So i'm writing this from the front desk of a shwanky, glorious huge hotel at the city outside of Ankor Wat. The kind with very friendly staff to pull out your chair for you at the internet booth. And i rode up to its circular drive, in the dark, on my bicycle, with a headlamp, passed a strech limo. I am looking for Katie Greene, my cousin, who is staying in the very hotel! We both independetly planned new years at Angkor! (and only found out a few days before we both left) but now, we can't find eachother. So close and so far! Katie!!! where are you!?
Love, Gigi
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Friday, December 25, 2009
Chistmas
I can even get over how fantastic Christmas dinner with my host family was.
If I had to sum up Thailand with only one photograph this one might be it:
Rew standing on a chair at the dinner table. He is wearing a red Santa had with light up plastic red stars around the rim. He is taking a huge bite of a fried chiken leg, as he poses next to the decorated table tree. The only food you can see on the table is bottle of Coke (spelled in Thai), a plate of sausages, the plate of friend chicken, and a huge grilled fish. Leap is in the back ground grinning over a bowl of rice.
The original plan was for me to make American food for the family for chirstmas dinner, so I went to Tops (the American grocery store) and bought tons of delicious ingredients for the traditional dinner feast:
-Hamburgers
-Mashed potatoes
-my favorite honey/lemon salad
-nachos
(actually just foods I miss and know how to make esp. without an oven)
Also, while at the mall (seeing Avatar Oh-My-God-I-Love-Enough-Said), I was inspired to get a Christmas tree as well! This was pretty much the best idea I’ve ever had. It’s no Christmas without a tree (in my family?) and it was a huge hit. It –made- it Christmas, which made it the perfect gift. I bought one of those kind of junky (7 Dollar) table tree at the mall. It was pre “decorated” with glued on gold beads and plastic apples that had mostly fallen off in the box, and bought garlands for it. Next went on a bunch of gold wrapped candies and chocolate with twist ties and rubber bands from our room. I set it up all nice and put it in a big red plastic tote.
Dinner planes changed when Mae left her phone at work and Paw and I got confused over the phone, and I ended up getting picked up an hour and a half late. So she just went ahead and made diner while they were picking me up.
Oh yeah, by the way while waiting for Paw ourside our apartment, I almost got hit by a motorcycle. I was sitting on the front steps of the building and he came roaring towards the driveway to pull into the building and hit a pole and then hit the motorcycles parked right in front of my legs knocking the down like dominos, before dragging up his bike and going down the drive. (I was fine, no worries, I’m surprised something like this hasn’t happened sooner). I wish I could say I used my rapid survivor instincts to whip my legs out of the path of danger, but actually I just stared at the guy and thought “huh, hes going really fast. those breaks are really loud. he just hit that pole. If those bikes had fallen on my legs it would probably have hurt alot”
Anyway, when Paw and the boys pulled up I held up the tree and they went nuts in the car which was just the beginning of a crazy fun night. Rew gave me my hat then (with gold moons and stars and santa and his reindeer lights on the front (<3 <3 <3 ). We sang chouses of Christmas carols for the drive home.
When we came in with the tree everyone was singing and running around and taking nuts pictures, and Mae was just bringin in the Christmas feast to put under the table: Tom yum Gung, cook cucumber-egg-ish mix, sausage, fish, chicken, fries, coke, all of which delicious especially Maes famous tom yum gung, (shrimp soup). Everyone adored the tree and Mae brought out gold wrapped cookies for it. I can’t remember any moments really just great feelings. We sang a lot of them coming in for famous lines. Paw and Mae were flirting, and playing with the kids, and the kids and I were having a ball and I even got the boys to wait to eat any candy off the tree until they had finished all their rice. There was general chaos of getting ready and a happy happy quiet of the first few bites of delicious food. We gave cheers to Christmas and just joked and I think I was one of my very favorite moments in Thailand. At dinner Mae said “we have so many Quam Suk (good things)”. It certainly made me miss my Christmas back home less because I could share the wonderful joy of the holiday with my Thai family who have been so generous to me for this whole journey.
I guess one moment I can remember is when I took off my hat for the first time (the first time I had looked at it since it got stuffed on my head when I jumped in the car) and I saw how Rew had picked out such a nice one, and thought was a great festive touch they were. (something I would never have though of as being necessary to Christmas, but may always be necessary for me, for chirstmas, for the rest of my life) and I leaned over and fave him a Thai kiss on the cheek. This means leaning right over like your going to kiss their cheek and giving them a big sniff. Mae saw and told him to give me one back, which he definaly wouldn’t do, but I felt I had truly passed into a being a real thai-integrated-family-member that the first reaction I had to my cute little brother was to give him a sniff-kiss he wouldn’t dream of returning even when mom told him to.
Namwng May was grinning and part of the festivities too, although she disappeared for actually eating dinner as well and wouldn’t take any candies off the tree afterwords (too many calories!) even when I stuck my pack of sugar free tooth cleaning gum up there. We’ll be hanging out tomorrow, cooking the American food I bought and doing art (I think/hope).
After dinner the family took a big paper lantern out into the drive way and lit it together. Nawng Leap took some amazing pictures of the flame (way better than any pictures I’d been taking!) and I chased him around and complimented his photography and his dad beamed proudly. (leap actually camptured dad with his true, glorious, smile). Paw told Leap to take a pictures of him with his daughter, and Rew ran to be in the picture and Paw and I had a laugh about that. The lantern was proablby four feet tall and when it fills with hot air: its so wonderful. We all let it go when it gets too hot and boyant to hold on to and Rew lit the rocked on the bottom and it lifted into the sky with a shower of silver sparks.
I can now understand almost every thing that’s said amongst the family around me and with Mae there to understand when I don’t know a word in Thai and I communicate anything I want to.
After the landtern the boys wanted to watch zombie t.v. so I went upstairs to find Mae and she wasn’t in her study or her room, but the TV was on in the hall so I stopped of a second to watch and …
“Hello?”
Oh My God! Tok Jai! Gave me a freight.
Mae has this big silver insulated box in the hall which Rew told me ‘she uses to make her skin white” it looks like spaceship kind of and has a little wooden chair inside and she was inside it, a foot from me, with her head sticking out of the hole in the top (its got a hood on the sides so I didn’t see her when I came up the stairs) and steam is sneaking out around her head. Omg. It was the most startling hilarious thing I have ever seen. We laughed and laughed about that for a long time too. I guess it’s a portable house steamer/sauna, (I gave it a try and, indeed, it was quite warm and humid).
Rew kept biting me that night and it was hurting so I laid down the law and snapped at him when he did it, and he got upset and left before bed so I thought I might actualys leep alone …but he came back a bit later.
Since Mae is leaving for a business meeting the next two days, they told me to make my hamburgers for breakfast. However, that was too much culture shock for me. I couldn’t make my whole big “Christmas dinner’ for breakfast. (+ that would have meant getting up at like 5 in the morning) But hwne I work up at 6:00 and Rew went to take his shower I was inspired to make American breakfast so I went down and made eggs-in-a-basket.
The only problem is the only cooking imstruments they have are pots and woks. I tired a pot, but it burned and I couldn’t flip it so I tired a wok, and Nawng May (who was helping me) said not enough oil! And dumped in the usual amout of cooking oil (about half a cup) and so they were fried, very very crispy, eggs in a basket. Which we ate with soy sauce. Which were actually better with soy sauce, than salt and pepper on account of the oil.
It was really funny, Leap (if you remember very picky) wouldn’t eat them. (I got to overhear this whole thing in Thai) And said “where are the hamburgers’ and Mae said “no hambugers today, but no no try these, you will like them, their delicious!” and simultaneously dad said “they are hamburgers!”. Leap stopped (he is five) and looked at them very carefully. And said “hamburgers have this shape” and made a hamburger shape with his hands, and Paw said “they are omelete-fried-egg-and-bread-hamburgers” and Leap still wouldn’t try them. But once Mae and Paw were looking the other way he reached out with his fork and tried to stab one of the center circles. It fell off his fork back onto the plate and he looked quickly around and Mae was still looking the other way and I grinned and covered my eyes and looked the other way really obviously so he stabbed it again and stuck the whole thing in his mouth really quick before Mae turned back around.
It was great.
Today I got dropped off again, and Cody and I went out and went to the cultural center in chiang mai wehre a delightful, kind, generous man named Ajaan Lek (Professor small) taught us how to paint umbrellas and fans. (Cody is learning crafts for her ICRP) The little room was full of colorful mobiles, and paitnints and umbrellas and fans. And Ajaan Lek patiently and infinitely supportively taught us to paint a scene with birds on a flowery branch first on paper and then on the fan. Every time we would do anything (particularly good or bad) he would say things like “perfect! Very good! Oh beautiful! Oh wouln’t this be even more beautiful?” and he was so undyingly patient and wonderful. We had no idea until we checked the time, but we were there for four hours. So plans to kayak the river through town were delayed.
How nice Thai people are example # 2:
I had a coughing fit in the middle and went and stood in the hall/balcony area and when I came back him he had gotten me a mug of hot water from his thrermous and some herbal medicine throat numbing seeds (like mustard seed sized) that were absoluly fabulous. I’ve never had hot water after a coughing fit but it was perfect!
How nice my friends are example # 2:
Erin bought me some blackcurrent super nice coughdrops from like sweeden or somewhere which are delicious.
Together my medicines did the trick for the rest of the afternoon.
Now I’m just typing away, waiting for Khun Paw and thinking we probably miscommunicated again. I should really go back to my original rule of never saying OK if I don’t understand everything…. Hum…
Merry Christmas everyone! If not “home” sick I’ve been fighting the “people” sick. I think this weekend it’s off to see my Host families extended family in some town outside Chaing Mai and after that me and some people are going to Angkor Wat for a 5? days (half travel). It should be super fun as I don’t know the people going as well yet, and it will be quite a different kind of adventuring than we’ve been doing. (traveling alone to a world famous (maybe touristy) sight). Then my ICRP starts which will go for 4 weeks, part in the mountain villages in the north and part in chiang mai.
P.S. Grandma, the leaves you ironed for me are taped all over our walls (in cool patterns) along with colorful lanterns, elephant wall hangings, my watercolors from on course, a paper tree with paper presents, little tiny stockings, and photographs from our trip so far. They are lovely! People often comment on our walls when they come in. (we have a great room, wonderful mood lighting, pretty clean).
Merry Christmas / Holidays,
Love. Gigi
p.s.s.
What else can I type about since Paw hasn’t come yet?
Did I ever tell you’all about Tuk Tuks? Tuk Tuks are great. They are motorcycles turned into passenger vehicles. They have a little roof and a bench. I just saw one go by that was decked out with lights. Hillarious. Tons of blue and red and yellow flashing blinking lights. Tuk tusk are the way you get home from the bars at the end of the night because they run later than the Rot Dangs (pick-ups turned taxies), and they are also what tourists ride because they are much more expensive but they are so. fun. Especially when your coming home from the bars at night.
If I had to sum up Thailand with only one photograph this one might be it:
Rew standing on a chair at the dinner table. He is wearing a red Santa had with light up plastic red stars around the rim. He is taking a huge bite of a fried chiken leg, as he poses next to the decorated table tree. The only food you can see on the table is bottle of Coke (spelled in Thai), a plate of sausages, the plate of friend chicken, and a huge grilled fish. Leap is in the back ground grinning over a bowl of rice.
