Madness? This! Is! Thailand!

In a conversation with my friends P. and M. on Facebook, I have empirically determined the Most Thai Thing Ever.

Me:  Today I witnessed a chicken attacking the scorched remains of a floating lantern. That may be the most Thai thing that has ever happened to me.
P:  If it didn't occur on the back of a motorbike, with a dog in the basket, then there's room for improvement.
Me:  This is true. A chicken attacking a lantern, on a motorbike with four people and a dog, driving the wrong way with no lights down the highway with the driver on the phone AND drinking a bottle of Chang, the second guy eating noodles out of a styrofoam container, and the passenger at the back setting off fireworks. As they drive between a wat and a 7-11. There, fixed it.  And they're going to a mookata.
M:  No blindfolds, no gangnam style?

Me:  Oh, shit, yeah! They're all blindfolded, including the dog, and Gangnam Style is playing.
P:  And there's a baby. Preferably being breastfed.

Me:  And not a helmet in sight.
P:  There'd be one, but it'd be hanging off the handle. Maybe one on the dog.
Me:  One of the passengers should be snorting lines of MSG off the guy in front of him.  Cut with chilli.
P:  And all of their names are some variation of Porn.

Translation notes:  This last bit refers to the fact that "porn" is Thai for "beautiful".  There is actually a Porn electrolysis clinic (which, no lie, I thought was named that because they were promising to make you as attractive as a porn star), and a friend of mine has met people named Porn, Supaporn, and in one memorable instance, Pornsuk.

Obviously, you don't actually snort MSG, but we had a conversation some months back about whether cocaine would be more addictive with MSG in it.  And they do love their MSG here.  One of my colleagues says that a meal without MSG is like a marriage without love.

Finally, Chang is a cheap Thai beer.  The mixture of nausea and regret that attacks the next morning after you've drunk too much of it is known as a Changover.

The More You Know!

Falling On My Head Like A New (And Unpleasant) Emotion

It’s ironic that my walk tonight lasted longer than normal, because I got caught up in the celebrations for the end of rainy season – and that’s why I was still half an hour from home when the most violent thunderstorm I’ve seen all year hit.  In Soviet Russia, weather celebrates the end of you!

I’ve taken to walking down, some nights, to a rather lively student food market that’s about halfway between my house and the Ping river; it’s a nice long walk (anywhere from an hour to two hours depending on the route), and it gives me a chance to explore the area a little more.  I drive most places that aren’t in my immediate neighbourhood, so it can be fun to take the slow route:  poke in small shops, get to meet stallholders, try and fail to befriend the local cats.  (Moray can testify that I have very limited success making friends with Thai cats.  By the end of his trip, he was jokingly telling me off for stalking the poor things. :))  I was on my way down there tonight when I heard music near the bus station, and when I followed it, I discovered the drunkest, least organised, happiest damn parade I have ever seen in my life.

There was a truck creeping along in front with a huge money tree on it; then a procession of about forty or fifty people carrying money trees and dancing (I gotta say, elderly Thai ladies can cut a rug; must be all the tai chi); and then another truck with giant speakers and a huge, rotating disco ball.  (Money trees, by the way, if you haven’t seen them, are trees made out of sticks with 20- and 100-baht notes woven into the branches.  They’re a form of Buddhist offering.)  This was the only parade I’ve ever seen where the participants got more excited every time it was held up.  Whenever the truck in front had to stop to let a bus past, the crowd would start dancing more wildly, swigging Leo, and setting off firecrackers right under their feet.  It was kind of awesome, and I was curious about where they were going, so I kept pace with them.  I didn’t actually go over and join them, for fear of intruding or putting a damper on the proceedings (“farang present, this is weird and uncomfortable, better tone it down”)… and, because, you know, what they were doing is a good way to lose some toes. :)  But I joined the stragglers trailing after them, and we picked up more and more people as we went, with the music getting more raucous all the time, until we reached a temple I’d never noticed before, tucked behind the new bus terminal.  The music and the disco ball stopped there, letting the worshipers process in with their offerings… while a few drunken older Thais stuck around to get funky in the middle of the road, under the swirling red and green lights.

I eventually peeled off and went to get dinner at the market (and also to hit my new favourite place – a laid-back bakery/manga library/internet café with fantastic chocolate pudding cake, which I would never have expected to find in such an un-touristy area).  And I’d barely turned back when the wind started up all of a sudden.  I didn’t think much of it, but all the Thai people did – they were instantly scrambling to batten down their stalls and close up the fronts of their shops.

I didn’t get far before the rain started:  big, fat drops that quickly turned into a complete downpour.  I ended up under a plastic shop awning with a middle-aged couple; a young dad and his son on their motorbike; and a young man, probably a student, who crouched near the edge of the awning and watched the rain with a surprisingly peaceful expression on his face.

And this was rain like you wouldn’t believe.  Within minutes, the streets were flooded.  It was coming down so hard that it kicked up a layer of mist a couple of feet thick, so that trying to see the road ahead of you was like peering through fog.  There was a particularly bright flash of lightning, and every light on the street went out; a few emergency lights struggled back on, but a minute later, another flash took those out, as well.  We were left with only the lightning and the headlights of a few cars that had pulled over by the side of the road; even in Thailand, where drivers are completely insane, no one was daring to move.  (Watching raindrops in headlights is the weirdest thing, by the way.  They look like they’re made with stop-go claymation.)

After maybe twenty minutes, it started to slacken a bit.  The couple were the first to leave, her clinging to his back on the motorbike so that they could wrap themselves in the same poncho.  A little while later, I decided that this was as good as it was going to get, and struck out for home.

The walk back was an adventure, let me tell you.  The fun part was balancing precariously on the curb – the only part of the sidewalk still above water – and then having the sheaves of water thrown up by passing cars soak me up to the shoulder.  (Well, that and walking by a lot of dry people smugly eating hot soup at a hotpot restaurant.  Bastards. :))  But I was doing okay… until I reached the petrol station, where the forecourt had become a lake.  The water was shin-deep; I ended up having to wade across, thinking uncomfortably about all those public-service animations from the time of the Bangkok floods, showing downed power lines and hidden sinkholes and families of crocodiles.  (Well, okay, I wasn’t really focusing on that last one.)

The rain picked up again just as I turned into my street, about five minutes from home; I finally staggered home, so drenched that the neighbour’s dog didn’t recognise my smell and practically went for me.  (Fortunately, we are talking about a miniature freaking poodle here, so I wasn’t exactly in danger. :))  I came home to a power outage, but thankfully it only lasted about an hour.  Which means that I had to shower in cold water in the dark, but I didn’t care – it just felt so good to be clean and dry.  And now I can actually heat up my dinner (which survived the walk – the Thai habit of putting everything in multiple plastic bags pays off!) and relax with some cartoons.

By the way, I did run into at least one refugee from the parade on the walk home.  She was wearing a soaked and tattered pink tulle skirt, and was trying to keep dry by holding an overturned silver offering bowl over her head.  Poor kid.  The celebrations for Loy Krathong may start a few days early, but rainy season isn’t giving up that easily.

