Lop Buri - Night #1 (3/9)

It has been an eventful day.  After the 2 hour drive up to the plant site, I spent most of the day riding around with a few different managers at the plant to see where they mine all of the raw material to create cement.  I even got to watch them blast a whole section of limestone, which totaled about 40,000 tons of rock.  My suspicions of having communication issues have been realized when I first met with the plant manager, Sawang.  He is in charge of all the operations and probably speaks the best English of anyone at the Plant…..I would characterize his English as lacking.  His vocabulary is not bad, but it is very hard to understand what words he is saying….neverthless, he is a very nice 

and has been extremely accommodating.  The other managers are also very nice and interested in teaching me the processes of the plant, but again, the language barrier really makes it tough.  I usually nod my head and then replay what was just said in my head in order to make some sense of it.  I think I understand about 1/2 of what has been said to me at this point.  I will be staying at a local town “resort” (Lop Buri Inn Resort)…apparently the swankiest place in the area.  It is actually not an awful place, but I would rate it on the same level as a cheap Motel 6 in terms of quality.  This place does have some interesting highlights, including a bunch of Monkey Statues that are about 15 ft tall, a swimming pool that smells like a sewer, and a restaurant that offers a menu in English.

As for the town of Lop Buri itself, I don’t think it is a place for a furang (Thai slang for foreigner) like myself to go wondering around.  It is not huge, but I would guess maybe 25,000 people live here, and I have yet to see anyone but locals walking around the streets.  I have a feeling that getting lost in a town like this could mean real trouble.....so I put the odds of me walking around at almost zero.  I may muster up the courage to walk to the 711, but that is only a 100 yards down the road and I'm not sure if that will happen.  

After walking around the hotel and admiring the attention to detail the creators of these monkey sculptures used, I was just planning on spending the rest of the evening writing and reading when I received a phone call from one the managers I had been with that day.  He said we would be going to dinner, so I met him and a couple other foreign plant visitors in the lobby.  We ended up going to a pretty nice place, which of course served Thai cuisine and had a bunch of people singing Karaoke.  I have decided that I really do like Thai food because they love to make things spicy….so I ate everything that was in front of me, and about half the time I had no clue what it was (you have to be a little adventurous here if you want to get anything to eat).  Our table consisted of a couple of managers from the plant (all of them Thai), an insurance consultant (from India but lives in Singapore), another insurance consultant (French), and a guy named Mosimo who works for Asia Cement’s parent company in Milan (Italian).  The dinner was excellent, the conversations were great (and hilarious at times when you figured out what the other person was actually saying), and my waiter would not stop filling up my beer glass.  I could barely get 1/2 way through a beer before he had it filled up again.  Luckily, I have not idea how to say “stop filling my beer up” in Thai, so the evening got a little hazy by the end of the night....definitely a great night.

 My initial plan was to stay up here all week, but I suspect I will head back sooner.  I really don’t want to inconvenience these guys, and they pretty much have to stop working in order to show me around and attempt to give explanations to any questions I have.  I also don’t know if I feel like “roughing” it up here for the whole week as it gets a little old not really being able to communicate with anyone….and I am starting to get a little tired of eating rice and mystery meat soup.  The unknowns of this week have been exciting and interesting (and more to come for sure), but I think a couple of days up will be more than sufficient in gaining a unique experience.  

Korp kun Korp,

sbt