Our Band From Japan

One of the things about Chiang Mai that’s both frustrating and fun, compared to London, is its size.  On the one hand, there’s not much going on most weeks; on the other hand, the need for entertainment (and the fact that everything is so much closer together) means that it’s easy to be lured out to things I might not have thought of attending otherwise.  In London, you could tell me that Jeremy Irons, Maggie Smith, and David Tennant were appearing onstage together in a play based on scenes from George R.R. Martin’s as-yet unpublished next novel, and that there was going to be free wine and a flaming-sword-swallowing act during the interval, and I’d still probably ask what Tube station it was near and google night buses before deciding to go.  Here:  traditional dance and a chance to purchase Japanese noodle dishes that are slightly different from Thai noodles?  I’m on it like white on rice!  Or noodles!

Which is how I ended up at the Lanna (Northern Thai)-Japan Festival.

It was a fun night, actually; it’s a kind of annual cultural exchange festival, with a stage in front of the Folklife Museum to showcase arts from both cultures, and about a dozen food stalls, as well as a few hawking cheap package tours to Japan.  Thai food stalls outnumbered Japanese, of course, even with the Sunday night market and its wealth of Thai food a few steps away, because Thai people are, to an outsider’s eye, immensely picky about their food.  Just ask someone from Bangkok about “weird” northern Thai food, or ask someone from Chiang Mai about how Bangkok residents do noodles “wrong” – and that’s without even getting into food from other Asian countries!  I, of course, ate all of it, because, as has been previously established, I am a goat.  The Hiroshima-style yaki (cabbage inside an omelet) and the teriyaki skewers were the best, but there were also noodle and rice dishes, fried vegetable croquettes, sweet rolls, and sushi (which I stayed the hell away from, Japanese festival or not – raw fish that’s been sitting on a market stall for hours is the Russian roulette of food).  There was also the Mystery Food, although I never got to taste that.  Okay, this requires a little explanation:  After a while, I started seeing several people with this… food, dripping oil and wrapped up in tissues.  It looked a lot like cheese fried in batter, so naturally I became a cheese-seeking missile.  I managed to track down the epicentre of the cheesequake, only to find a stall that was just cleaning up from something.  They definitely had trays with the remnants of flour and breadcrumbs, but no cheese in sight.  I scoured the rest of the festival without luck, so that must have been the right stall, making me wonder whether it had actually just been gloopy flour dumplings I’d been seeing.  After all, cheese isn’t really a major ingredient in Japanese cooking… right?

Then, no sooner did I sit down to watch the performances than a young guy took the seat next to me and tucked into his bowl of Mystery Food.  I sprang up and ran back to the stall – only to find that any hint of food was long gone, and it had now become a medical tent!

O MYSTERY FOOD WHERE ART THOU?

I could really go for some fried cheese right now.

The performances themselves were a mix of Lanna and Japanese, introduced by two women; it actually took me a minute to realise that the Japanese host was in a traditional Northern Thai longyi, sleeveless top, and scarf, with orchids in her hair (and rocking the look), while the Thai host was the one sporting a red kimono.  The Japanese delegation was miles ahead in terms of the variety of acts.  There was an aikido demonstration by a Chiang-Mai-based dojo (which I loved, mostly because the opening bout involved a tiny Thai girl of no more than nine taking on an entire queue of older students and flipping kids twice her size, followed by some self-defence demonstrations in which a woman repeatedly disarmed a hilariously skeezy-looking guy with a yellow plastic gun); a traditional fan dance by rows of small girls in kimonos; a more modern dance/aerobics regimen to music by a bunch of grimacing teenagers in matching silk jackets, which ended up looking more like an ROTC drill than anything; and a quintet of female musicians in stunning red gowns, playing Western classical selections on traditional instruments (and, in one case, accompanying a woman singing Gershwin hits, because that’s really what you think of when you think of Japan).  On the Thai side, it was basically the same group of young male drummers, with their wall-sized drum kit and gongs, accompanying the same group of dancing girls in a succession of different outfits.  However, I’ve got to give the Thais points for using actual traditional music.  Not one of the Japanese acts did the same; even the formal dance number was set to vintage 80s J-pop.  Maybe they thought that would appeal more to foreign audiences?

