Spectator Spots

Little America, part II

2011-11-17T04:56:00.000+06:30

They are blowing snow from machines onto the hillside outside Salt Lake City, hoping to hurry the ski season. It is well below freezing, but the sky is bright and blue. A handful of hot air balloons in loud primary colors are scattered across the sky. Alongside the road, fat sheep and jersey cows graze the golden fields. There are layered red mountains in various gnarled knuckle shapes, jutting up from the landscape. Otherwise, the terrain here resembles the majority of yesterdays drive through Nevada’s flat, wide open countryside, except, of course, for the lack of casinos. Shifting into Wyoming is almost as imperceptible, marked mostly by the sudden proliferation of fireworks booths and beer billboards, of which Utah is noticeably void. We drive these wide, flat areas, circled by the mountains of each state, which are sometimes raised like fingers in the air and sometimes draped like ladies’ full skirts fanned out in rounded mounds.

Just shy of Sinclair, Wyoming there are no trees, only scrub and sage and wind. We have passed groups of trailers that seem populated only by abandoned pickup camper shells and particle board sheds. We have passed oil fields dropped in the middle of big open spaces and resembling strange fortresses out of Gustave Doré’s imagination. There are still no signs of living people out here, except the ones we assume to be piloting the rest of the vehicles on the road. All the vehicles on the road are all plowing past us on highway 80 and rattling our bones. We have been shuttering here for over half an hour, waiting for a tow truck. It is only ten degrees above freezing, not including the wind chill factor, but the cop gets out of his pickup in short sleeves. I can’t imagine ever becoming so accustomed to this raw air. He waits for the pair of tough-skinned men from Iron J towing to hook us up and then runs interference while we try to squeeze back on the freeway between the semi trucks.

The Iron J duo tows us back to Rawlins, Wyoming while I stare out the window at grey scrub fields, peppered by wild pronghorns and a few houses. One house is painted canary yellow and someone has added “BAR” across the roof in big, block letters. The Iron J men drop us at an empty truck repair shop and tell us the owner will be back tomorrow morning. The wind here rattles us like the cars speeding on the road had done before. I am tired of being inside.

I trudge the two blocks to the diner I spotted on our way in. My face is flaming red from the bite of the wind, which is working its way through the fabric of my jeans and both coats I am wearing. Inside Penny’s Diner, where they serve breakfast all day and play hits from the 1950’s and 1960’s, there are clusters of people drinking coffee and eating burgers that are dressed with slabs of bacon, fried eggs and thick cuts of cheese. Everyone turns to look at me when I walk in, just like people in places like this do in the movies. I haven’t felt so conspicuous since I left Burma. I try to look nonchalant, sit down at the counter and order a coffee.

The waitress serving the table near me explains that she is new; it is her first day. She wears pale purple eye shadow and her hair in a loose perm. The woman at the table asks, “Are you still working at…” and points somewhere outside the diner window. The waitress nods and says, “Yep, still working there too. That’s what divorce’ll do you. I’ll be getting Sunday morning off though. Next month I think.”

The man at the other end of the counter when I am sitting tells someone on his cell phone, “I’m down here in Wyoming…yeah, the refinery….just for now, hopefully not long.” He and the person on the other end of the line seem to be commiserating about layoffs and finding work. The man hangs up and then explains the conversation to the waitress, who seems uninterested, but resigned. A girl dressed like a dead baby doll with blue hair and large splotches of fake blood on her white apron comes in and shows off her Halloween costume. I am somewhat resentful that her frightful getup garners less attention that my mere presence in the establishment. She’s from around here. I am not. I am tired.

It was nearly 24 hours after the adventure began before we were back on the road and headed toward my brother’s house in Cheyenne. We reached Laramie just as the sunset splashed pink light across the landscape. After the sun fell, we could no longer see the patches of snow and the snowdrift fences and the sloping fields. We made it to my brother’s place by eight and comforted ourselves with pizza and conversation.

I admit I am prone to stereotyping. This explains why I was surprised by several things in Wyoming. My brother and his wife took us around town where we saw some standard sites like the capital building and state museum—both closed on Sunday afternoon. Our buffalo ranch visit was mostly image-reinforcing, decorated as it was by antique ranch equipment and a bonne-fide ranch man who’s bow legged, laconic entrance always dropped everyone into silence. Even with the horses and cattle and the man wading through stable muck in his non-ironic chaps, there were bits of unpredictable popular progressive culture. The chicken coop was actually a colorful re-purposed bus they apparently drove to farmers’ markets. The sides were painted with advertisements for “free range, organic eggs” and the restaurant menu boasted a home-made veggie burger with no implied scorn.

We took in the educational gardens at the lake and learned a little about the Wyoming wind farm business and other renewable power projects in the state. We stopped at the natural food store on our return trip to my brother’s house and I marveled at the craggy-faced cowboys buying flaxseed and soy milk along side the dreadlocked teens. As I took a walk along the city’s bike path “Greenway” that passed by my brother’s place and followed the icy banks of Crow Creek, I was struck by the similarities to the bike path that had skirted my apartment in Eugene, Oregon. The path here wound down and under the busy streets and along quiet neighborhoods with empty playgrounds and then cut between Crow Creek and the railroad tracks. I passed a smiling dog walker, but otherwise nobody else was out, braving the icy air. It was good to be out walking, no matter the temperature, knowing I’d be locked in a vehicle again on our next long drive toward Oregon the next day. It was good also to be so pleasantly surprised by Wyoming. I don’t expect to move into the state anytime soon, but I was glad to learn more about this wide, raw country.

Little America, part I

2011-11-02T08:42:00.000+06:30

Reno: To enumerate the differences between this place and the city where I live in Burma would take too long. For one thing, there is a three story high television screen on the street out my seventh floor window that broadcasts images of Sting and his band. There seem to be more lights shining in the foyer of the Hotel-Casino than there are in the sky. There seem to be no people out of doors. The ones inside seem to have melded with the flashing slot machines like a strange life support system. It is difficult to know whether it is still day or whether night has fallen and it is difficult to find one’s way out once one is inside. There is no indication of a world outside. We wander down rows of blinking lights and spinning sound effects, up and down escalators and past cafés designed to give the captive diners the illusion of eating on an open terrace near a Romanesque fountain. Nobody in here would know that the air outside is nose-bitingly cold and that each exhalation produces pale little clouds and that the flashing fluorescents spark against the dark sky and that the sidewalks between these casino worlds echo with a startled silence.

Reno is filled with ghosts. Holiday crowds have left and the busiest streets are studded with gutted store fronts and hotels. Half the town is for lease and the other half is blithely persistent. It isn’t hope, really, just a kind of diligence. We are sure that persistence is rewarded. Whether or not the act of feeding bills into a machine and hearing it whir and bing while the lights flash arbitrarily makes us happy, we persist. We believe there is a strange science to it; that we can wear down the fates and achieve good fortune using this system of diligent machine feeding. We press on, unsmiling. Outside the sun has set in a dazzling display of tangerine and gold. The air has turned cold and all the bright bulbs adorning the signs up and down the strip have been switched on to illuminate the night. While so preoccupied, life gets away from us.

And then there was none

2011-09-30T11:46:00.000+06:30

I had been nursing a low-grade headache for over a month in Yangon before I came to Chiang Mai. Several people had offered speculative diagnosis, but the pain persisted. I suspected the cause was connected to accumulated mold from the five months of rainy season and the overwhelming build-up of stress from my perpetual pattern of overworking.

The Thailand visa trip was going to be four days, but I was coaxed into extending a few days—a fortuitously healthy decision. The first morning I woke in my friends’ guest room in Chiang Mai, the headache was noticeable absent. Life without a headache is wonderful. I stop squinting and rubbing my temples or grasping handfuls of hair and pulling it to create distracting counter pain, as I’ve taken to doing. Everything seems rosier without a headache. Even the rain, which comes down just as furiously here, doesn’t inspire the same anxiety that it does back home with a headache in Yangon.

It wasn’t as though all my troubles melted away instantly upon arriving in Thailand, but in some ways it felt like that. Perhaps this is how vacations always work, or at least how they ought to. I couldn’t help but notice the difference between my city of residence and this one. There is a slower pace here, which my friends astutely pointed out has more to do with me having that pace than the city itself. Yes, I am on vacation pace, compared to break-neck pace of my regular Yangon day, but there are more venues here to facilitate a relaxed pace. There are artful cafes where one can lounge with a coffee or a fresh juice and read or work on some project. This concept of the third place—a place to work where one is free of the distractions of home or office—is not common in Yangon. Here in Chiang Mai, it is prevalent.

The slower pace has also to do with transportation options and access to nature. I am fortunate my friends here in town are bicycle people. I get around here on my own steam and it is a blessed break from the belching, overfull busses that I rely upon in Yangon. Yesterday morning I set off from the house and within a few minutes was in the midst of some open fields and shortly after that I entered the roaring silence of the forest where the road through Doi Sutep National Park skirts along the foot of the hillside. There was no traffic, no bleating horns, no exhaust clouds. I wound down the road awhile, staring up the trunks of big trees and watching a stream rush over rocks. I was unhurried and unworried. Some men lounging beside the road smiled and waved, but nobody shouted at me or stopped what they were doing to stare and point at me. It was delightfully relaxing to feel unobserved.

I had no plan for my day. I felt confident I could find water when I needed some and some tasty food anywhere I ended up. I made my way back toward town and down the small soi off Sirimongkhalajarn to Café Compassion where I had raw date and cashew nut milk and chatted with one of the owners about her relocation from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. She wanted to know if I felt safe in Yangon. It’s a question that always makes me hesitant. Yes, I feel completely safe and yes, I’ve grown more or less accustomed to things that many people might say are indicative of safety’s antithesis. I had a policeman stationed on my block the first few months I lived there until I proved harmless and he was reassigned and I have had to get accustomed to regular, routine searches of bags or nighttime roadblocks. It is a country of unsettling rumors, which are likely true, but would cause one undue anxiety if considered too closely.

We fell momentarily silent, gazing out at the quiet road when suddenly three vehicles pulled up to a business half a block away and half a dozen uniformed men poured out and stormed some shop we couldn’t see from our vantage. The slow mood of the afternoon seemed unchanged by this sudden frenzy and we watched awhile to see if anything more would happen. The three vehicles remained in their precarious parking, half jutted out into the narrow street, but nothing else seemed to happen. I said my goodbyes and rode down toward the scene where I encountered a uniformed man who smiled and greeted me warmly, “Sawatdee Kap.” I greeted him in return and peddled on.

I’ve lived most of this year with a necessary acceptance of my ignorance—whether in Thailand or Myanmar. In the latter though, that ignorance feels much more profound. Perhaps it is my attachment to wanting sense, since I’m trying to learn to live in that place. I never know why I’m told not to walk on a certain street, why I’m forbidden to ride a bicycle on downtown streets, why I’m being charged to enter a building or a park or why someone is shouting at me when I walk by. It is refreshing here in Chiang Mai to enter parks and green spaces without paying exorbitant fees, to be free to ride a bike wherever I need to go and to have the chance to sit in a quiet place and write to you without perpetual disruption. I hope that I will not claim my headache back from the baggage carousel at the airport in Yangon, but even so, it will have been nice to leave my cares behind for a few days.

Granted

2011-08-23T17:53:00.000+06:30

One evening, during a lull in the small group work, a student asked what “taken for granted” meant. I secretly love these questions. Most of the points in question are idioms, slang or other variations of the language that native speakers use unconsciously and never write up in the language textbooks. My students dig these words and phrases out of popular songs, subtitles for television shows or movies or from an English conversation in which the individual did not want to admit he or she didn’t know some content or phrase that was used. So, they bring the questions to me, like the big sister who is attributed with more worldly knowledge. Sometimes these bits and pieces of language that are asked at random moments are they way we open up conversations about political responsibility (initiated by the inquiry about “hiding one’s head in the sand”); about gender equality (initiated by the inquiry about FGM, or female genital mutilation) and about things we take for granted.

We all stop recognizing the value or significance of valuable and significant things in our life. Not that we don’t find the thing valuable, but we stop consciously acknowledging the value for one reason or another. We neglect to recognize the amazing capacity of our bodies to keep themselves running; our lungs pull air and our hearts pump blood without our request or even our conscious thought about these unique abilities. We take them for granted.

I take for granted my ability to see and to taste and to dream at night. Perhaps we all take for granted the affection of family and friends. We take for granted the regular rising of the sun, having no reason to wonder whether it will happen again this morning like the last and the one before that. Growing up in California, I took for granted that I would see the sun most days. Living in Seattle I could take for granted that the sun would rise, but not that I would be able to see it anytime in a given day, or week. In Seattle, though, I took for granted the proliferation of greenery that required that ceaseless precipitation. Visiting my family in California then I would realize how I had always taken for granted the beauty of those rolling golden hills, which my mother dismissed as “just dry grass,” when I remarked on the beauty.

Certainly, it makes sense not to daily fret over sunrise and to think constantly about mechanical functions like breath and heart beat might prove crippling for the execution of our other, more conscious actions. On the other hand, must it require absence to appreciate the things we daily see? Must several intervening time zones be required to truly and consciously appreciate what one once had in the place where one grew up?

Being away makes it easier to see what I’ve taken for granted in the States. I’ve taken for granted street drainage and garbage collection and apartments with appliances. In an article in one of the magazines I recently inherited from my friend in Bangkok I read about kitchens and their gadgets. The author discussed sub-zero freezers, $200 Shun knives, margarita makers and other specialized gizmos. Where I live now, my single covered baking dish is also the mixing bowl, serving platter and fruit bowl. Having no refrigeration, I must wrap anything I want to keep cool it layers of plastic and submerge it in the tank of bathing water. I grew up accustomed to fitted kitchens with built-in storage areas and appliances. In that world I knew that any apartment I rented would come replete with oven and range—sadly electric, rather than gas in most cases—and usually an outsized refrigerator. I cook now on the equivalent of a camping stove, with removable gas canisters that I take to a store on the main street to have filled. As I walk to the gas shop with the empty canisters, clearly marked, “Danger. Do not refill,” I wade through the street’s oily puddles that have nowhere to go. The clogged gutters roil with cloudy water. Passing cars raise fans of water that splash against my legs and I miss the clean streets of Seattle.

Years from now, the obvious inconveniences will receded in my memory and I will recognize what I took for granted here. I imagine the list will include the evening sky, studded with crows and cranes. I will remember sitting on my balcony and listening to the speakers blaring from the nearby monastery as the light shifted from pink to gray. The list of things I took for granted will also include the quick, open smiles of women I pass on the road and the assuredness that if I haven’t found a seat on the bus, someone who has will offer to hold my grocery bags on his/her lap while I stand and cling onto the back of a seat. The list will also include the bright ding of trishaw bells and the explosion of variegated foliage on the path that I walk daily to work. I have to be quite resolute to remember to appreciate these things now. The distance of time or of distance will make the little things paramount in my memory of the life I lived here. Why is it that, though I can list these things when I sit down to contemplate pieces of my life, I do not appreciate them more actively in my day-to-day pattern?

When I first moved to Yangon I remember going here and there around town at night in taxis. “Here and there” usually involved passing the mammoth illuminated Shwedagon Pagoda. Our roads constantly circled, skirted or ran smack dab into the monument and it was never less spectacular each time. Each time the rattling cab spun round the pagoda’s grounds I would lean out the window to gawk at the steep golden sides that rose to a narrow needle point, which I knew was bedecked in proposition gems from the country’s well-to-do. The sight of that bright pinnacle always demanded my full attention and I complied. I was a bit-part in a fairytale that was set in a land of golden pillars.

My cab companions continued talking while I gawked. I asked them what they thought of such a magnificent sight always on the horizon. One friend leaned over to look and said he didn’t think much about it; it was just there. My other companion also looked out the cab window and peered up at the blinding shine of the pagoda. “There’s probably enough to feed the entire country on there,” she said, refereeing to the layers of gold leaf that covered the surface. They both went back to talking and I was left to the view. I could not imagine that I would ever get tired of looking at that beautiful thing, I thought to myself as the cab turned away down a road that would lead us back to the narrow road where my apartment building huddled among the dark houses and mango trees. I climbed the six flights of stairs to my flat and opened my balcony door and leaned on the railing from where I could make out the Shwedagon, punctuating the south eastern horizon like a gash of light sliced out of the dark sky. I marvled.

More than half a year has passed since that evening and I still occasionally go here and there in cabs at night when the busses have stopped running. The other night, while cabbing north from downtown, the newest member of our staff craned his neck and peeked around the cabbie to look out the car window. I followed his gaze and had to take a moment to realize that he was admiring the huge Shwedagon pagoda. I had forgotten to maintain my awe. The mammoth golden spire had taken on the normalcy of an every day object. I rode past it constantly in busses and in cabs, during the day and the night. I took it’s presence for granted.

I went out onto the balcony that night, and I’ve tried to do so more regularly since, to stare at the yellow mushroom cloud of light rising from the Shwedagon into the overcast sky. Everything gests in the way of simple moments of sitting in the evening air while dogs bark and the town falls quietly to sleep. I try to imagine what a visiting friend might say to see the Shwedagon glow on the horizon. I try to imagine what this view from my balcony into the Yangon night might look like to someone just arrived in town and how the sound of the young men on the corner singing their hearts out would seem magical and how the tinkle of all the little bells on the balconies and the bikes would not disappear into the backdrop of a daily life. I try to not take these little things for granted.

Hunt and gather

2011-08-08T13:45:00.001+06:30

When I first moved to Seattle, nearly a decade ago, my partner and I lived on the east edge of the Capitol Hill neighborhood. The nearest supermarket was an uninspiring Safeway story a fifteen minute walk uphill. We went there if necessity demanded, but otherwise we waited and took a pilgrimage to one of the Trader Joe’s markets in a distant neighborhood. On these journeys we would stock up on all the staples and rack up a hefty bill and a heavy load. The items we brought home and filled our shelves with would tide us over for awhile, supplemented with produce from farmer’s markets (if the season permitted) or from the uninspiring Safeway up the hill.

Recently I realized that I still practice the stocking up trip. I live in Yangon and buy most of my food at the street market a few blocks away or at the little supermarket several bus stops south of my street. My luxurious trip to stock up on staples is not at a Trader Joe’s across town, but at a market in Bangkok, which I visit during my regular visa run. On my most recent trip to the Bangkok markets I racked up a significant bill buying quinoa, flax seed and dried cranberries. Food like this has become a luxury. It is simultaneously nostalgic and rare, which makes its value immeasurable.

I’m somewhat surprised that I’ve become such a food person; someone motivated by an imagination of the flavor that could be created my combining several edible things. I did not grow up with foodies and there has always been a part of me that connected kitchens with oppression. I was lucky to have a number of friends last year who helped dissolve this latter notion. To each of these friends, the kitchen was a creative studio in which to create amazing culinary objects. Each of these friends gave me a new zeal for food preparation and I’m eternally grateful to them.

I have begun to associate some of my most quality time here in Myanmar with my kitchen. I have learned to prepare at least some of the local produce and have a fondness for experimenting with variations of local salads like gin dhouq (pickled ginger salad) or le pet dhouq (pickled tea leaf salad). I must admit though that I am mostly taken by making and sharing approximations of comfort food like oatmeal cookies with shredded carrots and ginger, baked macaroni with sour local yogurt and chili peppers and pizza, which I made recently for a group of students.

A significant part of my time scouring the markets in Bangkok is spent searching for something my students may have never tried that I could prepare in some way. We’ve shared freshly baked bread dipped in olive oil and balsamic vinegar, pasta with rosemary and shredded Pecorino Romano and apple cake sweetened with ginger ale. Quinoa may never become a favorite among the students and perhaps they’ll decide they don’t like the sour flavor of pimento stuffed olives or figs, but they’re eager to try and I’m equally eager to make the food pilgrimage around the streets of Bangkok to hunt down these things so that we can gather together in my flat and share.

crows of the morning

2011-07-17T14:07:00.000+06:30

Loss profit

2011-07-17T13:40:00.000+06:30

The space in which I live here in Yangon has been built slowly with each friend I have lost. For three months I lived in a more or less empty flat. The walls echoed and the single floor mat couldn’t come close to making the room feel inviting. When the woman who initially brought me into this country last year packed up her three years life in Yangon and moved away, I inherited, among other things, her cushions and kitchen table, a bookshelf and a low round table that I plopped in the middle of my lone floor mat, surrounded by cushions and made my central sitting spot. These objects transformed my flat from night into day. Domestic life was utterly different with her cupboard for my dishes and a table at which I could sit and write, as I am doing now. The books got a place off the floor and I even got a few hangings to liven the empty walls. The effect of these objects was magical. Add to this, the coffee percolator I splurged on during a visa trip to Bangkok and I began to feel more comfortable in my daily living space.

At the beginning of June I left another friend’s house clutching her oven to my chest and shouldering a bulging bag of baking goodies that she had packed up for me. In Yangon, an oven is an uncommon household item and one I had sorely missed. Numerous conversations had involved a wish list of things I would bake if an oven were at my disposal: savory breads and sweet ones, tarts, cheesy pastas and root vegetables. Now, here was the blessed oven on my very own countertop, surrounded by the amazing contents of the bakery gift bag. There was a rolling pin and wisk, dark brown cane sugar, a box of gingerbread mix, a bag of organic biscuit mix, baking soda, stevia, beautiful black vanilla beans and flax flour. I could not fathom my good fortune. I packed all the articles into my little food rack with the water boots, to prevent the ant attacks.

Among the spices she’d given me—cloves, all spice and a little pepper mill—I found a bag of damiana. It was an herb I had always kept around my kitchen in the states and I recognized the label from Frontier’s market in Eugene, Oregon. It felt so familiar and out of place. I brewed some in a tea and starred at the phenomenal little oven. I wanted to bake something immediately, but lacked a plug converter for my kitchen outlet. I made a grocery list, an a plan to go the very next morning. My excitement was abated only by the realization of what misfortune this new object portended. There would be no more late nights of dancing and eating and laughing together, of remembering the astounding taste of olive oil and the unparalleled comfort of friendship. These were things I would be unable to prepare in my oven.

It is unfortunate that my physical sense of home has been contingent on the loss of friends. The furniture of the first anchored me when I thought I might just pick up and go. The kitchen goods of the second departure has warmed my home, literally and symbolically. I have lived in this flat for six months, but have only recently invited friends over to house warm. My excuse was the oven. Before she left, I promised my friend that the oven would serve a whole community. I’ve brought biscuit experiments and bread, both sweet and savory, to the school, but baking was a social even for me as a child growing up with my mother and her mother in the kitchen on summer mornings. I began by having the student cohort that I like to call “mine” (there were nine of them that began at the school the same term that I arrived, thus making me the satellite revolving around their progress) over for dinner. I baked them a loaf of bread and made pasta with fresh basil and dried dates. They prepared a big delicious bowl of “rock flower” salad, made with a sort of frilly white algae. We ate and drank and talked and played a round of the card game SET, which I brought from the States. I was so deeply pleased by their company and their company made me so pleased with my humble home that I even went so far as to call it home. After they had all left, I stood on the balcony, listening to Miles Davis and finishing my glass of wine while the city fell to sleep below.

Beautiful day in the neighborhood

2011-06-06T21:05:00.001+06:30

In an attempt to relax and enjoy myself more, I've been taking walks around the neighborhood. This is more complicated and sometimes more exhausting than it would seem, but I'll spare you the details. Seeing more of my surroundings is refreshing, no matter.

Pictures on the wall

2011-05-31T12:32:00.001+06:30

I've recently experienced this misconception that I could go out my door, down stairs to the street, get into a car and drive out to the Columbia River gorge. In these moments I believe that I am a short trip from those tall waterfalls, the dark green stands of trees and the living room of my friend, Dana. I imagine I could, in the matter of a few hours, be standing by her front window with the wide view of Oregon across the water. This is how the world can seem so small, while at once seeming so unfathomably large.

Sitting beside the world map during the orientation at school the other day, I was struck by the distances between two points: Yangon to Seattle or Yangon to San Luis Obispo or to San Jose, to Chicago, to the gorge or to D.C. It is interesting to think of how impossible those distances once must have seemed. Now I could, in theory, go out my door, down the stairs to the street, get a trishaw to peddle me to the main road and a taxi to take me to the airport and be beside you within twenty-four hours. In theory.

It is not quite so easy. There is now so much from which to extricate myself. Aside from the obvious difficulty of imagining leaving my students, who have returned for the new term full of that wide-open affection—a visible joy I've come to treasure—there are more unexpected catches. I wouldn't know how to leave behind my balcony, on which I've spent hours watching the night settle, the Shwedagon glow, the birds careen and the clouds boil. Also, I have recently hung photos on my wall. These are the faces of friends from far away in times past. Here they are: smiling at the peak of a hike, pausing in preparations for a wedding celebration, making wine in the kitchen of one house, or drinking wine in the kitchen of another house.

While making me nostalgic for the people pictured in the photos and the places we shared, their likeness on the wall also somehow roots me here. These friends have entered this space in frozen moments that exist now only in memory and have made this room more my own. Though they'd never know it in their waking lives, thousands of miles away, these beautiful people exist now here in Yangon. They are almost tangible and I could almost step out this door and into their warm living rooms. I could almost be in their presence again.

It is a mean trick to think my worlds could come together so easily. I've resigned myself to the fact that none of my friends from that world will come here and see how I wake in the morning to the sound of chanting monks an fruit vendors and drink coffee on the balcony that looks out across the rooftops and the palm trees or how I touch their faces in the photos when I pass on my way out the door, down the stairs to the street. I cannot go from here to the gorge or to that little café on that drizzly Seattle street. There is just this dusty road past the mango trees and the factory to my school, which the people in the photos will never see.