The original plan was for me to make American food for the family for chirstmas dinner, so I went to Tops (the American grocery store) and bought tons of delicious ingredients for the traditional dinner feast:
-Hamburgers
-Mashed potatoes
-my favorite honey/lemon salad
-nachos
(actually just foods I miss and know how to make esp. without an oven)
Also, while at the mall (seeing Avatar Oh-My-God-I-Love-Enough-Said), I was inspired to get a Christmas tree as well! This was pretty much the best idea I’ve ever had. It’s no Christmas without a tree (in my family?) and it was a huge hit. It –made- it Christmas, which made it the perfect gift. I bought one of those kind of junky (7 Dollar) table tree at the mall. It was pre “decorated” with glued on gold beads and plastic apples that had mostly fallen off in the box, and bought garlands for it. Next went on a bunch of gold wrapped candies and chocolate with twist ties and rubber bands from our room. I set it up all nice and put it in a big red plastic tote.
Dinner planes changed when Mae left her phone at work and Paw and I got confused over the phone, and I ended up getting picked up an hour and a half late. So she just went ahead and made diner while they were picking me up.
Oh yeah, by the way while waiting for Paw ourside our apartment, I almost got hit by a motorcycle. I was sitting on the front steps of the building and he came roaring towards the driveway to pull into the building and hit a pole and then hit the motorcycles parked right in front of my legs knocking the down like dominos, before dragging up his bike and going down the drive. (I was fine, no worries, I’m surprised something like this hasn’t happened sooner). I wish I could say I used my rapid survivor instincts to whip my legs out of the path of danger, but actually I just stared at the guy and thought “huh, hes going really fast. those breaks are really loud. he just hit that pole. If those bikes had fallen on my legs it would probably have hurt alot”
Anyway, when Paw and the boys pulled up I held up the tree and they went nuts in the car which was just the beginning of a crazy fun night. Rew gave me my hat then (with gold moons and stars and santa and his reindeer lights on the front (<3 <3 <3 ). We sang chouses of Christmas carols for the drive home.
When we came in with the tree everyone was singing and running around and taking nuts pictures, and Mae was just bringin in the Christmas feast to put under the table: Tom yum Gung, cook cucumber-egg-ish mix, sausage, fish, chicken, fries, coke, all of which delicious especially Maes famous tom yum gung, (shrimp soup). Everyone adored the tree and Mae brought out gold wrapped cookies for it. I can’t remember any moments really just great feelings. We sang a lot of them coming in for famous lines. Paw and Mae were flirting, and playing with the kids, and the kids and I were having a ball and I even got the boys to wait to eat any candy off the tree until they had finished all their rice. There was general chaos of getting ready and a happy happy quiet of the first few bites of delicious food. We gave cheers to Christmas and just joked and I think I was one of my very favorite moments in Thailand. At dinner Mae said “we have so many Quam Suk (good things)”. It certainly made me miss my Christmas back home less because I could share the wonderful joy of the holiday with my Thai family who have been so generous to me for this whole journey.
I guess one moment I can remember is when I took off my hat for the first time (the first time I had looked at it since it got stuffed on my head when I jumped in the car) and I saw how Rew had picked out such a nice one, and thought was a great festive touch they were. (something I would never have though of as being necessary to Christmas, but may always be necessary for me, for chirstmas, for the rest of my life) and I leaned over and fave him a Thai kiss on the cheek. This means leaning right over like your going to kiss their cheek and giving them a big sniff. Mae saw and told him to give me one back, which he definaly wouldn’t do, but I felt I had truly passed into a being a real thai-integrated-family-member that the first reaction I had to my cute little brother was to give him a sniff-kiss he wouldn’t dream of returning even when mom told him to.
Namwng May was grinning and part of the festivities too, although she disappeared for actually eating dinner as well and wouldn’t take any candies off the tree afterwords (too many calories!) even when I stuck my pack of sugar free tooth cleaning gum up there. We’ll be hanging out tomorrow, cooking the American food I bought and doing art (I think/hope).
After dinner the family took a big paper lantern out into the drive way and lit it together. Nawng Leap took some amazing pictures of the flame (way better than any pictures I’d been taking!) and I chased him around and complimented his photography and his dad beamed proudly. (leap actually camptured dad with his true, glorious, smile). Paw told Leap to take a pictures of him with his daughter, and Rew ran to be in the picture and Paw and I had a laugh about that. The lantern was proablby four feet tall and when it fills with hot air: its so wonderful. We all let it go when it gets too hot and boyant to hold on to and Rew lit the rocked on the bottom and it lifted into the sky with a shower of silver sparks.
I can now understand almost every thing that’s said amongst the family around me and with Mae there to understand when I don’t know a word in Thai and I communicate anything I want to.
After the landtern the boys wanted to watch zombie t.v. so I went upstairs to find Mae and she wasn’t in her study or her room, but the TV was on in the hall so I stopped of a second to watch and …
“Hello?”
Oh My God! Tok Jai! Gave me a freight.
Mae has this big silver insulated box in the hall which Rew told me ‘she uses to make her skin white” it looks like spaceship kind of and has a little wooden chair inside and she was inside it, a foot from me, with her head sticking out of the hole in the top (its got a hood on the sides so I didn’t see her when I came up the stairs) and steam is sneaking out around her head. Omg. It was the most startling hilarious thing I have ever seen. We laughed and laughed about that for a long time too. I guess it’s a portable house steamer/sauna, (I gave it a try and, indeed, it was quite warm and humid).
Rew kept biting me that night and it was hurting so I laid down the law and snapped at him when he did it, and he got upset and left before bed so I thought I might actualys leep alone …but he came back a bit later.
Since Mae is leaving for a business meeting the next two days, they told me to make my hamburgers for breakfast. However, that was too much culture shock for me. I couldn’t make my whole big “Christmas dinner’ for breakfast. (+ that would have meant getting up at like 5 in the morning) But hwne I work up at 6:00 and Rew went to take his shower I was inspired to make American breakfast so I went down and made eggs-in-a-basket.
The only problem is the only cooking imstruments they have are pots and woks. I tired a pot, but it burned and I couldn’t flip it so I tired a wok, and Nawng May (who was helping me) said not enough oil! And dumped in the usual amout of cooking oil (about half a cup) and so they were fried, very very crispy, eggs in a basket. Which we ate with soy sauce. Which were actually better with soy sauce, than salt and pepper on account of the oil.
It was really funny, Leap (if you remember very picky) wouldn’t eat them. (I got to overhear this whole thing in Thai) And said “where are the hamburgers’ and Mae said “no hambugers today, but no no try these, you will like them, their delicious!” and simultaneously dad said “they are hamburgers!”. Leap stopped (he is five) and looked at them very carefully. And said “hamburgers have this shape” and made a hamburger shape with his hands, and Paw said “they are omelete-fried-egg-and-bread-hamburgers” and Leap still wouldn’t try them. But once Mae and Paw were looking the other way he reached out with his fork and tried to stab one of the center circles. It fell off his fork back onto the plate and he looked quickly around and Mae was still looking the other way and I grinned and covered my eyes and looked the other way really obviously so he stabbed it again and stuck the whole thing in his mouth really quick before Mae turned back around.
It was great.
Today I got dropped off again, and Cody and I went out and went to the cultural center in chiang mai wehre a delightful, kind, generous man named Ajaan Lek (Professor small) taught us how to paint umbrellas and fans. (Cody is learning crafts for her ICRP) The little room was full of colorful mobiles, and paitnints and umbrellas and fans. And Ajaan Lek patiently and infinitely supportively taught us to paint a scene with birds on a flowery branch first on paper and then on the fan. Every time we would do anything (particularly good or bad) he would say things like “perfect! Very good! Oh beautiful! Oh wouln’t this be even more beautiful?” and he was so undyingly patient and wonderful. We had no idea until we checked the time, but we were there for four hours. So plans to kayak the river through town were delayed.
How nice Thai people are example # 2:
I had a coughing fit in the middle and went and stood in the hall/balcony area and when I came back him he had gotten me a mug of hot water from his thrermous and some herbal medicine throat numbing seeds (like mustard seed sized) that were absoluly fabulous. I’ve never had hot water after a coughing fit but it was perfect!
How nice my friends are example # 2:
Erin bought me some blackcurrent super nice coughdrops from like sweeden or somewhere which are delicious.
Together my medicines did the trick for the rest of the afternoon.
Now I’m just typing away, waiting for Khun Paw and thinking we probably miscommunicated again. I should really go back to my original rule of never saying OK if I don’t understand everything…. Hum…
Merry Christmas everyone! If not “home” sick I’ve been fighting the “people” sick. I think this weekend it’s off to see my Host families extended family in some town outside Chaing Mai and after that me and some people are going to Angkor Wat for a 5? days (half travel). It should be super fun as I don’t know the people going as well yet, and it will be quite a different kind of adventuring than we’ve been doing. (traveling alone to a world famous (maybe touristy) sight). Then my ICRP starts which will go for 4 weeks, part in the mountain villages in the north and part in chiang mai.
P.S. Grandma, the leaves you ironed for me are taped all over our walls (in cool patterns) along with colorful lanterns, elephant wall hangings, my watercolors from on course, a paper tree with paper presents, little tiny stockings, and photographs from our trip so far. They are lovely! People often comment on our walls when they come in. (we have a great room, wonderful mood lighting, pretty clean).
Merry Christmas / Holidays,
Love. Gigi
p.s.s.
What else can I type about since Paw hasn’t come yet?
Did I ever tell you’all about Tuk Tuks? Tuk Tuks are great. They are motorcycles turned into passenger vehicles. They have a little roof and a bench. I just saw one go by that was decked out with lights. Hillarious. Tons of blue and red and yellow flashing blinking lights. Tuk tusk are the way you get home from the bars at the end of the night because they run later than the Rot Dangs (pick-ups turned taxies), and they are also what tourists ride because they are much more expensive but they are so. fun. Especially when your coming home from the bars at night.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
The Museum of World Insects
12-23-09
So my favorite part of my day / whole life in Thailand is when Khun Paw drops me off on his motorcycle. Today was “cold!” (probably like 65 degrees) when zoomed off into the late sunrise. The air rushes by my legs and hands and cheek. He always gives me the helmet. We zoom down the street, whizzing by other cars. When there’s a red light he just makes a left turn, crosses the street and makes another left turn to keep going. When the cars are stopped we weave between them snaking towards the light to meet up with the pack of motorcycles that accumulates at the front of the line.
Yesterday Erin and I went on an adventure to the Museum of World Insects. This really should go with accompanying hilarious pictures, but my card reader is broke… The place is just this old house turned museum. The guy who runs it is crazy. Like, he’s seriously had malaria one too many times. (apparently he’s had every kind of malaria there is… probably because his wife is a mosquito researcher and he is a malaria researcher). You would think being a malaria researcher would make you a mosquito’s enemy, but this guy is the biggest mosquito advocate ever. He wears a t-shirt with a hundred holes cut in it, which he called “mosquito feeding stations”. He has signs everywhere like “get to know them and you will understand” and “every creature is part of a natural cycle of nature made by God’ confusingly right next to people with horrible disfiguring tumors from mosquito born disease…??? I tried to start some conversations with him about what should be done to control disease and he had some decent points like when they fog for mosquitos they are killing the wrong species where they fog, and that people don’t finish their meds and make super strains of the disease, but he wouldn’t answer how malaria has been mostly gotten rid of in Thailand (my killing tons of mosquitos). Mostly he got side tracked telling me about he manager of my body (presumably brain?) that could take me on trips to the moon, and get rid of head aches, and he knew a man who researched headaches who’s manager showed him a three-faced girl and the girl could make his migraines go away.
