Baring knees and shoulders in the neighborhood here is inappropriate behavior. In the heat, I really want to bare my shoulders and knees. Especially when I run. It's enough to keep me inside the house some evenings. Hungry for dinner, in need of some exercise, but unwilling to get changed out of my tank top. I just lay here on the cool tile floor of the living room with the fan on Hi blowing in my face until the sun goes down and my hunger gets the better of me.
Yesterday evening, hot and hungry, I went out for my last meal in the neighborhood. The hunched, frizzy-haired, toothy-smiled woman who lives two houses down was sitting on the curb munching on something as I walked by. She called out to ask where I was going (like she does every day) and I told her I was going to eat (like I do every day). She laughed and shook her head and talked to me in Thai for about a minute straight. and the whole time I smiled and laughed when she laughed and nodded my head vigorously when it seemed approprate and made the "uuhhhh, uuuhh" sound that means (as far as I can tell) "yes, yes, I see, ok, hmm, really?, interesting." Basically, "I'm listening to you." This is how our conversations normally go, but this evening I got a treat at the end. As I said goodbye she offered me a bag of little leaf-wrapped treats which she said were sweet and made of rice and tua, which in Thai is a broad word for nut, bean or seed. So I still had no idea what I was getting.
Turns out it was a sticky rice dessert. A little pink, yes pink, banana surrounded by coconutty sticky rice and some sweet black beans, all wrapped in a banana leaf and steamed.
A warm, sticky, sweet, chewy little parcel to finish off my last supper of tom yam goongand rice and eggs.
On an entirely unrelated note, I recently stumbled upon this gem while avoiding the chore of grading 160 final exams.
School is officially finished for the year! Ten months ago, when I started here, I certainly didn't envision saying tearful goodbyes and making promises to come back soon to visit the 4th, 5th and 6th grade gremlins that I was teaching. But 10 months changes a lot. I'm going to miss these kids (most of them) like crazy.
So I'll close with some final images of Sathit Bangna School, leftover on my camera from "Exhibition Day" in December...
No one really seemed to understand what the purpose of this day was, but for the kids (and teachers) it meant a day without classes. And an excuse for the grade 1 moms to dress their kids up like beauty pageant contestants.
Teacher Katie proudly mans the Question Tree station.. We invested hours cutting, stapling, hole punching and tying on 100s leaves to create our beautiful tree. Which was promply destroyed by hordes of students.
My 5th and 6th graders. Ecstatic at the opportunity to rock blue jeans at school - no uniforms for a full day!
A particularly sassy little grade 1 beauty queen.
The foreign teachers, in matching prisoner attire, lead activities in the shade.
A portion of the street I live on is littered with these little fruit grenades.. Laying there in varying degrees of explodedness, I'll admit that I've been tempted to pick one up and have a try. I've been curious about what these guys taste like but, suspecting that at least one of the feral neighbor dogs has probably urinated/drooled/vomited on the street fruits, I've chosen to avoid the neighborhood supply. So I went ahead and bought one from the market. The flavor could be described only as uninteresting and sort of sickly, with maybe some bile and dirt undertones. It is very pretty though.
I haven't been taking motorbikes home from school lately. When it's been raining, and the streets here are less like streets and more like canals, my dangling feet and calves get soaked on the 30 block ride home. We wear skirts to school most days, so I ride the bike sidesaddle. [This, I learned after an uncomfortable encounter one day which probably doesn't need describing, is what women in skirts do here when mounting bikes.] To avoid soggy shoes sometimes I flex my thighs and straighten my legs, so I'm an L - legs sticking out at a 90 degree angle. It works great until you fail to notice the fence or the dumpster or the dog or the child or the other motorbike whizzing past you. Then, it hurts.
I knocked over a parked motorbike, doing exactly that a few weeks ago. Got the entire neighborhood's attention which the whack, screech, crash of my ankles making contact with the front of the bike, my motorbike driver yelling, braking hard, and finally the unmanned bike teetering and falling into the street. I'm a bit less of a novelty in the neighborhood now, after almost 10 months here, but doing something like that will inevitably draw a crowd. Which is exactly what happened. I should also mention that as I stepped off the bike to apologize and check for damage, my leg plunged thigh-deep down into a ditch full of some sort of vile sewage/oil/death sludge.
