walking home), children on water buffalo, tuk-tuks, long tail boats, rice paddies, 4 passengers on a motorbike, a wheelchair pulled by a motorbike, beggars on their bellies, royal photos everywhere, pick-up trucks with loads ten feet high, everyone standing at attention at 6pm as the national anthem plays, drivers sleeping in hammocks under their parked buses...and much more, I now take for granted. 
      The last few years students at Noble Academy, the Hmong charter school where I volunteer, have done "I spy" with me.  That is, they brainstorm photo opportunities for which they want me to search while I'm in Thailand.  This has been very helpful as I look at, what is now familiar to me, through their eyes and recapture some of sense of how exotic it all is compared to home.
    There there are the stories we tell ourselves...but I think I'll save that for a subsequent post.

I drive by this temple every day on my way to school in Ayutthaya.