Countdown to Re-Entry: It's the Fin-al Countdowwwwn!

I’m sitting in a café on Sukhumvit Road in Bangkok, having taken the train down from Chiang Mai a few days ago.  My last day was more relaxed than I’d feared it would be – drop the last of the donations at the charity shop (somewhere out there is a refugee child drowning in the ginormous only-one-left-when-I-got-to-the-stack VSO shirt I used to sleep in during the winters); go for a last massage at the place next to the Sunday market; have one more bowl of khao soi, my favourite Northern Thai dish (TWO KINDS OF NOODLES!); and gratefully accept a lift from my landlord to the train station.  I watched the sun slipping behind the mountains, turning everything – highway, roadside shrines, rice paddies, houses, motorbikes streaking home – pink and gold, until we headed into the jungle and the light dimmed.  I am going to miss that town so much.

It’s a weird feeling.  I know I’m ready to move on – more than ready.  If you offered me another six months in Chiang Mai, I wouldn’t take it.  There’s new and exciting work to be done when it comes to Burma’s (potential) transition to democracy, but most of it’s not going to be done from the Thai border, and a lot of it can’t – and shouldn’t – be done by foreigners.  And one by one, the friends I’ve made here have mostly trickled away, both the farangs and the Burma folks.  There will only be one VSO volunteer in Chiang Mai after I leave (poor woman), and she’s following me in a couple of months.  It’s time.

But I will miss it, and a lot of what I’ll miss will be the specific, sensual things:  tastes, smells, the particular red of the sun as it sinks behind Doi Suthep.  And it’s not that these are all better sensations than those in London.  For every plate of fried noodles or red curry, every faceful of jasmine fragrance or languid breeze over the water at the reservoir, there’s a lungful of mixed car exhaust and paddy field smoke; a whiff of the moat water in summer; a bite of oh-God-that-isn’t-frosting; a night so hot and airless that trying to sleep has me almost in tears.  It’s strange, but loving a place doesn’t necessarily untangle the good from the bad.  In some ways, I’ll miss choking on tuktuk fumes as I speed down the highway past tire warehouses as much as I’ll miss incense and jasmine.  Maybe more.

It’s been a curiously vivid period in my life, and, I think, an important one.  I learned a hell of a lot in these past few years.  Not all of my lessons were the ones I expected, either.  I learned how to communicate in simple words, or none at all, when the language gap is too wide – tough for someone whose instinct tends to be to throw more words at any given problem.  I learned several dozen ways to keep ants out of a computer.  I learned that I can ride a motorcycle, and trust me, no one was more shocked than I was (except possibly my pre-departure driving instructor in London, who’d informed me that I would never be able to get it).  I learned that politeness can be a particularly nasty weapon, but one that’s double-edged.  I learned that a completely nomadic existence, as some NGO workers have, doesn’t suit me much better than a completely fixed one, and I’m happiest somewhere in between.  I learned that adventure is doing what scares you, personally, and everyone’s will look different.

I’d expected to learn who I was, by facing hardships and dangers and coming through them.  What happened instead was that I learned who I was when all my excuses – I just need to change cities/get a new job/meet more people/pursue this dream of working in the developing world, and then everything will finally be okay – ran out, and I had to turn and face myself.

And once I did, I found a way to be comfortable in my own skin.

That is always going to be the legacy of this time, for me, and it’s a legacy I can carry with me.  That makes leaving feel a little bit more okay.

One more list for y’all – the Top Ten Things I’ll Miss About Thailand.

10.  The setting.  It’s easy to forget, living in the city, but the area of Chiang Mai can be breathtaking.  It’s all mountains and thick forest and rolling fields, with birds everywhere.  There’s a moment when you’re driving through the jungle around Huay Tung Tao reservoir when you come out of the trees and the world just falls away to either side of the road – water on one side, a steep drop down to the yellow-and-green rice fields below on the  other – and it’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen.

9.  The ease.  I could get out of work at five (often having rolled in mid-morning), pick up something hot for dinner from the local market, and easily be home before six.  Virtually nothing in Chiang Mai was more than a half-hour’s drive away.  Going back to, “I’ve just gotten in and it’s 8 pm and I still have to cook,” isn’t going to be an easy transition.

8.  Being an expat (and specifically a white expat).  It gives you a certain freedom, knowing that Thais are going to cut you extra slack and will put down any odd behaviour to you just being a crazy farang; and it also provides an instant in if you want to strike up a conversation with fellow expats.  You’re suddenly and visibly part of a community.  It’s not always a community you want to be part of, mind (don’t get me started on a certain breed of drunken backpacker, or a certain strain of NGO worker), but it’s there if you need it.

7.  The arts.  I’ve gotten so used to seeing gorgeously intricate hilltribe fabrics piled up on every market stall, walking past gilded and gabled temple roofs, and being served water out of the same beautiful silver vessels used to make offerings to the Buddha.  Again, it’s not that Everything Is Prettier in Thailand (there are definitely times when it isn’t!), but that there’s a certain set of aesthetic details I like that I won’t have around me anymore.

