Loud live music sung in Thai or English or something else I can't understand. The singers change with the songs, ranging from hip hop to metal and rock to pop. It's the only hoppin' place I've seen in this one horse town. There are even transvestites here!
Nights usually begin or end at Koon's bar. Lots of expats and some locals go to this fine establishment. The booze is cheap and the place stays open later than the 1 am curfew followed by all the other watering holes in town.
Days are filled with volunteerism, and the nights are filled with hedonism. Here we are singing at Lucky Music Place, where they have a stage, a mirrorball, an empty dance floor, and almost no patrons...a perfect setting for humiliating yourself in front of your friends. Intoxication required.
This time for a dog bite. There are stray and not-so-stray dogs roaming around Mae Sot, especially at night. Jenny got chased while riding her bike (a booze-run to 7-11) by two vicious hounds, one of whom nicked her leg.
We went to the ER for the rabies vaccine. Tetanus toxoid (I don't know why), amoxicillin, Tylenol, and the rabies series costs 2132 BHT (about $55); compare that to the $1000 it would cost for the vaccine in the States.
It was a Friday night at the ER at 11 pm and the were two other patients there. We didn't have to wait. It took longer to register than to receive the care. The hospital was really clean, but still about the same as the one in Krabi.
A random meal in Mae Sot. We were cruising by on my motorbike looking for a place to eat. There were a lot of Thai people eating in an open restaurant and decided to stop to check it out.
We got three plates of meat (chicken and pork and what?), some hot dog, fish paste stuff, green noodles, vermiccilli noodles, some vegetables to dunk in the hot water, fake crab meat, and a couple bowls of chili dipping sauce. We declined the sliced liver and squid. It was 69 BHT a person, less than $2.
We are nearing the rainy season here in Mae Sot, and with it comes
great wind and clouds in the afternoon and spectacular skies in the
evening.
From left to right they are: Jenny (medical student from the UK), Shaun (Australian university student teaching English), Russell (a professional English teacher from the UK), and Alexa (starting law school in the fall and teaching English from the States). I am about twenty years older than the oldest of them.
Mae Pa is a community not far from Mae Sot. It's basically a village rather than a city. A lot of Burmese, with and without work permits, live there. It is much better than living as a registered refugee in one of the refugee camps in the area. The Burmese without work permits are technically here illegally. Once in a while there is a crack down, as there was last week, when secret police were skulking around the volunteer offices, following volunteers around to see where they would go.
There is one school for unregistered Burmese kids in this area. They have about 120 students during the school year. The white stuff on their face is "thanaka", made from grinding a piece of wood from a particular tree into water and making a paste. Sunscreen, makeup, or tradition...it's all of the above. Only women wear it.
There is a great roti stand across the street from this place. There are Buddhist temples in town as well as a few churches.
This is an example of one of the six clinic rooms in the Outpatient Department (OPD). Ah-Mang is from Burma and has a prosthetic right leg from a bullet from the Burmese Army. He is one of the amazing medics at the Mae Tao Clinic (MTC). After 18 months of training and about 14 years of practice as a "medic", he is the closest they have to a physician. He reads the Merck Manual in his spare time. Oh, yeah, that's me in my Thai clothes. The fisherman pants are great and baggy and the top is nice and light. And yes, I've got a few whiskers on my chin.
Monday mornings are crazy. The waiting room in the outpatient department is like a crazy bus terminal with dogs sleeping under the benches, Buddhist monks in their robes, crying babies, and everyone drinks water out of one cup. Awesome.
As you can see, it's a secure border. There is no way to walk across the Moei River here or anywhere else.
The official name is "The Thai-Burmese Friendship Bridge" or something like that. I've been running to the border and back again at night for exercise. It takes about an hour. No, I haven't been going alone, but it's quite safe and quiet.
That silver beast is my bike! And that crowded area in the distance is the registration area. Mae Tao Clinic is a free clinic surviving on donations. It turns out that it is a sort of safe haven for unregistered Burmese. The patients come from across the border or live in the surrounding area working in sweat shops (14-hour days, 2 days off a month) so they can send money back to Burma. I've seen a lot of bizarre cases, including what I think was scleroderma. There are a lot of new diagnoses of liver failure, cancer, nephrotic syndrome, malaria, TB, parasites, and stress that I see in clinic. The wildest case was scleroderma. This is pretty amazing considering my only tests are a urine dip stick, a glucometer, a malaria prep, and hemoglobin.
This is my crash pad for a couple months. I am surrounded by mango trees and birds in the morning. It is a good place to be.
This is supposed to go all the way to Istanbul, if you were allowed to cross through Myanmar by land.
