Introducing the Lady in Red!

By popular demand, I present:

MY MOTORCYCLE.

She's a Honda Wave with a 110 cc engine.  Pretty, no?

So, anyone who's actually surprised I've named my motorcycle after a Transformers character, raise your hand. Yeah, didn't think so.  :)  I mean, short of actually buying a car (not very likely while I'm in either Thailand or London), when else am I going to get that chance?

I'm calling her Arcee.




Arcee in Transformers Prime is Optimus Prime's second-in-command.  She's a snarky, rebellious loner with a traumatic past, who is also a ninja.  And, it goes without saying, a motorcycle. :)



I'm still doing practice sessions with Pam, as well as on my own now (my neighbours think I'm nuts), and I may end up having a crack at the driving test this coming week.  Wish me luck!

Do Your Thing Down By The Ping

LOY KRATHONG, BABY!

Thursday was Loy Krathong, the festival of the water goddess that finishes off the wet season in Thailand.  (Well, I say Thursday, but the fireworks started in my neighbourhood about a week ago, and are still going strong tonight; I think there’s some national law that people can’t stop until the country’s entire supply of fireworks is used up.  Seriously, I’ve seen whole families lining up firecrackers with manic efficiency, like they’ve got an explosions quota.)  Like many elements of Thai Buddhism, this one was imported from India (in this case, about seven hundred years back).  The basic idea is that people gather to honour and appease Phra Mae Khong Kha, the goddess of water, and to symbolically set adrift bad luck or sins from the past year.

There are celebrations all over the country, but the ones in Chiang Mai are particularly famous, for a reason I’ll get to in a second.

First, pictures!

 The view from my front door - check out the candles along the balcony, and also at the edge of the driveway. 

 Trail of candles along the pavement just outside the old city.

I went out for Loy Krathong with one of the VSOs from my office and a handful of her friends, who work at other organisations around Chiang Mai.  We wandered around the banks of the Ping river, which were packed with people floating krathongs (little rafts with burning candles and incense on them).  Most are made of sections of bamboo decorated with flowers and woven banana leaves; others are made of bread, fruit, or even ice-cream cones (which the fish love).  The idea is to make a wish or hold an intention when you let it go; if the candle burns steadily and the raft floats well, then it's a good sign for the future.  Couples often release them together to bless their relationship, and you can also include a lock of hair (to carry away past sins) or a few coins (to get rid of bad luck).

 Krathongs in the moat around the old city.

 Everyone in Thailand floats krathongs for the festival, but in Chiang Mai, they do something extra.  See this?

 It's fire and it flies.  This is the coolest thing ever.

 Chiang Mai is especially known for its floating Loy Krathong lanterns.  They're paper lanterns powered by burning rings of fire (sorry, Johnny Cash) - old-time lanterns used clay pots of burning oil, but eventually that struck someone as oh yeah really freaking dangerous, so now it's a circle of beeswax.  Now we only need to worry about the strings of firecrackers people tie to them. :)

Lantern by the riverbank

... and down by the moat

A lot of the celebrations were going on down in Warorot Market, which is already a pretty awesome place (a huge food/clothing/electronics market about ten minutes down the nearest song tao route from me):

... and there was also a lantern garden just outside Tha Pae Gate, the eastern gate into the old city of Chiang Mai:

I don't even know what he is, apart from ADORABLE.

Oh, good.  I was worried there might be some kind of punishment involved, but apparently not!

There was also a stage set up, with traditional music and dance numbers:

Yeah, this was as close as I could get.

How creepy would it be to look up and see yourself on a screen that size?

Personally, I was digging the more informal musical acts along the moat:

Parade floats!

 So, we ended up buying a whole bunch of lanterns, and a few of us got krathongs as well (mine had orchids, which are one of my favourite flowers, and chrysanthemums, a favourite of my mother's), and we trekked out to one of the local temples, where you could actually climb onto a moored boat and release your krathong over the side.  Buddhist monks with giant candles were also making the rounds, helping revellers light their lanterns and firecrackers.  My camera had died at that point, but a lot of the other women got photos, so I'll see if I can link to them.

Meanwhile, random Loy Krathong prettiness around Chiang Mai:

But this, for me, was the coolest part.  See all the stars in the sky?

No you don't.  It was a completely starless night.  ALL of those are floating lanterns.

Wow.

My Week Let Me Show You It

Whew!  Busy few days.  Time to deploy that most devastating of literary flourishes:  List Format!

Monday:

-          Spend the morning at the launch of a documentary about war rape, created by a women's group.  Enjoy meeting some awesome women in the audience, including a fellow volunteer, a couple of journalists, and the funny, fiery head of the women's group.  (Also, eat some Thai chocolate cake with the kind of ravenous enthusiasm usually seen among nomads reaching an oasis.)

