Monday 27 February 2012

Your Moment of Zen-ocide

Random Thai cultural phenomena, part the thousandth:  Hitler Chic.

Yup, those are t-shirts of Hitler dressed as, among other things, Ronald McDonald and a Teletubby.  And I remember reading about the high school in Chiang Mai that horrified local expats when its senior chose the theme for their annual parade and celebration:  Nazism!

It really does seem to stem from genuine ignorance about Nazi history.  He's a funny little man with an amusing moustache, and they want to dress him in adorable outfits.  Awwww!  Except AHHHHHHHHH!

Sunday 26 February 2012

How Not To Make Friends and Influence People - Thai Edition


We learned a useful phrase in Thai class today:  puud len, to joke (literally “to speak play”).  You can use it to defuse a situation – “Puud len, puud len!  Just kidding, just kidding!”

All things considered, I really wish I’d known that phrase Saturday night.

What happened was this:  one of the VSO programme staff travelled out from Bangkok on Friday with the last member of our merry band, an older woman from the UK who had only landed in Thailand a few hours before.  We’d all gone out for a welcome dinner at the Vietnamese restaurant I mentioned, which was fantastic (there’s this one dish where you get a plate of dumpling wrappers, pork meatballs, chopped garlic, veg, and chillies, and make your own dumplings – *swoon*), and then we’d gone for a drink together.  After a beer, we all – the guy from the programme office included – had a really good, frank discussion about, among other things, Thai politics.  (The last few years have seen a conflict between the more populist “red shirts” and the more middle-class “yellow shirts”.)

Flash forward to Saturday night, when all the volunteers, the programme office guy, and our substitute Thai teacher (temporarily replacing the spectacular Waraya, who taught us last week) were at the local market having dinner.  One of the other volunteers wanted to get a shake, and the guy from the programme office pointed out the right food stall – “It’s the guy wearing a red shirt.”

Without thinking, I cracked a lame joke:  “Oooh, she must be choosing sides if she’s going looking for the red shirts!”

Yeah.  Protip?  Always take into account everyone sitting at the table.  I turned around to meet the suspiciously narrowed gaze of our new Thai teacher, who asked a soft, cold voice, “You don’t like the red shirts?”

Folks, you could play a clip of the Tour de France backwards, and you would still not see anyone backpedal as fast as I did right then.

(FYI, the next night, the guy at the stand was in a yellow shirt.  Keeping his options open?)

The new teacher, Sucha, and I seem to have gotten past my initial screwup, though:  Thai class was a lot of fun today.  It doesn’t feel quite like we’re sailing along effortlessly, the way it did with Waraya, but we still covered a lot of ground, and Sucha jokes around more with us.  She teases us about drinking (duum) and having lots of lovers (fan), and she’s started giving us nicknames, which is a very Thai thing:  most Thais go by their nicknames instead of their full names.  Some of the nicknames Thais are given sound bizarre, and even insulting, to Western ears:  It’s not uncommon to meet a Thai named “pig” or “fatty”, for example (nicknames given to chubby babies at birth).  Other nicknames are direct adoptions of (often random) English words, like Bank, or Helicopter.  (Yes, Helicopter.)  Our Philippino volunteer, who’s the sole man in the group, is now Bpoky – “handsome” in Tagalog.

It didn’t help today that a lot of us couldn’t stop laughing at some of the words we were learning.  We’d already gotten through prik (“prick”), which means chilli, without causing a scene, but when we reached sao-wah-tit (“sour tit”), which means weekend, all the native English speakers in the class just lost it. :)  So then we traded obscene terms in English and Thai for a while.  Suffice to say (as Pam actually warned me ages ago), when you say, “I’m going to ride my motorcycle,” you reaaaaally want to get the tone right.

Meanwhile, all the waitresses at the place where the other women and I always eat lunch have really started cheering us on as we practice our Thai.  They get so excited when we can have minor conversations with them (“What will you have?”  “I will have fried noodles with pork.”  “Can you eat spicy food?”  “I can eat a little bit.”).

So, yeah, language training is still going well, though I won’t be sorry to see Chiang Mai again.  And Arcee.  It’s bizarre how much I miss Arcee.  She’s getting a nice motorcycle wash as soon as I get back.

Saturday 25 February 2012

Unchained Melody

SO.  One thing I still hadn’t done here is go to the cinema – which is also a really good way to get more exposure to the Thai language, especially the different tones.  With that in mind, two of my fellow trainees and I headed over to the Bang Saen mall and its ludicrously comfortable theatre to see a Thai romance called The Melody.   

- WARNING:  SPOILERS BELOW -

It’s a piece that explores a uniquely Thai perspective:  that of a man so caught up in big-city life and in the quest for fame and fortune that he loses sight of his humanity, until, during an unexpected visit to a small town, he meets a spunky girl with a heart of gold who chides him for his screwed-up priorities and shows him the simple pleasures of everyday life and oh wait that’s every plot to every Western romantic comedy ever.


Of course, it’s still a cultural education, given that that’s where Thai culture is right now – the conflict between modern urban ambition and traditional community values.  If that’s explored in the same way that Western films explore it, that still says interesting things about the relationship between the two cultures.  And from what our teacher has said, The Melody is a pretty good example of what Thai audiences look for in a film.  There’s a cute central couple, a sappy love story, big emotions, and an uplifting resolution after an otherwise tragic ending.

