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.

Of Luxuries and Language

SATURDAY FTW.

I stayed up insanely late last night, because I was determined to finish this article for work before the end of the week (and decided that 5 am on Saturday constituted “before the end of the week” :)).  It’s not due until Thursday, but it’s pretty important (we’ve been asked by a pan-Asian newspaper based in Nepal to do a 2,000-word piece on what’s likely to happen to Burma’s rainforests when the country opens up to Western investment), and I wanted to have the rough draft done so that next week I can refine it/run it past people.

So, needless to say, after that, I slept like the dead (well, actually, I woke up at 10.30 in the morning to email the draft article to my colleague, then I slept like the dead!), and decided that, with the article done, I could kick back today.  So I drove down to the Ping River and explored the neighbourhood between the riverside Warrorot Market and the old city.  It was very relaxing.  That area of town feels more urban, in a way, than the old city itself:  the buildings are taller and more likely to be grey, nondescript concrete, but there are also some great hole-in-the-wall shops and cookhouses, and on a nice afternoon, most of the neighbourhood seems to sit out on the street (especially in front of the bike shops – it’s actually kind of cool to stop and watch a bunch of guys spread a disassembled motorcycle engine over half the sidewalk to tinker with it).  It feels very much like an area where people live and work, whereas the old city can sometimes seem like an artificial tourist paradise.

I poked around a small wat (Wat Ou Sai Khan, where the main shrine houses a jade Buddha; I was there too late in the day to see it, but I got some nice pictures of the temple and the murals) and got a bag of hot shrimp dumplings, covered in sweet and sour sauce, from the market.  I also stopped by one of the bars at the edge of the old city for a frozen margarita, and to read through one of my old guidebooks to see what else I want to see around the city (and what I’d like to show my guests in July!), then had dinner at a Mexican place called Loco Elvis, which I’d always wondered about.  (Good quesadillas, although my favourite place remains El Diablo, right across from it.)  I took a stroll through Backpacker’s Alley.  I discovered a Thai manga library, where you can rent a wide range of Japanese manga translated into Thai (and some Thai series, as well, I assume) – it’s a fantastic idea, given that most young Thais probably can’t afford to follow several series at a time (hell, many Western comic readers can only afford to follow a few series).  And at the end of the night, I walked back through Warrorot, which is packed with a young, mostly Thai crowd on Saturday nights, and stopped to buy ALL THE LYCHEE.  EVER.

Actually, that’s not even remotely true.  Yes, I have a giant shopping bag full of lychee, but that’s like a grain of sand next to the beach that was Warrorot Market.  It’s that time of year – they can barely give the stuff away.  And since mango season is ending, I figured I’d move onto a new Exotic Fruit To Make Myself Completely Sick On. :)

In one of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels, he tells the woman he’s in love with that he’s not going to kiss her when they jointly make a breakthrough in an investigation, because the first time they kiss shouldn’t be a footnote to something else; it should be unforgettable, “like when you taste lychee for the first time”.  That was me today.  Well, technically – I’ve had lychee-flavoured things, but I’d never actually had it fresh before.  The woman who sold me the lychee peeled me one to eat as she was weighing the rest (which is a common, nice little touch in fruit markets:  they’ll often give you a free taste of whatever’s in season or whatever they happen to be cutting up at the time, regardless of whether it’s what you’re buying or not).  I can see what Peter meant, actually.  Lychee’s not the strongest or most exotic taste (of course, the amount of imported fruit available in 1930s London was probably pretty limited), but it’s bright and sweet and kind of complex, so that you notice different flavours emerging as you eat it.  It’s one of those things, like jackfruit and durian, where I’m not likely to forget the first time I had it.  (Granted, in the case of durian, it was more like, “Dear God, I need to immediately forget ever eating this abomination, WHY DOES MY HOUSE SMELL LIKE IT,”, but you win some, you lose some. :))

But the best part of today:  I got a massage.  An hour-long head, back, and neck massage.  Oh, God.  It was about twice the price of a Thai (leg and hip) massage (apparently because it requires more advanced training, according to my friend who took a massage class here), but it was so, so worth it.  I went to a tiny place down the same street as the wat, and I’m not going to lie, I did pick it mostly because of the painfully adorable, big-eared grey kitten asleep on a bench outside. :)  The masseuse was an older woman with a sweet face, pretty strapping for a Thai, who basically spent an hour pounding my muscles into submission.  At one point, she bent my spine backwards until it cracked gloriously in about twelve places.  The whole thing felt very luxurious:  there was a facial massage with a hot towel, and the ceremonial cup of tea afterwards.  I gotta say, though, there was also a fair amount of hair-pulling involved.  And at one point, she just up and flicked me in the forehead.  Sometimes, I wonder whether masseuses do things because those things are therapeutic, or just because they can. :)

Seriously, though, I can recommend the hell out of getting a massage in Chiang Mai (or anywhere in Thailand, really).  Which brings me to something I’ve been meaning to post:

Catherine’s Dodgy Fell-Off-The-Back-Of-A-Van Thai Lessons #1:  Thai for Getting a Massage!

(Note:  At the end of all of these phrases, say “kha” if you’re a woman, or “khrap” if you’re a dude.)

