Sok Sabai steemit community, sit back and enjoy the 9th part of "19 Years Southeast Asia", the story of my expatriation.
I settled down on the Thai island of "Chang" with my partner, who I met a few months earlier, and opened a restaurant with her. The fact that it was not yet completely build finished didn't seem to bother anyone because the guests came anyway.
Now the main season was coming up and I wanted to have the shop built finished by then. The Thais didn't care if they ordered their food on a construction site, but with the western tourists, I wasn't so sure. So it was just right in time that our friend and some members of his family finally started to finish the restaurant.
What these guys made look much better than what the master builder and his people had accomplished. Especially our friend was a real specialist in woodwork and on top, they worked fast. If I had built with these people from the beginning, I would have saved money and surely everything would have been finished already. Afterwards, you're always smarter.
Shortly before the start of the season, the restaurant was finished. They had poured the concrete floor, plastered and tiled the kitchen and bathroom walls, made long wooden benches and tables for the guest area and put a lot of effort into decorative details. Now the tourists could come, but before they came, something else happened, which I as a German found unusual at that time and therefore I don't want to leave it unmentioned here.
It was one morning, there were no guests in the restaurant, I was sitting alone at my regular place and read a book. Suddenly a large SUV stopped in front of the store and four men got out. Three of them wore the typical uniforms of Thai officials, but one of them was dressed like a fleet admiral. He wore a dazzling white uniform, a corresponding cap and his chest were covered with decorations. Gosh, I thought the Navy's coming now breakfast, but that wasn't the case.
They didn't notice me at all but immediately headed towards my partner, who they could see through the large hatch in the kitchen. At first, they spoke to each other quite normally and exchanged the courtesies customary in Asia, but then the conversation became more heated. I didn't understand a word, but I noticed that my partner became really stroppy with the admiral guy.
After a short discussion, one of the other three officers took a form out of the briefcase and began to write. Then my partner signed and I was asked to pay an amount of 120 Thai Baht (about 3,60 $). When the gentlemen had moved away, I learned that we now also had a license to run our restaurant. She also told me that the guy in the white uniform wanted to have an extra fee because I was a foreigner, but she refused.
We were now a legitimate business, which fortunately did not mean that we ever had to pay any taxes. I had already mentioned once that on the elephant island things were handled a little more relaxed than on the mainland. At that time there was also only a handful of policemen for the whole island, in a small station somewhere in the pampas.
We were now a legitimate business, which fortunately did not mean that we ever had to pay any taxes. I had already mentioned once that on the elephant island things were handled a little more relaxed than on the mainland. At that time there was also only a handful of policemen for the whole island, in a small station somewhere on the island.
The loose conditions on Koh Chang made it possible for the people to live mostly as they liked and to earn their livelihood with activities, which can't necessarily be called legal. One of them was the illicit distillery. All over the island, black distillers had settled near fruit plantations and produced their booze with simplest means out of the fruits which they found on the ground.
As there was a cashew nut plantation right behind our property, it was not surprising that there was a black burner's hut next to it, a little bit in the thicket. The fleshy, juicy fruits on which the nuts grow were apparently ideal for making schnapps. Most of the islanders drank this stuff, and the first of them came already early in the morning to pick up their daily ration.
Our regional black distiller was an elderly always drunken lady, who filled the booze from a dented aluminum kettle into a small bottle of schnapps, which served as a measure for her, and then poured it into a transparent plastic bag, which was closed with an elastic. One bag cost 25 Thai Baht (about 0,76 $). I hadn't heard that islanders got blinded, so I also tried the jungle distillate at some point and found that you could compare the taste a bit with that of Italian grappa.
Slowly the tourists came to the island. It has not been raining for a few weeks now, instead, there was bright sunshine every day and it became quite windy. The pick-up taxis, which passed our restaurant a few times a day, were now fully loaded with western backpackers. They were, apart from the Islanders, our target group. A mixed bunch of people from all over the world.
In the next part of "19 Years Southeast Asia" you will learn how the island has been filled with a lot of weird people and what we have experienced with them. It seemed like a movie to me.
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