we earth-trodders should probably tremble when we see portents from the higher powers. i was reading on my balcony yesterday (nov 12) -- again in just boxers in the delicious sunlight -- and i see a cat crouched to spring on any one of the 7 or 8 serbian crows (not monochrome like ours but black then grey then black in three equal parts) bopping about within a few feet of it. i'm thinking, what are those birds doing there? don't they realize it's a cat?
so i watch, never having seen a tom ever catch a jerry (or the like), but when the cat finally pounces, the birds jump easily away. and then i see more: the birds are actually taunting the cat, prancing close to it but just out of reach, flying right over its head and landing just behind, hopping across its field of vision. and they seem to be working in concert.
after a few more attempts, the cat gives up and zips away. the birds then disperse.
when this Trauerspiel began, i assumed of course that fate was the cat and i one of the clearly doomed birds. but no! perhaps it's not so bleak; maybe all these chapters are going to turn out ok; just maybe...
another sign i wasn't sure how to interpret was my dishwashing liquid -- for the sensitive, such as myself! (also note how the ketchup label advertises hot peppers. hot peppers, however, are not among its ingred- ients...)
finally, the grilled lamb stand i intended to bring my main course for last night's dinner was closed, so instead i continued on and ate at a pretty fancy, old-school serbian restaurant, decked out gaudily like a love grotto Cupid would have shared with Bacchus. (oh my did the fountains spurt)
and reading the english menu, and noticing the prices being a little high, i was a little concerned. but how, my lovelies, knowing me as you do, could i resist Mountain Lamb in Self Milk? fear not! resist i didn't, and out comes a helmet-sized glass cauldron half filled with lamb chunks, potato, and veggies in a rich dairy "potage" -- clearly thickened with the feta-like kaymak and utterly stupendous. (picture to follow) i think i'll make this at home, only i'll cook down the liquid till it's an ultra-dense, lamb-infused ICBM of flavor. should be amazing.
also had an excellent day at the market, buying beets the shape of breasts in National Geographic from an old woman whose face said Eastern European Root Vegetable Farmer so loudly even had i not seen her wares i would have known she'd have tubers and rhizomes stashed away somewhere. even better, after i gave her a somewhat inappropriately large bank note, she kept saying in serbian, Grandma will change your bill for you, honey, Grandma will give it to you. ha!
by the by, my grandmother often refers to how her husband walter's family in austria-hungary -- now romania -- were "dirt farmers" only 2 generations before (not exactly sure what other type there are apart from the hydroponic geniuses in Marin county), and i've alluded here to the photo in which the alexandr karelin-faced women look like they could beat my brother at arm wrestling, so, yes, Grandma really wasn't far off the mark.
i then bought spinach from a man whose hands looked like size x-small medical gloves inflated to near rupture.
and -- PETA ALERT! PETA ALERT! -- i also bought 2 delightful bits of Barbaro, soon after the fall: horse steaks and dried horse sausage, the latter of which is complex and delicious in the extreme. i'll be cooking up the steaks tonight and will report back. but based on the color of the meat, they should be scrumptious.
back to the mill wheel, which, gods willing, will keep turning smoothly. the portents appear good.
all -- a quickie (which, of course, will lead to all sorts of Gueller jokes...)
if you are reading this blog, please do not fail to click on the comments button beneath each post. apparently my skill in life is not so much prose as assembling friends with the gift of the blarney, for their responses are quite superior to my windbag exhalations.
in fact, in a kind of revisitation of the cain/abel myth, my semi-illiterate younger brother turns out not only to be a better writer than i, a better cook (by far), an almost equal scrabble player (and superior at catan), but also a dean!
he hoists me on my own petard! i'm slain by my kin! oh the injustice!
so, yes, read his comments and those of the rest of the sanctum sanctorum.
as to the picture, it is anatomically correct only in that he'd be the clothed and i'd be the naked one, as i spend most my life in the buff while apparently no mortal save himself and our rents has ever seen my brother naked.
an over-belated post (and a few more coming at some point about events from recent weeks); sorry for the lack of chrono- logical order, but wanted to give a general update on la vie en belgrade.
first off, i'm embarrassed to say that prior to coming here i didn't really process that this is the former capital of yugoslavia and, as such, was a pretty prosperous and cosmo- politan city. now a decade of war obviously changes things, but you can still go downtown and see all the same shops you see in new york, get all the same stuff, and pay all the same prices. after 7 weeks of the alterity and curiosity of southeast asia (my last getaway), this familiarity was a little disappointing. instead of being a place where i could bring marlboros and hand them out like gold coins, i could buy marlboros from any kiosk while listening to lady gaga and checking out the newest nikes in a store window. so much for me being the risk-taking traveler.
furthermore, i failed to realize that belgrade is as far south as milan. everyone had been asking me how cold it would be, and i suspect it was some combination of associating serbia with siberia, the balkans with the baltics, and thinking of eastern europe through a russian/polish optic that made everyone (including myself) not remember the actual place on the map. strange. as it turned out, i sunbathed on my balcony in just boxers the first three days i was here. (photos mercifully suppressed)
on the food front, however, it has been pretty much as expected: LARGE quantities of meat.(the photo to the right represents some leftovers from a dinner where a single order netted you either 5 of the 8-inch sausages to the left or 5 of the meat/cheese stuffed polpette on the right. egads)
i did finally make it the central market, however, where i was delighted by pickled cabbages and peasants who look like they know how to pickle a cabbage in equal abundance. as you can see from the pic, i had a pretty good haul (exquisite smoked meat on the left, some incredible funky sort of cheese stuff in the plastic container on the right, an whole cabbage head -- pickled entire, of course -- beets, carrots, parsley, spinach, fresh pasta, radishes, delicious red/brown potatoes, tomatoes, and a cornbread with spinach in it). yum!
and last but not least, i've been delighting in the local rakija -- various types of brandy, this one a sljivovica (slivovitz, in the lower east side). i'm quite taken by this character and his orchiditis. this label actually seems to have more "subliminal" genitalia than the camel cigarette pack or Family Guy, but maybe that's just me.
in any case, zhivite! work's going well. i'll write again soon.
ah, life is using me like a speedbag. been too tired and too overwhelmed to check in here, and for that my apologies. like a child's balloon set free by the little hand, i rise and sink with each new prevailing force: the uplift of praise and attention for the book, the sinking dread of waiting (will the Times ever notice?). i feel alternately blessed in the extreme for being here and being this close to being able to share one of my great loves with a large number of people (yes, darlings, read good things!) but on the other shut out of the inner sanctum, shibboleth-less, not able to overcome nepotism and better networkers and all the rest. First i compare myself to my savvy New York friends and i think that of course i could never succeed; i bemoan my bucolic roots, my lack of this and that and the other. then i remember those roots and think how happy almost anyone from my highschool would be to be in my shoes, how surprised they'll be at the 25th reunion, and how fortunate i've obviously been to get this far. i said to a friend the other day that i should write the word "grateful" on post-its and put them all over my apartment, office desk, messenger bag, etc., just to remember where i am and what i've been able to do and how full the glass really is.
the stack there, of course, are the 50 books in B on the B. it was A.J. Jacobs' idea to stack them; he did it with his encyclopedias following his magisterial reading of them all for The Know-It-All. i had them like that in my apartment for a few weeks; they're almost as tall as i am, and it felt nice seeing them as a daunting tower, rendered entirely familiar.
was interviewed on NPR today for Weekend Edition. Leann Hanson asked me what i'm reading, and i answered Dickens' nonfiction (as i say on my new website, jackmurnighan.com), right now The Uncommercial Traveler. as i told her, he would read things in the news that interested him and travel out to those places just to poke his nose around, tell the story, document all the great stuff in life that interested him. as always, his incredible lust for life shines through, his ability to relate and appreciate all manner of (good) people, his inexhaustible wit, and the consummate charm of his perceptions and prose. in today's parlance, it's a little like a blog, and as the world's greatest serial writer ever, Dickens would have been the finest blogger of all time. i'll be typing up some of his quotes on Twitter (twitter.com/jackmurnighan), but maybe i'll collect them here soon.
ok, so tired i might collapse. woke up at 2:30 this morning from stress and went straight to work. will write again soon -- and will announce when the NPR piece will air. for now i don't know.
The semester has ended; my students are hacking up their final papers like so many alleycat hairballs; spring is springing along the east coast, causing otherwise insightful people to tell each other how exquisite the palpably obviously exquisite days are; and I have been counting down these days, minutes, and moments of panic, waiting to see if my book sells or if I should roll myself in a rug on the Bowery. (on a sidenote, I take comfort that some years ago I figured out how to keep one’s self alive, food-wise, on $1.17 a week plus a lemon peel – details on request). The waiting game is not good for my psyche, and I haven’t had the focus I’d like to have, thus the infrequency of these posts. My apologies.
That said, no small number of curious life experiences have transpired since last we spoke. In the research for my forthcoming experience-daredevil Nerve column, I Did It for Science, I went to a hypnotist to try to relive the “primal scene” (the origin, says dr. Freud, of much neurosis, of which I have much). I won’t preempt the material I’m going to put in the piece, but I will say that the first question the receptionist asked, when I called and explained my agenda, was, “In this life or a previous one.” Right now, honey, it’s all about this one. If I can get it somewhat down, maybe I’ll go back a few.
A few days after doing the chicken dance in Mesmer’s office, I left early to go to DC to give a seminar en route to joining up with Dave (my best bud from high school) for a weeklong trip out to Carolina’s outer banks. En route, I repeatedly saw one of my favorite things, Truk Nutz , which some years ago I made the mistake of not buying for my brother. Life is full of regrets, not attaching a set to Hillary’s Subaru, not riding the mechanical bull in all my years at Duke, or not buying Foam the 8-lb can of gefilte fish or keeping my ultraskanky moustache for Jeremy’s bachelor weekend. Alas.
Dave had never seen the nutz, so I was happy to share my cultural expertise. And then we arrived at the beach house, tastefully appointed with a zebra-print sunken bar, redundant microwave, 4 dishwashers, and a screening room with leather armchairs, cup holders, and the complete 35 dvd “one-and-a-half-star collection” (“Hey, anyone for Hitch or National Treasure II?). I know I’ve been ranting ceaselessly about vulgar expenditure, but this house might take the Devil’s food. (I will confess to enjoying the pool table, however, and my game actually seems to be developing).
I also managed to save a fading dragonfly. It was indoors, clearly being undone by the décor and about to expire, so weakened that I was able to grab it by its body (thorax?) and take it outside, where, when released, it flew off happily, despite the lack of zebra-print. Maybe this will increase my multiple-decade dream of coming back as a dragonfly in a future life. Why that, you ask? Among animalia, they’re the most nimble fliers, and oft they do it one mounted on another. What better existence?
So I guess I’m not just focusing on this life, try as I may. Clearly I need to be back in Ms. Inimitables’ arms, where the here and now seems especially there and then, flightlessness notwithstanding.
i often tell my students that, as Andrew Marvell expressed so nicely in his poem "on a drop of dew," the everything is contained in the anything. i also try to tell them that traveling is delightful in that it forces novelty and alterity on us, but one can find the infinite without ever leaving home -- if we look carefully enough.
that said, they might well rejoin that it's easier for me, for i do live in chinatown, after all. a trip to the market that my bro and i call the arcade (for it passes between mott to elizabeth streets just above hester) is an argument against flying anywhere for difference, revealing such culinary curios as pig uterus, pork bung (apparently foreskin -- or so i'm told), and this beauty, taken with my camera phone in a quick fly-by. i sent it to bro, phil, andrew, and ron (all experts at the placing in the mouth of all and sundry), and there was various speculation as to whether this creature was dredged from the Mesozoic, the Pacific deeps, the isle of Komodo, or Loch Ness. all speculation welcome; i'll provide the answer in an upcoming post.
but the lesson, as always (and even if you live in Normal, Illinois), is to keep your eyes open. the everything teems; allness abounds.
on a personal/biz note, as those of you receiving my tweets and/or facebook updates will know, it looks like Naughty Bits might be relaunching. this is very exciting, and i'm open to suggestions of brand new or coming-down-the-pike books to cover (both fiction and non). i'll be alternating: classic one week, contemporary the next. stay tuned.
putting this up now, for, on bro's advice, going to try to keep posts at fewer than 8500 words. apparently my burmese days got a little taxing for the employed reader; my apologies -- truly.
I'm back, have been back, have fully reacclimated to the ways of white people, to undercrowding, social order, directional traffic, trash collection, gratuitous appliances, non-organ meats, factory-made whiskey and Blackberrys. My book is done. My teaching job dissolved. My lovelife's solid. And I'm just another blanquito in the crowd. In many ways, it's good to be back; in others, I feel what I'm going to start calling the alienation of familiarity.
Here were some of my observations upon returning home:
New York felt decidedly calm. I could cross the street with no fear of death – even at night (something I had not experienced in some time).
We have too little street food, by a margin of about 9,000 fold. And, please, the hot dog?
White girls are tall.
So-called Green Liberals don't give much thought to the ecology of air travel (and shipping – think imported beer. Buy local cans!).
Snow sucks, as do shoes (after 6 weeks of sandals only, what a falling off). Escaping winter is magnificent.
Work, at least as the editor-at-large of Nerve and the instructor of Writing for Magazines, is rather nice.
A dhoti is just as useful as advertised, and can even double as a shawl.
My son Lars took a while to reintegrate me; that was sad. But then he did, and I wish I could thank him in a way he'd understand.
Ms. Inimitables is a fount of joy.
The Internet – especially the Google machine – is decidedly pleasant, though one can get used to having no information really quickly.
Running water is decadent and should be appreciated as such.
Hot water is almost criminal.
My three-room apartment is a palace. There are plugs everywhere.
My lightbulb to human ratio is the inverse of everyone's in Laos.
It doesn't make sense to have a place where you work and a place where you live (Dave feels this will eventually change in America)
My brother and Hillary now have three children. They gave terzo my initials: Juliet Katherine Murnighan.
I'm itching to conduct another wedding – or at least to baptize Phil when spring comes.
Somehow this blog revolutionized my relationship with my Dad. And for the first time ever, I know he'll read this.
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Now that I can't entertain you with the comestation of insect, arachnid, and rodent, I will have to provide other reasons for your visits; these will include a series of regular blog features, updating often (though selon l'humeur d'ecrivain) and all trademarked, including Life's Delightful Bargains, That Which Shouldn't Be Brooked, The Philosopher in the Kitchen, and Interminable Gratuitous Literary Citation (just kidding … I think). Expect at least one new installment of each every week, and I'll do my best to post on this autofellative thing every day the Muses deign to descend.
I also want to launch a little tie-in promo for my book http://www.amazon.com/Beowulf-Beach-What-Literatures-Greatest/dp/0307409570 (due out now May 19th, please review it ye media moguls), namely a kind of opt-in book club where I tell you which classic I'm reading and you read along or just take my word for it. First up will be Dostoevsky's The Idiot; after that probably Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night (if I can stomach it) or Stendahl's Charterhouse of Parma, and then some Mark Twain (I've never read either Tom or Huck, only The Innocents Abroad and that 20 years ago) or Wilde (again but carefully). And an added bonus: if anyone can convince me that Fitzgerald is actually a great writer (not merely good), then I'll let she or he pick one of the next reads. Until then, FSF is officially overrated.
Nice to speak to you all again. As always, i love to hear from you. And if you want to review my book or give me work, my hat's in my hand.
If they’re going to have so many staff members standing around doing nothing in these airport lounges, why don’t they teach them massage? Of course, I’d rather they just pump neurotoxins into business class or pull a pistol on you when you check in, but there you go (and if I’m one of the offed, well, I earned it).
Day 25, evening. I arrive in Yangon and get the usual hustle into a cab, but my driver speaks good English and doesn’t seem sketchy, helps me with pronunciations of things, and so I ask him if he knows a place that’s better than the one I had from the book. He takes me to Beautyland II PIC, and they’re total Scheissters: they tell me there’s only an expensive room left, then I see other people check in later, and in the morning I hear the same line to another group. Can’t they just say that there’s a first-night charge and then you get the cheaper rate? Wouldn’t that be a bit more savory?
Day 26, evening. Ok, so I think that might have been the best day of my trip. I’m sitting in my room having a paan as I write (betel nut in a leaf with various bizarrities, to be chewed and spat in blood-colored whaps. The first time I saw a stairwell in India, I thought someone had been murdered in it, but it was just the dried sputa of years of paan chewers). The power just went off and I have no windows, so I’ll head down to the restaurant and type up the deets.