Mystery Dumplings

A short meditation on culture and economics in Thailand:

The woman who runs my local noodle shop occasionally makes dumplings.  I still haven’t figured out why.

Don’t get me wrong – I obviously know why she MAKES dumplings.  They go in soup.  What I mean is that she doesn’t have them consistently; she tends to make one small batch a night, or maybe two.  And she doesn’t reserve them for people who specifically order dumpling soup.  Rather, she asks everyone whether they’d like some dumplings to go with their noodles.  If you say yes, you get a generous handful of them – and it’s not like she skimps on the meat or the noodles to make up for it.  Nope, it’s the same dish, at the same price.  Just with a delicious added freebie on top.

And I don’t understand why she bothers.  The dumplings are labour-intensive to make, and don’t earn her any extra cash.  If they were always on offer, I suppose they could be a way to lure in customers, and make her place stand out from the half-dozen identical noodle shops within shouting distance – but she usually doesn’t have them, and when she does, they tend to be hidden away.  They might be a treat to reward (and encourage) the loyalty of regular customers – but I remember her offering me some back when I first moved here, in the days before I had enough Thai to order food, or even to say, “I would like this,” and point.

The closest I can come is that, well, maybe she just likes to make us dumplings?

That’s not as silly as it sounds.  Let me lay down this beat and see if you pick it up.  The Rough Guide to Thailand states that three concepts are essential to understanding the Thai mindset:  jai yen, or “cool heart”, which I’ve talked about before; mai pen rai, which means, “It’s no problem,” but is less a no-worries philosophy and more closely related to jai yen – it’s about laughing things off and rolling with the punches; and sanuk, or fun, which everything should be arranged to be, as far as possible.  At this point in my time here, I think I’d add a fourth:  jai dee, or good heart.  Thai people are very focused on doing the right thing, and being generous with their time and help – according to some of my friends here, it’s very tied in with Buddhist ideas of karma.  Having trouble getting your motorcycle out of a parking space?  Someone will come over and start helping to move the bikes around you.  Ask for help from someone who doesn’t understand, or can’t answer, your question?  They’ll call over a friend, or even approach strangers on your behalf.  Leave your helmet, your groceries, whatever in the basket of your motorcycle?  It’s extremely rare that anyone would dream of taking it (and even when it does occur, a lot of helmet theft is spur-of-the-moment “borrowing” to avoid helmet fines, not premeditated theft for profit).

So it’s not entirely bizarre that someone would make extra treats for her customers just because, without any business motivation.  To take a similar example:  at another cookshop near me, rice or dry noodle dishes usually come with a bowl of soup on the side, but it’s understood that if the shop runs out of soup, it runs out of soup.  It would be terrible form to complain that you didn’t get your soup, whereas in a Western restaurant, it would only be natural to point out that one of the sides never arrived.  That’s because in a Western restaurant, it would be treated as part of the package to which you were entitled, whereas at a Thai cookshop, it’s seen as a courtesy, almost like a gift from your hosts.

It’s kind of charming, actually.  I’ll admit, I’m a sucker for an unexpected free treat, even a rare one; the fact that you never know when it’s coming gives something as simple as going to the noodle stall a tiny added thrill.

… which, come to think of it, probably keeps me going back more often.

Huh.  Maybe noodle-shop lady is more calculating than I thought.

Adventures in Thai Boxing, or, Friends Make the Best Collateral

So, tonight I went to my first-ever Muay Thai (Thai boxing) match!  My friend Moray (who's visiting for a couple of weeks) and I got some Mexican food for dinner and then wandered over to the International Thaepae Boxing Stadium, which is basically a concrete box ringed with bars, with an older ladyboy (who, I have to say, was totally working her skintight leopard-print dress) taking tickets at the door.  The whole place is lit up in multicoloured neon and is just the right side of delightfully seedy (which might be put on for the tourists, but it's still fun).  I only regret that we went so early, because they start playing the Muay Thai music about half an hour in advance.  Unlike traditional Thai music (or modern Thai pop), Muay Thai music is weird, discordant stuff that sounds a bit like a bagpipe being run over by a motorcycle.  (In fact, Moray and I speculated that the first Muay Thai match may have occurred when a motorcycle driver got into a fistfight with a travelling Scottish bagpiper he'd just run over.)  After ten minutes of it, anyone would be on edge enough to start punching the people around them.

And then, finally, the lights went down; the first two boxers entered in their ceremonial headbands to pray at each corner of the ring, followed by an elaborate, genuflecting dance in the centre; and the music, kind of hilariously, switched to "The Final Countdown". :)

Thai boxing is very entertaining to watch - it's more about kicks and knees and grappling than it is about straight-up punching, and it's a combination of brutal and weirdly affectionate, as fighters sometimes stay locked in each others' arms for almost a minute, scrabbling for purchase.  Some of the more experienced fighters pull off acrobatic moves that would almost look more at home in capoeira.  But I meant it about the brutal - we saw one knockout, one dislocated shoulder (that the coach relocated on the spot - "Just pop your arm over the ropes there"... *CRAAAACK*), and one kick to the groin that left the boxer whimpering in pain and basically pleading with the ref to end the match even before the countdown (you have to be ready to resume fighting before the count of ten) was complete.  Owww.

Incidentally, I want it on the record that I successfully picked the winner in five of the six fights - all of them except the main fight, in fact, which was the only one that went all five rounds and was won on points.  I obviously didn't place a bet, because VSO might frown on it, or at least on paying for new kneecaps after I got mine broken by Thai bookies.  We DID try to figure out how to break it to Moray's boss that Moray wouldn't be able to return to the office, because he'd be going to work in a Thai brothel after I lost him in a bet.  If this seems harsh, I should point out that he was contemplating selling me to pay for the cost of our dinner in Chiang Dao on Sunday. :)  (Ultimately, though, with my success rate, I don't think I would have lost Moray in the bet after all.  Possibly, I would have won some other foreigner who'd been unlucky at a previous match.)

After the first four matches, there was a break, and then five young fighters came and knelt in a circle in the middle of the ring.  One of the refs went around and, very slowly and ceremoniously, put blindfolds on each of them.  We waited with bated breath:  were they going to face off in pairs for the honour of fighting the next proper bout?  Or were there going to be some kind of blindfolded feats of martial arts?

AND THEN GANGNAM STYLE CAME ON THE SOUND SYSTEM AND ALL FIVE OF THEM KICKED THE SHIT OUT OF EACH OTHER.

This is quite possibly the best piece of entertainment I have ever seen.  The greatest bit was that the ref stayed in the ring to guide them towards each other, and sometimes one of the boxers would mistakenly attack him instead.  At one point, one fighter started hitting the ref... and then another started punching him in the head from the other side... and then all five fighters ended up in a heap on top of him.  I'm probably a bad person for laughing at that, but it was absolute gold.