-          Hitch a ride with Pam to one of the major hospitals to get a medical certificate for my driver’s licence.  Enjoy startlingly good, free hot chocolate (today’s theme:  Scamming Free Chocolaty Treats!), then get examined by a nurse wearing the same kind of white cap with a black stripe that my mother is wearing in her graduation photo from nursing school.  I admit, I like the lax Thai approach to medicine so far.  “Your blood pressure’s a little high.  Hang on, we’ll take it again.”

-          Go to the village/settlement where Pam works to practice motorcycling.  Abruptly forget everything I ever learned about being on a motorcycle and almost kill a chicken.  Feel immensely grateful for Pam’s patience as she takes me to a flat stretch of road to practice, y’know, turning and balancing and stuff, before I manage to get my groove back and go tearing along the backstreets, dodging market carts and song taos.  Race my motorcycle along a narrow strip of road between a gorgeous Buddhist temple and stretches of paddy field at sunset.

-          Hang out with Pam, talk about favourite crap TV, cheer on the crawlingly slow download of Downton Abbey onto her computer.

-          Go to a Burmese restaurant for my welcome dinner!  Actually, I’d already met everyone there, but it was cool to hang out with them all again.  It’s a nice group of volunteers.  And the food was amazing – curries, crunchy tea leaf salad, fried bundles of morning glory leaves…

Tuesday

-          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.

-          Lunch at a different Burmese restaurant with some of my colleagues.  Feel slightly awkward making conversation, but earn points with the Karen guys for actually liking fish sauce. :)

-          More motorcycle practice with Pam, this time on the campus of a local university.  Manage to work up to wind-whipping-my-hair speeds.  Come back; Pam drives my bike from the office to my flat for me.  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.

-          Walk to the market after work to get some dinner (stir-fried fish and greens with boiled rice, plus a little fried chicken – I MUST WEAN MYSELF OFF THE THAI FRIED CHICKEN, but oh, I’ve only just found the best market stall for it – and mangoes, and chocolate cake for later).  The market is buzzing, and has about half again as many active stalls as usual – granted, I’m usually there later in the evenings – with many of the additional stalls selling all kinds of sweets and candles for Loy Krathong.  (Loy Krathong, the festival of the water goddess, is tomorrow night.  Shit is going to get manic.)

Wednesday

-          Hitch a ride with another colleague, Andrew (who’s been shepherding me through getting settled here) to a lecture on development in Burma.  Drink tea with milk for the first time since arriving in Thailand, then join a couple of other volunteers for lunch at a vegetarian Thai restaurant.  It’s very nice – I get stir-fried tofu and a soy-and-pumpkin curry over brown rice – but 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?

-          Get a group dinner invitation from a colleague whose husband is unexpectedly in town.  Start to refuse, simply because it’s a reflex and I’m not good at mentally switching gears from “home and no more socialising today!” to “spend time with people like a normal person!”, but remind myself that I’m trying to accept more invitations, and go.  Have a wonderful time chatting with my colleague and her European husband, and occasionally with my other colleagues, over a traditional mookata dinner.  Basically, this is the way mookata works (and yes, I wish I’d thought to take a picture of this at the time):  You load a plate with strips of raw meat (or tofu, or fish, or any one of a dozen other things they’ve got), grab a cube or two of pork fat, and sit at your table around one of these:

which is placed over a bucket of coals.  You pour soup broth around the outer ring and toss some greens and mushrooms into it, then put a cube of pork fat at the apex and let it melt down over the grill.  Then you lay out the strips of meat and grill them, while you snack on the side dishes (chips, egg fried rice, deep-fried dough balls, hot clams in the shell, &c.).  It’s a very leisurely way to eat; you just keep turning and, eventually, eating and replacing the meat as it cooks, and by the end of the night, the soup is astoundingly good, because all the juices have been dripping down into it.  (It’s also all-you-can-eat for about 150 baht each - £3.)  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.”

It’s raining now.  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.  I’ve been having an awesome week so far, but it’s also been a bit overwhelming.

And I miss you all.

Museum Day!

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.

Anyway, I’ve been having a relatively lazy weekend overall, after my first full week of work.  Yesterday was Domesticity, Thailand Style:  did my laundry and hung it out on the tiny private balcony to dry; went to the market to buy pork and boiled eggs in broth and a pouch of red rice for dinner; walked down the road to refill all my empty water bottles at the drinking water kiosk; pried open a bottle of crappy lemon margarita with the aid of a kitchen knife and a key (I’d forgotten to buy a bottle opener), after the instructions on how to open it with a coin that I got from some old Aussie dude on YouTube proved useless – y’know, stuff.