Well, it started beautifully, as I walked around and ultimately sat down at a place on the street because the rag-clad proprietors looked so surprised that I was interested in the food. It proved to be a combo dish: the young guy cut a crunchy fried crueller (sort of like the Chinese one at Noodletown but with chick peas in it) into bits, then put it over noodles with chili and cilantro etc, then poured broth over. So it was noodley, yet crunchy, spicy, fascinating, utterly delicious, and 27 cents (little did I know how indicative of much Burmese street food would this curious “soup” turn out). Here as everywhere else so far, there’s plenty of streetside eating, sitting on the tiny plastic stools that make my milk-fed Western knees bang on things, but the combinations clearly reflect the part-Southeast Asian, part-Indian, part-Chinese nature of the place. There are fried samosa-y things and fried unidentifiables galore, as well as the occasional waist-high mound of cracklings (and if you don’t know what that is, shame on you!). But there are also noodles everywhere, both Chinese-style and Vietnamese-y.
Quick rewind: On the plane on the way over, I wore the shirt, so a woman from the row in front of me starts talking to me, teasing that she’s stuck sitting with her mother, though it’s only a one-hour flight. She’s a bit older than I, born Burmese but living in Hong Kong, perfect English, clearly aristo, and with about 9 other members of her family in business class heading back for a big reunion. Well, she sees my language book and starts helping me, then asks where I’m staying, then insists that I come with her and her family to the swank hotel for the night and stay on at her cousin’s home from that point on. Of course I’m mortified with all this, but I have to say yes, knowing how much the insider thing will improve my experience. Well, mercifully the hotel is full, so we arrange to meet the next day at the posh Traders Hotel lounge at noon.
I’m early. I’m always early. And I’m hungry, another virtual always. So I stroll, and walking behind the hotel, I find an alley with what turns out to be one of the joys of Yangon: a curry stand with about 8 different options. You get a plate of rice, then you can order as many little dishes of curry to accompany as you want, all served with soup, a plate of veggies, a salty fish sauce, and a bowl of fried chili paste which I systematically decimate. I got two curries: shrimp (chinga), and fish (nameroo), both excellent, especially with the chili paste. I also ate the cucumber chunks, but as I was leaving saw a tub of water with a ton of cut-up cucumber floating in it and I got a seriously sinking feeling.
The hotel lobby lounge is literally a museum. Again, what better agent of artistic production than radical wealth imbalance? (Does the cultural elite, myself included, ever really consider the implications of this? Our relics are simply elaborate tombstones over enormous and anonymous mass graves.) Anyway, I’m getting more and more uncomfortable waiting for Lorena (and not because of the cucumber water), so I’m ultimately kind of relieved that she doesn’t show up (is a pity, though, as I would have had a pretty incredible level of access…)
So now it’s back to traveling my way. I go rebook my room at the proper rate ($9), then head to the streetfood. I skip everything that looks like anything else I’ve had elsewhere, and eventually I see some people eating what for me is a kind of culinary holy grail (as laab was in Laos): Burmese tea salad. It’s made with a special kind of wet shredded fermented tea leaf, mixed with an incredible mélange of flavors: thin strips of cabbage, lime, roasted peanuts, fried onions, dried chick peas, etc etc etc. It’s just over the moon, but what’s better is the ruckus I cause by ordering it and sitting down with the people on the street. It’s really sweet: the father is running the stand; the mom gives up breastfeeding to come over; she has a few words of English, then sees my Burmese phrasebook and starts reading it; then the bomb daughter and brother come over; they pick up my other pages, and all 4 are reading and standing around me as I eat. Eventually, the mom finds the word “salad” in my book and I recognize the word for tea (“lepet”), so now I’m armed with “lepet thote” – a phrase I will repeat to great effect many times in the next few days. Then she goes and brings me a tomato salad to try (also unreal); I roll a cambodian smoke and a betel-mouthed guy comes up, sees my Burmese book and asks what I’m smoking; I offer him some and he puts a pinch in with his paan. Now that’s bold! The salad and unlimited tea ultimately costs 45 cents, so I give the dad double, say thank you and move on, where I pass the most glorious streetside tobacco girl who reciprocates my eye for 30 seconds (good god) as I walk to the river (more on her soon). There’s a No Foreigners area on the bank that seems inhabited, but I know this is a country not to fuck around with that stuff. So I quickly put my journal away, and head back, walking down a market street and turning into a sketchy alley where there are a lot of exceedingly dark storefronts with plates of food out front. I poke my nose into a few, then get semi-beckoned into one with a glassful of god-knows.
And now it begins. It’s a bar; I discover that when a voice says, Drink this, and hands me a glass. Of course I drink it; I can tell it’s alcoholic, but it seems maybe beerish/ciderish or a little stronger. So I go in, and a very tall (for Myanmar) and very very dark man with betel teeth insists that I sit down (I will ultimately learn that they call him Somali – as in Somalian -- because he’s so dark), and now I’m committed – though quite scared. The smattering of English among the all-male, all-dodgy bar patrons is a bit like words using only one row of keys on a typewriter (a lipogram, for the Oulipians among you). But I drinking heavily, and they love it; I cheers various people and we each drain our glasses. And soon they start bringing me food -- little plates of chicken blood cakes, roasted corn (which the man breaks off the cob with his thumb), Indian-style veggies. They are fascinated -- but terrified -- of the Cambodian tobacco (which admittedly has few friends). When I took it out to roll, the barman brought me some newsprint to roll it in – I remember seeing that in India. Then they ask me if I like marijuana (for safety reasons I vociferously say no), and on we go with the drinks. It’s completely hysterical. They are clearly here every night, the exact same reprobates, and I’m no doubt the biggest break in the monotony they’ve had in a while. We wrangle our way around various topics, and every new Burmese word I learn they find fantastic. I tire quickly (the “beer” I’ve been drinking turns out to be 50 proof applejack – Mandalay mamagee) but the next day will be the Myanmar independence day, so I promise to come back. And I know for a fact that they’ll all be here.
On my way toward my hotel I stop and ogle a mid-seventies Mercedes mini-limo in near mint condition parked on a side street. There’s a man near it who speaks good English; the car’s not his, but he works for an English-language school just there. On a whim, I volunteer to come do a conversation class for his students the next day.
This pic is obviously from my class (actually from the second day, as I go back three days in a row). It was fantastic. As you can see, there were 40 people packed into that filthy room (and this was a private school), half my students were monks, everyone was incredibly appreciative, the headmaster had me for typical Burmese lunch PIC, and I realized that this too should be a part of 3rd-world tourism: teach every day, give a little, have an impact, but also get much more access (one of the monks who was asking me political questions slipped me a piece of paper, saying, “This is a very good website. Sadly, checking it now – as I obviously didn’t try while still in Burma -- I can’t read his writing enough to find it. Pity). So when I left I told them all I hoped I’d be back in a year (which is true), and if so, I’ll be their teacher every day.
Later, back to the bar. Of course it’s exactly the same: same crew, same irate wives coming in now and then and berating their deadbeat spouses (who slink down in their chairs but don’t get up, then sit silently for a while after the women leave but keep drinking and eventually perk up), the same glazed eyes and room temperature liquor and amusement at my antics. When I use the word for chili pepper, they think I want some (or they use it as an excuse to fuck with me) and someone runs out and brings back two huge green ones, daring me to try. Ha, they dared the wrong man! I ate one whole and then held the other one out for whoever would follow. The guy that they only call Crazy Man finally took me up on the offer, washing it back with his half-mug of clear lightning, oft-refilled.
(it turns out that he and another of the most-hammered guys in here are bicycle rickshaw drivers – word to the wise!)
But the best incident of all was when I took out the remainder of a cheroot that I had started earlier in the day, put out, and brought with me. They all were looking at it funny; then the barman took it from me and said, “No good tobacco. No Myanma (they leave off the “r”) tobacco” and hands me another. I start to unwrap it and he takes it away too, pulls it out of its plastic, taps the wide end down on the table and ties it off with the plastic wrap just above the ring, and gives it to me to smoke. The only issue is: it’s backward! Or at least I think it is. The wide part is supposed to go in your mouth apparently, but that wasn’t how I smoked the last one (because to us, of course, conical smokes go narrow side in). And it’s got a built-in filter on the wide end, which means that I cremated and inhaled the entirety of the lung protector my first time around. No wonder they were starting at it!
And I have to say, smoking it the right direction, it was considerably more pleasant.
Okay, I haven’t spoken much yet about the food, and that’s a shame. I ate so much and so well, I’m tempted to say it was my favorite cuisine yet (though truthfully I have been blown away everywhere. One really can’t go wrong, unless you eat snakes).
The best food/cultural experience I had, though, was when I took a walk across the train tracks. (I would have made the trip across the river, but it was sealed off to foreigners). It didn’t take me long; after 15 or 20 minutes I was in an admittedly frighteningly poor part of Yangon (I was looking for two outlying markets that were on my map that didn’t prove to be in the indicated places, but no matter). It was interesting: as the streets turned from pavement to mere dust and the houses from plaster to corrugated metal sheets leaning together, I started getting a little nervous. But just as I’d think of turning back, I’d smile at someone and say Mingala-ba and they’d wave and nod and smile and all was clearly kosher.
I passed two young studly guys (scary), but then noticed that they were manning a string attached to something. I looked up and couldn’t make anything out, but they pointed toward where the moon would be and I saw the speck of their kite, up where the valkyries must wait and watch, and again I realized how easy it is to misread and misconjecture. Too busy kite-flying to mug me.
Then I heard drums. A rolling staccato, almost African (so of course I was in my element), and as I walked by, the players could see I was tapping air castanets (no wrist gyrations though, I promise), and they hooted at me, so I started drum clapping and foot stomping along, faster and faster (and they increased with me), and of course that drew the neighborhood out, and the rhythm kept increasing and getting louder, and it ended in mass cheering.
I’m still a little delirious from all that (and only half a block further down the street) when a woman grabs my hand, firmly. She speaks to me and I have no idea, and I try to keep walking but she stays with me, holding me so there’s no way I can get away. She keeps talking and I keep saying, No Myanma, but then she stops us and slowly starts singing to me (she seems pretty sauced), gives me a very mischievous grin, and begins swaying a bit like she’s prompting me to dance with her in the middle of the road.
Kind readers (if any of you have endured this far), forgive me: I failed you and me both. I didn’t dance. I smiled awkwardly; I slunk back; I eventually broke grip and high-tailed away, wuss that I am. Ach! Where does this bone-marrow instinctual No come from? I know that had I danced, I would have been roundly laughed at, but isn’t that much of the point? In India I danced for a huge group of local musicians, and it was one of the best days of my life (if you haven’t heard that story, I’d be happy to tell you). Why not give her a few spins? Sway a little of my curious childhood learning? (Granted, had she seemed a little less like a lunatic, it might have helped). But no, I wilted, again, as apparently no amount of roach-eating or muscle wine or tarantula is enough to shore up my masculinity into a ready Of Course. Sad, but hopefully alterable. Some day.
Well, I ultimately pass a ramshackle curry stand and stop to eat. I look under the potlids and pick one, then point to the rice, but then trying to get some tea, I can barely get a trickle out of the teapot. Predictably I had unscrewed the cap, but didn’t know to take the lid off, which was more or less to them like not knowing that you have to tear the sugar packet to get to it.
Had a nice fish curry, then what should probably be described as the limburger of fried little whole fish (called something like en achow) -- funky, but delicious. The man serving was wearing the dirtiest shirt ever I’ve ever seen on someone not coal-mining (except for when Mike used to come back from his summer job scraping the inside of boilers – wow). Total cost was a third of what it was at the place behind Traders, so it pays to go to the provinces.
Then I stopped by this contraption , called mote-le mia (means couple according to one person, cupcake according to another): little fried savory cups – unreal. I think these were my favorite food apart from the tea salad (though when I got them a second time in regular Yangon, she only gave me about a third as many and they weren’t anywhere near as good).
Oh, one other rival was the Burmese version of an Indian dish called aloo that I had under a bridge; that was incredible: PIC Aloo means potato, and this had both fried chips and boiled bits, then like 40 other flavors and textures, and all this would then have a flavorful soup poured on top (bro, it was the same trick more or less as your homemade potato chips with veal stew).
A few more Burmese notes: most of the men I met, especially the ones that approached me out of nowhere, asked rather quickly, Are you a bachelor? Is this code?
Had a few disappointing breakfasts: eggrolls cut up with sauce over, a mixed cold noodle, the traditional Burmese soup/noodle/mash. Harder to find a good breakfast here than elsewhere, though the rest of the meals were killer.
Opted not to eat at either Tokyo Donuts or Tokyo Fried Chicken.
Lunch with the headmaster by the way consisted of pan tribio: veg curry, Indian soup, chicken curry (hin), lemon sauce, and a spicy veg relish. Amazing.
Now I’m going to have to do a side piece on eros in Burma, because it was very different – and very pronounced. I think I’ll so it as one of my columns for that new magazine, so if you’re interested, let me know. I had a number of encounters (apart from those with the men) that were very charged, and I think made more charged by the repression and restraint of this culture. The number of obstacles put in the way of having any actual encounter (no guests in the hotel, no privacy anywhere, no PDA allowed at all, etc) had, I must say, a surprisingly potent ability to facilitate daydreaming. I found it intensely stimulating (sorry bro; I know you hate to hear about girls).
Ok, sorry about the drop in stylistic flair these past few posts. I haven’t been able to keep the same groove I had at the beginning. But I still appreciate your attention, and I hope they haven’t been boring.
hello again, didn't mean to leave you hanging for the gripping New Years Eve finale, so here goes (and burma posts to follow soon):
Well, much as I’d like to blame the village water or my Phnom sausage, I suspect that my shyness was once again the culprit: I went to be at 9. Yes, 9, and not a minute past, and slept well till I heard the kids come in at 12:30 (the two girls parting from the two boys, by the way; I doubt it would have differed for me), then slept again till 6:30 when my alarm went off. No dogs, no roosters, just the sleep of the 170-lb male who had only eaten a sandwich bag of sticky rice and 4 oranges the whole day.
Day 24: I wake feeling pretty damn good, surprisingly. Apparently, my microbial boarders were on a transit visa, happy to return to the next fool who bikes himself beyond the paleface pale. It was clearly a good idea to wait the extra day before undertaking the 24-hour, 3rd-world bus adventure over roads that from above must look like a mongrel with mange, and from the ground turn us each into tuning forks of nausea.
I still don’t really feel like eating, so for breakfast I only have a grilled liver sandwich (good re-entry food), but as a result, each time the bus stops for people to sit down to a meal or buy some victuals, I act like the village poor man, shuffling around the bus, rolling dubious smokes, nibbling from a bag of sticky rice dipping only in gao. It ultimately looks so bad that a concerned Lao man asks if I’ve taken lunch, and I say that I brought some with me and go hide.
It’s a full day, night, and morn of bus travel through mountainous Laos, so of course my journal pages fill and fill. Again the scenery is staggering, and I can see the payoff to the 2-day river trip to Luang Prabang (only the halfway point to Vientiane): a single jutting knob of a peak, 270-ed at the base by the Mekong, blinking its apex through intermittent clouds. From the river that must have been stunning, though unlikely to have been worth the 48 hours of tourist hell to get through; we made it in 12, and the view from beside was pretty fantastic in its own.
Culturally, again we see a wide range of ethnic villages, practices, and garb (with various old ladies having tied up their hair with cloth in such odd – to me -- shapes that they look like extras from the Star Wars bar scene). These village kids smile, but they don’t run down from the hills to wave at us as they did in the more remote zones. But were one to do only this trip and the morning market in Namtha, I think it would be adequate to feel like one had seen the northern Lao people; my river trip, plus bus, plus bus feels a little redundant.
One new element, though, is how much the people seem to pee. The bus stops literally every 2 hours, and almost everyone clears out to whizz. I keep trying to, thinking that we must be stopping since we won’t be able to for another 6 or 8 hours, but two hours later, sure enough, over we pull at any old flat spot with brush. The guy next to me, let’s call him Dr. Squirmy (as he keeps moving around bumping me, leaning against me, brushing my foot, shifting, and being a nuisance), goes out and goes every time. I can’t imagine how. One time when he rests his head on my shoulder -- _well_ across the line! – I nudge with elbow and give the WTF sign. From then on he’s a little better behaved. Eventually I offer him a lao lao; he sniffs it and makes the most pinched pained face I may have ever seen, and turns away in disgust. Eventually we reach the terminus; I ask Ventiane? and he says no. Love it.
Day 25: So I shook what I have of a tail feather to get to the airport for the earlier flight to Bangkok, hoping for the earlier connection to Yangon (Rangoon). Sadly, that flight only operates a few days a week, so I’ve now got almost 5 hours on my hands, only a dollar of local money left, and I’m at the airport. So of course I do the old heel-toe out to the main drag and go in search of breakfast. The options don’t look great: grilled meats which are delicious but expensive and not filling (and after two days of monking it, I really have my appetite back). I see a few places with the Lao version of congee: Chinese rice porridge that can be yummy but a 3-meat version can also be gotten on Chrystie street for $2.25, with tea (I once took a first date there -- oops). After taking in the sights and smog of a half mile or so, I gave up and went back to the closer of the congees. It had blood cakes in it, so that (in my new understanding) boded well.