Head, shoulders, knees and toes

2011-05-19T11:45:00.000+06:30

Because I like Bangkok, I have occasionally defended it to people who have less flattering opinions of the place. On occasion, I have wondered whether my affection for the city is predominately weighted by its counterpoint to the life I live in Yangon. Bangkok feels like relief. I take big breaths and move my limbs more freely when I get off the short plane trip from Yangon. Of course, there are heavy blows of culture shock as well. Everything is shiny and easily accessible. I was startled to note the number of hand phones and other personal electronic devices that appeared immediately on the smooth, bright train ride from the airport to town. From where I sat I could see twenty people, fifteen of whom were either talking or texting on cellular phones, playing games and watching videos on phones or

bobbing their heads to the music coming through the headphones plugged into their phones. Couples sat together, though each individual engaged in a phone activity of her own and talked only occasionally to the other. Meanwhile, the television advertisements blared continuously from the line of little screens that looked down at each row of captive commuters.

I had noted to one of my coworker recently that when walking downtown one day I noted that, despite it all, I liked not spotting signs for McDonald’s or Starbucks or outsized Coca-Cola billboards in Yangon. I, like other people I know, cited this lack of international product presence as though it indicated a lack of consumerism. That, of course, isn’t the case. Hledan and Minigon, two popular regions in Yangon, are full of shoppers buying what they have access to, whether or not an American recognizes the brands. Consumerism is not confined to countries that have contracted with Coke.

Unfortunately, consumerism has begun to look like freedom to some folks in Myanmar and people I know have speculated about just what opening the country will do to that impression. How many times have I heard present day Yangon compared to Bangkok of ten or twenty years ago? Will opening the capitalistic floodgates really transform one place into the other? Not remotely. What does the equation imply anyway? Has Bangkok evolved from a primitive backwater (implications of Yangon) to a modern metropolis or has Bangkok lost some essential noble truth that Yangon still holds in fragile balance? To chose one of these two positions is limiting to everyone involved. I neither want to see Yangon as hopelessly downtrodden nor Bangkok as soullessly materialistic. I want a different story.

Certainly there is overwhelming consumerism in Bangkok. Shopping is something more than a popular pastime and one is inundated by advertisements everywhere. But, McDonald’s, Starbucks and Coke do not appear any more prominently than any other product. Everything shares the same patterns of glitz and obscurity. The accusations lobbed against Bangkok of being just another generic city consumed by its consumerism are lost on me. This place does it its own way.

One thing that has struck me these last few days is all the shoulders and knees. Women here aren’t afraid to show these sets of joints. Why am I? In Yangon I have been well instructed in self-policing prude training. I take caution when I get set to go out. Will I be starred at in that head-shaking way because I show shins or shoulders? When I packed for Bangkok I brought all the things I’m unable to wear in Yangon. I’m not talking about fishnet tube tops or anything so interesting; there is the dress a student bought for me at the night market, which is modestly calf-length, but shows too much of my back and the black slacks that are gathered just above the knee. Today I wore the red tank top I had last worn for dance practice at school in Yangon. It isn’t strapless or translucent but it is form fitting and I apparently carry more on my chest than I thought. I hadn’t considered the top a gamble until a student came to me as we were finishing rehearsal and asked if I needed a shirt. I had been under the impression I had been wearing a shirt already, which was, it turned out, an opinion that many people did not share. I hadn’t worn the top since that day and the incident was on my mind when I went out this morning in Bangkok. Nobody appeared to care what I was wearing. Nobody paused to stare at me or dropped their conversation to watch me pass or make some comment in a whisper and chuckle to a friend. Everyone just continued what they were doing. It was a relief.

I know I will have to put myself back in order tomorrow morning to return to Yangon and begin again to meticulously police my appearance and behavior. Today though, I can walk around town with impunity. I relish my anonymity. I sit at a café alone and drink a coffee and read a book. On the train I tune out the blaring advertisements and admire the shoulders I can see.

Post

2011-05-07T15:33:00.002+06:30

Receiving letters has always made me exceedingly happy. Both of my grandmothers instructed me in the practice of correspondence at an early age. In the summer months when other children were on holiday, I sat drafting letters and journal entries under a gas lamp in my Nana's cabin. She was a cataloger who recorded details of days and the journals and letters I wrote with her were likewise inventories of tasks and temperature. My father's mother was a socialite and from her I was trained in the timely thank you note. These notes were not just for gifts at birthdays or Christmas time, but other esoteric expressions of gratitude as well. Letter writing was a duty, a childhood chore that my sister had to perform as well. Somehow, I took to it and began to expand the practice.

As communication becomes more transitory and abstract, I have taken not a small amount of pride in my Luddite attachment to the satisfyingly tangible physical letter. Over the past two decades I've built faithful correspondence relationships. One could track the patterns of my movement, from one town or state or country to another by sifting through the archive of the letters I received in each of these places. One could track the shifting style of age and era in the aesthetics of these archived envelopes, which are all bundled and tucked away in the basement of my friend's Seattle home. When the year comes when I am reunited with these last remaining items of my past, I will discover each envelope again with a joy similar to the one I felt upon first finding the letter in whichever mailbox it arrived.

The first joy of letters is the initial glimpse of the envelope, visibly different than the promotions, solicitations and bills that clog a mailbox. It is something different in the size and shape of the envelope: the creased corners or the light coffee stains, like fingerprints of friends' lives, almost as intimate as the handwritten address with all the flattened little n's and r's that bleed into one another and the t's arms that slant sometimes up and sometimes down. I remember the shapes and sizes of all the mailboxes into which I daily peeked, eager for signs of these special envelopes. I would carry the envelopes unopened sometimes an entire day until I'd found time and space appropriate to sit and read the letter within, without interruption. Every letter, in all the varieties of theme and length, is a singular thing that is constructed especially for the reader. I savor each with the sacral respect it is due. This righteous respect may be magnified by my present position.

Receiving a letters here on the other side of the globe where I am far from the company of the friend whose handwriting unfolds perfectly on the creased page, is a holy thing. Here in Myanmar, I don't have a mailbox. Postal service is not a completely common thing. The first letter that came for me arrived beautifully intact from Portland, Oregon. The carrier paused at the gate of the school and looked at the oversized postcard, painted and spangled with stars, and looked at the school compound and looked down again at the postcard and seemed unable to decide what to do. He handed the card to a student who likewise studied it, turned it over once or twice before bringing it over and handing it to me. I was beside myself. I read it repeatedly over the next hour. I showed it to everyone I could. I wanted to cry.

The carrier has become a bit more comfortable as more letters have arrived from California, Seattle, Chicago, New York. The envelopes are each left at the front door with whoever is sitting there at the time. I cannot anticipate when these envelopes will arrive and I have no place to peek into every day to check for them. I am caught by surprise every time, like yesterday when M— came upstairs and handed me three perfect little envelopes. "You have a delivery," she said. I wanted to cry.

Each envelope bore the marks of its journey: softened corners, inexplicable spots and stains and all the stamps and barcodes of processing. Each had been visibly opened and resealed with a stamp, confirming content acceptability. I studied each one with sentimental attention, like looking into that friend's face. The pages were full of words describing deliciously ordinary days. These moments of looking from a window, walking down a familiar street, listening to a faraway song, noting the color and mood of the sky, the wind and the people passing by are the sweetest, most satisfying morsels. Knowing that I was there in thought in those little moments of my friend's day is salve for all the self-sorry moments I've lately suffered. It is a profound joy that comes from recognizing how happiness is that simple.

Water works

2011-04-18T12:48:00.001+06:30

Myanmar's Thingyan celebration is a most notable for the four days of
Carnivalesque water play. Stages are erected to host musical
performances and to provide a row of hoses to spray on to the street
where groups of people drive by in open truck beds or on motorcycles
with the express reason of getting soaked. On the neighborhood streets
children and young people man buckets and smaller hoses to douse
people who pass by. This explosion of water stems from the traditional
gestural cup of water that is poured down a person's back as symbol of
ritual cleansing for the New Year. At eight in the morning on the
first day it starts with a cup of water poured down a passing person's
back, but as the days pass, the fervor increases until tubs of ice
water are flung at fast moving motor bike drivers with an impact that
resounds like a full force punch to the gut.

It is late afternoon on the third day as I write this. Revelers, who
have poured into town for days cheering and being soaked, seem a bit
more harried. They've been at it full-force for so long. A pickup
truck full of young people pulls past. The girls are leaning on one
another's shoulders with visible bodily weariness. The boys are
hanging their arms over the railings on the sides of the vehicle and
they are no longer shouting at the top of their lungs and twirling
their shirts like helicopter blades above their heads. The children
along our street have drained their tubs and buckets so there is a
brief respite from the deluge. They will get a second wind before
nightfall and then after dinner everyone will fill the streets again
to buy sweaters, shoes and Indian sweets.

From watching the three days of activity, Thingyan might seem like
such a young person's holiday. They careen through town on motorbikes
or open jeeps, shrieking like banshees. They get sauced, then doused
and sauced again. But, on closer inspection, you can see that between
all the skinny jeans and all the bleached hair, teased into all the
South Korean styles, there is mom, or maybe auntie, wrapped up in her
longyi and matching blouse printed with big pale flowers. She is
cheering along with the rest of them, smiling and ready to go get
drenched.

There are masks and long, colored wigs. There is garish face paint and
what would be called promiscuous clothing on other days, but this is
Thingyan.* Mohawks appear and sunglasses and rock and roll t-shirts
get flashy with tinsel and paint. The streets will be shiny with all
the hair gel and motor oil that washes off the streams of motorbikes
pouring endlessly in and out of town. The boys are super cool and the
girls are bolder, at least bold enough to raise their voices and lift
their hands in the air to cheer while buckets of water are flung.
Everyone seems so happy and free. It is a celebration. It is the New
Year.

* A new law was passed that threatened girls with a one month prison
term if caught in clothing "that are against Myanmar tradition and
culture," meaning short shorts and tank tops.

Of time past

2011-04-11T11:15:00.001+06:30

This story begins when I return to where I began. I descend from the
bus in the shocking cold of POL's early morning. Unlike when I arrived
in the early morning last year, I am met this time by friends who face
the chilly wind with me and take me quickly to my little hotel home. I
stumble into the same room where I lived for a quarter of the previous
year. It is all familiar in ways I had forgotten. But, seeing it all
again, I begin to remember.

I remember the stained pink walls and the thick desk I'd wrestled over
to the south side of the room. I remember the single narrow space
along side the low bed frame where I tucked my few clothes into an
open wooden rack beneath which I'd stowed away my backpack, happy to
put it out of commission for a few months. I remember again the maze
of switches and outlets, too high on the wall for me to reach. I
remember the way that every other guest's voice would carry in through
the high screened window onto the hallway. I remember also when
stretches of a week or more would pass in which I was the only guest
passing through that hallway. I remember the pair of floor toilets,
each with a high tank that occasionally works. I wash my hands and
face to try to lift the ten hour bus ride and I remember that the sink
drains onto the floor of the second toilet stall. I listen to it
trickle over the tiles as I stare into the mirror, on top of the frame
of which I knew I would find a small bar of soap. Do I look much the
same and will the town remember me, I wonder?

Even in a year's time things transform. I remember the dusty fan in
the center of the ceiling in my room that I stare up at again as I did
each night for months. From here, it all seems the same, just as the
pink walls appear the same. I mentally repopulate the place with my
small stack of books and sheaf of clothes, the hot pot would be there
on the floor beneath the long mirror and the 20 liter water bottle
there on the small stool in the corner behind the desk chair. I notice
several lines of new graffiti that have been scrawled on the wall near
the head of the bed: "Ko, love you so much!" the first line says and
is dated the eighth of October, 2010. "That day is you and me bline
(sic) date day. That day I can say I never forget." The second entry
is dated 10-10-10 and reads, "Ko I'll prayer may be more and more your
develop for your life. I love you just the way you are I don wanna be
someone else in my paiten (sic) heart! I gonna to see your happy from
nor the whole while your life yet." While the last line losses me
entirely, the story inspires my curiosity about the author, the blind
date that led to heart breaking love and a wish for the lover's
personal development. I stare at the sentences awhile, unable to fall
asleep.

An entire year, a collage of other people's lives, has passed through
this place since I was last here. It feels familiar to move through
the shuttered town in the early morning darkness and note to myself
landmarks of my former life: the internet café I frequented, the shop
where I had all my photo copies made and the little stall where I'd
always order dishes of le pet dhouq. As I lay in bed starring up at
the unused fan I hear the clock in the Purcell tower across the street
chime the hour. I am shocked: the clock tower, that broken relic? I'd
never known the thing to tell time, much less to announce it in the
early morning hours. I expect I will wake to a town both familiar and
transformed by the time we have been apart.

When I descend the stairs after waking to the seven chimes of the
Purcell tower later that morning and see S-, my expectation is
confirmed. She looks so startling identical to the image of her in my
memory. She is bright and utterly dominated by her smile. We are
effusive with one another; all exclamations and smiles. She is more
confident in her English and explains that she has been excited since
I called to reserve my room. I tell her I live in Yangon now, but have
been so anxious to come back here. She clutches her hand to her belly
and tells me proudly that she is pregnant. I'm happy for her. We stand
on the hotel threshold together and look at the street, noting aloud
what has changed. The sign shop is now a clothing store, a pharmacy
has opened across the street and there is a bright new café with
colorful tables where there was a shoe shop last year. I go to my old
café where I know there is decent coffee and from the patio table I
watch people pass on motor bikes. At one time I think that I recognize
A- passing by. I try to get very small and unnoticeable in my chair,
hoping my haircut makes me a stranger. Then I think I recognize J- and
I almost stand to wave, but too late. I see another man who looks
familiar, but I can't recall the context, so I continue to sit quietly
observing all the passing faces. The old foreign man who wears the
same blue ball cap rides up on his bike and goes into the bakery to
buy his baguette, like he has always done. I want to share a moment of
familiarity with him, but I don't think he has any idea who I am. Our
paths never officially crossed, save fore these mornings when I
watched him and he went about his routine like everyone else.

Throughout the next two days I see so many people I know and they are
beautifully familiar and fascinatingly transformed by a single year.
There are so many exclamations of recognition and joy. We all explain
how happy we are. SP- is stylishly adult now, but still reticent to
speak in an audible volume. KT- is still immeasurably kind. We race to
embrace one another and I give her the card and gift from my mother.
GP- has taken on a new position and looks calm and assured in his new
responsibility. An- has grown at least a head taller than his father
and has finished university. His mother greets me like a lost friend.
At the hotel I once called home T- chastises me for not coming to see
her sooner and not writing her more than I did when I was away. I'm
ashamed, but she kisses my cheeks and embraces me and tells me how
much she's missed me. She brings me dinner of le pet dhouq, which she
knows I love, and batter fried vegetables with a wonderfully sour
tamarind and garlic dressing. We talk about her son's schooling, her
inability to afford to host her own birthday celebration this year and
her recent move into her mother's house. Her husband has been
reassigned, she explains, and they'll be separated for three years.
That is a long stretch of time, I lamely observe. She is too composed
to react outwardly. This too is familiar to me. She looks at me
instead and says, "Sister, you're even more beautiful than before; you
look younger and I'm so old." I remind her we are nearly the same age.
She chuckles. It mustn't feel real any more to her than it does to me,
but we relish this familiarity. "I didn't believe it when they told me
you were coming," she says. "And then they told me today you were
here, here upstairs in your room. Oh, sister, I'm so happy." I am
happy as well, I have been unutterably happy all day.

The overwhelming feeling of homecoming is more than the fact that I'm
simply familiar with this place. I have lived in YGN now at least as
long as I lived here in this cramped, dirty room. I have friends in
YGN, I know how to get around and I know where to find good gin dhouq
and fresh mangos. It is this small place itself that I'm attached to
and these people. Of course, there is the excuse of my nostalgic
association with the place, being the first place I got to know here
in Myanmar. There is also the undeniable bonding effect of hazing.
Adversity draws us nearer even to the circumstances of the adversity.
Not to say my life last year was significantly adverse, or at least
not obviously so. I had my share of struggles, but none of them felt
unmanageable. I attribute this memory of ease to the place or to my
ease in the place or to the graceful amnesia of time.

In the early morning, before setting out to Dat Taw Gyaik waterfall
with some friends from YGN, I stand on the balcony to watch the town
wake. I relish these moments as much as I did before. The painted
shutters clatter open and are latched to the wall. Shop keepers wheel
out little tables on which to display water bottles, and racks on
which to stack jars of jam and packaged chips and jelly stuffed rolls
from China. In covered cases they make arrangements of rulers and
notebooks, individual sachets of shampoo or rolls of tissue paper. The
shop keepers fill buckets and pour water out over the cement shop
entrances, which they then scour with course bristled brooms. The
sound of that rhythmic scraping is comforting. The air is cool and
still. Soon everyone will prepare for Thingyan, the New Year, days
full of water throwing, music and bouts of maniacal cheering from big
pods of motorcycle revelers or open truck beds full of soaking wet
teenagers. The town will be again transformed. We are poised on the
edge of it, but right now the sun is slanting onto the balcony. A man
wearing a pink apron walks two doors down from his shop to take a
phone call that has come in for him. A horse carriage plods by,
surrounded by the sound of small tinkling bells. Purcell Tower chimes
seven and the town comes alive in earnest. I'll walk through the
market to get coconut pau-si and papaya. I'll pretend that I live here
again.

Tools for the job

2011-03-09T18:37:00.000+06:30

You need the right tool for each job. My friend learned this from his father. His father had actually used those words in all their folksy glory. His father, like mine, and many other fathers in the United States, had a workshop or garage or shed in which to keep these right tools for each sundry job. Imagine how many tools you would need if they were each designated to a unique task. I don’t have the luxury. Every item I have in my still empty apartment must serve as a tool for myriad tasks.

This one tool for many tasks rule is especially true in the kitchen. A rice cooker seems at first, by name alone, a tool with one specific purpose. Mine is now also an oatmeal cooker, a back-up water kettle and, when fitted with a shallow metal strainer, a vegetable steamer. My single knife is for chopping vegetables, peeling ginger and papaya, grating tin yet on top of my morning oatmeal and can sometimes moonlight as a screwdriver to replace the little pieces that are falling off the computer. Each of my four glass tumblers alternately serve as French press and coffee mug, watering can for houseplants and flower vase.

In the schema of reduce, reuse and recycle, I have easily achieved reduce. I moved here with only a backpack and a ukulele. I have been unable to fill the place with much more than that and am becoming quite comfortable with the austere simplicity of the empty, open flat. In a place without ready recycling, reuse is religiously practiced. The few articles of packaging that have come with various food purchases become tupperware containers, photo backing or gift wrapping. Empty paint cans are garbage pails and yogurt pots are planters. These tools, designed for one job, now fit so many others.

Unfortunate in some ways, this multi-use mentality is contagious and my time is soon egregiously multi-purposed. My morning bucket shower becomes occasion to empty out and scrub the bath room trough—a two and a half foot tall reservoir where bathing water is stored. Washing and hanging out laundry becomes also mopping the kitchen floor. Pausing with a cup of tea by the front window at the end of the day becomes suddenly several hours of scrubbing window panes. These tasks happen without warning. Cutting onions and okra causes me to notice the layer of dust that has fallen over the counter since the last time I washed it a few hours ago. A simple counter wipe-down transforms into a job with a brush and bucket of diluted vinegar. I scrub at the grout, breaking occasionally to stir the frying vegetables.

All these tasks are accompanied only by the atmospheric sounds from the city outside my window. I think often about turning on music, but I have no speakers and I can’t use head phones because of the bell. I’m obsessed with the bell. Every apartment has one of these bells attached to a long cord. One end of the cord is tied to the balcony and the other dangles head-level at the street below. This contraption is doorbell and buzzer. The person below pulls the cord, jangling the bell on the balcony. The person in the apartment above looks down, assesses the situation and responds accordingly. The man bringing your replacement water jug: drop the apartment gate key down the cord so he can let himself in and bring the twenty liter bottle six flights up to your apartment. The man collecting trash: pull up the cord, tie your trash bag to the end and lower it down to him so he can drop it in his shoulder basket and carry on. A friend swinging by to see you: drop the gate key as with the water man or stand on the balcony shouting a conversation, as seems to be a common option. The bell contraption is not only a pulley for your garbage collection; you can get the morning newspaper, bags of curry or fried snacks this way. This pulley system saves trips up and down the stairs in the heat. When a bebyo woman comes calling past with her basket atop her head, clap to get her attention, reel up the purchase she clips to the end of your cord and lower back down your payment to her.

Here’s my problem: how do I tell when it is my bell ringing? How can I single one little bell out of this constant jangling? The apartments all along the street are ringing at various intervals in concert with the perpetual jingling of all the passing bicycles and trishaws. I’ve found myself hurrying from the kitchen to the balcony to peer down the length of my cord, only to find a bicyclist pulling past below, trying to clear pedestrians out of his path. Or I will find my neighbor pulling up his morning newspaper. It hadn’t been my bell at all. I go back to whatever thing I was scrubbing in the kitchen and I don’t take my i-pod to keep me company because who knows when the next ringing bell will be mine.

I work away in the ambient noise of someone hammering nails, a mother calling to a child, a man passing with length of bamboo to sell, a loud version of Hotel California playing from the café below and someone ringing a bicycle bell as he turns the corner on my street. I’m left to my thoughts at their rambling and unpredictable pace. I think of walking on the busy streets of Addis Ababa. I think of the blue water in Greece. I think of the beautiful winding Oak-lined drives I’ve taken with my best friend in California. My mind roams between random spots in Seattle: Kerry Park, the bustle of the path around Greenlake, the night time streets from the little wine bar to the house where I lived in Columbia City and about the green slope overlooking the Volunteer Park reservoir and the city below. Among all its other functions, cleaning can also be a tool of nostalgia.

Tallying home

2011-02-24T19:18:00.001+06:30

At the nursery on a trip between one place and another, T.M. was
helping T.J. arrange the details of his purchase, which included a
large peace lily, several broad-leafed aglaonema and something
resembling a member of the umbrella plant family. They were lush, full
grown and expensive. T.J. had them potted in big earthen pots. I
wandered through the rows of plants. There were bougainvilleas of
various shades of violet, apple red, chartreuse and a beautiful sandy
rust color. There were big leafy plants that looked as though they'd
been dug right out of the jungle as well as rows of ground cover and
ornamental grasses for landscapers. Deeper in, there were little
succulents and cacti, fragrant jasmine and a plant I thought was
gardenia—my mother's favorite—but turned out to be a baby Thanaka
plant, which is the origin of the ubiquitous pale cosmetic that is
swirled on women's cheeks. Orchids hung from every beam, displaying
delicate eggshell blooms, fleshy pink cups with leggy lobes or dark
ones shot with shocking bolts of yellow. I flirted with the ambition
of becoming an orchid owner. Unfortunately, prices here are shockingly
comparable to the States and it is no more affordable to take up the
orchidelirium here.

The shock of costs is not limited to plant purchasing. It has been
surprisingly costly to establish a home here. Eighteen dollars for the
small version rice cooker, twenty-two dollars for a contraption on
which to hang clothes, sixty-five for a cotton mattress to drop on a
floor mat, nine fifty, in the corner of my empty apartment. It adds up
fast on my little salary, so the accumulation of household needs has
been slow. I call my space austerely Zen. A friend kindly compared the
paucity to an art installation. It is nice to think of it as something
I have intentionally chosen. As I admired the variegated coloring of a
small potted croton the nursery attendant stepped away from T.J.'s
order to inform me, "kuniq toun," seven thousand kyat, just over eight
dollars. I thanked her and moved on down the aisle.

Across the gravel road there were more plants arranged beneath another
wide tarp canopy. It was less congested on that side, where most of
the plants seemed to be ground cover starters. I enjoyed the
opportunity to just soak in the quiet rows of soil and foliage. It was
good to be off the busy streets, away from belching busses and taxis.
It's not that I haven't seen plants; they grow out of every nook and
cranny of my neighborhood. It was the quiet of the nursery that I
clung to. The slow, thick air was not oppressive here and the chance
to move slowly without being stared at, hollered at or nearly run down
by a trishaw was also refreshing. I walked slowly and purposelessly
through the greenery.

A little spindly plant caught my eye and I kneeled down to it. The
leaves were wine red triangles, veined with green. They were clustered
in groups of three: a large triangle flanked above by two smaller,
which mirrored one another and hung perpendicular to the stem. The
wide-based leaves caught the breeze like sails and shook upon their
narrow stems. The old woman tending the aisles of plants came and
crouched beside me. "Butterfly," she said and pointed to a three leaf
cluster. The little leaves quivered in the breeze like nervous little
wing flaps. She was right, they looked just like a little swarm of
butterflies all alight upon this thin green stalk. I turned and looked
at the woman. She met my eyes and smiled and repeated, "Butterfly!" I
took the little butterflies home with me, a dollar and a quarter, and
potted them in a yogurt jar. The empty apartment feels distinctly
homier with a group of butterflies fluttering in the corner.

The answer, my friend

2011-01-28T12:45:00.001+06:30

When I was a kid, I wanted a canopy bed. I used to select my favorite
model from the pictures in the J.C. Penny catalogue. My pick was
usually something with fabric panels that could be tied up to the four
posts or left to shade the bed within. Then I'd drape sheets from the
bottom of my sister's top bunk and sit inside the space I'd created,
pretending it was the tall four poster I'd carefully clipped from the
catalogue. I now wake each morning beneath the gauzy folds of my
mosquito netting, appreciating the practicalities of that furniture
fashion I'd loved as a kid. Maybe this is how we make someplace new
into a home, by pointing out resemblances to familiar things or to
things we once longed for.