Jep mai? – Does it hurt?

Jep. – Yes, it hurts.

Mai jep. – No, it doesn’t hurt.                     

Mai pen rai – no problem/okay

Bao bao noi. – Gently, please.

Chakatee! – That tickles!

Ron – hot (they’ll usually warn you this way before using a hot towel)

Dee – good

Dee maak maak – very good

Kop khun. – Thank you.

Now go forth and have people rub you!  Um… hang on, that came out wrong…

Sooooo many tentacles...

Another reader asked, “Tentacles next?”

You got it!

This story is actually from waaaaay back in January.  It’s appropriate, though, because this is the story of Chiang Mai’s Chinese New Year celebrations, and right now, there happens to be another festival going on – the Inthakin festival, which is in honour of the city’s 200-year-old sacred pillar.  It takes place over seven days at Wat Chedi Luang in the old city, and I was just planning to drive down there tonight to check it out, when two things hit at once:

a)      Rain!, and

b)      The realisation that Sunday night is Walking Street Market night, and the market is on the same road as Wat Chedi Luang, making driving insane and parking pretty much impossible.

So instead, I decided to get dinner locally.  I pulled on my astonishingly crappy 29-baht-in-your-choice-of-embarrassing-pastel-colours poncho from 7-11, parked Arcee, and – after lamenting the fact that most of the stalls on my street close really early on a Sunday – found myself stumbling into a sukiyaki place that I pass every day on my way to work.

I’d never tried Thai sukiyaki before.  It’s kind of like Chinese hotpot (and actually pretty different from Japanese sukiyaki, which has more in common with Thai barbecue, or mookata):  with Thai sukiyaki, you’re given a pot of broth over an open flame, and a whole array of raw meat and vegetables to play with.  I got some seafood, bacon, and (surprisingly good) beef, and by the end of the meal, the last of the soup tasted amazing with all the different juices mixed together.  The woman who ran the restaurant was terribly nice, as well, talking me through the menu in a mix of Thai and English, and bringing things out of the kitchen to show me when we couldn’t arrive at a decent translation together.  Awesome owner + spicy soup + an absolute mandate to play with your food in a leisurely way while watching the rain outside = perfect place for a wet evening. :)

At any rate, weather permitting, I’m going to go check out Inthakin tomorrow night instead, but let me tell you about Chinese New Year.

I’d heard a lot about Chiang Mai’s Chinese New Year celebrations, which take place in the city’s miniscule Chinatown, squeezed into the small maze of streets between the old city and Warrorot day market on the Ping River.  (It’s not really an advertised or defined “Chinatown” in the sense that many Western cities have one.  It’s a majority-Chinese neighbourhood, with a Chinese temple, and many of the actual shops are Chinese-run – but the people running the stalls at Warrorot and the neighbouring Night Bazaar are generally Thais and/or selling Thai crafts, which means it doesn’t feel very different from the rest of the city.  Although there is a big red gate.)

For two days, though, the entire neighbourhood was transformed:  all the shops were decked out in gleaming red lanterns, and a huge red-draped stage dominated Warrorot market, with smaller stages set up down the market’s side streets.  

On the evening I went, the crowd in Warrorot itself was so dense that it was almost impossible to move, but once I was able to break away, it was a lot of fun to wander through the smaller streets behind the market.

I don't know why I like this photo so much; I think it just captures the feeling of this neighbourhood really well.  That, and the Thai students entering warp speed in the foreground. :)

The usually sedate Chinese temple was lit up and full of worshippers, in a way that, for some reason, reminded me of a church during the Christmas Vigil:

(This kid playing with his new present probably cemented that impression.)

There was traditional Chinese music on the main stage, as well as piped in over speakers between performances, while the small stages hosted a variety of other performances.  I ended up catching part of a beauty pageant, with contestants in traditional dress (ranging from little girls up through young teenagers) doing classical dance numbers or parading around with fans, while gorgeous twentysomethings in slightly skimpier versions of traditional costumes interviewed them.  It was… somewhere between charming and indefinably skeezy, for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on.  Something about the way the contestants were presented as perfect, demure-yet-romanticised miniature women rather than girls, although I suppose that’s true of any child pageant.

For the occasion, the usual stalls in Warrorot market were replaced by stalls with red awnings and gold decorations, selling all kinds of food…

… all kinds of Thai food, that is.

Yeah, that came as kind of a surprise to me, too.  I know there’s a lot of mutual influence among different Asian cuisines, but there’s, “Oh, there are some Chinese dishes that are similar to Thai dishes,” and then there’s, “Dude, this is a plate of raad naa.  Not only that, it’s a plate of the same raad naa that you serve here every day, only this time you’re charging, like, 60 baht for it instead of 30 because you stuck some red streamers on your stall.”  There was even a stall dedicated to the many wonderful variations on the classic Northern Thai sausage.

None of this, obviously, stopped me from eating my own weight in dumplings.  Hey, it’s still a street fair, and certain things are expected. :)

My favourite food stall, though, was this one:

Grilled squid is a bit rarer than most kinds of street food (in Chiang Mai, at least – that’s one of the things I loved about being down in Bang Saen for my in-country training).  It’s also a little more expensive, but totally worth it.  I paid 120 baht for a whole squid, and proudly told the stallholder (a sceptical-looking young guy) that I wanted the hottest sauce he had.