6.  The attitude towards life.  This is a pretty broad statement about a culture that I freely admit I still only shallowly understand; two years isn’t enough time to really grok an alien culture, especially if you spend those two years with one foot in the West and one in Burma, and only have one hand braced in Thailand for balance (yes, I am basically breakdancing in this analogy).  But there’s a general approach to life in Thailand that combines a relaxed pace (a meeting that starts at 9 am farang time starts around 9.45 Thai time – and “vaguely 11-ish” Burma time, for reference) with a placid tendency to roll with the punches (if the restaurant doesn’t have it, it doesn’t have it; if the thing is broken, it’s broken; if it’s raining, you just don’t go; if you don’t have 250 baht for the stallholder, then whatever you have is okay) with an often astonishing kindness and emphasis on going out of your way to help strangers.  Okay, so “help” is sometimes spelled “get all up in the grill of” in Thai, but it’s well-intentioned and rather endearing.  I may not miss having people shout after me, “Where are you going?  Did you eat dinner yet?” but I have a feeling I’m definitely going to miss being able to smile at folks on the street.

5.  Markets.  Food markets with pigs’ heads and tubs of live eels and morning glory piled up with heaps of tiny eggplants and chunks of pumpkin, and row after row of curries in neat stainless steel trays right next to pyramids of fried cockroaches.  The other kind of food markets, with stalls peddling noodle soup and stewed pork leg over rice and pad thai, and customers from all the various stalls sitting elbow-by-elbow at shared tables to eat their dinner out of pastel plastic bowls.  Craft markets with stunning embroidery and antique silver jewelry; hilltribe markets with dusty piles of carpets and gorgeous traditional costumes; cheesy tourist markets with black velvet paintings of Muay Thai boxers, knock-off DVDs, and stalls peddling everything from nunchucks to brass knuckles.  All of them packed with loitering shoppers, stallholders riveted to portable TVs showing Thai soaps, and tiny carts selling skewers of grilled meat or bags of dumplings hot from the steamer.  Markets are such a fundamental part of my life here.

4.  The people.  My colleagues sometimes drive me nuts, it’s true, but I’m really fond of them.  Not having K. sneak up and hug me from behind, sweetly chirping, “Busy, Cat?  Busy busy?” as a way of softening me up for another assignment; not coming back from lunch to find S. barefoot on the bench outside, dozing under his hat, with a cigarette still dangling from his fingers; not getting drunk on cheap whiskey with Green Bob and talking about comic books and climate change late into the night – that makes me sad.

3.  Safety.  This is going to be one of the biggest changes.  Chiang Mai was ludicrously safe.  You could leave your computer on the coffeeshop table when you went to the bathroom.  You could leave the rent for your landlady in her unlocked office.  Most importantly, though, it was personally safe.  If I wanted to go for a walk or a drive at 3 am, the most I had to worry about was the soi (alley) dogs.  After pretty much weekly street harassment living in Leyton, I was cat-called precisely once in Chiang Mai.  In my last week there.  By a farang.

2.  Food.  I’ve already raved about the incredible variety of delicious, cheap cooked dishes you can find down pretty much any street, but it isn’t only that.  There are the vast piles of mango and jackfruit (my favourites), and also mangosteen, lychee, longon, and fruits I can’t even name.  There’s also a limited variety of really good Western food that I’ll (perversely) miss, especially soul food, Mexican food, and American-style diner fare – stuff that’s not as common in London (although I understand that it’s increasing since I left).  And as I mentioned in my “weirdest things” post, I may even find myself missing the stuff that I don’t particularly like, like Thai tea (a sweet orange-coloured powder) or gloopy rice-flour desserts.  (Although I doubt I’ll ever miss sugary butter.)

1.  Arcee!  I realised moving out here that it can be, in certain ways, harder to say goodbye to pets than to people.  People have an abstract existence; you can communicate with them remotely until you see them again.  Pets, though, can’t really interact with you unless you’re physically there (with the exception of the time Margaret held her phone up so that I could baby-talk one of her cats and he flew at the screen, claws akimbo :)).  Well, it turns out the same is true of motorcycles.  I know it’s my fault for anthropomorphizing the hell out of my bike, but it was a physical wrench to leave her, worse than almost any of the other goodbyes (with the exception of a couple of my closest friends here who aren’t leaving).  Arcee brought me safely through so much:  thunderstorms and floods, road trips, mountain drives in the dark, the time Moray and I had to steal her back out of a locked parking lot.  I feel like I’ve bonded with her.  More than that, she represented something to me:  a terror of driving that I met head-on until I was able to deal with it – and then until I adored it.  I’ll always have that, I suppose, but the trusty cherry-red bike I went through it with, I’ll probably never see again.

Countdown to Re-Entry: Marvels of the Western World

The title's a little tongue in cheek (I mean, obviously), but just as there are weird things that I'll miss about Thailand, there are weird things about London that will delight and astonish me.

Here are the top five:

1. Magic box??!!!  Make clothes dry!!??!  No need to hang clothes outside for mosquitoes to breed on!?!?!?
2. Water come out of tap okay to drink!!???  Drink water, not die??  Don't need to find 7/11 at 2 am??!!!
3. Another magic box!?!  Make food hot???
4. Walking down pavement for whole block!?!?!  Not trip???  No walking into noodle stall!!???  Don't get run over by motorbike??!!!
5. Tea in normal caf has caffeine?!?!  Not put sugar without asking????  Not orange!!?!?!?!

I'm going to be wandering around like a visitor from another planet for the first few days.

