A long-lost article about Greyhound-ing around the U.S.

America Unfiltered: 45 Days on the Greyhound

My forehead is oily and my ticket is sticky in my pocket before I get on my first bus. I'm an hour early, but the line is already snaking around the once-velvet ropes. There are families camped out: children sitting on suitcases, women evil-eyeing me as they huddle plastic sacks. There's a three-year-old girl with lollipop-stained lips who seems somehow fascinated with me, her big eyes wax as she watches me watch her until her mom pulls on her shoulder and makes her sit down. 10 minutes before the bus is supposed to leave, a woman rushes up with her young son. They have three large pieces of luggage plus a lot of pillowcases packed with everything they can hold. It's 12:30 in the morning, and she's wheezing from running to catch this bus. The son seems disoriented; he doesn't even know where they're going. She has two fresh black eyes.
I'm not your normal traveler, not this time. I've bought a ticket that most people don't know about -- Greyhound's unlimited travel pass, bargain-priced and good for 7, 14, 30, 45, or 60 days, based on how much of America you want to roll over. My ticket is for 45 days, and I'm going to stay on as much as I can endure. I say endure, but this is no David Blaine test of my willpower and capacities. No, I'm riding the bus because I believe in the bus. I used to ride a lot; by the end of college I would have logged enough frequent-rider miles to get a free ticket to Europe -- if anybody had been counting, and if you could ride a Greyhound to Gatwick. But this time it's different: I'm not trying to get from A to B, not riding the 'hound because it's cheaper, because I made my plans at the last minute, because I'm afraid of flying (which I'm not) or incapable of driving (ditto), because I'm leaving my abusive husband at 12:30 in the morning son in tow, or for any other of the typical reasons people find themselves busboard; I'm riding to listen, to listen and to look. Every time I've ridden the bus for more than 24 hours, something memorable happened, something tragic or comic or most likely both, something beautiful, if you can see it that way. And that's what I want to do, to see it that way, this country, its people. America, unfiltered.
She's open-armed, this nation of ours, and not too pricey. The ride-all-I-want 45-day pass, off-season (the summer is the only high season) puts me back $439, no tax. My provisional itinerary has me travelling 11,000 miles, which works out to 4 cents a mile -- pretty much the price of gas if I was doing it in a Geo. Greyhound calls its unlimited travel tickets the AmeriPass, and though I expect to see foreign teenagers using such tickets to do the U.S. bus version of Eurail-ing, in fact nobody seems to know the AmeriPass exists, even the drivers, who give me suspicious glances when I show it as my ticket. They seem to be thinking, "I get paid to be on this damn thing all week; what the hell are you doing it for?"
The simple answer is that when you're sardined in with people for a day or two or three, they tell you things -- things to pass the time, tales of joy to expose their identity, stories of sorrow to create complicity. On the long hauls, people tell you things they probably don't tell their close friends because they're going to see those friends again. But not me; they'll never see me again, so they let it roll, all the long, lovely, bitter, back-breaking truth of it. For hours I listen.
By Miami I have no ankles. From New York it's a straight shot down I-95, 31 hours Greyhound time, barring flats or missed connections or passengers popping caps in each other. But I'm holding so much water that from my calf muscle to my foot it looks like a loaf of Wonder bread. Still, I want to keep riding; I've got a friend in Atlanta where I can crash, and it's only another 24 hours. Waiting for the bus to depart, I meet an evangelist from Cameroon. He's surprised I know where Cameroon is; I'm surprised he's here. He says he's supposed to be taking a religion course in Ft. Meyers, but he spent all his money just to make it to Miami. Nothing left for the bus to get him there or for a place to stay when he arrives. "But God will provide," he says, and seems calm. To me it looks about 50/50.

