merry คริสต์มาส !

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it's Christmas day and I sit here at school, enjoying those most classic of holiday smells: burning garbage, deep fried fish paste and dog. I'm wearing a traditional holiday outfit: flip flops, chalk-encrusted pencil skirt and school uniform polo tee, and my hair is plastered back with sweat from the December mid-morning heat. I woke up this morning and found that I'd received a special visitor during the night... in the little yellow box I'd laid on the living room floor, two cockroaches had come to take the poison I'd left them and were gripping to their last moments of life. I also found a pile of dog shit on my doorstep as I raced out the door for work this morning!

Yesterday, in celebration of the holiday (the Christian origins of which none of the children - and adults, it would seem - here are aware of) the foreign teachers were asked to sing a song for the staff and student body. we elected the mercifully short Jingle Bell Rock. As we sang, Santa (teacher ryan) threw handfuls of candy out into the sea of screaming children.

Santa and friends sing before the student body

Santa fends off packs of hungry students

After the morning madness, we spent a good hour presenting gifts (from whom?) to members of the administration and getting our photos taken, we had a talent show of sorts. The whole morning long, groups of reluctant students got up on stage to sing carols about the birth of christ and eating figgy pudding and folks dressed up like eskimos..

the carolers

Then the high school students performed the grand finale performance, which was, of course, a sexy dance number to a popular (decidedly un-christmassy) pop/techno song.

yup, the one in high heels, make-up and tiny cutoffs in the front is a fellow

Now I leave for a school-free week on Ko Phi Phi!

Thanks for the christmas packages, emails, phone calls - they made my day today! Hope you all have a warm, safe and fabulously food-filled holiday and new year.

Until 2010!
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pattaya beach "cleanup"

A couple of weeks ago the school decided to embark on yet another one of those strange, poorly planned, last minute endeavors which inevitably end up in confusion and discomfort. The idea this time was to have a "cleanup day" where we unleash hundreds of our delinquent students on a rocky ocean side area in Pattaya to collect rubbish for a day. what could possibly go wrong?

Pattaya City

As is almost always the case here, the other American teachers and I were essentially clueless as to the itinerary for the trip and what it was we were expected to be doing for the 9 or so hours we spent with the kids that day. The bus ride there lasted for two long, loud hours. Busloads of children tumbled out into the midmorning heat and immediately scattered.. we wandered around for much of the day watching kids lifting pieces of glass, food wrappers and splintery boards riddled with rusty nails up onto the shore. Leaving the 100s of kids running around willy nilly, precariously teetering on slippery rocks, and generally getting up to no good, teacher Katie and I stole away to Starbucks and got ourselves iced coffees and used their nice clean bathrooms.

a failing attempt at taking a group photo

At the end of the day prizes were awarded to groups of students who collected the most garbage. unfortunately, this was measured by weight so "most" garbage meant "heaviest" garbage and we had kids hauling up bags of rocks, coconuts and wet rope, the more ambitious ones dragging concrete benches and whole boats (i kid not) up from the shore.

weigh station

Above are wash buckets of hot, filthy water for the children to rinse off their hands before eating. For lunch, the kids got boxes of sticky rice and fried chicken to eat with the hands they had just moments before been picking up old milk cartons, dirty tissues, animal bones, with. We all sat on the ground by the parking lot to eat our boxed lunches (teachers got muu krapow, one of my favorite dishes) and wait for some sort of cue as to what to do next. I ended up finding some of my students who were able to communicate that it was time to leave..

a cheeky grade 5 boy taking advantage of the opportunity to stop working and pose for the camera

high school students loiter on motorbikes

watching, transfixed, as the grade 6 girls slip and slide
over sharp rocks in their flip flops

grade 5 boys trying to wrestle a toilet bowl out from under boulders and logs
- pattaya city in the background

stir fried children with hemorrhagic fever

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In a scheme to get some laundry done for him free of charge, teacher ryan has taken on the task of translating Pi Pen's Thai food menu into English. He's been letting me help here and there, and it turns out it's an excellent way to get familiar with the Thai alphabet. From my few sessions sitting down with the menu and a thai translation/dictionary site I already feel more comfortable picking out and recognizing a lot of those little squiggles they have written everywhere here.

lots of confusing wiggly lines

The menu is only 16 lines long but it's a time consuming process to identify each character (the font Pi Pen uses on her menu seems to be a deliberate attempt to make the characters undecipherable) and then fiddle with different character/word combinations to finally come up with some kind of vague, incomplete translation of some of the words...
Ryan been more dedicated to the project, and has had much more success than I. He's translated menu items like "fried rice with chicken/pork/shrimp," "spicy prawn soup with or without coconut milk" and "pork sausage with rice and a fried egg." Here are some of the menu items i've translated so far:

