Saturday, April 3

And then Roman got sick.

Friday evening, I was starting to feel excited to eat for the first time since getting sick. We were getting ready to go out and find some street food, when Roman suddenly started feeling nauseous, and decided to stay home.

And then he spent all evening throwing up and feeling miserable—worse than me, I think. The poor thing!

So, things have been pretty quiet around here. I've had some outings in the neighborhood, but generally stayed close to home.

Some of you have asked what the Covid/social distancing situation is like here, so I thought I'd share what I've learned or observed so far.

In general, Thailand has done a really effective job of containing Covid. They've had just under 29,000 cases at this point, and 94 deaths. As Ellen pointed out when we texted about it, that's 42 per 100K people, versus 9,342 per 100K people in the US.

Thailand credits shutting down borders, doing contact tracing, and prevalent mask-wearing to their success in preventing Covid. They were able to end curfews and reopen schools in the summer of 2020. But there's also been criticism about how the pandemic has been handled, and the economic impact, which contributed to the 2020 protests.

On the ground, almost everyone wears masks when they're on the streets, in shopping centers, on the Metro, etc. Occasionally we'll see foreigners without masks, or someone slipping one off to drink water or something, and it seems like it's not a big deal, but also isn't common. Whenever you enter a 7-Eleven or a shopping center, they take your temperature—usually you hold your wrist in front of an infrared thermometer, but sometimes it scans your forehead or something. In one mall we walked through something that disinfected our shoes. Hand sanitizer is everywhere.

A woman taking her temperature at the entrance to a mall

When people are eating, they of course take their masks off. Restaurants for the most part seem to be open, and people are unmasked there (though, to tell you the truth, we haven't eaten in a proper sit-down restaurants—we just gravitate toward street carts with outside seating).

When we went to the meditation session, we had our temperatures taken before we could get into the building, but people were not wearing masks in the room. When we met with our Airbnb host (a foreigner) he wasn't wearing a mask. I am not concerned for our safety, but it does seem a little backwards to me—I think it's probably more important to wear masks in close groups meeting inside than out on the street? But it's been working for them—and, I mean, all these measures are I think largely an abundance of caution at this point (or maybe that's just what preventative health measures look like). Because we were able to get the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in Utah and we've been tested a million times, I'm not worried that we're going to get it or spread it, so I will probably just continue to try and comply with the expectations and policies here.

I don't know yet what the situation is like in schools or businesses—but hopefully I'll have more to report soon (we're starting to look for teaching jobs now).

Businesses seem to be open as usual, but I recently read a post on one of the Expat Facebook groups I joined, where a woman was saying all her favorite massage places has closed because of the pandemic. So really, I don't know how many things aren't open that would be otherwise. I do think the only foreigners here are long-term residents, and that the pandemic has killed the tourism industry (though, that is probably true everywhere in the world). I do continue to wonder about the impact on all the people who relied on that industry.

At some point in the last few days, I realized that Roman and I are not only transitioning from living in the US to living in Bangkok; we're also transitioning from living under a stricter quarantine to a more relaxed quarantine. We are, maybe along with—or else just a little ahead of—our friends and family in the US, starting to experience things we hadn't in over a year—riding public transportation, seeing the faces of strangers, and eating in indoor restaurants (well, we could, anyway!).

Everything else is such a big change that I somehow didn't take that in at first.

Anyway, here are some pics of Bangkok from my solo exploring:

Selling bananas on the front of the truck...

...and the rest of the fruit on the back

Small altar

Street food on Si Lom

Row of elephants

View from a skybridge

Unicorn cafe?

Flowers, trees

When I was walking around, I felt a little frisson of excitement at seeing the people eating at street food carts, the pretty flowering trees, the soaring silver buildings. I realized I haven't felt as much joy on this trip as I often do when I arrive in a foreign city.

We have been sick, and we have been contending with intense heat (we've been told more than once that this is the hottest time of the year, which is actually kind of a relief? I mean, it would be worse if this was the coolest). But I think the real emotional weight on me is the necessity of finding jobs.

Our visas only allow us to stay through May—there are some extensions available, but only for a month or two. So we have to get find something relatively soon. And getting jobs comes with its whole litany of considerations—there's the job search criteria (salary, location, starting date, benefits, etc), the requirements of the application process (providing documents, doing interviews, sometimes giving a sample lesson), and the bureaucratic obligations of getting a work visa once we have a job (which may require us to provide a lease, in addition to our background checks and work contracts). And that doesn't even touch on the anxieties of, you know, standing up in front of a roomful of children and having the gall to think I know how to teach!? Oh right, and trying to assimilate into a Thai workplace as best I can.

So yeah, there may be some restrictions on feelings of full-throated joy right now.

I am a little self-conscious that I seem like I'm complaining—I mean, we're in Thailand right now, and it's a total privilege to be here and even be able to apply for jobs in a foreign country. And I don't want to forget that. Or be ungrateful.

But, well, I have anxieties and I'm trying to recognize them. I'm also going to try to not get too ahead of myself. One step at a time. We have started to apply for jobs, and we will just have to see how it goes, as it goes.

But! Here are some things I ate:

Black and white sticky rice, som tam, and shumai

Avocado passionfruit juice

Pain au chocolat--you can get anything in Bangkok!