*****

Crossing Florida along almost any latitude line is an invitation to depression. Depressed economy, obscene scenery -- or lack thereof -- just blankness, vacancy, and sugar fields wedged between once-exquisite coastlines, now poxed with cheap motels. It doesn't get worse than central Florida, and apparently everyone agrees, because I was the only passenger on the bus from Miami to Tampa. I sat in the front with the driver, a steady hand who had driven for Greyhound 25 years already and had a lot of stories to tell.
Greyhound drivers, as any regular passenger knows, are predominantly a no-frills, Bryl-creamed, sterling-haired bunch of tattoo-sporting tough guys, Navy guys and marines, would-have-been cops who needed stable income with less risk (apparently) since the missus probably had a bun in the oven. And so it starts, that story, and it doesn't end until 30 odd years have passed and they've seen and lived through more human psychology than most New York shrinks, hands down. I love bus drivers; I love how they run their ships tight, how they punish the smokers even though they're the first ones out and puffing at each rest stop (read smoke break, for, as it turns out, cigarette breaks on the bus are a form of social control). A friend of mine, regular rider of the Dog as he calls it and a marine himself, was recounting to me last year's news story about the driver who got his throat slit while driving (no lie). He managed to kill his assailant and crawl away from his rolled bus, one hand stopping the blood flowing from his throat. "Those guys," my friend says, "You don't fuck with them. They don't take no shit from nobody."
So this driver in particular is incarcerated with me for 6 hours or so and tells me a few highlights of the better part of three decades at the big wheel. "I could write a book," he says, as most people who should but don't write books say. "I seen everything. I helped give birth to a baby on the back of my bus one time. Had guys die on it two other times -- natural causes, mind you." Two piloted into the darkness in his 60-seat Charon's skiff, one brought into the light -- that would still leave his score at minus-1, unless you count the very moments of conception fleetingly witnessed in the 15-square-inch reflection of the rear-view mirror. "I seen lots of couples cup-u-lating in the back," he tells me. And when I ask what you do when you catch the cup-u-lators in flagrante, he waxes wiser than the saints, "Well, I hate to come down too hard on two people just looking for a good feeling."
Of course I've still got to know how an onboard death-scene goes down, and I ask if someone just starts screaming from the back: "The guy next to me just bit it! The guy next to me just bit it!" or if an older lady walks slowly and quietly to the front and leans over her cane to whisper in the driver's ear, "Sorry to disturb you sir, but my husband just passed." But it turns out that neither scenario proved to be what happened in either of the cases my new friend had experienced. No, both times, everybody just thought the guy was zonked-out, asleep out of Pittsburgh, still asleep in Plattsburgh, not to be awakened.
In fact, it takes longer than you'd think to figure out that a sleeping man is dead. "I don't try to wake anybody anymore," my driver tells me, "I've been punched too many times. Damn if it isn't their stop and I'm just trying to wake em up so they don't miss it and I shake em by the shoulder and they wake up swinging. No more." So the ones who would need a good sight more than a shoulder shake don't get found till the bus needs to enter a depot to get cleaned and refueled -- about every six or eight hours on most routes -- and then whoever's still asleep gets a cautious poke. "When a few of those don't do the trick," says my cautious friend, "I call a supervisor."

*****

Miami, Atlanta, New Orleans, Dallas, San Diego. If you watch life long enough out of a window, it all starts to look like a miracle. It's a makeshift frame in a moving museum, the Greyhound window, but if you can see the photo behind it, see the hand of the artist and all the beauty writ, you really will have seen a kind of America.
And then you turn your gaze back in, to the older man sitting beside you, who stands to stretch his leg. "It gets a little stiff," he explains, "even after all these years." He had been a painter, and was up on a "spider" painting a water tower when the spider's cable broke and he fell 80 feet straight to the ground. And lived, and today walked onto the bus cane-less and with barely a limp. I want to know what it feels like to know you're falling, to know that if you feel the ground you'll probably never feel anything else. What goes through your head when you hear the cable break, feel the lurch, then the air on your face? But in a measured, mellifluous voice he tells me, "It didn't take but a second. I don't think I thought anything at all. I just put out my arms and when I woke up I was in the hospital and my family and friends were all there and I just looked at em all and said 'Where's my car and my cash?'" I laugh and he looks at me with infinite, old-man's eyes and says, "You think that's funny -- now when I come back home all my old friends have died. I fell 80 feet and I'm still alive and they're all dead."

