Week of 2/1-2/7

Here are some highlights of the last week or so:

Last Sunday (2/1)... yeah, that's over a week ago... we went to cooking school and learned how to make (among other things) curry, pad thai, and a banana with coconut milk desert. The day started with a visit to the market, where our teacher taught us about the different kinds of rice, various coconut products, and different forms of flavoring common in Thai foods.

Then we drove out to the farm where the cooking school is. There we learned about traditional Thai family farms and the ways they plant crops to encourage soil health and plant health - like planting stinky plants next to others to keep the bugs away. Their green beans are HUGE here - like as long as your arm. For real. It's intense.

Last Monday (2/2) all nine of us trekked out to the UN Irish Pub to watch the Superbowl be replayed. Those of us interested in the game already knew the outcome, but decided to go see it anyway. And we decided to mess with all the other people (at least some of whom didn't know the end) and cheer for the losing team. It was so much fun. Andy, Emily, and I in particular had a lot of fun being loud and raucous.

Best quote of the night came during the booth review for the last Steelers touchdown:
"Oh, come on! His toes are down; he's just being graceful! He's a fucking ballerina, that's all!"

Hilarious.

Also on Monday, a new language teacher started - Ajaan Jang. She's very high energy and is a ton of fun. She sometimes tells us stories about past years of Coe students, such as last year one student kept telling her to turn toward the water buffalo during his midterm. She said she tried really hard, but after the third or fourth water buffalo turn she just burst out laughing. What he meant was turn right - or liaow kwaa, not liaow kway. We also take a 20 minute break about two-thirds of the way through class, which is excellent. Two hours is a LONG class.

On Tuesday (2/3) Catherine got sick. Usually getting the stomache flu is not a huge deal, but since Catherine's pancreas doesn't work (she has diabetes) she can't be left alone while ill. Since I was one of the people that she gave 'betes training to over christmas break, and since Patricia is the one with all the tropical disease knowledge from her years working in Paraguay, the two of us camped out with Cate, making sure she tested her sugar and ate icing and such - did you know you can absorb sugar through your gums? I didn't until Christmas. It was actually scary for a while because her blood sugar refused to climb above the 60s (for reference 180-200 is good, 300 is high, and 40 is coma). Then we discovered the icing Cate was eating didn't actually have sugar in it. Oops. Thanks for that info Google. So I left her to rest with Patricia and took a drunk Becca for a walk to the 7-11 to purchase sugary things for Catherine, and bread-like things for her. There we discovered the group's new fave candy - Chokie-Chokie. It's basically a milk-chocolate fudgey-substance in a tube and is delicious. And two or three tubes absorbed via the gums made Catherine's blood sugar sky-rocket up over 200 so she could sleep.

Wednesday in Human Rights class we reverted to third grade and needing to raise our hands to talk rather than having a conversation like adults, and some people still didn't talk. Ugh. Hopefully we can un-revert this week. Probably one of the most interesting discussions we did manage to have was whether the "vacation mentality" would really enable people to make decisions to do things that they would be opposed to doing at home, as one of our authors discussing child prostitution suggested. Nathan and Ian were very sure that this would not happen, while Becca was convinced that it could. Thoughts? This also lead into later discussions regarding if humans are inherently good, inherently evil/bad/not good, or inherently stupid.

Thursday the program took us out to eat at Drexler's favorite Italian place in town, right across from CMU. It was pretty delicious, about as good as you can get anywhere (and a lot better than Gen, Nikki, John and I had gotten the day before!). Coe alumn, Brad, who is teaching English at CMU this year came with us too. I remember thinking we had a lot of good discussions, but I don't remember what about anymore. Drexler and Patricia talked about living abroad, Holly, Emily, Kacie, Nikki and Gen told ghost stories, I talked to John about Teach for America for a while, but I don't really remember what I spent most of my time talking about. Andy, Chris and Brad had boy talk at one end of the table. :)

Since it was the first Friday of the month, there was a craft market going on in one corner of the campus, and after class Patricia, Holly, Emily and I tried to wander to it, but it took a very long time and we got a little lost. Walking back was much faster. That night Andy, Chris, Gen, Nikki, Kacie, Emily, Holly and I went to a British Pub by the guesthouse for bar food and drinks. When everyone else went to play pool, Gen and I had a really great talk back at the table. I really enjoyed getting to connect with someone new on the trip. And Gen is such a sweetie!

