Christmas in Nong Khai: Part Two: Merry Christmas from a Thailand Tesco

December 25, 2014

Christmas morning in Thailand, and my good friend Robin very thoughtfully presented me with my absolute dream Christmas gift. He got me exactly what I wanted, it was the perfect present for me. No, no, not Dea, but almost as good. It was a bright orange t-shirt. A very bright one, with a picture of a bicycle on it. I was extremely very happy.

Then we set off on our bicycles for a Christmas adventure. We'd had a look at our map of Nong Khai and decided to explore a couple of the sights that were a little further afield. First up was a park that looked, at least on the map, like it would be a delightful place filled with laughter and joy on this special morning. We cycled along the riverfront to get there, and then briefly explored a Wat, before we arrived at the park. It wasn't at all what we'd expected. There weren't any children laughing and playing, no people at all in fact. The grass was untrimmed and yellowing in the sun, and the big lakes were still and lifeless, no birds swam here. The park was quite big and we cycled around it for a while until we came to a children's playground of rusting equipment. Still there was not a soul in sight. It felt like we were in one of those movies where zombies had killed everyone, and we were the last people alive. On the plus side, there was no queue for the slide!

"WEEEEE!!!!!!!!!"The slide was slippy concrete, very steep and very fast. It was super fun. Robin wanted to go down it on his bike.I talked him out of it.

Next we returned to the land of the living, and located all of the people at the big shopping mall around the large Tesco supermarket. Now Tesco is a British supermarket that, apart from a few small stores in Eastern Europe, I had never seen outside of Britain before. But in Thailand it seemed to have quite a grip on the nation, with these 'Tesco Lotus' stores everywhere. This one was a huge store, just exactly like the ones back home, except that everything was green. Robin and I explored and made purchases and posed with three Santas and weren't sure which was the real one. It was a strange experience, the first time I'd ever been to Tesco on Christmas Day, and also odd that this Buddhist country so readily accepted a Christian holiday in a British supermarket simply because the word 'Lotus' had been added to its name. But Thailand seemed like a country very willing to embrace the western way of life.

Robin shopping in Tesco. Just like in England, but more green!

It was a good job Robin didn't wear orange today, or we wouldn't have been able to identify anyone

After returning our haul to the guesthouse we wasted no time in springing forth on further adventures, this time heading southeast towards a sculpture park just outside of town. As if concrete slides and Tesco hadn't already made Christmas special enough, this sculpture park brought us to new heights of amazement. The sculptures were huge and numerous, and incredibly interesting. Built in 1978 by someone who thought all religions should learn from one another, it was a mixture of mostly Buddhist and Hindu influences, and included such wonders as giant seven-headed snakes and dogs with big erections:

This elephant surrounded by dogs was by far the highlight

This dog was way too happy to see that elephant

Lots of crazy and cool stuff at this sculpture park

There is a Robin in this picture, see if you can 'Spot the Robin!'

After all this excitement it was evening when we returned to the guesthouse and it was time for another Christmas dinner. The woman from the guesthouse told us that an Englishman that owned a bar just down the road was offering free food this evening to mark the festivities and all we had to do was buy a drink and we could eat all we wanted. This sounded like a mistake on his part, and us two hungry cyclists made our way there, determined to put him out of business.

Robin and I headed straight for the buffet, which had a surprising lack of Christmas food. It was also not at all vegetarian-friendly and all I came back with for my Christmas dinner was a plate of watermelon slices. It wasn't the best Christmas dinner ever, and when I realised that the Sprite I'd ordered cost two and a half times the normal price I angrily returned to the buffet table where I skimmed the mashed potato off the top of the cottage pie in a desperate attempt to at least break even.

I was at least consoled by the fact that there was another pool table here, and one with large pockets that would make us both look good too, but before indulging in another game we took seats at a table with a couple of Americans. The whole bar, in fact, was filled with ex-pats, almost all old men. Since arriving in Nong Khai I had seen a great many of these men, clearly most of them had married Thai women and now lived in this country. I'd also watched a documentary about the whole thing; Thai women going to Bangkok or Pattaya to prostitute themselves with the goal of finding a foreign husband, others looking for one online. The implication from the documentary was that having a foreign husband brought great respect to the girl and her family, as well as the obvious financial benefits. Presumably the man would also be happy to live with a beautiful wife in a beautiful country and so, at least from the documentary, it looked like it had the potential to be a win-win situation.

But obviously there were downsides too. The drunk American from the previous evening was once again present among us and shouted another slurred hello to us, which we did our best to ignore. In fact the last night he had shouted something about 'the best brothel in Pattaya' across the bar to another ex-pat, 'where the girls do this, and the girls do that', all of which seemed a little rude to be shouting about in front of his wife, who nevertheless sat there smiling politely, and we'd decided we'd rather not have anything more to do with him. And as for the Danish man that owned the Danish bakery that I'd seen on the riverfront, we had seen him several times staggering drunkenly around town shouting his head off too. Funnily enough, there had never been any sign of any Danish bread in the Danish bakery.

But the two old gents that we sat with now were very much more friendly, and sober, and so we made conversation with them for a while. I spoke with a 70-year-old retired lawyer from New York, who, though extremely friendly, described his current situation as a 'marriage of convenience.' It was his third marriage in fact, and he had several children and grandchildren back home. He told me he thought sometimes about going back, but it was too much effort now, and he was settled here in his marriage of convenience. But there was no sign of his third wife this Christmas evening; like almost all of the other ex-pats, he had come to the bar alone. On the other side of the table I caught some of the conversation where Robin, who hadn't quite grasped the situation, was asking an 80-year-old man how long he had been traveling. "I'm not traveling, boy! I live here!"

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