We ultimately decided that the only thing in the universe that could be better would be to put Psy in the centre of the ring and have him dance Gangnam Style while five blindfolded Thai boxers tried to hit him.  We would call this divine sport of the gods "Muay Psy". :)

The Dog Days Are Not Over

This is another thing I've been meaning to post for a while:  Dog Days.

You know how people have good and bad hair days?  In Thailand, you have good and bad dog days.  (And primarily terrible hair days - thank you, motorcycle helmet! - but that's beside the point.)  I'm serious.  Some days, I can waltz past the guard dogs at the gated mansions and the soi (alley) dogs who sleep in petrol station forecourts without getting so much as a dozy "woof" out of any of them.  Other days, even my neighbours' dogs - who have known me for close to a year now, and will occasionally even play fetch with me (although their concept of fetch extends only as far as "recover thrown object, and then make off with it like a douchebag") - will suddenly charge out of their front gates at me, barking their heads off and treating me like a one-woman barbarian invasion.

I've worked out that part of it is timing.  If it's after midnight, and I'm not on a motorcycle, I'm clearly wrong for that time and place, and therefore fair game.  (Found that out the hard way during a 2 am water run - *shudders*.)  But it's been known to happen in broad daylight, too.  Is it some scent that's throwing them off, like a different shampoo?  Is it my mood on those days?  Have I eaten so much crispy pork in Thailand that I now smell of it?  Who knows?

My worst dog day - well, dog night - was the first and, so far (touch wood), only time that dogs have actually chased me while I was riding my motorbike.  I was driving down a dark street, looking for a friend's house, and at the point where the paved road turned to dirt, there was a pack of soi dogs basically sprawled halfway across the road.  Holding my breath, I eased past them... but just my luck, my friend's house wasn't actually down that turn.  So I had to turn right around, and drive past the pack again.

The first time, they had raised their heads to look narrowly at me, and there had been a couple of warning growls.  But the second time - with an apparent consensus of, "Oh hell no, that bitch thinks she's coming BACK this way?  I don't believe this!" - the entire pack sprang to their feet and started baying after me.

Now, when you're being chased by dogs, your first instinct is going to be to get out of there as fast as possible.  THIS IS THE WRONG INSTINCT.  Nothing is likely to make a dog more determined to chase you than running away, and even on a motorcycle, odds are you won't be able to make your escape fast enough.  (Plus, your legs are awfully tempting targets when you're riding.)  No, my friend taught me the best response when she was giving me driving lessons.  You slow right the hell down, and as far as possible, you act relaxed.  In fact, one of the most effective ways to disarm a dog who's coming for you is to put on a big grin, pat your thighs, and babytalk to him.  I'm dead serious here.  Dogs can sense fear, and like twitchy Cold War governments, if you're afraid and poised to defend yourself, they immediately start wondering what dodgy thing you're up to.

(Hence the world's least helpful advice:  If you're afraid of dogs, stop being afraid of dogs, because otherwise they'll do scary things to you.  I've found that this is equally applicable to dating, and just as unhelpful.)

So I slowed to a crawl, and started calling out in a high voice, "Puppy-puppy!  Here puppy!"  And most of the dogs started giving me puzzled or contemptuous looks, and left off the chase.  A couple of them hung on a little longer, one even taking a couple of snaps at my heels, but when I didn't react, even he got bored.

Point:  Humanity, I think. :)

However, I was pretty shaken up, and it didn't help much when one of my local dogs decided to start playing a little game with me.  He likes to run up behind me and suddenly lunge for my ankles, like he's going to bite me - and then stop just short, huffing hot air on my feet, before running away with his tail wagging.  The first time he did this, I leapt six feet in the air, so now of course he things it's the Greatest Prank Ever.  I have dubbed him Asshat Dog.  (Actually, I had named in James Dean because he was always hanging around the motorcycle carpark, but as far as I'm concerned, he's Asshat Dog now.)

It could be a lot worse, though.  Chiang Mai dogs are comparatively mild.  One of my friends in the border town of Mae Sot is currently on a course of rabies shots after a dog there took a chunk out of her leg; they play for KEEPS in the smaller towns.

With the neighbourhood cats, I seem to be making steadier, although slower, progress.  Most of the cats who live along my route home have apparently decided that I'm okay now.  The main way I know this is that I'm now seeing them everywhere, instead of just a glimpse of a tail here and there as they dart away over fences.  The ginger cat belonging to my downstairs neighbour will actually demand ear-skritches, and occasionally lie down on my feet if I don't oblige for long enough.  My neighbours down the road have two kittens who actively tried to follow me home the other night (to be fair, I had fed them some of my fried chicken).  It makes me ridiculously happy.

All this makes a nice change from the boot-faced cat who lives at the house next to my office and hates me with the fire of a thousand suns.  I don't know whether it's the farang thing, or what the hell I did to him in a past life, but the resentment is palpable.  I even tried to bribe him with chicken.  This Did Not Go Well.

Me:  Kitteh want some chicken?  Yummy chicken!
Cat:  FUCK YOU.
Me:  *quails*
Cat:  *glares*
Me:  I'll... just leave it right here at a safe distance for you, yeah?
Cat:  DIE IN A FIRE.

It's one of those things you don't automatically expect to be different between cultures, but of course it is:  Thai people treat their animals differently than people in, say, the UK, so obviously the animals behave differently.

Incidentally, now that it's almost cold season, everyone is going to start putting shirts on their dogs again.  I can't wait. :)

I'd Sit in the Quad, and Think, "Oh My God!"

My landlady has installed a coffee and cocoa dispenser outside her office.

That's it.  Thailand is officially just like university.  My room is equipped with flat-pack furniture and a minifridge; everyone finds it weird that I drink tea and not coffee; I do laundry in my pajamas, because I need to wash everything I own; I almost never cook for myself; and there's a great social scene available, but you have to look past the parade of drunken 18-year-olds to find it.

And again like university, I can't get the cocoa dispenser to work.

Now, speaking of Thai cultural peculiarities, I'm going to tell you a little story.  Gather 'round, children, and you shall hear the tale of A. and his Mullet Adventures!


Some time ago, my colleague A. decided to cut his hair.  (You might remember that this is what would later lead to people being completely unable to recognise him.)  Ever since I’d known him, A. had had a kind of softer version of a white-boy ’fro – a shock of hair that reached almost down to his shoulders, or would if it didn’t prefer to shoot out in all directions, in that, “I don’t want to be a hair!  I want to be a DRAGON!” way that I’m all too familiar with, myself. :)  (With apologies to Edward Monckton.)

On this particular evening, there was a house party to say goodbye to two of the fast-dwindling Chiang Mai contingent.  I was just rolling up when a man I’d never seen before approached and asked how I was.

I did a double take.  “A.?”

The halo of hair I was used to seeing was gone, and in its place – instead of the traditional, close-cropped style I’d expected – was the most classic, sharply-cut mullet I’d ever seen.