What I hadn’t really bargained on is that 120 baht gets you a LOT of squid.  A huge bag of these giant, glorious chunks of squid, swimming in scorching green chilli sauce, that you somehow have to spear and eat with a big toothpick.  I spent the next half hour leaning casually against a building and smiling at passersby while I tried to discreetly choke down these enormous tentacles. :)

What I remember most vividly about that night, though, is feeling the first pang of real, uncomplicated homesickness for London as I crossed the bridge over the Ping on my way back home.  The lights reflecting in the water made me think of the view from Hungerford Bridge, and I suddenly missed the city that’s been my home for longer than any other.

Mona Lisa Smile

So!  Clearly, I am all about telling things out of order lately, so let me whisk you back two weeks and let you know about the last few days of in-country training.

As I mentioned, learning with Sucha was a lot of fun, once she warmed up to us.  At first, I thought she was a bit distant because of the stupid joke I’d made the night we met, but it turned out that she actually felt a little awkward around us because she hasn’t taught a lot of Westerners in the past (she tends to work with Japanese student groups).  At the beginning of the first class, she asked me and the other Western VSOs a few times whether we were all right, since we looked so serious (or, more likely, dopey, considering that it was early on a Monday morning).  After we reassured her that we were fine, she confessed, “I am not used to farang face; I thought you don’t like me.”

By the end of the week, though, the five of us ended up having a blast together – especially after we went out for mookata and a few drinks one evening, and ended up riffing on the Thai soaps being broadcast on a giant screen in the restaurant garden.  The one VSO from Sri Lanka provided a running commentary:  “Okay, there’s one girl in the hospital, and she’s talking to another girl on the phone.  They must be fighting over a man.  Oh, there’s the man, the one with his shirt open!  And now the girl in the hospital looks happy.  He must have chosen her.  But oh no!  Who’s this guy?  He’s brought the hospital girl flowers, and now he’s upset.  Maybe he’s in love with her, too?  What is the man with the open shirt going to do?”

We all ended up with Thai nicknames as well.  I already mentioned that Sucha dubbed our Philippino colleague Bpogey (it turns out that, contrary to my initial post, Bpoky isn’t the right way to say it, after all – “Bpogey”, pronounced kind of like “bogey on your six”, means “handsome”, but “Bpoky” is Tagalog for “vagina” – whoops!).  Well, the Sri Lankan volunteer became “Jan”, or “moonlight” (a pun on her actual name); the older Englishwoman was nicknamed “chombu”, or “rose apple”, after her first exposure to the Thai sun left her cheeks a little singed; and the other English volunteer, who’s the youngest of us, ended up being “dek dek” (“baby”).  I wound up with two nicknames, weirdly enough:  Ms. M150 (or “M roi haa sip” in Thai), because the early mornings and lack of black tea left me chugging the enamel-melting energy drink M150 every day, and “Monalisa”.  Yeah, I can’t really explain the second one.  Sucha just looked over at me at one point, and cackled, “You look like Mona Lisa!”  Chalk it up to the mysteries of the farang face…

... or maybe the headband.  Pictured, L to R:  Monalisa, Dek Dek, Chombu, Jan, and Bpogey.

The other VSOs and I also got the chance to explore some of Bang Saen.  There’s a pretty beach lined with palm trees; the water’s not really clean enough for swimming, but it’s gorgeous to walk along.  (At sunset, with the pink sky throwing the palm trees into shadow, it looks ludicrously like a postcard of Miami Beach – the kind of place you don’t expect to exist in real life.)  It’s also lined with stalls selling every kind of seafood imaginable.  Twenty baht (about 40p) can get you a skewer of freshly caught squid, doused in scalding green chilli sauce.  Man, that’s one thing I’m going to miss about Bang Saen.

(There are seafood restaurants, as well, although it’s not really worth the extra money to dine in a more formal atmosphere when you can eat on the beach, or in one of the markets.  I remember passing one of the restaurants that had an enormous statue of a fish – wearing a raincoat and flashing a jaunty thumbs-up, like Charlie Tuna – outside.  A tiny tortoiseshell cat was looking up at the fish and just yowling his little heart out, presumably because it was huge and, for some reason, he couldn’t bite into it.)

And speaking of seafood, Bang Saen’s university (which seems to provide a large part of the town’s population, as well as its social and cultural life) has a neat little aquarium that’s definitely worth an hour’s look.  (Especially if you have a Thai driver’s license, like yours truly, so you can avoid paying three times as much for the tourist admission rate.  *blows raspberry*)  It’s small but packed, and dimly lit to show off the astonishing, electric blues and greens of the tropical fish.  I think my favourite display might have been the octopus tank.  They’re so much faster than you would imagine, and they can basically go tearing along at top speed, whichever way they’re facing.  (When they’re swimming with their tentacles behind them, their faces look bizarrely like dogs’.)  There’s also a huge tank at the end that extends up and over the hallway, so you can look up and see a school of fish swooping like birds overhead – or, in my case, see the ominous shadow of a shark hovering like a bird of prey.  Gah!

