Growing up in Thailand, part 1

This post is really just me reminiscing about where I'm from, and pining for.... Somewhere else.

So you can skip it if you'd rather read something of weight. But if you're curious, continue. I know many people have asked me what it was like, third culture.

So this is an answer. One of three parts. The best one to open with, I think.

I grew up in Thailand.

Most people, I tell them that, they think "Oh! You lived in a little village in a wooden hut and used an outhouse, right?" Yeahhhh no. There are those, don't get me wrong... But there are many more cities than people like to think. I lived in a decently nice neighborhood in one of the 5 largest cities in Thailand. It was a cute little townhouse, nothing big, but to me it was perfect. The neighborhoods were safe there. You could ride your bike anywhere and it was fine. We often took back roads to get between neighborhoods to see friends, my brother and I did. On our bikes. Alone. There were neighborhood kids. We played football... Well, I watched them play football. I'm severely bad at anything athletic.  (Note, when I say "Football", I mean the one where you kick around a ball with your foot, not carry around some oval thing with your hands)

Our neighborhood, like most over there, had its own pool, with a restaurant, which we frequented. There was construction going on, and we would play around shells of houses and stuff. There was a small collection of giant concrete sewer pipes that made a perfect fort, where my brother and the other guys would have air-soft wars.

Upon leaving the neighborhood there was a highway, and on crossing the highway (Think "frogger"), there was the city park. This was a huge park, complete with a small zoo, and huge aviary, a small lake, paddleboats, a handful of open restaurants, lots of walking paths, and flowers, and lots of playground equipment. Oh yeah, and fire ants. Plenty of those. It was fantastic. And if that wasn't enough, the park was at the foot of what in Thailand we considered mountains.

They weren't really full size mountains, but you could see them from anywhere in the city and they were very big and covered in pretty green trees. There were roads that went up them, because that was where a good deal of the big temples were. Not most of them, by any means. Hat-yai, the city, is known for having as many temples as your average american city has churches. The level of devotion is what makes the difference, there. You could travel to the top of the mountain and see the giant gold statue of the standing Bhudda, and standing at his feet you could see most of the city. At any time, if you visited any temple on the mountains, you were sure to hear someone set off a long string of firecrackers to their god. To an 8 year old it was pretty awesome.

Of course, the ride up to the temples was pretty fun in and of itself. Dad had a motorcycle (You would consider it a scooter. But there was a difference between general motorcycles and scooters .Scooters were slow. Motorcycles were fast. It was like taking a harley and making a more generic, way less flashy, and much more affordable version of the thing. Strip the glamor. They were still faster than scooters and far better looking, but not the american motorcycle). My brother and I would take turns, one of us sitting in front of him and safe in his arms, and the other of us clinging to the back. For a temple trip you wanted to be in the front for the trip there, and on the back for the downhill trip home.

The local shopping choices were similar to Walmart and Target (Tesco Lotus, Big C, and Carefourr) but instead of maybe having just a subway or whatever they usually had three or more food chains... For instance, Tesco had a Mcdonalds, a KFC, a small dairy queen, and a baskin robins, and then a bunch of small merchandise stalls set up. They were all inside the building. It was like having a miniature mall, right there.

That was all good and well, but it didn't end there. If you took a trip into the actual city (15 minutes maybe?) there was more. Thailand didn't really have speed limits to speak of, and the joke (Which wasn't entirely a joke) was the Green meant go, Yellow was go faster, and then Red just meant go when no one's looking. Riding in the back of the pickup truck, or on the motorcycle, was a great cheap thrill. Every time. No overly stifling concern for safety. The truck didn't even have seat belts in the back seat.

There were two malls downtown. Lee Garden (Which was mostly restaurants and shopping places) and across from that Central, which was a department store, and then Diane 2. (It was Diane 2 because there was a Diane 1, that had just been a much smaller building so they closed it and opened a second one, and added a 2 to the name)

Diane 2 was a good 10 stories tall (I know, in the midwest we can't comprehend anything taller than 2 and a half stories, but really guys. Elevators. Escalators. They have a purpose outside of offices and hospitals.) There was a parking garage that had roughly the same amount of levels as the mall itself. At the top floor was a movie theater and an arcade. In the middle, running almost the full height of the mall, was a waterfall. Yeah. Be jealous, midwesterners. A waterfall with real water that fell into a pool at the bottom that had fish and fountains and stuff, on one side of which was the food court, and on the other side of which was a Tops. And what else was at the bottom? A bowling alley. Yeah. The place was great. Somewhere on one of the floor was a daidmond (Kind of like a mongolian grill place, except more chinese/thai), and a Pizza Company, and a Pizza Hut (The competition was great). Since the place was huge and full of stores it took hours to get through everything. But if you wanted other, slightly more expensive food choices, you went to Lee Garden.

Lee Garden was half a mall and half a 5 star luxury hotel. The top story was a (fairly pricey) restaurant where you could see the entire city. The mall half was, well, stores and stuff as typical of a mall, and also a large Mcdonalds, and a Swanson's ice cream. Yes. A restaurant just for ice cream. Really, really good quality ice cream in multiple flavors that you could get a million different ways. Would you like a sunday? Yes? Ok, how about one with a large scoop of chocolate brownie fudge ice cream and a large scoop of tiramisu ice cream covered in thick, warm fudge, chocolate sprinkles, and a cherry? Or maybe you'd like one with three scoops... Or a sunday bigger than your head? Yeah, they actually had one of those. I think it was called an earthquake and it came with 3 or 5 spoons so you could split it with friends because there was no way you were gonna eat the entire thing on your own.