Oh, yeah, speaking of that.  It turns out that the spunky girl with a heart of gold is terminally ill, and is refusing treatment, preferring to devote the remainder of her life to inspiring the protagonist.

A lot has been written about the phenomenon of women being killed off, maimed, raped, or otherwise victimised in fiction, solely for the purpose of motivating the male hero.  (In comic books, this is known as “women in refrigerators” syndrome, after a particularly infamous example.)  So I’ll just sum up briefly why it bothers me:  Name one movie, any movie, in which a brilliant but abrasive female artist had her life turned around by a warm, caring small-town man who acted as her muse for her vitally important work, and who then died tragically, inspiring her to greater heights of genius.

Yeah.  Not so much.

Oh, sure, city girl meets down-home boy is a trope in itself, but that’s different.  In those films, the woman’s work is most likely to be presented as a soul-sucking distraction, to be laid aside by the end of the film.  The guy is also much more likely to survive the ending, and to head off into the sunset with the heroine – not to lie, pallid and angelic, on a hospital bed while making her promise that she’ll continue her vital work without him.

Also, I liked this movie better when it was called Sweet November.  At least that version had Jason Isaacs in drag.

What I did really enjoy about The Melody, though, was the visual love letter to northern Thailand.  The movie is set in the border town of Mae Hong Son, not far from Chiang Mai.  Mae Hong Son provides a stunning backdrop – every other shot seems to be a slow, breathtaking pan across the mountains – but it’s also a character in its own right in the film, and the protagonist is shown falling in love with the town as well as with the girl.  I got a real kick out of watching all the aspects of northern Thai culture I’ve discovered over the last few months being explored, with real respect and affection, on the big screen.  The heroine leads the hero through an ethnic hill tribe market; they go hiking in the mountains; they send up floating lanterns together (although they’re tiny things borne aloft by balloons, instead of the smoke-belching quasi-Zeppelins we sent up at Loy Krathong); and you can even hear the market traders speaking northern slang in the background – Kop khun jao instead of Kop khun kha.  It drove home the difference between northern and southern Thailand, and made me miss Chiang Mai.

(Also, there was popcorn.  There’s a limit to how much I’m going to bitch about any experience where I get popcorn.)

And now, for your entertainment:  The Melody in fifteen minutes. :)


BOY:  Grrrr!  I am an asshole about the fact that I haven’t produced anything original in over a year, and all my fangirls are deserting me for ridiculously effeminate boybands in oversized shades.

RIDICULOUSLY EFFEMINATE BOYBAND:  Whazzup, bee-yotches?

BOY:  In a pathetic attempt to convince myself that my career isn’t in the toilet, I’m going to abandon it completely and take an impromptu road trip up to Adorable Northern Town, because someone called a Bangkok radio station from there to request one of my songs.

[For some reason, Adorable Northern Town looks the way Greenwich Village always does in mid-90s romantic comedies, and every business on the street is a coffeeshop.  Eventually, BOY finds a piano shop where GIRL is playing the piano.]

BOY:  You there!  Give up your pointless life in this assbiscuit of a town and come be part of my band.

GIRL:  Bitch, please.  I earned more piano trophies before I was twelve than you have in your entire life.

BOY:  Oh, you did NOT just go there.

GIRL:  And now I’m going to kidnap you in my adorable VW Bug and break your spirit, so that you will realise the error of your ways and come to appreciate the value of community and human affection and the attractively priced products offered for sale in hilltribe markets.  Adorable cancer kids!  Glomp him!

CANCER KIDS:  RAWR WE CRAVE HUMAN FLESH!

BOY:  AHHHH GET THEM OFF ME GET THEM OFF ME!

GIRL:  Teehee!

THE LITTLEST CANCER PATIENT:  *throws up on BOY’S shoes*

BOY:  For some reason this makes me spontaneously stop being an asshole.

[Extended scenes of BOY and GIRL caring tenderly for the CANCER KIDS, including teaching them to sing, playing games with them, and supporting the efforts of one boy of about seven to creepily perve on THE LITTLEST CANCER PATIENT.]

LITTLE CANCER BOY:  I want you to be my girlfriend!  Let’s totally reproduce the spaghetti-sucking scene from Lady and the Tramp!

THE LITTLEST CANCER PATIENT:  Okay, but only if I can use that scenario to trap BOY and GIRL into doing the same, thus carrying out my great purpose in life – as a plot point in the love story of the two main characters!

ALL THE ADULTS IN THE ROOM:  We are surprisingly okay with all of this!

[Her purpose in life achieved, THE LITTLEST CANCER PATIENT abruptly develops a nosebleed moments before the big benefit concert, is rushed to the hospital, and succumbs to the always-fatal Offscreenitis.  A doctor comes and delivers news of her death to BOY, GIRL, and THE LITTLEST CANCER PATIENT’S parents, who are devastated, despite having basically abandoned their child to be raised by a pair of twenty-something pop musicians.  No, seriously – they make a plot point out of how the kid’s mother never came to see her, and then we never find out why.]