*****

The coast of California is about as beautiful a place as you can drive anywhere, but the bus doesn't go that way, no Highway-1 or 17-mile drive past the rocks and seals of Monterey. No, it goes inland, through the farms of Fresno, through Modesto (aptly named) and the unlikely capitol Sacramento before turning in again to San Francisco. It's ugly country, but the bus is packed. The seat next to me, so often the last one taken, is overfilled by a young woman with a warm, enormous smile. I'm tired and barely speak, just ask if the light will bother her if I read. She says no, she normally reads too, and I sit with my book quietly for awhile, then put it down and shut my eyes. She asks if she can read it while I sleep and this is enough to make me curious about who she is and what she's doing. Her answers are somewhat predictable: college student, visiting her mom. We talk for a while; she's interested in me being a writer, she likes the idea of me taking the bus around just to hear people's stories, and after a while she looks at me a bit harder and says, "You want to hear the real reason I'm going to see my mom." Of course, I say, and then she tells me, "Because I just gave birth to a still-born child and never knew I was pregnant."
You hear stories of it, always second or third-hand, of obese women giving birth never having suspected they were carrying. The tales are hard to believe, of course; Don't they notice when they don't get their periods or when they start throwing up all the time, etc. etc. But apparently it can happen, and in the girl sitting next to me's case, she says she didn't notice anything was going on. (I don't ask strangers about their menstrual cycles, under any circumstances, but I guess she just got used to not getting it -- if we don't want to know the truth of something, it's amazing what we can keep from noticing). But then she said, "I wasn't able to go to the bathroom for three weeks, so I finally went to the doctor." (If it took three weeks of not going before she saw a doctor, you can see why missing 8 periods in a row might seem like no big deal.). "So I go in and he thinks I've got a kidney infection and gives me all this Vicadin and other stuff and two days later I'm in the tub and I go into labor and they rush me to the hospital but the baby ends up being born dead. And they think it was 36 weeks -- only a few weeks from full term. He was 7 lbs 10 oz" (the same weight I was, I'm thinking). "I used to joke with my friends that I had a tumor inside of me and it was moving around, but I never thought I was pregnant. We're suing the doctor for not giving me a test, but I don't know what's going to come of it. I've been really upset, you can imagine. I've been talking to people at my church and at the hospital, and I decided to go see my mom and take it easy for a little bit."

*****

America is enormous, and between the coasts, seems almost empty. In the Midwest, each horizon seems to have only one farmhouse in it and one tree, that's all. That's where I grew up, and that's where I'm heading back to now, the bus having turned, Seattle behind us, to head back East.
There is no longer leg one can take on a Greyhound than Seattle to Chicago. Over 2000 miles with only Spokane, an occasional ellipsis of Montana or North Dakota roadmap-dot towns, film-famous Fargo, the twin, tunneled-cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul, and the cow-country of Wisconsin in between. After Spokane, almost no one gets on or off the bus till Minneapolis two days later. You get on, you stay on, and those who do can't help but get to know each other. Of any place I've taken a bus, this is my favorite: the pressure cooker, the exposedness of us all to each other. I take a seat just in front of the back row, so I can witness all the back of the bus phenomena without disrupting anything. The back seat of the bus, as everyone knows, is a universe unto itself, and I just want to wait and witness.
On this trip, the 25 or so of us in for the long haul could fully cast a comedie humaine. Everybody I get to know deserves a book of their own (and, at the end, I find myself thinking: shouldn't that be true of everyone?), but at least I can give you a few sketches. There's Chuck, a 6' 5" former hell-angel who lost most of his right leg in a hay bailer; Dee, one-time Seahawk cheerleader and recovered drug-addict, has all the men abuzz; Mike, a pot-bellied truck driver chock-full of stories of going down on overweight women; Kenji, 20-year old gangbanger from northern Alabama, sweet as anyone could be; an emaciated Southeast Asian man who sleeps 23 straight hours; a young white guy who risks his life by reading Mein Kampf in plain view and calls Dee and Kenji "ignorant niggers"; Gary, the independent philosopher, carrying his manuscript in which he rewrites the history of western thought because, as he says, "The Greeks were wrong"; two Amish brothers, Abe and Clem, who Dee tries to scandalize with sex stories and who tell me they don't really care to travel outside of Montana much because "all cities look the same"; Joan, the cross-bearing 71-year-old grandmother, who doles out humor and foil-wrapped sandwiches in equal measure; a Native American woman whose ankles swell (mine, by now, have gotten used to it), and who gets asked out by the driver; a woman returning to her boyfriend, even though last time the police had to put her on a bus after he tried to blow her up in her own home because "this time it'll be different. He hasn't had a drink in three weeks"; a fourteen-year old set free by her parents who immediately gets in with Herr Kampf and his pregnant girlfriend surreptitiously drinking Smirnoff Ice; Xavier the drunk, middle-aged wiseacre, who wants to meet God so he can ask him why he didn't just kill Satan and why he made so many planets with no people on them; the young, insane guy, who fakes a diabetic seizure (I'm not making this up) so we have to travel and hour backward to get him into an ambulance, then, after our bus breaks down in Beach, North Dakota (irony of ironies, where did they get off calling a town there Beach?), he rejoins our bus in Fargo, then starts using his water bottle as a machine gun every time we pass a cow, scrunching up his face behind his black sunglasses, looking back at all of us with bared teeth and booming out the sound effects, DA-DA-DA-DA-DA ..... DA-DA-DA.... , DA-DA-DA-DA-DA ... DA-DA-DA, all the way through Wisconsin. It becomes a kind of soundtrack, DA-DA-DA-DA-DA ... DA-DA-DA-DA-DA.
For two and a half days I sit at the back of a bus with what to most extents and purposes is a random group of people, and yet, like anyone who endures hardship together, we become a group, a community. We're together long enough for me to watch the hair grow on the shaved head guy; I call him the Chia pet of our trip, but he doesn't take offense. Even Dee and the White Supremacist end up getting along, despite his prejudices. It's impossible for me not to think of us all together as a kind of family, diverse as we may be. As the hours passed, the analogy feels stronger and stronger: we don't choose our families, and most of the time they drive us crazy, but we endure them and typically even love them. And so with my busmates, even the "diabetic" -- he would gun down each passing quadriped and we would all just laugh, holding our water bottles too, firing away.