When we left the pub, Gen, Kacie and I decided to go check up on Paul, the saxophonist and co-owner of the jazz bar. Gen is his secret admirer, so at least a couple people from our group go every few nights. The jazz is decent (it really depends on the ensemble playing), but Paul is very good. This night, the combo was short a bassist and drummer. So one guy jumped up to the drum set for a song or two, and when he wasn't playing, Paul would occasionally tap a cymbal or something to accompany a solo or whatever. For the last song of the first set, Paul said they wanted to try something "experimental." I wouldn't say it was that experimental, but it was PHENOMENAL - I mean one of those times when music just reaches all the way to your soul, and you not only hear it with your ears, but feel it in your chest, in your pulse, creeping around your subconscious. A-mazing. I hadn't had that happen in a while, and this piece especially grabbed me.

Saturday (2/7) we went to an elephant show. To be honest, I almost didn't go. First off, we have our Thai language midterms this week, I wanted to get started on editing my NGO's english publications, and I need to read a lot faster/a lot more for my independent study on Thai conceptions of gender and sexuality. And secondly, these sorts of things always feel somewhat like animal exploitation to me, and I kind of wish there wasn't a market for it. I'm fine with safaris and going to see the animals in their own habitat or something replicating their natural environment, where they're wild and untrained. But animal shows kind of bother me. And this was our second one. In the end though, I went and it was fun to coo over baby elephants and marvel at elephant antics with everyone. I did skip riding the elephant though. It just felt like too much money to sit on an old-style throne on the back of an elephant that had just been forced to paint pictures and kick soccer balls in front of me. Instead, Patricia and I wandered around the camp, until we hit the village where all the mankoots (elephant handlers) and their families live. Then we turned around so as to not intrude.

Also on Saturday, I discovered one of the computers in the guesthouse has a slot that fits my camera's memory card!!! Excitement! So I'm working on uploading all of my pictures before we leave for Laos this weekend.

And the ants go marching down to the ground to get out of the rain

- children's song

My bathroom at the guesthouse has ants living in the wall. I'm trying to not worry about it because they don't seem interested in much beyond the shower, and they're not the biting red kind that Andy and Chris washed out of theirs. Also, I sometimes like to watch their antics.

Like this morning when I got up to shower I found a cluster of little brown ants by the window, and when I went in for a closer look, found them working to carry a large red carpenter ant they had captured and killed outside the window, around the sill to the opposite corner of the shower and up the wall to a hole that is the entrance to their wall abode.

They also had dismembered a black carpenter ant and were busy taking the pieces of this ant into another hole in the grout of the shower. I watched them carry the legs and abdomen through the hole, but then the little brown guys got confused when the head didn't fit. They kept trying to push it in at various angles adding more pushers, switching to pulling, but it just did not fit. After a few minutes the ants took it to a different hole in the tile.

I waited until both carpenter ants were safely in the wall before taking my shower.

But seriously, the ants seem to have a very highly structured and organized society. They know what they'er doing and no one and nothing can distract them from that, even when the shower walls get steamy and slippery, they're still traipsing along, window to sill to wall to hole and back again.

On our walk to visit an NGO this morning we were adopted by the most adorable street dog I have seen yet. It walked with us the whole 20 minutes there, waited for us outside and then walked the 20 minutes back with us. I wish we could have kept it and brought it back to Coe. Patricia thinks it may have been abandoned by an American and recognized us as being similar to its former owner. Poor baby.

Jan. 15-17 Recap: Bangkok

January 15th we arrived in Bangkok! With our delay in Chicago and then Narita/Tokyo, we arrived in BKK in the early afternoon. The day was gorgeous, sunny and in the 80s (compared with the double digits below zero in the Midwest!). We took taxi buses to our guesthouse by the train station, to unload luggage and then wandered the city. The group of us 9 students travelled around in a huge group this first night, and a couple of times we heard locals exclaim something like "Farong line!" enjoying the sight of us like ducks in a row.

As we wandered the city, I kept wishing I could read the graffitti we saw. Graffiti in the U.S. is fascinating enough, but this was in Thai! I was so disappointed that I couldn't read and truly appreciate it. (And no, I don't care about the road signs, just the graffiti).

Bangkok is a much busier city - or at least more chaotic in its busyness - than the U.S. cities I've been in. There is such a rush of people everywhere - on foot, on scooters and motorbikes, in tuk-tuks (glorified motorbikes), and in other vehicles. And it seems only turn signals and stop lights are required. Crosswalks, lanes, speeds, even sometimes whether sidewalks belong to peds or bikes are all up for interpretation. My mom would be horrified by how close vehicles drive to one another (if her comments to me are any indication!).

The taxis here are very brightly colored - hot pink is our favorite, but they also come in fire truck red, bright blue, irridescent purple, orange and often have another color of stripe along the side (green, white, yellow and blue are most common). Emily, Casey and I are thinking about painting my car when we get back.

