Refugee Camp California

A few weeks ago, I got the chance to spend a week in a Burmese refugee camp up by the border.  This particular camp is mostly Karen (one of the ethnic minorities in Burma; the Karen National Union’s struggle against the Burmese government has been called the world’s longest-running civil war, and while there was a ceasefire signed last month, it’s unclear whether it will be honoured on the ground).

Up Ahead in the Distance, I Saw a Shimmering Light

Some friends and I took a bus down to the nearest border town, ate lunch at a run-down little noodle bar at the bus station, then loaded all our stuff into a pickup truck for the trip over the mountains.  The views along the way were stunning… 

... at least, from the glimpses I caught while I was holding on for dear life.  Our driver was a young guy whose driving philosophy seemed to be, “WHEEEEE!”  Picture a roller coaster with no seatbelts; when you have to brace yourself so that your head doesn’t bash the ceiling as you go around turns, someone’s having a little too much fun at the wheel. :)

Such a Lovely Place

We made it, alive but queasy, to the camp, and trekked across about half of it to reach the guest house where we’d be staying.  Like most of the structures in the camp, it’s a bamboo and wood building, raised on stilts, with a drying area underneath and an attached washroom at the back.  It’s run by a round, beaming older woman we just called Moogha (“Auntie”).  She doesn’t speak English, but one of my Karen friends was staying with us, so she helped translate.

Moogha is awesome.  She’s plastered the guesthouse walls, inside and out, with photos of her family… interspersed with posters of Thai soap stars and Korean pop singers, as well as the occasional heart-spangled poster of syrupy-cute kittens. :)  (And Jesus.  But just two small Jesuses.  Jesi?)  In the evenings, she’d take us on a tour of the family pictures, telling us about how her brothers and sisters are scattered all over the world – this one in Australia, that one in Philippines, a few in Thailand.  (That’s the case for a lot of the people in the camps, especially the older folks:  everyone seems to have at least one relative who’s left to live abroad.)  We did our own, informal tour of the soap star posters without her.  One of my friends beckoned us over to a particular star in a school uniform and said, “I’ve been staring at this for ten minutes.  Is that a boy or a girl?”  My Karen friend – let’s call her K. – peered intently at it for a long time, and then pronounced with great gravitas, “I think it is tom.”  (“Tom” is short for “tomboy” – Thai/Burmese slang for a young lesbian who adopts a boyish look.)

Moogha and I didn’t exactly start off on the right foot:  our first night there, she smiled and beckoned me to sit next to her, then gestured at me and rubbed her arms, saying something in Karen.  I jumped in and answered the question that I assumed she was asking, because it was what everyone had been asking me all evening (and, many of you will recognise, all my life) – “Aren’t you cold?”  (I was the only one in a t-shirt.)  K. started laughing, and corrected me:  “No, no – she said that she always thought she was fat, but look at you!”  Um… thank you?

But that’s another thing Thais and people from Burma have in common – when they say something like that, it’s not a dig, it’s just a statement of fact.  They’d probably be horrified if you took it personally.  So I laughed, and we ended up spending a really great week staying with Moogha.  My favourite part was the one night that all the women (K.; the other foreign woman staying with us; Moogha; and me) sat around drinking cocoa (with sweetened condensed milk – it works surprisingly well) and talking, with K. interpreting for us.  Moogha wanted to know whether we were Christian.  I said that I came from a Catholic family, and my other friend said her family was Muslim; Moogha took all of this in stride, since Karen State has seen missionaries of all stripes over the years, and the camp itself contains multiple worship sites for Muslims and for several Christian denominations.  Moogha’s family, just in the last couple of generations, has had Catholics, Baptists, Muslims, Seventh Day Adventists… it was interesting that when a family member converted (often upon marriage), there didn’t seem to be any stigma or disappointment around it.

The guesthouse itself is rather beautiful, and staying there was, in a lot of ways, relaxing – there was a broad porch overlooking the dirt road out front, and we couldn’t sit down for five minutes without Moogha whipping out a plate of cookies and bringing out the tea with a speed that would put even the English folks I know to shame.  (Everywhere in the camp served this great looseleaf tea, with a strong, fresh, grassy taste.)  One thing that really surprised me about the camp overall, actually, was how good the food was.  I think I slightly prefer Burmese food to Thai food (not that I don’t love Thai food), because Burmese dishes are usually a bit hotter and less sweet.  But I didn’t realise that Burmese cuisine also has a fair amount of Indian influence, until I stayed in the camp.  Every morning, you could buy parothas and savoury roti, stuffed with chickpeas, at the shops along the road.