[Meanwhile, back at the ranch…]

NOTE FROM GIRL TO BOY:  Hi, could you come see me in the hospital?  I kind of forgot to tell you that I have leukaemia and two months to live LOL.

BOY:  Tell me everything about her condition!

DOCTOR:  Certainly, random pop idol with no provable connection to the patient!  Basically, we could totally shoot her up with some stem cells and she’d be fine, but she’s being a whiny moron about it for no adequately explained reason.

GIRL:  Yeah, they could save my life and all, but it would probably hurt a lot.

BOY:  …seriously?  You do realise that the guy said “curable”, right?

GIRL:  Yeah, but – the ouchie.

BOY:  It would hurt worse that dying?

GIRL:  Sometimes, it is better to accept death that to fight to live.

BOY:  I find your idiocy strangely magnetic.

[Extended scenes of BOY and GIRL falling slowly in love, while enjoying the many tourist attractions Northern Thailand has to offer:  floating lanterns, hill tribe markets, fields of sunflowers, and mountain roads so twisty that they make people violently ill.  Also, they ride in the back of a truck full of cabbage, and proceed to use the cabbage in a variety of provocative and flirtatious ways, probably rendering the poor farmer’s entire stock unsellable by the time they reach their destination.  They eventually end up at a restaurant, where BOY scrunches up his face and reluctantly consents to try some of the super-exotic and bizarre Northern Thai food, to the immense confusion of all the foreigners in the audience.]

FOREIGNERS IN THE AUDIENCE:  But… that looks like what I just had for dinner in Bangkok the other day…

THAIS IN THE AUDIENCE:  STFU IT IS TOTALLY DIFFERENT.

RANDOM RESTAURANT PATRONS:  LOL, that BOY is so totally a washed-up loser!  For some reason, this is our reaction to a young pop star who disappeared at the height of his popularity, and we do not at all wonder what could have happened to him, nor does it seem there has been any effort to find him in the past few weeks/months.

BOY:  ZOMG STRANGERS HATE ME MY LIFE IS OVER.

GIRL:  Yeah, well, my life is ACTUALLY over, so sit your five-dollar ass down before I make change!

BOY:  And it never occurred to you that you were choosing to die, dumbass?

GIRL:  *sigh*  Fine.  If you do all the work for me of hunting down some stem cells, making sure they’re a match, paying for the treatment, and supporting me throughout my ordeal, I suppose I could do you a favour and keep living past the age of 23.

BOY:  … wait, what do you mean “hunt down”…?

[So, yeah, it turns out that they don’t actually have any stem cells to give her, which possibly should have been something the doctor could have mentioned earlier.  But not to fear, because…]

BOY:  Guess what!  I wrote a cheesy pop ballad about us!  Also, with my MASSIVE POP STAR INFLUENCE I have managed to secure you some stem cells!

GIRL:  … really?  That’s all it took?

BOY:  Sure, my homeboy sorted us out.

GIRL:  How?

BOY:  Oh, I don’t know, connections, funding research, kidnapping and murdering pregnant women, you want the cells or not?

[But oh noes!]

DOCTOR:  Unfortunately, while these cells are a match, they’re taken from the placenta, so there aren’t enough of them to treat an adult patient.

BOY:  WHY CAN’T YOU TREAT HER WITH THEM?!

DOCTOR:  … because of the thing I just said?

BOY:  WHATEVER.

DOCTOR:  But, since you’re the protagonist, and a pop star, and it was your homeboy who committed serial murders to get the cells, we thought we’d allow you to choose which of two innocent cancer kids should receive the cells instead of your dying girlfriend.

BOY:  Panicking at the thought of making a life-or-death medical decision I am in no way qualified to make somehow reaffirms that I have rediscovered my humanity!

DOCTOR:  Fine, if that’s what you want, we will never resolve this plotline or reference it ever again.  I was just trying to do something nice by allowing you the chance to make a decision that would spell certain doom for a small cancer-stricken child.  Sheesh.

[Once again, BOY and GIRL embark on enjoying all that spectacularly beautiful Northern Thailand has to offer, while continuing to fall for each other.  This includes a lot of mountain climbing, which of course is ideal for end-stage cancer patients.  Finally, one day, while watching the sun rise over the mountains, they consummate their relationship…]

BOY:  *yawn-stretch-sidehug*

GIRL:  *rests her head on his shoulder*

OLDER THAIS IN THE AUDIENCE:  HOLD IT RIGHT THERE WHAT IS THIS A PORNO?

[BOY eventually remembers that he’s been a missing person for months…]

BOY:  ’Sup, dude.

PRODUCER:  HOLY SHIT WE PRACTICALLY HAD YOU DECLARED LEGALLY DEAD!

BOY:  Well, once you’ve finished being all hysterical and embarrassing and non-Thai about it, I need you to organise a benefit concert that will fix everything in my life somehow.

[At the benefit concert that will fix everything in BOY’S life somehow…]

BOY [on phone]:  I really wanted you to sing the cheesy pop ballad about us with me!  But I guess that as long as you’re here in the audience –

GIRL [on phone]:  Yeah, that isn’t happening, because I’m just really busy with work and the cancer kids and being irrepressible in a Holly Golightly-esque manner and not totally dying in the hospital this exact moment even as we speak, why do you ask?