Of course it was the best I’ve ever had (no photo, I’m afraid; camera too deeply packed). – By the way, I’m writing this in the business lounge in Vientiane, and a very attractive hostess woman just walked by, then into the women’s room, where I hear her hucking up loogies. What a continent. – So I have to try the other one now, even though I’m feeling pretty full, and it was different but perhaps equally good. In both cases, only men were eating, but both times one of them started up conversation with me in English, liked that I spoke a bit of Lao, and of course it was a total blast. At the second place the lady even offered to refill my bowl for free, which I sadly couldn’t manage, having gone from Gandhi to Gael Greene in but a few hours. The moral is as it’s always been: go where you’re not expected to be, eat, and you will triumph. Jeremy, I hope you and your colon are listening.
From the lounge: Am I nearing the age where I’m supposed to be wearing one of those fishing vests when I travel abroad? Pop, do you have a closet full of those things I don’t know about?
How delightful is sweet tamarind? Like a date with an attitude, and I mean that in both senses (of date). Marvelous. Plus the incredible crackle snap of the outer “shell” – more life a wafer crust – then the inside looks like a giant ant and you ultimately spit out chestnut jewels. Bro, the kids would love these. I’ll buy some for them at the bodega.
The Bangkok biz lounge allows you to mix your own drinks, and they have the makings of negronis, so of course I’m in trouble. Three weeks of lao lao and the like makes the palate a wee bit jonesy for something a little more nuanced (and Italian). It’s weird though how bad the food is in these places. Are they catering to brits? It’s a lot of “pies” and the like; almost everything the serve is in puff pastry. Egads. In laos the summer rolls were worse than the pizza. How is that possible? In Thailand the most attractive thing is the beef stew pie. That’s like saying Renee Zellwegger (I know that’s not spelled right) is your best option for a lead actress. I thought this was Hollywood?!
Now a thing I’ve never learned how to do (as you all know) is to say no to free food or drink. This can get one in trouble. I don’t have my brother’s capacities (as we’ve noticed from the relative merits of our posts), so Herr Doktor Wuss-Ass really shouldn’t be negroni-ing mid-afternoon. (A guy just came out with a chef’s hat on – he should be in federal relocation.) But what’s a former grad student to do? You show us crudite (by the way, how do you make a fucking egu in windows? It’s not a key command – that I can find – and it’s not a g-d “insert symbol” so WTF????) and cheese balls, and we think it’s a feast. And it will always be this way -- at least for me. That’s why my 1-drink-a-night policy in New York the last few months had an escape hatch if the drinks were free or if the 24-oz can cost the same as the 16-oz. I have rules, but I have _rules_.
Erratum (and what do I pen that won’t be an erratum later): the “Vietnamese” Mekong whiskey I alluded to in an earlier post is Thai. I kinda thought it was when I said it. Still stinks.
The other great specialite (no egu) of these lounges is the tuna sandwich, de-crusted. Now _that_ will make me go first class every time!
I’m going to say it right now: wealth is an obscenity, and I can’t endorse it -- for myself at least. So if I ultimately do well, I’ll have to capitulate and spend what’s necessary to support the lifestyle of my wife and kids (assuming). But if I’m alone, no way will I spend more than 100k per (in today’s dollars – and that’s a ton), and if I do, call me on it. Meanwhile, while they’re single, my kids will be entitled to whatever in their day is the equivalent of 30k-now a year (obviously once they’re married and breeding, they get more). So if they want to fingerpaint all day and can drink PBR, that’s their choice, but if they have higher standards, they must earn. All extras pass down the line. I don’t mind siring a line of dreamers and drifters and hippies, as long as they’re not too spoiled and have some sense of things. And they will _always_ be funded 5 grand whenever they want to spend a year in Asia – but just 5 grand.
A number of you commented on the apparent nudity in the rat video. I was wearing a towel, but I guess that wasn’t clear, and I honestly didn’t think it would come across as weird being shirtless in SE Asia. Sorry about that. But one of my burgeoning you-write-for-me-now-let’s-be-friends since I started back at Nerve, Elizabeth Manus, asked if I was a “introvert exhibitionist.” At first I pooh-poohed this, but then I felt the nail strike deeper and deeper. It makes a certain sense, though: the introvert suddenly and miraculously becomes a bit hopeful, saying, Wait, I might be noticed if only I try? So, yes, I will put myself out there, always with fingers crossed, virtually always stung and disappointed by response unequal to my hopes. And such, they say, is the nature of…
I believe this day of drinking is positioning me perfectly for an evening in Yangon (Rangoon) spent snacking and cherooting at the tea shops (where the eating is good), then crashing hard. After Captain Squirmoid’s antics and the psoriasitic road last night, that might just be ideal.
note: this too is a double post, though they move chronologically. post 20 is a little more than halfway down...
Dearies,
My life has been significantly affected by chickens. Many of you know the Fred Jameson’s house chicken story (either in my telling or Linz’s highly apocryphal and ever-metastasizing version); some of you know my travails this summer with the so-called Maui rooster (with all the windows closed -- despite having no AC -- and with earplugs in, I was still regularly awakened by crowing at 3:30 a.m – and not for the first time. It turns out the fucker was literally on the other side of my bedroom window. So I got up and went outside and, I kid you not, he gave me a sheepish, yeah I know I shouldn’t be squawking 3 hours before sunrise look before sulking away). Well, things that look a hell of a lot like the Maui rooster abound in Laos as well, and seem in similar lack of possession of a Farmer’s Almanac. Add to this an apparent community alarm clock of dogs fighting (normally around 6 or before) and the fact that when a door closes in the most of these guest houses, it sounds like the slamming of the portal of Ugolino’s tower of hunger, and you will understand why I haven’t exactly been sleeping in. As a result, my bedtimes have been getting earlier and earlier. When 9 rolls around now, I’m pretty much down for the count.
Some Westerners just came in and asked my landlady if there was hot water. She just giggled. Love that. A few minutes later I offered her a lao lao and she laughed again, only this time a bit more trepidatously.
An incredibly long, unbelievably slender dragonfly (my favorite of all animal groups) just landed on the rim of my whiskey glass. Clearly not everyone in Laos is afraid of lao lao. You’d think that since the name for it is just the country name said twice that it would be a little more popular. Addendum: my new friend (more on her in a second) tells me that in many of the villages, the men drink it morning to night, and don’t allow themselves – or anyone – to stop on an odd-number of glasses full, so you’d better be prepared to roll…
Day 20: So I came up here to rent a bike and see some hill villages; well, instead I buy a beer and meet a Dutch woman. Unlike the village women, she is not wearing her wealth in silver coins and buttons stitched onto elaborate headscarves and vests, she does not have a near-toothless mouth slicked from the inside with crimson (if that’s betel they’re chewing, they must have a quarter pound of it in there); she is not wearing shinguards of denim (very fashion forward) or long necklaces of beads or shells; her head is not wrapped nor under a triangled straw hat or colored headdress, and she would state her height American style by starting with a 6, not a 4. She biked herself up here from Namtha; she is exceptionally fit, might outweigh, and could almost certainly outlift me. Her name is Paola; she proves to be delightful company.
Day 21: But when day comes, the sun is pretty brutal; I see dozens of women of various villages at the market (including a line of 20 or so of them each selling her hooch from truck oil jugs or old Wesson bottles); and I conclude that that’s probably enough, and what I really want to do is get back to Namtha, go online, connect, relax, and get my bearings again. Paola is biking back down today as well, and wants me to then accompany her to the northwest corner of Laos (we are currently in northernmost central). Where she’s going is all but Yunnan China (which I will save for another trip), plus it will take two days to arrive and I would have to just turn around again to make it all the way back to Vientiane to catch my fancy flight to Burma. Oh well. I’m also beginning to feel ready to move on – I recognize the signs now: feeling like I’ve eaten all the different foods at the market, that I’ve gone as far as I can power myself from wherever my base is, that I’ve learned as many phrases as I’m going to learn and will never make the jump to anything substantial, and that I’ve seen a few too many of the white faces more than once, and it’s time to skedaddle. So I’m seeing Paula this evening; tomorrow I’ll bike one final direction to a few more villages, do the postponed homestay overnight and guided daytrek; then I’ll come back Wednesday evening for the new years festivities, whatever they’ll consist of, and Thursday I’ll take the 19-hr bus to Vientiane. Friday I fly. A northern Laos tripped boxed nicely and tied with a bow.
Day 22: You might think I’d have had a bad day: Paola left early this morning; my homestay excursion proved to be a 50-km mountainous trip just to have lunch (I got to the village and there was no government tourism office as I had been told there’d be, nor anyone who spoke even a word of English as I was told there’d be, so I had a bowl of noodles with a local woman and her mother – who told me she’s had 8 children – bought a little of her lao lao and then rode back.); I drank the village water by mistake (it looked very much like tea – eeks); and the water buffalo I took a photo of (for its simply prodigious hornrack) gave me a highly convincing I-might-charge look. This is not the first time I’ve been stared down by an animal that clearly saw I was yellow. I backed away like a good pansy.
But instead today’s been great. On my bike trip back from the homestay debacle, I pulled over when I saw an old village woman toting tons of stuff on her head and back while walking on the main road. I sign-asked her if she wanted a lift, and she gave me the most hysterical shy, no-no-no, red-cavern smile. God knows how many decades she’s been toting that burden up and down the mountain, but I suspect I was the only falang on a bike to try to pick her up. So hysterical. I love it when really old ladies get super girlish.
I also raced some schoolboys on their bikes and let them win, saw some stunning scenery (with many of the stilted hunter’s shacks along the mountainsides, so lovely), had earlier been invited into the home by the old lady with 8 kids (and she gave me some of her what I think is shredded palm and chili salad – smoking!); and I prior to that I had breakfasted on the only dish yet to challenge the gorgeous laab lady’s gorgeous laab (more on her soon): it was a banana-leaf wrapped thing with chicken in it, but mostly it was just an incredibly layered almost soupy sauce for sticky rice balls, detailed in the extreme and completely mystifying. It did have these inedible wood bits that I believe come from these very hairy sticks I’ve seen the village women selling; I’ll have to get those at the IGA when I get back and make the dish for you. (Hairy sticks? Aisle eleven)
I’ve been asking the names of all the foods, and one I need to look up (if I can get the transliteration at all correct) is de mon (day’ mon) PIC. I had a bite this morning; are these fried maggots? Can I get a ruling on this from someone? (Postscript: turns out they are grubs, which I’ve eaten before). They were not very good, and not identifiable as vegetable or meat. I really don’t know. The women at the market now all know that I buy lots of stuff, so they let me taste everything. Very nice, even when you end up with a mouthful of grubs.
Some random notes: the top speed of those crazy trucks seems to be 15mph, but it doesn’t seem to matter how loaded they are or how steep the climb is, they make it.
Meanwhile the vans shaped to look a bit dragonish with Thai temple kinds of lines to them (and with spoilers on the back) are a very bad idea.
At the market, I see two beasts for sale, still furred, that seem equal part rat, hare, and baby deer. God knows. Perhaps they gave up the ghost for the mystery jerky I had a 2 days ago. Yum.
Many of the village women have big wicker baskets that they turn into backpacks; that would go over well at UArts. But I still prefer the ones who tote their bags by draping the strap over their foreheads and going hands-free. I’d try that with my messenger bag but my brother sees evidence that my hairline has already seen its high tide.
There’s a Pekingese dog in town that only barks at village people, not Lao or whites.
Judging from the evidence I’ve seen live of here dogs and on television of recorded rhinoceri, female mammalia do not seem to want to copulate, nor to enjoy it when it’s “thrust upon them.”
The math and commerce senses here are even worse than I imagined. I had a bus fare of 22,000 kip so I have the girl a 2,000 note and a 50,000 note, which I wanted to get rid of. She looked at it like I had given her a flounder. I finally just took it back and gave her two tens. Then later I bought 1,000 kip worth of mia and the girl had no change for a 2,000. These are as small of notes as they use, but for the 500 (6 cents). And everything she sells is 1,000! Turns out that Paola taught at a school in Thailand for a month and said that there is literally no learning whatsoever, that the teachers go on vacation all the time, there are no tests, they never try to give the students more than 5 minutes of focused teaching at a time, no one does their homework and it doesn’t matter, etc. When she asked the headmaster if maybe they should do something differently, he said, “Talk to the government.”
Old ladies here are very good burpers. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever gotten more out of a belch at the poker table than I’ve heard a number of these belles dames manage. I haven’t heard any other people burp – just them.
I don’t know if there’s some genetic continuum that passes from grouse to wild turkey, but if there is, every shade of that spectrum is present here. I can no longer tell what’s what: the borders of the species blur so, there are innumerable size and color variations (I finally gave up trying to photograph them). The chickens do seem to be the croakers; the turkeys do their warbling thing (but in tones unfamiliar to me); the grouse or whatever they are (tasty looking) scuttle and squeak, and they all seem to breed and breed. Then line the roadsides, fill the villages, and occasionally are tied in bundles with broken necks either at the market or to the back of someone’s scooter. Oh, and you can buy them all live (sitting under weighted baskets) at the market.
In the village today there was also an incredibly massive black sow with an enormous teat sack and ten or so tiny piglets running after. I didn’t take a picture because I didn’t want to show up camera-happy for my homestay, but the piglets were really adorable and the mam something of a sublime of the gigantic and the ridiculous all at once.
The local bottled whiskey here is called Red Lion, and it assures you on the label that it was distilled under the supervision of an expert from Australia. Australian whiskey? That guy must have done a selling job like the 18yr-old Orson Welles convincing the Irish he was as a young “famous American actor” and landing a lead. And why, while we’re at it, do Scotland, Ireland, Canada, and America each have a whiskey of their own, but England no (nor Australia or NZ to my knowledge)? Did the brits think they’d done well enough with gin? Odd.
There are a lot of photos I don’t take, obviously. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I don’t tend to photograph people at all. I just don’t feel comfortable; it feels too anthropologically gawky or something. And I don’t photograph the food either unless I’ve bought some of it; then I ask. The one time I broke my rule was today when I asked if I could photograph a rat in the market (since I only did video of mine – idiot), and she said no and made the thumb-and-forefinger-cricketing money sign (which I had not known was universal). She clearly felt gawked at, and I felt awful (nor did I know how to say, But I’m not just a poser! I just ate one of those last week!).
On a brighter note, I finally told the laab lady that she’s beautiful. I had just bought another one and she clearly remembered me, for I heard her saying “laab, laab” as I got closer. She’s probably close to 30, tall with a long regal face and moviestar mouth so that when she smiles it spreads to expose one more tooth on either side than the non-Julia Robertses among us can show. And her teeth are perfect and very white, which is a little uncommon here (though the Laos are nowhere near as bad as the Chinese I’ve seen. My hotel room had some Chinese “toothpaste” and it was actually wood-pulp colored). She could easily be an abducted asian Bond princess or the lead one of those empty Chinese artsy films for export only (like that stupid Lantern one).
So anyway, as I’m leaving, having told her that her laab is delicious, I lean in just a touch and say “nam” – which means beautiful – and point to her. I thought I did it pretty subtly, and she didn’t seem to catch it, but the woman next to her then laughs and says, “Nam” a bit more loudly. Now the laab lady understands; out flash the teeth – so many – even as she’s raising a hand to her face mid-blush, but I can see her radiate more than a little. I of course hurry away, feeling very good.
Post 20: In which our hero’s GI lining proves mortal
Day 22, evening: I gave in and walked to the honkie restaurant to have a beer and type as a sort of prelude to tomorrow night (everyone seems to have picked this one joint, as we tend to do. By bike today I noticed a few mansions being built on the edge of town. Now I know whose making enough to build them). My thinking is that if I’m seen here now, maybe I will have an easier time talking to or being talked to by other people when the party starts manana. It’s a little grim: they’re all eating; I heard the guy next to me pay for he and his girlfriend’s 2 beers, French fries, and spaghetti -- literally. Across the street is the night market, the Calypso of laab, and all its other treats, and here they are, en masse. And here I am. Is there a little gravity to our own kind that I’m feeling? I remember in the 45 days spent on the greyhound that the seat next to me was always the last one taken, and I suspected it was because each new entrant could imagine a kinship more easily in someone else they saw sitting instead of with me (I would always choose to sit next to old people, so that tells you about my kinship radar). And now I feel the pocking of my haughty armor, the pinging sound of unexpected rains, but even so, I still have a strong suspicion that I’ll be going to be tomorrow before the chiming even of 11.
In any case, my social fort-da game will soon be ending (a major question, of course, is whether Paola made me feel less lonely or more). I’ll be in India in a week, traveling with Jeremy (one of the two official members of my parish) and perhaps meeting up with my friend Jyl (a kind of outreach), and there’s even been talk of crossing vectors with Mick and Martin, who continue to send plaintive emails about the abjection of their meals without me. (sidenote: just saw some girls posing for a trip photo and have to give a shout-out to Rufus, who spotted his son Declan’s first face-making for the camera and did a little video ode about the slippery slope from there. Too true, too true.).
I’m glad they serve Malibu spiced rum here. That’s vital.
