Bus Station Baguettes and Steamed Fish Eyes

Delight delight delight.
That's right, I've come back to Laos. Third time, sure is fine.
What have I done so far? Well. After a very very long journey from Chiang Mai, resplendent with frequent sudden stops for a poor British boy to be sick on the verge, I eat a delicious plate of raw spring roll. Then I nap like it's my job.
Later, I meet Mr. Bair out front of Mixay Temple and we ride around on his motorbike for a bit. I did wear a helmet, thank you. We zoom past crowded street stalls, steaming pots and clattering plates. We zoom past fashion outlets, some of which are actually not hideous, and I am confused why all the girls still wear their traditional embroidered knee-length skirts rather than these trendy trendy things.
Then the moon comes out from behind the buildings. Huge and orange, reflected over the stinking canal, beautiful.
We go to his sister in law's house and hang out there for a bit. She is very cool and she has a happy face. She is a young librarian with two boys, one is four and very naughty, and the other is almost one. The four-year-old and I play his version of hide and seek which means I count to ten while he hides around the corner, I find him immediataly and he then runs around the house cackling. Three families live in the one house, and the living room we sit in is covered in anime posters and drawings of fashionable blonde princesses. You can tell that kids rule this room!
Bair and I zoom off again and park outside a restaurant. We sit next to a noisy fountain and order the fish. It is epic. Caught fresh from the river, steamed with ginger, spring onion and mushroom, it is perhaps the best fish I've ever paid for. Bair's friend Air comes by and orders beer. He reaches over with a spoon, scoops out the fish eye, and politely offers it to me. Okay, this is a year of saying "yes".  It is very soft except for a ring of cartiledge that breaks up easily. It tastes like fish oil. It could have been worse. I am convinced I have been imbibed with its power and I can probably see underwater now.

And this morning, rising quietly from my rooftop dorm with three snoozing shapes in the beds around me, I leave the Mixay Guesthouse (200 baht for a dorm, o yea).
Then I get the best fruit shake in town from a little place (just this little place I know) that is on the right as you come out of the road that leads away from the big square with the fountain if you're walking away from the river. Seriously, the best.
Then I bargain like a badass with a nice tuk tuk man who drives me to a place, where I do what I need to do. 'Nuff said.

Now, what to do with my limited funds? Visit a temple I say, read my book for the day, drink tea. Whilst being badass, obv.

Happy Winter Holiday!

A refreshing 23 degrees Celsius on Christmas day in Chiang Mai, the first hot Christmas I've ever had. Very peculiar, agreed Zippy and Heather, Canadian comrades teaching in Vietnam and Hong Kong respectively. It's like Christmas already happened and we weren't there for it.

Nevertheless, we dutifully opened presents under palm trees over plates of eggs and pancakes from Bake&Bite, exchanging handmade crafts from not so far-flung exotic locations.

We took a clattering song taew to Wat Umong, wandered through the temple tunnels and overgrown paths scratched up by chickens and dogs, hoping to spot any escapee antelopes who had broken free from the old zoo on the grounds. Instead we found ourselves in the monk pad where they do their laundry and sleep. Whoops. We walked to the pond and bought pellets for the catfish. Man those things are ugly. As they swarmed around the food in a writhing gaping-mouthed mass, Zippy said, "It's like when someone has a really gross scab and you keep looking at it over and over." Some of them were huge. The picture doesn't quite capture the alien gullet maw of the giant catfish mob.

Gives me the Freudian creeps. Am I right, ladies, am I right?

So we washed our hands and went to the market to buy fruit and nuts in exciting colours for the party flapjacks. Here is the recipe for forgieners who don't what a flapjack really is.

Recipe for Party Flapjacks

200g butter
200g demerera sugar
200g honey
400g oats
pinches of any or more of the following spices:
nutmeg
cinammon
star anise
cloves
handfuls of any or more of the following treats:
chocolate chunks
raisins
chopped mango/ pineapple/ cherries/ almonds/ fresh ginger
multicolour sprinkles (that's the party bit)
M&Ms

Heat oven to 180 C
grease up a pan, make that thing slick so nothing sticks
put the butter, sugar and honey in a medium or large saucepan on medium heat (I have only one smallish-medium sized saucepan which made this whole thing a rather careful procedure) and stir till the butter melts and the sugar dissolves. Then get it off the heat.
Whack the oats into the pan.
Hassle the spices o'er top.
Impose the treats.
Stir everything up so it's good and wet, but holding it pretty much together, not falling apart like a sissy.
Press the sticky mix into the pan and put it into the middle of the oven. Cook it for 15-20 minutes. The edges will be crispy and your kitchen will smell like hot sugar (unless you have a sinus infection and you will be making this recipe for your friends only since you won't be able to smell or taste a thing)

When it looks done, take it out of the oven. Divide it into squares or any shape you want. Eat any bits that don't fit on your serving platter. Then it's up to you to party.

a roi maak maak.