The best part of the aquarium, though, was the names of the different species.  Bluestreak Damselfish was my favourite, hands down. :)

We also found a great coffeeshop called Sweet Corner Bangsean, where the owner – a gregarious young guy in chunky black glasses – would help us practice our Thai, and also chat to us in English about our studies.  The cake there is amazing.  (Bang Saen turned out to be surprisingly good for cake:  the main night market had at least three different cake stalls, offering gooey chocolate and black forest slices next to flavours like taro and green tea.)

Three of us even made it over to Chonburi, the nearest big town, one evening to do some of that I-never-realised-I-needed-this shopping that all new arrivals end up doing in their first week.  (I was along for moral support, although I did score some shoes. :))  We visited two of Chonburi’s hulking chrome-and-glass malls, which were kind of a trip.  The interiors felt homey and comforting to me, which is kind of disturbing when you think about it:  coming from New Jersey, I’m such a mall brat that I find escalators and an Auntie Anne’s pretzel stall soothing.  But the exteriors (especially of Chonburi’s huge Central Plaza) were all rectangular ponds and space-age metal arches.  Thailand’s cities can feel very futuristic in a lot of ways – a feeling that I think is enhanced by the general sense that the country is part of a region whose star is rising.  Not only do many Asian cities look like a living space-age fantasy, but it’s likely that the actual look of the world’s future will be strongly influenced by these cities, too.

I also got to try a new Thai food in Chonburi:  khanom jiin, which is basically glass noodles with a selection of soupy curries and toppings (like garlic, lime, coriander, and chilli).  It wasn’t completely new – it’s very like the popular Burmese dish mohinga, which my colleagues made for Christmas – but I’d never had the Thai version before.  The khanom jiin buffet in Central Plaza has a range of curries, from sweet peanut sauce to green curries that will take the roof of your mouth off (but in a good way). :)

There was one more major attraction in Bang Saen, but it deserves its own post.  And pictures.  I promise, you will not believe this shit otherwise.

On my and Sucha’s last night in Bang Saen, we had a party up in Sucha’s room, with what I’m pretty sure was – at a rough estimate – all the food in existence.  So, sorry if there were riots in the empty supermarkets of the world that night.  We had all the food.  There was a mound of fresh fish cakes easily the size of my head.  There was fried chicken, and roasted pork, and skewers of fresh squid, and there was candied squid and maple-roasted candied beef.  (The candied beef is actually nice, like hickory-smoked bacon, but I’m still not convinced about the candied squid – way too sweet for me.)  There were pineapples, and rose apples, and bunches of holy basil (which turns out to be surprisingly good as a garnish in a lemon Bacardi Breezer, trufax), and SO MUCH RICE.  And that’s without even getting into the range of Thai desserts – one that was a lot like flan, and another that disturbingly resembled frog’s eggs (but tasted like tapioca), and one that was essentially tiny orange gulab jamun.

And seven giant hunks of khao lam.

Khao lam is something Pam told me about when she heard I was going to Bang Saen.  “They do this dessert down there – it’s sticky rice and coconut milk, but it’s boiled together in a section of bamboo.  It’s so good.”  And it is – it’s like rice pudding, but sweeter, and with a richer texture.  Some places add chunks of taro or red beans for extra flavour.  The fun part, though, is that it comes in a hefty, two-foot long bamboo section that’s probably heavy enough to be used as a blunt instrument.  The merchant cracks it in a vise for you, and you then have to pry it open to get at the rice.  (I took one on the train back to Chiang Mai the next day.  I hesitate to think what the other passengers thought was going on behind the curtain of my sleeper compartment, with all the sickening cracking and glooping sounds.)

We basically spent the entire night eating, while Sucha spent the night, rather hilariously, adding us all on Facebook and then messaging us while she was sitting across the table.  Good times. ;)

(By the way, one more memory from in-country training.  We were describing the plot of “The Melody” – see my earlier review here – to the young Thai dude from the programme office.  Just as we were explaining how this ambitious young man from Bangkok was transformed by the love of a good-hearted country girl, he held up a hand.  “Let me guess,” he said.  “The girl has cancer?”  Heehee.)

How Not To Make Friends and Influence People - Thai Edition

We learned a useful phrase in Thai class today:  puud len, to joke (literally “to speak play”).  You can use it to defuse a situation – “Puud len, puud len!  Just kidding, just kidding!”

All things considered, I really wish I’d known that phrase Saturday night.

What happened was this:  one of the VSO programme staff travelled out from Bangkok on Friday with the last member of our merry band, an older woman from the UK who had only landed in Thailand a few hours before.  We’d all gone out for a welcome dinner at the Vietnamese restaurant I mentioned, which was fantastic (there’s this one dish where you get a plate of dumpling wrappers, pork meatballs, chopped garlic, veg, and chillies, and make your own dumplings – *swoon*), and then we’d gone for a drink together.  After a beer, we all – the guy from the programme office included – had a really good, frank discussion about, among other things, Thai politics.  (The last few years have seen a conflict between the more populist “red shirts” and the more middle-class “yellow shirts”.)