- eyebrows in fish sauce
- larvae poured over stringy peasant
- crude oil unboiled water yarn on floppy disk
- earthenware pig having not yet entered monkhood
and my favorite,
- stir fried children with hemorrhagic fever

I've given up. I suspect he's having more luck without my help.
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a laotian halloween

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Teacher Ryan and I left BKK the evening of October 30 on a bus headed for Vientiane, Laos. The trip was fine, a bit strange as it turned out we had booked the wrong bus for where we actually wanted to go, but just fine once we sign-languaged and facial-expressioned our way onto the correct bus. it was beautiful getting to watch the sun rise over the hills of northern thailand. and they gave us lukewarm boxes of rice with ground pork and fried eggs for dinner (I actually love that stuff) and soymilk and cookies for breakfast, so that kept me happy as food has a way of doing for me. We ended up finally making the border crossing by late morning on the 31st. we staggered, sleep-deprived and blinky in the midday sun, out of the immigration checkpoint and into a taxi that a couple old British guys offered to share with us. Into Vientiane, with no plans for where we would stay and no idea where the Thai embassy (to which a visit was the reason for the trip) was, we ended up finding a great hostel (Mixay Guesthouse, I think) for an economical 40,000 kip (about $4 usd) each. Turns out the price included a massive breakfast of toast, eggs, rice, curries, laotian sweets, tea, coffee so - both of us in shameless backpacker mode - we ended up taking full advantage of this perk and stuffing ourselves early each morning before heading to the embassy to take care of visa business and then again right before they closed it down in the late morning. This gluttony, combined with the fact that there were several lovely french bakeries, a good cheap sushi place, a tex-mex restaurant and an indian food place along the very street on which we were staying resulted in what was quite possibly a weight gain of about one pound. PER DAY. for the 5 days we were there. awesome.

Returning to Halloween day and our arrival in the Laotian capital.. after the taxi ride and hostel hunt, we sat down at a riverside (this description is far too flattering in reality. it was more like mudflatside) eating establishment along the bank of the Mekong - the river which creates much of the border between Laos and Thailand. Sipping a fine Beer Laos, we looked around to see what the locals were eating (usually a good way to figure out the best thing to order) and saw them all with bowlfuls of whole eggs on their tables and eggshells littering the ground. So we ordered these "hatched eggs" as the menu described them, which we foolishly believed to be harmless hardboiled eggs. Ryan was the first to crack open one of the eggs and lift a chunk of shell off to reveal...


*** please finish eating, or abandon plans to eat anytime soon if you decide to continue scrolling down ***


seriously.

happy halloween from laos!!

We didn't actually take this picture, but it's just about exactly what Ryan's egg looked like.. though i think his had a few more coagulated blood clumps hanging off the fetus head.

This is the first food i've encountered in Asia that i've been utterly unable to even consider tasting. After a confused, then shocked, then horrified, then nauseated pause, we awkwardly stood up, left our beer glasses and fetuses on the table along with a generous tip, and returned to the hostel for a fetus-free meal of bread and cheese.

In the end, with only a few paperwork disasters, we finally got our visa issues worked out and were able to catch an international bus direct from Vientiane to BKK's Suvarnabhumi airport and be back in our neighborhood by 7am... just in time to leave for school at 7:20. it made for an awful day at school, but well worth it for a chance to check out our neighbors to the north.

sun and sand and massaman curry

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Went out salsa dancing in Bangkok this weekend at La Rueda, an unassuming little place on Sukhumvit 18. They offer free beginner lessons on Saturday nights so Ivy and I, in our constant quest for free entertainment, put on our dancing shoes and spent the evening salsaing to Celia Cruz, Tito Puente, Jose Alberto... It was like being in Latin America again. with lots of asians.

Now back to the October vacation...

From Ko Tao, we took a night ferry to Surat Thani, followed by a bus over to the Andaman sea coast, followed by a 4 hour wait at a remote little "bus station" - really a hut in the jungle full of travel brochures - then a minivan ride to Krabi town where we had another hiatus while the drivers' friends tried to sell us ridiculous transport/vacation packages, then a couple of ferry rides, a bumpy trip in the back of a pickup and then, finally, we arrived at Kantiang Bay View Resort. The word "resort" is, i think, a bit misleading but the place - a spot right on the beach with a restaurant, bar and 20 or so little bungalows - ended up being a great place to stay. As it was still technically low season, we got a good rate (about $4/night) for a bungalow with a fan, private bathroom and porch complete with rope hammock.