BOY [on phone]:  Well, that isn’t at all suspicious.  Just make sure you watch the livestream of the concert on your Mac laptop, because I’ll be playing all those songs I composed using an iPhone musical app, and in the meantime I can talk to you on my iPhone and look at your beautiful face in all the iPhone digital pictures we took!

iPHONE:  Girlfriend dying of leukaemia and lying about why she’s unable to attend the most important concert of your career?  There’s an app for that!

[BOY goes out and performs his song, which admittedly sounds a lot less cheesy backed by a full orchestra.  Then again, the McDonald’s jingle would sound less cheesy backed by a full orchestra.  GIRL goes into cardiac arrest during the song, and her mother starts screaming, and the music continues as the doctors try desperately to revive her, and there really is no way to make this bit funny.]

BOY’S HOMEBOY:  *holds up a sign at the back of the concert hall*

SIGN:  We got more stem cells!  Please, for the love of all that is holy, don’t ask about the stains on my shirt.

IRONY:  *crashes through the ceiling and flattens the audience*

[We pan over the girl’s body, from her cheek, with a single tear running down it, to her hand.  Which twitches.  Because… I guess she’s a zombie now?  Never really explored.  Anyway, BOY hears the news immediately after the concert, and goes to the hospital.]

GIRL’S MOTHER:  My daughter asked me to give you this song she composed.  She called it The Melody.

TITLE DROP:  *crushes those members of the audience who escaped the IRONY earlier*

BOY:  I will love her forever and cherish her memory, even as I pass off her vastly superior composition as my own music!

PICTURESQUE NORTHERN THAILAND:  *preens itself in the background as a final montage rolls*

Thursday 23 February 2012

Welcome to Thailand! Huh?

Hey, everyone!  *waves*  I am down in the sweltering heat of southern Thailand, receiving my VSO training for new arrivals in Thailand!

… Yeah.  It’s kinda weird.

I’m only here for a couple of weeks, because it’s crunch time at work; because I’ve already encountered a lot of what we’ll be learning; and because, frankly, when you’ve already got your own place/neighbourhood/motorcycle, it’s a little jarring to swap back to being a newbie, sharing a room (although my roommate doesn’t arrive until tomorrow, so I’ll only be sharing for a week) and doing everything as a group.  Mostly, I’m here for the Thai lessons, because every volunteer I’ve met has assured me that VSO’s Thai teacher is ALL THE AWESOME.  And she is.  She is in possession of so much awesome that it’s impossible to look directly at her without sunglasses, such is the awesome that radiates from her.  We’ve had four mornings’ worth of Thai lessons so far, and we’re having reasonably complex conversations, plus we’ve got a good grasp of the structure of the language.  I’ve never been so far along in learning a foreign language in such a short time.  However, it doesn’t feel intensive.  It’s actually a hell of a lot of fun.  And the discussions of Thai culture that spring out of the lessons may be even more valuable; it turns out I still have a lot to learn.

We’re based in the small seaside town of Bang Saen, which is actually pretty relaxing.  There are some great restaurants (especially the Vietnamese place next to our guest house, Yanadin Apartments, as well as a handful of outdoor mookata places), and an extensive food market across from the university.  There are even a few stalls at the main night market that do really nice Western-style (for a given value of Western-style) cakes.  The regional capital is only a short song tao ride away.  It’s not Chiang Mai – Bang Saen is still basically a main street, with a network of small residential streets running off it – but as an introduction to Thai culture, food, and logistics, it’s not at all bad.

My fellow trainees include a very bubbly and elegant girl from the UK; a friendly woman from Sri Lanka; and an older guy from the Philippines, who basically keeps himself to himself.  The two women and I have been eating and hanging out together most of the time.  They’re good company, and I enjoy watching how excited they get (especially the British volunteer, who’s never been to Thailand) over things like papaya salad and riding a song tao.  It reminds me how cool a lot of this stuff is.  I find myself trying more new things (especially food) here than I have been recently in Chiang Mai.  I’m not sure if that’s because this feels like a vacation, shaking me out of my now-familiar routines, or because the sense of adventure is infectious.

Of course, I'm in the bizarre position of being more experienced than the other trainees, but not by much; I can often take the lead in practical situations, but there's still a lot I don't know, especially about placements outside Chiang Mai.  (They also all received briefings in Bangkok, which I missed; I'm not sorry at all to have skipped the political briefings, since I feel like I've already been exposed to a lot of that information, but it turns out that the health briefing included some stuff it would have been seriously good for me to know four months ago.  Ah, well!)  I just want it on record that I've valiantly resisted the urge to bullshit, despite the incredibly tempting opportunity to tell them that geckos are poisonous or that the way to greet Thai people is a friendly pat on the head. :)  (It really, really isn't.)

It turns out that I need to head back to Chiang Mai a little early, because I'm suddenly going to be training 180 refugee and migrant women about climate change over four days (terrifying, and yet awesome!).  I'm not going to be sorry to head back - another week of Bang Saen will be more than enough for me - but I am kind of sorry that neither of the other women I've been hanging out with will be posted in Chiang Mai.  However, the final volunteer - the one who's going to be sharing a room with me here - will be in Chiang Mai, and is arriving tomorrow...

