We’ve had some interesting dates in some interesting places.

• The entertainment deck of the cruise ship ferry crossing the North Sea with eastern European girls singing show tunes was a good one.
• Fire dancing and fiddling for New Years Eve in Guatemala, accompanied by our favourite Mennonite young people was an adventure.
• Four straight hours of open mic including guitars, fiddles, drums, flutes, and a digeradoo in a room so packed full of hippies that only the guys on the outside edges could roll a joint and that the police shut down sometime after one in the morning was pretty epic.

Tonight was better. And it all started with a snake.

Actually, it started by finding a flier in our mailbox. We were excited about this, the potential for our mailbox to actually hold something that a) we are interested in, and b) we can read, is a hopeful thing. This flier was in English, announcing the grand reopening party of the Mango Bar and Saloon on the main street in Nai Yang and advertising for “Pretty waitresses.”

“Uh… Mom… can they actually DO THAT? I mean, that’s pretty wrong…” Hannah points out. The flier was put there by our Russian neighbor, Ilya; but back to the snake.

It’s only about a half a mile’s walk into town and once the sun goes down it’s pleasantly cool so we decided to walk.

The moon is a fingernail crescent tonight and our street is lit with happy golden windows out of which the sounds of family dinners trickle. We’d only walked about fifty yards when I heard another sound. “Sssssssssst!” I stopped dead and gripped Tony’s hand. “Did you hear that? There was a hiss!!” I panic-stage-whispered. “No, there’s nothing, it’s fine, but did you hear that DOG last night?” he asked and tried to keep walking. I stood stalk still and looked. And looked. And Looked. Finally, I saw it. Shadowy movement behind us and on the left side of the street (MY side of the street!)

A cobra.

No kidding. Not a big one, maybe sixteen inches long, but slithering up on the vertical wall of our neighbor’s house with his hood partially open. Hissing. At me!

A cobra hissed at me!

You may not know this about me, but I do not have a symbiotic relationship with even garden snakes. My instinct is to pound them with a shovel until they are flat and not moving. I try to resist this instinct because I know that they are good and honest creatures, just trying to rid the world of other things I dislike, but I still don’t like them. Cobras are in a class by themselves. Fear factor forty-seven for me. And one hissed at me.

To be fair, he was being a perfectly mannerly snake and giving me a good loud hiss from fully ten feet away so that I wouldn’t be unpleasantly surprised by his presence and create an unfortunate event for both of us. I thank him for his kindness. I respect his good manners. But there was no way I was walking a step further. Tony had to go home and get the bike. Embarrassing but true, we burned a fossil fuel to go less than a mile because I’m terrified of a small black snake with excellent manners. I accept my cone of shame.

I ordered a drink to take the edge off the snake: Singapore Sling: Do yourself a favour: never order one.

If you are familiar with the expired TV series, Firefly, or if you’ve seen the movie Serenity that tied up it’s loose ends, then you can picture Mango’s Saloon perfectly. You know that scene in the movie, when our heroes are in the Maidenhead Bar on the world of Beaumonde, and the kitchy blend of American Old West meets Asian Old World is at it’s “weird but works” best? It’s that bar, complete with big dumb western guys trying to pick up overly made up local chicks and the loud TVs playing overhead.

I wanted really badly to get this glazed look, whisper, “Miranda” and then go absolutely crazy-ninja-chick-wild on the patrons. It would have been awesome. Sadly, no one but Tony would have gotten the joke, and we live here now, so I can’t go killing people with my mad-ninja skills until at least the week before we leave.

If you’re not a Firefly fan, let me put it to you this way:

Picture Texas, the most redneck corner you can find. Walk into the dustiest bar on the dustiest street. Now imagine that through some time warp you’ve been transferred to Southeast Asia inside. There are things that seem right:

• The big ‘merican in the corner, talking loudly, with tattoos
• Cowboy hats (though oddly they have hot pink and blue feathers sticking out of them and “Thailand” painted in gold letters on the hat band
• The bar maids are all wearing “classic American” blue jean mini-skirts and white t-shirts with smiles just a tad too perfect
• There are cow horns over the bar, but a huge whale vertebrae stacked on top of them and two small buddhist shrines hung directly over the old west style shotgun next to the liquor cabinet
• The music is perfect: they had both kinds: Country AND Western, with a little Neil Diamond and Mellencamp thrown in for good measure.
• Now imagine the guy singing them: cowboy hat and boots but he looks like a younger version of Mr. Miagi from he old Karate kid movies and he definitely did not learn these songs by reading the words because it’s half way through each song before you can be sure of WHICH song he’s singing. He learned them tonally, and he doesn’t do half bad, considering.

Stick with me, because this just keeps getting better:

Behind the bar: a middle aged ex-KGB desk jockey accompanied by his beautiful Russian wife. She was a spy in a past life, no question: perfect teeth, jet black hair and stilettos she could kill you with before you could say, “What microchip?!”

If I get to come back in another life I want to come back as a Russian chick. Somehow, even in a backwater town, on the far less sexy end of an island off the coast of nowhere, in Thailand they can pull off black satin sleeveless dresses ruched from their boobs to their, well, not quite to their knees, completely fringed in the most god-awful glamourous rhine stones you ever saw and crystal chandelier earrings with panache. It’s just unfair.

A grand opening party that is a happy blend of free buffet and sangria is always worth attending, but this one truly took the cake. At the end of the evening the questionnaires were circulated by Zee German with questions like, “Do you approve the changes?” “Do you approve the music?” “Do you think we should just say, “the hell with it” and blow this whole place up?” No kidding, that was a real question.

We danced (to Brown Eyed Girl) the Russian spy took photographs that no doubt will be used to cause pain or extort what little money we have later. The patrons clapped, “Look, real ‘Mericans!”

I did not want to get off of the bike to open the gate when we got home.

There is at least one cobra on my street. He is a known entity now. I proceeded slowly, peered into the gutters and the drain holes and remembered sitting idly on the side of the pool last week talking to Ilya and being horrified by him telling me that his wife (the spy) nearly stepped on one across their door frame (doubtless she killed it with the blow darts she conceals in the front of her sequined bodice.) I’m not so brave.