The Night train to Chang Mai

There is a movie, a B-movie, called The night train to Kathmandu. I saw it a few years ago on a VHS tape. It's one of those kids movies and got nothing to do with what I am going to write. It was just that being in a night train going somewhere, it came to my mind that movie, and I used the title changing just the location.
Chang Mai... Never heard of it until a few years ago, when I was approached by someone on skype, it was in 2006, that fancied practising a bit of Italian having, this lady, been married to an Italian that has left her with two kids, a kick in the ass and a family to look after. She lived in Milan, I cannot recall whether it was in the centre or the hinterland but she loved it, wherever this place was. Her husband, 25 years senior, though, decided they had to go back to Thailand, Chiang Mai, where they initially met via internet and there she left him and started dating, and having kids, with another few local ladies. I will not tell the name of the person because I do not even know if it's her true name and if it's a very rare one but I know that his name is real as I trucked him down as a resident of Chiang Mai and even a well respected one in the local community.
That was the first time I heard of Chiang Mai and I never thought I would have ever come to visit that place that sounded so exotic and far. Even for someone like me that travels the world, Asia has always been a far place and, as you might certainly know, if you read my initial blog in China and if you were following me on the Italian websites, for me Asia was China and India and all the rest was just something in between them. This was for food, languages, looks and anything else; just some small countries between two giants of which I never appreciated their undemocratic stances and policies about nearly anything, from the social systems to religious beliefs and acceptance of status as a force majeur or a divine will.
When I left for China I was full of resentment towards that country and the only reason I moved there was because we decided, my wife and I, to move and stay there for a few years. Unfortunately for a series of circumstances which I prefer to keep personal to avoid both being taken to court and publicise personal issues, I had to leave.
Since then, Asia, has been a sort of forbidden and impossible dream. It has revealed to be really hard moving back there, especially at the light of the current financial crisis.
However this is not what I was going to tell you tonight, while in this noisy and sort-of-run-down-train I am heading 14 hours away from Bangkok, a very noisy, unusual, full of contradictions, city, where modernity and tradition live aside, exactly like the luxury of the Paragon and the (apparent) poverty of the side roads that lead to the main arteries of this tentacular capital of the kingdom of Thailand.
What I am going to write is about the way I feel these days and I felt in the past. You must have noticed that my Chinese blog had virtually no breaks during the full stay in Beijing and that I decided only once not to write the weekly report due to the earthquake in Sichuan, as sign of respect to the victims. After leaving China it has been really hard writing anything... I just do not feel inspired by the Western world, whether is Brazil or Europe, when I am living West I feel empty.
What makes me change so much? Is it the thirst of knowledge I got? Is it the fact that Asia is totally different from the West, hence I an fascinated by the diversity? But, hold on, if I work in the Western world I can well afford to go on holidays Eastwards and enjoy the best of the two worlds, how come I do not even think about doing that?
In 1996, I was made redundant from my Foreign Exchange trader job in Switzerland and we moved, with a 8 months old child, back to England. I had no job and we had no money left after purchasing a 2-bedroom semi-detached house in Bedford and a cheap second-hand car.
I started working in a call centre and I was making 180 pounds gross a week, and, strange to say, we were a happy couple with a beautiful baby girl that was a bit of a pain but didn't annoy us much because our lives were much simpler than before, when I was a wealthy trader paid great money at a very young age.
However heaven didn't last long because a few months later I started again working in a pretty well paid position, even more than before, and we dreamt of buying our dream house, and so we did. From there my happiness started collapsing. I was rich but I had to live away from the family and from friends.
I started missing, immediately, the fact of having a family to see every night and a place I could call home. This affected me badly for quite some time until I got so used to it and I stopped even thinking about it and accepted my role of “slot machine” as a fact and as the only way I could possibly live.
I tried a few times to give up my profession but I was always sucked back into the vortex and I realised that where some of my colleagues found their happiness, cumulating money, the only way money could give me the impression of being happy was spending them. But then, I used to end up without money and I had to start again... I had never had a plan of saving enough and stop working because I simply didn't give a shit about how much money I was earning, I just hated my life and spending money was the only way to pay me back for all the sufferance I had in being away from the family.
In and out of work, moving between villages and cities and countries and continents did nothing but increase my bills and my intolerance towards any place I lived in. 25 countries in 22 years... I don't know how many cities, houses, mobile phone numbers, hotels, flights, car rented, restaurant bills I have been through all these years... Luxury was just ordinary while I used to look at people working in restaurants and menial job and I used to envy the fact that they could have a place to go to sleep to every single night, have a newspaper delivered at home if they wanted, go to a pub with friends and not by themselves. A wife looking after them and waiting for them at home. A husband taking the kids out at the gym or the pool or going to see the end-of-year recital without having to find an excuse why he could not be there and promise something in exchange of the time missed.