Tuesday 14 February 2012

Happy VD! Wait, that came out wrong.

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone!  Thanks to a (cute and really disturbing) Valentine's display board at my language school, I now know how to say, "You're sexy," in Thai.

You ready?

Ahem.

Khun sexy!

You may all marvel at my dazzling language skills now.  And feel free to use that bit of exotic repartee to impress someone special tonight, with my blessing.

Saturday 11 February 2012

Speed in a Sachet

This is the label on the tea I bought today:


Oh, tea, you had me at "hot off the drug is similiar to the driving".  Put the kettle on, baby!  I am clearly in for a wild night!


ETA:  It lies.

Thursday 9 February 2012

Refugee Camp California


A few weeks ago, I got the chance to spend a week in a Burmese refugee camp up by the border.  This particular camp is mostly Karen (one of the ethnic minorities in Burma; the Karen National Union’s struggle against the Burmese government has been called the world’s longest-running civil war, and while there was a ceasefire signed last month, it’s unclear whether it will be honoured on the ground).

Up Ahead in the Distance, I Saw a Shimmering Light

Some friends and I took a bus down to the nearest border town, ate lunch at a run-down little noodle bar at the bus station, then loaded all our stuff into a pickup truck for the trip over the mountains.  The views along the way were stunning… 



... at least, from the glimpses I caught while I was holding on for dear life.  Our driver was a young guy whose driving philosophy seemed to be, “WHEEEEE!”  Picture a roller coaster with no seatbelts; when you have to brace yourself so that your head doesn’t bash the ceiling as you go around turns, someone’s having a little too much fun at the wheel. :)







Such a Lovely Place



We made it, alive but queasy, to the camp, and trekked across about half of it to reach the guest house where we’d be staying.  Like most of the structures in the camp, it’s a bamboo and wood building, raised on stilts, with a drying area underneath and an attached washroom at the back.  It’s run by a round, beaming older woman we just called Moogha (“Auntie”).  She doesn’t speak English, but one of my Karen friends was staying with us, so she helped translate.



Moogha is awesome.  She’s plastered the guesthouse walls, inside and out, with photos of her family… interspersed with posters of Thai soap stars and Korean pop singers, as well as the occasional heart-spangled poster of syrupy-cute kittens. :)  (And Jesus.  But just two small Jesuses.  Jesi?)  In the evenings, she’d take us on a tour of the family pictures, telling us about how her brothers and sisters are scattered all over the world – this one in Australia, that one in Philippines, a few in Thailand.  (That’s the case for a lot of the people in the camps, especially the older folks:  everyone seems to have at least one relative who’s left to live abroad.)  We did our own, informal tour of the soap star posters without her.  One of my friends beckoned us over to a particular star in a school uniform and said, “I’ve been staring at this for ten minutes.  Is that a boy or a girl?”  My Karen friend – let’s call her K. – peered intently at it for a long time, and then pronounced with great gravitas, “I think it is tom.”  (“Tom” is short for “tomboy” – Thai/Burmese slang for a young lesbian who adopts a boyish look.)



Moogha and I didn’t exactly start off on the right foot:  our first night there, she smiled and beckoned me to sit next to her, then gestured at me and rubbed her arms, saying something in Karen.  I jumped in and answered the question that I assumed she was asking, because it was what everyone had been asking me all evening (and, many of you will recognise, all my life) – “Aren’t you cold?”  (I was the only one in a t-shirt.)  K. started laughing, and corrected me:  “No, no – she said that she always thought she was fat, but look at you!”  Um… thank you?


But that’s another thing Thais and people from Burma have in common – when they say something like that, it’s not a dig, it’s just a statement of fact.  They’d probably be horrified if you took it personally.  So I laughed, and we ended up spending a really great week staying with Moogha.  My favourite part was the one night that all the women (K.; the other foreign woman staying with us; Moogha; and me) sat around drinking cocoa (with sweetened condensed milk – it works surprisingly well) and talking, with K. interpreting for us.  Moogha wanted to know whether we were Christian.  I said that I came from a Catholic family, and my other friend said her family was Muslim; Moogha took all of this in stride, since Karen State has seen missionaries of all stripes over the years, and the camp itself contains multiple worship sites for Muslims and for several Christian denominations.  Moogha’s family, just in the last couple of generations, has had Catholics, Baptists, Muslims, Seventh Day Adventists… it was interesting that when a family member converted (often upon marriage), there didn’t seem to be any stigma or disappointment around it.



The guesthouse itself is rather beautiful, and staying there was, in a lot of ways, relaxing – there was a broad porch overlooking the dirt road out front, and we couldn’t sit down for five minutes without Moogha whipping out a plate of cookies and bringing out the tea with a speed that would put even the English folks I know to shame.  (Everywhere in the camp served this great looseleaf tea, with a strong, fresh, grassy taste.)  One thing that really surprised me about the camp overall, actually, was how good the food was.  I think I slightly prefer Burmese food to Thai food (not that I don’t love Thai food), because Burmese dishes are usually a bit hotter and less sweet.  But I didn’t realise that Burmese cuisine also has a fair amount of Indian influence, until I stayed in the camp.  Every morning, you could buy parothas and savoury roti, stuffed with chickpeas, at the shops along the road.