Countdown to Re-Entry: Weirdest Things I'll Miss

This isn’t a list of the things I’ll miss most about Thailand – trust me, I’ve got that list, and it’s a doozy – but of the ten weirdest things I’ll miss.  I realised when I was writing up my post on my final trip to Immigration that it’s possible to feel melancholy about leaving behind something you don’t necessarily like, or even something that’s actively unpleasant or inconvenient, just because it’s become such an ingrained aspect of your life.  So, here are ten of the strange things that have become so commonplace that it’ll feel stranger without them:

• Terrible Thai cover bands.  Forget actually going into the bars – there are nights when you can’t so much as drive along the moat without hearing a group of teenagers in adorably 90s backwards baseball caps massacre a Western pop song.  Which is not to say that there aren’t good Thai cover bands; there certainly are, and great original Thai bands, as well.  But it’s the epically awful ones I’ll really miss, because terrible bands are a bit like unhappy families – they’re unique.  Sure, there are times when I think that if I hear Maroon 5’s “One More Night” warbled off-key from the stage of one more outdoor bar I will stab someone, but life won’t be the same without it.

• Bizarre gelatin desserts.  When I get back to the land of warm scones, pub cake, and Hummingbird Bakery, am I actually going to pine for the taste of taro gelatin, squirmy little shreds of pandan-flavoured rice flour, and condensed milk?  Probably not – but there’s something satisfying about looking at a buffet of what appear, at first glance, to be luridly coloured alien body parts, and actually knowing what goes with what.

• Toilet paper everywhere but the toilet.  I’m actually not referring to the fact that you’re not allowed to flush toilet paper in Thailand, but rather to the fact that Thais don’t usually bother with varied paper products.  Runny nose?  Toilet paper.  Cleaning supplies?  Toilet paper.  Looking for something to wipe your hands in a restaurant?  That posh toilet paper with the puppies on it if you’re lucky; otherwise, the ubiquitous pink sheets that tear if you breathe on them.  Using the toilet?  …That’s what the squirter/water barrel and plastic pan combination is for.  What are you, a barbarian?

• The smell of the moat in hot season.  It’s difficult to describe – sort of rich and oily and sickly-sweet all at once – and it’s not a lot of fun to experience, but it’s a distinct, instantly recognisable seasonal marker, and it’s going to feel odd when neither the moat nor the smell nor the season itself is part of my life anymore.

• Spicy cheese ramen.  Words cannot do justice to the wonder of the Spicy Cheese variety of instant ramen.  Imagine store-brand mac and cheese in a box back in the States.  Now swap out the macaroni for egg noodles, and add desiccated crab stick and cayenne pepper.  It’s one of those foods that makes you feel ashamed for even being in the same room with it, and yet it’s insanely tasty.

• Thai (and Burma) bluntness.  “Blunt” seems, at first, not to fit in terribly well with the usual stereotype of Thai people or folks from Burma as deferential and absurdly polite, but there are a lot of ways that people from this region are straightforward to a degree that shocks Westerners.  I remember Margaret Cho (who’s of Korean descent) joking in one of her standup routines, “I’d hate to be the only white person in a room full of Asian people, because we’ll talk shit about you right to your face,” and I kind of get that now. :)  Thai and Burma people don’t think of it as talking shit; it’s just that they don’t see anything insulting about saying, “You’re very fat!” or, “Oh, you know, your colleague, the really old one.”  It’s a statement of fact.   Thais in particular also like to greet each other with what we would consider weirdly intrusive questions:   “Where are you going?”  “Where were you?”  “Have you eaten yet?”  The consolation is that it cuts both ways.  I remember ending a training for a group of women by asking, “Is there anything else you want to bring up?”  After a lively conference with the trainees, the translator said, “They say you are very beautiful.”  Another quick exchange with one of the women, and she added, “She like your face, how it is red.”  Well, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t before you started complimenting me, but thank you!

• Your soup is in a bag.  Because of course it is.  Actually, I’m amazed this never made it to the West, because it’s a great idea.  The usual Western solution of styrofoam bowls with plastic lids produces way more waste, and is prone to spilling, leaking through the paper takeaway bag, and scalding your hands (not that I have any experience with that ever, ahem).  Pour the soup in a plastic sandwich bag and secure it with a rubber band, though, and you can toss it around or even throw it in the basket of your motorcycle for a jaunt down a dirt road without losing a drop.

• The way my motorcycle helmet leaves a little red slash across the bridge of my nose.  It’s rakish!

• Struggles with language.  This is, in a way, one of the things I’ll be happiest to leave behind; it can be isolating to be surrounded by a language (in both written and spoken forms) that you only slightly understand, and exhausting having to remember a completely new system of grammar just to go to the corner store (not to mention the embarrassment when the Thai person you’re talking to breaks out of the usual script for the interaction and tries to make small talk, and you’re suddenly foundering).  At the same time, though, it can be freeing to sit in the middle of a coffeeshop or a public square and not understand a word being said around you; it means you don’t get distracted by other people’s conversations.  And in the same way that the language difference complicates everyday interactions, it also gives you a little thrill of triumph when you manage to get a tricky conversation right.  Besides, it is pretty funny when my inability to master short vs. long Thai vowels means that I end up ordering eight plates of noodles for lunch.

• Singing colleagues.  If you’d asked me even a few weeks ago what annoyed me the most about my workplace, I’d have said without hesitation, “The singing.”  People from Burma have a long tradition of singing while they work, and that’s transitioned from the fields to the office.  And it drives me insane.  It’s not the singing, per se, as they all have lovely voices, but when one of my younger colleagues starts putting on his comedy falsetto, or the woman across from him sings the same line of a song over and over at five-minute intervals, I get the urge to drive a pencil through both my eardrums.  At once.  And everything in between.  And yet… I’m going to miss the randomness of the song selection (why did we have that one week of Dan Hill’s “Sometimes When We Touch”?), and the occasional invented tunes (with the modern work songs “Looking for the January 2012 File” and “I Will Fucking End You, Google Chrome” being at the top of my personal charts).  I may even miss the comedy falsetto.  Occasionally.  Because the thing about breaking into song while you do a spreadsheet is, whether it’s endearing, irritating, or both, it’s my life in Thailand all over.
  