The whole place was a hoot. He had paintings of women in the forest holding body-sized mosquitos, and huge idealistic painings of mosquitos tenderly touching arms together while poised on flowers with the sunset behind ect. He also had a present from the first visitor to his musueam (an elephant off the street when the place was under construction) which was a pile of elephant dung in a case. Upstairs he had the most extensive insect collection (he found them all dead (didn’t kill any) by following trails of ants through the jungle to find where the bugs went to die and the ants went to eat them….) and signs that said stuff flike ‘I, the insect, donate my life to science to educate people”.
We are all becoming regulars at a café/coffee shop/internet place called Zane’s café. Its cool, we are getting to know al the people there. Theres an amazing ramen shop right in front, and a garden with tables, and many couches ect inside. Its pretty near the dorms.
That night at home, Paw and I lay on the floor and watched TV while the boys played GTA (Grand Theft Auto) on the computer. Paw and I watched a show about stunt drivers, and played balloon games with Rew. Rew and I drew some before bed.
Today I’m going to go see Avatar and then go grocery shopping at the foreigner grocery store. I’m making American food for my host family for Christmas dinner tonight (a day early cause my Mae has to work tomorrow). I think it will be hamburgers and mashed potatoes… (there are no ovens in Thailand).
So my favorite part of my day / whole life in Thailand is when Khun Paw drops me off on his motorcycle. Today was “cold!” (probably like 65 degrees) when zoomed off into the late sunrise. The air rushes by my legs and hands and cheek. He always gives me the helmet. We zoom down the street, whizzing by other cars. When there’s a red light he just makes a left turn, crosses the street and makes another left turn to keep going. When the cars are stopped we weave between them snaking towards the light to meet up with the pack of motorcycles that accumulates at the front of the line.
Yesterday Erin and I went on an adventure to the Museum of World Insects. This really should go with accompanying hilarious pictures, but my card reader is broke… The place is just this old house turned museum. The guy who runs it is crazy. Like, he’s seriously had malaria one too many times. (apparently he’s had every kind of malaria there is… probably because his wife is a mosquito researcher and he is a malaria researcher). You would think being a malaria researcher would make you a mosquito’s enemy, but this guy is the biggest mosquito advocate ever. He wears a t-shirt with a hundred holes cut in it, which he called “mosquito feeding stations”. He has signs everywhere like “get to know them and you will understand” and “every creature is part of a natural cycle of nature made by God’ confusingly right next to people with horrible disfiguring tumors from mosquito born disease…??? I tried to start some conversations with him about what should be done to control disease and he had some decent points like when they fog for mosquitos they are killing the wrong species where they fog, and that people don’t finish their meds and make super strains of the disease, but he wouldn’t answer how malaria has been mostly gotten rid of in Thailand (my killing tons of mosquitos). Mostly he got side tracked telling me about he manager of my body (presumably brain?) that could take me on trips to the moon, and get rid of head aches, and he knew a man who researched headaches who’s manager showed him a three-faced girl and the girl could make his migraines go away.
The whole place was a hoot. He had paintings of women in the forest holding body-sized mosquitos, and huge idealistic painings of mosquitos tenderly touching arms together while poised on flowers with the sunset behind ect. He also had a present from the first visitor to his musueam (an elephant off the street when the place was under construction) which was a pile of elephant dung in a case. Upstairs he had the most extensive insect collection (he found them all dead (didn’t kill any) by following trails of ants through the jungle to find where the bugs went to die and the ants went to eat them….) and signs that said stuff flike ‘I, the insect, donate my life to science to educate people”.
We are all becoming regulars at a café/coffee shop/internet place called Zane’s café. Its cool, we are getting to know al the people there. Theres an amazing ramen shop right in front, and a garden with tables, and many couches ect inside. Its pretty near the dorms.
That night at home, Paw and I lay on the floor and watched TV while the boys played GTA (Grand Theft Auto) on the computer. Paw and I watched a show about stunt drivers, and played balloon games with Rew. Rew and I drew some before bed.
Today I’m going to go see Avatar and then go grocery shopping at the foreigner grocery store. I’m making American food for my host family for Christmas dinner tonight (a day early cause my Mae has to work tomorrow). I think it will be hamburgers and mashed potatoes… (there are no ovens in Thailand).
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Waterfall Playing and Balloon Popping
12- 22 -09
The day before yesterday I discovered my favorite place in Chiang Mai. It isjust up the street from our apartments (about a 40 munite walk, or a not too long Rot Dang Ride). Im starting to think my Chur Len (Nick name) in Thai should just be Nam (water) because I am so fascinatedand enthralled with all things water on this trip. Water falls, snorkeling, kayaking, fountains, rivers, but really… mostly waterfalls. This is the Huey Gaow waterfall (we live at Huey Gaow place on Huey Gaow Road).
We got off the Rot dang and there were tons of little food stalls, and we walked up the path towards the falls. It turns out the falls are a tumbling river running over rocks, in little pools, little falls, running rivelts you can slide down like a waterslide. The whole park, on a hill side, is nesteled among trees with grassy nooks, and little stone brides over the water. We climbed up along the river/falls and there was a view out over the Chiang Mai Valley, the high rises emerging out of the green trees and haze. Tons of Thai families picnicked next to the water, or splashed their feet in it.
Near what we originally thought was the top, three thai boys about our age were sitting, dancing and splashing in the falls – one giggled and shrieked in a voice Ihigher pitched than I though it was possible for any guy to make. They splashed around in tiny underwear, and a large older Farang man sat on the rock next to them watching (Sex tourism much?).
We ate tiny hard boiled quail eggs and soy sauce next to the falls and climbed on. Past a really steep waterfall like spot we found a pool swimmable deep and overlooking the city. It was so cold! I forgot what it feels like to get into the water and be barly able to swim because you muscles are cramping up! It was almost like lake mi in august!!! Haha.
Up and up the woodland “trail” we went, crossing the waterfall here and there over rocks. And far far up, after navigating some brush and briary spots.
Wow.
We came out into a secrete garden of a dream tean hangout area. A few groups of young thai friends chilled next to a glorious stony sweap of water slides. A group had started a campfire on the rocks next to the water. A boy was playing the guitar. A twisted figtree watched down over the spot. Boys were zooming down the slipper rocks into pools. One maybe 6-8 foot fall rushed down into a tiny but very deep pool (next to the guitar players), which we soon learned was a natural waterslide and dunk pool! We made friends a bit with the Thai kids there and they told us how was best to slide of the waterfall….
It was so awesome.
The rock was slippery, and the water just wisked us off free fall and splash! Into the deep freezing water. The Khon Thai (Thai people ) laughed when we went off ‘Now mai?” they asked. “Cold?” It was over our heads deep, and toes barely touched bottom, before we popped up again. There were rocks (so close it seemed) but they stayed well out of the way. I don’t think you could possibly design anything more fun. The Thai boys showed us up by summersalting and flipping off the jump. The whole place was so romantic and gorgeous. And exciting. I can’t wait to go back.
The only catch was the littering / circle of concern thing I talked about earlier. There was trash and broken glass scattered all around and we had to be very careful of that. When we left I filled a trashbag with bottles and loads of broken glass but there was still much more. When the guitarplayers group left they left their food wrappers, bottles, plastic bags, and they left the camp fire still burning.
Philip and I each got a little glass bite on our hands and Erin bruised her heal. But, I’m kind of surprised we escaped the spot with as few injuries as we did considering all the glass, and going off waterfalls, and sliding down slippery rocks into pools…
Our time there was cut short a bit because I was getting picked up to go home to my host family. I spent the last two days there. It was so great to see them again, and it made me miss home much less. That night Rew and Leap taught me a great game where we tie a balloon to our ankle and then put our other foot touching in the center, count to three, and go! Try to stomp-pop the other peoples balloons> it was insanely hilarious. We went nuts, screaming and jumping and tussling. Three kids and many balloons = very loud and very happy. We had the hot pot for dinner where you add tons of stuff to boiling soup.
Nawng May seems to be living with them now. She is 17 and I think she quit school. She has a shy, beautiful smile. She helped Bah May Pen at her restaurant, but now she cleans house for us. It’s a little awkward for me because I want to help her clean but she says oh no no I can do it myself. She doesn’t eat with Rew and Leap and Me....
Yesterday I went to work with Mae. I also came down with a cold and I could barely focus. As an aside for what good care the host families take of us, I had a sore throat so my host mom sent her staff out to get me medicine, which ended up being amoxycillan (can’t spell). Then I awkwardly had to explain why I wouldn’t take it…. Um that’s way too strong, I have only a little sick. That’s antibacterial and this is a virus.” But then her doctors friend stopped by so he could explain better.
Anyway, I got to go to work with Mae. I felt really bad because after a bit Mae said “you look like you not enjoy being here”. Really I was super happy to be there, but I felt very awkward. I wasn’t dressed nice (baggy boy pants and a yello t shirt, flip flops) and everyone was dressed so nice. Also I didn’t realize exactly what it meant to be the director of such a big foundation in Thai culture. Everyone stood and wai-ed to us when she went anywhere, and stooped down to walk by her, and she just carried herself with such poise and grace. Then we ran into her boss and I got all tongue tied again. Oh. She delivered me to the big open sided warehouse room where they make the prosthetic legs, so I could see how it was done. I was so shy at first, and I just watched and didn’t say anthing because I couldn’t think of questions that didn’t involve complex vocab, but eventually I got talking a bit and made friends with the workers and felt much much better. Pi Boon and Pi La both dropped by for lunch and seeing them was great. Pi Churn (new, met him there) let me help add the plaster to a prosthetic leg!!! It was so cool!!
It was so interesting to be in such an international space. The visitied people from Africa were going back tomorrow (they are ready to start their own clinic there) but one guy was in there trying to respray paint his prosthetic hand (it was too dark) but kept making it look worse and worse (patchy pale and dark) and the Pi Churn was poking fun at him. Also Mrs. Idon’trememberhername next door neighbor from Japan was popping around talking with everyone an dhelping (they both speak English and some Thai). Then I was there, and all the Thai workers… it was just really really neat. I hope to go back when I am less exhausted and without sore throat to make a better impression. We all had lunch together out back from a long table with stick rice and lots of dishes.
After than I went home and slept the rest of the afternoon and into the evening. We ate dinenr together (they bought a pizza for a snack and it was great comfort food) then Paw and the boys and Nawng May and I watched a movie (day after tomorrow) in Thai and Paw and I talked about it as it went along and he taught me a few more Thai words, ant the boys played balloons in front of the TV and paw went to bed and Rew started another movie about “gangs” of boys who have park wars and it looked like the dream childhood (the main character was three years old but the size a of 17 year old because he ate mushrooms as a baby, that had a chemical in them explained Rew) and he wached with his head resting on my legs so although I was tired I didn’t have the heart to go to bed. And when it was done he kept trying to wake up Nawng (his Pi) May to tell her to turn off the lights, and I kept trying to keep him from watking her/knocking on the door. (fun)
and I clean up and we went upstairs and crawled in bed and did our ritural of him trying to tickle me while I’m trying to fall asleep, which melted me heart, then he fell asleep with our bodies curled up like two spirals facing eachother, my hand on his shoulder, and I couldn’t fall asleep for a long time and just lay there thinking about life and feeling fortunate, and alive, and trying not to cough because it might wake him up, and loving basically everything and everyone I know.