Just saw ice for the first time in Laos. In Vietnam and Cambodia, ice was almost an obsession (you could barely have a beer without them slipping in cubes). But here, no. One can only imagine a local village kid having the Aureliano Buendia experience were he to hoof his way into town and trade his brace of grouse for a glass of grog.
I believe many of you, my mom especially, will be pleased to know my eating or drinking finally caught up to me (hey, even Sandy Koufax gave up a run every once in a while, right? And Jeremy, the fact that the greatest pitcher in baseball history was Jewish must give you some hope for your tennis game). I ended up spending the latter part of yesterday evening in bed feeling on the verge of some civil unrest, either north or south of the Mason Dixon. It was as if a golfball was doing the Neptune thing of being swirled with poisonous gasses and had lodged itself just below my belly button (I tend to call this “pickling” myself, which my Mother loves – though she claims not to – because it’s somehow the world’s bacterial backlash to my hubris).
So, yes, I’m pickled, and the likely culprit is the village “tea,” though I also had eaten a bit of some Cambodian dried sausage that had been riding around in my bag for a week, and had wolfed down all the nicely spiced “giblets” in the village soup. God knows (could it have just been the bar company?). I end up not being able to eat the laab I bought and ultimately liberate myself Vesuvially of the ill-fated social beer and all other remnants. Post which, I felt rather decent.
Day 23: New Years Eve. Perhaps not the best time to wake still feeling kind of dodgy, but oh well. The question for me is whether to concede that I won’t make it to midnight nor make any headway with the 3 swedish girls who took the room next to mine and just get on the bus to Vientiane now. I’m very tempted – in part to see what the Lao celebration of the new year amid a 19-hr bus trip would be -- but the thought of the tremors the mountain roads will put the bus through make me a little anxious.
Turns out there’s no bus till tomorrow, which is no surprise I guess because the banks were closed yesterday and will be till the 2nd. (and, to keep with this gripe, a girl today couldn’t add 35 and 40, nor could she subtract 75 from 80. and even when I tell them the results, it doesn’t click, and they have to take out the calculator. Incredible)
So I’ve laid low most of the day. I did some shopping (presents!), ate some sticky rice and a few oranges, drank water and a little iced coffee and rested up. I did brick the groundwork for company for this evening by going outside and offering my Laos guide to some people who just arrived (the Swedish girls checked out this morning, tragically). That got us talking, then I brought out the mia, and now I have friends for the evening. (The whole smoking thing is really a life-saver, ironically, because it puts people outside in ready circulation and you can nab them). Since I’ve been in bed three quarters of today, I might even make midnight.
By the way, I should mention that I’ll be thinking very much of all of you tomorrow on my bus trip. At noon my time new york will be lowering the ball and most of you will be hugging and kissing people that I wish were me. I’ll still be aboard for the subsequent time zones too, so my friends in California and Alaska, I’ll try to raise a glass of lao lao to you as well. Maybe if I can get the people on board celebrating the various new years with me, it will be quite a party.
Ok, it’s a short second half to a double post, but I think I’ll go ahead and get it up. Enjoy yourselves, all, and when you can see again through the haze and pain, I will probably have written and posted a little something from the biz lounge in Vientiane or Bangkok. If not, hopefully within a few days, as I think Myanmar is allowing internet, as long as I don’t mention the putsch.
Day 18: So after the disappointing river trip and the scheissig border town, I took the public bus back to Luang Namtha, an 8-hour journey through the mountain tops, occasionally looking down on the river from which I had earlier looked up at the road. The scenery was nicer from this altitude: incredibly lush, very jungle-y, green peaks insinuating themselves into clouds, deep drop-offs from the road’s edge, and some climbs that the bus could only do at about half my normal walking pace (and the sound of the driver changing gears was like an elephant stepping down onto pasta pots covered with quahog shells. Various tribeswomen came onboard with their moppets; nor did they worry about seating or personal space, so at one point I had a boy on my lap while the mother pushed against me holding one daughter as the other daughter puked into a sack while sitting on 100lb rice bags in the aisle while the elder son watched from the next bag. Most of the trip I felt like the teacher at a one-room gradeschool. Later we picked up a teenaged girl in make up (rare) and the guys lifted her motoscooter and tied onto the top of the bus. Suffice it to say that I was thrilled. Much better than the soporific river.
Day 19: Today I had planned on biking out to a village and doing a homestay, but I realized this morning I needed a little stasis to chill out and perhaps even get some writing done. I’ve been eating very well, including a majestic bacony-jerky that came with a pure chili dipping sauce, a papaya salad with eggplant and a kind of tongue-numbingly-sour guava, and some kind of conical thing with a spike at the end that looked and tasted like a cross between a bamboo shoot, a palm heart, and an artichoke. (the village food, by the way, was not exceptional, though I love the fact that everything was served with sticky rice that you roll into little balls then use to dip and grab everything else, plus they serve guo, a kind of roasted chili compote, with every meal – yum). Of course I’ve been eating laab/laap with nearly every day (and various versions of the greens every other), and went ahead and got an uncooked one for old time’s sake. I’m holding to my opinion that cooked is better, but glad I reconfirmed. Saw a woman selling a string of tiny baby frogs. Also found a woman selling from a ton of different unmarked bottles of moonshine -- and filling them from plastic gallon oil jugs (new principle, bro?). I asked about the prices of each and settled on the clear one (which cost double what the cheapest did). If you don’t bring your own bottle, they pour it into a plastic bag and rubber band off the top. Love that.
I fear I failed to mention where I’m staying and the rather compromising story behind it. Remember the local guys singing karaoke in the background in the internet café from a post or two ago? Well, I had been spending so much time trying to upload the latest video that I befriended the young proprietor and he asked me back for a beer with them. I happened to be toting the bottle of Chinese hooch, so I went back and did my best to pass it around. They were all terrified of it; I meanwhile was terrified to sing (the only time I ever tried karaoke, I think I was either too nervous or the song was out of my range or both, as no sound came out of my mouth – a flailing my brother still mocks me for). So I said that if they would each drink the whiskey, I’d sing a song in English. Well, they eventually did, so I had to (I didn’t even know the song), and my karaoke cherry got broken, of all places, in what my brother would call a backroom Lao swordfest. How odd.
Anyway, one of the guys’ fathers owns a cheap (but nice) hotel here, so he offered to put me up for free if I’d fix the English on their brochure. Done and done. (it would be nice except there was no cold water this morning, so I had to on/off on/off with the scalding – not pleasant -- and today the electric went out. Oh well).
Just had a 2nd go at "mia" -- the narcotic leaf (I bought some more, as I left the first bag of it with my elder lady friend). I didn’t have the add-ins, so I used the chili dipping sauce that came with the jerky and rolled a smoke with some Lao tobacco I got at the market for a dime. Yum! Honestly, the leaf/chili thing is utterly over the moon. I kept saying wow wow wow while sucking on it. So, so good (and actually I think it goes even better with the pipe tobacco – will try that later).
I’ve decided to stay here for new years eve. There are only a few restaurants on the strip that cater to falang, so it might be a nice focused party. We’ll see. Also it seems like I really did need this day of immobility; I don’t think I was quite aware of how uprooted I can feel. (In retrospect, I arrived in Saigon and never left, went straight to Siem Reap and stayed there 5 days not one, came directly here and will end up spending 6 days not 3 – clearly I like to root. I should keep this in mind with future itineraries.)
So it turns out that the power is out all over town, and with the blackout comes surprisingly limited action, which bodes poorly for new years eve in Namtha. There are a few foreigners milling, but somehow the town stays sleepy; I’m not sure what everybody can be doing; I’m in about the only bar that has its own generator running, but clearly it’s not going to be like the New York brown-out (very good times). I end up talking to a 22yr-old lesbian UGa grad. Sadly, she never had the Andrew Experience.
Day 20: I took a ride today up to a tiny town near the Chinese border. It was rather interesting, as I was the one cracker of the 17 – yes 17 – people in the Toyota van (thus no pictures; I couldn’t reach to my pocket). Saw a few interesting things in addition to some gorgeous scenery: a man sleeping on the road (dogs do that here all the time, equally unaccountably -- is it really that much warmer?); a man flag down the bus by waving at us with a squirrel (upon closer inspection, it was exceptionally furry, with a red belly, and had been snared. One of my river mates explained to me that the reason there are so few birds and wildlife in Asian forests is that they’ve eaten everything); some downed power lines that a large group of men were moving off the road; and lots of hill tribe people in their funky hats/headdresses and polychrome garb (why is it that many of the world’s poorest people wear the most intricately colored and patterned clothes? I realize that having no TV or books leaves a lot of time for weaving, but still…); some hogs with stocks around their heads walking down the side of the road – not sure what the stocks were for. Anyone?
Upon arriving, I get a little frustrated because it’s Sunday, nothing is open, I can’t rent a bike, and, worst of all, no one seems to be eating and there are no stands or stores with covered bowls out front (nice for me because I ask for one then discover what it is after). I don’t want to have to negotiate a menu in Lao, and if they have an English version then I don’t want to eat there (any club that would have me…), so I simply don’t eat. I chew more mia, smoke my pipe, nibble on the leftover papaya salad I brought with me, and wait. Hours of this later, I finally set off on foot, hoping to find something somewhere on the outskirts of town or in the nearby countryside.
Leaving town, within minutes I find another 12-cent noodle (quite odd: a pho with a pink liquid poured over; then you add chili paste and salt; and finally you have the option to add a green liquid too. No idea what any of it was, nor was I so impressed – and why do they overcook the noodles?). Soon thereafter though, the gods grace me and I find a big market where I make quite a scene by sampling and then buying some home-made whiskey with red wood-looking chips sitting at the bottom. Another of the vendors signs “drink that you’ll soon be asleep” to me, and I do a fake stagger walk and everybody’s happy. Then I buy some beautifully bound tea, what I think is a sticky rice that turns out to be grilled pork, another sticky rice that turns out to be some paste with wild mushrooms in it, and a skewer of tiny, grilled, decapitated but otherwise whole birds, wonderfully seasoned, that the woman assures me are chicken hatchlings . I also bend down to sniff some kind of dried grayish vermiginous looking thing that was sitting next to a few bottles homemade whiskey. Everyone started laughing and I now know why: whatever it was, it is not something I will soon be able to un-smell. Eeks.
The pork is super yummy; the mushroom paste less winning; and the birdling poppers not especially crunchy – though with a nice resistance – and positively scrumptious. I return to this market the next day too and get a laab with the black, hairy -on-one-side tripe that I’ve only seen in one other place (anyone?), some outstanding pork jerkey, and then a mystery jerky from a woman who was also selling a grilled rat and one of the super furry squirrels. It cost three times what the other jerkies have cost, so I suspect it must be of something netted or trapped. It’s yummy, but not quite as gamey as I was hoping for. Any guesses?
quick note: somehow the one i posted yesterday seems not to have gone up, so this is now a double post. you'll see part way down where post 16 starts. sorry.
Cormac McCarthy loves to say that when it can’t get any worse, it does. Well, with the business-card-sized roach I thought I had reached the furthest limit of the edible, but Asia always keeps a few tricks up her sleeve.
So I made another video, and this one I won’t pre-announce (and the lighting is much better – one learns).
I have to say, this took another serious gut-check, and I almost failed. It took me two passes to go back to the old lady and negotiate, and then, putting it in my messenger bag, I had a bit of genuine nausea (speaking of which, the young proprietor of this internet café and his friends are singing karaoke right now – not a good thing). How funny to be flying straight into the teeth of my revulsion. I always assumed aversions to be mental, but I had no idea just how mental until I had to overcome a few (in pretty convenient circumstances, I should add). The roach was a serious struggle, as was this, but in both cases once I made up my mind, I got a little pumped up (that’s why I ate them at such strange times of day – I just had to run with the energy before I wimped out).
With the spider, the roach and this, every time I finished eating the damned things, I felt a kind of euphoria, like I had willed myself over something that I ordinarily would cower in front of. I’m not a bold person; I still can’t talk to strangers in bars or assert myself in certain situations, but I have found that I can decide to do something and then do it (like skydiving or breaking in to the sports complex in Florence – long story). With the food, there were many stages: I really had no desire whatsoever to eat the things; I kept thinking, Do I really need to do this? Yes, precisely because you don’t want to, you have to (like therapy). Then I had to get over the fear of even touching the things, much less putting them in my mouth and chewing. The spider wasn’t so bad (even when the little girl put the live one on me), but the roach, with the sticky juices it had released into the bag and its ungodly proportions, was a struggle. But then, it was like everything dominoed a little – and that’s what I think is interesting and liberating about all this – I was able to pick it up; I was able to conceive of doing it; I could double dare myself; I could imagine the shame I would feel if I backed away; I thought again how I’d be able to tell stories about it later; and suddenly I got a little bit excited to try. It became clear to me that I could choose, that there was no real barrier but association (as opposed to cute girls in bars who I’m positive would really prefer to be ignored all night), and I could just do it. Once I could latch onto that sense, then it wasn’t that hard to bite the head off the roach. I had overcome. Will I be able to apply this in non-entymo-zoological domains? I’m not sure. But it was a rush, and I think part of the thrill was the suspicion in the back of my mind that in the future I just might be able to.
One further note of clarification: people really do eat these things. The place I bought the thing in was sufficiently out of the way that I don’t think it was intended for tourists (plus, the old lady was in permanent squat over a lot of other kind of hopeless shit at the far end of the market – one should always seek out the margins, n’est pas Jacques?). She was the only one who had them, and I haven’t seen one since (nor has she been back – perhaps too busy sewer-hunting). I actually think this might be a delicacy – and she was wise enough to charge me 5 times the probable price.
Another conclusion that I’m coming to is that when it comes to eating dicey food is that there’s a very useful rule of thumb: if it’s fried or grilled, you’re pretty safe. The things to worry about are if it’s raw (like the laab that one time, though still tasty) or, worse, if it’s fermented. I can speak now with authority and say the funkiest, most gnarly, inedible thing I’ve ever come across was a simple fermented tofu out of an earthenware crock bought in Chinatown (on sale) for a dollar. As I removed the chunks, they looked like they had blood clots attached to them, they stunk to cloud 30, and they were truly unspeakably heinous. And somehow the Norwegian buried fermented fish that Krista tells me about – or Chinese versions of same -- strike me as similarly dubious, though at this point I guess I’d have to try them, as long as someone was filming. So regarding that maggot-shaped toolio Andrew Zimmer, when he eats some Rotsfisk – I think that’s close to the name; will check with Krista -- then I’ll be impressed. Until then, I hope he enjoys his rocky mountain oysters or scorpions. Whatevah…
Oh, by the way, I followed my principle and got a soup just as I was leaving Cambodia that had blood cakes in it (and have had another since I’ve been here), and this time I ate them and thought they were quite good. The only occasion in which I had had them before was on a date with a native Taiwanese woman who discussed in Chinese with our waiter in Chinatown (as they weren’t on the menu), then had them brought, and by them, I mean about 20, each the size of a half-depth Klondike bar, and they were very florid and odd, and daunting in their middle-of-the-table hillock. I concluded I didn’t like them, but as long as they are warm and in manageable quantities and don’t taste like they were infused with a Glade air freshener, then they seem to be okay.
Third thought: my language book doesn’t say how to say “delicious” or “good,” nor does Lonely Planet. And the latter doesn’t tell you how to say “sorry.” And under food, it leaves out all the markets and lists places with pancakes. They can suck a fucking toss rag.
One thing here that breaks my heart is that hill village women come into town and then stand outside the internet café for a while the way I do at mixers, unwilling or able to come up and ask anyone anything. They’re trying to sell some ware, but if no one acknowledges them, they ultimately just slink off. Ugh. I want to give them each money, but then you encourage begging and that creates problems. It just sucks all around.
Post 16: In which nostalgia rears its ugly, and curious leaves are chewed in curious company
all,
sorry this is coming in a day later than announced; the power went out for a day, and i went to a village up by the chinese border that didn't have connectivity. and sorry too about there being so few photos; i'll try to put up a few more from the gazillion that i took, if there's bandwidth.
and back tomorrow with the next video, which i hope is what you've all been waiting for.
much love, and missing you all (i'm starting to feel very sentimental writing these because i can feel you all very close. oh my...)
Day 14: Arrive in Laos.
Laos, like Illinois, has a silent “s”; you would think that would help me get it right.
First meal and it utterly blows me away, not unlike the first time I ate Lao food, which was in Providence, at an extremely dingy spot I stumbled upon called Asia Place. -- RECYCLED STORY ALERT – 4 PARAGRAPHS -- Asia Place was funny; it was up the street (on Federal hill) from a bar I’d occasionally schlep to because they had a 3 burgers and beans special that came with a stack of white bread and cocktails were $1. At the time I was working at Louie’s, a notorious greasiest-of-spoons by campus, and my boss happened to own the building Asia Place was in. “You eat there?” he asked incredulously. “That place is way too filthy for me.” This from the owner of a place where one of my patrons found a 5-inch rusty nail under her omelette (no exaggeration), and Louie wouldn’t give her her breakfast for free, he was just going to make another one (that’s when I quit). It was sad to go; they took me in as one of theirs (even though I was over 5’6”). I had endeared myself to the family by jumping into the trash barrel on my first day, holding it by both sides and pogoing up and down to mash everything to the bottom – a trick I had learned at my last job.