  And very soon, it really will be all over.

The Apocalyptic Universe

After an abortive attempt to get a tune-up for Arcee today (we got a diagnosis – slightly ragged wheel rims causing the wobbling I’ve noticed of late – but I wasn’t ready to leave her for a whole weekend), I drove into town and finally took the chance to check out the Lanna Folklife Museum.

The newly opened Folklife Museum is in a massive former courthouse near the centre of the city.  Like the Chiang Mai Arts and Cultural Centre across the street, it’s more dioramas than artefacts, but together, the two give a solid overview of the area’s history, art, and religious traditions.  While the Arts and Cultural Centre is endearingly dusty, the Folklife Museum still smells of new, and the interior is beautiful, all pale wood and cool tiled floors.  It covers the art and religion side of the equation, with exhibits on Lanna (northern Thai) music, pottery, textiles, murals, and Buddhist ritual practice, as well as a couple of rooms dealing with more day-to-day matters like rice harvesting, unique local foods (including khao soi, northern Thai sausage, and the tomato-pork dip I once heated up and ate like a curry in front of my bemused colleagues :)), and traditional courtship.  Courtship in Lanna society, it seems, used to be a little like old-fashioned courtship in rural English or American communities:  boy comes courting, boy and girl sit on the porch (well, in the Thai and American versions) while she does some kind of household chore, family discreetly leaves them alone, and if boy and girl hit it off, marriage plans are made.  (Also, apparently, once they started to fall in love, young Thai folks would secure “a permission to touch hands”.  Whether this was her family’s permission, his family’s, or each other’s wasn’t clear.)  My favourite detail was this:  “During a flirtation, they were interacting with a tactic of speaking.”  Wow!  Flirting with someone by talking to them!  I’m so glad that I’m privy to these erotic secrets of the mystical and seductive Orient. :P

Modern Lanna courtship rituals retain this magical art of talking, by the way.  Just with fewer porches and less spinning involved, and more malls, moped rides, and procurement of frothy orange concoctions from Wawee Coffee.

The more formal arts sections of the museum are cool, too, especially the gorgeous textile and pottery displays (including 700-year-old plates with remarkably Roman- or Japanese-style decoration).  I think that, like the Cultural Centre, it’s probably best as a first stop for tourists and new arrivals to get some context for their visits, but there were still some intriguing details I hadn’t known before.  Like the fact that the poles leaning against Bodhi trees on temple grounds serve a practical, as well as a devotional, purpose – Bodhi trees grow outward until the branches start to sag under their own weight, so the poles are there to hold the tree up (and gain karma for their donors in the process).  Or the (northern, at least) Thai belief that before birth, the soul needs to pay homage to the zodiac animal of its birth year, and that the animal will then bear the soul to the head of its father-to-be.  (I wasn’t entirely clear on which head.  Ahem.)  Or the fact that palm-leaf manuscripts were used almost exclusively for scriptures, but the (presumably cheaper) mulberry paper was used to produce books of talismans, magic, poetry, and even erotic drawings (which were apparently used as talismans).  Or the way traditional Lanna artists would depict kings, queens, and royal courts in the Burmese painting style, and reserve their own local style for scenes of ordinary life and nature – which makes sense, given that Burma ruled Chiang Mai for five hundred years, so the Burmese court was probably the popular standard for royalty and elegance for some time after that.

There was also a display explaining common tropes in Buddhist art, which drove home one of the things they told us way back in my first VSO training – different cultures have different concepts of time.  Not just whether ten minutes late counts as rude, acceptable, or actually pretty early, but also historical time.  The teleological view of history – the idea that it’s linear, from primitive past to glorious future, all moving towards some kind of goal – is primarily Western, and ties heavily into Christianity (although I think that view of history probably pre-dates it).  In the Christian belief system, the world doesn’t get remade again after Judgment Day.  That’s it.  In many other belief systems, however, including Buddhism, history is cyclical.  The world is destroyed and remade, just as humans die and are reborn.  This display explained that Buddhists believe there were innumerable past Buddhas, and even in our own epoch, Siddhartha Gautama is held to be the fifth (other traditions say fourth) Buddha.  (We’re still due one as well – the Future Buddha, who will arise when most people on Earth have forgotten the Dharma.)

The exhibit included an etched-glass mandala painting labeled “The Apocalyptic Universe”, which sounds like some kind of eighteenth-century work of speculative fiction.  If it isn’t, I may have to write it.

I found myself especially drawn to the displays on Buddhist mythology and ritual today.  After two years living and traveling in Southeast Asia, I feel like I’m only now beginning to get the hang of Buddhist iconography, being able to “read” the imagery the way I can read Christian imagery in a cathedral.  (Visiting places like Borobudur temple in Indonesia and the National Museum in Siem Reap, Cambodia has been incredibly helpful for this.)  Before today, it never really occurred to me as something I’m going to miss, but I think I will.  Not so much for what it is (although a lot of it is beautiful), but as a thread that’s woven so deeply through the past few years of my life.  I’ve become very used to strolling along, anywhere, and looking up to see the spires of chedis and the ornate, winged gables of temple halls, studded with pieces of mirror or painted in gold.  It’s as much a part of my daily life here as noodle shops or riding my motorcycle, but while I actively love those things and have always known I’ll miss them (well, from the point at which Arcee stopped terrifying me and became indispensable and awesome), I’ve never really considered temples in the same category before now.