Today, though, I got a red song tao (piloted, weirdly enough, by an elderly Thai man and a young Australian guy and no, I have no idea, either) to the Chiang Mai National Museum.

The National Museum is a pretty white-and-red building with elaborately carved eaves and sharply sloping roofs, set in a garden with a meditation pool out front.  It’s not huge, but it takes a good couple of hours to see it properly, and it provides a very interesting political and economic history of the city.  The lower floor starts with prehistory (and we’re talking extremely pre-; there are diagrams showing during which age, exactly, the surrounding area began to emerge from the ocean), including loads of Neolithic relics and even a couple of grave sites.  (One of the handaxes was amazing – I don’t know whether it was the stone they used or what, but it looked like it was machine-cut.)  There’s a cool showcase on the culture of one of the local tribes, the Lua, because apparently their culture is very close to that of the civilisation that founded Chiang Mai, the Lanna. 

And then there’s an in-depth history of Chiang Mai itself, starting with the city that predated it, Hariphunchai.  Apparently, Hariphunchai was founded by a holy man who then looked around and went, “Aww, crap, I don’t have anybody to run this place.”  So he invited the daughter of a local king to come rule, and she turned up with, basically, a create-your-own-civilisation starter pack:  monks, scribes, metalworkers, artisans, merchants, and “labour gang leaders”, plus a grow-your-own-royal-heir (given that she was pregnant at the time).  Awesome.  Hariphunchai was heavily influenced by Indian Buddhism, and when, five hundred years later, one of the Lanna kings from a neighbouring city conquered Hariphunchai and remade it as Chiang Mai proper, he and his family kept up the strong connections between the royal family and the Buddhist tradition (the king was even the one who got to call conferences to revise the holy texts).  As a result, Chiang Mai is still packed with temples (even though they flooded several ancient ones in the 1960s to build a dam), and the museum itself has loads of fantastic sacred art (including everything they could grab before the dam went up – some gorgeous crystal Buddhas and amazing gold miniatures of religious objects).

The section on the later kings of Chiang Mai (the city had its own royal family up through the early 20^th century, though they hadn’t really been a power in their own right since the 1500s, when Chiang Mai was conquered by Burma, before being freed and coming under the rule of the kings of Thailand in the late eighteenth century) was interesting for two reasons.  One was the portraits of the last ten or so kings:  you can see their outfits change from ornate local dress, to very simple local dress, to a Western-style military jacket with northern Thai-style trousers, to a full-on copy of a British military uniform.  The second reason was the cool, working Victorian 3-D viewer, like a steampunk version of those red plastic viewers with slide wheels that we all had back in the 80s.  (What the hell were those called?  Can anyone remember?)  The sign informed me that it was a “peed box”.  I just… what.

The second floor of the museum deals with the economic and artistic history of the city, and is well worth checking out.  For the most part, it’s a pretty straightforward look at types of trade, the roles of different communities (for example, the river trade was dominated for centuries by Chinese immigrants, who dealt directly with the Chinese community in Bankok), and the ways in which the creation of railroads drastically changed the local culture and economic structure.  The sections on banking, education, and healthcare are… surprisingly uncritical of Western influence (really, guys, you had no form of medicine whatsoever until missionaries built a hospital?), but very interesting.  (The latter also contains the line, “The doctor then began the construction of American inventor Cyrus McCormick.”  I didn’t know McCormick was an android. :))  There’s also a great display on forest industries, including a replica house with plows, a loom, and other tools, and a look at the sordid history of logging in this part of the world (a part of the museum where the Western powers don’t exactly come off so well).

I’m a sucker for the ornate and spangled, so my favourite bits were the more elaborate pieces of sacred art (there was a gorgeous dragon with blue, jewelled scales, which used to serve as a support for a temple gong).  However, the “peed box” made my day.

I realise, also, that I’d love to read a good history of museums around the world.  The British Museum’s Enlightenment Gallery and Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum both provide fascinating looks at the evolution of Western museums, but I’d like to get a more complete sense of how we, as humans, started to collect and examine things from our past in different cultures and times.

Anyway, made it back, crashed out for a bit, and now I should really get down to the market before things start closing up (there’s never very much going on on Sundays here).  The only things in the fridge right now, apart from mah chocolate stash, are the remnants of the few Thai foods I wasn’t crazy about:  coffee-flavoured biscuits that I thought were going to be chocolate, five-spiced dried tamarind, and pickled mango.  Hey, at least I tried. :)

Praise the Lord and Trim the Hedges

One thing I don't get (yet) about Thailand is the number of classifieds in Chiang Mai either requesting, or advertising, specifically Christian staff.  If we're talking about a babysitter, or even a housekeeper, perhaps, I can understand wanting someone who's that close to your household to share your faith.  But what's up with the number of Christian gardeners offering their services?  I am 99% sure the weeds don't particularly care.

