Thursday, June 21, 2007

Deutschland über alles
When I was still a callow lad basking in Thailand's relatively unknown glow, I recall being awakened by two sounds: a distinct bird call that I can still feebly recreate today given enough alcohol, and the cries of a wandering hawker peddling mangoes and cooked duck.

Forty four years later, I am happy to say that the same sort of bird still seems alive and well in the early Thai a.m. hours but the cries of the barbecue duck man have been replaced by Germanic folk songs and Odes to Odin and the sounds of wood being lustily chopped. I currently live next to a pair of elderly, extremely fit, gay German twins whose Pure Aryan appearance brings the term "Dr Mengele's experiments" uncomfortably to mind.

My racist, alcoholic British landlord of the moment who habitually refers to Thais as "nig-nogs" and claims to have dropped LSD with Leonard Cohen and been chums with Mick Jagger, the Cray twins of British crime fame and Tom Jones, among others, refers to them simply as "the poofta Nazis", which is probably stretching the point. Nonetheless, it's tempting to join him on this one especially when they stride like Nordic hikers, bare chested, bald headed and blue eyed in tandem singing what sound like Hitler Youth songs while hauling buckets of what appears to be mud or odd chemicals from some unknown site back to their home.

Physical fitness is big for them, less so for the rest of us. I mean, these guys haul buckets of mystery muck and chop chords of wood purely for the sheer fun of it all. At night they can been seen sitting in matching lounge chairs, occasionally with some demure Thai ladyboys, on their porch sipping clear beverages and apparently regailing their transvestite guests with tales of their father's heroics in the Waffen SS.

I miss the duck man.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why can you never seem to win some regular neighbours without potential non-serial-killer genes or worse (Germans) as neighbours?

pdm said...

Oh. Well... *gay* Nazis don't sound all that bad...

Anonymous said...

Aimlessly chopping wood is a German tradition older than the nazis.

Wilhelm the Second, the last emperor, did not do much else after he went into exile in 1918.

Anonymous said...

Hey Peter! Nice comment

Especially a nice comment when I keep in mind its coming from a fat as hell guy who needs to find his wife in china! *rolleyes*

Anonymous said...

And they say that us fat people have humour. Apparently not.