In the process of making a home in an unfamiliar place I was prepared
to spend a lot of time on logistics. The paperwork process was one
hurdle and then there were the weeks of discovering everything else
that I'd forgotten to ask or had had no idea to ask in the initial
meeting. I learned how to get water: To fill the reserve tank that
feeds the bathing trough and the apartment faucets, flip the switch in
the living room and water will be pumped up from the subterranean
tank. For drinking water, a man will carry a twenty liter jug up sixth
flights of stairs and replace the empty jug at a cost of 500 kyat.
Pipes to fix the kitchen drain that pours waste water onto the floor
beneath the sink can be found on a nearby street and cut to order. The
scrub brush, rubber gloves and detergent to clean the terrifying five
years accumulation of sludge from the area beneath the sink can be
found at another shop on the same street. And a long rope festooned
with bells and hung from the balcony to the street below will stand in
for an apartment building buzzer or doorbell, enabling people to
summon you and keys to be lowered to the ground, saving you a constant
trek up and down the six flights of stairs. I still do not know how to
dispose of my trash or refill the butane canisters I use for my little
cooking stove, but I'm learning.

I have been carrying with me a list of dozens of household needs. I
considered the bed most important and so began with that. But, waking
each morning to the noise from the street, lying on the naked mattress
beneath the mosquito net, I felt daunted by the bareness of the place
I was trying to call home. I had no way to cook food, no place to keep
food, no utensils or dishes for eating, nowhere to keep my clothes or
books, no place to sit and no surface on which to write. Accompanied
by T.M. and E, two of my perpetually generous and helpful coworkers, I
made a shopping expedition to an oversized supermarket to purchase
necessities: a sheet set and pillow, rice cooker and kettle, a lamp,
knife, cutting board, and a handled scooper for drawing water out of
the bathing trough to pour over my head. We stood in the aisle with
our ears held to the open mouths of thermoses, like listening for
waves inside sea shells, selecting the perfect one to keep my water
warm. I bought thin Chinese dish cloths and a three tiered shelf to
keep food and dishes off the counter and away from the ubiquitous
ants. I still needed utensils, a trash can, a desk and somewhere to
keep my clothes other than piled on top of my backpack. I ran over the
list of these things, adding to them a light bulb to replace the one
that had burnt out in a dramatic pop in the middle of the night and
had propelled my heart into my throat. I couldn't even begin to think
of curtains or a floor mat and pillows for sitting because they seemed
so vain in the face of needing a cooking pan and a way to clean my
laundry. I went about shopping like I had gone about everything since
I arrived here: focused and borderline frantic. I plowed through the
aisles, a model of efficiency, ticking things off my list. I had tried
to point out to myself the joylessness of my pace, but it is hard to
relax my fist once it is already clenched.

My shopping load felt significant and I needed the trishaw driver to
help me carry it all up the six flights of stairs to my flat. But, as
I unpacked everything: kettle and cutting board, towels, sheets and
doormats, it didn't seem to make a dent on the echoey emptiness of the
place. Then I reached the wind chimes. T.M. had slipped the chimes
into the top of one of my bags when we'd left the supermarket, saying,
"These are for you, love. Happy housewarming." I removed them from the
bag and unwrapped tape that bound them. There were six shiny chimes of
three sizes in two parallel rows, all attached by string to a wooden
top. Two round wooden bobbers dangled below the chimes and on each of
these two cords there was a round copper knocker. I hung the chimes
from the frame of my east facing kitchen window. The evening breeze
stirred the wooden bobbers and the chimes tinkled gently. I watched
the little cylinders sway and ping against one another and behind them
the coppery moon rose. And I admit I cried. It was a relief. How had I
forgotten how to make a home?

When trying to live in an unfamiliar place it is natural to think a
lot about what makes a place a home. It has been over a year and a
half since I've had a place of my own. I have fallen so out of
practice. Watching the wind chimes sway reminded me that keeping such
a frantic focus in this mad dash to learn a new land, a new job, a new
life, prevented me from stopping to lean out the window to listen to
the night and distracted me from the value of pinning joy up on the
wall of every room. These actions are what truly make an empty place
into a home.

Timing

2011-01-21T16:38:00.001+06:30

It is necessary to wake just after six in the morning because everyone
else does. Women pass on the street below, balancing baskets a top
their heads and calling, "Beb—yo—o! Beb—yo—o!" It is a musical call,
rhythmic and regular. A boy in his green school longyi rides by on a
bike and a trishaw driver follows close behind, ringing his bell at
what I can only see as random intervals. Voices from a nearby temple
are broadcast up above the city, diffused to a gurgling of tones that
rise and fall in tinny echoes.

From my front window, facing south east, the sunrise is obscured by a
neighboring building, but I can see the effects of it. The faces of
the buildings spread out miles before me are illuminated and the palm
fronds are warm honey tipped. The light spreads through my wide, empty
room in bright patches the shape of my window panes, making a
checkerboard across the walls.

I recall how much I like mornings here. I used to watch them most days
from the balcony of my hotel home in Pyin Oo Lwin. That was almost
exactly one year ago. It is baffling to comprehend. I imagine
sometimes that I never left this place; that I slept a long and
feverish night and a day and dreamt detailed dreams that seemed to
span seven months. These dreams were filled with many homes. One sat
on top of a hill, one near a lake, one full of animals and another
full of friends, wishing me a good journey and an interesting new
year. These dreams were full of dance and music, laughter and
sometimes tears. They were full of engaging conversations and
difficult ones, wine and food, embraces and the silence of snow fall.

When I wake it is to the Bebyo seller calling out in a sing-song voice
that bounces up the steep walls to my sixth floor flat. And at the end
of the day I stand here, looking toward the magnificent glow of the
Shwedagon, punctuating the horizon while trishaws pass below, jingling
their bells. Sometimes I have to lean out the window to watch them
peddle past and listen to the evening prayers roll in round, tinny
echoes around the street in order to picture in my mind a map with two
points. At one point, you may have just woken to your day and at the
other, I am ending mine while the train wails a lonely tone as it
pulls through town. If I trace a dotted line between these points on
this map in mind, it spans a distance that amazes me. We might, in
fact, be standing sole to sole.

Year marks

2010-12-15T02:26:00.000+06:30

At nine at night in the months of summer, some sunlight might still be visible from the top of this hill, but tonight it has been dark for hours by the time we arrive at the Mount Baker Ridge Viewpoint. We discuss whether to call the place a park; the semantics of the term. There are no grassy areas, no play structures, but there are benches and it is a public spot in the middle of a residential neighborhood. The site was conceived as an instrument to mark the path of the sun through a year. Seven sunset stones are lined up to indicate the location of the sunset at summer and winter solstice, seen from the south and north stones respectively, spring and autumn equinox, from the center stone, and several interspersed stones to mark various points along the year's course.

This arrangement of split stones, aligned with slits in the railing for unobstructed sight lines to the horizon, is not the reason people stop here. They come for the view. The view is why I return here, whether just after dawn or long after sunset. From here I can see some of my favorite spots in the city where I live. There is the looming Gothic Pacific Medical Center, designed by the same architects who brought us the iconic Seattle Asian Art Museum. There is also Smith Tower, hunkered down in Pioneer Square. Having long ago lost its 1914 claim to fame as the tallest office building west of the Mississippi River, Smith Tower is still one of the more interesting buildings too pick out of the clump of Seattle's downtown. Beyond this are the Olympic mountains like a row of molars lined along the Puget Sound. But, the mountains you cannot see tonight and the water is only discernible as the inky black mass stretched beyond the city. Music wavers in the air, carried up from a bar below.

My friend and I pace the park, which we call it despite itself, to peer between the designed crevasse of each sunset stone, imagining how the light might appear channeled through here. Imagining how each season would settle here, how the Salal would bloom in Spring, how late we could linger in the summer air, watching the sun set on the Solstice and how the trees would undress on the sidewalk as we brought out the first scarves of Autumn. It is nearly Solstice now in this dark, cold season and I find myself wistful even for the red numbness of my nose and fingers because I am moving away and at these times even discomforts become fond. I will miss spotting the sun through the stone located at Spring and the one designated for Summer. In fact, the light will be back to where it is now before I stand at this view point again. Soon, I will have the sunlight of my friends' night time and my friend will rise when I begin to dream. I lean my face against the park's cold railing while he plays a rhythm on the rungs. The sound hums against my cheekbone and ear. Each day as the sun drops here and rises for me across the world, I will lean my face to the ground like this and listen for messages from you in the sounds.

Snowday in Seattle

2010-11-27T08:18:00.000+06:30

Everyone knew that umbrellas were useless because snow moves in unpredictable spirals and eddies, not directly down. The people blink and shake their coats, turning white as they wait for the bus. I watched a crow and a gull circle one another, griping and pecking. The crow seemed the aggrieved one, doggedly preventing the gull from perching on lap posts or branches, circling starkly against the chalky clouds. Finally, the gull leaves and the bus comes and we file into the heated vehicle where icy flakes from our coats and scarves turn to steam that fingers the window edges and scents the small space with damp wool and hair. And I think about snow globes as we craw slowly down the street, passing red-cheeked people who move quickly, heads down. Some flakes fall stern ward and some to the bow and others seem never to fall at all, but to droop and then lift up again, skirt sideways and droop and repeat. Tree branches, window sills and car tops are blanketed. I favor the little ribs of white that cap the lips of the bricks jutting out of apartment buildings.

Once out walking in it, the snow globe charm is a little lost. It is cold and it is in my eyes. My feet lack traction and concentrating on each step prevents me from looking up at the wintry scene that is developing around me. I stop beneath the awning of a darkened store, "closed due to inclement weather." Against the similarly pale sky the snowflakes are a wide field of static. In the bright beam of a street light they are insects, they are fireflies spinning windingly every which way. These snowflakes are something less romantic to the drivers of cars who hold white-knuckled to steering wheels and lean far forward, nosing their blind windshields helplessly while a bus skates toward them across the glazed street.

By the time I walk home after several draughts fit for a St. Bernard's barrel, the streets are virtually empty, thought it isn't very late. There is a pair of boys trying to snow board down the steep street on a cookie sheet. They tumble and laugh. No cars pass me the entire walk home and sitting by the window, watching fat flakes fall on the neighbor's roof, the silence is startling. It keeps me up for several long soundless hours.

By eight the next morning the sky is clear and we suddenly live in small wintry towns. My Columbia City corner of Seattle is now a world into itself, separated from all the places one would need a car to reach. I am met warmly by dog walkers and parents pulling children on sleds. These people smile and say hello as though the camaraderie of our circumstances could overcome the famous Seattle standoffishness. Today we can all share a common pleasure in taking a morning walk, avoiding our cars and chuckling together about how unprepared for snow we all are. The clerk at my local market tells me she had to stay over at a gracious coworker's home in the neighborhood because she was unable to make it to her home up north last night. The Batistas at the cafe have to apologize that the daily donut shipment hasn't come in that morning, and the customer is more than forgiving. Infact she is almost pleased by the news, proof as it is of the chaos we have all been thrown into together. Regular things are no longer expected to happen as they should. This is a different day. I finish the chapter I am reading, close my book and head out into the blindingly white streets.

Hunting under clouds

2010-11-11T05:30:00.001+06:30

Chanterelles are one of the easiest mushrooms to identify. They have few look alikes and even those give themselves away in ways a novice hunter could spot. I, being a novice hunter, find Chanterelles a safe business.

I was visiting my beloved Dr. Dana at her home in the Columbia River Gorge and we were taking a slow morning waiting for the rain to slow, knowing we couldn't count on it to fully stop. It neither slowed nor stopped and finally we just suited up against it and went out anyway. We did get soaked, but we also pulled in quite a bounty.

We began near the Iron Mike Spring. A rusty water fountain with a makeshift pump housed beneath a narrow shelter in the middle of the trees is all that remains of the former Government mineral spring health spa. The water was tinny and bitter, but nearby signs espoused all its benefits, generaly on ones vitality and more specifically on ones masculine stamina.

We dove from there into the woods to hunt fungi. They hide under fallen pine needles amid knots of Oregon Grape. We cut them out from binds of vines and leaf litter. We search them out of the millions of other mushrooms that sprout up in a moment in a rain storm in the Washington woods in November. There were brainy red mushrooms and ribbed crowns of white or pale gray ones. Some rose on spindly stalks with dark, dewy gills and others bloomed like complicated coral. We passed by all but the Chanterelles.

They have the aroma of Apricots, faintly, we were told. But all you know when you're hunting is to look for the slightly labial ripple, rising from the forest floor. As we moved through the woods, cutting fungi as we found it, the rain did not cease. It ran down my chin, under the coat collar, down my neck and chest. The dampness crept up my ankles and shins. The hiking paths were murky rivers we waded through. But, in the evening, we dried our heads and feet and warmed ourselves with wine and the oven where we baked an elaborate lasagna with our hunted mushrooms, paired with apricots, nutmeg and hazelnuts. Outside the rain continued to fall and winter crept in on the fall.

Leaving the Gorge the next afternoon, the sky was startlingly blue and the hillside a combination of jade and lemon. It felt like a different season. I hadn't expected the sky and the sun. Mark and I walked halfway across the Bridge of the Gods and looked back at the long ribbon of the Columbia River, which was still and studded with light. Everything glinted in the sunlight: puddles, windows in distant houses and a fallen thing on the railroad tracks below. We drove on to Portland and didn't hit rain again until Seattle. Oh, Seattle.

Light

2010-10-31T04:19:00.000+06:30

In the morning I could still smell the smoke tangled up in fabric and hair. Through scent we can recall whole worlds. There was the fire, the sand, the stars and the water flecked with bioluminescence like fast feet static flashes under childhood covers. There were the warm hands and faces of people smiling and laughing and burning hair, and letters and paper cups and spilling blood or wine and pouring words into sand and smoke while starlight shone above us and spun in the tide around our thighs. These submerged stars flashed and flickered and burnt out in scooped hand fulls of the Puget Sound. Stars that are neither plant nor animal, eating light and spiraling on their thin arms through the dark water where they ignite suddenly like fiber optic tinsel when they are stirred by the shins of revelers who've gathered to toast to a friend's first day in her new year and to the luminance of other amazing things.

No place like home

2010-10-22T12:38:00.000+06:30

It is now certainly autumn and I am thinking about home. When I returned to Seattle in summer I had the fortunate opportunity to become a resident of neighborhoods far flung from Capitol Hill, where I have regularly made my home since I moved to this city almost a decade ago. Returning from South East Asia with little money and no employment I was buoyed by the excessive kindness of my friends and of strangers who allowed me the chance to get acquainted with a wider vision of this city I have frequently call home.

Through a combination of playing house guest and pet sitter I made my home in six different neighborhoods over the course of three months. Each place had its own local offerings: cafes, parks, libraries. Each neighborhood had its own personality and each inspired a unique way of living. I have a certain fondness for each of these six homes; for the hospitality of loved ones in Beacon Hill and Queen Anne and the generous new friendships of Georgetown, the festivities of Ballard and quietude of Lake City. Somehow though, it is Greenlake that holds the most powerful presence in my memory.

I lived a happy life in my few weeks in Greenlake. I spent my days drinking coffee, writing, walking along the lake in lazy loops and sharing time with friends. It was here I was reawakened to potential of the present in which I imagined I might find peace, or at least love. I was putting several frenetic years into perspective and stumbling through uncharacteristic calm, feeling free of worry and projection. They will remain some of the most pleasant weeks I have lived; the halcyon days of summer as I had imagined them alone in my small home in Burma a month prior. I thought often of Whitman: "I am satisfied... I see, dance, laugh, sing." I loafed in the grass and loosed the stop from my voice. I walked around the lake with the hordes of joggers and baby strollers, the dog walkers, the speed walkers and the slow walkers, talking about work days, wedding plans and the weekend. Hundreds of Seattlites emerge out of nowhere when the sun does. Two men played marimbas, a trio of swimmers in wetsuits and diving caps crossed the water while on the shore people played games of basketball, volleyball and badminton. Other people lay in the grass and read books while others cooked them hot dogs on portable grills. A man with a clarinet was accompanied by a lute and two people on skateboards pushed themselves along the path with long sticks, like gondolier rowers stuck on land. I revel in the feeling of this town when it suddenly blooms with life.

The Greenlake days were full of scent: coffee, baking bread, sweet sweat-salted skin and raspberries candied in the sun. I stayed long hours in bed in the low-roofed loft upstairs, looking from the window into the branches of the cherry tree where a crow called out and sunlight dipped and flickered. I enjoyed learning the new scents of someone else's skin, and the lull of long nights and late mornings. I stayed awake listening to breath and the quiet streets.

In those Greenlake weeks it was the silence of the neighborhood that was most startling. Some evenings on a return walk to the house a passing bus, empty and illuminated, would pass with a rattle and a roar, a sound swallowed immediately by the street's silence. A few houselights remained lit, but there were no signs of people. I picked small daisies from a patch alongside the sidewalk that had crept out beneath somebody's fence to turn their fried egg faces up beside the curb. I took a fistful to set on the kitchen windowsill.

Another bus passed by, pointed the other direction. Inside, a single passenger sat in the glaring light. The wide window open to the vacant yellow light reminded me of bright plastic chairs in 24hr donut shops, those romantic places that make rainy days more poetic and sunrise sacramental, where I used to stay up with over-brewed coffee and an over-filled notebook. I still dream of these places with a sudden longing like for an old friend, estranged for some reason neither of us would be able to explain. It isn't for opposition to donuts or to aged coffee, but because these shrines of insomnia are fewer and further between. The one that sat ten blocks down the street from the Greenlake house where I lived was closed up. I had just come from there, where I had peered in at the empty counters, the yellow plastic booths and lifeless fluorescent signs clustered in the windows.

I passed the place wondering how I'd become so domestic for a homeless girl, recently returned from abroad who was now going home to the pair of cats and the house plants. Alone on the still street I imagined I was the only one on the block or in the entire neighborhood. I could have been headed to any of these empty homes, could take armfuls of flowers from any yard, sit down on the chairs on these porches to see their view of the motionless night. Nobody would know. These all might have been my home, but none of them were, not even the place I was headed to. I was only passing through.

Suddenly there was a noise, a smack-thwap-whap, smack-thwap sound. There it was again, smack-thwap. The pace was regular and steady. It changed pitch as I approached the vacant school yard near the house where I was living. Smack-thwap-whap, smack-thwap, smack-thwap-whap. Though I couldn't see him, I could hear the shuffle of his shoes on the playground pavement. He wound up again sma-smack-thwap. The ball bounced back at him, he caught it and threw it again against the wide East wall of the school: smack-thwap-whap, smack-thwap-whap. He threw and caught the ball repeatedly. I didn't know why, but I didn't stop. I wanted to. I wanted to ask for a turn, I wanted to toss that rubber ball against the tall gray wall and hear it smack and return to me, thwap, over and over, rhythmically, regularly. I wanted to loose myself in it. Instead, I walked on, turned down the dark street I'd come to know and entered the dark house I was calling home.

Tukwila

2010-10-12T22:59:00.000+06:30

I am writing about Tukwila only after I have left it. The IRC position that I held for the past three months has ended. I will no longer board the Southbound train each morning and ride those twenty minutes to another world full of Halal shops, Bollywood video stores and mini marts sporting phone cards for every corner of the world.

During the last few days I thought a lot about this ride that carried me south of Seattle, gliding over the freeway, over the railroad tracks, beneath the shadow of Mt. Rainier. I pulled into the station and stared at the pair of tangerine colored cranes that have been erecting a parking fortress for months. I walked, as always, past the airport rental car lot, past our lunch time Indian cafe, past the church with the clothing bank where we took two familes of Somali children during Ramadan. I won't visit the High School any more where students wave at me and call out, "hello teacher, how are you?" That may be what I will miss the most. I, who has never been one to swoon for children, have become deeply attached to these. It is for the students I have known here as much as for the novelty of Tukwila itself that I will miss this place.

There are moments when I recognize this place as a conventional place; a place I would pass through casually and not wonder about. Blond women in aprons pour coffee for old men at the Pancake Chef restaurant. The men talk about High School football matches, push their hats back on their heads and exclaim about the state of the economy. I will miss the Pancake Chef, which has been little more than a sign in the background of my Tukwila days. I'll miss also the signs for Trudy's Bar and the Indoor SwapMeet and the Tukwila Trading Post Grocery.

This town is where hundreds of refugees learn America. I learn it as well. In America there are raised pickup trucks and lowered sports cars, there are baggy jeans, spandex leggings, hijab and longyi. In America there are young men that take three buses to get to the factory where they work, there are women studying ESL textbooks at home, there are boys who walk with their arms wrapped around one another, chatting in Nepali, Somali or Burmese. In America there are grandparents and parents and children carrying with them memories they can't bear to forget and trying to forget others they can't bear to remember. We all climb the escalator to the train platform pointed North. Beside me is a Mexican woman holding an infant and a Somali man in a work shirt. Inside the train there's a couple with a pair of suitcases, coming from the airport and a young man coming from the same place, wearing a reflective orange vest and dozing against the window. The train moves forward taking us to different places together.

Tourist at home

2010-05-28T05:08:00.000+06:30

Having returned to Seattle, I am trying to maintain a traveler's eyes. I am trying to maintain that receptive fascination with the world rather than adopt that slightly panicked perspective of someone suddenly unfamiliar with things that were once so familiar. My culture shock is astounded by height, language comprehension and food.

Everyone is taller than I. I forgot about this. For half a year I was quite ordinary sized and now I return to being unable to reach things in cupboards and having to craning my neck to have a conversation. And regarding conversations, it is surprisingly shocking to understand them. Now, when standing on the street I understand that people are chronicling shopping lists, griping about coworkers and discussing blunders, diets, parties, jobs lost or found and plans to have children. These kinds of conversations may have been going on around me the past six months, but they were incomprehensible. Also shocking is the ability to read signs. It is all the same tricks: everything is new and improved or tried and true. Everything is award-winning, now more than ever, marked down, special for a limited time only. Even as predictable as they are, I can't help myself, I have to read every sign. I buy and read the newspaper from beginning to end and I spend hours in the local library, overwhelmed by access to reading material.

I am not amazed by food itself as by my ability to prepare it. I have never been an inspired chef and I always appreciate and support my friends who are willing to cook for me but, traveling and having no access to a kitchen for six months makes preparing my own food a rare treat. I've had the opportunity to assist my friend, Naomi, rolling and cutting home-made pasta, which she served with delicious pesto and fresh foccacia. I have gathered with dear friends and prepared Ethiopian dishes, Mexican food and some Thai and Burmese favorites I learned to make. Though, in some ways, we lack the variety and quality of fresh fruits and vegetables that are available at the markets in South East Asia, we do have astounding ability to find the fixings for so many various cuisines right at our local market. I gather with my friends, relish their familiar faces and voices, chop onions, grate papaya, stir shiro and try to approximate sticky rice. The additional benefit to all the cooking is the warm kitchen, a thing I have found essential on these surprisingly cold days in Seattle.

My days here are in some ways quite domestic. I wake, walk my friend's dog, wash dishes, prepare coffee, call or write to friends that I am anxious to see and then commute to the public library to work through the afternoon. But, in another way, I am still performing a tourist's style of looking at this place. I take long, meandering walks through the parks and the neighborhood streets, through down town and up to the neighborhood that I once called home. Everything and nothing has changed. The city performs a natural urban fluctuation in which shops change names and products, buildings rise and fall.

Christopher and I walk from Pioneer Square, through the International District, up and over the bridge to Beacon Hill where I am startled by the panorama of snow-capped Olympic Mountains. This long line of ragged molars looming above the dark water of the Puget Sound have not changed and yet they are the most striking thing I have ever seen. The cloud cover, which has been mostly consistent since my return, is beginning to fracture and droop, creating an illusion of levitating peaks in the papaya-colored evening light. We pause on the bridge overlooking the sweeping lines of I-90 and I-5, the arteries of the city, pumping steady streams of colored cars east and west, north and south. Christopher points out places he has painted and the perspectives he's had from where he has stood, watching the scene for hours. I wonder if my work relies on the foreignness of a place, the newness that causes me to pay meticulous attention. He says for him it is about commitment. A place that you pass constantly could contain surprising novelty if you pay close attention and watch the subtleties. His work is a testament to the daily practice of this conscious vision. I have relied on the natural occurrence of this way of seeing that comes when I venture to a foreign place or when familiar places become foreign like when I become a tourist in my own home.

In the red

2010-05-16T16:15:00.000+06:30

The guesthouse where I’ve become accustomed to staying in Bangkok is closed. They are transitioning into long-term rentals for local people, the woman explains. They have consistently lost business over the past two years, which she attributes to the political unrest that has continued for the same length of time. Keeping services available for foreigners is just too much trouble. She lets me stay anyway. She says it’s because I am a repeat customer, who is kind enough to think of her even despite the troubles and because I am a woman traveling alone. She wants to look out for women. Most of the residents I’ve seen in the building are Thai women. Everyone greets me with a warm smile. It was a tough decision, the owner tells me. She and her British husband haven’t had a vacation in seven years and when the numbers kept dropping, particularly after this last round of violence in the capitol, they finally decided they had to make a change. It’s been two years and getting worse, she says. She doesn’t think that tourism will bounce back as quickly after this standoff, which has lasted over a month now.