The washroom took a little while to get used to.  Basically, it’s a squat toilet behind a curtain, with an umbrella over it – for privacy?  Decoration?  I have no idea – and a series of water butts, with scoops you can use to bathe.  When we could, we would rush back at the hottest point in the afternoon to have a bath, because the freezing water would actually feel good then.  After dark?  Not so much.  (One thing about being up in the mountains in northern Thailand, though – the water’s plentiful, and pretty clean.)  I did try, once, to bathe Burmese fashion, wearing a borrowed sarong for modesty (even though we took turns in the washroom) and washing underneath it.  Yeah.  I have no idea how the hell people do that without growing at least one additional arm.

You can also wash clothes in the washroom, and dry them under the house (which comes with its own set of taboos:  shirts and underwear have to dry on separate lines, and you can’t put men’s clothes to dry next to women’s).  I was putting out a pair of jeans to dry when I ran into Moogha’s flock of geese clustered around their food bowl.  I tried to pick my way past them, but they shot me deeply offended glances and left the bowl in a squawking huff.  Okay, fine.  I hung up my jeans, shucked my shoes outside the outer door of the washroom, and went in to have a bath.

When I opened the door to come out, I suddenly came face to face with the entire flock, lined up outside the door, shifting their weight back and forth and puffing out their shoulders like parodies of East End gangsters.

“Dudes, I need my shoes.  I just – can I get my shoes?  Could we do that?  Is that a possibility here?”

They eyed me up and down for a second, and then, almost proudly, shifted aside to show me what they’d done.

Which was SHIT ALL OVER MY SHOES.

Damn, yo.  You don’t cross geese.

(Speaking of the washroom, there was a funny moment on the night before we left the camp, as well:  We were all sitting around by candlelight, and I was wrapped in a shawl that basically covered the top half of my body.  Moogha asked me something, and K. translated, “Do you have clothes under?”  I must have looked puzzled, and I opened the shawl to show that I was wearing a t-shirt underneath.  Everyone cracked up, and K, when she got her breath back, clarified:  “Do you have clothes.  Drying.  Under.  The house?”)

We’re All Prisoners Here, Of Our Own Device

The refugee camp is arranged on either side of a small river in a steep valley.  It’s gorgeous, but it’s a precarious location, at serious risk from floods and landslides.  You can see the gouges in the side of the mountain where past landslides have taken out huge chunks and ripped up trees, and apparently, the main road was completely submerged the last time the river overflowed.  (At least here, there are still a lot of trees to anchor the soil:  in another camp we visited nearby, the refugees had to clear much of the forest to build houses, and a few years ago, a landslide wiped out an entire slope of buildings.)

 

In a way, the physical environment mirrors the situation of the refugees.  They’ve clearly done a lot with the camp over almost two decades:  in addition to the elegant traditional houses, there’s a new hydropower generator, and probably a couple dozen small shops scattered along the main dirt road, selling everything from Karen handicrafts to Thai snacks.  (The snacks and other odds and ends can’t net the shopkeepers much of a profit, because they’re trucked in and sold to the shops at high prices, and it’s not like the shopkeepers can mark them up much if they want them to sell.)   

 

However, because the camp is, by law, a temporary facility, nothing is allowed to last:  the refugees can’t set up solar panels (too permanent) or use concrete in their homes.  (Bamboo houses need to be heavily rebuilt, if not outright replaced, every few years.)  And it’s not like there are opportunities within the camp (outside of a few, hotly contested NGO jobs).  You can’t even set up a shop without government permission.  Do exceptionally well at the camp school, several people told me, and you might end up one day… teaching at the camp school.

It must be a very strange existence.  On the one hand, you don’t exactly have to do anything; you’ll still have food, and a place to live.  And on the other hand, there are so many barriers in place to prevent you from doing anything.  Or you could always leave the camp (as many do), possibly giving up on the dream of getting back to your old lands in Burma one day, and make a life for yourself elsewhere.  For the kids who were born, or at least raised, in the camp – and there’s a whole generation coming to maturity now who are too young to remember anything else – that’s an even tougher choice:  Stay with what you’ve always known, or head out into a world that your life in the camp really hasn’t prepared you to face?

It was fascinating watching my Karen friends from Chiang Mai, especially those with family and friends still in the camp.  Within hours of arriving, they’d ditched their jeans for traditional longyis; they started laughing more and standing straighter.  I sometimes forget that they live in a foreign country every bit as much as I do.