So we took this winner of a dish to Small House and had an actually good time with excellent chefs and budding professional line dancers. We wore our matching Christmas sweaters, fluffy and bedazzled. Ukuleles were played, turkey was digested next to the butternut squash dissolving in our stomachs.

Later, we song taewed merrily to the 24 hour coin-operated laundry and computer shop, where I called the Showers's, Zippy called the Doiron's, and Heather snoozed on a plastic chair. And who should flicker onto my screen but father Showers, decked out splendidly, if a little snugly, in a glittery google-eyed cartoon robot t-shirt with the word FRENZY! on it. "I'm thrilled with my present, thank you so much! I've been wearing it all day." How did I know my dad and my 12-year old brother had so much in common? Note to self, put names on presents when you wrap them in the same paper and ship them to different countries.
Enjoy your brown cushion cover, Michael.

Then we tra-la-lah'd home, and I listened to Lucy Day on the Myspace to send me off to sleep.

Happy Festive Time.

mountain fun

Nature Will Bitch You Up

After recess, the naughty nine-year olds were all like, "teacher, teacher!" and pointing at the table. A big, black, shiny, round, hairy, spike-leggedy beetle, with big chompy jaws. Poor creature, I thought, trapped inside horrid human classroom. So I let this huge bastard climb onto my hand, which it gripped with disproportionate strength. I whisked it away downstairs to the garden by the parking lot, tailed by two of the boys from class. I'll just let it down gently in the shrubbery, I thought kindly, but when I tried to pluck it off my hand, it HISSED AT ME. I have never heard myself scream like that, a wail of sheer terror, thinking this monster tightening its grip around my wrist was going to sever it, and I'm screaming and it's hissing and the boys are pointing and laughing at me, and I must regain my teacherly composure, so I coaxed it off with a dry leaf on the ground, each of its barbed legs unfastening themselves from my skin.

I found out later that they do not spit poison and kill, but they will pinch you like crabs do.

Big Flood Time

I am eating nice hot and sour coconut soup with chicken, noodles, a bit of boiled egg, and a disc of vegetable that is similar but nothing like potato. There is a hideous soap opera on TV behind me.

I have just said goodbye to a new and most excellent friend, esteemed musician, cardplayer and adventurer, Mr Nick Rocco. I think that's his name.

I will tell you of my day, from the very beginning. There are four things.

1. 4am, I am woken up, as I am every night, by the temple bell and the howling dogs. Someone is playing music that sounds like Cat Power, but just voice. Somehwere, a machine is on that sounds like a snoring basoon. It's raining. It's a good little soundscape, but I wish it was cool enough to close the balcony door.

2. 7am, it's still raining. I put on my plastic rain mac from 7-11 over my office clothes, and cycle to an interview at the Chiang Mai University Language Institute. BUT! What is this? Upon turning off the busy Huay Kaew road onto Sirimankalajarn, I am landed in six inches of water, which gets deeper as I go further along the street. I have never seen such a puddle. Every car is splashing me on my right, and my knuckles are white from fear of falling into one of the many potholes camoflagued under the brown water. I got really wet yeh. The interview was fine, and they're going to call me before December.
2.5. Later, after a sneaky full English breakfast, I comply with a sixteen-year-old Thai girl's approved request to have a lesson on how to flirt with foreign boys - I draw on my vast well of experience here: "So what do you think about you and me?" "Hi cutie." "You're so handsome." "I like your hair/ clothes/ music." Still, despite my efforts, she is concentrating on her phone and the clock on the wall.

3. I meet with Nick and Michael and Panisa, we have lunch and talk about when rascist jokes are appropriate and 80's teen movies. Then, then, Nick and I walk and walk, past the cabaret costume shop to the northwest corner of Old Town,  to this crazy Narnia building covered in white stone sculptures of lions, gorillas, and Greek boy gods, totally abandoned, half built and deteriorating. We walk up three flights of hazardous stairs, peeking in tiny empty rooms with floor to ceiling stained glass windows, until we get to the very top and out onto a big balcony, all of Chiang Mai presented to us. We poke around a little wooden house, empty but for a stool and two big knives. A woman starts following us around, pretending to sweep the concrete. Okay, sorry, we go now.