There’s another aspect to it, too.  I promise, I’m not going to go all, “ZOMG Thailand is so spiritual, you guys,” because I think that’s a massive oversimplification of a) Thailand and b) everywhere that isn’t Thailand.  However, there is something I find nice about the sheer visibility of Buddhist history and ritual here.  I suppose that it can act as a reminder of the spiritual side of life, lifting me momentarily out of my day-to-day concerns.  And yeah, it’s tough to swing a cat without hitting a church (or repurposed church building) in central London, but they aren’t as showy from the outside – they’re something you generally need to think about and seek out.  And even then, it’s generally seen as a little bit odd for a non-Christian to pop into a parish church for a few minutes because it looked pretty and they were in a contemplative mood.

Anyway, long story short, the Lanna Folklife Museum is well worth a quick trip if you’re traveling to Chiang Mai – and it wasn’t my only new cultural experience this week, either.  A few days ago, I took my friend R. out to dinner so that I could beg for tips about an upcoming job interview for a position in what used to be her field.  We decided to check out the new location of Khun Churn, the best vegetarian restaurant in Chiang Mai (no, seriously, fight me, bro), which has just moved inside the Old Chiang Mai Cultural Centre, south of the old city on Wu Lai Road.  The place is more of a pain to get to, tucked away amid warehouses and woodworking showrooms and second-hand stores hawking I Heart NY gear covered in Statues of Liberty, so, unlike the museums in the centre of town, it’s become almost the exclusive purview of coach tours.  Which is a shame, because it’s a great place (and free, unlike the other Chiang Mai museums).  The centrepiece is a genuine 140-year-old teak house on stilts – well, I thought that was impressive, although R., being English, laughed and pointed out that her place in Lewisham is at least that old.  Anyway, this house used to stand on the riverside near Wat Ket, and belonged to a wealthy Chinese merchant family.  It’s outfitted traditionally, from the ox carts and wooden looms underneath the house, to the gorgeous dressing table (set on the floor at kneeling height), curtained sleeping area, and separate model kitchen upstairs.  There are some fantastic antique clothes and betel sets on display, too.  The Cultural Centre also has a small hilltribe market, where you can buy textiles and coconut-shell stilts (or do what I did, and just watch small children using the stilts to try and stomp each other :)).

After dinner, we caught part of a performance of traditional Lanna and hilltribe dances.  It’s striking how, in some cultures, there’s a really strict gender segregation when it comes to communal performances.  Women dance, men play music.  And while there may be occasional male dancers (usually in flashy solo performances that involve swords or fire), there are almost never female musicians.  (This seems to be the case in a lot of Arab countries, too.  In Indonesia, by contrast, every gamelan orchestra I saw was a mix of men and women.)

The dancers ranged in age from six or seven up to around sixty, and I have to say, it was the adults letting the side down in a lot of cases.  Maybe it was a cultural thing – grown women needing to be demure and not show off – but most of the adult dancers half-heartedly strolled through simple line dances, waving their hands in a vague manner.  (And then there was the older guy who danced what had to be my favourite dance of the night.  I don’t know the Thai name, but I can only imagine that it translates to “Desultory Drunken Hopscotch”.)  The kids and teenagers, on the other hand, threw themselves into it.  There was a harvest dance where teenage girls whirled and flipped handfuls of rice on wide, flat baskets, and another dance with a young man juggling four flaming brands in his hands and mouth.  The most impressive dance of the night was one where kids sat in a circle holding bamboo poles in rows between them, thumping them and clapping them open and shut rhythmically (imagine the background beat in “We Will Rock You” – that rhythm).  Other children jumped between the poles, trying to keep from getting their feet caught.  Like double dutch, except instead of rope, they were using heavy poles that could easily crush an ankle.

And then the kids in the circle moved the poles around, forming a shifting cross-hatch like some fiendish web of alarm-system lasers in a Mission Impossible movie, and the kids jumped through those.  Respect, man.

It feels a bit strange to be exploring some of these things only now, when I’m so close to leaving.  It’s natural, I suppose – it’s so easy to put off seeing things when you live in a city.  But it does make me a little more melancholy about moving away.

Friendship Treaties Are Magic!

I ended up at Chiang Mai's ASEAN festival today.  Don't ask.

There were huge paper sculptures draped in Christmas lights; one was a peacock and the other was a horse that I think was copied directly from an advert I saw for My Little Pony:  Friendship is Magic.  The idea was that you went around to a series of booths representing each country, got your "passport" stamped (because as all of us who've traveled extensively in the ASEAN bloc know, there's nothing more fun than a recreation of going through immigration!), and sampled the food.

Except you weren't allowed to sample the food.

Well, okay, a couple of booths actually DID have samples set out, and I got to try some very nice Malaysian chicken with rice, peanuts, and dried shrimp.  Most of them, though, were a wash.  Laos was still frantically cooking, by which I mean "languidly poking a single chicken leg in red curry"; Indonesia and Brunei Darussalam only had single, rather elderly display plates of food.  Cambodia, if asked, would very politely lift the lid off a steamer and show you a sole serving of amok, which was either not done yet or Not for the Likes of You.  And a handful of others had their samples ready to go, but we plebians couldn't touch them until the interview segment.