When my friends and family ask me about the situation in Bangkok I explain that it is easily avoided. The action is mostly limited to the Ratchaprasong area, I explain. I am far north from there, near Chatuchak Park and the weekend market. Where I am, everybody is shopping or sitting on woven mats laid out on the grass beside the little lake in the park. We might as well be in another town, reading about the rallies, protests and violence in newspapers and hearing about it on the radio.

When I got back from Burma I was so overwhelmed by the comparable wealth and freedom of Thailand. I spent time marveling at the 24-hour electricity, the ubiquitous access to cell phone and internet service, the ease of transportation, the shiny cityscape, the smooth road from the airport into town and the freedom that the taxi driver had to talk about the bad state of his country. My little knowledge of the situation was that a sit-in had been staged and left unmolested for over a month. I have a measure of envy for such public displays of protest, which would never be tolerated in the country of my birth.

This admiration is mostly maintainable under the pretense that the protests and the violent repercussions are something distant that won’t actually affect me. This is not entirely true I realize this afternoon as I sit with my book on a bench in Chatuchak Park. The stakes are rising, the government has begun cracking down with military action and the protestors are on the move. Yesterday there was gun fire and burning tires on Din Daeng and Rama IV. It’s coming closer. As I sit reading, the helicopters come chopping at the hot air. We all look up from where we’re lounging in the park. A cloud of smoke from the barricades of burning tires lifts into the clouds, darkening the sky a little more. People stop walking and turn to look down Phahon Yothin Rd toward Victory Monument where the helicopters seem to be gathering. A soldier on a bicycle circles the area and pauses to gaze down the road, as though waiting for something to suddenly emerge from the stand-still traffic. He talks to someone on his radio. The air feels suddenly electric. Another helicopter passes over.

At the guesthouse the owner hangs up the phone and says she has just talked with a friend in the military. They are declaring a curfew for six p.m. starting tonight. Familiar with the heavy traffic that clogs the neighborhood around six, I find it impossible to imagine a curfew. You maybe should have left two days ago, the woman says to me. I don’t usually worry, but I am worried now, she says. More people are getting shot. She shakes her head. I ask if it is red shirts or other civilians as well. Nobody is wearing colors anymore, she points out. It was a strategy the red shirts adopted a few weeks ago. Everybody is in civilian clothes now. I’m red, she explains, but she’s not happy with this violence. She doubts the strategies and she is furious with the military hypocrisy. They say they are not shooting anyone, she says. But all the videos and all the photos show they are! She shakes her head again and says the reds are using bamboo poles with durian stuck on the top or throwing things, using slingshots and the military comes in and start shooting in the streets. She is appalled.

I ask her how she thinks it will end. She doesn’t know, other than the fact that it won’t end here. The movement has spread already like spores, she says. The people are everywhere, not just in Bangkok. It will continue. She says she was sad to close her business, but she’s glad she came to a decision and it seems like it was the right one. She’s tired. If I can’t get out of the country, she says, I’m welcome to stay on here. If it gets to be a problem, she won’t even charge me. Cop khun ka, I thank her and give her a wai. We all prepare to settle in for curfew, wondering what the world will be like tomorrow.

The Garden

2010-05-01T15:30:00.000+06:30

We go to Kandawgyi Gardens en masse. I have been in Pyin Oo Lwin about three months and have yet to visit the famous National Gardens. Perhaps I was waiting for a day like today, when I could tote a huge troupe with me and when the pleasure of the outing could mask the heavy feeling of my immanent departure.

Whether waiting so long to visit the garden built up or lessened my anticipation I’m not sure. I had heard both praise and criticism from locals and foreigners alike, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. The place is partly a city park and partly an educational botanical garden, aviary and zoo. It reminds me of parks I often wandered through in Seattle and it makes me sad that people don’t have the freedom to visit this place as they please, since the admission fee is prohibitively expensive. Passing down the track through the tall pine trees and the edible orchard garden I expect to see joggers or people on their lunch break strolling through the clean air. But, with a 1,000 Kyat price tag for locals (5,000 Kyat for foreigners), nobody can afford to come on casual daily visits. This is an expensive occasion.

The brochure explains that the garden “is designed as a ‘Natural Monument’ which keep [sic] and conserves precious nature.” The walk-in aviary presents birds “in the natural environment,” or, at least, a congested metropolitan version of a natural environment, with the impressive variety and number of winged creatures crammed into .97 acres. There are Oriental Pied Hornbills, Wreathed Hornbills, Golden Pheasants, Silver Pheasants and Golden Yellow Pheasants, Green Peafowl, Crested Serpent Eagles and Indian Griffin Vultures, among others. A big hornbill brazenly plops down on the walkway in front of us, demanding an offering of nuts and crackers that he already knows he’ll receive. His bravery in combination with his size is quite intimidating.

The brochure does not explain where the birds came from, who collected them or how the populations have been maintained in captivity. But, it does tell the story of the garden’s history. In 1915 Mr. Alex Rodger, a British research officer, and Lady Coffe, a Botanist from Kew Garden, created the landscaped reserve. It was recognized in 1917 and the 240 acres were declared a state botanical garden and forest reserve in 1924. The brochure also explains the current purpose of the garden, which is to serve as recreation and educational facility for local and foreign tourists and “promote ecotourism in Myanmar.”

I don’t know how effective the educational ecotourism goal has proved. Like many of the conservation projects there are signs and declarations, but precious little education and if you ask, few people would know what you’re talking about. As we are standing in the middle of the aviary, admiring the peacocks and colorful pheasants one of the students picks up an abandoned aluminum can. My foreign companion, S-, pauses to commend the girl for being aware of the severe litter problem. And in one of those perfect moments of unplannable irony, the congratulations is not fully out of S-’s mouth when the girl tosses the can off the raised walkway where we are standing, into the aviary grounds. S- is flabbergasted and turns to me with a shocked look. I can’t help laughing for some reason. The student walks on, unaware of what had happened.

As we continue through the garden, visiting a tree full of shrieking monkeys and crossing a pond full of faintly identifiable fish swimming around in the water below, students point out flowers and plants and remark on the beautiful color combinations. S—and I pause by a bed of rainbow chard and explain to everyone’s amusement that we eat this plant and it is quite tasty and quite good for you.

The time of our departure is drawing close. We have covered most of the garden’s sites, everyone has asked us to pose for dozens of photos and they have generously laden us with dozens of gifts. I feel the distinctive sense of joy and sorrow for all this love and the loss. I look back over the ponds and the grove of trees beyond and think of how nice it would be to watch the sunset here. But, the park closes before sunset, so visitors are on their own after that.

New Year

2010-04-16T19:22:00.001+06:30

The activity on the street is slowing down and dusk is edging into night. The final revelers are making their last rounds of the town. Motorbikes are still wrapped with tinsel or festooned with paper signs but the riders' voices are not as loud as they were five hours ago. The immense energy that has been pumping through town is beginning to flag—wigs are askew and face makeup has smeared and run into dark fissures down boys' cheeks. They sit now with the heaviness of hours spent shouting, drinking and riding break-neck through a slalom of water shot from hoses and thrown from buckets.

Thingyan is a week of Bahktinian water play that ushers in the Myanmar New Year. This morning my friend J- explained to me the water, which everyone is now wearing, helps wash away all the old year's sins. So, by pouring water on one another, we can all start anew. Or, maybe the act of flinging water is a sanctioned release from all that binds us tight. And there's plenty. Plus, it's a chance to cool down on these hot days. I'd asked my friend if there are any rules to the game, which seems singularly unsupervisable. He told me that people cannot throw water on pregnant women or monks. Standing now on the evening balcony I watch a monk ride by on the back of a motorbike, his robes transformed into a deeper shade of mulberry where he's been doused by a bucket of water. Rules only go so far.

I also ask my neighbor at the hotel and he says he thinks there are no rules. He's come to stay in Pyin Oo Lwin in order to escape the mêlée of Mandalay where he lives. The festivities are ten-times more intense there, he explains. We are standing on the balcony above the street, watching young men pass, three or four to each motorbike, singing at the top of their lungs and bouncing on the bike's shocks with their arms raised in the air as if they might succeed in flying. The clutch of pre-adolescent children who have stationed themselves on the curb below throw pail after pail of water at the riders with immeasurable zeal. The match of motorbike velocity and the pitching arm of the water kids results in a resounding impact—I've felt the surprising sting. The boys on the bikes gasp to catch a breath and then resume their song and their forward course. They can't use dirty water, my neighbor finally says, that's one rule. And they can't pour water on anyone in a uniform, any uniform. Uniforms are the only VIPs. Motorcades of flashing lights, tinted windows and helmets have been roaring past, parting the street like Moses the sea. A pair of students from the local academy comes down the street in their olive slacks and maroon berets. The children with the buckets douse them heartily. They must not know the rules, my companion says with a chuckle. The two boys keep walking their metered step. That's the other rule; you can't get mad.

I have noticed the strict adherence to this last rule, even when it seems like superhuman self control is the only thing maintaining it. A man moving a heavy bag of onions on a bicycle gets a slap of water in his face. He wipes at his eyes and spits water out on the ground but keeps pedaling. A woman in a perfectly starched blouse and skirt, walking carefully with her umbrella and bag of groceries is descended upon by two boys with buckets. After the attack, she brushes at the wet fabric of her skirt and tries to straighten her damp hair, but continues walking without changing her expression. The water is either a blessing or an inevitability that everyone understands.

The next morning there is a cloudy chill to the air and the wind whips at the vinyl shop signs. A leggy kiss-me-quick bends and shutters and a small potted tree tumbles down barring the video store's door. When the thunder starts it sounds theatrical, like the rumble of metal sheets shaken off stage or timpani timed by a conductor to perfectly match the electric vein that shoots through the clouds. It begins to rain and the revelers who are packed into the back of the pickup trucks, resplendent in costumes and hangovers, cheer manically because it was their fierce fun that brought this rain. These committed celebrators welcome the sky's contribution to the ceremony and are drenched before the children have even filled their buckets for the day.

Within an hour the rain has stopped, leaving the pavement with an obsidian sheen. As I walk through the streets I notice that the sky is still a mottled gray like granite, like the weathered tin roofs I can see from the top of the hotel. It is a clotted gray, like cream frosting. It is a furrowed gray like the swollen ocean off the Washington coast. The clouds roil, the wind blows plastic bags along the street and a boy raises his arms and spins in a circle with his head tilted slightly to the side. I want to listen to the music he hears. A woman calls out to me, hello, hello, wait! I stop and she disappears into her house. When she returns and comes down the steps I see she is carrying a full cup of water. She holds the cup over my shoulder, says Happy Myanmar New Year and then pours the water over me. Happy New Year, I say in return and slosh back home.

Watching

2010-04-02T21:10:00.000+06:30

Which part is the dream, I wonder, my life before or my life now? I find myself thinking fondly about little moments in my life back in the States, as though watching a film of someone else's life. I think about buying produce at Sundance market in Eugene, about sharing a glass of wine with my dear friend in Sonoma, walking the slackline on sunny days in Cal Anderson Park in Seattle or sharing an afternoon cup of tea on the slope overlooking the Volunteer Park reservoir. These memories move back and forth, in and out of clarity like a telephoto lens trying to focus on something that won't stay still. Then, there is now: a pickup truck loaded with people backfires like a rifle, the nuns robed in pink balance their silver bowls on the toast colored scarves they carry on their heads. They sing a dissonant song, calling for alms. I watch them pass on the sidewalk below.

I've stopped feeling like a traveler. I am living in one place and my days have order and predictability. There are cafes that I frequent and routes that I typically take. People greet me familiarly, like neighbors. I have ridden my bicycle around many of the winding roads that surround the town. I'm becoming familiar with the territory: where one road ascends past lines of little shops into a street lined with fat old trees that are dropping flowers on the horses' heads and where another road circles round the nineteenth century Christian cemetery and heads out toward the village that is always hit by lightning during a storm. It is only my town that is familiar to me, while the rest of the country is a stranger. I am reminded of this when I sit down with a man from Australia who is staying at my hotel home. He talks about where he is coming from and where he is going. I remember this style of conversation, full of lists of what has been seen and what is still left to see. He's visited more of the country than I have, I point out. It becomes like a competition, he complains. I agree and tell him, that's why I dropped out. And I really have. I look at my bag in the corner, grown dusty and neglected. Certain technicalities prevent me from going very far afield here, but I can at least go to Mandalay. So I pack my bag and at seven in the morning load into the back of one of the Hilux trucks that makes the drive daily down the winding road.

Most of my time in Mandalay is spent just wandering. This is my sight seeing method: weaving aimlessly through neighborhoods to look at houses and people at work. I do not visit the palace or the pagodas, but go instead to the post office to buy stamps and to a local market for a bunch of bananas. I pass down a street that seems to be an automotive repair district. Cannibalized bits of cars rest among the skeletons of other vehicles being resuscitated. I am hilarious entertainment walking around with my umbrella. An old woman squatting on the street breaks into unguarded laughter at seeing me. She gives me a big toothless grin and points at my umbrella, in case I hadn't realized what made me funny. Another woman who is bathing at one of the walled wells that pepper the street notices me and unabashedly calls to all the other women who are bathing and washing their clothes behind the retaining wall. Ten women's heads pop up to chuckle and watch me pass.

Here, we share the role of watched and watcher. I am strolling through people's daily lives, watching them work and talk and eat. They meet my gaze and most of the time we smile. When I go the next day to visit UBein, the 1300 yard teak footbridge just outside of the ancient capital Amarapura, I feel like stepping onto a conveyor

belt for observation. It is slow going across the bridge because groups of local tourists, families and college girls, want me to stop and pose for photographs. Women point at my umbrella and say, Good! Patang Ti! Or Beautiful! Beauty queen! I pass under the rest shelters and people point at me and surreptitiously snap photographs the same way that an American couple in matching khaki shorts does when they see a little Burmese girl whose cheeks are swirled with thanaka. The whole scene is like a series of exchanges recorded on my personal observer-observed flow chart. I am aware of watching and being watched by local people. I also can't keep myself from staring at the groups of white tourists. I am fascinated by their behavior after seeing so few of them over these past two months.

A woman in a wide sunhat tries not to notice the old man holding out his palm, asking her for money. Another woman tries out some Burmese phrases she's learned to a cluster of young children who are all delighted smiles and giggles. I watch some people relax and some grow more tense. And at the end of the bridge where the busses park, I watch the group of local kids get mad when the white man in the blue polo-shirt chooses only the girl in the blue dress to buy a trinket from. The man's tour group has already sealed themselves up on the big bus and the kids are hanging around in clusters near the doors, looking up at the tinted windows and holding out their watermelon seed purses, jade necklaces and carved teak figurines. Suddenly, the man opens the bus door with a hiss of cold air. The kids bolt forward. He shouts them back and points at the girl in blue. She steps up, takes his money, hands him the necklace and steps back. The rest of the kids speak in sharp tones and point fingers. Who really deserved the man's business they seem to be asking. It is a gamble working for tourists.

The kids turn away as the bus leaves. Some of them look my way, but they've already watched me and know I'm not a lucrative investment of their time. I'm a failed tourist; preferring to spend time sitting on the stone stairs than moving on to the sites at Inwa or browsing the array of gifts to take back to my loved ones. One boy comes up to ask where I'm from and where I'm going. How long do you stay, he asks. I don't know.

Turned around

2010-03-13T15:08:00.000+06:30

I am always wondering when I’ll be told not to do something or that I oughtn’t be somewhere. Some things I can’t anticipate, like dancing. How would I guess dancing is not allowed here? Some things I can expect, which is why when I set out on my bicycle today I assumed I’d be turned around at some point and told to go back the way I’d come. People starred at me and laughed at the neng neng cheda on the sabing, but nobody said anything so I kept on past the lake toward Kadwagi

Gardens. I passed the entrance and pumped up the steep hill past the amusement park and the National Landmark gardens. I did not pay the admission to any of the gardens,

being as how the $5 ticket is equal to time and a half my daily allowance. Contenting myself instead with the scenery outside the fence, I enjoyed the roadside poinsettia, bougainvillea and the sprays of sunny day blue sky flowers that pop up amidst the rubbish dropped beside the broken asphalt.

It is moments like this that I recall again where I am. The steep tulip trees are dropping crimson flowers. The day is warm and bright and the condition of the road deplorable. An old man carrying a young child pauses on his way up the hill to rest under a coffee tree. A boy on a bike that’s been piled high with branches passes me and grins, “mingalaba!” I’m chasing a phenomenally blue butterfly and rattling my bike fenders along the rocky road. Nobody ever says anything, but at

the bottom of the hill, after passing the line of coffee farms with colorful gates, there is a candy-cane striped barricade lowered across the road and a man with a gun in a chair. I turn and return up the hill, back the way I’d come. The old man with the child is trudging up the hill and the broken down lorry is in the same location under the bougainvillea that is dropping purple blossoms on both the patches of sharp gravel and the islands of worn asphalt without discretion.

I passed the gated gardens again and went instead down a dirt track to the flower nursery where the women in broad-brimmed hats working between rows of potted mums and roses giggled to see me. My return trip took me a circuitous route through windy neighborhoods, some with rows of houses like kingdoms with expansive grounds and a stack of guards and some with rows of rickety bamboo structures where naked children ran around playing games with sticks and string and lots of laughter.

Home Sweet Home

2010-02-24T16:19:00.000+06:30

I live in a hotel. This is nothing glamorous. This is not the hotel life of Eloise with attendants and a giant, en suite bathroom with a tub full of soapy hot water. It isn’t even the humble bohemian hotel life of Simone deBeauvoir, sitting at her writing desk in her chamber of books. I have glanced in at a few of the rooms at the orphanage where I am teaching and was happy to know my accommodation did not afford me undue comforts that my students and peers would not have access to. Our rooms are similar. I, of course, have the luxury of privacy, but they have those closets that are being made for them, a feature that I cannot boast. We use the word “basic” to describe the place where I live. This might be an understatement, but it is essentially true and I am finding ways to call it home.

Home sweet Home is a six foot by twelve foot room with filthy pepto-pink walls and a single

window. The top shutters do not fully close so the street bellow is virtually in the room with me. The screen is curled up out of its frame and the two curtains are held to the metal rod with three round clips. There is a desk, which is where I have camped my small library of books and a retinue of sundry domestic items from a bottle of ibuprofen, a box of face tissues, an eraser, mosquito repellant, deodorant and a bag of ginseng tea I purchased two months ago in Chiang Rai. Thailand seems a world away. Even further away is that other life I lived in the states. It is difficult to imagine being there again. This afternoon G—asked me what I thought of the climate here in Pyin Oo Lwin. It is colder than I expected. I sleep with two blankets at night. I wear a sweater all day. Rather than play the hide-from-the-sun game, skirting between the shade of shop awnings and tree branches, we play the bask-in-the-sun game. We cross to the sunny side of the street and turn our faces a little bit more toward the light. He wants to know how the climate is where I come from. It is in moments like these that I think about where I come from. Where do I come from? What is it like there? I tell him the weather here is similar to spring in Seattle. I tell him that in Seattle right now it is winter. It is much colder than here, it rains everyday and the sky is always cloudy. Oh! He grimaces. He feels that it is cold enough here. He wants to know also about the food here, am I all right? So far, I tell him. There was an American before who had a bad stomach the whole time. It was very difficult for him, he says. I’ve been lucky. He wants to know if I eat rice where I come from. Constantly. He is pleased and curious for more information, but his daughter is fidgeting and he has to move on. I tell him we will talk again.

When I arrive back at the Hotel where I live the crew is still cutting stones in the foyer. They have been remodeling the entry way with stone tiles and a jutting threshold sign where the name of the place will be prominently lettered. I’ve become as accustomed as one can to the blaring sound of power tools. I worry about their lack of protective gear. With dramatic precision, just as I am looking down thinking this, a man who is squatting on the sidewalk grinding stones with a hand tool drops the tool and clutches at his eye. He uses the dirty hem of his longyi to wipe at the piece of stone in his eye, but goes back to work with one hand on his face.

The night clerk is carrying a narrow table up the stairs in one hand and a long fluorescent tube light in the other. He is changing the bulb in someone’s room, standing on the table to reach the high light fixture. Light is unpredictable here. When I flip on my light switch I don’t know what to expect. Sometimes there is no response, meaning the power is out again. Sometimes I receive only a symbolic glow, not really classifiable as useable light in my little pink cave. Sometimes my room is a disco strobe light. My sights are set low now, I want only that sick, squinty light that feels gray, but is at least light. In the morning when I hurry to heat water in my electric tea pot I don’t need to worry about the light bulb because I have the warm glow of sunlight through the window.

The light in the bathroom down the hall is slightly more unpredictable and I have gotten in the habit of taking a flash light with me since “just in case” is usually pretty reliable. There’s nothing like being in the middle of showering and having the world go resolutely dark. Showering might be a misnomer. I have yet to use a showerhead. The first one that I tried trickled water down its neck and the second shot water every which way but down. Showering now occurs at an open faucet located at about my chest level. I duck under the stream of water and out again. The timing of these plunges depends upon the temperature of the water. I am confident that if I can just find the magic equation of the three different faucet knobs and the right timing, whether it be period of the day or length of time the water is left to run, then I will have hot water. I was tricked this evening when I returned home from my dinner at the Orphanage. My new habit is to test the temperature every time I visit the bathroom down the hall. Just a quick flick of the middle wall faucet to see if it is still icy or if it has achieved that elusive heat. I performed the ritual and, low and behold; hot water! Someone must have cracked the code. I grabbed my flip-flops and my shampoo and had a happy two minutes of hot water. Then I was stranded with a sudsy head and a stream of cold water falling on my feet. I performed the hummingbird’s quick approach and withdraw technique to rinse off the soap and then dried myself with my binder paper sized micro fiber towel. I still have confidence I will uncover the code. I have seen now that it is possible. Somebody had hot water. I, unfortunately, only caught the afterglow.

I haven’t had time to take many excursions or many photos, but I have been watching. I have been looking at the women sitting at the low table made of empty crates keeping watch over her high pile of watermelons. She looks at me and smiles. Her tanaka-painted cheeks crinkle. I smile in return. I have been looking at the family of four sitting tightly together on the motorcycle seat. The two young girls laugh as they putter down the bumpy street. I have been looking at the group of boys playing a kinesthetic game of tag as they leap back and forth across a newly dug trench near the stream choked with plastic bags and discarded baskets. One boy, gangly limbed and long necked, jumps but is tagged mid-air. His leap looses commitment and he tumbles halfway into the trench. They are all laughing and the boys across the street are laughing and cheering. They had all had their favorites. They will soon be flying their kites. The sky of early evening is always full of colored kites, bobbing in the breeze. I have been looking also at the children here at the orphanage. A boy is carrying his big paper plane up the ramp, raising and lowering it in a swooping flight and saying “wheeee, wheeee, wheeee!” The children have lined up to enter the dinning hall, where they will sing a song together and then clean the food off their metal plates. Suddenly the paper plane comes crashing down on the pavement beside the line of children. I look up to the balcony where I spend my mid-morning break sunning and planning lessons. The boy is peering over the balcony railing, wheeee!

I wish I could tell you more. There is so much more to tell.

Thai Tour

2010-01-30T16:02:00.000+06:30

The 1961 Tourist Organization of Thailand (TOT) brochure that my mother's foreign exchange sister, Phenwipa, brought with her when she went to live in California over forty years ago touts the valuable economic potential of foreign travelers to Thailand. The booklet is full of photographs of Wat Po and the Grand Palace and other breathtaking sites, along side images of tourists in suits and dresses with pill box hats, off-loading from airplanes and going through customs inspections. The authors estimate tourism will become one of Thailand's largest exports, explaining the use the term "export" because tourism increases the in-flow of foreign exchange in the same manner as other large industries like rice, rubber, tin-ore and teak. Field Marshal Srisdi Dhanarajala, Prime Minister and founder of the TOT, writes about the need to encourage more air travel passengers, whose flights are often routed through Bangkok, to stay awhile longer. He encourages the Thai people to encourage tourism and to view it as a positive thing that will be economically lucrative for everyone.

The brochure breaks down Thailand's yearly tourist statistics into gender, nationality and length of stay in the country. The majority of the 81,000 plus visitors to Thailand in 1960 were American males, who numbered around 21,500. These men spent, on average, $35 to $45 per day and stayed approximately three days. Nothing is said about where these men went or what they did with their time and money while in the country.

I don't know what the tourist statistics are today, but I doubt that Americans are presently the most common visitors to Thailand. The number of Americans I have encountered in these past two months can be counted on two hands (this is not including the American expats who call Thailand home). Many of the Americans I did meet, I met in Laos, though they had come via Thailand. At least half of the total Americans I encountered do not even live in the states currently.

Wachera, whom I met in December in Ayutthaya, thinks that I am just on a different route than the Americans. They go to Bangkok because they like dancing and pretty Thai girls, she says. Or they go to the beaches down south. She meets mostly Germans, French and Dutch travelers. But, she admits the numbers are down overall. Thian, who gave complimentary tours at the Grand Palace in Bangkok had also mentioned that he was seeing fewer tourists overall and almost no Americans. I was maybe the second one he'd seen the entire day, he told me. There used to be so many, he said. He attributes this drop in numvers to the economy.