And the crazy thing was, it actually kind of suited him.  I’ve often wondered who the hell the mullet was designed for, since it usually looks uniformly crappy on everyone, but on A., it framed his features in such a way that it almost worked.  (A., like me, is from Joisey, so that explains a lot.)  I complimented him on it, and he laughed, a bit embarrassed.  “Oh, yeah, my girlfriend was cutting my hair, and when she got to this point, I asked her to stop and leave it like that.  It’s kinda silly – it’s just for the party tonight.”

But it wasn’t.

Over the next week or so, it was clear that A. had fallen in love with his mullet.  He not only kept it, he changed his profile picture on Facebook to a joking shot of him in a muscle tee, kissing his bicep.  And the fascinating thing is, A. wasn’t the only one enjoying his new look.

“Thai people love the mullet,” he announced, strutting into a meeting one morning.

“Seriously?”

“Yeah!  I mean, they think it’s funny, but I swear, I have people opening up to me more now than with my old hair.  They trust me more.”

It sounded insane at the time, but if the Thai people he talked to were anything like our Burmese colleagues, then I could see what A. meant.  Everyone in the office spent ages cooing over his hair – giggling at it, touching it, wanting to know more about the cultural meaning that we Westerners were clearly attaching to it.  (When A. tried to explain the concept of “redneck”, they nodded sagely.  Yes, there were people in the more provincial parts of central Burma who behaved like this.  Although with fewer guns.)  Whenever someone new came by for a meeting, the whole process would start over.  I could see why A. was getting a kick out of it.

Apparently, outside the office, the attention was even friendlier – although not quite as platonic.  A. reported one day that he’d never had so many Thai women hitting on him.  He put it down to the fact that he looked more harmless and approachable with a silly haircut, but given some of the elaborately spiky styles – influenced largely by Korean pop bands – that I’ve seen on fashionable young Thai men, it’s equally possible that these women thought he was a trendsetter. :)  Sadly, I think that was the death knell of the mullet.  A few days later, A.’s girlfriend apparently had Words with him, and he came into work with a classic short haircut instead.

I missed the mullet, though.

I think A. did, too.

Nice Soap, Redux

Let me just start out by saying that I'm very sorry.  I've let this blog languish for a lot longer than I intended.  July and early August were pretty insane, with travel, friends visiting, and a bout of food poisoning that left me in bed for the better part of a week (luckily, I have friends in Chiang Mai who will rock up with rehydration salts and an Xbox and play Soul Caliber with me when I'm too weak to get up).  Still, I meant to get back to it after a few weeks - 

- and then there was a sudden death in my family.  And work started going nuts (every company and international financial institution in existence is trying to get its claws into Burma right now).  And it was suddenly Very Important that I go to all the border towns and teach training sessions on sustainable development - usually with only one or two days' notice.

So by the time I lifted my head, it had been more than two months since I'd posted.  I promise to do better from now on.

Time to get back to posting about the train of crazy that is my life.  In no particular order.  Much like my life.
And speaking of which, I never realised that the thematic phrase that would crop up again and again in this particular plot arc of my life would be “Nice Soap”.
The other day, I met a work associate’s wife and daughter, a friend of theirs, and the friend’s dead husband.  They were all pretty awesome, although I think the dead guy probably came off the coolest.  (No pun intended.)

About a week ago, you see, I was asked to go down to Mae Sot - a town right on the Thai-Burma border - and run a two-day training on sustainable development for a group of youth leaders.  After the second day, the head of the organisation running the training took me out to dinner, saying he wanted to introduce me to his wife (which is unusual, but when I found out she was a Westerner it made sense – “Hey, you, honky, meet my honky spouse,” is a lot more common than, “Meet my Burmese spouse, with whom you may or may not share a language”).  She was a lovely, extravagantly warm South African woman with her three-year-old in tow – a plump, sleepy bundle of pink and curls.  We went to one of Mae Sot’s roughly four Western restaurants (for the second time during this trip – the very sweet young American volunteer who picked me up from the bus station took me there the first night, as well).  Mae Sot, while it isn’t tiny, still feels like a ridiculously small town to me.  I mean, comparatively, it is:  on top of the four Western restaurants, they have one supermarket, a couple of large street markets, and really just one main street.  I don’t think I’ve driven/been driven anywhere here that took longer than ten minutes, as opposed to the minimum half hour it takes to get from my house to anywhere in central Chiang Mai.

At the restaurant, we met up with a friend of the couple’s – a force-of-nature older American who works with groups of Burmese women to help them develop traditional weaving into viable livelihoods.  We were chatting idly, and I asked what had brought her to Thailand in the first place.

She sat back a little, and her sharp blue eyes softened and blurred, but her voice was steady as she told me, “Well, my husband was diagnosed with terminal cancer.”

Apparently, the doctors kept giving him different prognoses – he had one year left, no, maybe three, no – until, one day, in the middle of a discussion about something else completely, he turned to his wife and said, “Why don’t we just go to Thailand?”  They both had strong ties here from previous NGO work, but no real plans for what they would do when they arrived; connections to a good grassroots charity helped them land on their feet, though.  And that was the beginning of what this woman described as the best part of their forty-plus-year marriage.  And damn, the way she talked about her husband made me wish I could have known him.  He apparently had a deliciously evil sense of humour, and took great delight in basically trolling reality:  he once tried to convince a local Burmese group of the advantages of growing a new kind of cash crop by enthusing about how well it worked, then whispering conspiratorially, “Don’t tell anyone this, but my [seventy-odd-year-old] wife has been eating them, and now she’s pregnant!”  And when he sprained his knee and was asked to lie on a gurney in the hospital corridor for a few minutes before it could be examined, he passed the time gasping to strangers, “Help me!  I don’t know what’s wrong with me!  I’ve been here for three days!” :)

His great project – one that he’d started on a trip to Thailand many years before – was nice soap.  That is, he wanted to help train Burmese communities in the manufacture of fancy soaps to sell.  The project kept running into problems – difficulty packaging and marketing the stuff, difficulty finding markets, and the number of tries it took to work the kinks out of the process didn’t help.  He ended up with a lot of bog-standard, not-so-nice soap along the way.  But the thing was, while the nice soap had trouble getting off the ground, the bog-standard soap was a hit – it was cheap for rural communities to manufacture for their own use.  They could buy the inexpensive oils nearby and mix the soap inside bamboo, slicing the soap-filled bamboo stalk into round cakes once it hardened.  For remote villages struggling with health and hygiene, it was brilliant.

Eventually, his wife said to him, “Are you sure that this isn’t what you’re supposed to do?”

The man passed away two years ago, at the age of seventy-four, thirteen years after his diagnosis.  His loved ones still talk and laugh about him as if he were alive, which I think is a great tribute.