Anyway, Asia Place never had any patrons, or at least never anyone eating; every once in a while, a small group of young Southeast Asian mobsters would come in and drink Heinekens (see!) or egg creams (for real). The place was run by a mother and her two daughters, each of whom had butt length hair with curlicue wavelets curled in. They wore a lot of makeup and were very pretty, and one time the mother asked if I had ever been to South East Asia. I said I had been to Thailand on route to India. She said, “No, you went for the girls.” I said, no, it was a stopover for 2 days because I was flying the wrong way around the world (this when I was 18). She said, no, you went for the girls, and I couldn’t convince her otherwise, snow-white lamb though I was at the time.
The other amusing thing about Asia Place is that the menu had names and explanations for most things, but then it just said Laab, $5. I didn’t even bother asking, I just ordered it, and that’s when I was first asked cooked or uncooked. Trying to be cool, I said cooked, like I had any idea what I was getting. It came; I couldn’t identify it; it was some kind of meat salad with lettuce and a few chilis. I proceeded to go back and eat it the next eight nights in a row, getting it raw on the last. This was before the internet, so it wasn’t easy to find out what the very thin slices of seemingly filter-y meat were; I thought maybe fish maw (something I had read about but never seen, and the stuff on my plate looked like it could strain plankton). Finally, after eating it raw (and being both compelled and alarmed), I asked what it was: beef stomach sliced so thin you couldn’t tell. Utterly incredible. But better get it cooked, every time but once.
The woman there enjoyed toying with me, not just with the Thai girl joke. The first time I ate the laab, I left the plate spotless and the stem of the lone fresh Thai chili in the center to show that I had eaten it. The next night, I left the two stems. The night after, four. I like to do the powers of two in my head to calm myself; I knew how quickly this could get out of hand. The fourth night I gave up. _She_ knew I was white – and how to break me.
BACK TO LAOS: So sauntering to the night market, I honestly had no idea what I’d find. There are quite a few honkies here, all preparing for boat trips or treks, and I feared seeing waffles and spaghetti. But no, there was laab! (though I think most books spell it laap.) On my first night! And just as good as I remembered! (I haven’t been to providence in 10 years). Plus an astonishingly good mound of mixed greens, then a less dazzling noodle (called elau, iilau, not sure how to spell it -- pronounced ee-lao) made by pouring a liquid on a screen over boiling water, steaming it, then rolling it on a stick (a little like the shrimp noodle that ron, lindz, my brother and I all love in chinatown where they pour it on a hot metal surface then scrape it into a steamed roll). That was more cool than tasty. The laab and greens though annihilated anything I’ve had yet in Asia. (Sorry, ron, maybe I didn’t give Cambodian food a chance, but if you’re competing with laab, the cards are stacked against you…)
The town I’m in is called Luang Namtha (I dropped $100 and flew straight here in an hour upon arriving at the capital instead of taking the when-all-goes-well 19-hour bus for $20). The 2007 guidebooks all said there was only generator-driven power, and only from 6-9:30 p.m. Well, I think they had a good 2008, because there are power lines everywhere, my room has a plug, plus a flush toilet and shower (it seems it can’t be escaped, at least not without going to the cheapest place listed in Lonely Planet and good luck getting a room).
Now that I’m up here, I’m reluctant to just take a boat all the way back down as planned; I think I’m going to rent a bike instead and go visit a bunch of hill villages of various Lao ethnic minorities (the Hmong among them – had to say it). They’ll all be ready for me when I get there, but maybe I can still eat some funky things and make some children laugh. And then I can come home to laab (and the laab lady – uh oh, I might be smitten again! –RECYCLED STORY ALERT – REST OF THIS PARAGRAPH -- I will confess to historically being captivated by any number of women whom I referred to as the insert food name here lady. My favorite was the produce lady in Florence – a young Sophia Loren meets La Cucinotta – good god it’s hard even to type the words!!! -- who called me “cipolla” because I’d go in every day and buy a single onion just to have the chance to see her. Oh, yes, then there was the rural cheese lady in Paris with the gap between her front teeth who would bring her masterpieces in sitting on maple leaves and threatening either to ooze over the edge or collapse in on themselves with mold. And so on…).
Clearly there is a disadvantage to flying, because all I can really talk about so far is that if you first saw the earth from above Laos you’d think we were all living on a giant head of broccoli rabe. I guess I can also say that so far it looks like Cambodia, but as busses they drive these pickupy things with two rows of seats bolted into the bed called sawngthaews, and there’s also a super crazy truck with a leafblower engine strapped out front powering the thing PIC. (Or I could tell you about clouds, but don’t get me started. I LOVE clouds viewed from a plane…). So, yes, if I fly, then you’re stuck hearing ossified food stories from the past. My bad. I’ll try to stick to the program and go ground from now on.
Day 15: My first day here I rent a bike and go out to see some villages. Quickly one of my suspicions was confirmed, namely, that if you don’t eat the local food, you really don’t interact with the populace. As I was biking by, saying hi to everyone, they were like “Fuck you, whatever.” But the minute I sat down to eat both a 12-cent noodle thing (PIC) and another noodle thing (PIC) – the latter at an end-of-the-road village where I couldn’t ford the river -- suddenly crowds formed, we all tried speaking to each other, and all kinds of stuff happened. One can waterbug the surface of a culture, but to pierce the meniscus, you have to eat.
Or drink. As it turns out, I bought two different local rice whiskeys, and a Chinese one (by mistake). The first because I rode by a stand at a somewhat remote village and there were small bags of liquid with rather high prices on them (close to a buck), one clearish, one reddish brown (slightly more expensive). The proprietor was asleep, and I’m not sure how I would have asked him anyway, so I concluded they must be booze, woke him up, and bought the latter (go high in low-end). It turned out to be half a liter of really smooth 40% eau de vie-like stuff, tasting a bit like the Chinese preserved-plum-infused vodka that I make at home, only smoother. Very nice.
The second I bought because I kept riding by stands that had unmarked bottles of clear or green liquid on them, stoppered with rag bits and rubber-banded. At first I thought they might be petrol, as in Cambodia, but I concluded that no, maybe not. So I pulled into one of the stands, made the universal I-can-imbibe-this-without-dying sign, got a nod back, and bought half a liter. (you had to bring your own bottle, so I took my water bottle out of its bike cage, drained it, and handed it to her – classy). I opted for the light green one, which proved also to be quite tasty. A bit less smooth, but good.
The third was a minor mistake. I had meant to try the clear one that I had seen elsewhere, but I had no empty bottle any more. Next to it, at one of the stands, they had little glass bottles of 250ml that they said were 40 cents, so I got one, only to look at it later and realize that it had Chinese written on it. Still tasty, but not local. I’m getting on the boat tomorrow, so it won’t be bad to have excess liquor – and also for the truck ride back. I’m sure the driver will appreciate it.
I did feel I got a little local cred today when hiking up to a supremely disappointing “waterfall” by turning my flipflops into Tevas with strung-together rubber bands, creating a little back resistance and stability. It worked great (I conceived of it last night in bed), and made hiking in those god-forsaken things actually doable. Plus, lots of people stared at them, at least with a little appreciation.
Day 16: So I came all the way up here because I had booked a trip with court along what was supposed to be the last unused river in Laos, deep into the remote North. Well, my supposed “jungle adventure” proved to be a near bust. The river was rarely narrower than 50 yards; there were villages alongside it every couple of miles (whose children waved at us but whose adults didn’t give a shit); the boat had an engine that wasn’t especially quiet or peaceful; and after about an hour, one got to know the scenery and it didn’t change much for the next 14 hours spent on the boat over two days. The boat, apart from the motor, was an authentic pieced-together wooden fantail, which meant it was highly uncomfortable to sit in the bottom of, as we did, and looked like a single termite could Titanic us at will. There were good parts: we stopped over in one village where everyone came out to see us . Plus, we spent the night in the young boat pilot’s village, and that proved to be the best part of the trip (and almost made it worth it).
Day 16, evening: First village overnight: So there were tons of interesting details about staying in the village, and when I can finally post pictures, you’ll see, among other things, the water buffalo, the green pumpkins they grow for pig feed, the bamboo shoot hanging in bags under the stilted huts, the stilted huts, the silk spinning apparatus and intricate looms, the kids, the cookfires, the cookpots, and the cooking (the cook wouldn’t let me take her picture).
Now of course we’re herded in there as falang (whities), so everyone starts coming around to sell us sarongs and scarves, which annoys me. But eventually things mellow out, and that’s when I pull out the lao lao whiskey I had bought in the village near Luang Namtha. It soon becomes clear that this makes me very popular among the men, especially the old men (though the one who I thought was probably 70 tells me he’s only 53 – eeks. Hard living, as in real work: it catches up fast.).
But I had also brought a bag of some leaves in liquid that I saw at another village. These my guide said were to be rolled with ginger, salt, and hot chilis, then sucked on while smoking, as a kind of stimulant. A stimulant to go with a stimulant, hell yeah! So with the whiskey, I pull out the (what at first I assume are coca leaves), and attract the super old lady’s attention (I think she’s pushing ninety but she says she’s 60-something, and has the teeth one seeks in a food vendor). She’s been chewing on a unlit cheroot or big beedie of some kind (like ones I’ve seen from Indonesia), and starts making drinking signs too, so I hand her a glass of whiskey, see her take a swig, then lean all the way to the ground and blow it all through a crack in the floorboards. She hated it! But then she takes a Carlton Fisk wad of the leaves and fires up her Clint Eastwood special, flashes me her crenellated grin, and now we’re fast friends.
It was kind of sad, as if the other 3 falang just faded from the room. We’re drinking and chewing and smoking (I pulled out my pipe and fired up some nice Dunhill 505), and the whole scene becomes _very_ convivial. (the leaves, by the way, taste almost olive-y, and the combo of leaf, salt, chili, ginger is delicious on its own, but does an Aufhebung into something utterly magical with the synergism of the tobacco). Soon enough the old lady asks if I’m married and I say no, and yes, indeed, she suggests her youngest, only 19, the sweet-faced cook who wouldn’t let me take her picture (but I did get one of her hair later in the boat).
So I end with an addendum to the summer-toothed-old-lady-soup principle: whenever one can drink, smoke, and chew narcotic leaves with said ancienne, one must.
Post 16: In which nostalgia rears its ugly, and curious leaves are chewed in curious company
all,
sorry this is coming in a day later than announced; the power went out for a day, and i went to a village up by the chinese border that didn't have connectivity. and sorry too about there being so few photos; i'll try to put up a few more from the gazillion that i took, if there's bandwidth.
and back tomorrow with the next video, which i hope is what you've all been waiting for.
much love, and missing you all (i'm starting to feel very sentimental writing these because i can feel you all very close. oh my...)
Day 14: Arrive in Laos.
Laos, like Illinois, has a silent “s”; you would think that would help me get it right.
First meal and it utterly blows me away, not unlike the first time I ate Lao food, which was in Providence, at an extremely dingy spot I stumbled upon called Asia Place. -- RECYCLED STORY ALERT – 4 PARAGRAPHS -- Asia Place was funny; it was up the street (on Federal hill) from a bar I’d occasionally schlep to because they had a 3 burgers and beans special that came with a stack of white bread and cocktails were $1. At the time I was working at Louie’s, a notorious greasiest-of-spoons by campus, and my boss happened to own the building Asia Place was in. “You eat there?” he asked incredulously. “That place is way too filthy for me.” This from the owner of a place where one of my patrons found a 5-inch rusty nail under her omelette (no exaggeration), and Louie wouldn’t give her her breakfast for free, he was just going to make another one (that’s when I quit). It was sad to go; they took me in as one of theirs (even though I was over 5’6”). I had endeared myself to the family by jumping into the trash barrel on my first day, holding it by both sides and pogoing up and down to mash everything to the bottom – a trick I had learned at my last job.
Anyway, Asia Place never had any patrons, or at least never anyone eating; every once in a while, a small group of young Southeast Asian mobsters would come in and drink Heinekens (see!) or egg creams (for real). The place was run by a mother and her two daughters, each of whom had butt length hair with curlicue wavelets curled in. They wore a lot of makeup and were very pretty, and one time the mother asked if I had ever been to South East Asia. I said I had been to Thailand on route to India. She said, “No, you went for the girls.” I said, no, it was a stopover for 2 days because I was flying the wrong way around the world (this when I was 18). She said, no, you went for the girls, and I couldn’t convince her otherwise, snow-white lamb though I was at the time.
The other amusing thing about Asia Place is that the menu had names and explanations for most things, but then it just said Laab, $5. I didn’t even bother asking, I just ordered it, and that’s when I was first asked cooked or uncooked. Trying to be cool, I said cooked, like I had any idea what I was getting. It came; I couldn’t identify it; it was some kind of meat salad with lettuce and a few chilis. I proceeded to go back and eat it the next eight nights in a row, getting it raw on the last. This was before the internet, so it wasn’t easy to find out what the very thin slices of seemingly filter-y meat were; I thought maybe fish maw (something I had read about but never seen, and the stuff on my plate looked like it could strain plankton). Finally, after eating it raw (and being both compelled and alarmed), I asked what it was: beef stomach sliced so thin you couldn’t tell. Utterly incredible. But better get it cooked, every time but once.
The woman there enjoyed toying with me, not just with the Thai girl joke. The first time I ate the laab, I left the plate spotless and the stem of the lone fresh Thai chili in the center to show that I had eaten it. The next night, I left the two stems. The night after, four. I like to do the powers of two in my head to calm myself; I knew how quickly this could get out of hand. The fourth night I gave up. _She_ knew I was white – and how to break me.
BACK TO LAOS: So sauntering to the night market, I honestly had no idea what I’d find. There are quite a few honkies here, all preparing for boat trips or treks, and I feared seeing waffles and spaghetti. But no, there was laab! (though I think most books spell it laap.) On my first night! And just as good as I remembered! (I haven’t been to providence in 10 years). Plus an astonishingly good mound of mixed greens, then a less dazzling noodle (called elau, iilau, not sure how to spell it -- pronounced ee-lao) made by pouring a liquid on a screen over boiling water, steaming it, then rolling it on a stick (a little like the shrimp noodle that ron, lindz, my brother and I all love in chinatown where they pour it on a hot metal surface then scrape it into a steamed roll). That was more cool than tasty. The laab and greens though annihilated anything I’ve had yet in Asia. (Sorry, ron, maybe I didn’t give Cambodian food a chance, but if you’re competing with laab, the cards are stacked against you…)
The town I’m in is called Luang Namtha (I dropped $100 and flew straight here in an hour upon arriving at the capital instead of taking the when-all-goes-well 19-hour bus for $20). The 2007 guidebooks all said there was only generator-driven power, and only from 6-9:30 p.m. Well, I think they had a good 2008, because there are power lines everywhere, my room has a plug, plus a flush toilet and shower (it seems it can’t be escaped, at least not without going to the cheapest place listed in Lonely Planet and good luck getting a room).
Now that I’m up here, I’m reluctant to just take a boat all the way back down as planned; I think I’m going to rent a bike instead and go visit a bunch of hill villages of various Lao ethnic minorities (the Hmong among them – had to say it). They’ll all be ready for me when I get there, but maybe I can still eat some funky things and make some children laugh. And then I can come home to laab (and the laab lady – uh oh, I might be smitten again! –RECYCLED STORY ALERT – REST OF THIS PARAGRAPH -- I will confess to historically being captivated by any number of women whom I referred to as the insert food name here lady. My favorite was the produce lady in Florence – a young Sophia Loren meets La Cucinotta – good god it’s hard even to type the words!!! -- who called me “cipolla” because I’d go in every day and buy a single onion just to have the chance to see her. Oh, yes, then there was the rural cheese lady in Paris with the gap between her front teeth who would bring her masterpieces in sitting on maple leaves and threatening either to ooze over the edge or collapse in on themselves with mold. And so on…).
Clearly there is a disadvantage to flying, because all I can really talk about so far is that if you first saw the earth from above Laos you’d think we were all living on a giant head of broccoli rabe. I guess I can also say that so far it looks like Cambodia, but as busses they drive these pickupy things with two rows of seats bolted into the bed called sawngthaews, and there’s also a super crazy truck with a leafblower engine strapped out front powering the thing PIC. (Or I could tell you about clouds, but don’t get me started. I LOVE clouds viewed from a plane…). So, yes, if I fly, then you’re stuck hearing ossified food stories from the past. My bad. I’ll try to stick to the program and go ground from now on.