Sad life isn't it? Saying that, there are people that envy me for my world tours and seem to grab, out of the all soup, the good parts and throw away the things that are not edible or too hard to chew.
In China, all of this changed.
Since I set foot on the People Republic's soil, I realised that I was starting a new life. I was not on the highest salary ever but I was happy. For the first time in my life I was doing something I liked, in a place I liked and with people I liked and I learned to love. The country I hated until the day before I landed was, all of a sudden, the only country in the world where I could possibly live. I was very very happy and, as it always happens, every single time I am happy, I get into immense sadness soon after because the gods love mocking us earthlings with their games.
Went to Brazil. I was very unhappy at the point that I decided to quit Brazil and then my job.
I was going to stop, plans were going to China and study Mandarin until January 2010 and then see. Once again, those gods I hate, started playing games on me with the complicity of some people envy, hate, resentment and jealousy. I was left without job and without hopes of getting a decent job in the immediate future.
And here I am now, in Thailand, back to Asia and writing like hell and feeling like telling everyone how I feel and what makes me really happy.
In 1998 I was working for a Dutch bank in Budapest and the big guys of the company came over for a visit from Amsterdam. I knew one lady part of the group and after a very formal dinner, boring like hell, and that could have paid a few monthly salary to an average Hungarian employee with the same money 10 of us dined with, I was told to take these people somewhere local and down to earth. I told them to dismiss their snob clothes and put something more on the hippy side...
They had the night of their lives, they enjoyed every moment of it. They danced and drunk like “humans” do and forgot, for a moment, numbers, plans, projects and Steering Committees of any sort.
The day after, they all thanked me for that night.
I understood that I was not better than them but that I was in a position where I could do it more often because I was not in a position of command but still, I was not a “human” being like those I used to mix with when I had taken off my “professional” clothes.
Think of the movies that Hollywood has produced about rich people getting poor and being happier because they find love, values and so on. Or, on the contrary, think of those movies where poor people get rich and they become unhappy and go through family tragedies, break-ups, spoiled kids and so on.
Why does society tend to send us a signal in a direction but then, via the same means it uses to persuade us to get rich, tells us that being poor, or not rich, after all it's not that bad. Isn't the same someone that, allegedly, is the son of God was telling us?
How does it feel being very popular and not being able to do anything without being pointed at, stared at and end up on a paper victim of a paparazzi? Wouldn't be nice to be just as insignificant as a spy? Normally spies are not like the Conneries or the Moores in the James Bond saga, they are pretty anonymous, someone that you wouldn't even recognise the day after after spending a whole evening talking to him.
Of course, you would say, but there are needs to satisfy and there is a family to think of and so on. True, all true but, do you think that the wealth is currently well divided amongst the people part of the society? How many million dollar someone needs to have a decent life, a happy life, a happy family and some kids that can complete the studies? 1, 2, 5 million dollars? How about these billionaires? How many families they have to support? While I appreciate that an entrepreneur has to be rewarded for the money he or she invests in a company, I cannot understand a banker making million of dollars in bonus thanks to other people works, most of the times, and his luck.
Listen to this.
In 1993 I was mobbed by a colleague and for that reason I decided to leave for Italy (I was in London and the time). I got an offer to work for an American bank, jointly to a colleague of mine working for another bank and a few years more junior than me. I didn't accept while he did. He ended up retiring two years later thanks to the bonuses he got for his performance which was nothing outstanding. Me, a year later left Italy and the bank and moved to Saudi Arabia because I could not afford to live on an Italian salary, despite the money I made for the bank between 1991 and 1994 was much more than that guy had made for the American bank.
How do you explain, then, this kind of situations?
Have you ever heard of people taking the companies on the brink of the bankruptcy and getting paid to leave?
From here came the need to leave for a while Europe, I could not stay an extra day in that place. I needed a break away from the society of “having” opposed to the one of “being”.
I am relaxing here, I still have not solved the problems I got in Europe, but I know that I have an alternative, because there is always an alternative to anything until a second before death.
Once I manage to solve my problems, I will give up my Western status and I will move to Asia where people are people and money is just a mean to live comfortably. I am sure it will change with time but it will take long enough to reach Western status. In the meantime I will have enjoyed the best possible standard of life and probably be dead.
This is the first vacation done on the cheap in my adult life. No luxury whatsoever and very very cheap. In 5 days if you exclude the flight I must have spent around 100/130 Euro and I have eaten well and a lot. I have been to the cinema, paid for accommodation, transportation fares, tickets admittance in some sites of interest and so on. I can certainly say that I am happy. The guy that is here in Thailand is happy, the one that with the head is still in Europe, is having a break but, for sure, is not as stressed as he was when he left last Sunday.
Guys, time to turn off the Mac as batteries are nearly abandoning me.
I will be back shortly with the “standard” blog.