Bleating - er, Blogging for Great Justice

Today is my third day in my office (which is not actually MY office, given that I work for a climate-change network of NGOs, and this is just one of the members of that network, which has kindly given us some work space - not unlike the setup with the All Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group and The CarbonNeutral Company).  The office is a gorgeous, shady old building with about fifteen hundred motorbikes out front. :)  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 :)).

But I won't, because he, like everyone in the office, is INSANELY nice and very welcoming, and I appreciate that.  So.  Much.

(In fact, my officemate just came skipping into the room, grinned at me, and said, "Shall we go to Paradise?"  I kind of blinked at him, and after a second, said, "Okay, do you... know the way?"  He said, "No, you see, now we are in hell - it's so hot.  So..." and he pointed at the air conditioner, "Paradise!"  I cracked up. :))

Also, one of my colleagues compared me to a goat today. :)  It was cute.  We all eat lunch together (mainly Karen dishes different colleagues bring from home, which are pretty much uniformly amazing - today, it was seafood-rice porridge, pumpkin curry, and some kind of sour veggie with dried fish), and apparently, the fact that I will happily taste anything, without ascertaining what the hell it is first, is causing great amusement. :)

You'll notice that I'm not talking about the actual work I'm doing, and I'm afraid that's deliberate; there's a limit to what I can say here, as there are potential security concerns.  So names and precise details are out, but I hope to blog in more general terms about some of the issues I encounter.  (Otherwise, let's face it, this blog is going to turn into Things Catherine Has Eaten very quickly.)  At the moment, I've been sicced on a massive climate change handbook (about 50 - 100 pages).  I've got two months to come up with a rough draft.

I say BRING IT!

Last thing:  I'm going to need an alias for my employer (the network), if I'm going to be able to talk about it without giving too much away or sounding like a dork.  Ideas?

Yellow Song Tao TO INFINITY AND BEYOND!

Happy Halloween, everyone!  In celebration, I have cracked into the stash of peanut M&Ms Margaret gave me for the trip to Thailand. :)

So, as I mentioned, I'm settling into my new neighbourhood, which is in the outskirts of Chiang Mai, near the office where I'll be spending a fair amount of time, but outside the old city where a lot of the restaurants, night spots, &c. are.  I am, nevertheless, rather liking it so far.  I'm right off the highway, so my street is pretty quiet, but the main road where I do all my shopping and so on feels a bit like I'm strolling alongside the New Jersey Turnpike (but a LOT cleaner).  The advantages, besides being within a ten-minute walk of the office, are the many, MANY delicious noodle soup carts nearby, the big shopping centre across the highway (for household essentials), the market that's just past the office (for many, many kinds of delicious street food, fruit, and desserts), and the general sense of safety, especially at night.  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.  Compare that to my neighbourhood in London, where three people might hiss obscene things in your ear from shadowed doorways on your walk home, and you didn't dare so much as look around, because it would be taken as "encouragement" *shudder*.

I'm in a one-room flat in a new development.  Now, my image of VSO living conditions was very much shaped by my friend Malcolm's stories of his experience in Malawi - pump your own water, no hot showers, trek into town every couple of weeks to check your email.  Obviously, Thailand is an emerging economy, so I knew it wasn't going to be like that, so I was expecting something along the lines of:

• Pretty much constant electricity
• Internet cafe down the road
• Shower attachment on the toilet wall, with cold water
• No fridge
• Gas ring for cooking
• Need for mosquito net at night
• Possibility of buying a fan for really hot nights
• Bucket to do laundry

What I've got:

• 24/7 electricity
• FREE HIGH-SPEED WIFI IN MY HOUSE
• Shower attachment on the toilet wall, with HOT water
• Mini-fridge
• No cooking apparatus whatsoever (a lot of Thais buy all their meals hot on the street, or eat pots of ramen)
• Air conditioning
• Brand-new washing machines at one end of the block of flats

So... yeah. :)  I mean, I'm living in the same conditions as my Thai neighbours, which is the point.  It's just that those conditions are nicer than expected.

There are also three beautiful gold-and-white spirit houses, with their own little moat, set near the gate.  And I have very nice neighbours who only laughed at me a little when I was driving wobbly circles around the parking lot out front during my first motorbike lesson. :)

Tonight I had what one of my fellow volunteers calls a Yellow Song Tao Adventure!  Song Taos are big, open-backed trucks; the yellow ones run the route from my house to Warorot Market, just outside the old city, so I grabbed one and rode down to explore.  Given my shaky grasp of both Thai and geography, it kind of was an adventure.  Especially since it was full, so I was hanging onto the back. :)  (Not as dangerous as it sounds; there's a little platform.)  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 :)).  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).  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. :)