We had a really nice meal, actually – all ridiculous stories instead of Very Serious Conversations About Burma, which puts it way ahead of other work functions in my book.  Not that Very Serious Conversations About Burma don’t have their place, but that place is when you’re making very serious decisions, not trying to impress people (and yes, I fall into that trap sometimes).  And the American friend actually works in Chiang Mai, so we swapped numbers.  Which reminds me that I really need to get some business cards printed.  Even getting the two sets I’d need (personal and professional) would be cheap enough; I’m just being lazy about it.  But seriously, the time in my life when torn-off scraps of paper with my number on them were acceptable ended when I graduated from university.

I’m beginning to think that they should read:  “Catherine Martin, Researcher, Writer, Soap Enthusiast”.


(Speaking of soap, I got some lovely stuff for 10 baht this past weekend at a brilliant market I didn't even know existed.  Behind the big Western supermarket on the Superhighway, it turns out that there's a WAREHOUSE-SIZED market full of food - vats of delicious curries, loads of fruit, a huge variety of sweets (many of which I'd never seen before), buckets with live eels, spit-roasted frogs, it's awesome.  It's hard to believe that I've been living a ten-minute drive away for almost a year without even knowing it was there.  Then again, it's possible that this market is new.  A while back, I was stuck for the entire drive into town behind one of the many trucks with loudspeakers that drive slowly around, blaring advertisements - this one was yelling about a new "Organic CommuniTEE Market Talaad!" (yes, with exactly that inflection, over and over) at this particular supermarket plaza.  Which, for those of you who aren't up on your Thai, is an organic community market... market.  If this was the market (the market market?) in question, then that slow, torturous drive was well worth it.  And, as I said, they also had some beautiful soaps - I picked up a bar of honey and lime, and one of jasmine and almond milk.  They're supposedly whitening, as well, but occasionally I just need to surrender to Thailand's conspiracy to make me whiter than I already am.)

Vote Early, Vote Often!

Democracy, round two!

I've got a backlog of stuff I've been meaning to post, so as I did a few weeks back, I'm going to throw some of these anecdotes out there for you to decide.  Pick a number, and I'll tell you a story.

As always, no advance info beyond the titles. :)

These are the numbers that didn't get picked last time.  Show them some love!

1. Mullet adventures!
2. Good and bad dog days
3. The questions Thais ask… and the one they won’t
4. BUG PLAGUE

And these are brand-new and shiny!

     5.  The Big No
     6.  The Ginger Tea Nazi
     7.  The Name's Enough
     8.  I have had it with these m*****f****** dams on this m*****f****** river!
     9.  Welcome to Thailand.  Try not to die.

In the meantime, I'll leave you with news that the frighteningly intelligent folks at Google hooked 16,000 computers up to create a massive electronic intelligence capable of learning.  And unleashed it on the internet.

What did this astonishing invention do when faced with the collected wisdom of human civilisation?

It did what any of us would do.  It searched for cats.

Now, what's really mindboggling about this:  Not only did the researchers not tell it to look for cats, they didn't even teach it what a cat is.

"“We never told it during the training, ‘This is a cat,’ ” said Dr. Dean... “It basically invented the concept of a cat. We probably have other ones that are side views of cats.”"

So the vast artificial intelligence discerned the existence of cats... and decided it quite liked them.

I never imagined the robot revolt would be so... cuddly.

Chan puud pasaa Thai nidnoy, or, playing with language

Thai class is still plugging away, and apart from the whole “get up early and drive to the other end of the city” thing, I’m actually quite enjoying it.  We’re down to a good core group now:  a ridiculously friendly Aussie couple (I keep hearing my friend Moray’s voice in my head, saying despairingly of Australians, “They’re so nice, they’re just so nice…” :)), a globe-trotting Swiss techie, a fun British guy who’s been here for about ten years and has a Thai wife (just as a disclaimer, there are times when foreigner-Thai relationships can have some pretty squicky power dynamics, and times when they don’t, and this seems like the latter as far as I know), and a British (him)/American (her) couple who remind me of my two best friends.

The lessons are cool, too, even if I’m struggling with the alphabet (Y HALO THUR, 32 vowels!).  I think my favourites are the days when we focus on food and terms used in restaurants.  Last week, we spent three hours on different ways to order noodles.

Thailand has a LOT of noodles.

Today, our teacher, who is energetic and completely adorable and looks about twelve, even though she’s an accomplished scholar of English and Japanese, told us, “Every Thai person prefers farang (foreigners) who puud pasaa Thai mai chat (don’t speak Thai clearly).”

After a pause, one of the class asked, “Why?” 

“It’s cute,” she said.

So, in that spirit, here are a few stories about language.

***
I was here for almost four months before I started taking Thai classes, so for a while, I was getting by on scraps I picked up and what my friends were kind enough to teach me over dinner.  Plus miming.  A lot of miming.  One of my friends here, T., sat me down over ice cream and took me through some of the basics of the language in a more structured way.  After half an hour or so, I had a few notebook pages full of useful phrases, and I asked her to help me practice them.

She got as far as she could before she burst out laughing.

Apparently, I was confusing the words “chan” (the feminine form of “I”) and “chang” (elephant).  So, basically, I was bellowing, “The elephant is hungry!  The elephant would like some pad thai!”

I’m glad she corrected me, but I kind of love the image of myself barrelling around Chiang Mai, confusing and terrifying people by obliviously demanding food and amenities for my invisible elephant.  Thai people would totally accommodate me.  You know they would.  “O-okay… um… would the elephant like chillies in that?”

I’d be a legend. :)

***

The other day, we were going through some basic letter combinations in class.  This is a good way, not just to learn how the consonants and vowels affect each other (the combination determines tone and so on), but also to pick up obscure vocabulary, as our teacher explains whether the combinations are actual words and what those words mean.  This particular day, she announced, “‘Bpoon’ is mean ‘semen’.”

The entire class gaped at her.  “What?”

“You know.  Semen.”

She looked out in confusion at our horrified faces, and mimed plastering the nearest wall.
We all simultaneously sat back in relief.  “Oh!  Cement!”

… at least, I hope to God she meant “cement”. :)

***

Speaking of my Thai teacher, she thinks that one of the funniest things about foreigners is the way we eat fruit.

Thais never just pick up an apple and bite into it.  They’ll peel it, slice it up, and eat it with a spoon.  So to Thai eyes, Westerners eating fruit whole with our hands looks barbaric.  Or as my teacher put it, “You look like students who have been stealing off fruit trees, and now you need to eat it all before someone catches you!”

(Btw, if you really want to crack Thai people up, walk down the street eating a guava.  It’s a visual pun – the word for guava is farang, as well, so you’re a farang with a farang.  Thais love this stuff.)

***

When it comes to studying Thai, I just can’t get away from elephants.

One of our exercises in class was to answer the question, “What do you like to do?” by listing a few different things.  Now, my memory for vocabulary in other languages is pretty lousy, and so the list of things I like that I could actually say in Thai was disappointingly short.  (My neighbours probably think I’m the most boring person imaginable, since whenever they ask where I’m going, I always tell them either that I’m going to work or that I’m going to eat – those are the only two answers that I can reliably remember!)  So I threw in, “I like to drink tea,” because, well, I do, and I could even remember the words for it.

