Sawadee-ka; Learning Thai

It took 8-27 attempts, when we arrived at the BKK airport at 3am, to communicate with our cab driver. It seemed to be mostly a word-stress problem, in the end, not a problem with the 5 tones, because we were saying YAOwarat instead of YawaLAT (the "r" vs. "l" vs. something in between being another part of the problem). When we arrived at the Chinatown Hotel on YaowaLAT Road, the cabbie did not know we were trying very hard to say "thank you." Ungrateful Falong. I said to E that it would be a turning point when someone responded as though they understood what we were saying.

That turning point came the next morning, and now we can bow and say "hello" and bow and say "thank you", with everything in between being pointing and smiling and trying not to be too terrible a Falong. Most of the time we are able to communicate. 

But we are not always so lucky. The morning of Day 1, after a point-and-wonder ordering job at a set of sidewalk street vendors, which yielded a delicious breakfast that we post-hoc decided may have been chicken feet or pork bung in a dark, gelatinous soup, paired with rice porridge with chicken meatballs, we noticed a third vendor on the same corner had bags of tiny donuts. Breakfast dessert! Lovely! So we tried to buy them. The lady said numbers, then we produced money, then she said no. We thought we had to buy more things, so we picked up a bag of cookies to go with our donuts. Still no. We tried big bills and small bills and change, but still she shook her head. So we put down the donuts and cookies and put away the banknotes and coins (all denominations bearing the face of the king) and we walked away, sad that we had done things so Wrong that the donut lady wouldn't sell us donuts, and that we couldn't even learn from the experience, except to be humbled by the fact that things don't always work out the way you expect, even when buying donuts.

A few days later, we managed to buy donuts.

Bangkok Arrival (or, That Falong Feeling)

Falong: in Thai, white foreigner; lit. "French"

For some reason this image came up when I googled "falong". It's not wrong, really. Just bizarre.

The baseline feeling of not understanding anything starts at Passport Control in the Bangkok airport. Taped to the glass booth enclosing the Passport Control Officer is a warning that it is illegal to disrespect the Buddha. Examples include tattoos and purchasing Buddha figurines. Then, above each passport control booth, there is a blue screen the a single line of text in the middle: "Does your skin match the color of the leaf?"

First instinct: giggle. Second: stop giggling in case it might be disrespectful and/or illegal. Third: feel concerned that this might be an actual question the PCO will ask. I have never seen a leaf my shade of pink. Or maybe "leaf" also means "sheet of paper" like in French, and they want to know if my skin is the color of my passport photo, which it is decidedly not, because my passport photo is of a tangerine-colored serial killer who's borrowing some of my features.

Suvarnabhumi Airport, Bangkok

And so the feeling of containing giggles, with anxiety that we are Doing It Wrong, and a touch of fear/excitement settles in. PCO, of course, asks me nothing of my skin or leaves, being preoccupied with the lady at the booth next door who, in some form or another, is doing things More Wrong than I was. 

It turns out "Does your skin match the color of the leaf?" was just the confusing end of a mistranslated advertisement for Vaseline moisturizing lotion, which must have gotten frozen on the screen by a technical glitch. No cause for alarm. Just a weird ad. They exist everywhere, it turns out.

Bleu Hill: A Fantasy Ruined - Response to "Blue Hill, a Literary Enclave, Grows in Downeast Maine"

The original New York Times article that this post satirizes can be found here.

A year-round resident of Blue Hill celebrates her 97th birthday. 

Maine is one of the oldest states in the country.

 ***

Rain lashed the pine boughs outside a journalist’s summer rental in Blue Hill, Me., in June as a perfectly seasonable chilly fog rolled among birches and firs. Inside a book-lined office, the journalist attempted to brush away a swarm of black flies that were getting in the way of his tear-jerking memory of a pig at the fair. The pig had lain in its own feces and taken no notice of him. It reminded had reminded him of reality, which was not supposed to be part of his damn vacation in Bleu Hill, Me.

He gazed out the window at the charming coastal Maine town he frequented. “How rustic! How picturesque! Behold the humpback peaks of Mount Desert Island looming due east! I’ve got it!” he cried, smashing a fist down, killing two black flies and wounding several others, “I’ll write a New York Times article about the quaintness!” He opened his MacBook Air and set it next to a vintage typewriter that he’d found in one of the 5,000,000 area antique shops and got to work.

"Poised at the cusp of Maine’s Downeast region, the Bleu Hill peninsula is a spit of seaboard notable for its rough-hewn splendor. With boulder-strewn blueberry barrens and clapboard farmhouses flaking into painterly decrepitude, the scenery seems purpose-built to bring out the poet within."

