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.