Whether the economy keeps us at home or whether the rest of my compatriots are sunning themselves somewhere in Phuket, I don't know. There are probably tons of Americans traveling in Thailand right now and I jusat haven't met them. Interestingly though, of the few I have met, half of these Americans hailed from places I have intimate connection with. Two had mother's living around the Seattle area. One called Grant's Pass home. And most recently, when sitting in Lumphini park with my friend John, who was giving me a crash course in Burmese language skills, a couple approached and asked if the lizards were dangerous. The animals they were referring to are the fat monitor lizards that swim around the little lakes and climb up on the bank beside you to investigate. We told the couple there was nothing to be worried about. She already had her bag in hand and looked ready for flight. John asked where they were visiting from. California, they said. Oh, he looked to me, California, like you. I asked where in California. Sonoma county. It is moments like this that I remember my other life, the one I once lived a few months ago when I was there in this couple's home town sharing a bottle of wine with my best friend, who might be their next door neighbor. It was my first taste of homesickness.

Souvenir

2010-01-24T13:40:00.000+06:30

On Don Det and Don Khon, two of the Four Thousand Island in southern Laos, the legacy of French presence is less prominent than it had been in Vientiane or UNESCO noted Luang Prabang. There are still fresh baguettes and crepes, as in the former towns, but fewer examples of colonial architecture. The five kilometer railway spanning the two islands was once used to move cargo up from Vietnam and Cambodia across land to avoid the rough patch of the river. It is the only rail line built by the French in Laos. The bridge still serves as the main crossing between the two islands and a rusted locomotive still marks the route.
The gutted Ecole Primare on Don Khon, maybe burned, maybe abandoned to mold and decay, is a beautiful skeleton, overgrown with plants and the only colonial architectural remnant I found on the two islands. Children play Kataw in the busy neighboring schoolyard while I circle the ruins, snapping pictures. Further along my bicycle ride down the Island’s coast I pass small houses where every so often a giant satellite dish dominates the courtyard and people gather around televisions that are playing Thai soap operas and music videos. I sit at a café where four television watchers ignore me as I rest and look out at the Mekong and the strange series of cement channels built by French merchants for the logs that were taken downstream from the forests west of Vientiane. There is the riverbank, there are patches of foliage, slow moving water and suddenly a big cement wall rising out of the river.

These are the physical evidence of past French influence. The American impact here is discovered in more symbolic evidence like the missing limbs of children and the untouchable land where Unexploded Ordinances are still very real, very dangerous potential. Every so often you find craters in the ground or stories like that of Phongsavath Manithong, written up in the Vientiane Times. Manithong lost both arms and a significant portion of his sight when he and his friends discovered a metal object in a field near his home. These cluster munitions, or “bombies,” were dropped 30 years ago by U.S. planes and still kill or injure around 300 people every year. The stories of fathers lost plowing a field, children lost searching for fishing bait or mothers lost gathering firewood are too common here in Laos. Considered the most bombed country per capita in the world, Laos had an estimated 260 million bombies dropped on it between 1964 and 1973. Only .5% of contaminated land has been cleared. An earlier article in the same issue of the Vientiane Times expresses concern about diminishing farm land. Unfortunately, plowing a field might kill you. These are the souvenirs from my country.

Usually, America's most obvious impact is the rife popular culture icons, but here in Laos Thailand’s influence is most active in that regard. It is not a memory, but rather a constant presence on television screens and in food shops where shelves are dominated by Thai imports. An op-ed from the Vientiane Times on January 21 declares, “the popular culture, fashion, media and music of neighboring countries is continuing to affect Lao society with growing fears that youngsters may forget their own fine culture.” The Lao people are grappling with their own unique path to modernization with all their souvenirs of the past.

Across the Mekong

2010-01-18T13:18:00.000+06:30

I have spent a happy week in Luang Prabang. I could settle in here. I could stay. My wonderful slow boat crew David, David, Juli and I made a morning routine of fresh fruit blended with coconut milk and ice, baguette sandwiches and small paper cups of thick Lao coffee. Our daily events took us various places around or outside of town, but invariably we would end up winding down the small soi to Utopia. Aptly named, the cafe/bar has a drowsy comfort with a wide bamboo deck, low tables and lounging cushions overlooking the Nam Khan river. Routine becomes settling after being on the move for almost two months.

In our days of wandering I had seen Wats and markets, visited a school with David, crossed the Nam Khan to the tall Wat on the hill where the monks were engaged in a three day prayer and a little neighborhood full of looms and beautiful silk and carvers at work on fragrant wood. I had yet to cross the other river so, when Michele and Mary come to town we charter a boat across the Mekong. We climb the bank and a staircase toward Wat Chom Phet then wander through the foliage to Wat Long Khun where a pair of kids chase us down to pay an admission price and then lead us to the cave when we ask. With the electric torches they offer us, we climb the staircase to a doorway into the mountainside then enter the rock. The air is thick and hot as we descend through the maze of caverns with sweeping ceilings and dripping stalactites. The silence is immense.

Back out in the daylight we continue along the path toward Wat Tham Xieng Maen, a beautifully decrepit Wat with a single monk and a fierce dog in the courtyard. The pillars and walls are cracked and loosing their plaster. A narrow brick building behind the Wat leans under age and neglect. Roof tiles have fallen in and shattered on the stone floor that is sprouting greenery. Further along the path, up a hillside covered with a fine reddish scree we find a house perched on stilts in the middle of a still pond. Saffron robes rustle lightly where they have been hung out to dry on the porch railings. There is nobody around and the only sound comes from the large leaves we crush beneath our feet. I imagine I am experiencing what a Murakami character must feel. We stand for awhile assessing our location amidst the thin trees somewhere just over the ridge from the Mekong River. It is moments like this that I am surprised to recall where I am. I wonder how difficult it will be to leave Laos, to leave Luang Prabang, to leave this quiet spot where I am now standing. It seems like an impossibly remote idea.

We wind down from the ridge to the riverside where we know there is a line of beach bars that play loud Laos love songs in the late afternoon. We choose the quietest one and order several bottles of Beer Lao. We are joined by Pat and Wat, both from Vientiane and presently working in Luang Prabang. "Wat. Like a temple," he explains. And Pat? Wind. They teach us also nam kawn for ice, which we are putting into our glasses with more beer, Wat calling jovially, "drink! drink! Cheers!" We play petaunque and learned mao means drunk. Everyone is laughing and happy. We eat cucumbers from the fields surrounding us on the sand; thin cucumbers drenched in fish sauce and thick cucumbers drizzled with soy sauce. Wat is effusive about his joy and the two men demonstrate elegant hand movements that they try to teach us in order to dance to the Lao songs that are blaring from the big speakers out onto the dark water. Pat exclaims how much he wants us to stay. "Stay here, get married to Laos!"

But our visas will expire and we will have to leave Laos. Before that we will have to leave Luang Prabang and before that we will have to leave this beach where all the little riverside bars are shutting down as the night sets in.

Blood Vine

2010-01-05T15:13:00.000+06:30

The Akha blood vine sauna was not as hot as I had anticipated. I scheduled my session for after breakfast, before the heat of the day in combination with the anticipated sauna heat would make the small hut unbearable in that small hut. But, the Akha sauna is less focused on the effect of heat as it is on the steam, permeated with the blood-colored sap from a thick vine.

Sliced segments of the vine, which I couldn't get anyone to give a name to, oozed a thick red fluid. The frozen pieces I was shown resembled cuts of meat. When I asked to see the plant it was cut from the woman explained that the vine was harvested out in the jungle and I was welcome to sign up for a trek. The chunks of vine are added to water in a big black kettle that is heated over a fire. The steam is piped into the cylindrical sauna room and released there through a hollow piece of bamboo that has been drilled with holes.

I maneuvered three of the plastic chairs into a makeshift platform on which I could lie down. The woven bamboo walls were sealed with the orange clay that coated the outside. I stared up at the walls in the dim light that came through a crack in the door frame and fancied myself in a big, round basket. The steam that filled the small room was aromatic in an earthy almost astringent way. It was warm but not hot and comfortable enough to relax and breathe deeply and drink from a bottle of water for an hour and a half.

In the jelly legged mood after a sauna session I sat and read until the afternoon cooled and I had a chance to explore the nearby waterfall and to climb up the ridge line to see the view. From the top of the hill I could hear a guitar, accompanied by several voices drifting up from the village and echoing off the hillside. I could make out the tune to "I've got a river of life" rising from the thatched roof of the missionary church. It was only then that I realized what day of week it was. I was happy to know I had lost track of time so thoroughly.

New Year in Chiang Rai

2010-01-02T02:35:00.000+06:30

I have had few occasions to consider how roosters don't wait until dawn to raise a racket. Three, four or five a.m. are also fine times for proclamation. As I woke each time the neighborhood erupted in this cock call and response, I thought about cuckoo clocks, starred up at the corrugated roof to remember where I was and then drifted back to sleep beneath the mosquito netting.

When I had asked YooPa the morning prior if I could stay on at the guesthouse for one more night she was deeply apologetic, but told me they were fully booked. It was New Year's eve and everyone was coming to town. "But maybe," she said, "in the room upstairs. You ok?" It was the room that she stayed in, but since she would be going back to her home tonight to spend the evening with her husband and twins it was available."Wait!" she stopped as she was about to lead me upstairs. "It's New Year. You come stay at my home, ok? We have kao tao then come back here in the morning. You ok?" I agreed to it.

We took off around six, once she found somebody to watch the guesthouse over night. We sped down the road as the sunlight disappeared and the full moon came out. After passing dark fields, a few clusters of road-side shops and more dark open space we came to a small neighborhood and turned onto a road lit only by the tall illuminated portrait of HM the King that sat at the juncture. Once we had parked the motorbike YooPa whisked me immediately to the kitchen area where she sat me down to a round block of wood, a long knife, an onion, several tomatoes and half a head of cabbage. She heated the wok, cracked some eggs and set to cooking. "Hungry!" she told me, "long day." It had been a busy one for her. People had come all day looking for rooms, but she was booked and she had to clean the rooms herself since her sister had walked off the job. I chopped a stack of vegetables then stirred them in the wok while she made chili oil and cut up some pieces of pork for herself. We sat together on the floor and ate. I hadn't realized even such a simple meal would be delicious. I was grateful for my first chance since I got to Thailand to get into a kitchen and make something.

We finished with small, sweet oranges and then I chatted with YooPa's brother-in-law Willie and his wife in his grandmother's house next door. He brought me in to the main room and the old woman quickly cleared a spot beside her and beckoned me to sit, "inde torn lap!" she welcomed me. I sat and made a wai to her, "cop khun ka, thank you." By way of Willie and his wife I communicated to Grandmother where I was from, how many brothers and sisters I had and no, I wasn't married. Yes, I was traveling alone and probably will do so for three more months. The king came on the television to read a New Year's message. He looked frail and YooPa said, "the king gets older." I asked about his recent illness. She said he was better now. The broadcast showed him escorted through crowds of his delighted subjects.

After a few New Year's gifts were exchanged YooPa gathered me and her twin sons to walk up the hill to the party. We laid out our mat amongst the others and sat bundled in blankets while a couple on stage led a sing along. The man on stage pointed me out. "The Farang isn't singing," YooPa translated. He laughed and said "Mai Pehn Rai, she is smiling though." The boys ate Oreo cookies and we watched some children's song and dance numbers, a skit performed by a group of teenagers and a serial presentation of a Miss Universe pageant in which all the contestants were local farmers. The men glided demurely across the stage and everyone laughed at the running commentary and bequeathed their favorite contestants with roses and colorful paper garlands. I didn't get to see who won the pageant because we left early since YooPa and I would need to leave for town by seven in the morning.

She took me up the ladder to the airy room where I would sleep and tucked the mosquito netting in around me once I was settled on the wooden platform. I lay awake awhile listening to a dog bark, the occasional grunt of a pig in the yard or the sudden swell of singing voices from the party on the hill. I was far from where I had been at this time last year, but I was happy.

This morning as I rode the 15 kilometers back to town with YooPa I was shocked by the cold air and struck by the beauty of the mist laying over the soggy rice paddies and the early light coloring the sugar palms. Monks in saffron were lined up on the road, receiving food from their neighbors. I was glad to see the sun rise on the first day of this new year.

Christmas, take four.

2009-12-28T21:13:00.000+06:30

Because I am traveling in

Thailand

during December, I assumed that I would go without a Christmas celebration this year. Instead, I have had four of them.

The morning I was to leave Sukhothai for Lampang I went instead to Mae Sot, three hours west by bus, half an hour of which I spent standing in an over-sold bus. In Tak I changed to a mini-bus for the last hour and a half to Mae Sot. Like the first bus, seats were a premium so once the bus was full, we squeezed in five more people. The road to Mae Sot was a climb and full of belching lorries. I tried alternately to breathe fresh air through the window and arch my body awkwardly out of the hot glare of the direct sunlight. I was seated in the back, behind John, who I had met at the station in Tak. He asked what I was going to do in Mae Sot, a town that serves as prime location for many NGO workers as well as a popular border crossing for travelers who need to renew a visa. I was doing neither, I told him. I hadn’t expected to come to Mae Sot. He was having a Christmas party for some of the street kids and another party at a camp near the dump outside of town, he told me. I was welcome to join. I agreed.

And so, for two days I helped John play Santa Claus to over a hundred Burmese children. We gave out plastic bags filled with basic need supplies like shampoo, bars of soap, toothpaste and a toothbrush or two. We blew up balloons, handed out pencils, played games and raffled sundry donated gift items: small notebooks, piggy banks, stuffed animals, a handful of throw blankets, small pillows with the smiling faces of cartoon characters, decorative fridge magnets, pens with bobble headed clowns and cartoon bears and all sorts of bags in all shapes and sizes from zippered wrist packs to laptop satchels. We handed out sweet snacks that we had picked up at the market. There were small fried coconut milk pancakes called khanom krok, fresh oranges and figs and around fifty slices of an extremely tasty treat that looks like a big custard. The woman called it kan yo deng and told me it was made of coconut milk, sugar and sticky rice.

In these first two days of parties, there were no Christmas decorations, no Christmas music or kitchy snowmen and reindeer. Very little was said about Christmas itself, but the mood was celebratory and the kids had a great time. The lack of these familiar commercial holiday items was made up for in my third Christmas, which had all the trimmings. This celebration was in the town of Lampang where I stopped for a few days to ride a bike along the meandering path beside the river. The central area around the clock tower had been blocked to traffic and filled with booths of food, handicrafts and amazing fresh orange juice. There was a huge illuminated tree and a stage from where Christmas standards in English were being broadcast across the square and the adjoining park. There were packs of clowns making balloon sculptures and packs of Santas dressed in red suits and false beards posing with kids for the picture-taking parents. A parade of marching bands and school children in costumes came by dressed in Santa hats, reindeer antlers and a little more inexplicably groups in cowboy hats and chaps, white gowns and fairy wings and giant headed manga characters. There are rumors that there would be snow later.

My final Christmas was in fact on Christmas day. There was a gathering on the roof-top deck of the Malek Guesthouse where I was staying in Chiang Mai. Though there was no tree or decorative snowmen and reindeer, several of the residents had helped blow up balloons and earlier there had been a gift exchange. Mostly, this party, like the other three Christmases, was an excuse to enjoy ourselves. I am not a Christian and thus have no personal investment in the origins of the holiday, but it seems that good cheer was in abundance. We ate food, had a few beers, met some people and practiced our Thai language skills. At one point in the evening a man carried a big sky lantern up to the deck where we were all gathered. As the flame heated the air inside, the pale paper ballooned open and then lifted into the air. We watched the lantern rise and grow smaller until it was just one tiny point of light amid many.

A single day across the border

2009-12-24T09:17:00.000+06:30

Carrom is played on a square board with four corner pockets. The men use larger strikers to knock small disks into these pockets. I can tell there are points and penalties and strategies at play, but I have a difficult time putting it together while sitting on the street in Wyawaddy, watching a group of men play. The extent of my Burmese language skills consists of hello and thank you kindly, so I cannot get the gist of the game through conversation. It looks a bit like pool and table-top shuffleboard. I watch for a while and commend them on an interesting game. As I stand to leave I notice the spectators on the sidewalk have doubled over the span of the fifteen minutes I squatted there watching. Everyone is intensely friendly; eager to say hello and ask where I am from. I am wary at first, prepared to ward off solicitations and sales pitches, but typically and exchange of greetings is all anybody is after.

I turn down a narrow market alley, shaded with trees and tarps. I pass stalls of Longyi cloth, stalls with shampoo, detergent, plastic trashcans and other necessities, stalls with stacks of dried fish and cauliflower crowns, stalls with men and women repairing clothing at treddle sewing machines. In the midst of these shops there is a small cafe set with tables and a single small refrigerator of soda cans and bottled water. I select a water and the cafe proprietor packs the bottle in a plastic bag with a straw to go. I gesture instead to a table and chair. She brings me a cup then sits down near me and comments on my folded umbrella. "Pa tong ti" she calls it and says it is good. She calls to a few people sitting near us to look at the umbrella. A small child in a baseball cap is cheerfully bouncing on her mother's lap while another woman chats with her. The child sees me and stares. I wave and the mother says to the girl, "hello, I love you, hello," trying to get her to wave her little hand. The child laughs and hides her face in her cap. The young man sitting at the table with his knees pulled up by his chest and his longyi tucked modestly up tells me proudly, "she is my daughter." I tell him she is beautiful. He thanks me. The little girl peeks out of her hat.

Several men in white longyi and long-sleeved shirts wearing wide conical hats come down the market alley ringing a bell and pulling a gilded cart where a small golden Buddha is housed. The cart is blaring a chanting music and when they stop one man switches off the recording, leaving the market suddenly quiet. The men come and sit at nearby tables and two of them sit at mine, removing their hats and receiving glasses of water from the proprietor. One man asks where I am from. America. He nods. You come Burma? From Thailand. He nods again. The other man picks up my umbrella, opens it and shows it to the other men. Patong Ti? I ask. The man nods and the first one tells me, Burma makes these. They finish their water, collect their hats and wide metal bowls, switch the recording back on and proceed down the market alley.
When I get up to go and thank the proprietor, che zu dim ba ray, she smiles. As I step out of her shop though she stops me and making chiding noises she takes my umbrella from my hand, opens it and returns it to me. Better.

My Umbrella

2009-12-18T20:45:00.000+06:30

I purchased the umbrella on a particularly glaring day in Bangkok and not only have used the parasol almost daily since it has also become the popular item in my wardrobe. Thian, who was guiding tours through Wat Phra Kaew and the Grand Palace and who walked around and chatted with me awhile mentioned the umbrella right away. He asked if I'd been to Thailand before and I told him I hadn't. "Well, you've adapted" he said and pointed at my umbrella as he opened his own while we walked together toward Chakri Maha Prasat Hall. A few days later a woman from Phuket stopped me at Lumphini Park to admire the umbrella and to ask where I'd gotten it. We chatted a little about the heat and she told me to be careful not to burn. A group of women along the soi where I am staying here in Sukhothai began to chatter together as I passed and one woman smiled and pointed at the umbrella and said, "I like it." I thanked her. While the grammar school groups who visited the sites at Sukhothai with me chuckled at the Farang with the umbrella, the group of Japanese tourists in wide brimmed hats all thought me charmingly novel. One man came up to me and said, "Paper umbrella." I nodded. "From where?" I told him from Bangkok. He pointed to the painted images of the crane and the full red sun and smiled and gave me a thumbs up. Another man came over and asked if he could have his picture taken with me. We stood on the little island facing Wat Sa Si with Wat Mahathat framed nicely behind us. "USA and Japan!" he said and we smiled at the camera. They all thanked me and I peddled my bicycle on to Wat Si Chum to see the nearly fifty foot tall Buddha seated in his small space. Once I had parked my bicycle a crew of pink polo-shirted grade school students approached me to ask a set of interview questions in their workbook: what is your name and where are you from and what is your favorite place in Thailand? I answered them each and they only giggled when I tried to ask them the questions in return. They they asked to have their photo taken with me. I think it was only because of my paper umbrella.

Bus, Bike and Boat

2009-12-16T19:30:00.001+06:30

Sometimes my inability to effectively communicate becomes all too clear to me. I am baffled by tone. I feel incomprehensible in my most earnest attempts. Even with the kind tutoring of Zam, who helped coach me on the most necessary and quotidian requests I would need to make for things like refill minutes for my mobile and food without meat, each time I try these phrases the clerk invariably procures someone who speaks some English to assist me. This is helpful, but also frustrating. I'm certain I am slaughtering the lilting rise and fall of the words with my pleading pronunciation that wants only to be comprehended. If there is nobody on hand to speak English and my attempts at a good rising tone or falling tone fail to make sense we reach and impasse and toss up our hands or shake our heads. This communication block is usually most pronounced with transportation arrangements. The Tuk Tuk driver will shake his head at my question and I will keep trying down the line, hoping to find someone who will take pity on me.

On Tuesday, feeling a bit worn down from moving around so often and having already peddled around the sites of Ayutthaya and wandered through the evening street fair, I wanted to take a more leisurely day. I set out to find transportation to the Royal Folk Arts and Crafts Centre at Bang Sai, a distance of 35km. I figured I could wander about the site a short while and then return early to read and relax.

I began with the bus. The man who rented out his line of bicycles outside my guest house told me to go down to where the city buses stop and to ask for Bang Sai. Simple, he said. I did as he said and asked one bus driver, Bang Sai? He shook his head and pointed at the bus parked beside him to the right. I went to that driver, Bang Sai? I asked. The diver pulled a man off the sidewalk and asked him and together they ushered me over to another bus and asked me Bang Sai? Yes, Ka, Bang Sai. Ok, I was on the bus. The attendant was still unsure, Bang Sai? He asked. Ka, pi pit ta pan, the museum, at Bang Sai. I showed him the small photograph of the Folk Art Centre in the tourist brochure. We had taken off at this point and were driving through town. He took the brochure and walked down the line of other riders asking them if they knew this place. He got an affirmative at some point because he returned and smiled at me and declared, Bang Sai. I paid my fare and watched the buildings fall away to wide green rice fields full of cranes.

We drove and drove and suddenly I saw a bilingual road sign for Bang Sai to the left and Bang Soli straight ahead. We continued ahead. Had my Sai sounded like Soli? The attendant looked at me and assured me Bang Sai, at the end, and made a loop with his finger to demonstrate it was the last stop on the line, but we would get there. I sat back watching out the window as we passed a field of Pampas grass, the Toyota Service Center, a small house made of corrugated tin, an elaborate rooster strutting beside the road, a line of close pink and khaki colored houses with balconies, a noodle vendor pushing her cart. Then suddenly the driver stopped and shouted, Farang, Farang! Bang Sai! He pointed at another bus that had stopped in the street. There Bang Sai, he said. I followed his direction, offloaded and ran around to climb up into the second bus, which was bigger and more vacant than the first bus. I paid another fare and returned the way we had come past the noodle vendor, the balconies, the rooster, the service center and followed the signs to Bang Sai. I grew hopeful when I saw signs directing traffic to the Folk Arts and Crafts Centre in the direction we were headed.

At some point we stopped on the side of the road, surrounded by fields and a few houses and the attendant said Bang Sai and pointed to a non-descript road to our left. A woman on the bus explained something and the attendant told me, motorcycle and pointed to the two men lounging in a covered area. The bus pulled away and I approached the men. Bang Sai? They looked at me. Pi pit ta pan, museum, Bang Sai. One driver stood up and said to me, maybe a boat will come. He got onto his motorcyclele and waited for me. Maybe a boat will come. So I got on behind him and we took off down one road and another. There were a few houses, fields and a dog who watched us pass. We came around the corner and there was a Catholic school full of the voices of children and just beyond, an empty dock. The driver stopped his bike and pointed at the dock. I payed him 20 Baht and went down to the dock where two men were sitting. I asked the same question Bang Sai? Pi pit ta pan? They pointed across the water where the museum sat spread out on the opposite bank. We had to wait for the boat. I was so close, but by now, I just wanted to go back to my room and take a nap. The man with the boat was eating, they told me. We sat facing one another. One man offered me what looked like a pork rind. I decided not to use my stock of vegetarian words and instead accepted it and took a few small bites. I offered him some of my dried cranberries, which he refused at first, but decided to try after watching me eat them. We waited beside the still water, making as much conversation as we could until the owner of the small boat returned and the man who had given me the pork rind ferried me across the water.

It was now after three o'clock and I had not eaten. I wandered from the waterfront through the Centre's campus where large halls housed the students of different crafts: woodcarving, sculpture, weaving, furniture making and more until I found the canteen. It was there I met the amazing French rescue team, Alain and Dam, who had been visiting nearby sites at Bang Pa-In and had stopped by the Centre before they returned to Bangkok. They were gracious hosts and after they had shared with me their conversation they shared also their taxi back to the main road where I was able to catch a single bus directly back to Auytthaya and avoid the same Boat, Bike, and Double Bus return adventure. I'll have another day to spend reading and relaxing.

The Horse's house

2009-12-11T09:27:00.000+06:30

Beware of age sixty-one if you were born in the year of the Horse. Jim Thompson had been warned of this in a horoscope chart that was drawn up for him and which hangs still on the wall of his former residence, which is now the preeminent museum of his life.

Jim Thompson (born James Harrison Wilson Thompson) an American expat in Thailand, founded the Thai Silk Company in Bangkok in 1951. The art was a home-based, hand-made enterprise prior to Thompson's company. He built his home near the core of the silk community in Bangkok, introduced color fast dyes and new looms and turned silk into a booming trade. His Majesty the King awarded Thompson the honorable Order of the White Elephant in 1961 for his efforts.

In 1967 Thompson, aged 61, disappeared in the Cameron Highlands of Central Malaysia. He was never found and though theories abound about abduction, tiger attack or assassination by the CIA, whose predecessor, Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Thompson worked with during WWII, the case remains unsolved. We can only hope that his horoscope gave him warning and he was in some way prepared.