The washroom took a little while to get used to.  Basically, it’s a squat toilet behind a curtain, with an umbrella over it – for privacy?  Decoration?  I have no idea – and a series of water butts, with scoops you can use to bathe.  When we could, we would rush back at the hottest point in the afternoon to have a bath, because the freezing water would actually feel good then.  After dark?  Not so much.  (One thing about being up in the mountains in northern Thailand, though – the water’s plentiful, and pretty clean.)  I did try, once, to bathe Burmese fashion, wearing a borrowed sarong for modesty (even though we took turns in the washroom) and washing underneath it.  Yeah.  I have no idea how the hell people do that without growing at least one additional arm.



You can also wash clothes in the washroom, and dry them under the house (which comes with its own set of taboos:  shirts and underwear have to dry on separate lines, and you can’t put men’s clothes to dry next to women’s).  I was putting out a pair of jeans to dry when I ran into Moogha’s flock of geese clustered around their food bowl.  I tried to pick my way past them, but they shot me deeply offended glances and left the bowl in a squawking huff.  Okay, fine.  I hung up my jeans, shucked my shoes outside the outer door of the washroom, and went in to have a bath.



When I opened the door to come out, I suddenly came face to face with the entire flock, lined up outside the door, shifting their weight back and forth and puffing out their shoulders like parodies of East End gangsters.



“Dudes, I need my shoes.  I just – can I get my shoes?  Could we do that?  Is that a possibility here?”



They eyed me up and down for a second, and then, almost proudly, shifted aside to show me what they’d done.


Which was SHIT ALL OVER MY SHOES.



Damn, yo.  You don’t cross geese.



(Speaking of the washroom, there was a funny moment on the night before we left the camp, as well:  We were all sitting around by candlelight, and I was wrapped in a shawl that basically covered the top half of my body.  Moogha asked me something, and K. translated, “Do you have clothes under?”  I must have looked puzzled, and I opened the shawl to show that I was wearing a t-shirt underneath.  Everyone cracked up, and K, when she got her breath back, clarified:  “Do you have clothes.  Drying.  Under.  The house?”)


We’re All Prisoners Here, Of Our Own Device



The refugee camp is arranged on either side of a small river in a steep valley.  It’s gorgeous, but it’s a precarious location, at serious risk from floods and landslides.  You can see the gouges in the side of the mountain where past landslides have taken out huge chunks and ripped up trees, and apparently, the main road was completely submerged the last time the river overflowed.  (At least here, there are still a lot of trees to anchor the soil:  in another camp we visited nearby, the refugees had to clear much of the forest to build houses, and a few years ago, a landslide wiped out an entire slope of buildings.)



 







In a way, the physical environment mirrors the situation of the refugees.  They’ve clearly done a lot with the camp over almost two decades:  in addition to the elegant traditional houses, there’s a new hydropower generator, and probably a couple dozen small shops scattered along the main dirt road, selling everything from Karen handicrafts to Thai snacks.  (The snacks and other odds and ends can’t net the shopkeepers much of a profit, because they’re trucked in and sold to the shops at high prices, and it’s not like the shopkeepers can mark them up much if they want them to sell.)   



However, because the camp is, by law, a temporary facility, nothing is allowed to last:  the refugees can’t set up solar panels (too permanent) or use concrete in their homes.  (Bamboo houses need to be heavily rebuilt, if not outright replaced, every few years.)  And it’s not like there are opportunities within the camp (outside of a few, hotly contested NGO jobs).  You can’t even set up a shop without government permission.  Do exceptionally well at the camp school, several people told me, and you might end up one day… teaching at the camp school.


It must be a very strange existence.  On the one hand, you don’t exactly have to do anything; you’ll still have food, and a place to live.  And on the other hand, there are so many barriers in place to prevent you from doing anything.  Or you could always leave the camp (as many do), possibly giving up on the dream of getting back to your old lands in Burma one day, and make a life for yourself elsewhere.  For the kids who were born, or at least raised, in the camp – and there’s a whole generation coming to maturity now who are too young to remember anything else – that’s an even tougher choice:  Stay with what you’ve always known, or head out into a world that your life in the camp really hasn’t prepared you to face?

It was fascinating watching my Karen friends from Chiang Mai, especially those with family and friends still in the camp.  Within hours of arriving, they’d ditched their jeans for traditional longyis; they started laughing more and standing straighter.  I sometimes forget that they live in a foreign country every bit as much as I do.

They started telling stories, too, that I might never have heard back in Chiang Mai.  One of my friends, E., grew up mainly in the camp, but before that, she and her family were in a Karen village near to a militia stronghold.  The young commandos would have to steal from neighbouring farms as a test of their stealth (whatever they took would always be returned the next day).  One night, E.’s mother heard one of their ducks quacking and screeching like crazy, and looked outside to see two shadowy figures making off with the panicked duck.  E.’s mother grabbed a makeshift weapon from the kitchen and tore out of the house after them, yelling for them to stop.  They got away, but the next day, the duck was returned by two contrite young men.  “Oh, auntie, auntie, we got a punishment!  First we could not make the duck be quiet, and then you chased us!  We failed the commando test!”