Kind of.

The teacher’s eyes widened.  “What?” she asked.

“Duum chaa,” I said hesitantly.  “Drink tea?”

She started giggling like mad.  “I thought you said ‘duu chang’ – look at elephant!”

“I like looking at elephants, too!” I protested, over the class’s laughter.  “It just doesn’t come up very much!”

(Of course, I don’t get to look at my hungry, pad-thai-loving elephant.  Because he’s invisible. :))

***

Naturally, some words are more difficult to translate than others, whether from Thai to English or vice versa.  Either they’re difficult to define in simple terms (today, the whole class got in on the effort to explain to our teacher what ‘niche’ meant, without success), or they’re so culturally rooted that even a basic definition has to start by explaining the cultural differences.

But sometimes, those are the words that stick with you, and that you find yourself using even in conversations in English.  Because they’re not directly translatable, it often means that they describe something that English doesn’t quite have a word for – whether that’s something universal that Thai just puts very well, or something specific to that culture that you need to be able to discuss if you’re living here.

In Thai, a lot of the phrases that I end up occasionally adopting have to do with the word “jai”, or “heart”.  Thais describe an awful lot of feelings and character traits as some kind of heart.  There are the ones that are easy to explain:  “jai dee”, for example, is literally “heart good”, and means exactly the same as in English – good-hearted, or kind.  “Mii naam jai” sounds a little weirder to English speakers – it literally translates as “to have a water heart”.  It means generous, which actually makes sense if you think of having an overflowing heart.

And then there are the “jai” phrases that really are tough to explain, like “kray jai”.  There’s no direct translation for that in English, although I imagine quite a few southeast/east Asian languages have an equivalent.  “Polite” is probably the closest we could get, but that doesn’t even begin to cover it.  “Kray jai” basically means that you’re afraid of offending people, so you act deferentially and do everything you can to avoid showing anyone up – although it can get to the point of being so deferential and self-effacing that you’re showing people up by default.  If you offer to buy me dinner, you mii naam jai.  If I spend the whole time at dinner patting your hand and listening sympathetically to your troubles, I’m being jai dee.  If, when the bill comes, we spend an hour going oh-but-you-MUST-let-me-pay-I-simply-COULDN’T-allow-you-to-put-yourself-out, we’re both being kray jai.  And probably annoying the hell out of the waiter.

(Incidentally, the same concept exists in the indigenous language many of my Burmese colleagues speak – the word there is “anna”.  Occasionally, when my boss takes the staff to eat family-style and no one is willing to finish off a dish on the table in case someone else might want some, my boss will tell us, “Don’t be anna!”  It’s kind of like, “Don’t be shy!” or “Don’t stand on ceremony!” – but the difference is that, unlike those phrases, “Don’t be anna!” is one-time permission.  It implies that, of course, you’ll be anna at all other times.  Why wouldn’t you be?)

The two “jai” phrases that probably come up the most are deceptively straightforward:  “jai ron”, or “hot heart”, and “jai yen”, or “cool heart”.  Pretty easy, right?  I bet that if I asked you to guess at the definitions, you’d assume that someone who’s jai ron is hot-headed or emotional, while someone who’s jai yen is even-tempered or undemonstrative – and you’d be right.  But what foreigners won’t immediately realise about these phrases is that you’re always supposed to be jai yen.  Jai ron is absolutely, unequivocally BAD – probably the worst social sin in Thai culture.  It’s not like in Western culture, where to be passionate, even angry, for a good cause is often considered a virtue, and a lot of our favourite fictional heroes are hot-headed young things.

Obviously, both cultural frameworks have their ups and downs – even as an adult, I still don’t do very well with raised voices and blatant anger, so I find the emphasis on jai yen here soothing.  On the other hand, I’ve heard male colleagues tell female colleagues, “Jai yen!  Jai yen!” in the same tone that a British guy might use to say, “Oh, calm down, dear,” and that makes me bristle.

(Incidentally, a depressing example of language reflecting culture – our Thai teacher told us this morning, “This is not a good country for women,” and pointed out that it says a lot about Thai attitudes that the language has an incredible variety of words for “bitch”.)
It’s just interesting that, once you get used to these concepts, you end up using the phrases because nothing else really fits (at least when you’re talking about life here).  I remember going out to dinner with T. and a few of the women from the office, and we ended up talking about a dispute one of them was having with a male colleague.  T. – who’s from Canada, and was addressing a group of Burmese women, in English – asked, “Why’s he being so jai ron about this?”  Because that was the real question – not, “Why is he angry?” but, “Why is he being so unwarrantedly pissy about this that he’s willing to go against cultural norms and expectations?”

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to drink tea.  Or possibly look at elephants.

*NB:  The Thai part of this post title means, "I speak a little Thai."  It does NOT mean, "The elephant speaks a little Thai."  I think.

One Day in a Border Town

Warning - long post is long.

The strange thing about living in Thailand (apart, obviously, from their tendency to put ham in doughnuts) is that loving the differences and resenting them; feeling like I could take on the world and feeling drained and in need of some goddamned Western-style bread; in other words, coping and not coping, come in waves.  Actually, maybe that isn’t strange at all.  Maybe that describes the process of getting used to living anywhere, especially after the first few months, when your focus shifts from adjusting to settling in and building a life.

So I have rough patches, sometimes.  (Not always bread-related, I should add. :))  There are days when I feel like I’ve already tried every dish from every vendor in our little local market about five times, or when I waste whole evenings idly websurfing – surrounded by dorm-style furniture, under a fluorescent light, in a room that could be anywhere in the world – and can barely remember, afterwards, what I even read.  Or when I finish checking over the spelling and grammar of the thousandth English translation for my organisation, and wonder what good I’m even doing here.

But there are also a lot of good days.  More good days now, I think, than over the past month or two.  VSO warned us going in that for most volunteers, there’s a rocky period about three to five months in:  you’re homesick, the things that used to be thrilling and exotic are now irritating or inconvenient or just not the way you want them to be, and you still haven’t fully adjusted.  It’s like you’ve scuffed up your new life, but you haven’t quite broken it in.  (And you’re getting sick of putting metaphorical bandaids on your rhetorical toes every morning.)  One of my brother’s friends, back when he was living in Nepal, put it even more simply:  “After six months, there will come a point where you’ll hate it.”

I never hated it here.  I doubt I ever will.  But I know what that adjustment period feels like – and now, I think I’m coming out the other side. 

I’m starting to feel really at home in my neighbourhood.  The stallholders and the neighbours know me; we seem to have progressed past the point where they were all insatiably curious about the farang, and kept trying to pepper me with questions, and then past the point where we all more or less ignored each other on the street (probably my fault – city girl instincts), and to a stage where we can exchange a smile or a few words without it feeling like we’re staging an elaborate pantomime of a cultural encounter.  Even my neighbour’s cats put up with ear skritches now.