So there I stood, leg throbbing and swelling and caked in black slime, face like a drippy tomato in the afternoon sun, looking pathetically around at my witnesses... and they just erupted in laughter. these are the coolest people. they made sure i was fine/happy/not dying and a few of them offered a ride to the school where I could wash off whatever this stuff was that was, by now, probably eating away at the skin on my leg.
[I've recovered nicely, by the way, and no harm was done to the motorbike I attacked.]
And so I haven't been riding motorbikes lately.
Lethargy got the better of me yesterday afternoon, however, and I took a bike home from the market. Halfway through the ride home, the driver exclaimed something completely incomprehensible from inside his helmet, reached behind him and thrust a tamarind pod into my face. Taking both hands off his bike for a moment, he showed me the universal "Consume this food!" motion.. and (yes, while driving) sat watching me in his side mirror. so I smashed that pod open and shoved the sticky sweet tamarind in my mouth as fast as i could. big, exaggerated chewing and eating motions to demonstrate that I was, in fact, giving it a try. now please look at the road again.. And he did exactly that ...until I expressed to him how delicious I found the tamarind. At this, he started shovelling handfuls of the the pods over his shoulder, insisting exuberantly that I accept what ended up being about 3 pounds of tamarind - enough to keep me full for a week. Luckily I was able to bring them into class with me today and share them with the kids.
. Rain is roaring outside my windows this morning - the room's filled with the smell, the sound of the first real rain in a long time hitting the warm pavement, the neighborhood rooftops, smoldering garbage piles, the swampy canal a few blocks away. The stormy sky, the way I didn't see sunlight until 9 this morning, the puddles on my doorstep - it reminds me of home in Oregon.
Unlike in Oregon, where going out in the rain is a near daily necessity, stepping outside when it's raining here - unless for completely unavoidable reasons - is considered strange behavior. The one and only time i went for a run in the rain, i got looks of confusion, astonishment, concern, horror from my neighbors and constant offers of shelter or assistance from drivers, motorcyclists, bicyclists, grandmas poking their heads from kitchen windows, landscaping crews taking shelter under banana trees. So instead of going for a run this morning, I treated myself to a cup of tea, a piece of toast and 3 hours of winter Olympics coverage - all enjoyed in the comfort of the nest i've built myself in my bed here.
By 10am I'd worked up an appetite from all that eating and nestling and Olympics watching, so I summoned the energy to take a cold shower, get out of my pajamas and visit a nearby market to pick up lunch. I went for something I hadn't tried yet, and I'm still unsure as to what it was, really..
food parcel
Served on a banana leaf, this dish (I asked about 10 different people what it's called and I can't remember what a single of them told me) is basically a really eggy, slightly oily, crunchy, chewy crepe (or maybe some strange cousin of the omelet?) stuffed with veggies and an indistinguishable protein substance. The salty, sweet, savory flavor was incredibly similar to the taste of pad thai, now that I think about it. When I ordered, the surprisingly voluptuous Thai woman at the food stall, cooking fast and ferociously, stopped what she was doing for about 2 seconds to shout something in Thai, then flip, fold and wrap the meal in a banana leaf, drop it into a bag along with a little condiment bag of cucumbers with red onion and vinegar, take my money and hand me my meal. And most impressive was the fact that the whole time she kept a broad smile on her face. I imagine I'd be a crazed, wild-eyed, panicked mess.
The countdown to summer vacation continues: 7 school days
. Three weeks of school left. That means three weeks left to complete a comical number of student evaluations, [the most challenging part of these has proven to be simply writing out the students' names. Wananatchaporn Rattananontachaisuk, for example, was a particularly frustrating one. they're all about that long.] create, administer and score final exams for my 160+ students, and finish the ridiculous amount of paperwork I've been diligently procrastinating for the past few months.
