day 3 - world war two day

today was topsy turvy - the bits that i most liked were the bits of the itinerary i really hadn't been excited about at _all_, and vice versa.
started off with drive drive drive in minivan out to the countryside where we went to a "coconut sugar farm" (it's in quotation marks because it's not ACTUALLY a farm, it's ACTUALLY a massive thinly-disguised souvenir-stall. they have a thirty-second demonstration of how to extract sugar from coconut palm trees, and when you ask them where the actual farm is, they say, oh, it's right here! and gesture at the souvenir stalls). then out to a teak wood carving place, where they make all the traditional teakwood furniture carved with little heffalumps and things. that bit was cool: we got to wander around and look at the artists chiseling away making these intricate carvings, some of which were beautiful and some of which were schlock, but even the schlocky ones clearly required a high degree of skill and attention to detail. it reminded me very much of when i was in india with david, and we went out to the sand dunes waaaaaaaaaaay outside of jaisalmer in the western desert of rajasthan, so pretty much officially BFE (or BFI, i spose it would be in this case) and the sand dunes at sunset are a big photo-op spot for indian weddings and whatever the indian version of prom or quinceaneras is, so there are all these indian girls in their snazziest saris lying on the sand dunes with their sari ends fluttering out behind them in the breeze with spectacular orange sunset colours behind them, getting their photos taken, and the photographers are all clearly trying really hard to not let any of the little snack/souvenir stalls into the frames of the photographs, so the photos look as if they were taken out in the desert in the middle of nowhere. but the joke, as david pointed out, is that it IS the desert in the middle of nowhere, even though there are snack/souvenir stalls... anyway. it was sort of the same thing today at this teakwood carving place - you drive for ages through green lush jungle to get there, and then you walk down a little path and get to a bamboo-hut type building where men and women sitting on tree stumps are hunched over their hand-carvings with their ancient chisel sets and you think wow this is the real thing, man. and then you turn around, and there's this gleaming air-conditioned "furniture show room" where you can buy all their stuff with visa, mastercard, or amex and you feel disappointed, as if somehow it makes it less real, but you're STILL in the jungle in thailand and the teakwood stuff really is all handcarved by the people sitting there doing it, but it detracts from the sense that you discovered something that noone else knew about.
after that we went to the ratchaburi floating market - the way there was very pretty: we hopped into the motor-gondola thingies and went a maze of green canals lined with more little houses and trees and sugar cane fields and loveliness - but the floating market itself was a bit overwhelming, to be honest. the floating bits of it are great: little old ladies with their gondolas packed full of fruits and veggies and mystery snacks, and they have a long hook with a basket on it and if you buy something they hold out the basket for you to put money into, and then they pass you whatever you bought in the basket (i bought some mystery snack wrapped in banana leaves and a mango). the non-floating part of it was, once again, depressingly, a large-scale opportunity to buy t-shirts, candles, chopstick sets, green plastic buddhas, carved wooden erotic dancers (there's this whole priscilla-queen-of-the-desert thing (i hesitate to call it a tradition) of female erotic dancers shooting pingpong balls out of their fannies here, and you can buy your very own carved wooden, er, testament to this skill, should you need one. i'm glad that's what we're spending our old-growth forests on). i ended up sitting on the end of the pier trying to draw a picture of some flower pots and a little shrine thingy on the opposite bank, and while i failed to produce any great, or even good, or even mediocre :) works of art, i did have a revelation about public sketching: it's a really nice thing to do when travelling in the developing world when you are feeling bitter about being nothing more than a walking wallet, because you attract positive attention for something that has nothing to do with your ability to provide an income for people. a couple of the boat people came and sat and watched me and clearly got a big kick out of the whole thing.
oh god, this blog entry is getting long, too, and i haven't even gotten to the afternoon and i'm getting soooo sleeeepy.
so, very quickly: afternoon was dedicated to bridge over the river kwai and the allied experience in thailand during WWII, and this was the bit that i was not excited about before we did it but which i found hugely tremendously moving and am SO GLAD we did. we started off at a little museum in chanthanaburi, on the river kwai, which was set up in 1970-something by a japanese ex-WWII-officer who had worked in the POW camps and who was about to become a Buddhist monk and who wanted to try and reconcile his wartime experience and his conscience as best he could. it's a replica of one of the POW huts, and it's just yellowing newspaper clippings, photographs with erratically-spelt english captions, and paintings/sketches done by the prisoners, and while i don't think it told the complete story by a long shot, it moved me very much. the bit that just tore me to pieces was an article about a group of japanese ex-soldiers and allied ex-prisoners who travelled there for a meeting of reconciliation in the 1970's, and they met face to face thirty years after the war at this place which had been the scene of a total holocaust. i can't even imagine what that would have been like. i am going to rent the movie of the bridge over the river kwai when i get home and do a bit more reading about it. we also went to the war cemetery for the allied dead, and it was so SAD, to see the gravestones of all these men and boys who had died there so young. the epitaphs on the gravestones were an unintentionally bittersweet indication of british class distinctions persisting even after death: they are all standard issue army gravestones, with rank, name, date of death, age at death and insignia of the regiment they belonged to, but the families were obviously given a blank spot at the bottom if they wanted to add a little something. there is everything from the dignified latin tag for the uppercrusties, down to rhyming-but-not-quite-scanning couplets for the more humble: 'with angels you will rest, you always were the very best. with us always, love from mam, doreen, bert and the boys.' anyway. hard not to get teary reading through all of them. if i die and end up with an inscribed gravestone, i definitely want to go pleb, however - so much more room for creativity and personality in the inscriptions.
then back to hotel (which is, once again, unexpectedly posh and resort-y: bags waiting for us in rooms when we got there, pool complex complete with swim-up bar, king-size bed with king-size TV, etc. i am sitting on the poofy sofa in the lobby now, listening to an ongoing karaoke disaster from the bar downstairs.) i do not feel quite at ease in hotels like this: i do want things to be clean and comfortable, but it feels too much like a ramada inn that's putting some sort of cutesy thailand-themed advertising promotion for the week. is that fair? i dunno, but i am now so tired i can't actually think about it and am going to run back to my room, dodging any mosquitoes, and collapse into the bed that is big enough to sleep about six people. i will have to sleep diagonally :).
good night to all!