But not all the stories were funny.  E. also told me about her family trying to settle further up the mountain, to have a farm there, until the competition with local villagers over land and resources drove them to the camp; and she told me about what had happened about a year after she and her family settled in the refugee camp.  In the middle of the night, Burmese soldiers arrived, and started setting the refugees’ homes on fire.  “Maybe one hundred, two hundred houses they burned.”  I asked why there wasn’t some kind of security for the camp; she said that there is now, but that at the time, the few Thai guards had turned and run.  “We had no weapons, but there were some who had been soldiers – Karen soldiers, you know – they had guns, and they…”  Her voice, which had been cool and matter-of-fact, started sounding forced.  “They tried to form a line…”

She didn’t give me many details beyond that, and it was a few minutes before she could look at me again.

You Can Check Out Any Time You Like…

On my last morning in the camp, I walked past a cluster of young men in longyis and military castoff jackets, gathered around a radio.  A few of them were warbling along as I passed:

And still those voices are calling from far away,
Wake you up in the middle of the night, just to hear them say…

So, naturally, I started singing.


Welcome to the Hotel California,
Such a lovely place, such a lovely face…

And then we all cracked up. :)

The ride back over the mountain was a lot smoother, with a much older, more experienced driver – I’d like to put down for the record that it also didn’t take a minute longer than the drive to the camp.  However, that was still long enough for him to play his Jim Reeves CD.  All the way through.  FOUR TIMES.  All I could think, after the third rendition, was, “Yeesh, this Reeves guy really has to stop falling in love with women who make him this miserable.  Then again, one of these songs is about a single breakup driving him to drink and leading him to bounce around cesspool beach resorts catching assorted venereal diseases, so I think he also has to acknowledge his own role in this problem.”

And that was my time in the refugee camp.  I’m still turning a lot of it over in my mind, but I think it was helpful for me to see, given the work I’m doing.

Sunday 5 February 2012

The Night of the Living Chicken Heads

NOTE:  This blog post is actually a few weeks old, I'm afraid, so the trip I refer to in the first part has already happened; I'll be blogging about that shortly.  Sorry for the delay!

So!  I'm not going to be around next week, because I'm heading to one of the refugee camps near the border.  I've got my first aid kit, I've got a four-pack of loo roll, I've got a fully-loaded Kindle (and some paperbacks and a flashlight), I've got a giant bag of snacks from 7/11.  I AM READY FOR MY CULTURAL ENCOUNTER NOW.

But first, a whirlwind update on the last few weeks.


Christmas night was very chilled-out and nice.  I went to the same house where I spent Thanksgiving (with Pam’s friends, who are rapidly becoming a large part of my circle here – they’re cool).  Again, there was a MASSIVE feast with roast chicken and duck, stuffing, ungodly delicious roast potatoes, and a dessert that Pam made.  If Margaret is the Leonard da Vinci of desserts, Pam is like the Jackson Pollack of desserts.  There’s kind of a pattern, but you couldn’t swear it was intentional.  She’s only got a toaster oven, so she makes very thin layers of cake or brownie, and then sticks them together with deliciousness of various sorts.  At Thanksgiving we had Chocolate Shocker, which is two layers of brownie sandwiched with melted chocolate and clotted cream fudge.  For Christmas, we escalated to a dessert that she dubbed Chocolate Motherf***er.  God, I don’t even know what was in that.  There was chocolate, and fruit, and a LOT of kirsch – it was like a brownie Christmas pudding that had been bathed in alcohol.  (She ended up leaving half of it at the house, so now she can ask her friends, “Hey, how’s that motherf***er I left in your freezer?”)

Even Chocolate Motherf***er wasn’t quite as weird as the Thai Christmas treat of the evening:  fried duck bills.  They’re sort of like… well, you know when you eat fried chicken, and you occasionally come across a spot where there’s no chicken, just batter on top of the bone?  Yeah.  The whole thing is like that.  Bones in batter.  A friend from home asked me a while back what the weirdest thing I’ve eaten in Thailand has been, and I didn’t have a good answer at the time, but that now tops the list (even above live shrimp)…

… or at least it did until New Year’s Eve.  But we’ll get to that.

Much of Christmas was spent lounging on the porch, everyone a little bit stunned by potatoes and Chocolate Motherf***er. :)  By popular request, one of the guests brought her dog by – an excitable little pug whom she’d dressed in a Spiderman outfit.  Spider-pug, spider-pug…

And I got to try the spiced rum I’d been making (okay, “making” is a little grandiose for what I was doing, which was taking bargain-basement Thai rum and bunging spices in it for a few days).  Not bad, all things considered.  If I were doing it again (which I might), I’d change the proportions around:  lots of orange zest, more cinnamon, and only a few cloves, because they tend to take over the flavour.  Still, it was a huge improvement over what I started with. ;)

On New Year’s Eve, I went to the market to get lunch, and found that my favourite Stall O’ Fried Stuff had a new offering:  fried chicken heads.  The whole thing.  Eyes, brains, and all.  I was intrigued by what had to be a traditional Thai New Year’s treat, so I got two.  They’re actually very tasty – fatty and rich, sort of like if you batter-dipped the turkey neck that usually comes with a Thanksgiving turkey, but good.

