Monday, June 30: Send email to Asavanant for appointment Thursday. Might as well bite the bullet now for a crown, while I still have insurance.

Today we go To Loie. We leave Pattaya at 3:00 PM by motorcycle taxi, and then take a bus to Mor Chit in Bangkok (B90). We arrive at Mor Chit at 6:30 PM and book a 7:00 bus. I ask Fon if there is a better bus and she says “no”. However, while I’m waiting for her to return with the tickets (B320 each), I notice a signboard that indicates that, not only are there about 20 busses going to Loie (not 2 like Fon said), one of them is a VIP bus, which is an ex-press! Now, it might not be so bad taking a local, which stops at every dinky little village along the way (about 380 miles) if it is daytime and you want to do some sightseeing, but not at night when you want to sleep! Fon points out that the VIP bus leaves at 10PM- I point out that it leaves at 9 PM and probably gets in earlier than the local. Ok Ok. Fon assures me that the accommodations on the VIP bus are the same as the bus we are taking, the only difference being the number of stops. She also points out that the VIP bus costs an addi-tional B175 (about $4.50 USD). I’ll tell you now, by the end of the trip, I would have gladly paid much more for a better ride.

I give Fon B100 and tell her to get some junk food for the trip. I already have 3 large bot-tle of water and three cans of Lipton Iced Tea. She returns with 3 sliced farang fruit, doused with ground chili and salt. Not my old idea of junk food, but it probably qualifies in a Thai kind of way. We also have a large container of garlic-fried chicken fillets that Fon made the night before. The garlic will prove to be a valuable and powerful weapon, for rea-sons that will become clear later. The bus arrives. It is, of course, NOT the same as a VIP bus, one of which happens to be sitting right next to us, as if to rub salt in my wounds. Our bus is smaller and dumpier looking. Prediction 1: the VCR/TV programming will suck. Predic-tion 2: the toilet will prove to be inferior. Prediction 3: Any guesses on my music prediction (Hint: the bus is going to northeastern Thailand.)??

We board the bus and settle in. In the seat in front of me is one of the largest Thai men I have ever seen. He sits down and his seat immediately reclines, so far that his head is al-most in my lap and he is actually underneath MY lights and air vents! I am not sure if he in-tentionally reclined the seat or if the seat simply collapsed under his weight when he sat down, because the seat NEVER WENT BACK UP during the 9 hours that followed, even when he was sitting upright. Plus, his seat squeaked, creaked, groaned and otherwise complained under his bulk, making the most horribly annoying sound for the remainder of the journey. That sound in my ears was like a tiny pebble in your shoe. At first, you don’t even notice it, but, given enough time, you want to CUT YOUR DAMN FOOT OFF!

So far, we haven’t left the bus terminal, I’ve not even made it to my predictions and already the ride sucks. It doesn’t get any better.

Right after we leave, the video starts. It is a badly edited tape of a Thai concert, a singer named Mai Thai, who Fon tells me is very popular. It is, of course, all Isaan music. The music is only about 25% of the show, however. The rest is a running comedy act, featuring a bi-zarre cast, including some squeaky voiced Thai (sound like a bad version of early Jerry Lewis), some fat ladyboy pretender, an overdressed, over-make-up’ed, overweight woman with way too much hair, a short guy with a shaved head and an assortment of other charac-ters. I could understand one word out of every 500 or so, but, mai bpen rai, I have a multi-lingual Thai girlfriend who can translate for me. WRONG! She and the rest of the bus are so busy laughing that I can’t get her to speak. How funny was it? This funny: I eventually offer her some of the farang fruit/chili/salt mix. She declines, saying, “Not want spicy to come out nose”. I survived, helped by liberal doses of the aforementioned garlic-fried chicken.

After about 90 minutes, both the video and the chicken were gone, just in time to pull into a food market for a free meal- it comes with the ticket. “Why you not tell me?”, I ask. Shrugs. Of course, I have no appetite now. We disembark and get 2 plates of food- Fon is ravenous. If I could remember where this food stall was located, I would advise you to eat there before flying again. The food will make all airline fare taste like gourmet offering. Fortunately, I was full.

Everybody boards the bus again and off we go. Time to use the mobile toilet. Predictions 1 and 3 were accurate, what do you think about prediction #2? Nope. Wrong. The toilet was worse than that. The light was broken, the door wouldn’t stay closed, which had made eve-rybody’s aim remarkably inaccurate, leading to the worst stench you can imagine. My aim was no better.