There was also a rice-pounding demonstration, which is a lot more hardcore than I ever realised.  Essentially, it takes two people:  the first one wails away at the rice with a hammer the size of Mjölnir, but it’s the second job that really takes guts.  That person has to pat the rice back into place between hammer strikes.  The two men demonstrating had a lightning-fast rhythm going, but I hate to think what would happen if one of them fell out of step…

One of the best parts of the festival was the crowd-watching, though.  Quite a few people turned up in Japanese dress, but exactly what that meant differed widely.  Among the many variations on kimonos and other forms of traditional dress, you also had modern-looking silk jackets, a few teenage girls rolling out the head-to-toe Gothic Lolita look, and one old Japanese man wearing animatronic bunny ears.  I thought at first that he was selling them, but no – just wandering around, beaming at people and waggling his animatronic bunny ears.

I love this town sometimes.

Two-Year Anniversary Post

As of 23 October, I have been in Thailand for two years.

I've been wrestling with how to sum up my time here, and then I got the idea of revisiting my first few posts from Thailand and seeing how my life and opinions have changed (and how they haven't).  So I holed up in a Nepali cafe above a handicrafts shop, just down a narrow street from the hilltribe market (how awesome is it that a place like that exists in my town?), and got in the TARDIB (Time and Relative Dimension in Blogging).  Plain text is from the original blog post on that date - comments in italics below are added commentary from two years on.

Enjoy!

Sunday, 23 October 2011

So, I’m in Bangkok.  On an adventure!  Roughing it in my authentic Thai guesthouse with – um – air conditioning and high-speed wifi, within walking distance of one of the poshest malls I have ever seen.  Ahem.

The food here is GORGEOUS.  Oh, man, you were all so right about that.

Everyone I’ve spoken to at VSO Thailand so far has been incredibly nice.  Either this is going to be a very pleasant two years, or they’re all secretly plotting to kill and possibly eat me.  I’m gambling on the first one.
- I was correct.  Although they may still be biding their time before striking.

I must be the only Western traveller to Thailand who spends her time figuring out how to turn the hot water off.
- My tolerance for cold has dropped insanely since I’ve been here.  Apparently, your blood literally thins when you live in a hot climate.  At this point, I’m pretty grateful for hot water, and for the refugee-camp-woven blanket my colleagues got me for Christmas last year.

None of the vendors seemed very pushy, possibly because I was with a Thai person, or maybe because their locations guarantee them a decent trade in any case.  There are also many, many beggars sitting in the darker corners, or in one case, lying prone on the sidewalk with a begging bowl in front of him.  They, too, seem very reserved despite their numbers.
- This turns out to be more about Thai culture than economics.  I’ve still met very few pushy vendors, although food vendors I know will greet me with, “What can I get you?” in Thai, which can be awkward if I’m trying to slip past their stalls without indulging!

[My host] went for a really good tom yam soup with seaweed, some fried chicken with cashews, and a lemongrass-and-coconut-milk seafood soup dosed up with chillies.  The first two were basically high-quality versions of what you’ll find in a Thai restaurant in the UK, but the last dish was amazing – the flavours were familiar, but it was like they were suddenly three-dimensional, fresh and subtle in a way that the English approximations can’t quite capture.
- I’d forgotten that was my first time trying that dish!  It’s called tom kha, and I still love it.

He pointed out that the instant-noodle shelf had been stripped bare by people stocking up for the floods.
- Two years in this country have given me an instinctive understanding of the importance of ramen.  :P

 It’s possible that I caved and spent 40 baht (a little under a pound) on a pack of Ferraro Rocher, but I figure that a small taste of home to take the edge of the culture shock is okay. :)
- I long ago stopped apologising for splurging on Western food from time to time.  Son, I have eaten fried duck bill, battered chicken heads, live shrimp, crickets, bamboo worms, and jungle cat.  I have nothing to prove in the culinary adventure stakes.

But I hope this is a good beginning.
- It was. :)

Tuesday, 25 October 2011:  Things not permitted in my hotel:

·                     Drugs

·                     Weapons

·                     Pets

·                     Jackfruit

“Jackfruit” gets its own sign.  With an illustration.  They are SERIOUS about the jackfruit.
- It wasn’t jackfruit on the sign; it was durian.  And having experienced the lingering aroma of durian, I think it was fully justified.