The day before yesterday I discovered my favorite place in Chiang Mai. It isjust up the street from our apartments (about a 40 munite walk, or a not too long Rot Dang Ride). Im starting to think my Chur Len (Nick name) in Thai should just be Nam (water) because I am so fascinatedand enthralled with all things water on this trip. Water falls, snorkeling, kayaking, fountains, rivers, but really… mostly waterfalls. This is the Huey Gaow waterfall (we live at Huey Gaow place on Huey Gaow Road).
We got off the Rot dang and there were tons of little food stalls, and we walked up the path towards the falls. It turns out the falls are a tumbling river running over rocks, in little pools, little falls, running rivelts you can slide down like a waterslide. The whole park, on a hill side, is nesteled among trees with grassy nooks, and little stone brides over the water. We climbed up along the river/falls and there was a view out over the Chiang Mai Valley, the high rises emerging out of the green trees and haze. Tons of Thai families picnicked next to the water, or splashed their feet in it.
Near what we originally thought was the top, three thai boys about our age were sitting, dancing and splashing in the falls – one giggled and shrieked in a voice Ihigher pitched than I though it was possible for any guy to make. They splashed around in tiny underwear, and a large older Farang man sat on the rock next to them watching (Sex tourism much?).
We ate tiny hard boiled quail eggs and soy sauce next to the falls and climbed on. Past a really steep waterfall like spot we found a pool swimmable deep and overlooking the city. It was so cold! I forgot what it feels like to get into the water and be barly able to swim because you muscles are cramping up! It was almost like lake mi in august!!! Haha.
Up and up the woodland “trail” we went, crossing the waterfall here and there over rocks. And far far up, after navigating some brush and briary spots.
Wow.
We came out into a secrete garden of a dream tean hangout area. A few groups of young thai friends chilled next to a glorious stony sweap of water slides. A group had started a campfire on the rocks next to the water. A boy was playing the guitar. A twisted figtree watched down over the spot. Boys were zooming down the slipper rocks into pools. One maybe 6-8 foot fall rushed down into a tiny but very deep pool (next to the guitar players), which we soon learned was a natural waterslide and dunk pool! We made friends a bit with the Thai kids there and they told us how was best to slide of the waterfall….
It was so awesome.
The rock was slippery, and the water just wisked us off free fall and splash! Into the deep freezing water. The Khon Thai (Thai people ) laughed when we went off ‘Now mai?” they asked. “Cold?” It was over our heads deep, and toes barely touched bottom, before we popped up again. There were rocks (so close it seemed) but they stayed well out of the way. I don’t think you could possibly design anything more fun. The Thai boys showed us up by summersalting and flipping off the jump. The whole place was so romantic and gorgeous. And exciting. I can’t wait to go back.
The only catch was the littering / circle of concern thing I talked about earlier. There was trash and broken glass scattered all around and we had to be very careful of that. When we left I filled a trashbag with bottles and loads of broken glass but there was still much more. When the guitarplayers group left they left their food wrappers, bottles, plastic bags, and they left the camp fire still burning.
Philip and I each got a little glass bite on our hands and Erin bruised her heal. But, I’m kind of surprised we escaped the spot with as few injuries as we did considering all the glass, and going off waterfalls, and sliding down slippery rocks into pools…
Our time there was cut short a bit because I was getting picked up to go home to my host family. I spent the last two days there. It was so great to see them again, and it made me miss home much less. That night Rew and Leap taught me a great game where we tie a balloon to our ankle and then put our other foot touching in the center, count to three, and go! Try to stomp-pop the other peoples balloons> it was insanely hilarious. We went nuts, screaming and jumping and tussling. Three kids and many balloons = very loud and very happy. We had the hot pot for dinner where you add tons of stuff to boiling soup.
Nawng May seems to be living with them now. She is 17 and I think she quit school. She has a shy, beautiful smile. She helped Bah May Pen at her restaurant, but now she cleans house for us. It’s a little awkward for me because I want to help her clean but she says oh no no I can do it myself. She doesn’t eat with Rew and Leap and Me....
Yesterday I went to work with Mae. I also came down with a cold and I could barely focus. As an aside for what good care the host families take of us, I had a sore throat so my host mom sent her staff out to get me medicine, which ended up being amoxycillan (can’t spell). Then I awkwardly had to explain why I wouldn’t take it…. Um that’s way too strong, I have only a little sick. That’s antibacterial and this is a virus.” But then her doctors friend stopped by so he could explain better.
Anyway, I got to go to work with Mae. I felt really bad because after a bit Mae said “you look like you not enjoy being here”. Really I was super happy to be there, but I felt very awkward. I wasn’t dressed nice (baggy boy pants and a yello t shirt, flip flops) and everyone was dressed so nice. Also I didn’t realize exactly what it meant to be the director of such a big foundation in Thai culture. Everyone stood and wai-ed to us when she went anywhere, and stooped down to walk by her, and she just carried herself with such poise and grace. Then we ran into her boss and I got all tongue tied again. Oh. She delivered me to the big open sided warehouse room where they make the prosthetic legs, so I could see how it was done. I was so shy at first, and I just watched and didn’t say anthing because I couldn’t think of questions that didn’t involve complex vocab, but eventually I got talking a bit and made friends with the workers and felt much much better. Pi Boon and Pi La both dropped by for lunch and seeing them was great. Pi Churn (new, met him there) let me help add the plaster to a prosthetic leg!!! It was so cool!!
It was so interesting to be in such an international space. The visitied people from Africa were going back tomorrow (they are ready to start their own clinic there) but one guy was in there trying to respray paint his prosthetic hand (it was too dark) but kept making it look worse and worse (patchy pale and dark) and the Pi Churn was poking fun at him. Also Mrs. Idon’trememberhername next door neighbor from Japan was popping around talking with everyone an dhelping (they both speak English and some Thai). Then I was there, and all the Thai workers… it was just really really neat. I hope to go back when I am less exhausted and without sore throat to make a better impression. We all had lunch together out back from a long table with stick rice and lots of dishes.
After than I went home and slept the rest of the afternoon and into the evening. We ate dinenr together (they bought a pizza for a snack and it was great comfort food) then Paw and the boys and Nawng May and I watched a movie (day after tomorrow) in Thai and Paw and I talked about it as it went along and he taught me a few more Thai words, ant the boys played balloons in front of the TV and paw went to bed and Rew started another movie about “gangs” of boys who have park wars and it looked like the dream childhood (the main character was three years old but the size a of 17 year old because he ate mushrooms as a baby, that had a chemical in them explained Rew) and he wached with his head resting on my legs so although I was tired I didn’t have the heart to go to bed. And when it was done he kept trying to wake up Nawng (his Pi) May to tell her to turn off the lights, and I kept trying to keep him from watking her/knocking on the door. (fun)
and I clean up and we went upstairs and crawled in bed and did our ritural of him trying to tickle me while I’m trying to fall asleep, which melted me heart, then he fell asleep with our bodies curled up like two spirals facing eachother, my hand on his shoulder, and I couldn’t fall asleep for a long time and just lay there thinking about life and feeling fortunate, and alive, and trying not to cough because it might wake him up, and loving basically everything and everyone I know.
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Islands part III - In which I go night diving
Ok. So guess where I am as I am writing this….
I’m at a second story spa, looking out over a busy Chiang Mai street…. and my feet are being nibbled by hundreds of tiny fish!!! Erin and I just found this crazy place. You sit with your feet hanging in cool tanks of water and the tiny cleaning fish suck, and nibble and TICKLE you toes. At first I just died laughing, it was way too tickly but now I’m doing pretty good… except when they go in between my toes… The info sheet says it is called: “Fish Spa Skin Pampering and Nibbling Treatment” ! who knew!?
The whole thing was only for 6 dollars (we got a special discount for being adorable and speaking thai) we get to stay as long as we want (provided too many other customers don’t come, and then need to switch us out.) Apparently this is the popular thing for Thai and Chiang Mai people. Its great.
Also it has free wifi.
Overfishing, global warming, tourist and anchor damage, and even more over fishing have left the reefs missing most of their best sea creatures. Although each of us 30 students snorkled for maybe 10-20+ hours on the program (hundreds of total observation hours) all over the archipelago no a single one of us ever saw a shark. But I was very lucky.
One morning on the Lipe part of the islands course Marica and I got up early to do a dawn snorkel by ourselves. We went down to the beach right off the resort, and swam out. The reef as patchy and more sandy than other reefs, but still in surprisingly OK condition considering its proximity to all the development. We had just reached the big reef shelf (pretty far out into the channel) and I was looking around, and suddenly I see a very familiar shape right there below me. A sea turtle!
I couldn’t believe it, their basically ecologically extinct from the area. Island fisherman have gone years without seeing them, and there he way! The siz of a trash can lid. I was so startled I shouted into my snorkel, and threw my head out of the water to call marica over. As I did so he started booking it over the reef, and the moment I put my face back in the water he was gone.
My best guess was he was the sponge-eating hawkbill sea turtle, wandering around looking for a new home. It was such a special moment, I felt so lucky to have seen him. It also made me feel conflicted and sad. There used to be many tutles breading in the archipelago but people at all the eggs, and trawlers and fisher nets caught but the adults. I’d make me so sad to think this was a tutle “sink” a place roving turtles went to and didn’t come back from, drawing down the total world population. On the other hand maybe it’s a good sign he was there at all.
The night dive:
It was late on the last night on Lipe, when Marica and I went out for our night dive. We were armed with two half broken underwater flashlights. The night was perfectly clear, zillions of tiny stars in the sky. There were the lights from Mountain Resort on the hill overlooking the water. Across the channel Adang island was tall and dark. To make it all the more mysterious and amazing heat lightning cracked in the clouds over the ocean. The dark water sloshed up on the beach, and hiss back across the sand. It was so scary, and so amazing. Marica and I put on our gear and turned on the lights; from the surface they illuminated bright teal patches in the dark water, underwater they opened up halos in the darkness. We kicked out towards the reef. Dark patches of coral glowered under us. It was truly just like flying in a lucid dream. When the heat lightning flashed we could see it from under the water. Horror movie flashes of errie grey light. We got way out, the dark surface rolling beneath us. We flicked off the lights. I stuck my head under the water, and shouted with shock and with glee! The water was filled with bioluminescence – tiny marine organisms that glow when you bump into them. Tiny sparks of light glittered in oras around bodies and kicking fins. For all the stars above there were dancing stars under the water. We splashed and summer salted and shook around under water. If Marcia was a little ways off and I couldn’t see her in the dark, I could just see the glow of her phantom ghost. Trembling and tumbling through the water. When she dived to check out the coral with the light her front half of her body swam ahead and shadow legs trailing stars followed.
The reef was a sleep. It was dark grey, not the rich brown of day time. There were a few ragged and sleepy fish hiding inbetween the corals, urchins empty annenomies. A few red red fish scurried over the reef with buggy black eyes. It was like going forward in time 10 or 20 years, to see what the reefs will be like when they are empty and degraded.