Flash forward to Saturday night, when all the volunteers, the programme office guy, and our substitute Thai teacher (temporarily replacing the spectacular Waraya, who taught us last week) were at the local market having dinner.  One of the other volunteers wanted to get a shake, and the guy from the programme office pointed out the right food stall – “It’s the guy wearing a red shirt.”

Without thinking, I cracked a lame joke:  “Oooh, she must be choosing sides if she’s going looking for the red shirts!”

Yeah.  Protip?  Always take into account everyone sitting at the table.  I turned around to meet the suspiciously narrowed gaze of our new Thai teacher, who asked a soft, cold voice, “You don’t like the red shirts?”

Folks, you could play a clip of the Tour de France backwards, and you would still not see anyone backpedal as fast as I did right then.

(FYI, the next night, the guy at the stand was in a yellow shirt.  Keeping his options open?)

The new teacher, Sucha, and I seem to have gotten past my initial screwup, though:  Thai class was a lot of fun today.  It doesn’t feel quite like we’re sailing along effortlessly, the way it did with Waraya, but we still covered a lot of ground, and Sucha jokes around more with us.  She teases us about drinking (duum) and having lots of lovers (fan), and she’s started giving us nicknames, which is a very Thai thing:  most Thais go by their nicknames instead of their full names.  Some of the nicknames Thais are given sound bizarre, and even insulting, to Western ears:  It’s not uncommon to meet a Thai named “pig” or “fatty”, for example (nicknames given to chubby babies at birth).  Other nicknames are direct adoptions of (often random) English words, like Bank, or Helicopter.  (Yes, Helicopter.)  Our Philippino volunteer, who’s the sole man in the group, is now Bpoky – “handsome” in Tagalog.

It didn’t help today that a lot of us couldn’t stop laughing at some of the words we were learning.  We’d already gotten through prik (“prick”), which means chilli, without causing a scene, but when we reached sao-wah-tit (“sour tit”), which means weekend, all the native English speakers in the class just lost it. :)  So then we traded obscene terms in English and Thai for a while.  Suffice to say (as Pam actually warned me ages ago), when you say, “I’m going to ride my motorcycle,” you reaaaaally want to get the tone right.

Meanwhile, all the waitresses at the place where the other women and I always eat lunch have really started cheering us on as we practice our Thai.  They get so excited when we can have minor conversations with them (“What will you have?”  “I will have fried noodles with pork.”  “Can you eat spicy food?”  “I can eat a little bit.”).

So, yeah, language training is still going well, though I won’t be sorry to see Chiang Mai again.  And Arcee.  It’s bizarre how much I miss Arcee.  She’s getting a nice motorcycle wash as soon as I get back.

Speed in a Sachet

This is the label on the tea I bought today:

Oh, tea, you had me at "hot off the drug is similiar to the driving".  Put the kettle on, baby!  I am clearly in for a wild night!

ETA:  It lies.

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.

Get Your Motor Running

Well, the draft of my report is still very rough, and I keep finding more ground to cover the more I look, but I now have a good chunk of… um… words.  They may not be perfect, but they’re words, and there are lots of them!

I don’t know if I’ve explained exactly what it is I’m writing:  basically, it’s an advocacy guide to all national and international sustainable development rules affecting Burma, plus a look at whether and how those regulations are being applied on the ground.  So, it’s a big book of anything that would allow activists to go, “See, you said you were going to do this, and actually, you’re doing that.”  It’s the “on the ground” stuff that’s often the most difficult to track down – information from inside the country can be hard to get and verify.  But holy crap, I’m learning a lot along the way.  There probably could not be a better crash course to start my placement than researching this thing.

I think I’m moving out of the “ZOMG EVERYTHING IS NEW!” phase, so the character of these posts may change a bit.  Here’s a roundup of a few things from the past week:

• I’m slowly getting to know people in the office.  I still feel a bit awkward making conversation, but I’m trying, and everyone’s been very sweet about it.  (It’s difficult to explain, but there are different cultural rhythms and styles of conversation – for example, there’s a particular way Karen people tease each other.  It reminds me a little bit of trying to fit into a British office for the first time.  It’s a more dramatic change than that, of course, but on the plus side, this time I was prepared for there to be differences.)
  
  I still have lunch with the folks in the office a few times a week; it’s usually a mix of conversation in English for my benefit, and conversation in Karen while I smile and stuff my face. :)  Also, it gives me the chance to try loads of new foods, both home-cooked Karen dishes and Thai food from the local market.  The big discovery this week?  I knew that you can eat fresh jackfruit, and that you can use the flesh in a curry, but damn, no one told me that you can eat the seeds, too!  (You’ve got to boil them first, but still.)  They’re like giant, warm macadamia nuts.  I love that freaking fruit.  It is the most awesome fruit.