I’m also starting to be more comfortable with the rhythms of the work.  There can be a definite sense of hurry-up-and-wait about it; sometimes, they don’t give me anything new for days, while at other times, they ring me up at night or on a Saturday morning to come in and check over a funding submission.  But I understand enough about the workings of the organisation now that I don’t have to wait for assignments all the time; I can pitch in, or work up proposals for new projects (provided that I present them as a range of possibilities, to avoid my boss just automatically saying yes to all of them to please me). 

So I want to talk about one of the good days.  This was last Tuesday.  Pretty much an ordinary day – nothing earth-shattering happened… but that’s kind of the point.

Let me tell you a story.

Night of the Living Bread (a.k.a. My Lunch Has Eyes)

On Thursday, I showed up to our weekly pub quiz looking like a drowned rat.  The storm had started when I was only about ten minutes from the pub, but man, it’s pretty astonishing how much water Thailand can dump on you in the space of ten minutes.  By the time I crossed the moat, the road was swamped, with the water practically up to my pedals.

And then I got this text from Pam:

Trying to get to quiz but there’s been a powercut and I’m trapped in the elevator!

So yeah, my night could have started out worse!

To Pam’s credit, she not only stayed completely calm while trapped in a completely dark box with the temperature rising (no more fan), which probably would have had me leaving bloody claw marks on the sealed door, but when they finally located her by knocking on the walls (no emergency call button, either – someone didn’t think through the whole “emergency call button linked to the same circuit as the elevators” thing!) and got her loose, she hopped on her motorcycle in the still-pouring rain and drove down anyway, only missing the first round of the quiz.  That woman is hardcore.  We walked away with third place. :)

Given the horror-movie slant of the evening, though, I thought this would be an appropriate time to share something utterly and indescribably Thai:  the Body Bakery in Ratchaburi.

Yup.  That is bread in the shape of dismembered human body parts.

It’s completely edible, and also accurate enough to be extremely disturbing (seriously, look at that top photo and tell me that isn’t exactly the way a pair of real, shrink-wrapped human heads would look).  My favourite part, though, is the fact that the baker believes the message of his art is, “Don’t judge by outward appearances.”  Right, because I thought that was a severed head, but it’s actually lovely, lovely bread!  I think we’ve got the closing couplet of a Dr. Seuss book here.

(Why did I say this was utterly Thai?  It’s that mix of gore and innocence – it seems very fitting for a society that considers watching the cleanup from a fatal road accident to be a spectator sport, and then turns around and invents motorcycle helmets with kitty ears in a variety of soft pastel colours.  Also, Thais love baked goods, so there we go.)

But what if snacking on a bread head gives you a craving for the real thing?  Well, you may get your wish soon enough, considering that the zombie apocalypse has started in Florida.

Clearly, it’s time to bone up on the mechanics of the zombie takeover of the world, and the most statistically effective strategies for stopping ravening hordes of the undead.

And if any of you haven’t heard this yet, consider it the soundtrack to the apocalypse...

Of Luxuries and Language

SATURDAY FTW.

I stayed up insanely late last night, because I was determined to finish this article for work before the end of the week (and decided that 5 am on Saturday constituted “before the end of the week” :)).  It’s not due until Thursday, but it’s pretty important (we’ve been asked by a pan-Asian newspaper based in Nepal to do a 2,000-word piece on what’s likely to happen to Burma’s rainforests when the country opens up to Western investment), and I wanted to have the rough draft done so that next week I can refine it/run it past people.

So, needless to say, after that, I slept like the dead (well, actually, I woke up at 10.30 in the morning to email the draft article to my colleague, then I slept like the dead!), and decided that, with the article done, I could kick back today.  So I drove down to the Ping River and explored the neighbourhood between the riverside Warrorot Market and the old city.  It was very relaxing.  That area of town feels more urban, in a way, than the old city itself:  the buildings are taller and more likely to be grey, nondescript concrete, but there are also some great hole-in-the-wall shops and cookhouses, and on a nice afternoon, most of the neighbourhood seems to sit out on the street (especially in front of the bike shops – it’s actually kind of cool to stop and watch a bunch of guys spread a disassembled motorcycle engine over half the sidewalk to tinker with it).  It feels very much like an area where people live and work, whereas the old city can sometimes seem like an artificial tourist paradise.

I poked around a small wat (Wat Ou Sai Khan, where the main shrine houses a jade Buddha; I was there too late in the day to see it, but I got some nice pictures of the temple and the murals) and got a bag of hot shrimp dumplings, covered in sweet and sour sauce, from the market.  I also stopped by one of the bars at the edge of the old city for a frozen margarita, and to read through one of my old guidebooks to see what else I want to see around the city (and what I’d like to show my guests in July!), then had dinner at a Mexican place called Loco Elvis, which I’d always wondered about.  (Good quesadillas, although my favourite place remains El Diablo, right across from it.)  I took a stroll through Backpacker’s Alley.  I discovered a Thai manga library, where you can rent a wide range of Japanese manga translated into Thai (and some Thai series, as well, I assume) – it’s a fantastic idea, given that most young Thais probably can’t afford to follow several series at a time (hell, many Western comic readers can only afford to follow a few series).  And at the end of the night, I walked back through Warrorot, which is packed with a young, mostly Thai crowd on Saturday nights, and stopped to buy ALL THE LYCHEE.  EVER.

Actually, that’s not even remotely true.  Yes, I have a giant shopping bag full of lychee, but that’s like a grain of sand next to the beach that was Warrorot Market.  It’s that time of year – they can barely give the stuff away.  And since mango season is ending, I figured I’d move onto a new Exotic Fruit To Make Myself Completely Sick On. :)

In one of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels, he tells the woman he’s in love with that he’s not going to kiss her when they jointly make a breakthrough in an investigation, because the first time they kiss shouldn’t be a footnote to something else; it should be unforgettable, “like when you taste lychee for the first time”.  That was me today.  Well, technically – I’ve had lychee-flavoured things, but I’d never actually had it fresh before.  The woman who sold me the lychee peeled me one to eat as she was weighing the rest (which is a common, nice little touch in fruit markets:  they’ll often give you a free taste of whatever’s in season or whatever they happen to be cutting up at the time, regardless of whether it’s what you’re buying or not).  I can see what Peter meant, actually.  Lychee’s not the strongest or most exotic taste (of course, the amount of imported fruit available in 1930s London was probably pretty limited), but it’s bright and sweet and kind of complex, so that you notice different flavours emerging as you eat it.  It’s one of those things, like jackfruit and durian, where I’m not likely to forget the first time I had it.  (Granted, in the case of durian, it was more like, “Dear God, I need to immediately forget ever eating this abomination, WHY DOES MY HOUSE SMELL LIKE IT,”, but you win some, you lose some. :))

But the best part of today:  I got a massage.  An hour-long head, back, and neck massage.  Oh, God.  It was about twice the price of a Thai (leg and hip) massage (apparently because it requires more advanced training, according to my friend who took a massage class here), but it was so, so worth it.  I went to a tiny place down the same street as the wat, and I’m not going to lie, I did pick it mostly because of the painfully adorable, big-eared grey kitten asleep on a bench outside. :)  The masseuse was an older woman with a sweet face, pretty strapping for a Thai, who basically spent an hour pounding my muscles into submission.  At one point, she bent my spine backwards until it cracked gloriously in about twelve places.  The whole thing felt very luxurious:  there was a facial massage with a hot towel, and the ceremonial cup of tea afterwards.  I gotta say, though, there was also a fair amount of hair-pulling involved.  And at one point, she just up and flicked me in the forehead.  Sometimes, I wonder whether masseuses do things because those things are therapeutic, or just because they can. :)

Seriously, though, I can recommend the hell out of getting a massage in Chiang Mai (or anywhere in Thailand, really).  Which brings me to something I’ve been meaning to post:

Catherine’s Dodgy Fell-Off-The-Back-Of-A-Van Thai Lessons #1:  Thai for Getting a Massage!