But we did see one creature of interest: one of the floating nearly clear rocketship of a things that I don’t remember what their called. You could just make out the neon lines of is cone shapped body and trailing fins. I cupped it in an underwater hand, it felt like jelly.
Our lights started running out of juice so we made our way back. When we got in they were basically dead.
I notice that most of the memories I want to lock into writing are diving ones. I’ll try to record some others, too.
The wait staff at the Mounton resort (where we were staying) were all super friendly. They came from the mailland to work there half the year. Several of them were lady-boys “Pu Ching” (men become women), which was cool to have to opportunity to meet them. Every evening if I walked through the restaurant to get to the beach we would stop and all chat together, or when I walked down for breakfast there would be a chorous of hellos. It was such a small island that it was cool to make relationships over the week we were there. Restaurant owners waved and smiled asking “by nai crahp?” where are you going? All the time.
The area where the trash was sorted was in the center of the island, hidden by a patch of forest. We walked passed it so many times before we were shown the secret path in. Once we started paying attention, when we walked the road to town during the day we could see smoke wafting out of the trees from the burning. So there is at least one patch of woods that will remain s tanding on Koh Lipe (Lipe Island)… the one that hids the trash pit.
On our first visit to the trash area they were burning what looked like a refrigerator sized plastic crate, it smoldered toxicly. Five urak lawoi women sorted heaps and heaps of rubagge into packs of cardboard, cans, glass, burnables ect. One interesting thing we learned was that the tourists (mostly western European) are conditioned to sort their rubbage, but that the Khon Thai (Thai people) don’t do this. Pi Pooh wanted to hire Urak Lawoi for his projects to give them an opportunity at employment, and so maybe if they sorted at work they would bring that home to their resident families, too.
The same applies for littering… in Thailand throwing you trash on the side of the road is super common if there isn’t a trash can right there… or even if there is. This comes back to the circle of concern: things are much more relationship based, things outside the circle are disregarded however huge amounts of consideration and respect and generosity for those in the circle is accorded. Every thai house I’ve been inside is spotless. It makes me have appreciation for our common courtesy, but the importance put on relationships and greng jai (respect and consideration for others and social harmony) is something I’d like to take back to the states.
...
I'd like to thank you all for reading, and for you e-mails ect. Sorry if this is way too much information, and that is rather choppy. (Its easiest for me to just post my journal up in big chunks.) I hope you are all having wonderful holidays, and Merry Christmas to my family back home! The holidays seem very bizarre here; the only hit to the season is the coffee shops, and airports are all hosting fake Christmas trees. You are in my thoughts.
Love, Gigi
I’m at a second story spa, looking out over a busy Chiang Mai street…. and my feet are being nibbled by hundreds of tiny fish!!! Erin and I just found this crazy place. You sit with your feet hanging in cool tanks of water and the tiny cleaning fish suck, and nibble and TICKLE you toes. At first I just died laughing, it was way too tickly but now I’m doing pretty good… except when they go in between my toes… The info sheet says it is called: “Fish Spa Skin Pampering and Nibbling Treatment” ! who knew!?
The whole thing was only for 6 dollars (we got a special discount for being adorable and speaking thai) we get to stay as long as we want (provided too many other customers don’t come, and then need to switch us out.) Apparently this is the popular thing for Thai and Chiang Mai people. Its great.
Also it has free wifi.
Overfishing, global warming, tourist and anchor damage, and even more over fishing have left the reefs missing most of their best sea creatures. Although each of us 30 students snorkled for maybe 10-20+ hours on the program (hundreds of total observation hours) all over the archipelago no a single one of us ever saw a shark. But I was very lucky.
One morning on the Lipe part of the islands course Marica and I got up early to do a dawn snorkel by ourselves. We went down to the beach right off the resort, and swam out. The reef as patchy and more sandy than other reefs, but still in surprisingly OK condition considering its proximity to all the development. We had just reached the big reef shelf (pretty far out into the channel) and I was looking around, and suddenly I see a very familiar shape right there below me. A sea turtle!
I couldn’t believe it, their basically ecologically extinct from the area. Island fisherman have gone years without seeing them, and there he way! The siz of a trash can lid. I was so startled I shouted into my snorkel, and threw my head out of the water to call marica over. As I did so he started booking it over the reef, and the moment I put my face back in the water he was gone.
My best guess was he was the sponge-eating hawkbill sea turtle, wandering around looking for a new home. It was such a special moment, I felt so lucky to have seen him. It also made me feel conflicted and sad. There used to be many tutles breading in the archipelago but people at all the eggs, and trawlers and fisher nets caught but the adults. I’d make me so sad to think this was a tutle “sink” a place roving turtles went to and didn’t come back from, drawing down the total world population. On the other hand maybe it’s a good sign he was there at all.
The night dive:
It was late on the last night on Lipe, when Marica and I went out for our night dive. We were armed with two half broken underwater flashlights. The night was perfectly clear, zillions of tiny stars in the sky. There were the lights from Mountain Resort on the hill overlooking the water. Across the channel Adang island was tall and dark. To make it all the more mysterious and amazing heat lightning cracked in the clouds over the ocean. The dark water sloshed up on the beach, and hiss back across the sand. It was so scary, and so amazing. Marica and I put on our gear and turned on the lights; from the surface they illuminated bright teal patches in the dark water, underwater they opened up halos in the darkness. We kicked out towards the reef. Dark patches of coral glowered under us. It was truly just like flying in a lucid dream. When the heat lightning flashed we could see it from under the water. Horror movie flashes of errie grey light. We got way out, the dark surface rolling beneath us. We flicked off the lights. I stuck my head under the water, and shouted with shock and with glee! The water was filled with bioluminescence – tiny marine organisms that glow when you bump into them. Tiny sparks of light glittered in oras around bodies and kicking fins. For all the stars above there were dancing stars under the water. We splashed and summer salted and shook around under water. If Marcia was a little ways off and I couldn’t see her in the dark, I could just see the glow of her phantom ghost. Trembling and tumbling through the water. When she dived to check out the coral with the light her front half of her body swam ahead and shadow legs trailing stars followed.
The reef was a sleep. It was dark grey, not the rich brown of day time. There were a few ragged and sleepy fish hiding inbetween the corals, urchins empty annenomies. A few red red fish scurried over the reef with buggy black eyes. It was like going forward in time 10 or 20 years, to see what the reefs will be like when they are empty and degraded.
But we did see one creature of interest: one of the floating nearly clear rocketship of a things that I don’t remember what their called. You could just make out the neon lines of is cone shapped body and trailing fins. I cupped it in an underwater hand, it felt like jelly.
Our lights started running out of juice so we made our way back. When we got in they were basically dead.
I notice that most of the memories I want to lock into writing are diving ones. I’ll try to record some others, too.
The wait staff at the Mounton resort (where we were staying) were all super friendly. They came from the mailland to work there half the year. Several of them were lady-boys “Pu Ching” (men become women), which was cool to have to opportunity to meet them. Every evening if I walked through the restaurant to get to the beach we would stop and all chat together, or when I walked down for breakfast there would be a chorous of hellos. It was such a small island that it was cool to make relationships over the week we were there. Restaurant owners waved and smiled asking “by nai crahp?” where are you going? All the time.
The area where the trash was sorted was in the center of the island, hidden by a patch of forest. We walked passed it so many times before we were shown the secret path in. Once we started paying attention, when we walked the road to town during the day we could see smoke wafting out of the trees from the burning. So there is at least one patch of woods that will remain s tanding on Koh Lipe (Lipe Island)… the one that hids the trash pit.
On our first visit to the trash area they were burning what looked like a refrigerator sized plastic crate, it smoldered toxicly. Five urak lawoi women sorted heaps and heaps of rubagge into packs of cardboard, cans, glass, burnables ect. One interesting thing we learned was that the tourists (mostly western European) are conditioned to sort their rubbage, but that the Khon Thai (Thai people) don’t do this. Pi Pooh wanted to hire Urak Lawoi for his projects to give them an opportunity at employment, and so maybe if they sorted at work they would bring that home to their resident families, too.
The same applies for littering… in Thailand throwing you trash on the side of the road is super common if there isn’t a trash can right there… or even if there is. This comes back to the circle of concern: things are much more relationship based, things outside the circle are disregarded however huge amounts of consideration and respect and generosity for those in the circle is accorded. Every thai house I’ve been inside is spotless. It makes me have appreciation for our common courtesy, but the importance put on relationships and greng jai (respect and consideration for others and social harmony) is something I’d like to take back to the states.
...
I'd like to thank you all for reading, and for you e-mails ect. Sorry if this is way too much information, and that is rather choppy. (Its easiest for me to just post my journal up in big chunks.) I hope you are all having wonderful holidays, and Merry Christmas to my family back home! The holidays seem very bizarre here; the only hit to the season is the coffee shops, and airports are all hosting fake Christmas trees. You are in my thoughts.
Love, Gigi
Islands part II - The last frogs of Lipe
The second half of our trip was to Lipe island.
This half was was most spent doing an indepth research project, in thai, about development on the island! My group studied waste management on the island. (which turned out to be a really amazing thing to study because it was at a pivotal point in the islands history). The island is about a mile long, and it has 1,800 bungalos on it for starters (2/3 of those have been put up in the last three years). Its flat, used to be forested, has patches of gorgeous white sand beach, and has a village where the Urak Lawoi people live. There are also many Urak Lawoi who sold their land years and years ago and now the new owners want to develop it and are kicking them off the land, so they live in squatter towns. There is a walking street with tons of restaurants, dive shops, internet cafes ect.
Until a couple years ago all the waste on the island was burned, buried, or left on the beach for the tide to take out to sea. But waste has become a huge problem. The island produces 2.2 metric tons of waste a day!!! Just in the last year, a waste management / collection system was started and a lot is now shipped off the island. Finding out alla bout it was fascinating, and we interviewed people from all parts of the process… its was like solving a mystery!! Sometime we would think we heard something but not believe it- like once we though we were miscommunicating because some people were telling us they fed the trash to ducks, then we found out there were ducks that were bought to eat some of the food waste (only there were 20, then ten choked on trash and died).
In two weeks, when we get our learning journals back I’ll type up some of the short essays I wrote in the island.
One evening I made friends with a bunch of Thai girls, who were spinning poi on the beach in front of the massage place they worked for. I tried, and failed terribly, at teaching them the 5 beat weave, but it was tons of fun. (Poi is what I did for circus club, were you spin (traditionally flaming) balls at the ends of strings around your body in complex patterns) We stayed up late hanging out at their place, and they invited me to sleep over, but I didn’t thinkt hat would be ISDSI protocol so they walked me across the island home.
Development on the island was so sad. It happened so unbelievably fast. Even as we visited trees fell, and resorts went up. We saw several restaurants go from frames to open in a week. Bulldozers worked all night. The night we arrived the islands only wetland (in the middle of the island, between us and town ) was a light with massive bonfires burning the fallen trees. As we found our way down the rutted dirt road hundreds of frogs fled the swamp, knocking into our legs. Their shinny bodies glistening in the moonlight, and fire light. For days they hopped aimlessly around the resort. The last frogs of Lipe island. The super ironic thing was our resort had about a hundred frog shapped trash cans
This half was was most spent doing an indepth research project, in thai, about development on the island! My group studied waste management on the island. (which turned out to be a really amazing thing to study because it was at a pivotal point in the islands history). The island is about a mile long, and it has 1,800 bungalos on it for starters (2/3 of those have been put up in the last three years). Its flat, used to be forested, has patches of gorgeous white sand beach, and has a village where the Urak Lawoi people live. There are also many Urak Lawoi who sold their land years and years ago and now the new owners want to develop it and are kicking them off the land, so they live in squatter towns. There is a walking street with tons of restaurants, dive shops, internet cafes ect.