• My friend Pam and I were the whole of our team for the UN Irish Pub’s weekly pub quiz this time around (the teams vary in size a lot, depending on who’s free and in the mood) – and we came third out of about twenty teams!  Whoot. :)  It was the first time we’ve won a prize since I started coming along (I refuse to believe that those two events are related, despite the evidence :)), but the prize for third place is a jug of beer… and I’m not a huge beer fan, and Pam doesn’t drink (plus, we both had to drive back home).  So we ended up wandering around, pimping our beer out to the remaining teams in an apologetic sorry-we’re-smarter-than-you-please-have-some-beer kind of way.  (Pam’s theory is that you can get away with saying almost anything, provided that you add, “Have some beer!” at the end.  “You’re astonishingly ugly.  Have some beer!”  “May the hand of God descend and wipe your lineage from the face of the earth.  Have some beer!”)  It was cool, actually – we met some really nice people.  As frequently happens when you wander around giving out free booze.

• I bought some deodorant.  It is “whitening”.  I am scared.

• Full points and a free jug of UN beer go to my friend Lee, who predicted that I would end up loving my motorcycle.  Until very recently, I didn’t think that would be the case; I was competent to ride it, but it was still (and frequently still is) pretty nervewracking, and knowing I would have to do a tricky drive (like, say, in heavy traffic) the next day would make it tough to sleep the night before.  I still have occasional bad moments, but over the past few days, something’s shifted.  There have been times, driving along the superhighway – on a bright day, with the mountains rearing up just ahead of you, or late at night, when there’s very little traffic – when I’ve found myself wanting to go faster, wanting to open up Arcee’s engine a little more and see what she can do, and (at least briefly) really loving the feeling of flying along the road.  It’s faintly possible I may have started singing under my breath, “Get your motor runnin’, head out on the highway…” :)

• Yesterday, I went out to dinner with another of my fellow VSOs (a Canadian volunteer named Taskin, who’s awesome), and had sushi for the first time in Thailand.  It was lovely – really fresh sashimi, and salmon tempura rolls with crispy flour on the outside, which I haven’t seen elsewhere.  And afterwards, we wandered around the funky, Camden-style local student market, with its racks of funky, often gloriously nonsensical t-shirts, like, "Stupid T-Shirt Company - We Do Only Stupid Thing!"  (Some of them were perfectly legit, like the one with a picture of an AT-AT that said, “Imperial Taxi Service”.  On the other hand, there were a couple where the joke could have been intentional, or possibly the result of an awful translation, like the shirt that demanded to know, “Are you single or fixed?”)  We even found a late-night ice cream parlour that makes a brilliant range of flavours on site – brownie, chocomint, real vanilla bean (which is rare here), two-tone chocolate – and where the proprietor let us taste about half a dozen before deciding.  So I got to have brownie-batter ice cream while Taskin taught me some Thai verbs.  It was a really nice night. :)

• Last night, I saw one of the little lizards that inhabit the stairwells (not Henry; he’s my special shower lizard) dashing madly down a wall when he heard my approach.  Unfortunately, this particular wall has a recess that starts about two feet above the floor, and for some reason, instead of sticking to the wall as it curved inward, the lizard simply ran out of wall and fell to the tiles with a *smack*.
  
  I looked at the lizard.  The lizard looked at me.  If you were going to subtitle that silent exchange of looks, the conversation would probably go something like this:
  
  Me:  Hey, dude, are you okay?Lizard:  I meant to do that.
  Me:  Ohhh-kay, are you sure?  Because that –
  Lizard:  Totally meant to do that!
  Me:  It’s just that that looked like a pretty nasty –
  Lizard:  I SAID I’M FINE!  Now, if you’ll excuse me, some of us have flies to devour.  *tail flick*

This weekend’s experiment:  Baking cookies inna toaster oven!  Stay tuned.

My Life In Pictures

The old city through the gate, and Doi Suthep mountain beyond.

 PHOTO DUMP!

I've posted pictures of special things and events before, but here are some random shots of my everyday life.  (And food.  Lots of food.  By request.  Sapna. :))  Enjoy!


This is Thae Pae Gate, the eastern gate into the old city of Chiang Mai (and the gate nearest to me).  You might just about recognise it from the Loy Krathong photos - this is where the lantern garden was.

My flat.  Sorry about the mess - I took these in the first couple of days I was here.  You can see the former Kettle O' Doom on top of the fridge there.  Once it passed from providing hot water and punishing electric shocks to JUST doing the shocks, I retired it. :)

Picture display on the side of my wardrobe.  Check out the Hampstead Players' Fiddler on the Roof flyer on the lefthand side there.  Awesome design!  By the way, the long sheet is a set of Undead Alert Cards, so that you can keep people informed about your zombie-infection status.  I am currently at Threat Level Blue - In No Way One of the Living Dead.

View from outside my front door.

Shower lizard lives right outside my shower!  (Finger provided for size reference.)

 Foodie section of the post!  Above, the way I get most of my meals these days - in a plastic bag from the local market (or from the noodle stand near my house).  Top, fish with rice and cilantro.  Left, another Thai staple - panang with sticky rice.

Guilty pleasures section:  Above, market-stall fried chicken and fishcakes.  Left, chocolate eclair (15 baht - that's about 30p - from the market, but you can only get them rarely).

If you're thinking of being my baby, it don't matter if you're black and white.