*****
I continue riding. Chicago, Memphis, Portland, Burlington and eventually south once more and to New York City, a kind of home. Coming into New York from the North on the Greyhound, you slide down through the commuter traffic of New Jersey, then through the eerie orange light of the Lincoln Tunnel. You emerge into a city like no other (despite what Clem says), a city so full of so much it's easy to glaze it all over. Within an hour, I'm back in my apartment, and the next day, I'm already back in my New York rhythm, buying groceries in Chinatown, on the subway going to and from a meeting. But something has changed, I feel it on the 6-train. I am looking more, listening more. I still have my window. America is everywhere.

Shwedagon Pagoda

Yangon's famed -- and gigantic -- Shwedagon pagoda.  Finally putting up a picture, hoping you can see the sublime of the mathematical in its sheer size and grandeur. 

 

Photo cred: jax

Photo cred: jax

But I can't help liking the smaller shrines better, like this little one. 

And best of all I like the bells, like these three (including one detail).

Every visitor who comes to Yangon goes to see Shwedagon, as well they should.  But I hope they step away from the gold and glitz and commune a bit with all the care and love that went into even the tiniest details of this majestic place. I think Myanmar likes to emphasize the spiritual impact of the big, but I keep being moved by the little -- here, there, often, always. 

Oops, I ate them again...

These were fried all the way through, so they lacked the exploding coconut-cream innards that the ones in Cambodia had. (Though to be completely frank, I thought the ones in Cambodia were much better; these were more like gritty, oily plantain chips.) As a sustainable protein source, however, they should definitely be cultivated. As a taste, well, I think the cultivation should be rather more optional...

Wait, am I really understanding what people are saying?

No, not well and certainly not always, but this week I started having conversations of substance that didn't follow the canned scripts of my textbooks.  

And then this happened:

Please eat the liquid on the far right, I entreat you.

Please eat the liquid on the far right, I entreat you.

Yes, that is a dhosa, but it is a very special dhosa; it's a dhosa I only found out about because I ended up talking at length — in Burmese — with a man about how good the Muslim food here is.  He asked me if I had had this and that (I had), I successfully referred to varieties of tamarind sauces and potato curries, and when we spoke of dhosas, he said there was a special one that came with fish-curry liquid that I could go get on 53rd street.  

Well. 

53rd street is rather dingy and untrafficked, so you can imagine the surprise of the vendor when I strolled up and asked for his specialty. His smile was incredible. More incredible, as I’m sure you’ve gathered, was the fish curry liquid itself, especially with his gorgeous dhosa and the egg fried into it. Wow. 

Maybe I would have stumbled upon this place had I not spoken Burmese, and maybe I would have seen someone eating the trademark sauce and ordered it, but the fact that it came to me like a reward for all the hours of study made me almost cry. 