The journalist passed up another form of decrepitude that may send the poet diving back within, which is found in local inhabitants struggling with heroin addiction, while their Tea Party governor responds by emphasizing law enforcement over treatment in a throw back to the 1980s. The number of heroin-related arrests in the state of Maine nearly tripled between 2010 and 2013, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The Bleu Hill Peninsula has not escaped this trend, despite quaintly not having a police force. But let us return to the town of Bleu Hill that the journalist airbrushed with literary appeal.

Marlintini’s Bar and Grill, a far cry from being a bygone haunt of the area's literati, is just the only place in town with table service that’s open for lunch. This is why the peninsula’s writers, who are numerous and internationally recognized (though notably not year-round residents), eat there along with everyone else. Because of a sharp decline in viable restaurants in Bleu Hill, finding food or drink after 9pm is impossible. This may or may not be related to the fact that Maine’s population is one of the oldest, on average in the country, and nestled among the vacant storefronts on Main Street in Bleu Hill is a thriving funeral parlor.

A touch of reality, squeezed amidst language of patronizing pastoralism was Marge from Red Gap Used Books saying, of Bleu Hill, Me., “It’s a welcoming place. Until you prove yourself to be a jerk, you’re fine.”

She’s right, on the whole, though the relationships between “Mainers”, “transplants”, and people “from away”, can also be more complicated. The journalist is also right that Blue Hill is strikingly beautiful. At the same time, travel writers should strive to scratch through the postcard surface of the places they write about to dignify the complexities that make those place real. Because Blue Hill, after all, is a real place. 

Haley Malm was born and raised in Blue Hill. 

Más Comida Rica en Oaxaca

Quesadilla, jugo, tamal con salsa verde (y pollo) 

 This was the best tamal in the history of tamales.

Tiny avocados with edible skin! 

3 bugs and a Suze (this one's for you, Alfred)

Best pozole in town, with so many extras... 

Tiny gulp

Oaxaca, la Cuidad, con Suzannita

Here we are in Oaxaca, la Ciudad, where I feel exceptionally lucky to visit Suzanna, whose life here is pretty damn idyllic, at least from the perspective of a vacationer breezing in for a week. Her house is sprawling, open to the elements, perched on the edge of el Cerro with a breathtaking view of the city, accessible up an uneven collection of staircases from a street with the unfortunate name of Porfirio Díaz. 

                            La vista                                                             Imagine delivering a washing machine...

She is the only person I know who is capable of living in el Centro, and still not having road access. Being the happiest, most smiling person I know, she knows everyone a person would like to know in Oaxaca. She has also adopted two adorable street dogs, Ciruela and Zapote, both named after frutas (plum and zapote, which is a Mexican fruit that is dark inside, like Zapote is outside), who serve as doorbells/guard dogs/puppies to love. Zapote is a ADHD puppy who finds it pleasurable to chew a toy, but far more pleasurable to chew a toy on top of my foot. For some reason this makes me feel loved and accepted and worthy of the space I take up on this earth. He ate my flipflop, but it is hard to hold it against him for too long.

Ciruela (left) plays the role of responsible older sister, following commands, only barking when someone arrives, looking concerned when Zapote gets in trouble, and wagging her tail when he (occasionally) gets praised, but spending the bulk of her life alternating between playing with him and telling him to buzz off. 

My first night in Oaxaca Suzanna gave me fresh ciruelas and guavas and a pile of rocks to throw at the feral dogs if they were keeping me up with their barking. “I hope they don’t visit tonight,” she said with a smile and a shrug. I put my rocks on the table in my room, but slept so soundly that whether or not they visited, I didn’t need the rocks.


       

Ciruelas y guayabas                                                             Rocks to throw at dogs   

Suzanna lives with her boyfriend Eyder, from the DF, who is dulce como todo. If machismo is part of Mexican culture, it does not live in a single bone in Eyder’s body. His English is impressive, his accent adorable, his manner calm and unaffected. “You cannot have tacos and mole,” he laments, torn between his loves for his home cuisine and his adopted one, “It is universally impossible.” There are tacos here, but apparently not tacos. “The mole here,” he said as we ordered dinner at a restaurant called Bisnaga, “is spiritually fulfilling.”

Suzanna has been here three years now, teaching in an ad hoc school, which consists of Suzanna taking 6 or 8 or 10 kids under wing, figuring out what inspires them, and teaching them about whatever that is, with some reading and writing and ‘rithmetic woven in. It is a beautiful educational model, and Oaxaca is their classroom. 

A comparative study of Ganesh and Horton

Her students have ranged in age from 3 or 4 to 9 or 10, but most were gone on vacation when I arrived, leaving only two little brothers, Jacobo (9) and Samuel (7), in her charge.