Day 15: My first day here I rent a bike and go out to see some villages. Quickly one of my suspicions was confirmed, namely, that if you don’t eat the local food, you really don’t interact with the populace. As I was biking by, saying hi to everyone, they were like “Fuck you, whatever.” But the minute I sat down to eat both a 12-cent noodle thing (PIC) and another noodle thing (PIC) – the latter at an end-of-the-road village where I couldn’t ford the river -- suddenly crowds formed, we all tried speaking to each other, and all kinds of stuff happened. One can waterbug the surface of a culture, but to pierce the meniscus, you have to eat.
Or drink. As it turns out, I bought two different local rice whiskeys, and a Chinese one (by mistake). The first because I rode by a stand at a somewhat remote village and there were small bags of liquid with rather high prices on them (close to a buck), one clearish, one reddish brown (slightly more expensive). The proprietor was asleep, and I’m not sure how I would have asked him anyway, so I concluded they must be booze, woke him up, and bought the latter (go high in low-end). It turned out to be half a liter of really smooth 40% eau de vie-like stuff, tasting a bit like the Chinese preserved-plum-infused vodka that I make at home, only smoother. Very nice.
The second I bought because I kept riding by stands that had unmarked bottles of clear or green liquid on them, stoppered with rag bits and rubber-banded. At first I thought they might be petrol, as in Cambodia, but I concluded that no, maybe not. So I pulled into one of the stands, made the universal I-can-imbibe-this-without-dying sign, got a nod back, and bought half a liter. (you had to bring your own bottle, so I took my water bottle out of its bike cage, drained it, and handed it to her – classy). I opted for the light green one, which proved also to be quite tasty. A bit less smooth, but good.
The third was a minor mistake. I had meant to try the clear one that I had seen elsewhere, but I had no empty bottle any more. Next to it, at one of the stands, they had little glass bottles of 250ml that they said were 40 cents, so I got one, only to look at it later and realize that it had Chinese written on it. Still tasty, but not local. I’m getting on the boat tomorrow, so it won’t be bad to have excess liquor – and also for the truck ride back. I’m sure the driver will appreciate it.
I did feel I got a little local cred today when hiking up to a supremely disappointing “waterfall” by turning my flipflops into Tevas with strung-together rubber bands, creating a little back resistance and stability. It worked great (I conceived of it last night in bed), and made hiking in those god-forsaken things actually doable. Plus, lots of people stared at them, at least with a little appreciation.
Day 16: So I came all the way up here because I had booked a trip with court along what was supposed to be the last unused river in Laos, deep into the remote North. Well, my supposed “jungle adventure” proved to be a near bust. The river was rarely narrower than 50 yards; there were villages alongside it every couple of miles (whose children waved at us but whose adults didn’t give a shit); the boat had an engine that wasn’t especially quiet or peaceful; and after about an hour, one got to know the scenery and it didn’t change much for the next 14 hours spent on the boat over two days. The boat, apart from the motor, was an authentic pieced-together wooden fantail, which meant it was highly uncomfortable to sit in the bottom of, as we did, and looked like a single termite could Titanic us at will. There were good parts: we stopped over in one village where everyone came out to see us . Plus, we spent the night in the young boat pilot’s village, and that proved to be the best part of the trip (and almost made it worth it).
Day 16, evening: First village overnight: So there were tons of interesting details about staying in the village, and when I can finally post pictures, you’ll see, among other things, the water buffalo, the green pumpkins they grow for pig feed, the bamboo shoot hanging in bags under the stilted huts, the stilted huts, the silk spinning apparatus and intricate looms, the kids, the cookfires, the cookpots, and the cooking (the cook wouldn’t let me take her picture).
Now of course we’re herded in there as falang (whities), so everyone starts coming around to sell us sarongs and scarves, which annoys me. But eventually things mellow out, and that’s when I pull out the lao lao whiskey I had bought in the village near Luang Namtha. It soon becomes clear that this makes me very popular among the men, especially the old men (though the one who I thought was probably 70 tells me he’s only 53 – eeks. Hard living, as in real work: it catches up fast.).
But I had also brought a bag of some leaves in liquid that I saw at another village. These my guide said were to be rolled with ginger, salt, and hot chilis, then sucked on while smoking, as a kind of stimulant. A stimulant to go with a stimulant, hell yeah! So with the whiskey, I pull out the (what at first I assume are coca leaves), and attract the super old lady’s attention (I think she’s pushing ninety but she says she’s 60-something, and has the teeth one seeks in a food vendor). She’s been chewing on a unlit cheroot or big beedie of some kind (like ones I’ve seen from Indonesia), and starts making drinking signs too, so I hand her a glass of whiskey, see her take a swig, then lean all the way to the ground and blow it all through a crack in the floorboards. She hated it! But then she takes a Carlton Fisk wad of the leaves and fires up her Clint Eastwood special, flashes me her crenellated grin, and now we’re fast friends.
It was kind of sad, as if the other 3 falang just faded from the room. We’re drinking and chewing and smoking (I pulled out my pipe and fired up some nice Dunhill 505), and the whole scene becomes _very_ convivial. (the leaves, by the way, taste almost olive-y, and the combo of leaf, salt, chili, ginger is delicious on its own, but does an Aufhebung into something utterly magical with the synergism of the tobacco). Soon enough the old lady asks if I’m married and I say no, and yes, indeed, she suggests her youngest, only 19, the sweet-faced cook who wouldn’t let me take her picture (but I did get one of her hair later in the boat).
So I end with an addendum to the summer-toothed-old-lady-soup principle: whenever one can drink, smoke, and chew narcotic leaves with said ancienne, one must.
A short sweet return, as i have three posts ready for you now, the triptych culminating in another video at post 17. But for now, some last bits on cambodia:
Erratum: What I thought were water buffalo and then called oxen because they were domesticated (and the last image I saw of an asian man riding a water buffalo was depicting life from at least a hundred years ago) were in fact water buffalo . Fantastic. Also explains the tendency to mud bathe.
Day 13, Today the plan is to go a bit higher end, fancy-pants, in search of imbricated flavor combinations and a touch of the haute (perhaps in diametrical response to the fact that my friend yesterday told me I had had the chance to eat rice-paddy rat in Siem Reap and missed it. Fed ex?).
I walk around the whole morning, hitting various markets that of course are fascinating in the extreme (among the pics you’ll see later, prawns the size of small lobsters with hugely long intense cobalt-colored legs; a stand with all the various Cambodian seasoning leaves -- awesome; a tied-up bundle -- bro, a hank? -- of dried bird hatchlings – very strange; fresh pepper, still green, on the stem; and others. (and do click on this one of the hanging dried fish -- they're gorgeous).
One thing I’m looking for is this combination cleaver/ultrabadass peeler/shaver that I’ve seen women using for all kinds of things, including slicing the thinnest disks off an entire bunch of lemon grass at one time. That would save a lot of work (though it might be difficult to explain on the plane). They have little ones, but all the working women have these honking huge ones; I covet. Unsuccessful in my search, I ultimately eat at the 20-stand “food court” inside the central market – massively a-bustle and sweltering – and have a delicious beef and noodle soup (she had big beef bones leaning against her pot – I always take that as a good sign – then she sliced the steak super thin and cooked it by swirling it in a ladle of hot soup before putting it all in my bowl. Delicious.). Almost immediately after, I pass by the first curry stand I’ve seen, so I have a second breakfast of red curry chicken. Not amazing, But I do end up talking at length in French with a Cambodian woman named Bonasy (close to my age) who wants to take me around tomorrow, but I have to leave in the morning, plus speaking French exhausts me. And I get even shyer than normal. The name of my shame, still after all these years: French.
An almost random thought, but something I noticed when I started speaking with Bonasy: Single men among you, have you entered the phase where when you notice a woman, you immediately check for a wedding ring? Do you know when you made that switch? It’s seems to me that it comes on rather subtly. For me it happened some time in the last two years, and it’s interesting how often one can predict that there will be one, even with considerably younger women
Phnom Penh has a lot of temples, and they’re very beautiful. Of course I like the older, deteriorating ones best, so I’ll put up the photos when I can. I also especially like the entranceways to the monasteries; they have intricately carved stone facades above the gates that are very nice. They’re almost my favorite part. (photos someday)
A side note: what are all the fucking backpackers carrying? Those front bags they tote around in addition to the rucksacks are an obscenity, and why are all their bags always jammed-full? Have they already bought everything that they will buy, or do they have to throw something away with each new purpose to keep zero sum? I’ve been here two weeks and not struggled at all having just 2/3 of a small pack of stuff (including a snazzy shirt and Fudgie). Yes, there is laundry service in the third world, and are the backpackers really changing into those goofy outfits. If you’re going to pack your armoire, why not bring a few outfits that look decent? At times I think that each of us is representing our entire color, and good god do white people tend to look bad.
I’m not in especially good spirits. The computer difficulties are driving me crazy; my landlord at this place is cheesy and patronizing (I know, it’s his job, kind of); I asked him for names of good Khmer restaurants and he directed me to one that had an all-English menu outside and prices for dishes starting at $5. Fuck that. My mood did just perk up because in our lobby they have a television that they keep on all day showing the National Geographic channel, and on their most terrifying list (or some such) were featuring things I’ve eaten this week. I feel a new, stronger sense of being king of the foodchain. King of the bleeping foodchain can’t find a restaurant, however, at least not one that looks right, and then realizes he forgot his phrasebook and won’t be able to order anything, plus he will only be able to eat one dish, so a random point and shoot could be a problem (I have yet to send back a morsel on any plate and feel, ethically, that I must continue this policy). In my sad prandial peregrinations, I find myself back at last night’s outdoor market, though this time at the other end, and it’s clearly less Chinese. I buy everything in the row: a bowl of lemongrass beef and rice (I think it might be the “dry” type of curry, “amok”) -- simply outstanding; a skewer of grilled chicken hearts, a childhood fave and very nicely spiced; another nuom salad (quite bitter) and a kind of beef/pickle salad from the same woman (eh); a grilled sausage that comes with banh mi veggies but no bread (I could use some); and a Black Panther premium stout (8%). Nothing haute, I’ll admit, but pretty damn good. Not the worst way to leave Cambodia; I actually think the amok was my favorite thing in Cambodia.
So I decided to wear my fancy shirt to the airport so I could strut around and be supercilious to the backpackers (again, the hypocrisy runs as deep as the vanity). I also got there very early so I could try to change some flights, etc (I realized I didn’t want to spend new years eve in burma). So there’s virtually no one at security, I blow right through, and then the Cambodian passport controller, while giving me the stamp, asks how my visit was. I say wonderful, that the Cambodian people were very friendly, and he says, “You like me? … I like you.” I’m completely caught off guard, mumble something unintelligible, and he says, still holding my passport and exit card: “Travelling alone. No wife or girlfriend. Very good. Born 1969 but still have very young face.” I smile and make nice till he gives me my ID, then make some comment about having a girlfriend waiting for me back home and run to the business lounge. Jesus, the shirt!
So I have a fair bit written (which i'll include below), but the computers here chug along so slowly that it was a miracle that i could upload the video(it took two tries of over an hour each) and i don't have the patience to try with all the photos (pho-tos?). But I thought you should be left with a grand finale, and i clearly wanted to exit (temporarily) with a crunch. With that said, here's the vid -- note, it's not for the squeamish... (and sorry about the lighting -- it gets a little better)
Tomorrow i head to laos, so i might be able to post from the capital, vientiane. but i arrive late and leave early in the morning for a 24-hr bus ride north, then jump on a boat for a 2-day trip through the jungle, and then perhaps another 2-day trip south. soon thereafter i fly to myanmar (burma) where the government is the only ISP and often shuts it down. not sure how much posting i'll be doing. so happy holidays to all; i should be back around jan 5 and hopefully can put up a great big update of adventures both culinary and amorous.
here's the last post, with a few photos
Post 13: A word of explanation: the current title of this blog is actually something I came up with for a column I’m doing for a new magazine that’s launching in the January (details when it’s official). So when I decided at the last minute to try to keep you all with me as I ambled down dusty lanes, pointing paying and eating, I was a little lazy and behind, so I just threw that title up there and continued. In retrospect, there are many titles I could or should have used, among them
*Courting Cestoda (pic below) or Man vs. Microbe
*He Doesn’t Know He’s White
*I Lead with My Stomach
Or it could have been another installment from a series of books I began in my twenties:
*How to Live Like You’re Homeless in the Great Cities of the World…
Any one of those probably would have done the trick, but the one I finally decided on is:
*At the End, I’ll Eat Myself
Hope you like it, and that there’s no more confusion. One other bit of business, my brother is now maraschino-ing my blog with his responses as comments at the bottom of the posts. You will quickly see that he and I are two parallel lines that meet at the roast pork stand. I encourage you to enjoy the smarter, more charming, taller, blonder, stronger, better cooking, more procreative and more worldwise of the two brothers. I got the bigger feet.
Well my time in Siem Reap is coming to an end. I was going to leave this morning, but last night ran into Anthony, an excellent older Irishman (65) former hippie and socialist, as acerbic as I on all topics (just mention politicians, hope, television, tourism, India, or smokeable drugs and you will get a curse-festooned jeremiad), who also has a soft side and gets almost teary talking about the “impressive” and “atmospheric” elements of the temples (though he completely agrees about the ruin, and admits to imagining them in their heyday and how the world has seen nothing like it since). He’s staying at the same guest house, and we spoke yesterday morning at coffee, then ran into each other in town in the evening. I stood him for a few beers 857 while he taught me world history, then confessed to having come to Cambodia to smoke “special cigarettes” – not those kind -- _very _ special cigarettes. So I agreed to follow him to the various bars where such things were rumored to be available. Like many such quests, it all felt foolish and more pathetic than edgy, and eventually I left him to check in with you lovelies.
Apparently, though, unburdened of his collegiate imperial-boy load, he did get offered a few bags of what might have been “China white – the best” or what might have been talcum powder. Not being allowed to test drive it, he passed.
Day 11 The real reason I stayed on, though, is because our landlord told us he’d show us his crocodile farm this morning. I had no idea it would be in the back yard, a giant tank filled with 12 or 15 full-grown monsters. It was stunning. I hope you can tell from the photos that we were pressed against the wall just above the killers, and they were mighty mighty. Incredibly impressive and studly, and I’ve never felt more like a petite fours, sitting on a tray for someone/thing to pop in its mouth as a treat. They stared at me like I stare at the chickens on the rotisserie at Cosco – still too expensive! -- (or like dirty-footed boys would at the lurid goats heads I’d see spinning in the Arab quarters of Paris). It was an interesting and in some ways liberating sensation; my identity had traveled the full distance from man to meal.
So it’s my last day here now, and I have a fair amount of work to do for Agatha, nerve’s photo editor and my own personal Patton. She sends me files -- too sexy to open in public – so large they make the local cables start smoking and send Fudgie into anxiety comas, and to these I’m supposed to write dashing and witty accompanying text. Just what I need, to be revved up even more, so far from ms. harrison and her inimitables, in this fableland peopled only by girls in their teens. (the ceiling fan ticks; the air thickens; the room closes in; droplets form and connect and become rivulets that run down my arms; I feel an invisible jungle that could hotly assimilate me, mulch rising up and to pool me under; so many strands of kudzu twining round my eyes and limbs and throat…)
I could never have edited nerve in the tropics.
A few other things I’ve noticed here in Cambodia: the garbage trucks, such as they are, never seem to have a hood or any protection whatsoever around the engine: it’s just exposed and the driver sits right behind it on his cushioned bench. Odd. Also, one forgets in America what pregnant and nursing dogs look like. Virtually every dog here is dragging its pendulous teats around, looking pretty miserable. My landlord, Wab, told us a story about a male dog coming in to mate with one of his females and he scared it into the crocodile pit, and the dog actually tried to fight. I asked if it escaped and he made some comment about them whacking it and “dog barbecue.”
A sidenote on eating pets. If you are troubled by the idea, and you’re not a vegetarian, then you, my friend, are much hypocrite as I (though mine exhibits itself in other realms). How can you feel okay eating pork (especially if I tell you about the guy driving down the road with a whole live hog tied squealing to the back of his moto) and then worry for or think it unjust that some eats Lassie? I know it’s a clichéd argument, I just had to get it off my chest as I finish the last of these Golden Retriever ribs…
The Cambodians, especially here in Siem Reap since this is the spot of the country’s biggest tourist attraction, really speak a lot of English. I was able to change a watch battery, talk to a young man about bartending as a career (while eating the delicious Nuom salad ), hear all about the crocodile trade from Wab, etc etc. Much as I’ve struggled to learn to say Please, thanks, delicious, yes, no, hi, bye and 1-100,000, I can only imagine how hard it must be for them to become travel agents for Westerners (all speaking differently accented English) and all the rest. I know you know all this already, but it really is marked . (that said, here, as in Vietnam, the phrase I can’t seem to explain to anyone or get them to translate for me, is “What is this called?” Nor do my fucking books list it. And the ironic thing is that every time I try to ask someone, they think I’m asking about some thing and tell me its name, but I can’t get them to understand I want to know how to say the question. Is it a conspiracy?