I've been working hard on saving money since, as of the end of term on March 10 I will no longer have a source of income. As lunch at the school is free for teachers and students, I gorge myself in the lunch room each day. Shoveling in bowlfuls of rice and curry and eggs and fish, not necessarily because I'm hungry, nor because I find the food particularly delicious. No, it's pretty much just the fact that it's free. That and the, The more I eat now, the less I have to pay to eat later mentality that grips me when I'm in ultra-frugal mode.
Yes, school lunch is one of the things I'm going to miss here in Samut Prakan. It's the highlight of the school day. My reward for having woken up and taught the first three class periods of the morning. There is just one meal option each day - whatever the school cooks feel like making. Sometimes it's sweet curry over rice or hot noodle soup or rice with scrambled eggs and ketchup (yup) or stir-fried veggies and pork. it's usually pretty good.
Well it seems I'm not the only one who looks forward to her school lunches. The kids can't really focus at the best of times, but in the class period before lunch they're particularly spacey. I gave a spelling quiz on Monday (bus/train/catch/take/airplane/car/van/ride) and this was what one of my grade 4 students handed in as her answers:
drumstick/drumstick/mutant drumstick?/drumstick
I'd write more but I need to go eat my free lunch.
I've been taking for granted the cold season's respite from the heat. And now I begin to remember what it's like to be drenched in sweat from morning to night. Despite the way it makes running difficult, requires me to wash my sweaty shirts more often and leaves my face glistening with a sweaty sheen, I usually enjoy the heat just fine. That is, of course, when I have a functioning shower at home. Something's wrong with the plumbing at the house so we've been without water for two long sweaty, hot days. As one might imagine I smell (and look) awesome.
On Sunday morning - back when I could still bathe myself - I went to the home of the family I tutor for. I was greeted at the gate by their new puppy, a poofy ball of pomeranian fluff, about 6 inches in diameter, named Poo. We spent most of the two hours rolling around with the unfortunately named pup and talking about pets and home and food and why Americans say "piece of cake" when the conversation has nothing to do with cake. (in thai they have a similar expression: "like eating a banana") As I left they presented me with a leaf-wrapped parcel and told me to eat it for lunch..
mystery leaf package
So I refrained from buying the sticks of chicken satay with peanut sauce, or the somtam with stickyrice, or the noodle soup, or the coconut smoothies, or the steamed pork buns that I pass on my 20-block walk home and saved my appetite. At home I opened up my package to find...
Joong! aka Zhongzi aka Jongzi aka probably many other things
Joong are steamed Chinese sticky rice dumplings wrapped in bamboo leaves - kind of like a Chinese tamale. kind of. This one was a delicious mash of long grain sticky rice, peanuts, mushrooms, salt egg yolks, chestnuts, sweet pork chunks and fresh lotus seeds, all seasoned with 5spice powder and a generous amount of black pepper.
Joong deconstructed
Savory and meaty and salty and sweet and nutty and chewy... I demolished my joong in about 5 delicious minutes. .
. As the school year winds down, the kids are acting more monstrous than ever.. constructing (and field testing) elaborate paper airplanes, riding on each others' shoulders wielding cardboard swords, swinging large sticks (and often hitting the ceiling fans, to their glee), biting classmates (and faculty), eating assigned homework.. I had every intention of going out last Friday night but after a week of playing disciplinarian, it wasn't going to happen. What I ended up doing with my Friday night: slumping on my living room floor with a cup of chocolate milk, a bowl of rice and soy sauce, 5 steamed bbq pork buns and no shame. Fell asleep on the floor before i could finish my dinner. Staggered upstairs to my bedroom at around 8:00 pm. Fell asleep again - this time in bed - at about 8:01 pm.
To redeem myself after a pitiful Friday night I resolved to do something new and interesting on Saturday. So at midday, along with teacher Katie, I headed into Bangkok's Chinatown.