This bit was, admittedly, awesome:  two young Thai presenters (both in traditional garb for the occasion, but you could tell from his spiked hair and her glitter eyeshadow that they would both be a lot more at home in more fashionable threads) were making the rounds, sampling the food and making terrible, terrible banter about each country.  I think most of the terrible banter was his fault.  Cultural expectations being what they are here (and, to be fair, in the West as well), he was supposed to be entertaining and engage with people, and she was supposed to laugh demurely and support him.  But he was clearly foundering, both with the language in the English segments and with the task overall, and she seemed to be trying her best, through gritted teeth, to get him to up his game.

"Now, you speak some Laos, don't you?" she asked sweetly.

"No," he declared, "I don't speak Laos."

"Come on, a little bit?"

He stared at her.  Crickets chirped.  A pan-ASEAN tumbleweed rolled past.

I caught up with them at the Burma (sorry, Myanmar) booth, where he was flailing about asking people for a translation of nam prik gung, the food on offer, and she was following him trying to get his attention.  After she finally snagged him long enough to whisper in his ear, he grinned and announced, "Chili Shimp!  It is Chili Shimp!"

"Everyone can try the Chili Shrimp of Myanmar!" she called out, which I think makes for a better tourist slogan than "The Golden Land".

A couple of Westerners went up:  a young man in yoga pants who professed to like the dish, but had some trouble with the spice, and an older American woman I'd seen wandering around, interrogating people about the ingredients on display at each booth (to the point where I'd wanted to yell, "It's garlic!  You're pointing at garlic!  Where the hell do you come from that you don't know what GARLIC is?").  She asked worriedly whether it was spicy, and, on tasting it, recoiled with a horrified expression.

Amateurs.

A mix of free food and showing people up appeals to pretty much everything my id craves, so I strolled to the front and asked to taste, and made a big show of appreciating the flavour.  (It had a tiny kick to it, and was very nice.)  The cameraman zoomed in on my reaction to a degree that probably came out borderline pornographic.  The male presenter asked where I was from.

"I am from U.S.," I told him, because I've spent years telling people I'm from America and being corrected ("Ah, U.S.!").

"Ah, U.S.!" he said on cue, and then stared at me with a lost expression before offering, in a tiny voice, "United Kingdom...?"

"United States," his long-suffering companion hissed.

He stared at me a minute longer, then trilled, "Thank you!"

So, I think the taping was just for the Jumbotron on the other side of the plaza (I am not kidding), but it's possible I've ended up on some local news channel, pornographically eating The Chili Shrimp of Myanmar and confusing Thai people.

A fitting way to leave my placement, really.

Big Fish and Buddha Bling: Tales of Immigration

Recently, I went to Immigration for my very last visa extension (3 months, taking me through to April).  I was complaining to my friend Liz about having to get up so early and elbow strangers for a spot in the queue, and she suggested that I liveblog the experience – or, rather, write down my observations live and then post them when I had internet access again.  So, enjoy my Immigration adventures in real time, with added flashbacks looking back at two years of mishaps, insanity, sleepless nights, and assault by small children.  Warnings for strong language…

Countdown to Re-Entry: Mistakes

For your (hopeful) entertainment, I've decided to do a few "Countdown to Re-Entry" lists, cataloguing the awesome and the difficult things about the process of moving back to London.  Today's list:  "Mistakes I Know I'm Going to Make in London".

10.  Waltzing into M&S and kindly informing the cashier that it's okay, they don't have to bag my things for me!  Yup.  That's right.  They certainly don't.  (Bonus points if I attempt this in Thai.)

9.  Getting onto a bus, asking how much the fare is, then shaking my head and saying, "You're joking!  Do I look like a tourist?  I can do one-fifty; it's really close by!"  (Granted, I just looked up the actual cash single bus fare in London now to make this joke, and, "You're joking!" was my genuine reaction.  Yeesh.)

8.  Buying a bunch of Pot Noodles at the offlicence out of habit.  Yeaaah, not as cheap as pots of mama noodles in a Thai 7-11, and not nearly spicy enough.

7.  Wondering when someone's going to just come up and start helping me without my asking if I'm struggling with anything from a heavy box to a map, while people around me are actually averting their gazes politely because they don't want to presume.  (Or mocking me.  Either/or.)

6.  Peering between the lanes of traffic to make sure I don't get hit by a motorcycle while crossing the street.  Granted, it's a lot safer to be making this mistake in London than it is to make the corresponding mistake in Thailand, and not look.

5.  Believing that "let's meet at 7," means, "let's meet around 7.20-ish-maybe".

4.  Refusing to visit a public loo if I'm out of tissues.  Wait, what do you mean, they provide paper for you?

3.  Forgetting to cook or shop for food, under the assumption that I can always just pick something up on the way home.  Living on takeaway somehow isn't as sustainable in London...

2.  Assuming I can strike up a conversation on the street with anyone, especially anyone who isn't Asian, because hey, they must be travelers or expats like me!  Solidarity!  Nope; they were born here, and don't appreciate being asked, "So where ya from?" by an overly chipper American.

1.  Eating absolutely everything with a spoon.

And a bonus one:  Ending every sentence with "kha".  Maybe.  I mostly manage to avoid this in English, but if I try speaking any other language, like, say, French?  Hoo boy.  I learned that on my trip to Montreal last Christmas. :))

Hello, Darkness, My Old Friend

It's amazing how Thailand is never still.  You think I'd be used to it, having lived in cities since I was 18, but this is a different kind of noise.  It isn't a steady, low-level buzz that you eventually stop hearing.  The baseline is actually much quieter than it would be in a major city, but that only makes the individual noises stand out more.

