a description, because I didn't dare take a photo

A neckless, girthy ex-football type sits astride a bike. He’s pedaling nonchalantly, no hands. He has a sleeveless shirt and a shaved head. He wears earrings in both ears and a giant dust mask across his mouth and nose. He’s Buddha vs. a biohazard, Mr. Clean doing some serious damage control.

Thanks to recent slash-and-burn efforts on the part of local farmers, Chiang Mai has been under a pallor of bluish smoke for the last two weeks. The whole city is hazy and indistinct, because of both the smog and my watery eyes. Most foreigners have taken to wearing face protection when they go out. I’ve asked some of my Thai friends why they don’t wear masks too, but they just say the smoke can’t kill them. I guess after a lifetime of sucking small-engine exhaust, you’re not really fazed by a little more air pollution.

This bike-riding Papa Bear that I saw, he moves slowly through the streets. He’s confused. This was supposed to be his perfect vacation- good weather, cheap prices, what you want when you want it. And then all of a sudden the environment turned on him. He’s still watching the locals with the look of someone who’s thrown a lot of his money into this city’s darkest corners. But he’s on the defensive. He’s hiding behind a dust mask. Things aren’t quite what they seem.

the New Foods Log after 150 days in Asia

New Parts of Familiar Animals I Have Eaten:

Cow Stomach
Pig Intestines
Pig Stomach
Pig Heart
Pig Liver
Pig Blood
Pig Sinews, Deep Fried with Sesame Seeds
Chicken Blood, Congealed and Cubed in Soup
Chicken Feet
Chicken Neck
Fish Entrails

New Animals I Have Eaten

Jellyfish
Snails, Pried Out of their Shells with a Toothpick
Crickets
Grasshoppers, Fried in Soysauce
Cockroaches
A Lot of New Fish

Familiar Animals, Presented Differently

Shrimp, Still Alive

Knowing For Certain

I'm not someone who puts much faith in ESP or premonitions. The desire to know the future seems to be a fruitless and foolish endeavor. In light of recent events, however, I believe that there are some things that you can absolutely know. For instance, pretty much from day one in Thailand I have believed that I will run into some incidental figure out of my past. Not a close friend, just someone from the periphery of my life, like a kindergarten classmate or friend from drama camp.

Last week, this expectation was proven correct when a woman stood up from a table in a restaurant in Chiang Mai as I walked by. "Dan? Dan?" she said. I had no idea who she was, but that was not surprising if she was to be from some hidden part of my life. She introduced herself as someone who had volunteered at the Painted Turtle. At her urging, I vaguely recalled a conversation we might have had about traveling to Asia. I felt no surprise at the meeting, which I think galled her. I felt only relief that my wait was over.

Now this restaurant was the same one where a few months ago I sat and watched someone run into a friend from college that she hadn't talked to in five years. I don't want to tempt fate, but I intend on eating there more often. There are plenty of moments from my past that I would love to live through again with an old friend. I know there are people I wronged, and with a few minutes of hugging and incredulous reunion I might be able to redeem myself. If I stayed here forever I could in time relive my entire life again.

Some of the Downside of Living Alone in a Foreign Country

It can be incredibly lonely. Chiang Mai is a waypoint for tourists doing longer treks through the north. So the English-speaking population in this city is for the most part transient, and several interesting friend-candidates have all moved on before we had a chance to meet up more than a few times. And my Thai is not good enough to foray blindly into social situations.

It was a stark discovery for me to realize that the language that I have spent my entire life practicing, and the language that I devoted my major in college to, can only take me a short way here. I spend a lot of my day wrapped up in a kind of restless energy that comes, I think, from constantly having to edit my English to make it more understandable to non-native speakers, or else translate that English into miserable Thai.

At home I can be articulate, funny, serious, academic with carefully worded sentences that I don't even really need to think about. Here I speak to people in my broken Thai and simplified English and feel like there are whole parts of my personality that I am just not able to express. How can they really know me if I can't communicate any complexity of emotion or critical thought? I can only talk about what they talk to every tourist about- the food, the weather, basic greetings. Much of what I like best about myself, my facility with my native tongue and the person that allows me to become, is just not available to me here.

Mae Sot

In Thailand, with a Non-Immigrant B Visa, I can stay for 90 days and then I have to renew by leaving the country. Last weekend I got to do this on a trip to the Burmese border that coincided with a stay with the family of one of my students.

I traveled to Mae Sot with Kaey's family- her husband, two shrill kids, and one of Kaey's students who acted as a sometime babysitter. Kaey is a professor at a local university where she teaches developmental psych. She's going to the US in May to study English and on the weekends I help her get her conversation skils up to par.

My last border experience was crossing into Cambodia, and it included masked men with guns running down alleyways, mountains of trash, and me feeling more unsafe than I ever want to feel again. To my great relief, Mae Sot was much calmer and at times startlingly beautiful.

My favorite part of the city was its improbable collection of people. Driving through the streets I saw Burmese men, with patterned sarongs and white-painted faces. Kaey explained to me that the custom is to make a paste out of herbs to use as sunblock on the face. Some of the women wore it in designs on their cheeks and forehead. Then in another part of the city was a Muslim community, identified by the crescent and star symbols over the doors and the many mosques. There the men had long beards and I saw women wearing veils moving slowly on bicycles. There were many other people more recognizeably Thai to me, as well as the ever-present Chinese gold shops trimmed in red and yellow, and I even saw several NGO-type farangs.