The trek to Chinatown on Saturday involved a van ride through our flooded neighborhood, a hot damp ride on the public bus (with windows that were, to my horror, impossible to open), a few minutes on the Bangkok skytrain, another few on the subway, and finally some confused wandering around city streets. After 9 months in Samut Prakarn, Saturday was my first visit to Yaowarat Rd (Chinatown). It was a frenetic and amazing jumble of street vendors, honking stand-still traffic, hurried pedestrians, jam packed restaurants, bustling narrow alleyways - not far off what I'd imagined it to be.
Yaowarat Road in Chinatown
With a hankering for some real Chinese dim sum, we explored the major thoroughfares, the hot winding alleyways, the rows upon rows of umbrella-shaded vendors and finally came across a restaurant (boasting, like 100s of its neighbors, the best shark fin soup in town) with a small steamy case out front, brimming with little dim sum morsels in varied shapes and colors. Once we were seated inside the tiny bustling room, sipping a Singha, our waitress brought out a towering stack of round bamboo steamer baskets and arranged them around our table. They held different varieties of hot little dumpling parcels. we pointed to a few (emerald dumplings, dragon's eyes and a shrimp/crab/pork wrap thing, i believe), she scooped up the rest and we dug in..
dim sum and a brewsky
Yaowarat again, as we attempt to cross the street
Lanterns strung over the streets in preparation for the upcoming Chinese New Year
Almost 2 months ago, on December 4, we celebrated the birthday (82nd?) of Thailand's king, the country's most beloved public figure. Classes for most of the day were canceled and parents came to watch the festivities. Monks from a nearby temple arrived in the morning for a sort of blessing ceremony in the school's open air auditorium.
Monks sit on the stage facing the students who are supposed to be listening quietly. In actuality most of them are chatting, talking on their cell phones, biting each other, etc.
After the blessing ceremony (most of which I still don't understand), I was ushered over to stand around the outside of the school courtyard lined with long rows of tables laden with non-perishable foods (dry rice, cup-o-noodles, UHT milk boxes, hard candies, wafer cookies). On the inside of the square the monks walked single file along the perimeter as the kids and teachers reached out to drop the foods into their silver bowls.
[This tradition of ทำบุญ tumboon, or merit-making, is something I see daily here, and most obviously on holidays. Families, schools, businesses, carefully prepare trays with bottles of water or soda, a vase of flowers, bowls of rice and plates of sliced fruit or candies or any number of foods. The trays and other offerings (usually buckets of food, money and other necessities) are either presented to monks who drive around in pickups collecting alms or set in front of a spirit house. The thai teachers at school, from what I could gather, said that these offering are not charity. Instead they're an opportunity for Buddhist laypeople to show humbleness and respect to Buddhist monks and to "make merit." Merit is a kind of energy or force which helps ensure goodness and blessings in all aspects of one's life, I think.]
merit-making ceremony
one of the monks uses a bundle of sticks to sprinkle water on the gathered teachers and students
kids in pink offer chocolate milk and ramen noodles to the monks
Colors carry a certain significance here, especially colored shirts. Each day of the week is assigned a hue [Sunday = Red / Monday = Yellow / Tuesday = Pink / Wednesday = Green / Thursday = Orange / Friday = Blue / Saturday = Purple] so on any given day here you'll see a disproportionate number of people walking around town in that day's color. The exceptions lately, however, are Sunday and Monday because of the deep political division between the Yellow Shirts and the Red Shirts. In 2007 the 80 year old king was hospitalized and thousands of Thais gathered in Bangkok to pray for his recovery. Apparently, when he was released and stepped out of the hospital he was wearing a pink shirt and blazer (some of the teachers here believe that a Thai astrologer had predicted that wearing pink would help the king heal and enjoy a long life). thus... pink is now the king's color here. And for the birthday celebration we all donned our pink apparel for school as a sign of respect.
. My christmas dinner this year consisted of raisinettes and soymilk from 7/11 consumed on a bumpy night bus with thai karaoke music videos blaring overhead. All the buses were running late that night so we didn't get going until 9:30 or so, but arrived at the Krabi bus terminal in plenty of time to catch a morning ferry to koh phi phi.