Sam watches a man weave.                          Suzanna plays.                              Jacobo dons a crown we made.

These were sweet little bilingual boys who, under Suzanna’s tutelage, showed irrepressible longing to learn how to crochet a blanket. So we learned! My beginning was a little funky, but it makes a passable coaster.

Entertaining side note about Sam: At age 6 he decided he wanted to be baptized. His secular parents looked at him funny and said no, so he went to the priest and arranged a date for his baptism and explained to his parents that the party would follow.

Jacobo’s passion is food (and eating), and he has lots of advice about it, rattling off, “Have you ever had memelas? Have you ever had horchata? Have you ever had tejate?” faster than we can order. Which makes me really happy. I hope he doesn’t get beat up too much next year in a conventional school.

     The lady who made our memelas making a tlyauda                               Our memelas 

          Sopa de frijoles con quesillo y tostadas                      Don't laugh at the lime and coconut gelatina, Suze

Tostada and green juice at the organic market;                                      Enchiladas in the conventional market               

Obligatory meat-comes-from-animals butcher shot. 

Jacobo grinds chocolate in the market for his uncle.

St Barthélemy

I'm on vacation, which you may notice is the time when I kick back, post too much on Facebook, and write long missives after hard days soaking in the sun/culture/what-have-you. I am spoiled. And currently suffering the accompanying sunburn--serves me right.

The first family vacation with Hannah Phoebe (my lovely niece of 15 months) is under way! She has charmed much of the island of St Barthélemy, the language barrier being a non-issue for the pre-linguistic little darling.

For those who are not familiar, the island is French, Caribbean, mountainous, and filled with the extremely wealthy, the extremely beautiful, and the extremely reclusive. It has been remarked that the construction workers may have part time modeling gigs.

While most of the family vacation has been spent zipping about in our rented cars from beach to beach, hitting up French bakeries, and figuring out which days the butcher roasts chickens, the good stuff to report is always when things go awry. Here's a snippet.

Typical tourist behavior

Quick cast of characters, for those who don't know the family:

Mom: my mother
Dad: my father
Uncle Tony: my parents' dearest friend; part of the family since Peace Corps days
Larry: my brother
Debby: my sister-in-law
Hannah: my aforementioned nièce, who is also known as Banana, The Banana, T. Banana, and, of late, Banane

It's after the first hard day at the beach. Mom and Dad and Uncle Tony have been sent to pick up groceries at the Marché U, get some bread from the bakery, and see if the butcher is roasting chickens. Debby, Larry, Hannah, and I go home to rinse the sea out of our hair and feed the Banana before her fast approaching bedtime. We had, earlier in the day, been lounging on the deck, reading, sunning, trying to remember how to relax (except the Banana, who is very good at relaxing, and at making sure those in her immediate surroundings cannot--but in the most endearing of ways!) when suddenly my brother felt something brush against his leg, and, realizing that his daughter was in plain view, and therefore not brushing against his leg, let out an obscene yelp that brought the whole family to attention. Fearing the worst (and the worst when there's a baby on deck is pretty terrifying), we leapt from our reading materials to investigate, but Hannah had been calmly eating a pretzel and banging her favorite rock on the deck, which activities ceased when we all realized that the brushing-up-against had been done by none other than a watermelon-sized turtle who had joined us without our noticing. Hannah, for whom the turtle was neither more or less exciting than, say, the sliding screen door (also a novelty, if you're 1 going on 2), noticed that all attention was fixed on it, and that she was being pulled away from it. This was fine with her, until the turtle started eating her abandoned pretzel, at which point she burst into tears at the injustice.

Âllo oui?

All this back story in order to introduce an important 8th character to the cast. Snapper (not named by us--in fact I don't care for this name. I am going to call him Turtle) is a frequent visitor to 'La Petrel,' the house we are renting. He was in fact mentioned in the house instructions. Namely that checking behind car tires before leaving the driveway is important to his continued existence.

So we're coming back from the beach, excited about the prospect of poulet rôti and whatever accoutrements Uncle Tony will be whipping up for dinner. Larry and I hit the showers while Debby attends to Hannah. After a few minutes, Larry and I come streaking out of our respective showers, soaking and soapy and prematurely wrapped in towels for some semblance of modesty, because we have each realized that neither of the shower drains is functioning, and as a result there are two puddles, one from each bathroom, that are joining forces to flood our two bedrooms and part of the living room. Orders fly fast and furious, and Debby, who has been diapering the baby, now begins frantically herding all our belongings above the flood line while Hannah sits her dry diaper down in the growing puddle. We lay towels down like sandbags as Larry searches for a mop or other useful flood-deterring implement, then Debby looks out the window and, with intense calm that is evidence of experience with crisis counseling, speaks. 