It's almost 4.30 am, and from my back balcony I can hear:

- Music, possibly from a temple
- Hammering and sawing
- Motorbikes
- Dogs
- Roosters
- The occasional truck pulling up in the gravel drive behind the apartment complex
- The loud thrum of the water heating system, indicating that someone in the complex is taking a shower
- My next-door neighbour either going out or coming home (probably the latter)

The only constant (and kind of soothing) sound is the night insects.

Noise in Thailand is treated very differently, socially, from noise in Western countries.  There's no cultural rule that you're supposed to refrain from disturbing others; noise is just a thing that happens.  One of my friends here told me that the most hostile response she ever got from a Thai person was when she went downstairs at three in the morning to ask two women who were blaring music beneath her window to keep it down.  The women were very friendly until they understood what she wanted, at which point they got pretty pissed off.  "No, this is Thailand," one of them told her.  "You shut your window."

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.

Conversations in Burma

I do have the blog post recording the end of my last visit to Rangoon mostly drafted, and I’ll post that eventually.  Right now, though, I wanted to share this.

 

I am in Rangoon again.  For work, this time.  That’s not what it says on my visa, but that’s what I’m doing, pretty openly – instead of furtively meeting with partners in cafes, I’m attending conferences in hotels, with agendas available at the door listing the speeches we’ll hear on land confiscation issues, on investment-related problems, on protesting against unsustainable development.

I am chatting with cab drivers about how cool it was when Obama met Aung San Suu Kyi.

I am standing, right now, at my hotel room window, and the sky just opened with a goddamned roar.  The rain is so hard that the air is white with mist, and since I’m overlooking an alley packed with corrugated-iron-roofed houses, the sound of it is like a jet engine.  Beyond the alley are skyscrapers of cream-coloured stone, warm lights spilling from the windows; off to my left are the dark outlines of palm trees and, beyond that, the massive golden stupa of Shwe Dagon Pagoda.  I’ve got the window open, my face half-tilted into the rain; it’s wonderful, as long as you don’t have to be out in it.

I really, really like Rangoon.  I like that it’s a big, grey, sprawling urban mess, but it’s got a unique character to it.  There’s no fashionable posturing, as in Bangkok, nor is there the feeling of anxiety that seems to attend it.  Everyone is in short-sleeved shirts and knotted cotton lungis, the women with flowers in their hair and yellow powder smeared over their cheeks, everyone’s strolling to and from work swinging their steel tiffin tins or leaning out of car doors to spit betel on the ground like they don’t give a damn, and everything is on Burma time.  In some ways, it feels like an archetypal Asian city – a maze of fruit and DVD stalls in front of each of the new Western shopping centres; bicycle rickshaws fighting it out with taxis; stray dogs everywhere – but to me, the clothes, the food, and the language all feel familiar now, after eighteen months working with Burma groups.  (And the food, oh, God – spicy, oily Arakan curries; sticky Shan noodles with spring onions and chili; parathas and chapatis courtesy of the Muslim vendors on every corner.  I love Thai food, but I love Burmese food even more.)  The differences is that in Chiang Mai, it’s all subdued, as my friends from Burma try to maintain their traditions while flying under the radar of the Thai folks around them, fitting in enough not to ruffle feathers.  Here, it’s out in the open and unapologetic.  I especially love seeing people I know from the border who’ve moved to Yangon.  I ran into one former colleague who’s switched out her pantsuits for a lungi, and started wearing powder, and jade amulets in place of Thai gold – but none of those changes compare to how happy she looks, how much more at ease in her skin.

And Rangoon is one of the few places I’ve been where, as a rare Westerner, I can walk the streets without being hassled.  Stared at, yes, but not hassled.  It’s such a relief.

Although on rare occasions, the staring is almost worse.

And on that note, I have to tell you this story because it’s really weird.

After dinner tonight (Shan noodles and a pile of light-as-air crispy wontons, aw yesss), I found a little shopping complex that was still open, and that had a supermarket.  This was lucky, because I wanted to get some rice mixes to take back, as well as something for the folks at the office.

Now, I want to make a couple of things totally clear.  First, there were other customers around when I went into the supermarket.  And second, I was in there maybe ten minutes – and I’d seen other people shopping about five minutes ago – when I started realizing that the employees were staring at me.

This isn’t exactly new in Rangoon, as I mentioned.  I figured they weren’t expecting a – I actually don’t even know what the Burmese equivalent of farang is, so let’s go with honky – in their store.  Or not expecting a honky to be buying dry noodle mixes and homemade palm sugar candy.  Or something.  So I ignored it.

An aisle later, I realised they weren’t just staring:  they were following me.

This was getting weirder and weirder, and I have to admit, I was curious about what would happen.  So I crossed the store.  They followed me, silently.  I went down a different aisle.  They all congregated at one end of it, in formation, like the Jets trying to corner a Shark in an alleyway.

I turned and looked at them.

They looked at me.

This went on for a bit.

Finally – finally! – one of them stepped forward.  “Miss, we close.”

Fair enough.  She gently took the few things I was buying out of my hands, and brought them smartly to the front of the store.

And then I saw it.  The entire staircase up to the next level of the shopping centre, as well as the whole balcony above it, were clogged with rank upon rank of young Burmese workers in matching uniforms.  At a conservative estimate, there were easily a hundred people.  All of them staring at me in dead silence.

They had all been waiting for me.