*waves*

Hey, everyone!  Right now I'm happily ensconced on my bed with the contents of the care package Margaret just sent me (chocolates, jaffa cakes, and M&S Christmas tea, which is delicious), and with a three-day weekend ahead of me, because Monday is the king's birthday.  (There are GIANT PHOTOS of the king, complete with gilt and flags, all over Chiang Mai this week.)  I'll still be doing some work over the weekend, but I'm basically ahead of schedule; the outline for my report was supposed to be finalised by Monday, and not only have I handed it in, but I've got a chunk of the first chapter written.  The rest of it's still pretty daunting, but I'll get there!

So, the highlights of last week included getting my driver's licence (whoo-hoo!), and THANKSGIVING.

The driving test in Thailand... well, explains a certain amount about the drivers in Thailand.  It's a doddle - straight line, turn, up a hill, down a hill, easy slalom (although I feel incredibly smug about the fact that the slalom is one of the things my London motorcycle instructor despaired of my ever getting), and drive along a plank.  Not that I should talk; I've had the licence for almost two weeks now, and I'm still very much getting used to the bike, so I'm benefitting from the somewhat lax system, too.  And I'm still rather hypocritically proud of myself for getting this far. :)

Now, this is the design for both licence plates and driver's licences issued in Chiang Mai.  I'm showing you the plates, because the text on the licence covers most of this.  I'm sorry that the picture is still pretty blurry; it was the best I could find online.  I want you to direct your attention to the bottom right-hand corner there.

WHAT.  ARE THOSE PANDAS.  DOING.

So, yeah, I've got humping pandas on my licence. :)  Hey, it's a good thing!  They're endangered!

Since getting my licence, I've been experimenting with further distances and trickier drives.  The first real excursion on my own was just to the local Western-style bakery (bribing myself with cake was an essential part of the learning process :)).  After that, I've driven to the Night Bazaar, taken the full loop of the Superhighway to go meet friends for dinner, and, last night, driven right into the old city for pub quiz night!  I'm still a bit leery of traffic, and so far I've only gotten up to about 50 kmph before feeling like I'm going to shake apart, but... yeah, I think that, "I'll get there!" is the theme of this post.

The Night Bazaar is well worth a visit.  It's a lively, strange mix of traditional handicrafts and the kind of boho art and "Come to the Dark Side - We Have Cookies" t-shirts you'll find in Camden Lock, with loads of fruit and ice cream stands thrown in.  There are posh antique shops and galleries side-by-side with overflowing textile stalls and carts selling Buddhist trinkets, as well as a warehouse-like hall with rank upon rank of both authentic craft tables and tatty souvenir shops (you know those cat statues with the one bobbing arm?  Would you like FIVE BILLION OF THEM?).  The vendors are friendly without being pushy, although a guy selling Indian-style laquer did tell me he'd seen me walking along the river the day before with my boyfriend.  So either I have a doppleganger who's getting more than I am, or I've been sleep- ...dating.

I'd give the Night Bazaar food court a miss, though, if I were you.  It's got a bizarre atmosphere, like one of those slightly fancier outdoor New Jersey malls (usually called a "plaza" or a "colonnade") that's dotted with trees and windowboxes to give it a classier feel.  There are live performances of Thai dancing, which is cool, but the food isn't great for the price.  I was intending to get some sushi, until I saw the sushi.  I think someone defrosted a bag of mixed veg, wrapped some rice around them, squirted the whole thing with salad cream, and called it a day...

Anyway, I did manage to get a little Christmas shopping done (more is slated for tomorrow, when I hit the hilltribe market and some of the craft shops).  As for the pub quiz this week, we came fourth - quite a feat, considering it was just Pam and me for about three rounds!  After that, we were joined by a very nice Aussie couple backpacking around Europe, who helped us shoot ahead in the ranking because one of them knew the given names of all the Jonas Brothers. :)  Before they left, Pam gave them the full rundown of top places to go in Chiang Mai when you've only got a couple of days - a few of the more beautiful or unusual wats; the Night Bazaar and the nearby day market; and loads of excellent restaurants, including a cocktail van the expats call "Latifah's", because apparently, after you've had a few, the proprietor looks a little like a Thai Queen Latifah. :)  I even got to chip in with a few ideas, which made me feel all cool. ;)

And yes, I did get to celebrate Thanksgiving here in Chiang Mai!  I was invited to a party thrown by a friend of a friend - a MASSIVE feast with about twenty people and all the Thanksgiving/Western comfort food you could ever want:  roast chicken, lasagna, mash, bread with garlic butter, stuffing, sprouts, cheese, brownies, and even wine (which is way out of my budget normally, so I appreciated being spoiled by the non-volunteer expats :)).  It was very relaxed, and it wound up being one of those evenings where a few people are lingering, smoking and drinking on the porch and earnestly dissecting scifi novels, at two in the morning.  There haven't been enough of those in my life lately.

I'm enjoying going out with and getting to know the other VSOs and their friends, but at the same time, it sometimes makes me acutely aware of the fact that my own friends - who would love this person or have so much to contribute to that conversation or get a kick out of this random cultural quirk - are so far away.

A few more things:

• Yesterday was the Thai and Burmese Christian festival of Sweet December (an increasingly big deal in this country), which celebrates the first day of the month of Jesus's birth.  Apparently, there are prayers, and then everyone gets together and eats solidly until midnight.  This is precisely my kind of celebration.

