Large baby

Amomg the Thais we encountered on a day-long excursion to Lopburi, an old Thai capital, the center of attention was Maxim, an eight-month-old boy, who was very large and very white. He was the son of Kevin, the American nephew of Perry Smith, the friend of Simon and Poe who arranged this outing. Perry is a retired official of World Vision, the Christian NGO (Perry is Buddhist), and lives in Thailand, India and London. Kevin, who lives in Malaysia and has done real estate, is married to Dafy, a young Bulgarian. When I met Maxim, I thought Kevin said Maxine, and I said, "Wow, she is enormous." Kevin and Dafy laughed and said, no, it is a boy named Maxim. Thais value light skin---Isaan people from the north are looked down on and Cambodians might as well be Bushmen of the Kalahari---so there was much ooo-ing and ah-ing over large, pale Maxim on the steets of Lopburi. In the market all the women wanted to hold him. This made Dafy nervous, as did the frogs in a bucket in the meat market. She was afraid Maxim might catch something from them and told Kevin, "I hate them! I hate them!"

Dafy was also nervous about the monkeys hissing and cavorting on the power lines overhead, and not without reason. The town is teeming with a kind of macaque, and sometimes these creatures swoop down and grab food or even cell phones from passers-by. The townspeople have come to revere the monkeys despite their unmannerliness. They are believed to be offspring of the Hindu god Kali. They are also a big tourist attraction and have brought prosperity to Lopburi. So once a year the monkeys are guests at a feast put on just for them. Their favorite foods are cucumbers and boiled eggs. We did spot evidence of ambivalence toward the monkeys. The guard at one Khmer ruin that draws tourists was carrying a slingshot.

Inside the modest palace compound of King Narai was the room where he met foreign envoys. Siam's first substantial contacts with Europe were in the seventeenth century, and we stood in the simple stone room where the king met emmisaries from the French court. (The Thai term for foreigner, farang, originally meant French person.) Court protocol required the French envoy to hold his letter up to the king on his high platform, but the Frenchman bent over, deliberately making the king reach down. The king at that moment maybe got an inkling of what life with the Europeans was going to be like. There's an engraving showing this historic event.

Also in our entourage was Dick Sandler, an American who originally studied Thailand and the Thai language at Yale and has lived here for forty years. He runs two resorts in the South. Standing in a palace annex built by King Mongkut, the beloved ninteenth century founder of modern Thailand, Dick made a crack about Mongkut and his doing the polka in The King and I. I was surprised and mentioned how so many Thais I knew resented their great king having been turned into an adorable buffoon in this tuneful farang entertainment. Dick said the Thais don't like The King and I because they prefer their own myths about Mongkut. He said they are great myth-makers about their history. I guess this is something the Thais have in common with Americans.

Another American in our party (Poe had hired a large van and driver for the day) was Bob Feingold. Bob lives in a small town in Malaysia. He went there from Connecticut in the late sixties as a Peace Corps volunteer, then lived and worked in Kuala Lumpur and is now back in his original Peace Corps town. Joe and I have run into or heard about similar stories in this part of the world. Fond as many of us are of Ethiopia, I've never heard of any Peace Corps people going back there to live. Of course, part of the attraction here is that Thailand was a lot more hospitable to gay men than was East Jesus, USA in 1966.

Today is Sunday, and tomorrow we go by bus to seaside Hua Hin for five days. It's another vacation from our vacation.