The department store accross the street was only interesting to me and my brother because, well, we were under 13 and the top floor was dedicated to toys.

(Note; there was a bad bombing there last year. If you look up Lee Gardens Plaza you'll find pictures of smoke and stuff. I did leave that out... In order to park in any parking garage at either mall, they did sweep your car with a mirror and stuff because the frequent bomb attempts and actual bombings in the city)

Next to Lee Garden/Central was what we affetionately termed the brown market. We're pretty sure none of the things sold there were legal. It was just safer not to question anything. (If my dad went there alone and dressed in a button up, people would close shop. Once he started bringing my brother they realized he wasn't a federal investigator and they became good friends with him). We also called them the rabbit warrens. The area was probably about as extensive as the malls were, but they were all ground level and somewhat in the open.

Anywhere in the city there were good food options for under 5 american dollars. Think full meals. Rice meat and vegetables.

There was rarely nothing to do on a weekend.

Towards the end, when my brother and I were 9 and 11, respectively, we moved out of our neighborhood and townhouse and into an actual house. There had been some australian missionaries there but they were older and decided to move home, if I remember right. Their landlord liked renting to missionaries so much, we got the place next. That neighborhood, of course, also had a pool but its pool was bigger. We had a yard, and in that yard was a small water tower which my brother and I would climb... But that wasn't really the interesting thing. The interesting thing was up the street, on the highway.

About a two minute bike ride from us, there was an internet cafe.

Now, having never had internet access before this was kind of new, and it was before facebook. So we still had no contact with the outside world really. But we'd grown up with zoo tycoon and rollercoaster tycoon. And only 7 of the 40 computers in the place were for internet. The rest were purely for gaming.

And that is how I became a gamer.

Fighting had gotten pretty bad at home so my brother and I would spend all our free time up the street. Each computer had Half-Life, CounterStrike, Half-Life Opposing Force, Red Alert 2, Yuri's Revenge, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and Grand Theft Auto Vice City. There were a few other games too (Like some golf game) but we didn't pay those much attention. All the computers were in the same system, so imagine a lan game of halflife... With half the room playing. One map. 20 people. Guns and explosives and crowbars and wrenches. And as the only girl in a room full of male college students I learned very, very quickly how to be good at the game. (It was awesome. The larger games, a lot of times I would kill someone and you'd hear a group of guys a few computers down laughing at the guy who just got killed by the small foreign girl) Counterstrike, on the other hand, was not my game. Neither was Wolfenstein. The rest of them I was at least competent in (Though I still cant decide if I prefer red alert or yuri's revenge).

It was a small tragedy when we moved to Min Buri, which is a city in the province of Bangkok. But soon thereafter we found the 10 year anniversary edition of the command and conquer games, and dad had already gotten sick of the desktop pc and its viruses. The computer became our escape.

That city happened to have a mall, but it was 30 minutes away. There was also a safari 5 minutes away from us. But that wasn't the fun thing. The fun thing was getting to go into the actual city. The capitol of the nation; Bangkok.

Now, Bangkok is roughly the size of New York. Except where New York is tall and built upwards, Bangkok is shorter but very spread out. When you watch those movies where it's in the future and everything is just city and it keeps going on and on and on forever (Total Rekall, for instance), that's what traveling in Bangkok is like. Mom used to say it was like someone took a section of city about Kansas City sized, and cut and pasted it over and over and over again. And traffic is impenetrable, full of cars and pink taxis (Yea, pink. Pink and orange and blue and every other bright color under the sun. Two toned or one toned. Because just yellow is just boring).

For convenience sake, the malls are all connected by walkways above the roads. And there's a sky train system. Actually, there may also be a subway by now. When we left I know there was talk of one, but it's been a while...

My favorite mall was, thankfully, closer to min buri ( I think...) There was nothing too special about it... Arcade, movie theater, same as Fashion Island, the mall closet to us. But the roof wasn't a restaurant or a move theater.

The roof was a water park.

You like Oceans of Fun? Now imagine that, on the roof of a 15 story building, within the biggest city in the country.

Now do you understand what my problem with Kansas City is?

Where I live, now, there used to be a mall five minutes away. But due to crime and stuff that place got shut down, making the nearest mall 20 minutes away. That mall is two stories tall. It has a limited food court. Every store is pretty much the same thing. There is one very small arcade in it. The other mall is a half hour away and is pretty much the exact same thing, only a little bigger. There's a bowing alley somewhere around here I think, but everything in this country is so much more expensive. You can either eat somewhere and have a full, healthy meal that you actually like... Or you can go bowling. Or maybe go to a movie. Peachwave is great. I love peachwave. There are parks here, but each is small and heaven help you if you're there past dark. There are pools but you need a membership to go, and those pools all come with rules and regulations.

Everything here has so many rules and regulations...

Thats another difference. Over there, you could buy some food from a street vendor who was just him, his cart, and a hot metal plate. No special safety measures to keep the food good. No rules about sanitation. Food was food and you ate it. You didn't worry about how long has it been sitting out here in this unforgiving hot sun... You ate it, you liked it. Maybe you bought more.

And you didn't get sick, either.

What was it like growing up in a third world country? What was it like, not growing up in the land of the free?

Quite freeing, actually. Quite freeing indeed.


If you have any questions feel free to ask me and I'll fit them in. Next post on this subject will either be about the religious part, with the spirits and deliverance and all that, or about what it was like being between here and there, with no real home country.



~Silver