Last weekend I visited my friend Spencer, a teacher at the other American School of Bangkok campus. He lives on the outskirts of Bangkok in a giant condominium complex, complete with an Olympic sized pool, bars, a hair salon, and guards who click their heels and salute at you as you drive past. The condo complex overlooks a small lake, with small communities of thai shacks clustered along the edges. Spencer and I went out exploring these communities. Many were built up above the water on stilts, pieced together with aluminum or pieces of wood. A few little bungalows tucked in. You could look right in and see mothers taking a shower and husbands preparing food. In each community there were little stores, little food vending booths. Men sat along the concrete walkways, fishing with lines attached to sticks in the murky water. Bottles floating, plastic floating, green or grey looking water. We walked through some of the communities and the people were all very nice, most knew a few words of English, and most warned us about giant cobras lurking in the grasses just down the way.

So we went just down the way, but didn’t see any. We found old women fishing on the side of the lake. They wore ski masks to keep the sun off their faces and giant hats. They think that the lighter their skin is the more beautiful they are. Many face lotions here have whitening agents in them. Dark skin is a sign of poverty – outdoor manual labor. The women were catching tiny fish, 4 or 5 inches long, and keeping them for supper. We ran into other people fishing, a whole group of them in the water, in an area that was netted off, with really big fish trying to jump out of the nets. They were swimming around pulling out the logs from inside the giant nets, I couldn’t really figure out what they were doing. They were all very friendly, but eyeing us like we didn’t really belong there. There were so many people fishing in that little lake that I don’t know how it isn’t over fished, especially with all their houses built right over the lake and no central plumbing.

We also talked to a group of men who were sitting out on a dock that was almost falling in, drinking shine (moonshine) and singing and clapping. They offered us some, which was pretty tasty, and also passed around a large plastic bowl of clams mixed with spices – clams they had obviously caught from the lake – but we passed on those, not wanting to spend the next 70 hours on the toilet. They were very impressed with Spencer’s tattoos, and most of us showed us theirs - black dragons or people’s faces or weird circles with English words like “never die” – one of the guys had done them all, by HAND, the community tattoo artist. One of them was playing with a lighter that ran out of fuel and he just flung it into the water without a thought – no concept of “keep the water clean – you depend on that water to live”.

It was strange to look out across the lake and see the giant condo just on the other side with air conditioning and massage centers. One of the men that we met that day, living in the dirty little shacks, was one of the condo guards.