I won’t lie to you, it was eerie.  I tried to defuse the moment – “Oh, you were all waiting for me, I am so sorry!” – but, in true ahnah fashion*, they wouldn’t acknowledge the apology because it would mean, in essence, admitting I’d done something wrong, which is impolite.  So they kept staring.  I was blushing so hard you could probably detect it from space by now.  The cashier, who was the only one who, by contrast, wouldn’t meet my eyes at all, rang me up, and then – I am not kidding – I led a procession of over a hundred Burmese workers into the streets of Rangoon.

Just never tell the Burmese authorities that happened, okay? ;) 

*Ahnah doesn’t have a direct English translation, but I’ve talked about the Thai version – kray jai – on my blog before.  It’s being so polite, and going so out of your way to avoid posing any difficulty for someone, that you sometimes end up making everything really uncomfortable.  It’s also part of what stands in the way of speaking up if you disagree or don’t understand something.  Ahnah is letting someone stand on your foot for an hour, even though you’re sure it’s not deliberate, because you, well, don’t like to mention it.

(Incidentally, they told me they close at 9, and I was feeling really guilty about holding them up – until I got back to my hotel, a ten minute walk away, and checked my phone.  9:08.  Wow.  Quick off the mark, much?)

One more story from my time here… and I was debating how to tell this, as I sometimes do when I’m relating conversations in writing.  To me, a lot of the charm of these stories isn’t just what someone says, but how they say it – and I don’t mean “charm” in a condescending way, like it’s “quaint”, but just that the pattern of someone’s speech, the phrases they use – and, yes, even the mistakes – are all part of the fabric of the story.  So I tend to render conversations word-for-word, as best I can, rather than correct people’s grammar.  But I’m afraid that comes across as mocking people for whom English isn’t their first language.  I’m not – God knows, anyone who’s heard me attempt to speak Thai has some idea how much awe I have for people who are fluent in more than one language, and I can still say exactly four things in Burmese, except that I can’t say two of them in polite company, and I’m not supposed to say the third one for security reasons, so I can say one thing in Burmese.  So a Burmese person who can carry on a conversation with me in English, however much we have to stumble through together?  Has my admiration and my gratitude.

With that in mind, I’m going to tell this story with the quotes I remember intact, so you get the actual flavour of the exchange.

I had the greatest conversation with my young cab driver coming from the convention back to my hotel today (in his really odd-smelling cab – sir, please choose either a metric tonne of jasmine garlands, or a Glade lemon airfreshener.  Pick your theme and run with it!  This is not a good opportunity for cultural fusion!).  He started out asking whether I was American, and on finding out I was, pronounced this “very good”; I asked him whether he was from Yangon, which he was, and he then added triumphantly, “I am taxi driver!”  Which I took to be kind of like when I was first learning Arabic, and kept informing people in a loud voice that I was a student and my house was in East London, even the ones I met through school or at my house. :)

Then we started talking about the traffic (the perennial topic of conversation for anyone stuck in a cab in Rangoon, which is about half the population at any given time), the sights, and all the new developments around Rangoon.  He told me there were two huge new shopping malls downtown:  “In Myanmar, verrrry big shopping mall!  You American, small shopping mall!” he grinned.  And then he described some of the luxury hotels, adding, “One night stay, three hundred dollar!”  He sucked in a pained breath, and laughed.  “In Myanmar, very good hotel!  You American, small hotel!”

And then, out of the blue, he turned to me (we were stuck in traffic, don’t worry) and said, “Obama!  Obama come to Myanmar, very good!  Clinton come, very good!  Meet Lady Aung San Suu Kyi, shake hands like this –“  He demonstrated on himself, pretzling his arms together.  “Ah, my friend!”  (Obama also ill-advisedly kissed Daw Aung San Suu Kyi on the cheek, but I was too embarrassed to bring that up. :))

“Obama speak English very good!” my driver chirped happily.  I was a little weirded out by this – did he think Obama wasn’t American-born?  Had the Republican habit of describing the president with careful disdain as “articulate” travelled this far?  But then he went on, and I realised what he was getting at.  “Clinton speak English very good!  Number Two, Lady Aung San Suu Kyi, also, English very good!”  He waved a hand contemptuously.  “Number One – Number One is soldier, is government, is Thein Sein – English no good.  No good!”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the change that has happened in Burma:  a man openly praising Aung San Suu Kyi and talking scornfully about the military government to the stranger in the back of his cab.  And he brought it up, which means that he probably has this conversation with most of the foreigners he drives.  Wow.  It’s not enough, yet, not by a long shot.  But it’s pretty striking, nonetheless.

Aung San Suu Kyi is popular, he told me:  “Yangon, Lady Aung San Suu Kyi!  Mandalay, Lady Aung San Suu Kyi!  Inle, Lady Aung San Suu Kyi!”  He also credited her with doing more to help the people in practical ways than the government is willing to do.  The soldiers gave $150 to improve the roads, he told me; Lady Aung San Suu Kyi gave $300.  “Very good!”

I almost wish we hadn’t reached my hotel so quickly; I wanted to listen to more of this.  Hell, I was getting as much out of one conversation as out of weeks reading the Burma papers.  This wasn’t the first startlingly open political conversation I’d had in Burma – you might remember me talking about my guide on my last trip, and how he’d tell me in a low voice about people’s opposition to the mega-development projects – but he was a friend of a friend, and he didn’t really start talking until we were safely out of Rangoon.  This guy didn’t know me from Adam.

Things really are changing:  some for the better, some for the worse (I just got news of another anti-Muslim riot, this time in Lashio).  It’s a remarkable time.

Very good.