The Bus Ride

29/30 Oct. 2009
After three weeks, my certification class is over and I'm moving to Ayutthaya to begin my job. There are several of us that have been placed within the Ayutthaya region (about an hour outside of Bangkok), and four of us opted to take the overnight bus from Chiang Mai to Ayutthaya. Thai buses are definitely not made for Westerners, but it wasn't crowded so we were at least able to take two seats each. Karl and I watched Boondock Saints on his laptop, popped a couple of Ambien, and would have passed out for the next eight hours had not a few things happened. The first was that I had to use the bathroom, which was downstairs. There was a group of four French people behind us, one of whom left his shit in the middle of the aisle. I was walking back to my seat when I tripped over this. I tried to grab one of the seats to steady myself, but instead grabbed the head of a sleeping Frenchwoman, who screamed bloody murder when I grabbed her head. I tried explaining in English, but the Ambien made me slur all my words together, plus she didn't speak any English (or probably Thai for that matter...fucking French). I eventually gave up and went back to sleep.

A little while later, I was again awakened when we stopped at a night market to get food. I wandered down to the store to buy some chips and spent at least five minutes trying to figure out what I wanted. Even though the chips are made by Lay's, they are not like what we are used to. In Thailand they apparently want their chips to taste like full meals, so you get flavors like spicy chili squid, pork spareribs, and Vietnamese seafood. I opted for the ham-and-swiss-sandwich flavor and got back onto the bus. As I was scarfing down the chips, an interesting thing happened: I decided to go spelunking into the chip bag.

If you've never experienced Ambien let me tell you a little about it. Ambien is a prescription sleeping pill that is much, much stronger than Valium. I told Karl, "Ambien is going to knock you out for eight hours, if for some reason it doesn't, shit gets weird." This is how I found myself spelunking in the chip bag (I was looking for Gandhi so I could get a blessing from him). I'm pretty sure that I didn't actually try to fit my head in it, but I don't want to testify to it under oath. During our stop, Karl and I had a 10 min. conversation that consisted of 3 words (I'm not exaggerating) and a lot of grunts. Fortunately, after half an hour of this, the bus left and we were able to go back to sleep.

The bus arrived in Ayutthaya at 4:30, and Tom, who's been to Ayutthaya before, told Karl and I to go to Tony's Place, a local guesthouse where all the phrang hang out. It was closed and the lights were turned off, but they left the door open to the lounge so we went in, grabbed a couple of sofa's, and sat down. One of the Thai's who worked there woke up and came over to us. I tried to explain the situation in broken, Ambien-affected Thai, but he just took me upstairs, pointed me to a hammock, and went back to sleep, and that is why I love this country.

The next morning, one of my placement company employees took me to my apartment and got me settled in. The apartment itself is pretty nice, but basic. Bed, desk, two chairs, balcony, shower, toilet. The apartments are across the street from the bus station and two blocks from downtown. Ayutthaya itself is about 81,000 people and seems like a really cool place. All of the Americans and English swear it's the best city in Thailand, and it seems like a really chill place. Life is good.