And then I went off to a New Year’s Eve party, and got spectacularly lost.  Seriously.  What should have been a half-hour drive, if that, took me an hour and a half.  (In my defence, that has a lot to do with the fact that on certain stretches of highway, it takes a really long time to reach a place where you can U-turn, so once I missed a turn I was locked in for ages.  It also has to do with the fact that, you know, I suck at remembering directions.)  Pam eventually had to come rescue me from endless loops of the nighttime suburban streets of Chiang Mai.  Which is when I excitedly related my culinary adventures to her.

“Have you ever seen those chicken heads they have in the market around this time of year?”

“Yeah,” she said.  “For dogs.”

“No, no, the batter-dipped ones.”

“Yup.  They’re for dogs.”

So much for my great foray into traditional Thai cuisine.  VSO Eats Dog Food – Film At Eleven!

Luckily, the food at the party was a hell of a lot better than that (and actually intended for humans, which was a step up for me).  We had a barbeque on someone’s roof terrace, with steak, belly pork, grilled aubergines, and every kind of sauce you can possibly imagine (including an addictive Dutch peanut dip the hostess made, which was like a mix between peanut butter and Szechuan sauce).  We could just about make out the fireworks over the river, and we sent up a few paper lanterns of our own.



At this party, I met what I can only assume to be Bizarro Me.  Her parents live in the same town were I grew up, we went to the same college; we’re even the same age.  Hell, we each, for a time in high school, worked at a store that the other really loved, so it’s almost certain that we’ve been in the same room together before… 16,000 miles away from here.  We bonded over memories of our favourite ice cream parlour in New Jersey. :)

And then, around 3 am, when a lot of people had gone home and I was contemplating doing the same… the guitars came out.

So I lingered, and listened, and ate too much whipped cream while I did. :)  One of the guests – who I had no idea could sing – turns out to have this fantastic voice, rich and liquid and slightly rough.  He did a string of folk and blues songs (including this one, which I’d never heard before)… as well as “Baby One More Time”, to which we all sang along like doofuses.  And then another guest, a guy from Argentina who was just here on holiday, sang some awesome Spanish love songs; it was a great contrast, because his voice was very soft and ethereal, but just as gorgeous in its own way.

It was the kind of night that I didn’t actually have very many of in college, but without the crippling awkwardness I might have felt at eighteen.  (Don’t get me wrong – I still feel plenty awkward walking into a party, unless I know pretty much everyone there very well.  In a way, I think I might be more aware of it now.  But I’m also a lot better at knowing how to behave, which is a massive help in getting through it.)

I think it was at least 4.30 am by the time I drove home, on a bike that was soaked with early-morning dew, along the gloriously empty highway.  Riding a motorcycle is the most fun when there’s no one else on the road (which is incredibly rare here; Chiang Mai is a ludicrously crowded ancient city ringed by massive highways).

The big news, though, is that I’VE FINALLY FINISHED THE PAPER!  Well, the first draft, at any rate.  It’s 73 pages long, and it was pretty gruelling to get it researched and written in a month, especially since I knew so little about Burmese law and history going in.  Then again, this was an excellent, if slightly overwhelming, introduction to the issues.

I think the most important thing I learned, though, was a set of techniques for kicking yourself in the ass to get a project finished when the fear of failure is crippling, and when you’re the kind of person who all too often reacts to that fear by hiding and procrastinating and looking for ways to numb yourself against the scary feelings.  It’s not that I didn’t care about my last job, or that I didn’t want to do well at it – but it wasn’t the dream come true that this placement is, and it wasn’t the conscious choice that this is, and I already knew how to do it.  This felt more difficult.

And yes, it’s a little depressing that I’m almost thirty and still struggle with procrastination to such a degree, but I think a big part of what I learned was to stop hating on myself so much and work with the patterns and emotions that come naturally to me, instead of beating myself up for not acting and feeling the way I always thought a “good” worker should.  If you’re someone who freaks out a bit when starting a big important project, you’re probably never going to change that.  What you can do is make sure that you aren’t someone who can’t start a big important project because you’re afraid.

Other tiny triumphs lately have included WINNING the pub quiz at the U.N. Irish Pub (well, that wasn't tiny, but it's not like I did it alone - and we won a 750 baht voucher, which covered dinner for three of us the next time!), and hauling myself out of bed at four in the morning yesterday to go down to the Immigration Office.  I'd turned up at around 7.45 on Thursday to get my visa renewed, only to find that I was the eighty-sixth person to sign in for a slot that day (the office doesn't even open until 8.30).  Luckily, they told us in pretty short order that everyone after about person #41 was out of luck, so I didn't have to stick around, but that meant that Friday was my only chance to get my visa, or I'd have to miss the trip to the camp in order to stick around in Chiang Mai.  So I drove along the deserted flyover - it was actually kind of gorgeous, the shape of the mountains barely visible in the distance before dawn - and got to the front gate at 5 am.

I was the seventh person to sign in.

Chiang Mai immigration is HARDCORE, man.

But I finally got my visa, AND I got a re-entry permit that will let me come back from the trip I have planned back to the UK in April.  And then I came home around 3 pm and fell on my face, because DAMN.