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.
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