4. We want coffee, dammit, where can we get something like that in this town? Isn't it a Wednesday? In the middle of the afternoon? Where's the service? The service is currently under five feet of dirty water, sorry, closed today. And the next day. And most of the weekend. We hitch up our shorts and wade through. Thai people are stil smiling, heaving water with buckets from behind sandbanks, taking pictures of each other. Someone released a dam that was looking ready to burst, so rather than mess up the entire province, they just ruined a few homes and businesses by the river. Sabai sabai. It's pretty much okay now.

Sexytainment

After work on Saturday, which was a painful morning of attempting to throttle out even a grunt in English followed by an afternoon of pretending to be tigers and bears with 6 year olds, I song teawed it to Wororot Market, the one sandwiched between Chinatown and the river. It seemed everyone was closing up their stalls as I walked through, but I managed to try a steaming hot completely delicious banana with sticky rice wrapped in palm leaf, grilled to perfect sweetness and chewy texture. Sticky fingers on the street, I walked past stores selling incence, flowers and chillis in bulk, others hawking terrible frilly shirts size 6 only, "no try on." I found a barbeque on wheels setting up, and I haven't been so adventurous with scary-looking food (see reaction to fried bugs, previous), so I ordered a tiny white squid on a stick. It had a surprising inner texture of fresh mucous, and the outer flesh was a kind of edible fish rubber. I ate its crispy little tentacles and threw the rest away. Meanwhile, as I endured this experience, it was getting dark. The streets I had only just walked down, looking urgently for work clothes before they shut, were lit up and full of new vendors. I'm sure I walked the same four streets at least twice, they were changed each time. Cheap tat for miles, gaudy, colourful and glittering. I saw a man set up his stall by pouring out a bucket of enourmous plastic jewelled rings onto a cloth and spreading them out a bit.

I got some coconut juice, which made me suddenly in love as I looked over the bridge of the Mae Ping, seeing the bank lit up by tiny hanging lamps in the trees. There was even a clear sky. The taxi drove me back home the long way, down a dark winding road of bowing palm leaves hanging over garden walls, with the occasional light from a bar made of corrugated iron, plastic canvas and bamboo poles all roped together.

If you are reading this then we definately love each other.

Amy Asks Too Many Questions, But Her Feet Are Wise

Quick update on my emotional state: I am stressed, homesick, tired, irritated by most westerners, in awe of the tropics, curious, inquisitive (is that an emotion?), grateful. There.

Suddenly I have 25 hours of work a week. So much for a 3-day silent retreat in some temple up some mountain. Lesson plan lesson plan flashcards simon says names of animals of numbers of months of the year of days of the week. Six-year-olds are ace, even the day after a very fun birthday celebration. They will be mental, chucking cushions at each other, falling over, shouting shouting, and as soon as you get a box of coloured pencils out, they go silent. Language schools are a good place to start, lots of small classes with all diferent ages. Administration is hectic confusing, lots of pink slips and green slips and even a punch card, like in a factory. For now, it'll do.

Thai people are just as smiley as everyone says. People greet you on the street, when you get into the same song teaw as them, and when they drive by on the road in the car next to you. Everyone says hello, and once you get talking to people, seeing them around a few times, they all want to help you learn Thai and teach you to draw.

In the past three days, a man has tried to snatch my purse (the indecency!),I've eaten a third of my weight in Japanese food at a buffet, I've been to an orchid and butterfly farm with the inimitable Amy, who also dared me to eat fried bugs, which were a grasshopper, a silk worm, a maggot, and a beetle. The maggots were long and crispy, void of taste. The silk worm was perhaps the least appetizing thing I've had in my mouth ever. Imagine crunchy burned leggy fish-tasting bits coating your tongue, getting caught in your molars. I've had an authentic Thai massage from an old blind man, who said I felt like a man, like a plank of wood. Ta. I went swimming in a lake by the mountain, so warm, so quiet, beauty beauty. I've played Jenga in the Griffin Bar (Moon Mueng Soi 7) with Egg and Amy, every night.