Until a couple years ago all the waste on the island was burned, buried, or left on the beach for the tide to take out to sea. But waste has become a huge problem. The island produces 2.2 metric tons of waste a day!!! Just in the last year, a waste management / collection system was started and a lot is now shipped off the island. Finding out alla bout it was fascinating, and we interviewed people from all parts of the process… its was like solving a mystery!! Sometime we would think we heard something but not believe it- like once we though we were miscommunicating because some people were telling us they fed the trash to ducks, then we found out there were ducks that were bought to eat some of the food waste (only there were 20, then ten choked on trash and died).
In two weeks, when we get our learning journals back I’ll type up some of the short essays I wrote in the island.
One evening I made friends with a bunch of Thai girls, who were spinning poi on the beach in front of the massage place they worked for. I tried, and failed terribly, at teaching them the 5 beat weave, but it was tons of fun. (Poi is what I did for circus club, were you spin (traditionally flaming) balls at the ends of strings around your body in complex patterns) We stayed up late hanging out at their place, and they invited me to sleep over, but I didn’t thinkt hat would be ISDSI protocol so they walked me across the island home.
Development on the island was so sad. It happened so unbelievably fast. Even as we visited trees fell, and resorts went up. We saw several restaurants go from frames to open in a week. Bulldozers worked all night. The night we arrived the islands only wetland (in the middle of the island, between us and town ) was a light with massive bonfires burning the fallen trees. As we found our way down the rutted dirt road hundreds of frogs fled the swamp, knocking into our legs. Their shinny bodies glistening in the moonlight, and fire light. For days they hopped aimlessly around the resort. The last frogs of Lipe island. The super ironic thing was our resort had about a hundred frog shapped trash cans
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Islands part I
I guess the place to begin with for islands is that it was a course cobinding two of my greatest interests: Environment in relation to Tourism, and Reef ecology / aventure sports.
I Loved it. The first time I saw a reef it almost stopped my heart again. I thought “I could do this for the rest of my life”. We had just arrived on course. Our 24 hour bus ride had ended in reaching a small port town, with a marina tucked into mangroves (which remineded me of Florida, shout out to Alli, Q, Beth, and Glenn!). At the small town I went out on my own for lunch and found a busy little Thai restaurant, and sat at at table with several Chow Lay (sea people) fisherman and chatted with them. It was exciting to be speaking to Thai strangers on my own, especially with their souther accents which were hard to decifer at first. Later we boarded a speed boat and took a four hour ride through patchy islands, and expanses of blue and teal water.
The park we arrived in had three islands, Rawi (where we landed) and Adang which were both part of the national park, and a thirld smaller, flat island: Lipe. This island had been allocated to the native Urak Lawoi people as their land when the park was formed. Many/most of the Urak Lawoi sold their land there, and now it is being absolutely consumed by development (much more later). There are many little islands to, and each are ringed by coral reefs.
We arrived at Rawi to a swath of white sand beach, with a few coconut trees, and a low moutian of jungle/forest rising behind it. We had a camp of tents just inside some trees, and there was a national park station, which was a square house where our guides lived for the time. The amazing thing about the bay in which we were camped was the extreme fluctuation of the tides. At high tide, water lapped up right a the base of our campsite beach area, at low tide the whole bay turned into a intertidal flat land. Sand, chunks of dead corals, little rivulets of running water, muck.
It was pretty low tide when I first went out. I remember walking out the grey mud soft on my feet until I saw my first sea cucumber in the ankle deep water. I crouched down, put on my mask and stuck my face in the water. It was neet, I poked its stiff body, watched it do absolutely nothing, and was fascinated. Next I saw an urchin, spines gently waving in the pressure in of in flowing water. Next it was my first tiny fish – black and neo blue stipped diving under a rock. Then an annenomy! Then a field of staghorn coral as far as I could see (brown branching coral alike a bazillions buck’s antlers all packed togheter) the water level was so low (I was swimming in waist deep water) that I couldn’t flaot over them. I remember trying to tip toe thorugh and a tip breaking off with a crunch and a dusting of sand. I back tracked around. That’s when the reef started to open up.
Its so hard to describe a reef to anyone – you fly over it, floating and with skin diving (fancy way of saying diving without oxygen tanks) you can swoop and prowl through the bulkheads. Lumy masses of coral with fish meandering this way and that, waving annenomies, splashes of color, the glissening surface when you come back up, the sandy batches on the bottom…. I was euphoric at first, being there. As me and the other students swam around I saw a sting ray hiding in a sandy patch on the bottom, eventually he lifted lazily out of the sand and flapped off over the reef, his long purple barb trailing after him.
The reefs never got old for me. I barely ever wanted to go in, and whenever I would go in on my own even if I ahd been doing something fun like hanging on the beach or whatever, as soon as I saw the reef I got this great feeling like why wasn’t I doing this every second. Durring the trip Philip was my enduring partner is adoration and fascination with the biology around us and Marica was my parner in crime for being the last (annoying, sorry guys) ones for coming in off the reef. Both bio peopleinterested in art, we spend one night laying under the stars planning our secret career ambitions to be marine biologists by day and artists (her music and food me painting and poetry) by night.
We sea kayaked to several reefs in the area. Some had big rocks going into the water, other were flat and rolling off of beaches. I loved kayaking, as always, and felt at home in the boats. Unlike forests, where I was challenged by the hiking, I could make up for a lack of brust strength with good form. Also I love working my abs and arms hard.
Manuvering a boat through the water is such an art and joy. One day we went out there were crazy winds and currents (it was the strongest cycle of the tides – the day of the full moon) and to round one point we had to thow every ounce of our strength into the paddles. Surging forward as furiously as I could manage I barly crawled forward along the shore. It was amazing. I could feel the tiniest adjustments in improving my form tip the balance between being swept backwards by the wind of waves.
The waves were wonderful. Sometimes there were swells that would rock the boat (a few feet high (?), or they would break over your bow and roll down the spray skirt. One of the most fantastic moments of my whole time in Thailand was coming back from this same windy day ( we had to turn around there was no way we could keep going in the winds) and we were coming back in to the bay. The shallowness over the reef formed great waves, but it was low tide so we couldn’t make it in over the coral just below the surface. We paddled along the endge of the reef looking for a way in. I followed Pi Aaron far left to find a way through on that side and it was looking good, until all of a sudden huge waves came in behind us and swept into the area of light blue/green (shallow) water. Corals tips broke out of the surface. Aaron realized it was too shallow “well have to go back!” he yells but the waves were sweeping us forwads towards the reef! A big coral head broke the surface, swirling yellow. “no good” he yelles. “Should I go forward or back” I shout back as a huge wave sends my boat tremmorring, launched towards/through the shallows “Get backwards!” I look back and the biggest wave I have seen in Thailand is right behind me, I can see it has seconds before it breaks. I whip my paddle around and thrust my kayak backwards, climb the swell moments before it breaks on me….I make it!! The monster rushes forwards, surgin my kayak on it sback. Pi aaron, nearly below me… woosh! My paddle scrapes agaist cora for a brief moment but I manuvour past and we are flying, blackpaddeling back out into the deeper swells. It was so quick and so epic. I wrote in my journal “it was such a perfec tmis of adrenaline and exuberance, challenge na adventure, physical, technical, teamwork, peaceful. The sea”
We back around the reef, and I glided over the sweels and we came in by the high and dry mangroces with their arched roots. It was really hella far to carry the boats over the tidal flats, so some of us tied up on the mangrove tip of the peninsula and walked in. before dinner (which was pasts and pesto!!!) Philip and I expored the intertidal zone, after we had to go back to get our boats.
But the full moon had already carried in several meters of water into the bay. We hiked the beach to the mangroces and sloshed out into the thight deep water. It was awesome! To our left the moon rose over the mangrove, casting silvery and shadows over the sweet trees. The warm ocean swirled gently at our waists, our headlamps bobbed like stars out ahead. The bay was gently pulsing with waves. For the first time on the trip, a few stars poked out from the cloudy sky. We got out to our boats, kocking restlessly about eachother like teathered horses. We untied the kayaks, prepared them for eh rde back and paddle out into the glittering water. Night kayaking under the full moon, the perfect soft water, glassy, a live reef sleeping and a sandy bottom a few meters below our boats. We laghed grinned, trailed our fingertips in the water, Frenchi snapped pictures, a cicade hummed, more stars came out. Our pod slowly paddled in the still water together, maybe we were whales not horses.
It was like the wind was breathing us towards shore. “you gave me goosebumbs!” said frenchi when I told her, she said the ocean breaths yesterday – watching the annenomies wave in the current.
When the tide goes out, the long tail boats tied up near camp are left high and dry. That night, the water high, I carried my stuff out over my head and climbed aboard the deck. The waves rocked and knocked on the boat. I wrote the journal I just copied from by moon light. The wind was humid and warm. I slept on the boat, and when I woke up the next morning I was high and dry again.
Gosh, there are just so many moments to recount.
Some other activites we did on the first half of the course were:
- hiking around in a mangrove and walking about on the roots. Later we went back snorkeling. It was kinda spooky, but it made me feel like I was inside the mangrove tank at the Shed Aquarium. I actually got that feeling a lot, on the reef, like I was inside an aquarium and it always made the whole thing a little bit more exciting.
- Pi Aaron told us we could touch the annenomies without getting stung because our skin was thicker than a fish’s and we were so large. I dove down and did this, and it feel cool – “just like you would imagine” and also some tips sort of stuck to you fingers. Then I thought “hey, you know what would be really cool to be able to say I did / do. Something most people don’t do…. I could put my face in one.” So I swam closer…closter… OUCH!!AHGJSSOGI! The annenomie stings on my lips felt like I had just eaten something really really spicy and then got punched in the mouth. For the rest of the day I had “spicy” lips.
- Philip and I went out on a rough day, at the end of the day. It was low tide and we had to walk about past the mangroves to get to the reef. The water was murky and brown. When there was no coral it was pretty scary because you couldn’t see anything at all. When there was coral it rose mysteriously out of the murky water. We were about to go back in when suddenly, right in front of me, the size of a basket ball is a LIONFISH!!! (go look up a picture if you don’t know what I mean) its fans of long fins waved ominously, as it hovered over the reef. I got Philip over as quickly as possible and we just watched it as it watched us. I swear it started to stare us down and slowly advance on us. Lionfish are very poisonous, so we keep a careful distance. Then on the way back we saw two more!!
- We kept getting ticks, some in ears or on backs. Their not so gross as the bits just ache for weeks. We think they were hanging out in our hammocks. (don’t
- Worry no lime disease in Thailand)
- We had a fire on the beach and waited until the tide came and a big wave put it out with a rush of steam.
- The beach was covered with little hermit crabs.
- Sun rise over the tide flats.
- On our long kayak day where we moved to a new island, Emily got sea sick in her kayak as we were crossing a channel between two islands and puked off the side of her boat. the hilarious thing was the first thing she thought was “nutrient cycling!”.