They started telling stories, too, that I might never have heard back in Chiang Mai.  One of my friends, E., grew up mainly in the camp, but before that, she and her family were in a Karen village near to a militia stronghold.  The young commandos would have to steal from neighbouring farms as a test of their stealth (whatever they took would always be returned the next day).  One night, E.’s mother heard one of their ducks quacking and screeching like crazy, and looked outside to see two shadowy figures making off with the panicked duck.  E.’s mother grabbed a makeshift weapon from the kitchen and tore out of the house after them, yelling for them to stop.  They got away, but the next day, the duck was returned by two contrite young men.  “Oh, auntie, auntie, we got a punishment!  First we could not make the duck be quiet, and then you chased us!  We failed the commando test!”

But not all the stories were funny.  E. also told me about her family trying to settle further up the mountain, to have a farm there, until the competition with local villagers over land and resources drove them to the camp; and she told me about what had happened about a year after she and her family settled in the refugee camp.  In the middle of the night, Burmese soldiers arrived, and started setting the refugees’ homes on fire.  “Maybe one hundred, two hundred houses they burned.”  I asked why there wasn’t some kind of security for the camp; she said that there is now, but that at the time, the few Thai guards had turned and run.  “We had no weapons, but there were some who had been soldiers – Karen soldiers, you know – they had guns, and they…”  Her voice, which had been cool and matter-of-fact, started sounding forced.  “They tried to form a line…”

She didn’t give me many details beyond that, and it was a few minutes before she could look at me again.

You Can Check Out Any Time You Like…

On my last morning in the camp, I walked past a cluster of young men in longyis and military castoff jackets, gathered around a radio.  A few of them were warbling along as I passed:

And still those voices are calling from far away,

Wake you up in the middle of the night, just to hear them say…

So, naturally, I started singing.

Welcome to the Hotel California,

Such a lovely place, such a lovely face…

And then we all cracked up. :)

The ride back over the mountain was a lot smoother, with a much older, more experienced driver – I’d like to put down for the record that it also didn’t take a minute longer than the drive to the camp.  However, that was still long enough for him to play his Jim Reeves CD.  All the way through.  FOUR TIMES.  All I could think, after the third rendition, was, “Yeesh, this Reeves guy really has to stop falling in love with women who make him this miserable.  Then again, one of these songs is about a single breakup driving him to drink and leading him to bounce around cesspool beach resorts catching assorted venereal diseases, so I think he also has to acknowledge his own role in this problem.”

And that was my time in the refugee camp.  I’m still turning a lot of it over in my mind, but I think it was helpful for me to see, given the work I’m doing.

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.

Whoot!

Okay, so it's four in the morning, but ladies and gentlemen, WE HAVE A DRAFT!

It's currently 48 pages long.  It's sloppy, it still has gaps, and it took me a week longer to finish than I'd estimated (then again, it also ended up being longer and more complex than I had in mind, so basically, the fact that I did more work at that stage will hopefully mean that there's less editing and filling-in to be done now).

I now have a week and a half to substantially re-write it and fill in the gaps in the research, but I feel a bit more relaxed about that now.

I can do this.

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like... New Year...

The last of my presents are in the post!  And as a thank-you for my copious business, the post office gave me, with great ceremony... a free pack of post-office-branded tissues.  I do not understand my adopted country at all.

Also, my local 7/11 has a cardboard Christmas tree outside - by which I mean that it's actually cut out of a brown cardboard box, and then edged with a green tinsel garland and green ornaments to make it appear more... frondy, I guess.  There are presents underneath that are hilariously wrapped almost exactly the way I wrapped the ones I sent - in Thai newsprint with sparkly ribbons.  Vindicated!  (This is even funnier because 7/11 has actually started stocking wrapping paper this week - sorry, recipients of newsprint-wrapped goodies! - but only single, individually cellophaned sheets for small presents.  I guess it wasn't financially worth it to crack open a bunch of them just to decorate the shop.)

New Year's displays have also started appearing, although they tend to be a lot more, well, rationally-sized than Christmas displays in the West.  Usually, we're talking fireworks, balloons, garlands, a few presents (mainly toys, although the 7/11 display includes boxes of Oreos with a "To:" and "From:" space), and the ubiquitous "monk kits".  (These are buckets full of practical items, like canned food, bottled water, and matches; there's a monk's robe coiled up at the bottom.  People bring them to temples on holidays as a kind of offering.  The idea is that they make the monks' lives easier by reducing the need to go out and get everyday stuff themselves.  The first time I saw them, I thought they were just really boring gift baskets.)

Tomorrow there's an office party for those of us still kicking around, and then the office shuts until January!  Which is kind of nice; I mean, I'll still be working every day from home, but I'm realising more and more that the times when I'm naturally productive =/= office hours.  I think that occurred to me at about 2.30 this morning, as I was wrapping up a section on biodiversity conservation.

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