And, as long we’re discussing Burmese Muslim food, here’s a snap of the young women who make my favorite chapatis and tamarind sauces. 

And finally, how could I not share another of Chi Mya's (also Muslim) masterpieces: curried kidneys, dhal, okra, hot chili paste, cucumbers and two mystery vegetables (one a very bitter but delicious leaf, the other almost a cactus). I finally broached the topic of him teaching me, saying that next year I would speak well and he would have to show me how to make his food. He said he would. The master plan is coming together...

One day I will know how to cook this, and you will all be invited. 

One day I will know how to cook this, and you will all be invited. 

Yangon, Round 2

I'm back....

Schwedagon pagoda (left) and Kandawgyi Palace Hotel (right) from a rooftop hotel bar

Schwedagon pagoda (left) and Kandawgyi Palace Hotel (right) from a rooftop hotel bar

The child in light blue has tanaka intricately painted on his face.

The child in light blue has tanaka intricately painted on his face.

Waiting for the train.  They're not exactly the Japanese hi-speeds, so you have plenty of time to gather and vacate.

Waiting for the train.  They're not exactly the Japanese hi-speeds, so you have plenty of time to gather and vacate.

The famous Shan noodle. I was disappointed but later blown away by Shan ma la hin and myo mi shi. Pics tk if the light is ever good. 

The famous Shan noodle. I was disappointed but later blown away by Shan ma la hin and myo mi shi. Pics tk if the light is ever good. 

My Everest. If I can succeed in reading this, it will feel like finishing Proust in French. 

My Everest. If I can succeed in reading this, it will feel like finishing Proust in French. 

Quiet Yangon

The temple top is almost complete...

The temple top is almost complete...

Building a rooftop -- unprotected

Building a rooftop -- unprotected

Dousing outpost from Thingyan. These kids got me a bunch of times.

Dousing outpost from Thingyan. These kids got me a bunch of times.

Giant party bus with shrieking sound-system...

Giant party bus with shrieking sound-system...

Mini party-bus with yet more shrieky sound-system

Mini party-bus with yet more shrieky sound-system

Cat bowls

Cat bowls

A building under construction, shrouded and looking like a Claes Oldenburg soft sculpture

A building under construction, shrouded and looking like a Claes Oldenburg soft sculpture

View from my hotel window

View from my hotel window

The abandoned minister's building, finally under reconstruction

The abandoned minister's building, finally under reconstruction

Large government building

Large government building

Man crossing street

Man crossing street

Happy Burmese New year

Scene like the one I was in at this year's Thingyan, the Burmese water festival during the four days leading up to New Year.  (credit:http://myanmar-cefa.or.jp/myanmar_tourism_tokyo/img/myanmar/zaw_zaw_tun_108a1_40_myanmar_new_year_festival.jpg)

Scene like the one I was in at this year's Thingyan, the Burmese water festival during the four days leading up to New Year.  (credit:http://myanmar-cefa.or.jp/myanmar_tourism_tokyo/img/myanmar/zaw_zaw_tun_108a1_40_myanmar_new_year_festival.jpg)

Happy Myanmar new year!

My 2015 in situ resolutions:

  • dance under firehoses whenever possible
  • risk GI distress fearlessly (and at least thrice daily)
  • learn the rest of the alphabet by next week — I’m close!
  • spend at least a month in a Buddhist monastery
  • schedule as many appointments for “nya nei nga na yi” as possible — and say it with pride
  • offer my soul to learn how to make Chi Mya’s curries
  • help people understand this stunningly contradictory — as perplexing as inspiring — country
  • and maybe drink a little more $1.85/bottle Burmese whiskey...

And, if you didn't see my post on Facebook, I spent about 4 hours in a throng just like the one above, in the heart of the swarm, dancing like a maniac, all the while pummeled by firehoses from above. I was kissed by six different burmese guys -- all complete strangers -- handed local whiskey in water bottles, danced with by every child and every grandmother, and so drenched that it killed my iPhone, even though I had it in a ziploc bag. Totally worth it!

Now, if you avoid the stages with the giant dance parties, that doesn't mean you're out of the soup. For four days, literally from morning till sunset all around the city, kids everywhere spray everyone with hoses -- some with serious nozzlage, occasionally taking out whole busloads of people -- and tossing buckets of ice water on anyone who comes close enough. 