His personal legend, as well as the legacy of the Thai Silk Company, which still runs strong to this day, draw people to the Jim Thompson House, but so also does the house itself. Having worked as an architect in the States prior to the war, Thompson's draw toward traditional Thai house building inspired his amalgam structure, made by assembling together six different nineteenth century teak houses. He adapted the resulting single residence to a contemporary lifestyle by installing indoor facilities and a Western dinner table, which he created by joining together two Majong tables. He otherwise stayed very true to a classical Thai residence. The house was elevated above the ground for safety from floods. Roof tiles were fired in Authaya and the outer walls were covered in a type of red paint that serves as a preservative. The walls were tilted inward to create an illusion of height and the roof steeply pointed to encourage ventilation in the tropical climate. His most significant departure from customary building was to flip the walls around so that the wood carving that typically faced outward would face inward, causing in at least one case the shutters to be hinged from the outside, rather than the inside.

The house still holds much of the man's private collection of South East Asian art and antiques, including several seventh and eighth century Dvaravati Buddhas, teak statues and reliefs from Myanmar and a notable collection of Bencharong Porcelain, which display the indicative five-color design work. My favorite piece was the nineteenth century Chinese mouse house with the candy-colored mazy boxes arranged behind a glass screen with a Joseph Cornell type of whimsy.

Thompson's home is one of the essential stops on tourist itineraries, the business he began remains lucrative and the Thai-founded James H.W. Thompson Foundation works diligently toward Thai art and heritage preservation, initiating valuable research and cultural projects. There is even a contemporary art display space on site whose current exhibit, "Golden Tiger/Hidden Monkey," brings together the work of Kamol Phaosavasdi, Wisut Ponnimit, Bhubawit Kritpholnara (Roj Singhakul) and Pattree Bhakdibutr who each explore the theme of Asian astrology through film, textile, paintings and installations, including a line of essential oils mixed to fit the characteristics of each animal sign and filling the gallery with fragrance. Those born in the sign of the Horse are flexible and magnetic, the panels explained, and might be prone to wandering. That Thompson disappeared while doing so and exactly at the age he had been warned of makes me want to believe that he instead took off and settled in another country and began another life. Maybe he did this several times again and lived to a ripe old age. I'll add it to the ever growing list of speculations about the man.

To see more about Jim Thompson, his house and his company, visit the official Jim Thompson House Website .

Father's Day

2009-12-07T11:19:00.000+06:30

When flipping through the Bangkok Post entertainment supplement “GURU,” I came upon a two page spread “Father’s Day Survival Kit,” with lists of gift and outing ideas, events at local restaurants. I read the headline again. I looked again at the date of the paper. Yes, it was for the week of December 4th and yes, it did say Father’s Day. In the States I was accustomed to all the greeting card and gift store paraphernalia for “Dads and Grads.” This is how I remembered that Father’s Day was in June. Today is far from June. I asked Janet about it on our way toward Rattanakosin for the King’s Birthday celebration. Father’s Day is the King’s birthday, she told me. He is the father of the country, so it is a day to celebrate fatherhood.

King Rama IX’s birthday is no minor symbolic celebration; the city of Bangkok goes all out. All week we had seen pink shirts popping up all over town. Typically, I learned, Thai people wear yellow on the King’s day, because on the Thai colored weekly calendar, yellow is the color for Monday, which is the day the king was born. This year, because the king had been in the hospital since September, the people adopted pink, a color that several years ago was determined to be auspicious for the king’s health. The metro was a sea of pink polo shirts as was the sky train station which we were climbing up to after visiting Don at his bookstore on Sukhumvit when we heard the marching bands. Looking over the railing, we watched four different musical groups pass beneath us along with packs of students, outfitted in their king’s color of health. The marching musicians wore uniforms and young girls were dressed in the traditional pha nung and the tall spire like crown used in classical Thai dance. An ambulance was sandwiched between each musical group and after the ten minute procession, the traffic crawled along.

Our boat down the Chao Phraya was likewise filled with the pepto colored polo shirts and they also filled the market place where we docked. But, it was most striking to see the color spread like a blanket throughout the entire grounds of Sanam Luang. We stood in the crowd and waited for the ceremony while a voice droned over the loudspeaker. We watched a toddler enthusiastically swing a Thai flag around her head, much to the danger of her parents who took turns holding her and shielding their eyes from the small flag pole. When it was time, we lit candles by passing the flame between wicks and from the field of guttering lights the mass of voices rose together in the Royal Anthem.

People began trickling out of the wide area when the fireworks erupted behind us. It didn’t register until later, when we were pressed in the crush of bodies moving en masse down expansive Thanon Ratchadamnoen Klang, that those smart souls had likely escaped a bit less compacted by the crowd. We moved body-to-body down the thoroughfare that was illuminated by tiers of lights dripping form the trees. Stages had been erected and different musical groups performed with excessive amplification. A gallery of photographs and informational panels about the king’s life and accomplishments were displayed along the sidewalk. The press of revelers tightened and released with unexplainable regularity. Two parades with huge illuminated floats and beautiful girls dressed in traditional headdresses waving demurely at the crowd passed just before we reached the Democracy Monument where an orchestra was playing energetically. As we passed Wat Saket more fireworks exploded above the wide square, the sound ricocheted down the street we were taking away from town.

When we were finally reached the sky train and headed back to Janet’s neighborhood we were dead on our feet. We dropped into our seats and stared at the flashing series of advertisements that are played on television screens in every car. One advertisement seemed particularly involved and significantly less frenetic than the usual. The storyline was set between flashbacks of a boy and his father getting by after the death of his mother and the modern day boy, now a man, focused on his job and forgetting to call his father on father’s day. The grown up boy discovers a small pink book under a stack of papers on his desk. He smiles and flips through the pages of glossy images of His Majesty, the King. The denouement of the story shows the grown up son coming in to his father’s house that night. The two greet one another with Hallmark heart-warming affection. Everyone sitting near us on the sky train car was fixed on the screen. Don’t forget your father this father’s day and Happy Birthday to the King.

Arrival

2009-12-03T14:34:00.000+06:30

I have arrived in Bangkok. I don't have much creative brainpower right now as I am still getting my footing and recovering from jet lag.
But, when Janet took me across town on the subway, this is what met me when we emerged from the underground station. Wow.

Pass of the Oaks

2009-11-30T01:45:00.000+06:30

This is the little town where I grew up. Here is the city park that long before my time spanned the entire distance from the Railroad station to the expansive Paso Robles Inn where travelers at the beginning of the 20th century stopped for a soak in the healing hot springs. The composer and pianist Ignace Paderewski would come to relieve his arthritis here on his West Coast tour. The town still celebrates his assistance getting them on the map with an annual festival of his music played by the most precocious of local youth.

The grand hotel is no longer standing, burned to the ground as it was in 1940. They say the blaze began in a wastebasket. It took down the entire enterprise. The replacement hotel is much less impressive, even after the face lift it was given around a decade ago. Also less grand is the city park, which was at some point amended from the sprawling grounds spanning Rail Road to Hotel entrance to a two block squared town park with a play ground, gazebo and picnic tables. The park has been served well by the face-lifts it has received over the past few decades. While my beloved Carnegie Library building was outgrown and then deemed unsafe after the most recent earthquake, it still stands decoratively in the center of the park, newly retrofitted and converted to as historical museum. I checked out my first Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan books from here. I played on the now extinct swing sets in the adjacent playground as my Nana looked on and my mother drove my infant brother again down to Children's Hospital.

Downtown was then just beginning its struggle, which accelerated at the entry of WalMart across town in the mid 1990's. We talked often about how the place was doomed. It wasn't until wine took off that these park blocks began to regain some presence. They were there before but, the little town of cows and almonds has been sprouting more vineyards and wineries in the past decade. Tourist materials now list Tuscan stonework, handcrafted gourmet cheese, massage spas and clothing boutiques as common services. There are wine bars and interesting restaurants touting local gourmet produce and meats.

I am sitting now in a new cafe with decent coffee and a great red wooden Dutch door open to the morning sunshine. The woman in the leather arm chair beside me filling in a crossword puzzle wears strappy black heels and an attractive pea coat. There is a young family sharing pieces of an organic cranberry oat scone and smiling at the four year-old's story. Three Japanese men come in to order coffee and ask directions some place. I never imagined my little town would become a tourist spot. I never imagined the cowboy boots would be traded for designer flats and Italian loafers.

There are couples strolling down the red brick paths around the park. A man unfurls a brightly-colored "Museum Open" flag on the steps of the old Carnegie Library. It is good to know that the downtown has stayed alive despite the homogenized eye-sore developments on the edges of town where WalMart and Starbucks and Applebees have taken root. It is nice to be a tourist in my own hometown, a place both familiar and entirely remade.

Touristing

2009-11-19T04:43:00.000+06:30

Last Wednesday, when I ought to have been beginning my work week at the Asian Art Museum where I would likely take a moment to step outside in the morning and look through the center of Noguchi's Black Sun sculpture, over the reservoir and toward the Space Needle across town, I was instead at the top of the Space Needle looking down at the museum. I could see from the sound to the mountains and from the Ballard bridge to Pioneer Square. There are the radio towers on Madison Ave, there are the snowy tops of the Cascades, there is the city in spotted light as the sun ducks in and out of clouds. There are shiny walls of glass downtown, veins of traffic and clumps of trees, loosing their leaves.

This was the season that I first arrived in Seattle, seven years ago. We had several weeks of crisp, cool, but cloudless days and then the rain set in. Mark and I had come to town without money or a place to live, so we set immediately to work. With these early days locked into the mechanics of living in a new place, I gave up my chance to be a tourist here. Somehow over the years, I never took the opportunity to go back and try it out. Sometimes I told people it made my experience of the place a bit incomplete, yet I never had the time or expendable income to tourist it in my own town. Christopher convinced me I should try it before I skipped town for Thailand. This is what finally brought me to the Needle, that local monument with which I have had such a mixed relationship. I have stared at it through the front doors of the museum where I worked. I woke to an unobstructed view of it from my bedroom window for six months. While I admit I have suffered a sort of resentment for its ubiquitous presence in the logos and advertising paraphernalia all across the city, as though declaring it the indicator of a Seatlleite's identity, I still took visiting friends and family to Volunteer Park to climb the water tower for a better view or to Kerry Park for New Year's fireworks over it's spacey flat top.

It is cathartic to have gone up and seen how abstract the city seems from this artificial elevation. It is all clumps of treetops and stripes of streets through a matrix of earth-toned boxy buildings with dark windows. As I stood there and watched the families come and go, peering through the telescopes and playing with the high-tech multimedia touch-screen interpretive displays I felt like I was meeting that person I had been told about, had passed on the street a hundred times, seen from so many windows, on so many t-shirts and postcards, and had simply never met. Maybe I will think more fondly of the Space Needle when I am several thousand miles away. Maybe I will miss it. The Puget Sound stretched out golden in the sudden light that broke the clouds. It is a beautiful city.

Ruins

2009-10-09T00:17:00.000+06:30

The thriving Harrington-Beall Greenhouse Company filled this wide plot of land on Vashon Island from 1889 to 1989. When the company left, it left the greenhouses to be consumed by blackberry brambles and ivy vines. Slender trees have grown up through and shattered the glass ceilings. Pieces of broken panes crack and fracture beneath our feet as we move from one overgrown room to the next. A thin, gray deciduous tree has been crimped abnormally in it's growth between the building's frame. In this bright, but cool October air the tree has begun to drop leaves onto the crumbling brick, the moss, shattered bits of glass and blackberry vines below.

For weeks I have been looking at photographs of Angkor Wat and other jungled monuments in South East Asia so the abandoned-to-nature sense of this place feels somehow sacred, as does the significance of these voracious and gardener-feared vines laying claim to the formerlly hermetic environment of the greenhouse. They stretch like this for acres. There are some places where the structure of the place is almost utterly obscured. It feels like walking outdoors until we encounter a short brick wall and ceiling frames.

In Greece, the ruins I visited were clearly delineated and elucidated by interpretive signs. Even when little more than a corner stone remained, a plaque would declare the calculated dimensions and appearance of the building that would have occupied the space, calling on our imagination to fill in the details and to picture where Socrates stood to deliver his teachings. My patience for the exercise wore thin.

Here at the Harrington-Beall Greenhouses, one could argue, there is less history, less cultural value. But here, like at the fenced lot kitty-corner to Town Hall where an apartment building was demolished and the jagged foundation was left exposed or at the empty apartment building where the last resident set fire to his world and to the building that sits now ruined and vacant, I am left to imagine my own stories about the pieces that remain. I am not asked to try to picture monuments. Instead, every small item I spot provokes curiosity about the ordinary lives. The banality of these places posses some profound mystery. The singed wall of the dead man's apartment. The dangling fragments of glass, still clinging to the greenhouse framework, which has been muscled by wrist-thick brambles.

The dangling plates of glass suddenly conjure disconcerting images of a guillotine. I crouch in protective shelter of a remaining door frame and watch sunlight drop through the building's skeleton. I like the silence, the ruin of the place. I turn and trace my way back, relishing the crunching sound of my tred over the fallen glass panes like breaking the shell of the first frost on bare soil.

What in Sam Hill. . .

2009-09-25T23:45:00.000+06:30

It is a wealthy man's privilege to be visionary, even if the vision be eccentric or unmanageable. Sam Hill imagined an agricultural and artistic mecca out above the stunningly picturesque Columbia River. Though his vision never exactly succeed, it is him we can thank for the scenic highway through the Columbia River Gorge. And it was to his home, now the Maryhill Museum of Art, that we set out toward one warm day in September.

The museum is perched on the hillside overlooking the river, twenty-five miles east of the Dalles. Hill began construction on the mansion in 1914 on a portion of his 5,000 acre land along the river. The harsh and remote location got the better of his dreams and when he stopped construction on the house in 1917, it might have continued to sit unfinished and empty except for the encouragement of friend and modern dancer Loie Fuller, who convinced Hill to convert the mansion into a museum. This same museum, dedicated in 1926 by Queen Marie of Romania, did not open to the public until 1937, six years after Hill's death. The place now sports beautiful shady grounds, studded by sculptures and strolled by peacocks, a large collection of Rodin pieces, some beautifully intricate chess sets as well as a small gallery devoted to Louie Fuller, a larger one to Queen Marie of Romania and one dedicated to an overview of the Native People's of North America.

A more exceptional indicator of Hill's eccentricities is the Stonehenge memorial he dedicated in 1918, which is considered the nation's first WWI memorial. Erected on a landscape nearly opposite that of it's Scottish model, this Stonehenge rises from the Eastern Washington grassland and looks down to the river.

We wandered around the concrete pillars, snapping pictures along with the other tourists who had pulled into the dusty parking lot beside us. Just downhill and slightly west of the henge we spotted Sam Hill's tomb; a pale block we mistook for an electrical box. I was struck by how unusually modest this grave marker was compared to the concrete mansions, monuments and motorways he had constructed in his life. Looking south from Stonehenge where the river cuts through the rocky gold landscape it seems strange that Hill considered this arid land ripe for an agricultural utopia. His faith in human ingenuity and perseverance to transform nature pressed him to continue his projects. In the end, though, they can only speak to the ability man has to leave an indelible mark on a land.

plenty

2009-08-31T02:48:00.000+06:30

I have returned several times to West Seattle's Camp Long since I learned of it's existence at the Mandy Greer- Zoe Scofield show a month previous. (see Water Calling, pt. 1 from July 2009). I have come here to pick blackberries for a pie, to walk the network of trails and to attend another performance.

The Eleventh Annual Arts in Nature Festival was a two day event at Camp Long, hosted by the Nature Consortium and featuring live music, dance, installations and hands-on activities. There was a broad variety of events, from Marimba ensembles to modern dance troupes, aerial acrobatics, Brazilian Jazz and everything in between.

I had been tipped off to the Museum of Sound cabins and headed directly to them. Each of the eight cabins was an open stage for the artist who took up residence there for the weekend. The installations they created in theses spaces ranged from elaborately reconstructed visual and auditory interiors, replete with audience-participation activities to the virtually unaltered interior spaces with only the barest presentation of the artist's statement. I preferred the style of the former.

In Kristin Tollefson's "Land of Plenty," installed in Cabin 9, I discovered a trove of treasures, a nook that Annie Dillard would delight in. I certainly did. Her exhibit, Tollefson says was inspired by "becom[ing] acutely aware of the things I chose to keep or collect and my motivations for doing so. . ." The small cabin was filled with collected things: whole egg shells, beads, buttons, feathers, burls, seeds and leaves all amassed in multi-sized Mason jars and adorned with light or nests of paper and gauzy cloth. It was a bit like a laboratory, like a forgotten tool shed at an old farm or a bit like the nestled corner in a dream where your feelings are manifest in small, perfect objects. I studied the contents of each of her jars over and over.

I, too, recently became aware of the precious things I chose to collect while I was boxing up the few belongings I would keep in storage and disposing of the rest. During a night of packing, I sat and stared at a small jar I had over the years filled with found things--a dried cricket, a cat's jaw bone, feathers, seeds, a wishbone, bits of sea-softened glass and smoothed stones. These small things speak almost as clearly of my past as do the photo albums and boxes of letters I was sorting and storing in cardboard boxes.

I stared into Tollefson's dream-lit jars at these valuable, simple things and wondered about her history with them and the stories she could tell about each one. In her program blurb she writes about how she is drawn to simplifying her existence, "but utility, sentimentality, beauty and guilt associated with what I have saved get in the way." I had shared this conflict until recently. Simplicity is less of an option for me now, but I am learning to turn circumstances into opportunity. It was comforting to live vicariously through Tollefson's sentimental objects, nestled as they were in jars lined up on the rough wooden shelves and floorboards of the small Camp Long cabin.

Water Calling pt. 2

2009-08-01T05:13:00.000+06:30

Where Mandy Greer and Zoe Scofield's piece at Camp Long was evocative and impressionistic, the "Waterlines" presentation at Volunteer Park was directly focused on educating audiences. Stokley Towles is a storyteller and his story is sewers and pipes and reservoirs and bottles. The story is really about water; drinking it, cleaning it, cleaning in it and conserving it.

Tracing the history of water use, he includes a glimpse at our transition from water fear (based on the polluted condition in eighteenth century urban centers) to our "conquest of nature" and production of therapeutic bottled water. He lines up rows of bottled water and read their elaborate selling points: Doctor recommended, intelligence boosting and purifying. A small bottle from Japan that touts itself as containing extra Hydrogen is displayed with a locally produced bottle that advertises extra Oxygen. Towles suggests the two waters be melded to make water with extra. . .water! Displaying a bottle of Dasani water he explains that Coca-Cola produces this water at local bottling plants. The water begins in the city pipes--the same water in our tap at home--Coca-Cola filters and purifies the water, adds minerals, slaps a label on it and sells it with elaborate health qualities. He drops two pennies into a jar. The amount of city water purchased with two pennies instead purchased in these bottles would equal how much? He pours a pitcher of pennies into a jar equal the size of the one with the two pennies and it fills right to the top.

Towles is heavy on exuberant demonstration and reminds me of the mad-scientist educational television shows my younger brother loved to watch. The trailer unit where we are seated is full of charts, maps and photos that outline Seattle's water cycle, use and quality. One map shows the location of rat-in-the-toilet complaint calls around the city. One map shows where the drinking water of each region in the city originates. One bulletin board is for visitor's water stories. One map shows the seasonal taste and quality differences recorded by Seattle utilities employees.

I have only one question, why are we inside a trailer at Volunteer Park? Why does this presentation need to be in a park; this particular park, or in a park at all. I know the group of installations, performances and presentations is a joint Parks Service-Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs project and thus necessarily located in one of Seattle's Parks. But, while Mandy Greer's performance felt integrally linked to the location, Stokley Towles' performance feels connected more to the concept and able to be located anywhere since it did not feel like a very site-centered site-specific performance. I longed for some reference to why we were located here specifically. Maybe I was only disappointed that the show was not outdoors and the weather was so beautiful that day.

Water Calling pt. 1

2009-07-21T02:45:00.000+06:30

This summer, Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs has focused on water with a series of site-specific installations and performance pieces at three city park locations. At each site, local artists have responded to water cycle, use and conservation.

Camp Long is one of the city parks I didn't know existed. Like many of my fellow Seattleites, I have my favorite parks, many of which are in my own neighborhood. Frequenting the same spots as I do, I neglect to get acquainted with new parks. Thus, Mandy Greer's performance, "Mater Matrix Mother and Medium" was a chance to not only view a creative installation and a performance, but to explore new spots in the city.

Camp Long was built in 1937 at a WPA project and sported a lodge, cabins, picnic areas and Schurman Rock, the first man-made climbing rock in the nation. The lodge, cabins and group picnic and campfire sites are still rentable and might, on quiet West Seattle evenings, provide some illusion of having escaped the city.

We came upon an expansive audience sitting on mismatched blankets, grouped around the polliwog pond behind the lodge. Joining the others, we sat facing the collage crocheted "fibre river" that wound through the tree trunks and limbs. The 200 foot long crochet river that wound through a portion of the park from the polliwog pond, through branches, around bushes and encompassing thick tree trunks was made in part during a series of 30 community crochet sessions held all over Seattle. The effect is fascinating, with webs and vines and knots in every shade of blue yarn, wending through the trees. When she began to move I realized that the clump of yarn by the base of the tree closest to the pond was not a tangle in the river but the dancer Zoe Scofield who emerged costumed in a portion of the fibre river, which kept her tethered to the tree. She moved in meditative staccato, touched the water and the tree and rolled herself across the soil and pulled anchor rocks from the pond, all accompanied by a cleverly scored partly live, partly projected soundtrack performed by Morgan Henderson.

When Scofield curled back against the tree where she had begun, we all moved in to inspect the installation, tracing it up the tree trunks and down to the mossy rocks in the water until we thought we had reached the end of the thread. I don't know what I learned about water except the visceral role of its presence in a performance and the satisfaction of tracing a fabricated river over water and tree limbs in a park on a warm sunny afternoon.

Covet not the trees of the field

2009-06-19T03:31:00.000+06:30

I was raised on a collection of Biblical rules, some of which made too much sense (don't kill) and weren't discussed in much depth . Other rules seemed unnecessary and almost impossible to enforce (don't wear cotton/polyester blends) and so were dropped. Then there were the rules that cropped up in the grey areas. Don't lie, one of the most excessively reinforced rules, seemed to be overlooked when my parents took me to the fair and called me two years younger than I was so that I could skip the admission fee. These white lies were different than bearing false witness, which, I was told, was the real problem. Don't lie in court or to your dad when he demands "who left the hose running and flooded the planter?" The other stuff is harmless.

Don't covet in another tricky rule to enforce in our contemporary society. Maybe the general dissatisfaction that keeps us tuned to advertising and distressed at our own financial and/or social condition in the world is what the white lie is to perjury. Is it only the direct envy of a friend's good fortune, new house or great job that we are to concern ourselves with. Where then does the longing for place fit in?

When I come here to California to visit family I am faced with a combination of nostalgia and envy. When I visit in the winter it is the weather I am jealous of. In the spring, or early summer it is the landscape I long for. It took moving away from them for me to appreciate the fleshy, golden hills, spotted with dark broccoli crown Valley Oaks.

My covetousness of this landscape has so much to do with the Oak trees. The writhing shapes and scaled bark are so far removed from the uniformly rigid Douglas Fir groves ubiquitous to my home in the Northwest. These Oaks are always dancing. The Blue Oaks that filled the ravines around the home where I grew up were the heartiest things, able to cope with California's frequent and grueling droughts. An old growth Blue Oak may only measure half a meter circumference for its four hundred year life. The iconic Valley Oaks, with the wide, bushy arms, were notorious for dropping limbs. One day a branch with the girth of a Blue Oak trunk might fall in a barley field where the wide lobed leaves would turn unseasonably brown. Despite their sacrificial limbs, these Valley Oaks were superior tree house locations and the most appropriate photo subjects, spread-armed in the open golden fields. I have never spent time framing pines in a camera lens like I still do the Oaks every time I visit. I sit on these hot evenings, watching the sun set behind the rolling golden hills, like sunny thighs and shoulders, coveting the shapes, the warmth, the difference of it all.

monumenting

2009-05-18T03:11:00.000+06:30

It is sad that I have become so overwhelmed by the plethora of archaeological sites, fortresses, ruins and points of historic interest. Perhaps it is doubly unfortunate then that I saved Athens for the end of the trip. The Acropolis is astounding in all the ways that one might expect; the size and grandeur of those columns, the age of it and it's lofty view of the entire sprawling, polluted city are all impressive. The place was, again as one would expect, swarmed with visitors snapping thousands of photos in order to capture every angle of those steep marble pillars and platforms. People pass through the sites with their lenses out and pause occasionally to frame a shot and then wait for people to pass so the shot can be captured, un-marred by the presence of other visitors.They wait like this for indefinite periods of time.

I circle the ruins and then find a bench to sit and watch people file past, taking in the sites through their viewfinders. I wander across the hill and down to the Ancient Agora where I walk through the knee-high walls where ancient places once were and where now I find groves of Aleppo Pines and Kermes Oaks. I watch metro trains pass and I study the graffiti across the tracks. At Hadrian's Library I watch three turtles cruise the stone remnants and graze through the green grass that has filled in the floors once tiled with tiled mosaics. And this wall, now the back to these hopping trinket and postcard shops, was once part of the main room of the library, where the forty niches were filled with wooden shelves and cupboards that housed almost 17,000 books. I look up at the open sky and try to imaging these walls, the high ceilings and the rows of book spines. The heat and my swollen feet and ten days of imagining walls where there are no longer walls have taken their toll and I feel a bit defeated by being unable to picture these. But, my mood improves later as I share a meal with four fellow travelers I have met along the way. Two are returning home and two are setting out for the islands. Athens is a place of arrival and departure. Soon, I too will be leaving.