- We did an pilot study research project on one reef. We got two days to make observations, come up with a research question, then design the study and do it. It was super fun! I explored a possible correlation between Harold’s angel fish and staghorn coral (i think the coral causes them to school because of the density of hiding spots).
- I had the thought at one point: Some time in my life I want to have a job that gives me pruned fingers.
more later,
Love love love, Gigi
I Loved it. The first time I saw a reef it almost stopped my heart again. I thought “I could do this for the rest of my life”. We had just arrived on course. Our 24 hour bus ride had ended in reaching a small port town, with a marina tucked into mangroves (which remineded me of Florida, shout out to Alli, Q, Beth, and Glenn!). At the small town I went out on my own for lunch and found a busy little Thai restaurant, and sat at at table with several Chow Lay (sea people) fisherman and chatted with them. It was exciting to be speaking to Thai strangers on my own, especially with their souther accents which were hard to decifer at first. Later we boarded a speed boat and took a four hour ride through patchy islands, and expanses of blue and teal water.
The park we arrived in had three islands, Rawi (where we landed) and Adang which were both part of the national park, and a thirld smaller, flat island: Lipe. This island had been allocated to the native Urak Lawoi people as their land when the park was formed. Many/most of the Urak Lawoi sold their land there, and now it is being absolutely consumed by development (much more later). There are many little islands to, and each are ringed by coral reefs.
We arrived at Rawi to a swath of white sand beach, with a few coconut trees, and a low moutian of jungle/forest rising behind it. We had a camp of tents just inside some trees, and there was a national park station, which was a square house where our guides lived for the time. The amazing thing about the bay in which we were camped was the extreme fluctuation of the tides. At high tide, water lapped up right a the base of our campsite beach area, at low tide the whole bay turned into a intertidal flat land. Sand, chunks of dead corals, little rivulets of running water, muck.
It was pretty low tide when I first went out. I remember walking out the grey mud soft on my feet until I saw my first sea cucumber in the ankle deep water. I crouched down, put on my mask and stuck my face in the water. It was neet, I poked its stiff body, watched it do absolutely nothing, and was fascinated. Next I saw an urchin, spines gently waving in the pressure in of in flowing water. Next it was my first tiny fish – black and neo blue stipped diving under a rock. Then an annenomy! Then a field of staghorn coral as far as I could see (brown branching coral alike a bazillions buck’s antlers all packed togheter) the water level was so low (I was swimming in waist deep water) that I couldn’t flaot over them. I remember trying to tip toe thorugh and a tip breaking off with a crunch and a dusting of sand. I back tracked around. That’s when the reef started to open up.
Its so hard to describe a reef to anyone – you fly over it, floating and with skin diving (fancy way of saying diving without oxygen tanks) you can swoop and prowl through the bulkheads. Lumy masses of coral with fish meandering this way and that, waving annenomies, splashes of color, the glissening surface when you come back up, the sandy batches on the bottom…. I was euphoric at first, being there. As me and the other students swam around I saw a sting ray hiding in a sandy patch on the bottom, eventually he lifted lazily out of the sand and flapped off over the reef, his long purple barb trailing after him.
The reefs never got old for me. I barely ever wanted to go in, and whenever I would go in on my own even if I ahd been doing something fun like hanging on the beach or whatever, as soon as I saw the reef I got this great feeling like why wasn’t I doing this every second. Durring the trip Philip was my enduring partner is adoration and fascination with the biology around us and Marica was my parner in crime for being the last (annoying, sorry guys) ones for coming in off the reef. Both bio peopleinterested in art, we spend one night laying under the stars planning our secret career ambitions to be marine biologists by day and artists (her music and food me painting and poetry) by night.
We sea kayaked to several reefs in the area. Some had big rocks going into the water, other were flat and rolling off of beaches. I loved kayaking, as always, and felt at home in the boats. Unlike forests, where I was challenged by the hiking, I could make up for a lack of brust strength with good form. Also I love working my abs and arms hard.
Manuvering a boat through the water is such an art and joy. One day we went out there were crazy winds and currents (it was the strongest cycle of the tides – the day of the full moon) and to round one point we had to thow every ounce of our strength into the paddles. Surging forward as furiously as I could manage I barly crawled forward along the shore. It was amazing. I could feel the tiniest adjustments in improving my form tip the balance between being swept backwards by the wind of waves.
The waves were wonderful. Sometimes there were swells that would rock the boat (a few feet high (?), or they would break over your bow and roll down the spray skirt. One of the most fantastic moments of my whole time in Thailand was coming back from this same windy day ( we had to turn around there was no way we could keep going in the winds) and we were coming back in to the bay. The shallowness over the reef formed great waves, but it was low tide so we couldn’t make it in over the coral just below the surface. We paddled along the endge of the reef looking for a way in. I followed Pi Aaron far left to find a way through on that side and it was looking good, until all of a sudden huge waves came in behind us and swept into the area of light blue/green (shallow) water. Corals tips broke out of the surface. Aaron realized it was too shallow “well have to go back!” he yells but the waves were sweeping us forwads towards the reef! A big coral head broke the surface, swirling yellow. “no good” he yelles. “Should I go forward or back” I shout back as a huge wave sends my boat tremmorring, launched towards/through the shallows “Get backwards!” I look back and the biggest wave I have seen in Thailand is right behind me, I can see it has seconds before it breaks. I whip my paddle around and thrust my kayak backwards, climb the swell moments before it breaks on me….I make it!! The monster rushes forwards, surgin my kayak on it sback. Pi aaron, nearly below me… woosh! My paddle scrapes agaist cora for a brief moment but I manuvour past and we are flying, blackpaddeling back out into the deeper swells. It was so quick and so epic. I wrote in my journal “it was such a perfec tmis of adrenaline and exuberance, challenge na adventure, physical, technical, teamwork, peaceful. The sea”
We back around the reef, and I glided over the sweels and we came in by the high and dry mangroces with their arched roots. It was really hella far to carry the boats over the tidal flats, so some of us tied up on the mangrove tip of the peninsula and walked in. before dinner (which was pasts and pesto!!!) Philip and I expored the intertidal zone, after we had to go back to get our boats.
But the full moon had already carried in several meters of water into the bay. We hiked the beach to the mangroces and sloshed out into the thight deep water. It was awesome! To our left the moon rose over the mangrove, casting silvery and shadows over the sweet trees. The warm ocean swirled gently at our waists, our headlamps bobbed like stars out ahead. The bay was gently pulsing with waves. For the first time on the trip, a few stars poked out from the cloudy sky. We got out to our boats, kocking restlessly about eachother like teathered horses. We untied the kayaks, prepared them for eh rde back and paddle out into the glittering water. Night kayaking under the full moon, the perfect soft water, glassy, a live reef sleeping and a sandy bottom a few meters below our boats. We laghed grinned, trailed our fingertips in the water, Frenchi snapped pictures, a cicade hummed, more stars came out. Our pod slowly paddled in the still water together, maybe we were whales not horses.
It was like the wind was breathing us towards shore. “you gave me goosebumbs!” said frenchi when I told her, she said the ocean breaths yesterday – watching the annenomies wave in the current.
When the tide goes out, the long tail boats tied up near camp are left high and dry. That night, the water high, I carried my stuff out over my head and climbed aboard the deck. The waves rocked and knocked on the boat. I wrote the journal I just copied from by moon light. The wind was humid and warm. I slept on the boat, and when I woke up the next morning I was high and dry again.
Gosh, there are just so many moments to recount.
Some other activites we did on the first half of the course were:
- hiking around in a mangrove and walking about on the roots. Later we went back snorkeling. It was kinda spooky, but it made me feel like I was inside the mangrove tank at the Shed Aquarium. I actually got that feeling a lot, on the reef, like I was inside an aquarium and it always made the whole thing a little bit more exciting.
- Pi Aaron told us we could touch the annenomies without getting stung because our skin was thicker than a fish’s and we were so large. I dove down and did this, and it feel cool – “just like you would imagine” and also some tips sort of stuck to you fingers. Then I thought “hey, you know what would be really cool to be able to say I did / do. Something most people don’t do…. I could put my face in one.” So I swam closer…closter… OUCH!!AHGJSSOGI! The annenomie stings on my lips felt like I had just eaten something really really spicy and then got punched in the mouth. For the rest of the day I had “spicy” lips.
- Philip and I went out on a rough day, at the end of the day. It was low tide and we had to walk about past the mangroves to get to the reef. The water was murky and brown. When there was no coral it was pretty scary because you couldn’t see anything at all. When there was coral it rose mysteriously out of the murky water. We were about to go back in when suddenly, right in front of me, the size of a basket ball is a LIONFISH!!! (go look up a picture if you don’t know what I mean) its fans of long fins waved ominously, as it hovered over the reef. I got Philip over as quickly as possible and we just watched it as it watched us. I swear it started to stare us down and slowly advance on us. Lionfish are very poisonous, so we keep a careful distance. Then on the way back we saw two more!!
- We kept getting ticks, some in ears or on backs. Their not so gross as the bits just ache for weeks. We think they were hanging out in our hammocks. (don’t
- Worry no lime disease in Thailand)
- We had a fire on the beach and waited until the tide came and a big wave put it out with a rush of steam.
- The beach was covered with little hermit crabs.
- Sun rise over the tide flats.
- On our long kayak day where we moved to a new island, Emily got sea sick in her kayak as we were crossing a channel between two islands and puked off the side of her boat. the hilarious thing was the first thing she thought was “nutrient cycling!”.
- We did an pilot study research project on one reef. We got two days to make observations, come up with a research question, then design the study and do it. It was super fun! I explored a possible correlation between Harold’s angel fish and staghorn coral (i think the coral causes them to school because of the density of hiding spots).
- I had the thought at one point: Some time in my life I want to have a job that gives me pruned fingers.
more later,
Love love love, Gigi
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Islands
Hi all!
So tomorrow morning at 6:00 Am i will be getting on a bus and heading down to the southern tip of thailand for our final field course ISLANDS! i can't wait! i think this may be my favorite field course and it will certianly be the biggest adventure. It starts with a 24 hour bus ride to get there. Then a four hour boat ride to get out to the archipelago of islands, in the Andaman Sea. We will be in a cluster of islands and reefs on the west side of the Thailand peninsula. We will by kayaking, sleeping on the beach, diving in the reefs, doing diversity studies, and even doing a NIGHT DIVE in the coral reef! This means diving in the dark, with lights to look at the night time activities of the coral, the phosporecents, the SHARKS LURKING IN THE DARK WATER AS THE WAVES ROLL UNDERUS!!!!! ok... maybe not. :D but i'm very excited. We will be interviewing/learning from a people called the Urak Lawoi (im not sure bout that spelling) Who used to be a semi nomadic sea people. Now they live in some quickly globalizing islands. They fish, run tourist industry, and i'll be able to tell you alot more abotu them when we get back. They are caught in a political dispute over usership/land rights.... They sold their land rights long ago, for cash under the impression that they would still be able to live there without rights, but now, years later, things are getting messy....
They used to fish the reefs by throwing dinamite in the water...
Thanks giving was nice. The whole school, Staff, Pi's, Students and families went out to a nice western restaurant for dinner and we got BREAD!!!! YAY!!! i love bread!!! (there is no bread here. only white bread, once in a while). After we had "beer olympics" in the dorms. Which included making teams with themes like robots, farang, team struggle bus... and each room hosted a different drinking game (like checkers on the b & w floor with beer cans)... it was very fun. The students who are not from K will be heading back home soon, just after Islands ends, its insane! i can't think of leaving yet!!!
