Riap Roy?

In the evenings, or dton yen I still eat dinner at my host family's house. This is for several reasons; number one- they were very concerned about me moving out and who would take care of me and my safety, so in the desire to not offend I agreed to still eat over there. (My house is practically in my backyard, so its rather convenient.) Initially I was still eating breakfast over there as well, but after two weeks of non-regular eating times, I told them that I want to eat breakfast at my house, so now its just dinner and the occasional lunch on the weekends. But back to why I still eat there; food is also a very important part of Thai culture, so much in fact that one common greeting you'll hear is gin kaao ru yaang” (tan kaao ru yaang in Issan)- basically, have you eaten yet or not? Understanding that, and my disposition to be antisocial, I decided that it would be really, really weird for me to sit in my house alone and eat. The third reason I still eat over there is somewhat of a two parter- first of all, I'm extremely lazy. I eat way more processed food then I want to, primarily because I usually wait until I'm nearly starving to feed myself. While my town has a market every day and several small shops, there's not really any place to buy frozen pizza (nor do I have a place to cook it either), or pierogs. Also, I can cook for myself in America, and part of experiencing another culture is eating their food. Part of the third reason is also that the food is delicious and much better then anything I would attempt to make. The final reason I like to still eat there is Gam. Gam is the baby at the host family's house and (other than my niece and nephew of course) is the cutest child alive.

Sunday when I was eating over there, my host mother- Maa Dtuu- told me that I should come home from work at 4, change my clothes and go with her to do something for two hours. I wasn't quite sure what that something was, but I could tell it involved some sort of physical activity- I thought maybe dancing. The next day (Monday) on my way to work I noticed that my community had a new exercise “court”. This is actually a fairly common thing in Thailand and it basically an outdoor gym, Thai style. By which I mean, it has several fairly odd pieces of exercise equipment. In a flash of insight, I realized that's probably what Maa Dtuu was indicating with her gesticulations. At five, when I finally got out of work (not because I was busy, but because I was waiting for someone to finish working on some questions I had asked) I started to bike home to change and saw my friend Joy. She was buy the exercise equipment and wanted me to stop and aerobic dance (arabic deten in Thai) with her. I indicated that I needed to change my clothes and she said she would wait for me. Back at home, I changed my clothes and then went to my host family's house to tell Maa Dtuu I was ready, the whole time hoping I was right about the exercise equipment and that I wouldn't have to completely blow Joy off. She was indeed still waiting when we got back, and Maa Dtuu graciously agreed to dance before we went to “work out”. Our later work out session basically consisted of Maa Dtuu walking around telling me which equipment to try out. I really have no idea what the hell we would have done if I actually left work at four, because I think we were only there for about 40 minutes. Which some what speaks to the elusive nature of time in Thailand, but that's too much to get into here. The important part of this section of the story is seeing my gay friend, Gon (or Sarah).

Gon works at the hospital in my town, and from the very first time I met him, way back during my site visit I had him pegged. Not that its that hard. Most Thai men are some what effeminate, but the gay ones are flaming. I think this is mostly due to the fact that Thailand is very open to transgendered and transexual people. The flip side to this, however, is that if you are homosexual its pretty much assumed that you want to be (or consider yourself) to be the opposite gender. Gon and I are fairly close, about as close as am to anyone at this point, primarily because we were on the same arabic deten team during the town's annual arabic deten competition. But I also hung out with him during Song Kran (Thai New Year) and introduced him to my friend Phil when he came to visit. Plus, I came out to him, so we've got that going. Anyway, before Maa Dtuu and I finished our “work out” Gon told me I should come to the hospital the next day at five thirty am, to do something. At least I was pretty sure he said I should come, some times its really hard to tell what he means, because even though he speaks English, its kinda similar to talking through Google translate. I asked him three times, just to be clear, if he meant I should come at five thirty, and he said yes. I probably should have tried to get a bit more clarification on why he wanted me to come.

You have to understand that my clothing always causes me a fair amount of anxiety, both back in America and even more so here. In America this is primarily because I don't really know how to dress myself and often times the things I put on either make me look like a boy, or just really weird. Often I don't really care, but there are those times that I have a horrible outfit-related disaster so bad I can tell people are staring at me because of it. Over the years, through all the head-shaving, weird clothes wearing and general inability to follow cultural norms, I've developed a fairly thick skin when it comes to being stared at. Not that it doesn't bother or irritate me, just that I can shake it off fairly well- which is good, cause being the only white female in a small town in Thailand gets ya stared at all the time. Here in Thailand, the issue isn't so much not matching, or looking weird, as most people here dress worse than me; but rather whether or not I'm riap roy. Riap roy is a Thai concept that is fluid and encompasses a lot but usually is used to indicate appropriate behavior and dress (its also used to indicate readiness to do something, and probably a couple other things I still haven't figured out yet). Peace Corps pretty much drilled riap roy-ness into our heads and (somewhat over-) emphasized the amount of importance Thai people place on appearance. Thai people (or at least my people) also are really into uniforms and everyone wearing the same thing- or at least color. In fact, each day has a color, and on my first day of work I got the talk about which color to wear which day. Since I generally only understand about 30% of what is being said (or done), I'm often concerned that I'm going to wear the wrong thing- except to the office, on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday; then I just slap on the appropriately colored polio and head on my merry way. Monday and Thursday is a bit more tricky because Monday is uniform day (and I don't have one) and Thursday is “free-style” day. I've already had one incident where I wore an all white outfit (including a skirt!) to a tree planting event. This was during Visakha Bucha Day, and I had been told to wear all white to the thing I was going to later that day, so I figured I needed to wear white to whatever it was I was going to in the morning. The problem was, I didn't really know what I was going to, and my host father is notoriously bad at explaining what the hell he wants me to do. But back to the five thirty hospital visit. If I had thought about it a bit longer, or maybe the night before, I probably would have worn work-clothes, but for some reason I decided I needed to be riap roy, and wore my Tuesday work outfit (pink shirt, black pants). Well, when I got to the hospital, it turned out that it was actually their tri-monthly morning work-out day. Whoops. Since I had no desire to run, nor was I dressed appropriately for it I just sat around and hung out with Gon. During this hanging out, I was also told to eat some of the soup they had ready for the runners (its hard- actually nearly impossible- to go anywhere in Thailand with out being fed, or at the least, offered food). Since it smelled extremely good, I had some, even though there were large chunks of meat and congealed blood in it. Luckily Gon loves the meat and I just gave him the pieces I picked out. After all the runners got back, people started to leave, so I left too. On the way home, I realized how nice it was at six in the morning, and that getting up and going for a bike ride each morning would probably be a good idea.