A few other (among hundreds) of things that have intrigued me: One, that people here can’t do math. All the locals take out calculators to do simple calculations like 4 times 5 or 3% of 20 dollars. Perhaps they are taking 11 hours a day of English classes and that doesn’t leave room for the maths, but it is perplexing. Then there are these ubiquitous large flat wooden carts – almost like a barn door on wheels – covered with tiny clams seasoned heavily on the outside of the shell. These I don’t understand. I also don’t understand why this exact place that I choose to have fruit shakes and type these words seems, within minutes of my arrival, to be the Port Authority station of flies. They don’t seem to be after my drink, so am I to conclude that I’m honey sweet without knowing it? Or more like a giant piece of dogshit?
Forgot to mention the rapport I developed with a very old man who was always squatting on the sidewalk on the route to the old market, watching traffic. I’d see him every time I passed, always said hi, and he would flash me a hysterically bad-toothed grin. I think there might have been some betel nut in there, but wow, what a mouth (apart from which he was actually quite handsome). Just past him, the tuk tuk drivers would see me coming and imitate my stormtrooping gate, then howl. Clearly I was a neighborhood favorite
I’ve been on the lookout for a good pair of sandals, only problem is that my feet look like Sasquatch prints next to any of the local products. In Saigon, I had barely started to glance at a woman’s offerings and she shouted “No fit!” I had no choice but to slink away sheepishly. Then today some girls were laughing as I pulled out a sandal and then looked at my paw. Alas.
Day 12: I was really looking forward to the bus ride, considering how magical the trip up was (and since I had just had my best breakfast yet, though it seemed rather Vietnamese), until the bus driver started literally blaring Cambodian pop schmalz and playing the videos on a TV. Putting in my ear plugs, it lowered from 108 to 103 decibels, and within minutes I knew there’d be no appreciation this trip, but at least I could buy a bag of spiders and crickets and take them to the bar.
No dice. We fucking stop at two bus-friendly restaurants (ugh), and I end up just getting a sliced-up mango and an iced coffee. The good news is that the young Cambodian guy next to me on the trip is a tour guide at Angkor, speaks good English, and tells me where to go to get a cheap guest house (if any of you want to go to Siem Reap, I have his card; he’d be willing to pick you up in Phnom and facilitate as much or as little as you’d want. Good guy), and ultimately tells a moto driver for me -- very sweet (and notice how with no plans, things do keep working out. This I’ve always called the Rufus principle, and it’s always made me furious because I never used it, overpreparing instead to little or no benefit). It’s as if the universe in collusion to loosen me up. You’ve got a long way to go…
Well, call it a homing device. I found Phnom Penh’s so-called “bug market” within an hour of my arrival (the fact that it’s outside of the walls of the Silver Pagoda helped, as did it being right by the river, always my first destination, but I really had no idea where it was). It’s a good thing I promised you I’d eat one of the giant winged roaches because I’m still scared shitless and dying to back out. They’re huge! I had just bought two, trying to look cool, when an asian man, seeing me get them, made a kind of “oooh” noise that was not at all encouraging. I think the way I’m going to have to do it is make a little video for you all and try to post it. The comical thing is that I feel like I should eat them tonight so I don’t leave them in my room overnight and attract more……of them! (Bro has a great story of having a few bananas in his “hotel” room in New Orleans and waking up to a menagerie).
Apart from the abject terror of my bar snacks tabbed for later, somehow Phnom Penh doesn’t feel quite right. The traffic, though not as bad as Saigon, is annoying; none of the street food seems appealing (and all of it very familiar by now, until I get a little crepe-like thing with sweetened condensed milk drizzled inside, grilled as I watch in a golfball of butter – now that was incredible, if potentially instant infarction-inducing). I finally find a market back near my guest house (after circling for half an hour toting the bugs), and hunger forced me to get some completely lackluster Chinese fried beef and noodles (he had a wok full of excellent looking seasoned beef, then my plate came and the strips were naked. That ain’t the way to treat a future autophage!). I think tomorrow I’ll take Ron’s advice (and Bernie Bernbaum’s threat) and start eating in restaurants. But I think if I return to Cambodia, I’ll do the bike trip between here and Siem Reap and avoid both cities. By the time Jeremy meets me in Bangalore, I’m probably going to have rented a mule to carry our bags as we foot our way, village to village, on the road to Mumbai.
Forgive me, my dearies, for that somewhat melancholic ending (and also these sideways photos, which it would take me about an hour to fix); occasionally the Weltschmerz gets to me, no matter how idyllic the real manages to be. And for the record, not only am I exceptionally happy here, I’m literally bubbling over with the life I get to return to when I come home. It is true that there seems to be a little bit of membrane between me and the most important elements of life (I’m in a blissful open relationship, but Sarah lives with her long-time boyfriend; my two magical sons are being raised 100 miles away; my job is there too and seems to be dissolving; bro has moved to the burbs; I’m subletting both my apartments and living among the progenitors and pooches of Park Slope, etc etc). And yet from those shards of seemingly broken matzoh, an integral whole does add up, strange as it may be. I almost cancelled this trip again to not leave any of it, so when I slurp my last noodle, burp my last pani puri, and fly my honkie-ass, exploiting self home, I will be gleeful. Today I go to the temples. Last night’s meals were tasty but not amazing (Ron actually wrote and said that to get the finest of the subtle Cambodian flavor combinations, I might have to eat in restaurants – and he also said that the boggy countryside I went through is actually flooded up to the road much of the year, and the children play on the tarmac like it’s their yard. Wow.). I rent a dilapidated bike from my guest house (it’s too short, squeaky, with bad brakes and a semiflat tire – I quickly realize that on this front I might have gone first class, had I the opportunity) and knee-chest, knee-chest my way the 10k out to Angkor. For those of you male readers who haven’t figured it out yet (and lord knows I need a refresher course every other day), believing in oneself is the source of all error. I thought I knew the route; of course I got lost, ending up at the far exit of Angkor (where you can’t buy the $20 entrance pass to get in) and had to circle all the way back around to do it the right way. By this point I’m about 20km in, livid, and my left knee keeps making a soft pop noise if I deviate even slightly from a perfect circle in my pedaling. So when the local girls start screaming if I want water, a guide book, a hat, to park my bike, etc, I get more surly than I’d like to have been. One girl actually says she’s going to steal my bike because I said no to her offer of a parking spot for a water and then went and made the same deal at another stall. I really just need T-shirts in all the languages of Asia that say, I don’t like to be screamed at. They’d keep me from having to walk to the Chinatown bus holding my ticket up like an anti-salesgirl talisman and being punched on the arm by the vendors from the other company. Angkor Wat, the big doozie, comes first, another reason one should be able to enter where I biked to so it can be one’s grand finale. I’m embarrassed to say that I walked through and back out again and thought I had gone to the wrong temple. It was impressive, but not like the photos. When you get close you see just how ravaged the 800-yr-old marvel is. (it made me think that the similarly vintaged Chanson de Roland is still going strong – though my copy is help together with a rubberband – and if you want real immortality, better to be a writer than an architect -- not that I have any such grandiose ambitions…) It also made me remember what I had read of a Burmese temple: that the suzerain or whatever he was called back then had all his laborers killed when they completed it, so no one else could ever have such fine work. Tell the wind, my friend; tell the rain and the ages. It’s true we don’t have such fine work anymore, but the one maiden example you left behind can’t defend herself from all time’s suitors. I was somewhat depressed. To recycle a metaphor I first stole (it was applied by its original speaker to trying to reading Garcia Marquez in English, though I used it in latest book to speak of Goethe in the Queen’s), I felt like I was looking at the underside of a Persian rug; I could see what might have been there, but I couldn’t see it there. Or not much of it, not enough. Enough to marvel, to think of the slaves, the power, the odd way human history has always played out (what’s Horkheimer’s -- Benjamin's andrew says, and he's the rigorous one -- line? “All great works of civilization are monuments to barbarism”). The photo here is of one trace of the level of filigree; googleimage Angkor Wat and you’ll see the whole structure and imagine how it must have been. The next temple, the famous Bayon with its carved faces (the pic at the top of this post) in the “town” of Angkor Thom 3 kilometers deeper in, was better preserved (as you can see ). Eventually I would spend some quiet solitude (which makes all the difference – these are temples, after all) near this crumbling one863, then, at the temple Ta Prohm, was in literal awe of the spung tree (aka octopus tree) 864 865and the prodigious abilities of its roots. Plus there was one growing right on top part of the temple 866 – thus causing it to crumble – and again I thought, “Nature always wins.” By the time I was done biking the circuit, I thought I might have to spend the rest of my days being carried around in a milk crate, so on the road home I stopped and got a sugarcane juice (in a plastic bag, as they sell iced drinks to go), sucked it down (yum!) and pressed the remaining ice to one knee, then the other. Passing through the outlying, riverfront shanties 2868 of Siem Reap, I knew I had to eat, so I surprised an old lady by wanting to look under all her pot lids. I followed her recommendation and had the cold fish soup – very delicate and nice, though the fish itself was a little funky (and my bone trick needs work). 867 Utterly scored though after home and a shower and a nap, walking into town I bought a banana-leafed roll being grilled by an old lady. Turned out to be sticky rice filled with now-slightly-liquifying banana, 869 and the grilled side was brown and crisped and caramelly. SO good. Then of course I had to sample the local beef jerky, lest my brother disown me, and here’s how it came. 871 Meat unknown, even after eating. Now I’m having a 50-cent mango shake outside, in lieu of the two-dollar coffee, and Fudgie is getting a lot of attention (a tuk tuk driver, whom I “spoke” to yesterday while eating my papaya salad, comes over and watches me type. I’m thinking of Levi-Strauss’ “Writing Lesson” among the Nambikwara, just updated for 21st century technology). Fudgie, by the way, gets his name by being a tiny Fujitsu lifebook, which I couldn’t believe they didn’t call the Fudge, considering how cute he is, and so now he’s Fudgie or occasionally the Fudginator. I’m sorry I just wasted a minute of your life telling you that. You can’t get that minute back. But yes, you can order my straight jacket now. There are many more flies when you don’t spend two dollars.
Day 9, breakfast Walking into town, I stop for a gorgeous if forgettable bowl of noodles and vegetable medley. The cook had another pot, though, that looked spicy, so tomorrow I’ll try that. Plus her son was very friendly; he leads guides of the temples in German, but we didn’t succeed in speaking that language together very well, nor did English go any better. Oh well. Still far behind on this chronicle (and on my column intro for Kasia, plus needing to get back to Lucinda about a change she wanted to make to my book intro), I wanted to do some serious work, so I brought Fudgie and looked for a decent place to have a coffee. Unlike Saigon, Siem Reap doesn’t seem to have much of a café culture, at least for locals. So I end up having to take a seat at a very swanky colonial hotel open air bar, where my white ass suddenly realizes it’s sitting on cushions not plastic, my pate notices the fan overhead, I eventually go to a loo that’s walled in exquisite fabric and smells of lavender (with a functional flush toilet), and I think, so this is what it’s like. Again, with my haircut I couldn’t look more like an imperialist, so all I need now is my linen and silk 3-piece suit that I wore to Amanda’s wedding and I’d be set. Coolies bringing me ice and whiskies and dinner at the ambassador’s and the trade, the mine, the banana plantation and lord knows how these people live in such climes… I have no idea what my coffee will cost, and I was honestly surprised: only two bucks (one anywhere else is 50 cents). That, given the service, the view, and the two hours work I got done, is money well spent. I might go back even today.
Day 9, lunch -- momentous
I haven’t yet described how just off the central market is a seedy parking lot market of much less tourist-friendly cooked-food stalls. That’s where I got yesterday’s river fish (4 for 75 cents) and the snake (50 cents) and where I’ve concluded I’m going to get pretty much everything. So leaving my colonist’s privilege, I flip to the other side of imperialism and order a plate of truly exquisite looking tripe . The woman selling it had four or five pots of stuff, but this looked so incredibly good, I thought that the standard offal pun was worth risking. Plus I love Lao tripe salad (called laab, similar to the thai larp, though they use other meats), and I thought this could be related (the woman was cutting lettuce). One note about laab, as my brother knows, I prefer it cooked to raw (thus another of our policies: if ordering an unknown meat, and asked if you if you want it raw or cooked, better start with cooked. And, for the record, raw tripe strips taste _very_ transgressive, if you know what I mean). This, though, was more like a curry or a stew, and the tripe was shockingly pleasant, with none of the funkiness, rubberiness or unpleasantness it often has. Delicious. As usual, I exchange a few words with the people at my table; one guy seems upset that I’m not taking a spoon (I realize eventually that that’s the utensil for your left hand, and perhaps the left hand is not to be eaten with, as in India, for obvious reasons). Not taking a spoon might well have said, I have a flush toilet – or it might have said worse, considerably worse. But then… Oh my. Let me pause, reader, and quote the note in my journal, written before she started speaking, “Utter bomb sits down next to me, also eating tripe.” I am undone (and clearly my journal will one day rival Pepys’…) Of course I try to hide myself in the aroma of my rice, but eventually she asks if I’d like to try the side dish she’s eating, which she calls Cambodian cheese (it’s the shu mei filling-like stuff in the pic – very strong and intense, so much so I’m not even sure I liked it). Her English is quite good. Her name is Machai; she comes from a village north of here; she would invite me but there is no road. She borrowed her sister’s moto, as she works here one day a week selling magazines. She tells me that the tripe dish we’re having is called cha. She says she wants to study law but probably can’t pay for it. She’s yet to start university. She’s 19. “I’m 40,” I say. “An old man.” “Not so old,” she says, “and still handsome.” Something inside me falls, like a marble rolling off a table. She is delicately, intricately beautiful. Her lips are full and her skin impeccable; I imagine how light the down must be on her belly, how smooth her legs. She speaks in a light, shy voice, so tender-seeming I don’t even feel predatory, merely appreciative. I bumblingly say that if she wants to practice her English later (of course I don’t say see me later), we could have dinner. She doesn’t quite agree or disagree to this, but she writes down her name and number, and I tell her the name of my guest house and that she should call there and leave a message if she wants to meet up. But somehow this seems to confuse or scare her, and there’s awkwardness. I get up and leave, somewhat hastening to get away from whatever the possibilities are of the situation. Some part of me doesn’t want to know, to let myself really desire her, to think her real and thus unsheathe the blade. She said she gets off work at 5, but I mis-time my arrival at the market and, when 5 strikes, I’ve already eaten the lemongrass and tamarind stew you see above. I could haunt the market for another half hour, but the beggars have discovered me and, again, I’m afraid of disappointment, equally probable whether she would show up or not. This is not the first of my encounters with women here; I have been noticing a lot of smiles since I arrived in Cambodia. In Saigon, every now and then a woman would flash me a look. In a residential back alleyway, there was a young mother of transcendent proportions in a black wife-beater who gazed up from her shrimp-grilling and melted me. A younger girl in Cholon followed me with her eyes half a block before I noticed (so said Martin); our eyes locked for 100 yards, and, when I turned half a block past her, she was still entreating. But here such looks are more common, and they’re often from quite young girls. I think the difference in age really doesn’t matter to them, or at least they become mothers here so seemingly young, that a girl of 16 can give me very adult glances. It’s disturbing in the way some of Sally Mann’s photos are disturbing (and why I can easily understand her persecution): you don’t want to be vulnerable, but you can’t help yourself, and then you feel the truth: the creakiness of your knees, your crow’s feet, your difference, the inability, and you think how strange that mere desire can be so crafty as to pass itself off as real longing, that one can drink so deep from the cup of naivete as to momentarily imagine not just physical contact with the girl but life. And then with the bitter tinge of the touch never comes (nor even a kiss, which in itself would transport), you somehow feel as though one of your lives flashed from a doorway and was lost. It’s not true; that life would have had no more substance than the phantom that it was, yet still part of you thinks it real and mourns. Perhaps if we could see desire for what it is, then we would never lose sight of life as it is too: my happiness at home, my fulfillment, the fact that I wouldn’t exchange it and Sarah and you my friends and my brother and the New York I love for anything at all. I know I am not a man to cheat, for even when I covet, I soon wake from the reverie and all my sugarplum projections. But odd, no, how quickly at hand and seemingly real those sugarplums can momentarily be?
So now I’m back in the colonial splendor, insulated by the unlikeliness that Machai would ever walk down this block. Instead I can gaze on the white college girls and their panty lines, the elegant draping ladies emerging from the rooms upstairs, the beautiful wait staff and their wet-chestnut colored skin, and the business skirts passing on motos. It’s good that the drinks here are so expensive or I might start having Pernods -- and that could lead this often sad and sort of young and sort of old man to weeping. It’s very hard to be with others; it’s very hard to be alone.
Day 8, morning: --TMI ALERT-- : --TMI ALERT-- Henceforth no TP. Details on request.