And i figured out quickly that there's no better target for them than a white guy on a bicycle. So I'd zoom in, ringing my bell wildly, take the bucket of frigidity to the face and then say, "Muh so bu!" (i'm not wet!) then circle back so they could get me again. 

Obviously I love this country, so by now you probably think I'm completely biased, but that really was one hell of a party.

Why the hotel staff is convinced that I'm a lunatic

I started this on Facebook, but here’s a more thorough list of why the hotel staff thinks I’m crazy:

  • Virtually everyone who visits here only stays a night, as they leave for Bagan or Mandalay the next day — or just arrived from there and are flying home. I’ve been here a month.
  • I carry a dictionary with me everywhere like it was my colostomy bag or some other vital health necessity to have on my person. 
  • Every morning they see me tracing out Burmese letters and pronouncing them to myself like I was in an imaginary preschool, trying to copy answers from Snuffalupagus’ homework. 
  • By the time I’ve finished my chili-laden breakfast, my orthography practice, and my 6-12 tiny cups of tea, I have a bandeau of sweat fully seeped through both my undershirt and outershirt from navel to clavicle. (Do boiled beverages in 100-degree heat tend to have that effect…?)
  • I willfully stay in the 2nd-worst room in the hotel — the one right by the check-in desk — though I did upgrade from the orchid nursery I started in. Granted I tend to be roused (with the staff) every time a new guest arrives at 3 a.m., but at least I no longer wake to sodden clothing. 
  • I come back from the gym most afternoons so drenched from head to toe I might has well have swam home. (I think my gym should advertise Bikram Weightlifting!) Mercifully my room has a drying rack. 
  • I always have prodigious quantities of tea salad in my room — thanks to Zaw’s dad’s generosity — and the dense, mulchy odor of the fermented tea copulates with the dense, mulchy odor of my gym-clothing to create a jungle miasma probably akin to the breath of a hyena or some other carrion-eating, hot-mouthed mammal.
  • I eschew the toast, butter, and jam they offer at breakfast and instead take the local “pe pyo” (boiled baby chickpeas, served with fried rice and an egg) and, as mentioned, cover it with chilis.  (And, note, most Burmese are physically terrified of hot peppers. it’s very fun to try to get them to eat them…)  I’ve seen other foreigners get served the pe pyo, but they never seem to touch it.
  • When the staff does brave the effluvium of my room, they find an empty bottle of local whiskey in my trash every week or so, but no evidence of ice or mixers. (And another thing the Burmese are afraid of is drinking whiskey neat. Every time I do that, I get little head-cocking gestures from the other bar patrons that seem to mean, “Damn, dude.”)
  • I’ve spurned backpacks and instead gone the local route, toting a yellow plastic bag fashioned out of the plastic covering of a crate that once held 20 kilos of Me-O brand cat food. In the same way that black plastic trashbags are often called “Irish luggage,” I think these hand-sewn guys are Burmese working-class Louis Vuittons. 
  • They often run into me at the street food vendors they frequent, my knees up by my ears as I crouch in an undersized chair, sweat dripping from my forearms onto my shorts’ hems, darkening them visibly.
  • Some days I speak to them in accurate Burmese and other days I utterly botch everything. I’ve known them since I started studying, so it’s a little like visiting your family and being thrown back into some atavistic version of yourself you forgot even existed. (ex: When I’m around my family, my handyman skills go out the window, while when I’m alone, I’m passably adroit..). Suffice it to say that the hotel guys make me nervous.
  • All the reasons all of you already know I’m crazy, which I think I wear pretty plainly on my sweat-soaked sleeves.

If only words could be as color is...

My eye slakes -- the melancholy rainbows of fading, brightness a-blitz against the grime, a thousand iterations coaxing white to green, as if the universe of color was calipered between the two shirts hanging from this balcony.    

At other times, color takes the form of parable...

monasteryTopPainted.jpg

Or a caco-symphony... (undoctored iPhone snaps from the top of the Mingala market) 

Here a kun: ya (paan) stand -- to test the amplitude of your rods and cones...

A kun:-ya stand for betel-chewers (similar to paan in India)

A kun:-ya stand for betel-chewers (similar to paan in India)

The white urn contains the lime they slake on each leaf prior to putting in the betel, tobacco, and all else

The white urn contains the lime they slake on each leaf prior to putting in the betel, tobacco, and all else

I love it, though you do have to discharge giant gobs of brick-colored sputum as you chew... 