Today, I … joined a volunteer from New Zealand for lunch… she introduced me to spicy papaya salad, for which I am VERY grateful!
- I, in turn, have all but force-fed it to every guest I’ve had here, and Margaret has taken the recipe back and made it for her guests in London.  And so the cycle of life continues.

I attempted a little bit of sightseeing in downtown Bangkok, and snapped a few pictures of one of the smaller palaces, before deciding that it was late, I was tired, fuck this noise, I was going to treat myself to a Westernised drink in one of the cafes and read. :)  (Hey, there's no harm in that occasionally.  Oreo shake FTW!)
- This is still how every day I spend it Bangkok ends.  I actually like Bangkok, but it’s weirdly exhausting.

Saturday, 29 October 2011:  HOLY CRAP, I CAN RIDE A MOTORCYCLE.
- You’re damn skippy I can!

I had a few hours' training today with a fellow VSO volunteer, the wonderfully snarky Pam (also my "buddy" whose job is helping me get settled in to Chiang Mai - so far, she's shown me where to buy utensils, imported cheese, and chocolate cake, so orientation WIN, as far as I'm concerned :)).
- Pam and I spent the first year and a half of my time here having dinner at least once a week, swapping downloaded copies of weird pulp movies, mock-insulting each other, and even travelling to Burma together.  She turned out to be one of the best things about my placement, and I miss her.  (She left last March, but I still bug her on Facebook with questions like, “Hey, where did you used to buy tea leaf salad when you were living here?” and “Do they let you use your driver’s licence for ID to fly to Bangkok?” and occasionally even, "I AM LOST IN A RICE PADDY, HELP ME.")

Monday, 31 October 2011:  I'm right off the highway, so my street is pretty quiet
- Ahahahaha and then they built a giant mall.

You can actually return a stranger's greeting on the street in Chiang Mai - yes, even at night - and that will be that.  At most, they might ask if you want to come into their restaurant, or want a taxi.
- This is still 99% true.  There is that 1% - a couple of drunken Thai teenagers tried to grope my friend one night, for example – but this is still pretty much the safest place I’ve ever lived.  And that includes Princeton, New Jersey.

No cooking apparatus whatsoever (a lot of Thais buy all their meals hot on the street, or eat pots of ramen)

- At this point in my life, I have acquired:  1) a toaster oven, 2) a kettle, 3) an electric wok, and 4) a blender.  It’s astonishing, the variety of food you can produce with that combination of appliances, if you’ve got the patience.  I’m on a baked-goods-and-pumpkin-soup kick at the moment because the weather’s turning cool.

Tonight I had what one of my fellow volunteers calls a Yellow Song Tao Adventure! … I took a wander around the eastern part of the old city, snapping pictures of the various wats, locating two brilliant English-language bookshops, eavesdropping on a tourist cooking class that was taking a tour of one of the markets (which was a lot more expensive than my local market, </smug>), embarrassing the local dogs by cooing over them, and resisting the temptation to eat EVERYTHING (seriously, this living on street food would be brilliant if my self-control were better :)). 
- Spoiler alert:  My self-control never got better. :)  I did eventually tour most of the major wats (including the mountain temple, the forest temple with its frescoed tunnels painted for a mad monk, the temple that once housed the famous Emerald Buddha, the temple with the prayer jukeboxes, the Shan temple, and the temple with the statue of Donald Duck – don’t ask); make friends with the old Irish dude who runs one of the bookshops and supplies me with my George R.R. Martin fix; learn how to cook a lot of the ingredients at the market, though I still haven’t taken a course myself; befriend the dogs in my neighbourhood; and try almost every kind of street food.

Then I met up with a couple of other VSO volunteers for dinner at a gorgeous little vegetarian restaurant and bookshop, where I fell in love with the Burmese-influenced dish khao soi (egg noodles and spring onions with meat or tofu in a delicious coconut curry sauce, served - at least in this case - with crunchy noodles on top).
- The crunchy noodles turn out to be mandatory.  The first time I went back to London, I made this dish for Margaret, who looked at the pot, said, “Two kinds of noodles?  TWO KINDS OF NOODLES!” and threw her arms around me. :)

I totally failed to find the right song tao route on the way back, so eventually I flagged down an empty one headed in my direction, and we negotiated that he'd take me as far as the superhighway (where he was going anyway) for the normal fare.  Little things like that leave me ridiculously pleased with myself when I'm in a foreign country. :)

- I can actually give directions and bargain in Thai, now, which tends to get me a lower fare.  Especially because I know how to say, “Puud len, na kha?” – “You’re kidding, right?” – and walk away if they try to quote me the tourist rate.