(Note:  At the end of all of these phrases, say “kha” if you’re a woman, or “khrap” if you’re a dude.)

Jep mai? – Does it hurt?

Jep. – Yes, it hurts.

Mai jep. – No, it doesn’t hurt.                     

Mai pen rai – no problem/okay

Bao bao noi. – Gently, please.

Chakatee! – That tickles!

Ron – hot (they’ll usually warn you this way before using a hot towel)

Dee – good

Dee maak maak – very good

Kop khun. – Thank you.

Now go forth and have people rub you!  Um… hang on, that came out wrong…

Sooooo many tentacles...

Another reader asked, “Tentacles next?”

You got it!

This story is actually from waaaaay back in January.  It’s appropriate, though, because this is the story of Chiang Mai’s Chinese New Year celebrations, and right now, there happens to be another festival going on – the Inthakin festival, which is in honour of the city’s 200-year-old sacred pillar.  It takes place over seven days at Wat Chedi Luang in the old city, and I was just planning to drive down there tonight to check it out, when two things hit at once:

a)      Rain!, and

b)      The realisation that Sunday night is Walking Street Market night, and the market is on the same road as Wat Chedi Luang, making driving insane and parking pretty much impossible.

So instead, I decided to get dinner locally.  I pulled on my astonishingly crappy 29-baht-in-your-choice-of-embarrassing-pastel-colours poncho from 7-11, parked Arcee, and – after lamenting the fact that most of the stalls on my street close really early on a Sunday – found myself stumbling into a sukiyaki place that I pass every day on my way to work.

I’d never tried Thai sukiyaki before.  It’s kind of like Chinese hotpot (and actually pretty different from Japanese sukiyaki, which has more in common with Thai barbecue, or mookata):  with Thai sukiyaki, you’re given a pot of broth over an open flame, and a whole array of raw meat and vegetables to play with.  I got some seafood, bacon, and (surprisingly good) beef, and by the end of the meal, the last of the soup tasted amazing with all the different juices mixed together.  The woman who ran the restaurant was terribly nice, as well, talking me through the menu in a mix of Thai and English, and bringing things out of the kitchen to show me when we couldn’t arrive at a decent translation together.  Awesome owner + spicy soup + an absolute mandate to play with your food in a leisurely way while watching the rain outside = perfect place for a wet evening. :)

At any rate, weather permitting, I’m going to go check out Inthakin tomorrow night instead, but let me tell you about Chinese New Year.

I’d heard a lot about Chiang Mai’s Chinese New Year celebrations, which take place in the city’s miniscule Chinatown, squeezed into the small maze of streets between the old city and Warrorot day market on the Ping River.  (It’s not really an advertised or defined “Chinatown” in the sense that many Western cities have one.  It’s a majority-Chinese neighbourhood, with a Chinese temple, and many of the actual shops are Chinese-run – but the people running the stalls at Warrorot and the neighbouring Night Bazaar are generally Thais and/or selling Thai crafts, which means it doesn’t feel very different from the rest of the city.  Although there is a big red gate.)

For two days, though, the entire neighbourhood was transformed:  all the shops were decked out in gleaming red lanterns, and a huge red-draped stage dominated Warrorot market, with smaller stages set up down the market’s side streets.  

On the evening I went, the crowd in Warrorot itself was so dense that it was almost impossible to move, but once I was able to break away, it was a lot of fun to wander through the smaller streets behind the market.

I don't know why I like this photo so much; I think it just captures the feeling of this neighbourhood really well.  That, and the Thai students entering warp speed in the foreground. :)

The usually sedate Chinese temple was lit up and full of worshippers, in a way that, for some reason, reminded me of a church during the Christmas Vigil:

(This kid playing with his new present probably cemented that impression.)

There was traditional Chinese music on the main stage, as well as piped in over speakers between performances, while the small stages hosted a variety of other performances.  I ended up catching part of a beauty pageant, with contestants in traditional dress (ranging from little girls up through young teenagers) doing classical dance numbers or parading around with fans, while gorgeous twentysomethings in slightly skimpier versions of traditional costumes interviewed them.  It was… somewhere between charming and indefinably skeezy, for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on.  Something about the way the contestants were presented as perfect, demure-yet-romanticised miniature women rather than girls, although I suppose that’s true of any child pageant.

For the occasion, the usual stalls in Warrorot market were replaced by stalls with red awnings and gold decorations, selling all kinds of food…

… all kinds of Thai food, that is.

Yeah, that came as kind of a surprise to me, too.  I know there’s a lot of mutual influence among different Asian cuisines, but there’s, “Oh, there are some Chinese dishes that are similar to Thai dishes,” and then there’s, “Dude, this is a plate of raad naa.  Not only that, it’s a plate of the same raad naa that you serve here every day, only this time you’re charging, like, 60 baht for it instead of 30 because you stuck some red streamers on your stall.”  There was even a stall dedicated to the many wonderful variations on the classic Northern Thai sausage.

None of this, obviously, stopped me from eating my own weight in dumplings.  Hey, it’s still a street fair, and certain things are expected. :)

My favourite food stall, though, was this one:

Grilled squid is a bit rarer than most kinds of street food (in Chiang Mai, at least – that’s one of the things I loved about being down in Bang Saen for my in-country training).  It’s also a little more expensive, but totally worth it.  I paid 120 baht for a whole squid, and proudly told the stallholder (a sceptical-looking young guy) that I wanted the hottest sauce he had.

What I hadn’t really bargained on is that 120 baht gets you a LOT of squid.  A huge bag of these giant, glorious chunks of squid, swimming in scorching green chilli sauce, that you somehow have to spear and eat with a big toothpick.  I spent the next half hour leaning casually against a building and smiling at passersby while I tried to discreetly choke down these enormous tentacles. :)

What I remember most vividly about that night, though, is feeling the first pang of real, uncomplicated homesickness for London as I crossed the bridge over the Ping on my way back home.  The lights reflecting in the water made me think of the view from Hungerford Bridge, and I suddenly missed the city that’s been my home for longer than any other.