Well, at least I can sleep- a 9-hour ride, middle of the night, already a long day. Wrong again. Remember, this is a local bus. We stop everywhere and each time, the lights and some DAMN ISSAN MUSIC come on full blast! This, combined with the squeaking from the seat in front of me, makes me crazy. Then, suddenly, with no control on my part, the aforemen-tioned powerful and valuable weapon is unleashed on the sleeping bus, spreading as an invisi-ble, yet deadly, odiferous cloud of intestinally modified garlic gas.

Tuesday, July 1: Arrived at Loie this AM at 04:00 (dtii siip). We take a tuk-tuk to the ho-tel (B60) and check-in to a small room, the Phu Lauang Hotel (B560/night). We then go to the market, which is booming. There, we see many of Fon’s friends, all checking out her fa-rang “husband”. We buy a bunch of food and put it in the back of the pickup of the “lady who sell food”, who lives 2 houses away from Fon in the village. We go back to the hotel and sleep until about 9:30. Showers, shave, no breakfast. We walk through Loie proper, where we see one of Fon’s friends at a drink shop and then head to a shop where I rent a Suzuki Smash (110 cc.) for B150/day for 2 days. We then drive the hour or so to Fon’s house, hit-ting some drenching rain along the way.

Fon’s house: many ladies come over and make Krathong kind of thing. I give Fon B8000 to buy cement (50 bags @ B100/each) and block (600 @ B3/each). I take many photos of her house. It’s not bad, really- 3 walls and roof finished, framing done for nice front door, hong noon blocked out. We get her stepbrother to drive us in his big truck to the cement com-pany; we go to food market and buy a lot of food, like 6 fish, 3 chickens (head, feet and all). I get the idea that there will be some kind huge celebration with the farang as focus. Fon mentions buying some whiskey- I ask how many people (she doesn’t know) and I tell her that I don’t want to buy whiskey. I figure I’ll go 1 liter for every 10 hardcore drinkers. That works out to about 4 drinks each. Should be plenty, in my book. As it is, I’ve already donated ½ liter of Cuervo Gold.

Turns out ladies are making “pakwan”, which Fon says is always made for weddings!! Ack!!

I meet Fon’s: father, mother, daughter (Angerie), grandson (Fame), stepbrother, and 2 of 3 brothers, aunt, and cousin.

OK- looks like this is going to be one of those village parties that I read about. There are about 40 people at the house. Suddenly, Fon tells me to sit by the pakwan. I come over, a string is wrapped around an old guy with a special scarf, then over my hands, then Fon’s hands, then her father’s and mother’s hands. Fon folds her hands like she’s praying and tells me to do the same. The old guy starts a chanting prayer for about 20 minutes. After that, he opens a hard-boiled egg and Fon and I eat the egg with bits of khaow nieow (sticky rice). We are then splashed with khaow lao (rice liquor, basically moonshine made from rice). Af-ter splashing is with the ‘shine for about 5 minutes, we are offered the glass to drink. I wet my lips, but don’t drink any, much to the amusement of the crowd. Apparently, Fon has to down anything that I don’t drink. She downs the glass, again, much to the crowd’s amuse-ment.

After this, the crowd gathers around us. We are each given a metallic pillow, blue for me and silver for Fon. Each person in the crowd takes turns tying a piece of string around Fon’s wrist and another piece around mine. Most people rub it gently on our wrists, then give the knot a little rub when finished. One woman actually slips some money in my pocket. We obvi-ously end up with quite a pile of string on each wrist. People seem to have genuine and deep concern, care and well wishes, with wonderful smiles.

After the string thing, food is put out. Mostly the women are clustered in the living room and the men are on the front porch and the kitchen. Everybody sits on the floor. I think there is only 1 chair in Fon’s parents’ whole house. Here is a pile of food. The women tend to drink orange soda and Coke, while the men drink Mekong whiskey (actually a type of rum, but really rotgut- only B75/liter- that’s only $1.85 for a large bottle of booze! Nobody gets smashed and I continue to decline all offers of whiskey (mai gin lao, mai chorp = I don’t drink alcohol, I don’t like it). People continue to come and go for several hours, all doing the string thing.

I take many digital photos and display them on the family’s TV set, to howls of laughter from the women. I wish I had had the presence of mind to get my video camera running at the start of the ceremony. I think this will be a once-in-a-lifetime event for me. Fon tells me that only Pen, her girlfriend from this village, has had the same ceremony.

We head home about 10 PM. It has been raining off and on, but we seem to be having an off spell. We get home safely and decide to sleep early.