I love it, though you do have to discharge giant gobs of brick-colored sputum as you chew... 

The cans themselves are amazing

The cans themselves are amazing

Or here, where incense has its distinctive redolence -- only this time visually...

And have I mentioned the food? The genius of the hin (curry): my beloved Chi Mya's stand...

Chi Mya's stand (I got his name wrong in the earlier post; that was his daughter!)

Chi Mya's stand (I got his name wrong in the earlier post; that was his daughter!)

A chicken-feet salad

A chicken-feet salad

Almost a Burmese spaghetti, of all things...

Almost a Burmese spaghetti, of all things...

And, of course, the brooms...

Luh-hpeq' thoq': Burmese tea salad as a cultural conduit

The wonder that is fermented green tea leaves plus tons of crunchies and savories, all mixed together.

The wonder that is fermented green tea leaves plus tons of crunchies and savories, all mixed together.

 

Oh my beloved tea salad,
for which I pen this poetaster’s paean,
had I ne’er tasted your myriad charms,
this trip might’ve proved European…

Five shockingly short years ago, at the tail end of a 6-week stint in Southeast Asia, I happened to touch down in Yangon, erstwhile Rangoon, then capital of Myanmar, erstwhile Burma.  I hadn’t had time to do much research, and I didn’t know what to expect. I knew that in 1988 there had been an election, but then the military had stepped in and said nah and took over themselves. I knew they changed the name of the country and capital (and ultimately built a new city in the jungle and moved the seat of power there).  I knew their borders had been closed to tourists until soon before, that most of the country was strictly off-limits (and still is), that you were required to exchange a certain amount of money per day, and that most of that money went to the military, thus putting Myanmar on most people’s Scheiss list.     

But there I was — and wow how it proved to be awesome. As I recount earlier on this blog (thanks, Squarespace for such easy navigation...), I happened to meet a Burmese guy who ran a English-language school, volunteered to speak to his students — mostly monks — and found the people (and later the food) utterly irresistible. i resolved that the next time I could take a trip, I’d come back and spend significant time. 

In my travels I had already found that the easiest way to get local people to trust you was to sit down and eat street food (or drink homemade liquor with them or smoke really skanky tobacco…), but nowhere did my approach have more impact than here, and nowhere did learning 20 words of the language create more happiness. 

And the best was “luh-peh tho’” (tea salad). I had had it in NY — and loved it — and one of the monks told me how to say the name, so I would stop every time I saw it on the street, then sit in a kindergarten-sized plastic chair and wolf it down (while drinking 6-12 cups of hot tea in the 90-degree heat). 

Those were the most precious hours; the interactions with the vendors, their families, the passersby, the other patrons were all so joyful and comedic. There was still very little tourism at that point, so I was quite an oddity anyway, but plunked down on the sidewalk, smiling, saying “luh-peh tho’” and giving the thumbs up as people walked by me, I might as well have been a giant clown juggling tilapia. But I also believe (and of course I might be imagining) that the people felt that I was showing marked appreciation of their country — an appreciation they weren’t getting from pretty much anywhere in the world at that time. I’ve since been told how cut off Burmese people felt from the rest of the world, how isolated. So eating a uniquely Burmese dish in full view was probably as good a thing as a non-speaker could possibly do.

And so I’m back, and I eat luh-peh tho’ almost every day.  Now I know how to pronounce it properly, how to say “I’m American, but, yes, I love Burmese food and people. Tea salad is my favorite! I was here five years ago and wanted to come back, and I’m so happy now that I’m here,” and it clearly has an impact. But as delightful as it is now, it still pales a little compared to how it was then. 

At that point, I think it was critical. And somehow in my standard bumbling fashion, I had lucked into the easiest and most delicious way to say “I adore you” to a people that hadn’t been hearing that anywhere near enough. 

It's even better when you eat a mini garlic clove and chile with every bite!

It's even better when you eat a mini garlic clove and chile with every bite!

Across the big bridge, Yangon

I took a long walk today over a huge bridge along what felt like a highway. But it was worth it; the views were incredible, and then I had a wonderful lunch experience, doted over by the girl in the picture below and her mom (who kept giving me more food until I literally said I was in pain). I will go back with my video camera, but for now, here's the best I could do with my iPhone4...