Week 3: Zombie Minge Vs. Octocock

This week I:
 

• Went out for the birthday of one of my Burmese colleagues.  It was a nice evening, but kind of daunting – I’m not at my best trying to make conversation in large parties of new people, never mind when there are language issues, and some of my colleagues were a bit awkward and apologetic about how quiet I was, which made me feel worse.  But I think it was a step towards getting to know people a little bit better.  (Also, I ate a live shrimp.  Well, to be more precise, I ate a shrimp from a dish of live shrimp, but I think my particular selection had already shuffled off this mortal coil.  I’m still claiming macho points, though.)

• Went to a pub quiz with Pam and her friends at an Irish bar in central Chiang Mai.  (They also do Western food – mmmm, chicken parm…)  We came in sixth out of 21 teams, which isn’t too bad, and our team name (Zombie Minge vs. Octocock) was undoubtedly both the best name and the most disturbing idea for a porno of the whole night.  Weirdly enough, the quiz was run by an American who was the absolute spit and image of Bill Levine, the American who runs a pub quiz at his pizza parlour in the Lazimpat district of Kathmandu.  I’m beginning to think there’s some kind of secret society at work.

• Met with the cool leader of the women’s group I mentioned earlier, who gave me a better sense of how to pitch the project I’m working on and some ways to communicate past cultural/class differences, and, in the process, slightly freaked me out about the magnitude of the task.  (I’m not afraid of not finishing, btw – I’m afraid of producing something that the people I intend it for won’t find useful, and I’m afraid that everyone will be too polite to tell me where I’m going wrong, so this report, which is supposed to be a practical guide for advocacy, will end up quietly gathering dust somewhere.  But I’m doing everything I can to try and make sure that doesn’t happen.) 

 

• Took and passed the written driving exam (despite a few very questionable graphics – “Which turn is correct?  Well, it’s obviously not that one, since that car is clearly on fire, and dropping out of the sky directly onto a gaggle of malformed schoolchildren.”).  This meant hanging around the DMV for ages, but that gave me a chance to really get into Alex Irvine’s novel Transformers:  Exodus, and also get chatting to a dude from Boston, who lives here with his girlfriend, and who believes that aliens built the pyramids, thanks to a lack of torch-smudges above the paintings inside.  (Look, I dunno, it’s been that kind of week.)  I’ll go back for the practical this coming week.

 

• Got introduced by Pam to a brilliant café called Love at First Bite (yes, it shares a name with a cheesy vampire comedy :)), which has AMAZING cakes, including one that’s essentially a bowl of half-cooked brownie batter with whipped cream on it.  The owners also have an adorable dog named Sashimi, who, owing to the state of her health, can’t just go running around, so she gets fifteen minutes on the treadmill every day.  In her pink sweater and ribbons.  The sight of her earnest, fuzzy little face as she labours away in her own tiny gym is hilarious.  Then we (Pam and I, not the dog) went to dinner at another Western-style restaurant, the Duke’s, which does really good variations on New Jersey-style diner food.  Real mozzarella sticks, man.  Properly stuffed calzones.  Mash.  Oh, it’s good to know there’s a place for when the really shameful cravings hit. :) 

 

• Drove my motorcycle the 25 km out to the annual rice harvest festival at a local organic farming/teaching organisation (okay, I was following a colleague, but still!).  This included a couple of U-turns on the highway, which I still find nervewracking, but for the most part, it was actually okay!  We missed the “harvest” bit, and turned up for the “festival” part, which included an amazing lunch (beef, pork, peanut, and pumpkin curries, all over mountains of rice), and I got to see some of the Burmese students again, and meet a few more volunteers, and completely fail to convince the dogs to play with me.  (Maybe I smell like farang?) 

 
And today I slept.  A slightly disturbing amount.  It’s not like I got up particularly early, but I still crashed for a full two and a half hours this afternoon.  It’s quite possible that I’m just processing – emotionally and physically – but I don’t know what to do if I continue this exhausted.