That night we had dinner as a group so that we could learn how to order food for ourselves. This meant that our profs taught us the word for "I would like" and then we are supposed to point at the menu: "Kaw... (point)." Also at dinner we learned how to say "excuse me" - kaw tope. This simple two syllable phrase proved quite difficult for our group, however, due to Thai tones. In english a rising tone indicates a question, and (in english) you can change a statement to a question just by raising the tone of your voice on the last word. So, when we were practicing "excuse me" in Thai we would say "kaw tope" and give both words a rising tone, since we were trying to ask for confirmation or correction of our pronounciations. In doing this though, we completely destroyed the meaning of the phrase.

On the 16th (Friday) each of us students woke up at various times anywhere between 4:00 am and 10:00 am, due to jet lag. It's pretty amazing - we're all in bed by 8 or 9 and most of us get up by 7. Our parents would love us in Thailand so much more - no more angry, sleepy mornings! By 9:00 we were leaving the guesthouse, again as a large group of foreign students, to try to find ourselves some food. We had wandered past a bunch of delicious smelling food stands in BKK's Chinatown (it has a Chinatown and an Indiatown) the day before, so we decided to try to find these stalls again. And this brings us to our first cultural lesson:

Food is not as readily available in Thailand as it is in the US. Our wanderings did not bring the same bounty of smells and people that we had seen the night before and eventually a local who took pity on the "lost" farong told us that, 1 - it was too early to get food (since most stalls and vendors do not open until 10:30 for lunch time) and 2 - we were not in a safe part of town to be wandering around in. Oops. He suggested we take a tuk-tuk or taxi to the other side of town and see the sights. This we did not do, since we were going later that day with our profs, but we did cross the couple of streets to the "better, safer" side. As we did this, the first stalls began to open and we were able to purchase chai yen (milk tea) and some rice dishes for about 45 baht total (just over a dollar), making it the cheapest meal I have ever eaten.

That afternoon we took a boat tour around the city. Originally, the only way to get around Bangkok was by boat; there were no roads. Even today, gridlock around the city's streets can become bad enough that sometimes water taxi is still the best option. Our tour took us first to a Snake Farm, which had a zoo-like area and also included a snake show. During the show they milked a cobra and did a bunch of other stunts with mildly to very poisonous local snakes. I touched a python, had a monkey repeatedly grab my knee looking for food, and I fed nuts to a bear.

The next stop was a wat (buddhist temple) called Temple of the Dawn. It is built in the Cambodian style of temples (meaning it had a lot of tall, narrow towers), and was decorated with broken pottery imported/stolen from China. Here we spent a lot of time looking around at all the different buddha statues in various areas of the temple and most, if not all, of our group climbed the extremely narrow stairs to the highest public level of the main temple (about halfway up the tallest spire). These steps were so steep that to climb them you were almost on hands and knees and had to turn your feet sideways on the step if you wanted to have any chance of them fitting on the stairs. It was intense. (I hope to post pictures once we reach Chiang Mai; I apologize for not being able to now.)

Our final stop was an outdoor market at a pier. Translated the pier is called "Elephant Pier." One part of the market is famous for it's large amount of buddhist amulets. There was so much food and drinks to partake in at the market. We all bought various fruits - rambutans, mangosteens, various banana varieties, mango - and some sort of food, whether a rice dish or skewers of meat. Chai yen and rosella juice have become the groups favorite drinks, while we have also tried guava juice and soda, pineapple soda, strawberry soda, chrysanthemum juice, parsley juice, green coconut juice, tangerine juice, and some sort of fruit punch. I am the only one who despises green coconut juice - it was such a weird mix of sweet, bitter and salty, but I was the only one who disliked it. And parsley juice was surprisingly good - it tasted tangy and fresh, like raw parsley, but also sweet. Very refreshing.

I know how to say hello (swa-tee-kah), lonely (wa-way), excuse me (kaw-tope) and I'd like a thai iced tea (kaw-chai-yen). Basically, I'm ready to move here! (NO.) I think I really need to figure out Yes, No, Sorry, Thank you, Just walking and Bathroom/Toilet because I keep trying to say these things in Spanish or English - neither of which are helpful. Drex and John (our professors) keep using their Thai skills, with taxi drivers or vendors or to get random tour people to leave us alone; its like they're teasing us. I can't wait to start Thai classes at Chiang Mai.

Today (Saturday, Jan. 17th) we continued our tour around Bangkok, seeing Wat Pho - home of the Reclining Buddha (which is HUGE) and another wat attached to the Royal Palace that is home of the Emerald Buddha. I will post more about these places and pictures tomorrow, however, since I need to go meet the group for our train to Chiang Mai! So excited!