Days in the Life of a Pattaya Hotel Owner

The past couple of weeks in Pattaya have seen me hit by a series of minor, yet nonetheless debilitating, illnesses. It appears that no sooner am I through one ailment, the next is knocking on my door and barging in without waiting for a welcome. I have considered asking for a season ticket at the local hospital, such is the frequency of my visits recently.

Unfortunately the visits to the hospital have not been for me, as both Sam and James have been in need of medical attention. Sam, who has a devil may care attitude to life, came off his bicycle whilst playing in our village. He sustained some pretty nasty looking gashes to his foot and although he avoided the need for stitches, his foot is heavily bandaged and very concerned he may miss the start of the school football season. James is a rather more circumspect child, although his injuries were also as a result of him riding his bicycle around the village. However, with James it was not through his actions that he was harmed. As he rode past one of our neighbour’s houses, they opened their front gate allowing a rather ferocious “pet” dog to escape onto the street and immediately set about attacking my six-year old. Fortunately the owner’s managed to restrain the beast fairly quickly and before anything more serious than a small bite to the back could be administered.

Here in Thailand, diseases such as rabies are something to take seriously and James was immediately taken to the hospital to be checked and given a six-week course of medication and five injections over a four-week period to ensure nothing more fatal than a few scratches resulted form the incident. Having seen to James’ health, the next on out list of things that must be done was to contact the owners of the dog and endeavour to ensure the hound would not be released into society again. As soon as we arrived, the owner was spouting genuine apologies and promising she and her husband would pay all medical costs incurred as a result of the attack. They went further by stating that the dog had been taken to a local temple where it would be cared for by the monks and, as such, would no longer present us or other members of the village with a cause for concern. The nature of the apologies and action taken by these neighbours very quickly soothed our anger and it was heartening to know that some people will take necessary action without having to be bribed to do so! We learnt a day or so later that the dog lasted only 24 hours at the monastery; it attacked another canine inmate, who reacted rather more violently than James and promptly killed its attacker!

Suffering from my maladies necessitated my spending a week at home and therefore watching the life of the village. Being the school holiday’s life was primarily children running or cycling around from early morning to late at night when the calls to bed from parents would resound across the streets. Nothing much happened most of the time, other than my children being involved in the accidents already described. It did strike me as strange that all other families appeared to have avoided trips to the hospital to have their children’s wounds healed! However, life in Thailand throws up the most bizarre and unexpected situations that will be guaranteed to wake you up from your afternoon nap on the roof terrace.

I had spent the late afternoon on the roof terrace with my book and a cold glass of orange juice. As the late afternoon drew upon us, I had nodded off in the shade before being abruptly awoken by the screaming of a Thai woman and the shouted drawl of an American obviously from one of the southern states. I peered out over the garden fence to look in the direction of this disturbance, expecting it to be no more than a family quarrel. In fact, what I witnessed were the house owners shouting in unison at their next door neighbour. They were irate that this family had the temerity to be playing Thai music at 5:00PM whilst they were endeavouring to watch the television. The music had been playing most of the afternoon and it was most certainly not at a volume that would cause complaint…well at least that is what I had thought.

The following morning I was up at a very early after another sleepless night. I was downstairs checking my email and around 6:30AM the silence was broken by rather similar shouting tones to those I had witnessed the previous evening. I walked outside to take a look at what this early-morning fuss was all about and spotted the friendly neighbours yelling over their back wall at the farm on the other side. I could not see the person or persons they were yelling at, but the English bits were abusing the farmer for having chickens that cock-a-doodle-do’d early in the morning and cattle that smelt bad! The ongoing shouting had soon woken Mrs. Boss who joined me to watch the festivities. She was soon telling me the Thai wife was making threats towards the farmer which I considered to be most unwise. However, regardless of what our neighbours were saying, there would be little the farmer could do to stop his chickens giving their early morning calls except perhaps strangling them which I imagined he would be unwilling to do. As for the cattle smelling like…well cattle, wherever one is in the world they tend to pong a bit and they also tend to poo wherever they happen to be when the need arises. I have yet to see a cow, pig, buffalo or other farmyard animal who is toilet trained. I had obviously completely missed what the point of their outburst was, but it gave me the rare chance to laugh at others embroiled in something that had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with me — now there is a rarity.

Later in the day, with the local cattle still giving off a faint farmyard aroma, I learned that these neighbours were regularly having rows with everyone and anyone. It seemed as though they wanted to live in a world occupied only by them but chose to come and live in a village with other people and buy a house that backed onto a farm. They had abused neighbours either side of them and opposite them to the point that five “for sale” signs were up because the owners could no longer stand living near or opposite these people. During the day, the neighbours that were being abused the night before had also erected a “for sale” sign telling us they too were now ready to move away from the couple from hell. I was almost at the point of being distraught that I had spent so much time at Jasmine Mansion that I had missed all of these exciting goings on here at home! Oh well…never mind. I am almost certain that I am involved in enough mishaps already to worry about having missed a couple of local disputes.