Day 8, breakfast/lunch: I leave my guest house and discover that it’s right along the river and a nice walk to the central market, where I find an awesome array of food possibilities. I begin with a fried pomfret (sweet and very yummy) -- picture went up yesterday and i can't seem to retrieve it -- and a bowl of rice and 5 or 6 chilis, which is a very nice way to defibrillate your day.
Inside the market (which is densedensedense – photo to follow), I sample a bunch of munchies: somewhat candied olives and unpleasant round fruits; various pickles, sort of chinese-style; some dried banana flakes and tamarinds which I can’t figure out how to eat (don’t bite through the latter unless you want your tongue soured to a crisp); and some tasty deep fried stuffed hot peppers, cauliflower, and green beans with a spicy dipping sauce. Eventually I also get 4 small grilled whole unscaled ungutted river fish; I’m not sure if I was supposed to eat the skin and scales, but they didn’t suit me so much. The flesh was pretty tasty (and healthy for a change) and I’m learning how to deal with the infinity of pin bones: you chew and chew back near your molars, and the fish will flake off leaving the bones behind. (I’m only trying this because at the $2.50 Malaysian place I used to go to deep off Canal street, I’d see worker guys put nearly a whole fish in their mouths at once, masticate/whorl it around for a minute and then take a ball of de-fished bones out of their mouths at the end. Amazing.)
It’s very pleasant walking around here. Traffic is light, people are friendly when I acknowledge them, there are definitive non-tourist places just off where all the honkies congregate (and where I go check email and post these rather Western blogs), and there’s interesting food everywhere. I’m supposed to be here for the temples, but first I have to catch up on the writing (and sleeping, which is going better) and eat a few more things, then I’ll be ready for some high culture. All the final papers from my two classes were due today, so I had a lot of grading and stuff to do as well, so most of my day was spent in an internet café. I took a break though to have a shredded papaya salad – one of my faves, and this one with small crab legs and claws (in the shell) pounded up into it – interesting addition, though not necessarily preferable.
At the center of the central market, I also make a nice discovery: first thinking that I’m seeing little slices of dried sausage (a guaranteed must-buy), I realize it’s actually betel nut -- which I chewed in India and wasn’t really fond of if it wasn’t rolled in a paan. But by association that helped me realize therefore that the small, clear unmarked bag of almost black-colored shredded what-I-thought-was seaweed was actually tobacco, perhaps akin to that smoked by Solomon on the ferry (one note: the only betel-chewer I’ve seen here so far was a beggar grandmother. So if the same stand sells loose tobacco, it might well be grandpa’s skankweed). Of course I buy a bag, and luckily I had brought papers in case I ever wanted to roll my pipe tobacco into cigarettes (I know how effective smoking can be as a social device – dammit, maybe I’m not that shy). So I “spin” up one of these (in my bro’s lingo), fire it, and good god, _that_ is some strong tobacco. Gauloises’ patented dry-roasted dogshit flavor has nothing on my Cambodian’s local smoke. Not even inhaling, I’m airborne within a few puffs. It’s stronger even than I remember beadies in India to have been (though I will certainly confirm in a few weeks); the only comparison I have is with some cigarettes from Russia I had in college; they had a super dark tobacco packed entirely into the first third of the smoke (that’s how they came in the pack) and the other two thirds of the cigarette was just a cardboard tube. The tobacco in that front third was so tight it was almost like a brick, then you’d smoke it and it was rough and rugged and harsh but super flavorful. Bro, I have to think Clint’s cheroots – or at least the soggy butt-ends that il brutto smoked – must have tasted something like this. Apparently in Burma you can buy single cheroots in the tea houses; i intend to sample many.
Day 8, dinner
Finally it’s dinner time and the macho theme continues to prevail. I happen to get, independently, two components of a truly masculine meal. The first is what was called on the box “Muscle Wine,” i.e. the local liquor, which I feel it’s my duty to try. I’ve had the Vietnamese Mekong whiskey; this is darker colored, as you can see, like a Gosling’s Rum and tastes like black liquorice (not anise-y but like black twizzlers) – surprisingly ok. The other half of my man’s meal, as I’m sure you noticed above, is Satan from the garden of eden, this time strung up as he deserved and put over charcoal, basted with local flavors and grilled till tough.
Lucifer doesn’t go easily. I can barely get my teeth through the skin, and then it almost seems like it’s full of bones (it’s the internal structure of the snake that allows it its movement) and firm fatty bubbles like the pigskin bits you find in Portuguese sausage. It would be worth it, but the flavor again is quite new, and this time less welcome, sort of musty and funky and gamey, the way I’d imagine opossum would taste (though god knows I might soon find that out too).
I ultimately have very little of either of my male enhancers, probably good since I couldn’t be more stag, and the 37-yr-old French librarian, whose name I noticed on the guest register just above mine, tragically checked out this morning. Quelle dommage (craigslist.fr rencontres perdus?).
I've finally had time to tell the full story, so i'm going to re-post the photos from installment 8, inset in the text (andrew, blogger king, told me how), and you should get it the right way. Here we go:
Day 7: If you know me well, you will have heard me say that the gods of irony are the only gods there are. Fine, I’m talking out of my ass, but whatever your denomination, you’ll agree that they make their presence felt in more than abundant vestigia. So on the heels of a misanthropic post for which I took a little deserved heat (yes, I know I should give everybody a chance -- just as, theoretically, I could give ever restaurant a chance -- but I have reason to suspect that my hunches on both fronts are often correct when they scream out, “Must avoid” …), I find myself not only speaking to but befriending a Cambodian on the bus to Siem Reap (launching city for some of the world’s finest temples, including the famous Angkor Wat). My new pal, Bunthon, will ultimately facilitate some intense and fabulous insider experiences that I’ll try to detail to some degree, but yesterday left me so mouth- and eye-overloaded (they literally ached in their orbits from gawking), I’m not sure what I’ll be able to do it all justice. (And, yes, Plaegian, I also realize that it could be your creator could have sent Bunthon – my own chainsmoking Beatrice -- to remind me of the errance of last post, but for now I’ll stick to my theological guns.)
Ok, so I decided to bus to Cambodia instead of heading to the Mekong delta and boating up because some months ago Lisa advised against the latter, saying it was “most touristy – horrid.” Normally I love river travel, but then again I prefer it if I’m traveling alongside the river, by foot along the quays or amid the leftover condoms and syringes on the banks (cue the Suttree descriptions). Plus I felt pretty contented with Saigon; the parts that I wanted to explore on foot I did, and to do anything else I would have had to strap myself to the back of a man and be motorbiked around (which, as with having to be marsupialed to a masculine in my first skydive, would have taken some of the fun out of it.) I am sad, though, to have missed Cu Chi, the unbelievably elaborate – and therefore that much more depressing – tunnel system built by the Vietnamese soldiers to elude the Americans during the war. If you want to know just how awful man can make life for man, these will rival anything this side of the harshest imprisonment or slavery.
Off I went to my little bus; I had stockpiled peanut butter sandwiches, steamed buns (which all prove to be awful), the veggie/meat/rice dish (inedible), water, and pickled salads. My brother mistakenly warned me about getting bahn mis for the trip, as he ended up with an infernally spicy one for his 12-hr ride, resulting in no small discomfort (I’m going to try to believe him that those particular chilis were extra hot…), so there was little threat of that. I’m sure he would have been much happier had I duplicated his experience. Still, I went to such lengths to make sure to have a light pack when I left the states; now with my one-day’s provisions, I was carrying what felt like 40 kilos. On the way out of Saigon, I mostly took notes for my forthcoming post on the erotics of girls on scooters (especially with the terrorist-looking cloth masks they often wear over their faces because of the smog, and with the long armguards that look like 50s Hollywood starlet gloves). I’ll make sure to post one of my photos as an example, as soon as I find one that doesn’t feature two schoolgirls in uniform riding tandem…
Once we’re into the countryside, it’s not long before we reach the Cambodian frontier. Wouldn’t it be nice to be a border guard, to have no trace of humanity whatsoever, to be more dour and joyless than American socialists, and to spend your day making people’s lives atrocious? Such a great group of men. Mercifully, one of the perks of the tourist bus is that we are assisted with our visa applications, otherwise I’d probably still be trying to convince the authorities that all those articles on Nerve are by some other jack murnighan.
Cambodia. Wow. It’s immediately different (and not only because there are enormous American and American-style casinos just inside the border check – and shanties across the street). Obviously the script is different, and it’s suddenly a bit scary to not be able to make out signs, even when I consult my supposed alphabet (who is this publisher Thomas Cooke, anyway. His fucking language books are utter fucking shite. Again, since they’re intended for brits, aussies, and us, it’s probably a Volume II of the Proust situation; they make them out of garbage because they don’t think anyone is ever actually going to open them).
After the language and Vegas Bally’s – no joke (oh, and the billboard for Tiger beer that says, It’s better on top, enjoy winning!) -- you immediately notice roadside stands with shelves of old Johnny Walker red and black bottles refilled with yellow liquid. Of course, I wanted to pull over and swill whatever it was; only later did I realize that these are gas stations, and the bottles contain petrol. And then you notice the marshiness -- man, this country is wet! The Netherlands are reputedly under sea level, and apparently huge chunks of Bangladesh wash away after a bad monsoon (killing dozens of times as many people as 9/11, by the way), but I’ve never seen a place as swampy or fen-ny or boggy or rice-paddy-y or however it should properly be described. It’s beautiful. The houses are mostly like shanties on stilts, though in some cases they’re still ground-level – perhaps floating – and connected to the road by long wet narrow single-tree-trunk footbridges that would make Nadia Comaneche a little nervous (though I saw a young girl just walk over one like it was nothing).
There are cows everywhere, most on leashes by the roadside; there are exquisite, quite impressively horned, slate-colored oxen (I saw an old man squatting by a mud lake then noticed his plow team lolling up to their eyeballs in the muck – very sweet); there is an abundance of pool tables (don’t ever bet money with a skinny Asian man at a poohall); there was a troupe of men pulling a highwire cable down the length of the road like some mythic snake; there was a boy chin-deep in the flood washing his cow, and when he saw the bus coming, he started jumping up and down and waving; and on and on. And then we got to the ferry.
The ferry. Good god. We bipeds need water, clearly, but in overabundance it is our natural enemy. Not a large river that we were crossing, but an utter impasse for the less-moneyed, to them the very earth’s rim. So they congregate, and they accumulate, and the better-off ones pack themselves into Toyota van and onto Toyota vans and mash their cargo into and onto Toyota vans until the rear is tied up in such a distended state it looks like my sister-in-law, Hillary, walking backward in her present gravitude. (the photo above was actually a rather light load compared with some others. Then today I saw two Toyota light pickups each with literally 30+ people in and on them. Unfucking real.)
To serve these masses, women and kids with trays and bags and racks of food, none of which I can purchase, tragically, as my fancy tourist bus’s windows are sealed for the AC. Ugh. So many things I would have liked to try, though I must admit, as noted above, that I wasn’t quite ready to cross the Rubicon of the giant flying cockroaches (you realize that each one is the length of my palm! And wide! And thick! Good god, biting into one of those you would have detonated a pint of bug gelatin into your mouth). Looking into a van, I see a little boy eating tiny live shrimp and an impossibly old man rolling a cigarette (wide-gauge, like I roll them) from a yellowed bag of the skankiest tobacco I’ve ever seen (which gave me ideas…). My eyes were paining from the exertion, and I finally thought, Ah, ferry-town ferry, shuttle me to and fro, shuttle me amid all and all, fore and back till I’ve seen all that is see-able, all one can witness, and then let Charon take the rudder…
We continue. Through Phnom Penh where we stop and I pho á la Hanoi and we start again, hamstrung in city traffic (but oh, girls on motos…), and I see the sublime and unexpected beauty of a truck carrying 10,000 unboxed bottles of fish sauce. Eventually we leave the city and begin driving by villages and countryside of enormous beauty. The people when I make eye contact smile. I wave and they laugh and the bus moves on.
Eventually we stop at a roadside market, where I see the tray of tarantulas and again fail the nut-check. But then a man who has been on the bus, who had pho at the same place in Phnom that I had pho, who I took to be Indian or Pakistani, bends to order the spiders, and I say, Ah, you are getting them. And he says, Yes, do you want to try? Now I believe you will all understand that it’s one thing to wuss out alone (I disappoint myself with utter impunity) but when there’s a witness… So of course I can’t demur. He hands me a gooey object and it is surprisingly large and even a little heavy. I ask if you eat the whole thing and he looks at me like I’m an idiot, then nods, tilting his head back as if to say, Chug it. I bite off the headside half. And chew. And swallow. And smile. It tastes a bit candied, actually, not sweet but sticky and chewy like a cross between chiccharones and tamarind paste (or sun chips and a prune). The flavor is not one that had been logged in my register, but it was somewhere on the line between fruit and meat, again a bit plummy, though if you could imagine a plum with no sweetness, or like a jerky made out of a particularly delicate mango-fed beef. Not amazing, mind you, but good enough that I ate one again later (as you will see).
Apparently once the vendors see you eating spiders, they open the floodgates. Out come the locusts (or grasshoppers for the less eschatological among you) or crickets, which Andrew tells me this is (hell if i know -- to it looked way to big to be a cricket). They too are fried (what dubious thing isn’t put in oil?), and here I had heard that the outside was crunchy and the inside a vile substantial pudding. But again, how could I say no in front of my new friend? In one goes, whole (I really didn’t want to see the color of the pudding), and to my surprise it was genuinely good. Again a bit like a candy, with a wafery crisp outside and then, yes, pudding, but pudding that tasted a bit like coconut cream. My friend, Bunthon, tells me both the tarantulas and the locusts are the specialty of this particular village, and, as I’ve never heard a Westerner say they liked a fried insect, it could be that these are particularly good specimens of the same, the Kobe steaks of edible horrorfilm beasts. (but then I admit to a somewhat large palate; take Marmite: if you don’t grow up eating the stuff, you’re not supposed to be capable of liking it, and I _love_ Marmite…)
Anyway, now Bunthon and I are friends. I ask him if he knows anyone who runs a guest house; of course he does and he’d be happy to take me. (I’d be suspicious, but I have no room reserved and he seems genuinely friendly). It turns out he is one of the Cambodian reps for a pan-SE Asian tour company, South Breeze Travels, and would be happy to hook any of you up with as fancy a trip as you want. Actually, he wants me to do it and charge you whatever I can get, keeping the commission. Email me at the address in my profile…)
When we get to Siem Reap, instead of taking me immediately to the guest house, he invites me home for dinner with his wife and family (at the sound of the word wife I took a deep internal sigh of relief. Right, Leif?). Of course I accept, awkward as I feel, and we are tuk-tukked back to his house. In I stroll, forgetting to take my sandals off (it’s my first invite in, and I had forgotten protocol). I meet his family; his toddler son screams in fear when I look at him; his 4 yr-old is afraid too but eventually starts taking my picture and everybody and everything’s picture (his camera) and then won’t stop showing me his homework and dragging me around by the finger.
Bunthon and his wife are excellent hosts; dinner is served on the floor, and consists not only of the fried delectables from the market (which the kids eat up like fries) but sour fish soup which you spoon onto your rice and add a little chili (every time I have grabbed the chili spoon since I’ve been in Asia everyone looks fearful). Then strips of beef and an incredible tray of the standard Cambodian vegetable medley: sliced cucumber, basil leaves, the herb I photographed that Bunthon had no English name for, lettuce chunks, cabbage, carrot disks, and shredded banana flower (the spirally pink/red thing). This you dip with the beef in with one of two killer sauces – unbelievable. One of them Bunthon says is very Cambodian and that Thai and Vietnamese people don’t like it. (I admit that the difference was lost on me; had he had said it was very Thai or Vietamese and that Cambodians don’t like it, my taste buds would have been none the wiser). He also poured me a beer and himself one, and was sad when wouldn’t have a second, though he did. Then he made me have one when he had his third. Then he said I could spend the night there (which I refused only because I had gotten so little sleep, and my awkwardness was reaching its apogee) and apologized for keeping me so long while he had his fourth. “I like beer way too much,” he said, then drove me through the dark bumpy streets on the back of his motorcycle.
Arrived in cambodia. much, much, much to tell (and perhaps i'm somewhat less misanthropic than advertised). details to follow.
also, yes, that's my haircut. i forgot to mention that i got one. i splurged and spent $2.50 at a nicish men's place where i was offered my first manicure. i declined.
finally, if you don't already know, i'm a fundamentally lonely and massively insecure person in need of steady transfusions of affirmation; small surprise, then, that i check to see if the posts get any responses and light up when they do (even when i'm being scolded). i also light up upon receiving private emails, pictures, and cash contributions, as you prefer. thank you for caring.
post to follow, once i resolve some technical difficulties. poor fudgie...
liquid -- for the sensitive, such as myself! (also note how the ketchup label advertises hot peppers. hot peppers, however, are not among its ingred- ients...)
soon after the fall: horse steaks and dried horse sausage, the latter of which is complex and delicious in the extreme. i'll be cooking up the steaks tonight and will report back. but based on the color of the meat, they should be scrumptious.