Imbibe

2009-05-14T01:57:00.000+06:30

I have had a very difficult time finding a single shot of espresso for less than €3 in Nafplio. I come across a place that calls itself a cafe and brewery where a grating easy jazz/techno blend plays on a stereo inside and a single man sits at one of the table arrangements out front. He is concentrated on his telephone screen and does not glance up when I open the menu to check. The man has a plain mug on the table in front of him and there is a full vine of sherbet colored bougainvillea climbing the side of the building. Perhaps it is this or because there is nobody out front telling me to come, sit down, come look at the menu, promising special prices just for me, or maybe because their espresso is only €2, but I decide to sit down beside the bougainvillea. I glance inside for the waiter. Nobody emerges. I sit for a few more minutes, pull my book out of my bag and begin to read. It is only then that the man with the phone pushes back from his table, stands, approaches my table and greets me without fanfare. I order my coffee and when he returns with it I ask, aren't there any Greek beers? The menu at this "cafe and brewery" is full of overpriced imports: Guinness, Heineken and Sapporo for €6. He says there are two Greek beers, Mythos and Alpha. There is also one brewer here locally, but you can't buy that anyplace, just Mythos and Alpha. Both are light lagers, I point out, are there no dark beers? No, he answers flatly and returns to his table and his cell phone. So, I drink my coffee and watch people pass with their billed and brimmed hats and their burnt shoulders. I hear a woman signing as she hangs out sun dresses and rearranges a postcard rack a few doors down. I cannot recognize the words or the tune, but the air is warm and her voice soothing.

Not the stones

2009-05-11T20:13:00.000+06:30

Yasud did not want me to sit on the stones. It is his job, he explained in Greek and gestures. He wants me to sit in one of the designated areas off to the side. He leads me to where he is sitting and motions for me to sit beside him. It is hot, he mimes and I agree. I say, it is beautiful and make a gesture that sweeps over the Temple of Athena in front of us, the Parnasus mountains to our right and the valley full of olive trees and wildflowers to our left. Yes, beautiful, he agrees. He begins to pick the flowers and name them and hand them to me. We both sit. He explains with gestures that he twisted his ankle today. He turns his wrist quickly to one side, pointing at his foot, pretends to spit on his hand and makes a sliding gesture of one palm on the other. I agree, the marble steps up at the Temple of Apollo are dangerously slick.
He wants to know, school? finish? Yes, I tell him, finished. He asks, doctor? I laugh. No, masters degree. Maestro? He mimes a writing gesture then a typing gesture. Yes, I make a handwriting gesture in the air also, writing, yes. He nods. We both sit and stare at the tall pillars of the temple, at the strawberry colored poppies and the spray of wild mustard. And Maitre? Paitre? Good? Yes, my parents are fine. California, I tell him. He knows it and approves. Brother? Sister? One brother, one sister, I tell him. He repeats this and nods. I ask him the same. Eight, he tells me, eight brothers. But, mother dead, father dead and four brothers dead. I have four brothers, he says. He also has two children, both in school. This is why it is all right that there are so many tourists, he thinks. Even though everything is horribly expensive. Coffee, drink, food all take the shirt right off his back, he mimes. I agree.

One thing and another

2009-05-09T23:07:00.000+06:30

Here in Iraklion, Crete everything has been so many things. Most were churches. The Municipal Art Gallery was Agios Markos. The Museum of Religious Art was Agios Ekaterini. The Church Agios Titos was constructed after Crete's liberation in 961 C.E. then converted to a Catholic Church, then to a Muslim Mosque, rebuilt twice after fire and earthquake and still looks beautiful in early morning light before the city wakes.

In Rethymnon things are as they were. The Venetian Fortezza was built in the late 16th century as protection against the Turkish threat. It crowns the hill above the town and draws tourists. Who have become the livelyhod of a number of the city's residents like the charming waiter at Vassalos Taverna. Unlike most of the cafes in town it is not just the menu that speaks in five languages. He is serving a large group of French tourists, a German family, an Italian couple and me. His cafe is nestled in a narrow street perpendicular to the folk museum. The streets are made of peeling stone walls and flagstone paths, dressed up like a sitting room. Cafes are, as a habit, more outside than in. The internal portion usually being no more than a small stall and kitchen with all the tables spread out into the square or street beneath umbrellas. He has arranged a shelf of wine bottles and decorative candles and even has a number of paintings hung on the external wall beside a drainpipe and a tree. He moves easily from one table to the next, laughing and talking easily between languages.

I am on the other side of the spectrum and my Greek has not progressed past the basic greetings, partings and appreciations. While riding the metro toward the bus station where I would catch my bus to Delphi I heard a short announcement in Greek play over the speakers but, of course, had no idea of its meaning. All of a sudden, at the next stop, everyone stood and got off the train. A man gestured to me to disembark as well, so I filed out with everyone else with no idea where I was going. I asked, Monestraki? and a man pointed to a bus that was fast filing up. We were being re-routed. The man launched into a detailed explanation in Greek and I waited for him to finish before I pointed out that I had no idea what he has said. He shruged and walked away and I boarded the bus.

Morning in Minoan town

2009-05-07T00:35:00.000+06:30

We docked at 5:30 a.m. That eight hour boat ride was the best sleep I'd had in days, even if I had been stretched between two airplane chairs with only an inflatable neck pillow. It was the hard and disjointing sleep of having been traveling for forty-eight hours. Now it is nearly nine a.m. I have already gotten lost in the labyrinthine and indecipherable streets of Iraklio and had already watched the sun rise, nectarine-colored over the bay, the boats, the cranes and the stone mass of St. George's gate. It is still too early to check into a hostel, but all I can think of is a hot shower and a change of clothes.

My first day in Crete will be a bit more stationary than I may have planned because of how I brutalized my feet roaming all over the North end of Athens yesterday while trying to find the Archaeological Museum and instead finding neighborhoods where abandoned buildings crumpled beside designer shoe stores and students rallied with bright banners and megaphones at the Athens School of Economics and old men on benches leaned toward one another on benches peering closely at chess boards and playing traditional music on tinny radios in Areos Park.

It is astounding how much history a place can have. In this town you can glance down the length of Oktovriou-Patison to the Parthenon above and in the Archaeological museum you are met with centuries of every bit and piece of our daily lives: dishes, utensils, tools and jewelry plus all the instruments of war and worship. Rooms of bronze statues and marble gods, some of enormous proportion, stretch on, but it is the Minoan and Mycenae figures that I admire most. The smooth Parian marble face is featureless and her arms are folded over her belly or raised up like wings.

Arrival

2009-05-06T00:04:00.000+06:30

In the New Jersey airport it is seven in the morning, but I'm trying to adjust to two in the afternoon, which is the present time in Athens. I am sitting between Steak Escape and Juan Valdez Cafe where they are announcing to each customer that they have no more coffee brewed. For some reason, everyone is opting to get cups of decaf drip coffee rather than order espresso. The coffee attendant fills two of these orders before I remind him that I had ordered an Americano a while ago. He approaches the neglected espresso machine, pulls out a laminated sheet of drink recipes and studies it closely. I wonder what it tells him: two shots of espresso, diluted with hot water so that the cup warms my palms as I hold it between my hands, watching people pass with rolling suitcases, glancing rapidly at wristwatches or strolling with an unfocused gaze. A child begins to cry to no reason, two women sit at a table tearing paper into small pieces and a man wheels his suitcase past, bumping into the leg of every chair so that they are each turned at haphazard angles. He continues on and takes no notice. I recognize everyone, but know that I know none of them. I am in a space between two worlds: the one I left behind in the slow fall of rain and the one I will arrive in tomorrow morning, Athens' time.

-----------

There are ceaseless cigarette billboards on the road that the bus takes between the airport and the port at Pireus. All the Maxim Slims and Pal Mals promising good times. In the space between there are sudden fields of red poppies and yellow daisies and buildings in every state of construction or demolition. Everything is coming up or coming down and between the gaping window frames and bare foundations every empty lot looks like ancient ruins.

I learn that a sidewalk is strictly for parking and pedestrians feel free to walk in the middle of the street alongside the bus. I learn also that the surface of every building is for graffiti. More colorful than the wildflowers, the city is full of elaborate bombs and crazy tags, many scrawled in English on every type of wall, whether made of plaster, marble or ancient hand-hewn stone. "Hooli Guns Crew," "Vain," and "Amigos" pop up often on the road I'm on.
I'll be investigating Athens' graffiti until I ship out tonight for Crete at 22:00.

Till Human Voices Wake Us

2009-04-15T00:33:00.000+06:30

The Olympic Peninsula is notorious for its rain. The National Park estimates that west slopes receive around 12 feet of rainfall each year. Even when the forecast is clear you stand a good chance of experiencing some precipitation. So, when the forecast declares a 100% chance of rain, you better believe it. We went anyway. If Seattleites waited for clear days to go for a hike, we would rarely get out of the city. Besides, there is something breathtaking about the damp air draped over the branches of the cedars that creep right to the edge of the sand.

The stretch of shore we were hiking between Rialto Beach and the Chilean Memorial follows a string of steep seastacks and passes through the famous natural arch called Hole in the Wall. This is one of the points along the way that a hiker must time passage with the tides. We had two of these points on our route. Hole in the Wall could be crossed overland if necessary, but the second point was a sheer cliff descending to a rocky shelf that was submerged and utterly impassible if the tide was in. Once on the other side, there is no turning back until the tide is out again.

This is a practice in letting go. Being so accustomed to timing appointments to the minute, running for buses and watching the clock while stopping a moment for lunch, it is jarring to be caught out of time like this. We were suspended here on the beach among the enormous driftwood tree trunks that had installed themselves, smooth and water-logged in the sand. The rain began once the tent was up and we settled in to our spot beneath the trees to wait until a time when the tide would pull away and let us back into the world we had left behind.

"We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown."

-T.S. Eliot

Houston problems

2009-02-26T22:03:00.000+06:30

I have seen Houston only in the dark, from a seat on the ten p.m. shuttle ride to the Baymont Hotel where the airline put me up for the night and the six a.m. return ride to the airport. I know only about these freeways and billboards and lines of stucco motels with inedible food. I suspected it would be difficult for a vegetarian, but the airline had included food vouchers in my compensation packet so I carried them to the only open restaurant, which was off the lobby of the neighboring Days Inn. Their menu consisted of chicken wing and potato appetizers, chicken and ground beef salads and the section called "Steak and Other Things." The other things were chicken pasta, roasted chicken and then, at the very bottom, the vegetarian pasta, which I ordered to go.
While waiting, I listened to a man hold court about his Christmas traditions. He wore a black ball cap emblazoned with a pharmaceutical company logo and he spoke loudly about where his father took them to get their tree and which house the family gathered at for dinner. His table companions were another man and two women, all dressed in equally drab business casual that marked them as members of some work conference or business trip. The ball-cap man talked continuously even when one of his companions tried to make supporting comments on his story. The din of his incessant ramble rose over any attempted interjection and the usurper would invariably fall out of the joust while he continued the monologue. I handed over my food vouchers and carried the container away, realizing only back in my room how impossible it would be to eat the contents that so closely resembled the Styrofoam packaging. After touring Chicago with my gourmand friend, sampling Chianti-brazed fig pizza, pumpkin ravioli, and wide rice noodles fried with chilies and lime, I had to abandon the over-cooked spiral pasta with its deep dusting of canned Parmesan cheese powder, which hid the frozen green beans and corn.
For awhile I starred at the ceiling, listening to the man in the neighboring room cheer loudly at the television. Was it the basketball game, the rodeo or the Fox news station that had him riled up? I couldn't imagine it was the HBO movie, Nova or the telenovella that had done it. Those were our only options, I had obligingly checked all the television stations when I arrived. I imagined the man's whooping directed at the scientist on Nova in his goggles, explaining the development of lathe technology. Then I heard a woman's voice join in a call and response with the man and I decided to stuff bits of Kleenex in my ears and try not to pay attention. I continued my watch on the ceiling and though about where I would travel using the flight voucher that the airline had given me. I might go to New York or to New Mexico, maybe even Mexico or the South of France. At some point I fell asleep, dreaming of airports and planes, either a reflection of my day or foreshadowing the one to come.
The Houston airport blended into the Phoenix airport and I started to recognize people, or imagined I did. My back was stiff and my head foggy. I didn't know the time or the time zone. The woman seated beside me on the flight from Phoenix to Seattle tore the crossword puzzle out of the airline magazine, mumbled a prayer to herself and gripped her seat belt buckle as we lifted off. She took a long look out the window as we rose, then fell resolutely to sleep with her arms crossed and her mouth open. Framed by the window, the lines along her face continued the patterns traceable on the ground below. The captain crackled on the overhead speakers, "turn your attention to the left windows as we cross over the Grand Canyon," he advised. I leaned over the woman's little body, swaddled in her pink cotton coat and peered down at the deep gouge in the earth. How many times have I passed over this canyon, but I have never been to the edge to look over? Maybe I will return to Arizona, I though to myself. The sky was blue and the sun through the window warm. In another hour we would begin our descent into the soggy Northwest.

Doctor Chan

2009-02-25T22:06:00.000+06:30

In Chicago, I can go anywhere and find a platform to stand above the streets and watch people pass. I can also board the trains that visit these platforms and get an ideal spectator tour of the backs of the buildings of the city. In addition, it is much warmer to huddle into a plastic chair on the train than brave the icy Illinois air.
The train car speakers project a litany of announcements about which side of the car the doors will open upon reaching the next stop, the name of the stop we are approaching, who the reserved seats are reserved for, how standing passengers ought not lean against the doors, and how our observant eyes could save lives: "announce suspicious or unattended packages immediately," the voice drones happily. We pass the windows of old brick shotgun buildings with wooden scaffold style stairs and landings. I am close enough to reach out and touch the weathered rails or run my hand along the ice-blown bricks.
The man in the seat behind me isn't really asking a question, he just wants somebody to listen. He wants to get off at Belmont and catch the Bus 9 that will take him up Ashland Ave. He'll catch it by the "whole wheat food place" so he won't have to transfer at Fullerton. So, what's the question, the girl he is sitting beside is too nice to ask. What is she supposed to tell him? Is she, like the rest of us, only a witness to his plan? He knows where he's trying to go and how to get there. He is seeking only confirmation. She offers him that. I couldn't offer it, I have no idea where I am and have only a vague notion of where I'm headed.
"I just want to know the buses better," he says. "That will be both of our assignments tonight." He says and then apologizes for putting his arm on the back of the seat to stretch his shoulder, inadvertently putting his arm around her. "Sexual harassment," he says, "I don't want to get busted. Where are you going?" She tells him she's headed to school. DePaul. "You must be a braniac, then. Not that I didn't think you were, but to get into DePaul you've got to be good. What are you studying?" Medicine, she tells him. "You going to be a Doctor?"
"I want to be." She's giggly now, embarrassed.
"I'll be your patient." He says. "Dr. what?"
"Dr. Chan," she tells him.
He repeats the name then says, "If you have a son will you name him Charlie?" She is confused. "Charlie, Charlie Chan," he prompts. "is that inappropriate?" She still doesn't follow the reference. He is in his mid sixties and she not more than twenty. "Charlie Chan," he says again, but louder. "This is my stop. Charlie Chan, an old movie, look it up." With that, he is out the train doors, which opened on the right, and moving fast down the platform toward the number 9 bus somewhere bellow.
Shortly after, we descend into the tunnels beneath Chicago and since I can no longer see the mottled brick walls and snowy roofs I disembark, climb up the stairs to street level and look for a cafe to keep me out of the cold.

New View

2009-01-03T03:29:00.000+06:30

Here is a peek from the window at my new place. Yes, there is the Space Needle, which we watched explode in a hundred colored sprays on New Year's Eve. But, more importantly is the glimpse of the Olympic Mountains. I look forward to the longer and, hopefully, clearer days of summer.

Solstice

2008-12-22T13:57:00.000+06:30

Seattle is not used to snow and our reaction is a combination of glee and terror. Passing a lanky man on Summit Avenue by the Quick Mart and the Starbucks I overhear his half of a phone conversation: "yeah, it's like snow days when I was a kid in the Midwest in the 70's!" He is describing the Denny Street sled party that has been going strong since yesterday evening.

A hundred hipsters are clustered in the intersection of Denny and Bellevue Avenue where police have posted a road closed sign at the point that Denny plummets down and crosses over the freeway. Two or three people slide down the slope at a time on a collection of sundry household objects: Rubbermaid tubs, trash cans, flattened cardboard boxes, inflatable mattresses and water rafts. One man waits his turn holding a large metallic turkey platter with handles. Everyone is bundled up in thick coats and scarfs. The snow is still falling. Two large recycling cans are filled and overflowing with beer bottles and soda cans, empty cases of Fat Tire Ale have been disassembled, transformed into sleds and discarded in piles at the base of the traffic signals, which continue mechanically switching from red to green. People laugh and fall and snap pictures of one another. "It was like this until three in the morning," one man in a snow crusted hoody and moustache tells the couple standing beside him. They will be here just as late today because the sky continues to drop fresh layers of snow on the street and the crumpled cardboard boxes and the beer won't be running out.

Other parts of the neighborhood are eerily still, as though all signs of life were lifted when the snow began to fall. The streets are quiet and white. Down a steep incline I find two cars in silent impact, left behind in the street in a perfect equilateral with the sidewalk. In this town, everything is left behind. A bus drops a cable and is left still and empty in the middle of the street. Cars spin their wheels and slide on the ice and are left half-parked and capped with an inch of powder on empty side streets. Even stores and cafes are left dark with hand-written signs taped to the doors: "closed due to weather." In this ghost town people take to their skis and snow shoes, they stop going to work, stop their Christmas shopping and instead traipse through the city looking at their favorite parks and buildings, now draped in snow. Or they carry their buckets and boxes to a good sledding spot and warm themselves with play. We are like winter vacationers on a long holiday.

hobo tourist

2008-11-13T05:19:00.000+06:30

I have come to Canada alone and walking around the streets of Victoria I feel more like a hobo than a tourist. I buy a cup of coffee and sit in the cafe for hours. I wander into the Cathedral to look at the stained glass and use their toilets. Then, like the homeless of any city, I go to the library. I expected a grand columned Carnegie library, but that one sits vacant across town and I find instead a bland fortress called the Waddington Building Complex that houses a number of other city offices and is impossible to enter. I circle the entire thing, finding only doors lettered with "Emergency Exit Only." I finally discover a break in the wall on the North side that opens up into a courtyard where a young man sits, playing his guitar and singing in a forced vibrato that echoes up the textured brick and window glass. Only the first two floors of the complex are devoted to the library collections. I was unable to find Borges, Annie Dillard or Saramago and when I sat to read a magazine, the volume of the interior construction behind the circulation desk was overwhelming. An old man with a thick backpack and a beard dozes in a nearby chair. A woman with two plastic garbage bags tucked against her seat stares at the same spot in the book she holds open before her and never turns a page. A young man in a frayed sweater sits down next to me and peers over to the page I am reading and then follows me out to the courtyard where I sit to eat the sandwich I made that morning at the hostel.

I walk to the waterfront and follow along the perimeter of the bay to watch the biplanes lift from the water and the people stroll in the surprising sunny afternoon. Standing on the stony shore I take stock of the detritus: an orange peel, a crushed Starbucks cup and a swollen tennis shoe that is missing its laces. It is the same collection you might find on any beach in Washington or Oregon, like the crowd at the library was the one I would expect in my local library and the crowd at the cafe much like the cafe crowd in my neighborhood.

It is British Columbia's liquor laws that I am unable to anticipate. Feeling the lull of winter's early sunset and the desire to kick back and spend the evening reading and drinking a beer, but also feeling the pressure of my skinny wallet I thought it best to pick up the evening's ale in the grocery store rather than go out to a pub. After collecting a bag of bagels, some goat cheese and a couple of apples I noted that I hadn't passed the aisles of beer and wine. Then I remembered, all the alcohol in Victoria is locked up in the government liquor stores and it is now past six. No luck.

So, I walk the two blocks from my quiet residential hostel to the Ocean Island hostel where Mark and I stayed five years ago. I know they have a little bar there because it kept us awake most of the night last time. An American boy is asking an Argentinian about Buenos Aires. A British woman and a German pair are making plans to see the Salmon runs tomorrow. The Australian bartender is telling stories to two women she may have known forever and may have just met. A sign above the bar says that if you look under 25 you'll be expected to show two forms of identification. She doesn't ask to see any identification when I order a pint of the stout, but she does ask what food I want. I don't. The thing is, she explains, in accordance with BC's liquor laws no alcohol can be ordered without food. And so, for 6 Canadian dollars I can have my beer with a little Cesar salad, a samosa, a plate of pasta salad, perogies or dolmades. With my lager its not a bad dinner for a hobo tourist. I read a newspaper article about a Vancouver study that shows uglism is more common than racism and I listen to all the travelers make their plans for Peru and Mallorca.

I will go back out into the cold air and through the empty streets to my hostel. Soon it will be Remembrance Day and I will watch bagpipers in kilts march down Douglas street and I will listen to the couple in the cafe beside me talk about Barack Obama. I will cross the Blue Bridge from Johnson street and catch sight of an inflated plastic bag suspended in the water. I will stop to watch the ghostly shape float languidly toward the open bay and I won't know exactly what makes this thrown-away object so beautiful. An invisible current will catch the bag, fold it over upon itself and I will watch it disappear into the dark water.

Treating Bakhtin

2008-11-02T05:56:00.000+06:30

Halloween is one of our last attempts at Bakhtin's Carnivalesque. When else can you walk through downtown Seattle and see a woman in slacks and heels with her perfectly coiffed hair, hand in hand with a three-foot tall vampire, drooling blood? Nobody even blinks. It is the day that children become gruesome adults, men become buxom women and account managers become smurfs and the Pac Man ghosts: Blinky, Inky, Pinky and Clyde. Nobody and everybody is performing and nobody and everybody is the audience. On this day, normalcy can be entirely ignored.

In Cal Anderson Park, that ceaseless haven of spectator opportunity, I discovered a hive of costumed bicyclists swarming the basketball courts. They were clustered in themed teams, awaiting their scavenger hunt directions. Here were Scooby Doo, Shaggy, Velma and Fred. There were five smurfs in blue body paint and white caps brushing shoulders with three broad-shouldered, blond and bearded versions of Alice in her characteristic little blue pinafore. The Cheshire cat stands off to the side punching buttons on her cell phone. There were classic collections of zombies, mime troupes and vikings plus more esoteric group themes that somehow incorporated the man dressed as a shower and the big tubular purple bacilli.

On Halloween, well-behaved Americans have the opportunity to break from the conventions of their daily life. The costumes, the revelry and the full rejection of inhibition alone serve to decentralize hegemony. For a single evening we create an alternative world of mockery, subversion and the monstrous exaggeration of the body.

Perhaps we still fall short of Bakhtin's prescription. I couldn't tell you what part of the social-political sphere a shower or a microbe or PacMan are challenging. The man dressed as Sarah Palin, walking arm in arm with a man in moose antlers is more obvious. But, even they were passing politely down the sidewalk and the traffic on the streets continued on course and doors were routinely opened and closed and everyone laughed at the appropriate times to all the punch lines. We are such a well-behaved society. The bikes scattered out into the night. I watched Blinky and Clyde in their red and orange capes wait patiently at the red light while a woman dressed as a dead pirate crossed the street calling out, "I'm J-walking! I'm J-walking!" A single police car cruised passed.

Beermarks

2008-10-17T02:13:00.001+06:30

It was encouraging to see the debate turnout in my neighborhood. I am among those television-free households who found it necessary to locate a business that would open some space and tune in to the broadcasts. The Stranger (our local irreverent weekly paper) provided a list of bars and cafes that were dedicating their space to debate viewers, some even offering special happy hour deals or debate related activities. I was joined by fellow television-free Seattleites or neighbors who just preferred not to watch these events alone in their homes. Like a futbol match, the debates are best watched in a public space where the climate is directly reflective of the atmosphere on the television screen and the amount of alcohol consumed by your fellow viewers.

I caught the first round of Presidential debates at the Twilight Exit, a locals spot a block from where I once lived on the cross hairs of the Capitol Hill, the Central District and the Madison Valley neighborhoods. The place, though swarming with people, was eerily quiet for a bar. Through the major portion of the debate nobody heckled or cheered; everyone just starred and listened. As the 90 minute exchange continued and more pint glasses were emptied my fellow viewers began to vocalize, but it remained mostly localized. We expressed opinions to the friends we had gathered around a table, or in my case, gathered in a huddle around the PacMan game in the corner. It wasn't until after the closing speeches that people broke into voluble analysis.

This pattern of silence, opening gradually to commentary was not repeated at Cafe Presse, where I watched the second set of debates. This favorite Capitol Hill haunt is notoriously crowded, but on this night the narrow front room was standing-room only. This evening's Vice Presidential debates were the most looked-forward to event of the election. Hecklers were ruthless, drinking games abounded and there was much irritable shushing from the bloggers tapping away in the corner.