We stayed with Kaey's parents in a compound that houses her brother and his wife and several of her cousins as well. The power of family is magnetic here. In a surprise move, Kaey's younger brother Boy took me under his wing for the weekend. Even though he speaks little English he made it his project to entertain me. And I think he wanted to prove to me how modern his lifestyle is.

The parents are showy about their wealth, with Boy as the shining example. He took me through the streets of Mae Sot in his brand-new pickup, blasting Akon and Snoop Dogg on a sphincter-shaking subwoofer. It was a strange kind of culture shock to hear Snoop Dogg as we waited for cows to clear off the road. He dragged me into golfing with his friends, other young businessmen from Mae Sot: a pharmacist, a motorbike salesman, a restaurant owner, etc. They said I looked like Clark Kent with my glasses and asked me if I was wearing red underwear. Several times on the golf course an old man would walk out holding a baby. And on the fifth hole I could see a woman washing her clothes in a water trap. The greenside accomodations are not so desirable there I think. Our caddies were Burmese and they spoke as little Thai as I did. And back in the clubhouse we dined on food that was American in spirit, if not in presentation or ingredients. Heavy stuff like fried crickets dipped in ketchup and squid cooked in egg yolks.

Back at the family compound I had a totally different kind of cultural experience. Kaey's husband Oak woke me up at dawn one day to go shopping with him. I followed him to the town market, where I held bags for him as he bought enough meat to rebuild a pig. We spent most of the day in the kitchen preparing laab muu, which is a traditional dish in his family. It consists of basically taking each part of a pig, preparing it in its own savory way, and then mushing it back together in a black sauce. I got to pare intestines, deep fry the heart, and best of all, tenderize the leg meat until it was as creamy as cake frosting. The whole thing was actually pretty good, prepared with a lot of spice and served with fried onions and vegetables. I get the feeling that the family likes the food, but doesn't love it. So Oak was left eating laab leftovers at the next few meals.

The actual trip into Myanmar was brief and unremarkable. I walked over the Friendship Bridge, a massive concrete causeway, sat for five minutes in Burmese customs, and then walked back into Thailand. I got to see the dry and dusty bed of the Moei River below me, and some Thai policemen catching Burmese trying to sneak into Thailand.

The weekend was three days for me without another native English speaker. I was exhausted from trying to pare down my sentences and translate into Thai. It was surprising how much Chiang Mai felt like home when I returned.

Status Update

I was recently offered a job at The Painted Turtle, a summer camp in California that I have worked at in the past. It was pretty much the best job offer I've gotten since being in Thailand, and I'm also starting to think more seriously about coming home. So I took the job, and I will be returning to the US in mid-May. It's strange to think that this trip, which has been so open-ended for so long, now has a fixed end date. But I've known since I got here that the expatriate life-style is not for me, and even a stay of much longer than a few months would be more than I wanted. I've got about two more months of teaching, and then a short time to travel.

A second note is that I just turned 23. The school I teach at, The Inter Eng Club, threw me a bash with grilled shrimp, Thai crooning around a guitar, lots of whiskey, and a generous mix of my students and co-workers. It was a great time. The guests were quite generous, and several gave me presents. I received a dress-shirt, two ties (one pre-tied), and a pencil case. Proof that I'm known around these parts as all business.

the joys of housekeeping

When I returned to my room at noon today I noticed a funky odor. What I had thought before was simply the general pong of me living by myself, was in fact something much more sinister. I did a nasal check of my laundry basket, the bathroom, but found the problem in a lumpy, whitish liquid that was leaking from under my fridge. I sponged it up and forget about it, as I was rushing to get back to school.

This evening I returned to my room to find the smell even more potent. I shifted the fridge and saw one of the feet dragged a milky trail across the floor. I remembered that about a month ago I had left a bottle of milk on its side in the fridge. I had discovered it the next day and mopped it up, congratulating myself on an unpleasant job carried out swiftly. I didn't stop to wonder why an entire bottle of spilt milk needed only a few swabs with the sponge- now an oversight with potentially problematic consequences.

I looked under the fridge and found that the whole thing was set up on a frame. I lifted the fridge off the frame, only to be confronted by a seriously stinky odor. The milk had apparently poured down through the rubber seal around the door and settled under one of the legs. Little cheesy bits of dried milk spotted the underside. So I hefted the frame out to my porch to shake off the crusty bits. But as I moved it onto the porch I heard something slosh around. This was getting almost too disgusting to bear, but I pried off a rubber cap from the bottom of the frame. Out dripped something oily and evil-smelling that went over the railing and splashed down onto the parking lot below. The milk had poured down into the frame like one of those backyard basketball hoop stands that you fill up with the hose. This disaster had been festering under the fridge for almost a month, and only now that the weather was heating up did I discover it.

I found myself thinking about the grandmotherly advise "don't cry over spilt milk." Well, what if you spilled it a month ago? And now the smell is so bad it's making your eyes water? Does that count as crying?