The ferry navigated through a bay teeming with speedboats, ferries, longtails as we pulled up to the island's Ton Sai pier. The scene at the dock was one of mayhem, confusion, headaches.. boat drivers, vendors, hotel reps demanding attention from the bedraggled backpackers stumping off the ferry. each insisting they were offering the cheapest/best/most fun/last available options on the island.. we ended up escaping the madness and taking a boat to Long Beach. Found a great place to stay (Phi Phi Hill) overlooking the bay for around $10/night, tossed backpacks on beds, donned swimsuits and dove into the andaman sea. and thus began christmas vacation.
Ko Phi Phi Leh and Ton Sai bay from Phi Phi Hill's restaurant
and again
walking to ton sai village at low tide
The beach where we stayed had just a smattering of few resorts and restaurants, one dive shop, one small convenience store/gift shop.. so we walked to the main town most days to pick up water and cheap food (we lived mainly on fruit, peanuts, bread and homemade peanut butter I brought from home).
aside from hikes to town, most days were spent snorkeling, swimming, reading on the beach (and diving... underwater post to follow)
There was also a cool hike from the town, up to a viewpoint and down to the far side of the island. climbing through steep jungley terrain in the tropical heat, felt a bit like mogley
the viewpoint
the isthmus where the town of Ton Sai is built - apparently hard hit by the 2004 tsunami
After a few nights on Long Beach we tossed our luggage in a longtail and found a place to stay on Rantee, a beach accessible only by boat or a 40 minute scramble along a narrow jungle path.
Rantee Huts - where we stayed on Rantee
Rantee Hut, a beachside operation with several bungalows and a small a restaurant/bar, is run by a group of friendly, generous thai guys. A relaxing, place to spend the final few days of the vacation..
the quiet beach at rantee
high tide from the bungalow steps at Rantee Hut
longboat before a rainstorm at rantee
morning pineapple smoothie and connect 4 at the beachside bar
hot, salty, sandy with a bellyful of thai food. this is contentment.
At the start of the semester our supervisor invited the foreign teachers to visit one of Samut Prakan's more impressive claims to fame, the Ancient City. It's essentially a miniature Thailand complete with scaled down replicas of the country's most important temples and landmarks. Starting the far south we took a tour all the way up to BKK, then up the western border to the northern provinces and back through central, then eastern Thailand.. in a span of less than 3 hours. It's beautifully done, well maintained, worth the trip.
I know woefully little about the structures in these pictures are, so I'm refraining from adding captions:
A warm, sticky, sweet, chewy little parcel to finish off my last supper of tom yam goong and rice and eggs.
No one really seemed to understand what the purpose of this day was, but for the kids (and teachers) it meant a day without classes. And an excuse for the grade 1 moms to dress their kids up like beauty pageant contestants.
Teacher Katie proudly mans the Question Tree station..
My 5th and 6th graders.
A particularly sassy little grade 1 beauty queen.
The foreign teachers, in matching prisoner attire, lead activities in the shade.
aka มะเฟือง, or ma feuuang
food parcel
drumstick/drumstick/mutant drumstick?/drumstick
mystery leaf package
Joong!
Joong deconstructed
Yaowarat Road in Chinatown
dim sum and a brewsky
Yaowarat again, as we attempt to cross the street
Lanterns strung over the streets in preparation
Monks sit on the stage facing the students who are supposed to be listening quietly.
merit-making ceremony
one of the monks uses a bundle of sticks to sprinkle water
kids in pink offer chocolate milk and ramen noodles to the monks
Teacher Ryan and Folk show off their pink shirts
Ko Phi Phi Leh and Ton Sai bay from Phi Phi Hill's restaurant
and again
walking to ton sai village at low tide
aside from hikes to town, most days were spent snorkeling, swimming, reading on the beach
the viewpoint
the isthmus where the town of Ton Sai is built - apparently hard hit by the 2004 tsunami
Rantee Huts - where we stayed on Rantee
the quiet beach at rantee
high tide from the bungalow steps at Rantee Hut
longboat before a rainstorm at rantee
morning pineapple smoothie and connect 4 at the beachside bar
hot, salty, sandy with a bellyful of thai food.