Kantiang bay from the bungalows at our "resort"

Ko Lanta was everything that Ko Tao was not.. Quiet, relaxing, peaceful, we spent most of our time swimming, reading/sleeping on the beach, snorkeling in the bay and eating. We barely ventured farther than Kantiang Bay - one reason I'd love to go back sometime and explore more of the island. Another striking difference between the two islands was that the culture of Ko Lanta has a very prominent Muslim influence. Most of the girls and women on the island wear head scarves and kept most of their skin covered whenever they were outside or in public. Alcohol isn't served at many of the restaurants because they're owned by Muslims. Our favorite food on Ko Lanta was the sweet, creamy, incredibly spiced Massaman curry, ubiquitous at restaurants and street stands on the island. The name Massamam is apparently thought to have derived from a variation of the word Muslim. It's a coconut milk curry flavored with cardamom, cinnamon, fish sauce, tamarind and chilies (and loads more I'm unaware of, i'm sure) and full of potatoes, toasted peanuts and chicken (or beef sometimes).

low tide

there was one ultra swanky, fancy pants resort in Kantiang Bay. some locals told us each year at the start of high season (which happened to be the last day of our trip) they construct this big plastic floating jetty so that their guests can be delivered directly by boat without having to get near the dusty dirt streets of the island. An unsightly blotch on the otherwise pristine bay, it was nonetheless kind of cool.

playing on the jetty

squinting in the afternoon sun - the fancy resort behind me

Same Same but Different Restaurant in Kantiang Bay

Four days later we reluctantly packed up and enjoyed another pickup truck-minivan-ferry-minivan-ferry-minivan-bus trip to the Surat Thani train station, boarded a sleeper car this time and were Bangkok bound once again...

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backpackers, beaches and beer

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Way, way back in early October, the school semester finally came to a close and teacher ryan and I made our escape from Samut Prakarn on a train bound for the southern town of Chumpon.

First, I'll back up a little.. when ryan and i arrived at the train station in Bangkok, we were descended upon by a herd of thais in blinding orange shirts asking us where we were going (I foolishly told them the truth) and then proceeding to insist adamantly, frantically that the trains to Chumpon were full and that we only had 7 minutes to book a private bus or else we'd be stuck "for long, long, long time" in bangkok. Despite their size these little guys were impressive in their ability to herd us away from the ticket counter and over to a corner of the station where i started to believe them and consider buying into their urgent orange shirty scam.. Ryan, luckily, broke free and found out at the ticket counter that trains to Chumpon were not, in fact, full and booked us two seats on the night train leaving an hour later.

Turns out we bought tickets for an "economy" car. this made for a memorable trip...

Hot and sweaty because the one ceiling fan in the car was broken, the two of us were smooshed in seats shared with disgruntled strangers in the back of the train car. The seats themselves were defunct, locked permanently in a severely reclined position, which would have been just fine if it weren't for the fact that all the cleaning supplies for the train were apparently stored directly behind the seats. A sullen man with shaggy twigs of hair obscuring his eyes shuffled over every (what felt like) 5 minutes to retrieve or replace another bucket or mop or bottle or rag, at which point I'd scootch my body up against the seat in front of me as he wrestled with the broken seat back, wriggling and jerking his torso in behind me. every five minutes. Additionally, as the train pulled out of the station there began a clanking noise - a really disturbing, terrible, something-is-breaking sort of sound - emanating from somewhere directly below my feet. The din continued for the entirety of the 7 hour train ride and dissolved any hope I may have had of sleeping that night.

Bleary eyed and in a shitty mood when we arrived in Chumpon, I trudged alongside Ryan out from the station to the waiting bus which carted us out to a waiting ferry which, finally, carried us to our island destination.

Finally in Ko Tao, we booked a bungalow at Blue Wind Resort (cheapest place we could find, at about $5 usd each/night), dumped our backpacks and perused the dive shop options on Hat Sai Ri. Within an hour we settled on Big Blue Divers and were on the next boat out that afternoon. Poor visibility and a big group made for a less than spectacular dive, but it was great to get back in the water again after almost 7 months on land..

the Gulf of Thailand (and a pitiful scrap of the thai flag)
from the diveboat

upper deck where we ate cookies and sunbathed between dives

big boulders on Laem Nam Tok

Laem Nam Tok again

The beach where we stayed on Ko Tao, Hat Sai Ri, is popular with backpackers and other young travelers looking to get scuba certified in what is perhaps the cheapest and most popular place on earth to become an open water diver. This means we found ourselves in the company on 100s of Americans, Europeans, Australians looking for (and finding plenty of) sun, sand and cheap booze. It was fun to eat all the western foods i'd been craving, drink cold beers at beachside bars, meet a few interesting travelers and get some diving in, but we eventually tired of Ko Tao's (more specifically Hat Si Ri's) frat party feel and were ready to move farther south to Ko Lanta.

the memorable pizza place where I tasted my first bite of cheese since leaving the states...
heaven.
greasy, salty, cheesy heaven.

Hat Sai Ri early in the morning before
last night's partiers emerged

Hat Sai Ri

longtails lined up waiting to take the first round of divers out for the day

Ko Lanta post to follow.

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