For the third debate I settled in at the dark Summit Public House two blocks down from my apartment. This small space was full of unfiltered dialogue at the outset. The novelty of public viewing here was fully embraced. The audience cheered and howled like enthusiasts of the game. When McCain referred to: "the American people, my friends," the bartender flung his rag at the television screen, shouting, "I ain't your friend!" People laughed and ordered more beer. A woman at the bar is turned to snap photos of the crowd.

At the Hopvine Pub on 15th Avenue I had my smallest crowd yet for the fourth and final debate. At each of the previous locations by the time we were five minutes till kick-off there wasn't room to breathe. Here, there were still empty seats when McCain and Obama took their seats. Is it the rain or are we tired of politics, as usual? People trickled in, though, and by the time the candidates were in full swing, the modest, but lively crowd was too. Joe the plumber was suddenly the most popular guy in the room and whole pitchers of beer were dedicated to toasting him. But, despite these outbursts of glee, the viewers were committed to watching what was being said. They were comparing notes with one another about the state of affairs as they understand them, the history of the candidates, projections about the potential of the next four years.

It is encouraging to be gathered here in some semblance of community political awareness that Americans are notorious for lacking. It is encouraging to imagine that we are growing out of our apathy, that we'd choose to come and watch two men argue about foreign and domestic policy than see a film, a show or just go drink for some other reason. It is encouraging to imagine that we are educating ourselves and that we are taking an interest, not just in our financial peril, but in valuable issues that effect us and our global neighbors. I know that we're still working with the sound-byting, heartstring strumming, tear jerking, mud flinging political camp of old, but maybe if I heard the kind of talk-back I did at the tables in the Twilight Exit, Cafe Presse, Summit Public House and Hopvine Pub out on the streets on a daily basis, things might feel different.

Don't forget to get out and VOTE!

Game days

2008-07-26T01:07:00.000+06:30

I rely upon Cal Anderson park to reveal new and inventive games to me. Sure, there are the classic baseball games, Bocce Ball crews and the ubiquitous Frisbee throwers, but something about the park brings out more interesting displays of leisure activity. In winter I discovered a group of bicycle polo players batting a ball around the basketball courts. A few months later there was a game of skateboard street hockey played with a crushed aluminum can. Last week I found what I think is a made-up game with wooden blocks and cylindrical batons, which are tossed over strings to knock over the opposing team's line of wooden blocks. I couldn't quite decipher it all.

On some days at the tennis courts I can find a raucous game of dodge ball in full swing. This weekly match is no minor event. The court is always packed with people stalking around each other with big gumball-colored rubber balls and serious game face. Nobody has been able to tell me exactly how long the Dodgeballers have been pummeling each other in Cal Anderson and I don't know exactly how it is scheduled and how people know when to come but they do come and in droves. It has become a sensation for players and spectators alike.

This isn't a light-hearted revival of a kitchy throwback, it is an intense competition. The tennis net serves as a divider for those people who are still in the game and viable targets and those who have been struck out and are temporary spectators. Full-time spectators are outside the chain link fence hollering like betters at a cock fight. When I arrive there are seven men still standing on the East side and a single man and woman on the West side. He is tagged out by a double attack and suddenly she is on her own. There is a brief moment of pause as the four of the seven men who still have ammunition aim and hold, reviewing the advice of their mothers. They hurl their rubber balls at the girl anyway. She dodges one missile, catches the next and uses it to deflect the third while the fourth utterly misses. All the balls are hers now and she is watching the seven men watch her. It is all about her timing now with all the gumball colored rubber balls piled like a snow drift in her corner of the tennis court. She can pick one of the guys off the opposite side, wait to dodge the return attack and try again. She throws, he dodges, another one moves quick, recovers the ball and returns it to her before she can react. He nails her in the thigh and it is over. The waiting mass of players unceremoniously fill up the two sides of the court again and begin a new round. A blond boy next to me leaning against the chain link fence turns to a brunette boy and hands him a dollar and says, "here you win."

Cascade rails

2008-07-10T04:22:00.000+06:30

We are on the Amtrak Cascades from Portland to Seattle. Rachel and I barely made our train; running full-tilt down downtown Portland streets to jump directly onto our car. Now, as we pull into Seattle, so close we could crawl to the station platform, we come to a full and sudden stop. A voice crackles over the speakers: we apologize for the inconvenience, there is freight ahead. We're having a bit of a territory dispute. But, we should be up and running and into the Seattle station within a minute. We hear this message three more times and 15 minutes later we crawl forward to the platform, offload and go home. Only 15 minutes late? We got off easy.

The majority of American freight is still transported by rail, while passenger services are a money loosing venture. Perhaps that is why the freights always win these territory standoffs. In the July/August 2008 issue of Good, Ben Jervey rides from New York to Oakland on the Amtrak, chronicling it's failure. The train he rides to Salt Lake City sits for six hours on the tracks just shy of their destination because a stalled freighter has blocked the way. He also cites a horrible tale that is circulated among the riders about a California train that was stalled for two days on the tracks. Most of us have experienced or heard about the ubiquitous Amtrak delays and so rarely think of our stateside train as a viable transportation alternative. This embarrassing neglect of public transportation is unfortunate. Jervy talks to George Chilson of the National Association of Railroad Passengers about how environmentally responsible train travel could be since it uses half the energy of a plane trip and can carry twice the passengers. But, our trains can't sell themselves as convenient or efficient, which are two very important factors we weight when making transportation choices. A conductor even tells Jervy, if you have some place to get to, take a plane. Otherwise, a train will do.

A train is still much more affordable and convenient than a plane for a 180 mile trip between Portland and Seattle. These days it is even more affordable than driving that distance. And there is something about it that draws me. It isn't the romance of the rails in that nostalgic Americana sense as much as the convenience of kicking back to read a novel or drowse or write and not worry about hitting rush hour and not worry about locating a rest stop. On top of that, I appreciate the opportunity to glance the backs of things. We build huge neon fast food signs, over-lit gas stations and sprawling shopping centers and car lots to face our highways. On a train I pass the backs of things: loading docks, a river, a field of small plants and a woman tending them on her knees. There are frontage roads and hillsides of scotch broom and Douglas fir. Occasionally there are empty stretches of track, piles of miscellaneous debris and graffitied underpasses. One tagger has written "Niacin & Pomegranate" under a bridge. Is it a prescription, a moniker or a code with a meaning I don't know? The trees give way to fenced back yards and a cat in a narrow alley watching us pass.

a tree falls. . .

2008-06-19T02:15:00.000+06:30

Randal is recently, happily divorced he tells us. He is getting back into camping now that he is free. He is in the campsite adjacent to ours and has come over to give us unsolicited advice on how to set up camp. He has graciously brought us an armload of discarded lumber to burn. He knows what it's like to get a late start out here, he explains. It is 9:30 pm and the sun has just set. He says he'll be over to check on us later. I can't wait.

He brings another arm load of lumber when he returns. It is from work, he says, they'll just throw it away. To him we are hopeless city slickers in need of advice. We brought a stack of books and a bottle of olive oil and forgot chairs and firewood. But it is good that we have sense enough to want to escape the rat race and come out here. He commends for it then points at the frying pan on the Coleman stove, cooking spuds? Squash, Mark tells him. Really? Squash seems strange to Randal. He laughs and excuses himself to go cook his own dinner: dogs over the fire, he explains. I can see him hunched over his big fire pit turning the sausages over on the grate. The chemical stink of the treated lumber billows out around us.

It is June but we can't get through to the Poe Mountain trailhead because the road is obscured by a lasting load of snow. We find a severed chipmunk tail beside a small section of intestine and a pale round internal organ I can't identify. On the sunny corners of the road we find several mounds of wet black bear dung. I watch a tree fall. There is a crack and a sigh a few hundred feet to my right. I turn and the huge trunk flashes through the standing trees; a diving body leaping off the hillside. It is such a sudden and unexpected motion and then it is gone. I hold my breath through the pregnant silence and then the crash halfway down the slope tremors the small ferns near my feet. I exhale.

We are camped on the border of the Glacier Peak Wilderness, just west of Leavenworth. The area is covered with Forest Service roads and free campgrounds that are all packed with people during this weekend of bright open blue skies. A barely maintained trail wends along the Wenatchee river. I scale the fields of fallen trees, scramble up faded switchbacks, lose and rediscover the trail, retracing to a outcropping or a stream to begin again, watch birds dive into the gorge and discover a waterfall sunken into the rocks. The sun is hot and unfamiliar. The water is cold and I let it spray my face, watching the pulse of the two currents play in circles.

I know I can slow down like this and watch birds pick through the leaves in a park back in the city but it is easier here. We are simple. We compartmentalize. We consider the wilderness outside of our lives. Here, alone beside the river there is only the sound of the water pouring down the rocks, the glug, glug of a water-logged branch bobbing in the circular current. I am pulled into silence, turning smooth stones over and over in my palm. If I tripped and fell down this slope I would be the loudest noise. If I fell in the city among the bustle of days, the traffic drone and construction cranes, I wouldn't make a sound.

sun and shade

2008-05-27T01:31:00.000+06:30

On these sudden beautiful days in Seattle I find myself taking photographs of the startling blue sky. Maybe it is to prove that there are days without rain and maybe to remind myself in the middle of next winter that the sun will come again. It is nearly June and I have been living thorough an eleven month rainy season. I left the Northwest last summer and traveled through rainy Massachusetts and Ireland and then stormy Germany and Ethiopia, returning just when Seattle became overcast again.

My sister lives near the center of the California coast and she writes to tell me that she is suffering 100 degree days already. Santa Cruz County is ablaze with wildfires and people are talking worriedly about droughts. I feel lucky even in the May drizzle but then the sun comes out and I feel like I've stumbled upon Shangri-la. Some friends came up to visit last week on their way through to British Columbia. The skies here were blue and the temperatures comfortably in the 70's. Amazing, this is perfect, they exclaimed as we walked around the paths through the Arboretum. This is why I live here. In the core of winter I remember these perfect three months and manage to muscle through.

I returned to the Arboretum trail along the lake twice again that day. After sending my visitors off toward Vancouver I walked back to the lake shore to stretch out in the sun and read. But, it was soon clear that I was lounging beside a freeway in rush hour. Boats were practically lined up bow to stern in a double line, one pointed east and one west. The air that ought to have been redolent with blooming trees and sun-baked soil was thick with oily exhaust. It reeked and my head began to pound as the engines roared back and forth. I left.

By the time we had gathered a group to return again for an evening picnic the boat traffic had all but disappeared, but so too had the sun. There was a slight drizzle setting in and the air was cooling. Let's not forget where we really are.

discovery

2008-05-09T01:58:00.000+06:30

Recently, Pico Iyer gave a presentation at Benaroya Hall for Seattle Arts and Lectures. In his talk he discussed travel writing. More pointedly, he addressed the rumor that travel writing is dead. And perhaps it is dead, in the way that we have known it. Travel writing thrived in a world where some people went places, saw things and wrote about them and other people stayed home and relied on the reporting of traveling people to learn about distant countries and cultures. Now, we have such unmitigated access to the world that before a travel essay about visiting Mayan ruins in Chiapas can hit the press, everyone has already seen the Discovery Channel special that took them inside the pyramid, they have Googled pictures from every angle, read the Wikipedia entry or they have already booked their flight. They may already be on their way.

Iyer has rechristened travel writing, the literature of discovery. He feels that the writer's task now is to help readers make sense of the flood of information they encounter. The author's work provides a key with which to decipher the incredible input we face when planning and traveling. This is not the same type of key provided by guide books, which tell readers where to go, where to sleep and what to do. The literature of discovery is an account of the author's experiences. It is an orientation to the transformation of travel; a briefing on how travel effects us. Iyer believes we travel not simply to see new places but to have our assumptions of places transformed and to create a new relationship with home. The literature of discovery is often focused on the homecoming, settling in after a trip and using the new awareness gained from recent travels to reflect upon the journey and the place you have returned to.

The literature of discovery seems inherently connected to the idea of journey. But this journey need not be to some distant place. Journey can be internal or over the distance of time and change. This is why Iyer's newest book, "The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama," while not being easily classified as travel literature, fits easily into the literature of discovery. The Dalai Lama's position is in some ways outside of place. He journeys across the world to teach and talk before thousands of people but upon returning from his journey, he does not return home. He has been prevented from returning home for nearly five decades. During this perpetual journey, the Dalai Lama and the world have learned much about one another. He has become one of the most recognizable spiritual leaders, a pop culture darling and an unswerving voice of global compassion. He is a monk, a philosopher, a politician, a globally-recognized face of both tradition and change. Iyer skillfully blends the internal and external worlds of the Dalai Lama, collected from their 30 years acquaintance, to provide us with a portrait of both the man and the innumerable lands he passes through.

growing pains

2008-05-01T00:17:00.000+06:30

I have a tendency to live in towns that foster love-hate relationships with their residents. These are places that are trying desperately to define themselves and to define their niche in the world. San Luis Obispo, California, with its idyllic weather and slow paced life ought to have resembled a perpetual picnic. Instead, my friends and I chafed against the monotony and the passive acquiescence of the moneyed class that dominated the area, touting itself as artistic but proving it in a blindered way. The place was too small and settled in its idylls. Opportunities were limited and the cost of living high. I loved the picnic, but after a few years it feels like the twilight zone of even tempers and temperatures and I began to realize that zombies live here.

Likewise, Eugene Oregon's great beer, easy biking and infamously laid-back lifestyle ought to have fostered peace of mind. But, the town is still trying to find itself. The downtown has been on a steady decline as local businesses cave to steep leases. Despite valiant attempts to revive the city's core with a great public library and a few characteristically local spots like Cosmic Pizza and Books Without Borders; it still feels like a ghost town. Getting around Eugene requires a map to the stars, where insiders reveal the less than obvious locations of some of the town's most rewarding spots like Wandering Goat Coffee, Cornucopia Cafe and the Pizza Research Institute. When I moved to town I couldn't figure the place out for months and I began to think I was being excluded or I was just dumb for not being able to understand why anybody would like living in this town. I finally got a map to the stars and had a great half a year before I left.

In Seattle it is easy to find great spots and love them, but you can't be sure they'll still be around next week. Seattle has any number of forces grappling for the right to define its importance as the Pacific Northwest's biggest little metropolis. The most visible of these tug-of-wars in my neighborhood is the ceaseless condo conversion debate.

I live on Capitol Hill and everything is becoming a condo: Odd Fellows Hall with Century Ballroom and Velocity Dance is slated to go as is beloved B&O Espresso. The Kincora-Manray-Bimbo's-Cha Cha-Pony block was already famously razed and is now sits as a slipshod parking lot until condo markets bounce back. Cafes, shops and old houses disappear from the neighborhood all the time and identical shiny glass and stucco condos rise up. Even our lovely brick apartment buildings suddenly sprout real estate signs and the little studio apartments start selling as $300,000 condos.

It is this last part that really gets me. The Seattle Post Intelligencer ran an article about the lack of available rentals on April 21, declaring that our economic slump, particularly as it effects the housing market has all but ended condo conversions as we know it. Is it true? Is it too late? Urban growth is up as we discover that gas prices rule out commuting. People move to the city and in the economic condition they are not in the mood for buying. We need rentals. Unfortunately, there are fewer apartment buildings on the hill now that they've gone the condo way and it is nearly impossible to find a place to live.

When I first moved to Capitol Hill in 2002, apartment vacancy was almost 7%, a high point in the past ten years. I recall the freedom of shopping around for a place and being able to bargain with landlords about rental and deposit prices. These days apartment vacancy is 3% and places rent within a few days of being listed. At 10 a.m. I saw a one bedroom a few blocks off Broadway posted on Craig's List. I called to set up a walk through. The woman set our meeting time for 1 p.m. At 12 noon, she called to cancel. It has already been rented, she told me. There is no longer bargaining power for renters. We feel lucky to even get a place.

Growth is inevitable and the development for it can be a great and needed thing like improved public transportation or it can be just gross, like countless uniform condos springing up everywhere you turn. No matter the positive or negative implications of growth the process is usually messy, as Broadway would tell you. It is a sea of Land Use Action signs, bulldozers and cranes.

Where the river meets the sea

2008-04-11T01:57:00.000+06:30

I haven’t seen the ocean in seven months and the Washington coast for nearly four years. So, we head to Iron Springs, a little clutch of cabins built in the 1940's heyday of highway travel. A wooden deck and a wide wall of picture windows for each little house. A kitchen and a fireplace we kept burning last night while we talked and drank a good wine. In the morning I can see the waves curl in across the wide beach, sending up plumes of spray when they crash. The spruce and Douglas fir that have grown as close to the beach as possible are wind-molded into a single green mass, leaning East like hair blown back by a breeze. There are people and dogs and small children with pails carving up the sand under the huge Do not enter, aircraft landing signs stationed on the deepest point of the beach bellow where the cold clear water of Iron Springs runs toward the ocean. Sitting in the creaking arm chair, starring at the horizon-flat and filled entirely with water-I am so far from the city.
I have become an unrepentant city dweller, something I realize when I note my impractical shoes. When driving last night through Aberdeen and Copalis I was shocked by the quiet darkness of the sleeping towns, as though when the sun set everyone turned in and by 8:30, when we drove through, not a creature was stirring. How do people live in towns that shut down at dark? That’s why TV is so popular, Mark says.
I grew up 10 miles outside of a town of 20,000 people. At the time it was a town without a center and anybody who wanted to have something to do in the evenings commuted to the more vibrant college town 30 miles further south. I went there as often as I could and when I was 17 moved to a town from which I could commute the same distance to San Francisco. I live now in Seattle, a block from Broadway on Capital Hill and can be amongst people and commotion, having a cocktail or a drop-dead cup of coffee almost instantly almost anytime of day or night.
My parents remind me of how strange it is that I have become a “city person,” raised as I was in the middle of the open oak-chaparral and barley fields. My world is alternately strange and fascinating to them and when they visit it is a time equally of family communion and anthropological adventure.
You can see into your neighbor’s apartment, my mother observed when she came to visit this winter. Having declared that she must live on at least 10 acres of land and refuses to ever live in a place where she might be able to see neighbors, the idea of having a view right into someone else’s living room (and thus those people having a view into yours) horrifies her. But, she stationed herself on the corner of the couch nearest the window so she could have an unobstructed view into the neighbor’s world. When you live so close to people you forget to stare at their lives and you learn to tune out the white noise of their conversations like you do the car traffic, horns and sirens. I need to step away sometimes to clear out my filters and hear again. So, I come to the coast for silence, the private world, the crackling fire, the clattering of rain on the room and steady sigh of the tide, the chance to read a book from cover to cover in a day with the only interruptions being a pause to make coffee or walk on the beach when the rain lulls. It is a chance to not know what time it is, the chance to be alone with my thoughts. But if this were everyday would I read as many books? Would I be stir-crazy in my own thoughts without the input to sort through and consider?
I am the privileged few who can take advantage of two ways of life.

Seattle's Demons

2008-03-07T02:05:00.000+06:30

When I returned to Seattle after three years away, I discovered two conflicting opinions of discontent broiling in the streets of the city. In the pages of the alternative urbanite darling, The Stranger, I found that beloved shops, clubs and other community spots were being razed to make way for the condos that were apparently in demand from our monied neighbors. In the pages of Seattle Magazine I read that the city was rife with dirty homeless drug dealers. Apparently, people who had never feared danger in New York City were terrified of the early morning Seattle corners filled as they were with the ramshackle shelters of the poor. We were at once being attacked by the unimaginative leech of wealth and mass development and being threatened by the sloth and indolence of underprivileged. Either way, we were headed nowhere good pretty fast.

This conflicting concern for the city’s character and direction is nothing new among Seattleites. We always seem shocked by what is happening in the city and are constantly trying to identify the place in the face of the influences from the world outside and the unexpected developments from within. I have heard people state amazing facts about Seattle being given abnormally high ratings in standard of living, book consumption or some other cultured pursuit. I have also heard the same people rant viciously about the city’s systemic problems in government, policy and style. Reading Fred Moody’s book, Seattle and the Demons of Ambition, made me realize that this perpetual conflict of pride and scorn is nothing new. In his book he chronicles the history of the city as he experiences it from his childhood in the 1960’s through the peaks and valleys of boom and bust that the city constantly cycled through up to the present. He discusses the origins of Seattle in Maynard Town, already full of the confliction of ambition and the pretense of carelessness. Moody feels that the true character of his Seattle is definitively casual and unambitious. Moody’s city is home of the content loser, which made it an ideal home for grunge and made entities like Starbucks, Microsoft and Amazon.com feel anomalous. The book is a nice peek at life on the ground during the early nineties when Seattle’s public image was booming across the nation. Moody provides fascinating portraits of Bill Gates, the Chihuly industry, Seattle Weekly’s David Brewster and Kurt Cobain, Van Conner and other grunge mavens. While the book is essentially about Moody’s own experiences in Seattle through a couple high-speed decades of growth, he writes with a journalistic finesse that allows his personal experience to steer the story but never to bog it down. The exception would be his harping on the true character of Seattle that he watched languish under the blinding rush of the city’s fortune and fame. But, this flaw is one I see more as an endemic condition of Seattleites than a unique issue for Moody.

Home or Away

2007-09-02T15:30:00.000+06:30

In the drowsy late afternoon when we nap, while the rain continues to fall, I've found myself imagining walking through the streets of Seattle. Maybe it is the rian and maybe I have begun to fel a bit homesick after three months of moving about the world.
We are still in Lalibela. It is a beautiful spot and the rains bring so much color to the mountains, which stretch as far as you can see. Every few days there is a long enough cloud break to afford us a hike up to the Ashetan Maryam monestary plateau or down the road toward Yemrehanna Kristos or, like yesterday, out through the barley and tef fields to an overlook above a valley filled with tukul houses, goats and little rivers. A million wildflowers bloom—yellow, violet and sapphire—and the honey bees are deafening. It is beautiful.
We are trying to plan a trek through the Simien Mountains, tired as we are of towns and crowds and the Lalibela children's greetings: "hello money!" These last two weeks have been so slowly paced, with late mornings, reading, visiting the rock-hewn churches and playing Set or Coloretto.
We've been in Ethiopia for a month and so many things have begun to feel normal, while so many other things have not. Livestock in the street, random power outages and remembering to use either the water heater or the lights but not both at once is all becoming normal. Being stared at and drawing a crowd anytime we stop I am still not comfortable with. I don't know if I'll ever get used to the 5 and 6am loudspeakers blaring from atop the church or the mad baboon that attacks people at the hotel gate. And may I never loose the amazement I feel when I stand at the edge of a plateau, looking over the long valleys and the endless line of green table-top mountains stretching on forever.

california dreaming

2007-07-18T02:41:00.000+06:30

We were told that our ride share would be a camper so we would have plenty of space for our backpacks. Timo and Lydia had arranged the ride through mitfahrgelgenheit.de, an organized hitchhiking website that Timo's brother Nico has used often with very positive results. As travelers in a country we've never been in before we are prepared to accept everything that is handed to us so, when this Eddie Vedder doppelganger in board shorts shows up driving an ancient VW camper, we went along.

There is a surfboard secured to the ceiling and the walls are plastered with magazine photos of waves and famous surfers I don't know. There's a well-used backpack adorned carabiners and patches and on the console above the driver's head is a lime green Weezer sticker. The driver is Andy and Mark asks if he is from California because it looks like it to us. Lydia had told Andy that we were from the states, from California and he smiles with pride, says he's never been there but that Californians are his heroes. I have a sense that we will sorely disappoint him.

Andy and his traveling companion are driving to Kempton to pick up a friend who will accompany them on a week-long biking tour through the alps. The other passenger hitching along like us is Julius who is going to visit his godfather in Stuttgart and has recently spent time in Vancouver B.C. He wants to be a sports journalist. He has a thatch of blond hair, dark-framed Buddy Holly glasses and spends the beginning of our trip sound asleep in the back of the camper.

It is a long drive because the camper is old an refuses to move more than 80 kilometers an hour (50 mph) and then virtually crawls through the higher territory as we move further south. Other cars on the Autobahn fly past us and make our little German California shudder and sway a bit. For the entire six hours we listen to American grunge pop and other top 40 hits. This is not unusual in Germany. I may be at a loss in a cafe where I cannot communicate with my waitress and am merely guessing off the menu or confused in a market where I may not know exactly what I am buying, may not be able to ask anyone for the help that I need and am unable to understand what the cashier is asking me to pay but I will always understand the plaintive whine of Counting Crows or jingle of the Beach Boys. It doesn't make me feel more comfortable, more at home. It is too confusing and makes me more aware of that out of place feeling like I feel in the back of Andy's camper when the rain begins again to fall and the radio wails about the sunny shores of California.

I am the stranger here and I'm wondering if there is someone Andy wants us to be. I am not the sun-kissed blonde in the tankini and I find myself wishing that Mark still had his ponytail as though it could make us more authentic. We are too quiet, sitting in our very un-Californian clothes reading books. I lie down in the back and listen to Andy and his friend discuss something I can't understand and The Police sing 'Roxanne' a second time through. All the windows are shaded and everywhere there are hanging things: a slingshot with a leather strap, a small plastic paddle for swatting flies, a 6-inch buck knife, a Bart Simpson figurine, a half-full laundry sack, a bottle opener, a little glass lantern with a candle and a swinging door. As we weave along the Autobahn toward Kempten everything sways and rattles on the ceiling and the walls and I am lulled to sleep.

When Timo and Lydia come to pick us up on the street where Andy parks his camper they cannot stop laughing. Nico has used the mitfahrgelgenheit site often and has never encountered a ride like that, they tell us. We thought this was standard. When you're traveling it is easy to accept what comes, to confuse the common with the possible, Mark says. In our minds Germany will always be full of surfer dudes in old VW's