Wednesday, 2 November 2011:  Today is my third day in my office… My desk is in the coolest corner, in a room I share with a couple of other people (including a guy who sings little snatches of tunes to himself while he works, which... well, at least he has a nice voice, but occasionally I feel like yelling NO, FINISH THAT SONG BEFORE YOU MOVE ON TO A DIFFERENT ONE.  I'm a little compulsive like that :)).
- Now I just make passive-aggressive jokes on Facebook about how I’m going to punch him in the junk if he doesn’t stop.  I am a terrible person.  In my defence, though, two years of this.

Also, one of my colleagues compared me to a goat today. :)  It was cute.  We all eat lunch together… and apparently, the fact that I will happily taste anything, without ascertaining what the hell it is first, is causing great amusement. :)
- I don’t know whether I ever posted about this, but at least part of the “goat” reputation came from the day I brought a ground-pork-and-tomato curry to work to share.  No one else seemed terribly interested in it, for some reason.  Shrugging, I heated it up and ate it with a spoon.  It was over a year before I found out that that “curry”?  Was a dip.  It’s supposed to be served cold, with vegetables.  I was basically making a meal out of a heated bowl of salsa. J  None of my colleagues ever told me, by the way.

Sunday, 6 November 2011:  Today was Red Song Tao Adventure Day!  By the time I leave Chiang Mai, I will have ridden song taos of ALL COLOURS!  Actually, that’s a stupid goal.  Forget I said that.
- Pretty sure I’ve racked up yellow, red, green, and blue, which only leaves white.  NOW what are you calling a stupid goal, me of two years ago? :P

Wednesday, 9 November 2011:  Meet with colleagues about my project.  Ask loads of questions.  Feel slightly overwhelmed – less by the work, more by the sheer holy-hell-I-have-no-idea-if-I’m-doing-this-right-ness of the new job.
- I eventually learned that it takes people in Burma organisations at least six months to trust you, so the off-balance, what-am-I-even-doing feeling is completely natural.  Eventually, they start letting you in on bigger strategies and telling you what they really think (for good or ill – one of my colleagues waited until after my first project, an 80-page paper, was printed and released to let us know that she always thought it should have been more of a one-page pamphlet :)).

Yup, I have my own motorcycle.  (I mean, it’s on loan from VSO, but still.)  It is red.  I am in love.  I’m going to name it.
- She’s been with me through floods and thunderstorms and shittastic Thai drivers, dog attacks, drives up mountains, navigating past elephants, and road trips with passengers, including the time I did the last twelve miles running on fumes and blew into town without a drop of petrol to spare.  She’s had her steering column fixed, her tires changed, her brakes replaced, her gasket repaired; she’s been clamped twice (though I maintain that one of those wasn’t my fault), and one time I had to sneak into a gated parking lot and carry her up a flight of stairs to rescue her, by which I mean that Moray mostly carried her and I steered.  Her suspension is shot, and she’s not as young as she was, but I still love her.  Her name is Arcee.

One of the foods we share is… odd.  It’s like a ground-mushroom knockoff of a ground pork dish, but it has this kind of, well, frosting on it.  The frosting is creamy and white and a little salty, but otherwise has no particular taste.  (If you’re thinking of making a disgusting joke right about now, don’t bother, because I have made all of them in my head already.)  It’s not coconut cream, it doesn’t seem to be cream cream, and I don’t think soy cream looks like that.  The hell did I just eat, man?
- I still have no idea what that was.  And it disturbs me.

 Have a wonderful time chatting with my colleagues over a traditional mookata dinner… I’ve had some great meals here, but this is the first place where I’ve thought, “Oh, I am SO taking people here when they visit me.”
- That was before I discovered the MASSIVE AIRCRAFT HANGER of a mookata restaurant, which is supposedly the biggest restaurant in Thailand, seating something like 1,500 people.  THAT’s where I take visitors. :)

It shouldn’t be raining, not this hard – the wet and dry seasons are all messed up – and it’s making me kind of melancholy.   And I miss you all.
- They still are.  It still does.  I still do.