Amy was going to stay in Chiang Mai for a night and then go back to Pai, but she stayed here to play for my birthday. It was a dead good birthday. We arrived at the Reggae Bar early, so it was empty. We had a horrible pink cocktail. Then a Thai man with a dredlocked beard and many tattoos started chatting us up with the kind of abuse that's supposed to be funny. Then his mate Yawee showed up and it was his birthday too (the gayest man in Thailand, from Miami, got his nails done that day, and the tatooed man had no idea his best mate was queer, ("never, I never do that, why you say that, it disgusting"). So one small glass of strong clear liquid followed another and then it was two hours later and the band was singing us Happy Birthday. I woke up the next morning with all the lights on, but all of my clothes folded neatly in the cupboard.

I have an address now, send me a message if you wannit.

Paradise Direct

May I introduce the sexpat. You will know him by his flip flops dragging across the polished floor of the 7-11, his bald patch, his thin white vest. He sits at the front of restaurants that serve 100 baht burgers, leaning over to the waitresses nearby, telling them about America, telling them that he needs them to help him out. He is glassy-eyed, slack-mouthed and flake-skinned. Usually he carries a plastic shopping bag in one hand, a cane in the other. A skinny girl will follow a couple of steps behind. If you walk around a few sois after 8pm you'll hear her "hee hee hee!" echo down the alley.

And so I have landed back in Chiang Mai, which is really very nice, except for holes in the pavement and some funny smells. I've just come back from 26 hours in Pai, the mythical laid back mountain town. No funny business here please, there is a mosque. Four boys and I took a bus through spiralling jungle roads, bumping past towering green pulsing city of plant life twisting all sexy around everything, all of it growing on top of itself. Flowers hang open like mouths. Tiny houses made out of bamboo and palm leaves are being slowly eaten by the land. Mountains appeared suddenly, vastly, yawning out into the grey horizon. Rice fields and brown cows, then little huts behind big signs that say PAI IN LOVE, HAPPY HOUSE, SWEET DREAMS. We arrived at the tiny bus station and walked down the road, past little restaurants offering coffee and fried eggs. We checked in to the Riverside, all bamboo huts and hammocks.

We rented motorcycles, yes dad that is what we did, and I rode with a helmet on the back with a boy who had been riding motorcycles since he was 12. And he slowed down when I asked him to. I am unscathed, unlike one of the others who crashed into a car next to the rental place, burned his leg on the exhaust and had to pay off the driver 2,000 baht, or the other one who decided to go to a mountain summit to watch the sunset, drive into a pothole in the dark and bash up his foot.

We went to Pam Bok waterfall, a gorge full of mist and rushing noise. There was a very good rock for climbing up and jumping off, and a strong current that knocked one of the guys under water and swept him downstream. He is still alive, and probably not concussed. It was certainly a confrontation with a big natural force; water is in so many forms in this country, whether it's the canal around Chiang Mai, stagnant ground water in the village wells, in the waxy green of plants, or in deafening 30 foot falls.

Milk Sandwich, Yam Sandwich

After 6 days of being in Thailand, I think I have arrived today.

A note on wildlife. Little lizards grip on to signs, gates, walls, mimicking colours. They are super quick, so no chance of catching one. Cows with sticking out ribs and shoulders have floppy ears and hump backs. They munch on boggy leaves in fields next to the main road. Dogs be barking, cats be slinking, kamikaze squirrels are bleached on their tummies and tails. After sunset, which is like a divine light switch being flicked at 7pm, crickets drown out the noise of the highway next to Wat Jet Yod temple, and the frogs compete for the best warble. Bats skim the river around Old Town. I saw a gigantic glossy rat streak behind a cupboard in the cafe I had dinner in last night. The day before, a beetle longer than my middle finger crawled out from under a table on quick spindly legs, wings clicking. Orchids languidly weigh down their stalks, hanging down from temple walls. Tiny fish swim in ornamental ponds, weird looking birds squawk in cages above bamboo furniture shops.

I got a little job at King’s School on Kaew Nawarat, Just west of the big brown Mae Ping river. I start on Saturday afternoon, and I’ll be on very part-time hours. Still, I feel good about having something to show for my first day hawking my wares. I got very muddled up in alleyways searching for the fabled AUA school, and after reading the guidebook I think it is far too good for the likes of moi. They have requirements for the dress code like shower every day, wear a bra, shave...

I went into Tesco (yep) and I have found my favourite food so far: Ovaltine snacks. Crunchy malt biscuits with a sweet gritty paste malt sandwich filling, only 35 baht for a pack. It seems there is a malt-based craze here, because Ovaltine is on every farang drinks menu. I have given in to it completely.