"I think the turtle is dead and the cats are eating it." 

Larry, still in a towel, comes running, brandishing a squeegy. Turtle has indeed seen better days. He is outside the window, on his back, cocked awkwardly to one side, and there are two wiry cats with feathered collars circling around and nipping at him. There is cat feces nearby, which is ominous, besides being disgusting. Turtle waves his stubby little legs. Not dead. Hannah puts her hands up against the screen door and gurgles. A screen door! Larry yells at the cats, who scamper away in that reproachful, feline way, then he sets Turtle upright. Turtle blinks, perhaps to clear his head, and walks off into the underbrush as we all watch. 

"Did I save him, or is that just part of being a turtle?" muses Larry. 

Wetness creeping against our feet is a reminder that there is still a flood watch in effect, and we scurry about unclogging drains and squeegying the waters out the various screen doors as Hannah runs around us. We manage to shower and tidy up, and by the time the parents arrive at La Petrel, we are a scene of perfect tranquility, sipping dark-and-stormies while Hannah eats a pretzel and bangs her favorite rock onto the deck.

"You might want to check the drain in your shower," I say to my parents, waving my drink in the direction of the house.

"Yes," says Dad, who has stayed at this house before, "You have to take the drains apart or the showers flood."

FIN

 

The Christmas I Finally Became An Adult

So I arrive in DC sleep deprived (bad child) and immediately realize that I need to snap out of it, because my dad and grandma have gotten a horrible stomach bug that has left my 92 year old grandma looking completely exhausted and my dad running to the bathroom with alarming frequency. My sister-in-law has been so preoccupied with her own baby baby that she hasn't had time to go shopping for the teenage mother she 'adopted' for the holidays.

Task 1:

Hey bloggy! You work with urban youth, can you find a collection of wintry items, not too expensive, that a 19 year old mommy might like?

Done. I know just the thing, and Dad’s coming along for a run to Best Buy. Piece of cake. Excepting the epic lines at Old Navy, and the DC traffic jam. Do the grocery shopping while we’re out? No problem! C'mon people, challenge me!

Task 2:

Christmas Eve: all things.

Ok, I've been challenged. Christmas Eve, it may come as no surprise, is rife with traditional food that my parents typically handle. I know how to do a fair number of the dishes, but the lihamirakkapiraas (sp?) is something I've never attempted. Since I’ve barred my dad from the kitchen for obvious reasons, and the bro and sis-in-law are busy with the baby, and my mom is so worried about my grandma as to render her more or less useless, I make the damn liha. It's an elaborate affair involving three kinds of meat enveloped in a sourdough crust with interlocking lattice on top. 

I also whip up lunch for everyone and wrap all the presents for Santa's bag (that's a whole 'nother goddamn Scandinavian tradition to be addressed later...), and make the chocolate raspberry torte for Christmas Day.

Successful completion brought on the terrifying feeling that I might, finally, be an adult.

I drew the line at playing Santa, though I would have done it if my brother had procrastinated for ten seconds longer. You see, every year on Christmas Eve when my brother and I were small, my parents carried out an old Finnish tradition, in which Joulupukki comes to call leaving gifts for all the (overgrown in our case) well-behaved children. Joulupukki is Finnish Santa, though the original tradition involved a goat ramming his head on the door and demanding gifts. I always wondered why we had a goat at the top of our Christmas tree instead of a star or an angel like other people.

In any case, when we were kids, Dad dressed up as Santa Claus and delivered one present to each family member on Christmas Eve. Now that we’re bigger, Dad’s duties have been transferred to whomever Mom picks, or to the person who drinks too much and thinks it might be fun. We knew my Jewish sister-in-law was a trooper when she agreed to be Santa one year, but now she, like the rest of us, tries to rest on her laurels unless called upon. Anyway, for the photo op, my brother plays Santa, and holds his one-month old baby, who doesn’t even flinch at his exuberant ringing of sleigh bells. 

Task 3:

Christmas day. Make the boula (here again I've made up the spelling. Feel free to correct me) before xmas breakfast. It’s a delicious yeasted cardamom bread that is my favorite tradition, which is why I get up at 7 to knead and rise, knead and rise, braid and rise. Then I relinquish the Christmasy reigns, which is a lovely break, except that when it comes time to make Christmas dinner, my brother is wrapped up in photoshooting the baby for the billionth time with his new camera lens, and he burns the shit out of the first element of dinner. I tell him to concentrate on the baby.

Task 4:

Leave DC in the midst of an Eastern Seaboard disaster of a Christmas storm. None of us proved capable of this.