Get Your Motor Running

Well, the draft of my report is still very rough, and I keep finding more ground to cover the more I look, but I now have a good chunk of… um… words.  They may not be perfect, but they’re words, and there are lots of them!

I don’t know if I’ve explained exactly what it is I’m writing:  basically, it’s an advocacy guide to all national and international sustainable development rules affecting Burma, plus a look at whether and how those regulations are being applied on the ground.  So, it’s a big book of anything that would allow activists to go, “See, you said you were going to do this, and actually, you’re doing that.”  It’s the “on the ground” stuff that’s often the most difficult to track down – information from inside the country can be hard to get and verify.  But holy crap, I’m learning a lot along the way.  There probably could not be a better crash course to start my placement than researching this thing.

I think I’m moving out of the “ZOMG EVERYTHING IS NEW!” phase, so the character of these posts may change a bit.  Here’s a roundup of a few things from the past week:

• I’m slowly getting to know people in the office.  I still feel a bit awkward making conversation, but I’m trying, and everyone’s been very sweet about it.  (It’s difficult to explain, but there are different cultural rhythms and styles of conversation – for example, there’s a particular way Karen people tease each other.  It reminds me a little bit of trying to fit into a British office for the first time.  It’s a more dramatic change than that, of course, but on the plus side, this time I was prepared for there to be differences.)
  
  I still have lunch with the folks in the office a few times a week; it’s usually a mix of conversation in English for my benefit, and conversation in Karen while I smile and stuff my face. :)  Also, it gives me the chance to try loads of new foods, both home-cooked Karen dishes and Thai food from the local market.  The big discovery this week?  I knew that you can eat fresh jackfruit, and that you can use the flesh in a curry, but damn, no one told me that you can eat the seeds, too!  (You’ve got to boil them first, but still.)  They’re like giant, warm macadamia nuts.  I love that freaking fruit.  It is the most awesome fruit.

• My friend Pam and I were the whole of our team for the UN Irish Pub’s weekly pub quiz this time around (the teams vary in size a lot, depending on who’s free and in the mood) – and we came third out of about twenty teams!  Whoot. :)  It was the first time we’ve won a prize since I started coming along (I refuse to believe that those two events are related, despite the evidence :)), but the prize for third place is a jug of beer… and I’m not a huge beer fan, and Pam doesn’t drink (plus, we both had to drive back home).  So we ended up wandering around, pimping our beer out to the remaining teams in an apologetic sorry-we’re-smarter-than-you-please-have-some-beer kind of way.  (Pam’s theory is that you can get away with saying almost anything, provided that you add, “Have some beer!” at the end.  “You’re astonishingly ugly.  Have some beer!”  “May the hand of God descend and wipe your lineage from the face of the earth.  Have some beer!”)  It was cool, actually – we met some really nice people.  As frequently happens when you wander around giving out free booze.

• I bought some deodorant.  It is “whitening”.  I am scared.

• Full points and a free jug of UN beer go to my friend Lee, who predicted that I would end up loving my motorcycle.  Until very recently, I didn’t think that would be the case; I was competent to ride it, but it was still (and frequently still is) pretty nervewracking, and knowing I would have to do a tricky drive (like, say, in heavy traffic) the next day would make it tough to sleep the night before.  I still have occasional bad moments, but over the past few days, something’s shifted.  There have been times, driving along the superhighway – on a bright day, with the mountains rearing up just ahead of you, or late at night, when there’s very little traffic – when I’ve found myself wanting to go faster, wanting to open up Arcee’s engine a little more and see what she can do, and (at least briefly) really loving the feeling of flying along the road.  It’s faintly possible I may have started singing under my breath, “Get your motor runnin’, head out on the highway…” :)

• Yesterday, I went out to dinner with another of my fellow VSOs (a Canadian volunteer named Taskin, who’s awesome), and had sushi for the first time in Thailand.  It was lovely – really fresh sashimi, and salmon tempura rolls with crispy flour on the outside, which I haven’t seen elsewhere.  And afterwards, we wandered around the funky, Camden-style local student market, with its racks of funky, often gloriously nonsensical t-shirts, like, "Stupid T-Shirt Company - We Do Only Stupid Thing!"  (Some of them were perfectly legit, like the one with a picture of an AT-AT that said, “Imperial Taxi Service”.  On the other hand, there were a couple where the joke could have been intentional, or possibly the result of an awful translation, like the shirt that demanded to know, “Are you single or fixed?”)  We even found a late-night ice cream parlour that makes a brilliant range of flavours on site – brownie, chocomint, real vanilla bean (which is rare here), two-tone chocolate – and where the proprietor let us taste about half a dozen before deciding.  So I got to have brownie-batter ice cream while Taskin taught me some Thai verbs.  It was a really nice night. :)

• Last night, I saw one of the little lizards that inhabit the stairwells (not Henry; he’s my special shower lizard) dashing madly down a wall when he heard my approach.  Unfortunately, this particular wall has a recess that starts about two feet above the floor, and for some reason, instead of sticking to the wall as it curved inward, the lizard simply ran out of wall and fell to the tiles with a *smack*.
  
  I looked at the lizard.  The lizard looked at me.  If you were going to subtitle that silent exchange of looks, the conversation would probably go something like this:
  
  Me:  Hey, dude, are you okay?Lizard:  I meant to do that.
  Me:  Ohhh-kay, are you sure?  Because that –
  Lizard:  Totally meant to do that!
  Me:  It’s just that that looked like a pretty nasty –
  Lizard:  I SAID I’M FINE!  Now, if you’ll excuse me, some of us have flies to devour.  *tail flick*

This weekend’s experiment:  Baking cookies inna toaster oven!  Stay tuned.