• I discovered earlier this week that I fail at rice. :)  I went to one of the local restaurants (little cookshops that are essentially a few tables in a bare storefront, with a noodle stand outside), and for the first time, ordered a dish with rice instead of a bowl of soup.  I started eating the rice the Western way - you know, with a fork.  Halfway through, the cook saw me, burst out laughing, and eventually - when she was able to control her giggles - very gently took my fork away and handed me a spoon, beaming at having enlightened the clearly mental farang.  RICE - UR DOIN' IT WRONG.

• Contractually obligated geek-post:  There's been a lot of debate, online and off, about the depiction of women in comics lately since DC comics relaunched its entire line (and, in the process, gave us some of the most facepalmingly objectifying art of superheroines ever).  A common counter-argument to protests about the objectification of women is, "But men are objectified in comics, too!  They're drawn as perfect specimens with giant muscles and powerful bodies!"  Well, if you're interested, here is the perfect rebuttal to that argument, in the form of an awesome webcomic.  If this kind of pop-culture debate is your thang and you want to learn more in general, don't miss this blog.

Photo post soon!  I'm sure you're all dying to see what my apartment looks like, right? :P

Week 3: Zombie Minge Vs. Octocock

This week I:
 

• Went out for the birthday of one of my Burmese colleagues.  It was a nice evening, but kind of daunting – I’m not at my best trying to make conversation in large parties of new people, never mind when there are language issues, and some of my colleagues were a bit awkward and apologetic about how quiet I was, which made me feel worse.  But I think it was a step towards getting to know people a little bit better.  (Also, I ate a live shrimp.  Well, to be more precise, I ate a shrimp from a dish of live shrimp, but I think my particular selection had already shuffled off this mortal coil.  I’m still claiming macho points, though.)

• Went to a pub quiz with Pam and her friends at an Irish bar in central Chiang Mai.  (They also do Western food – mmmm, chicken parm…)  We came in sixth out of 21 teams, which isn’t too bad, and our team name (Zombie Minge vs. Octocock) was undoubtedly both the best name and the most disturbing idea for a porno of the whole night.  Weirdly enough, the quiz was run by an American who was the absolute spit and image of Bill Levine, the American who runs a pub quiz at his pizza parlour in the Lazimpat district of Kathmandu.  I’m beginning to think there’s some kind of secret society at work.

• Met with the cool leader of the women’s group I mentioned earlier, who gave me a better sense of how to pitch the project I’m working on and some ways to communicate past cultural/class differences, and, in the process, slightly freaked me out about the magnitude of the task.  (I’m not afraid of not finishing, btw – I’m afraid of producing something that the people I intend it for won’t find useful, and I’m afraid that everyone will be too polite to tell me where I’m going wrong, so this report, which is supposed to be a practical guide for advocacy, will end up quietly gathering dust somewhere.  But I’m doing everything I can to try and make sure that doesn’t happen.) 

 

• Took and passed the written driving exam (despite a few very questionable graphics – “Which turn is correct?  Well, it’s obviously not that one, since that car is clearly on fire, and dropping out of the sky directly onto a gaggle of malformed schoolchildren.”).  This meant hanging around the DMV for ages, but that gave me a chance to really get into Alex Irvine’s novel Transformers:  Exodus, and also get chatting to a dude from Boston, who lives here with his girlfriend, and who believes that aliens built the pyramids, thanks to a lack of torch-smudges above the paintings inside.  (Look, I dunno, it’s been that kind of week.)  I’ll go back for the practical this coming week.

 

• Got introduced by Pam to a brilliant café called Love at First Bite (yes, it shares a name with a cheesy vampire comedy :)), which has AMAZING cakes, including one that’s essentially a bowl of half-cooked brownie batter with whipped cream on it.  The owners also have an adorable dog named Sashimi, who, owing to the state of her health, can’t just go running around, so she gets fifteen minutes on the treadmill every day.  In her pink sweater and ribbons.  The sight of her earnest, fuzzy little face as she labours away in her own tiny gym is hilarious.  Then we (Pam and I, not the dog) went to dinner at another Western-style restaurant, the Duke’s, which does really good variations on New Jersey-style diner food.  Real mozzarella sticks, man.  Properly stuffed calzones.  Mash.  Oh, it’s good to know there’s a place for when the really shameful cravings hit. :) 

 

• Drove my motorcycle the 25 km out to the annual rice harvest festival at a local organic farming/teaching organisation (okay, I was following a colleague, but still!).  This included a couple of U-turns on the highway, which I still find nervewracking, but for the most part, it was actually okay!  We missed the “harvest” bit, and turned up for the “festival” part, which included an amazing lunch (beef, pork, peanut, and pumpkin curries, all over mountains of rice), and I got to see some of the Burmese students again, and meet a few more volunteers, and completely fail to convince the dogs to play with me.  (Maybe I smell like farang?) 

 
And today I slept.  A slightly disturbing amount.  It’s not like I got up particularly early, but I still crashed for a full two and a half hours this afternoon.  It’s quite possible that I’m just processing – emotionally and physically – but I don’t know what to do if I continue this exhausted.