I'll be doing my ICRP on a comparative case study of ecotrouism in thailand. i'll be comparing the Community Based Tourism, homestays we visited for forests and a zip-line adventure park outside of Chiang Mai. They are both good (but very different) ecotourism places. I'll be comparing how they deal with the economic, soical and environmental pillars of sustainablilty. Ill be doing lots of ethnogrphy (never done this before!) interviewing and stuff. I'm so excited because i've never done anything like that before.
I still have no idea what i'llb e doing for break. Although one idea i had was to go back to the Karen Villages and draw a coloring book of Karen life. THe kids there grow up with pictures of a white Jesus, and toy dump trucks (when they've never seen a construction site). I think it would be cool for them to have a toy/media about themselves. Also it might help with the toruism because it could show basic activities and ways of life and teh parents could use it as a resource when people come to stay with them but dont speak much Thai. (it would have the word for each thign in Thai, Bakenyaw, English, French, German, Chinese ext)... dunno. it would be really fun to draw though!
Love you all loads! i hope your having the best of holidays!
Remember, when your feeling down, that there is so much to be thankful for!
I'm thankful for all my supporting friends and family back home,
Love Gigi
So tomorrow morning at 6:00 Am i will be getting on a bus and heading down to the southern tip of thailand for our final field course ISLANDS! i can't wait! i think this may be my favorite field course and it will certianly be the biggest adventure. It starts with a 24 hour bus ride to get there. Then a four hour boat ride to get out to the archipelago of islands, in the Andaman Sea. We will be in a cluster of islands and reefs on the west side of the Thailand peninsula. We will by kayaking, sleeping on the beach, diving in the reefs, doing diversity studies, and even doing a NIGHT DIVE in the coral reef! This means diving in the dark, with lights to look at the night time activities of the coral, the phosporecents, the SHARKS LURKING IN THE DARK WATER AS THE WAVES ROLL UNDERUS!!!!! ok... maybe not. :D but i'm very excited. We will be interviewing/learning from a people called the Urak Lawoi (im not sure bout that spelling) Who used to be a semi nomadic sea people. Now they live in some quickly globalizing islands. They fish, run tourist industry, and i'll be able to tell you alot more abotu them when we get back. They are caught in a political dispute over usership/land rights.... They sold their land rights long ago, for cash under the impression that they would still be able to live there without rights, but now, years later, things are getting messy....
They used to fish the reefs by throwing dinamite in the water...
Thanks giving was nice. The whole school, Staff, Pi's, Students and families went out to a nice western restaurant for dinner and we got BREAD!!!! YAY!!! i love bread!!! (there is no bread here. only white bread, once in a while). After we had "beer olympics" in the dorms. Which included making teams with themes like robots, farang, team struggle bus... and each room hosted a different drinking game (like checkers on the b & w floor with beer cans)... it was very fun. The students who are not from K will be heading back home soon, just after Islands ends, its insane! i can't think of leaving yet!!!
I'll be doing my ICRP on a comparative case study of ecotrouism in thailand. i'll be comparing the Community Based Tourism, homestays we visited for forests and a zip-line adventure park outside of Chiang Mai. They are both good (but very different) ecotourism places. I'll be comparing how they deal with the economic, soical and environmental pillars of sustainablilty. Ill be doing lots of ethnogrphy (never done this before!) interviewing and stuff. I'm so excited because i've never done anything like that before.
I still have no idea what i'llb e doing for break. Although one idea i had was to go back to the Karen Villages and draw a coloring book of Karen life. THe kids there grow up with pictures of a white Jesus, and toy dump trucks (when they've never seen a construction site). I think it would be cool for them to have a toy/media about themselves. Also it might help with the toruism because it could show basic activities and ways of life and teh parents could use it as a resource when people come to stay with them but dont speak much Thai. (it would have the word for each thign in Thai, Bakenyaw, English, French, German, Chinese ext)... dunno. it would be really fun to draw though!
Love you all loads! i hope your having the best of holidays!
Remember, when your feeling down, that there is so much to be thankful for!
I'm thankful for all my supporting friends and family back home,
Love Gigi
Monday, November 23, 2009
answers to some of Grandma J's questions!
I am surprised how well dressed the children are, with the cute two piece outfits. I could not find the rats head, 'tho the photos moved too fast to really look. So far I have seen them twice. Where are they cooking eggs in the hot pool? Are there more than one vent? Where from? I presume the water buffalo are let out to eat and work and then are tied up under the homes. It seems as tho all they can do is stand there. The dogs are scrawny. Did you bring a frisbee with you on this trip? Did the first one ever fall off the roof? What are you hunting for in the rice? I think that floating flowers down the river includes the Ganges in India. Are those banana trees?
A neighbor brought over fresh chocolate-chip cookies. Delicious! Do you get sweets with your meals? I can't see the makings of much except fruit. The children are sucking on sticks.
Of???? WHAT A TRIP!!!! G'ma J
The kids here are well dressed because their mothers make almost all of thier clothes! its actually truly amazing, sometimes they buy them, and and sometimes they buy thread from the city, and sometimes they plant the cotton, and the seeds to decorate them and plants for dyes, or go and find them in thier conservation forests, and make the thread, and weave the cloth and sew the clothes. its is amazing!!!!!!! one thign the villager said alot is 'here, we can live without money"
the bit with eggs in the hot spring was with my host family on the way to Chiang Rai, its pretty cool, its a hot spring just like yellowstone, but on the side of the road. People just buy the eggs and pop them into to boil! eat them with soy sauce, yum!
yes, they tie the buffalo under thier homes when the come back so they dont eat the garden.
The dogs eat left over rice, they are very very scrawny.
i brought a frissbee and it was a huge hit, but i lost it at the third village (kids were playing and then we went to go play in the waterfall and i forgot to find it/bring it to the next village) i hope they have it and are playing with it, they could share thier culture with me and maybe i can share a bit of mine! (the first one is still on my host families roof)
uh... i don't think we are looking for anything in the rice, we are harvesting it@ ohoh wait, those are jobs tears, they are seed that the women sew onto shirts (the cool b&w pictures with hands right?)
the amazing tres with beautiful huge square leaves are banana trees! they are so fun to draw!
yes, thai food is either rice, very bitter, curry, or extreemly sweet. Only i never feel full from eating rice, so i have a hard time feeling full here. All my firends here keep fantasizing about cheese. man. i love cheese. and bread with olive oil.
A neighbor brought over fresh chocolate-chip cookies. Delicious! Do you get sweets with your meals? I can't see the makings of much except fruit. The children are sucking on sticks.
Of???? WHAT A TRIP!!!! G'ma J
The kids here are well dressed because their mothers make almost all of thier clothes! its actually truly amazing, sometimes they buy them, and and sometimes they buy thread from the city, and sometimes they plant the cotton, and the seeds to decorate them and plants for dyes, or go and find them in thier conservation forests, and make the thread, and weave the cloth and sew the clothes. its is amazing!!!!!!! one thign the villager said alot is 'here, we can live without money"
the bit with eggs in the hot spring was with my host family on the way to Chiang Rai, its pretty cool, its a hot spring just like yellowstone, but on the side of the road. People just buy the eggs and pop them into to boil! eat them with soy sauce, yum!
yes, they tie the buffalo under thier homes when the come back so they dont eat the garden.
The dogs eat left over rice, they are very very scrawny.
i brought a frissbee and it was a huge hit, but i lost it at the third village (kids were playing and then we went to go play in the waterfall and i forgot to find it/bring it to the next village) i hope they have it and are playing with it, they could share thier culture with me and maybe i can share a bit of mine! (the first one is still on my host families roof)
uh... i don't think we are looking for anything in the rice, we are harvesting it@ ohoh wait, those are jobs tears, they are seed that the women sew onto shirts (the cool b&w pictures with hands right?)
the amazing tres with beautiful huge square leaves are banana trees! they are so fun to draw!
yes, thai food is either rice, very bitter, curry, or extreemly sweet. Only i never feel full from eating rice, so i have a hard time feeling full here. All my firends here keep fantasizing about cheese. man. i love cheese. and bread with olive oil.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Political Ecology of Forests!
The Political Ecology of Forests
Hi everyone! Mom, dad, friends and family!
This is Sunday morning, the first weekend I’m back from the forests. Its 7:15 in the morning, which is the time at which my body simply refused to let me sleep in any longer! Yesterday I woke up naturally at 4:00 am… but then, I was on top of the third highest peak of Thialand, and an hour later me and a handful of friends started the dark climb up the steep rocky trail to the top of the peak for sunrise. The top was like an island in clouds, jagged mountain tops rising out of a turning slurry of white mist. The din pre-dawn light settling as lightly on the jungle-alpine flowers as the dew.
But that’s another story….
Forests was a very wonderful course for me. There were no shocking moments, and no ground shaking surprises, but I’ve just come back from spending two weeks living with and learning from probably the most generous people I have ever met in my entire life. I have, probably also, come back from participating in the most environmentally simple life-style of my entire life, and that felt wonderful, too.
I think I may have had a particularly peaceful experience, since my entire life I have been fascinated with ancient subsistence lifestyle. In my heart I have always had a place that wished I was born into a nomadic-wilderness tribe. Not, to say, that the Karen are living either and ancient nor normadic-wilderness life style, but that the simple subsistence tasks, the proximity to nature, and the tremendously tight communities involved echoed well with me.
Excusing the roosters and the bed bugs, I could easily live that life style for a long time. It felt natural, to me.
So what you must really be saying right now, is well?! What life style!! So I guess I better get down to the context.
P.S. pictures are up on Picassa too, if ya’ll want to open that in another tab and maybe read along, it might spark me to type out some explanations for those moments.
The course started out with a 8 hour bus ride to the very north of Thailand. The land is mountainous, and considering it is the “cold season”, I usually like to put on fleece or hat in the evenings . The first place we arrived at was a little town called Maehongsong, we visited an NGO there (The Project for the Recovery of Life and Culture) and rested up, and the next morning we took off for a 4? Hour back of the pickup truck ride into the mountains. We bounced and rattled down a rickety dirt road, twisting and plunging through the hills, all the way out to a little mountain town called Huey Tong Kaw.
Huey Tong Kaw is a ethnic Karen village with 28 houses. The village is budhist with a large serving of traditional animism. It has a public sala, a community of black smithers, a herbal medicine man, one man with a pick-up-truck, and solar panels (prodived by the Taksin administration) which provided electric lighting to each house. It is located sort of on a mountain side/base and my house was the furtherst up the hill. They have low land patty rice fields (called Na), and upland swidden-agricultural fields (called Rai). The Karen are famous (idealiszed?) for having the more env. friendly agricultural techniques of all the different forest tribes. As we found out, this is something they are very proud of, and I was convinced that it is pretty dang good, considering.
Swidden agriculture, also sometimes known as slash and burn, means cutting down a swath of forest to plant, planting it for a period of time and when the soil is exhausted, moving on to a new plot. Rotational swidden agriculture, like the Karen have, means the community has about 8-12 different Rai location, and switches through them each year. While the Rais are not in use (fallow) the jungle grows back over them, the plants repleshishing the soil, and building up organic living matter, so that when the Karen return, cut and burn the plot, all that matter turns into yummy food for their plants.
The Karen have a special style of this rotational ag, where they leave large tree trunks sticking out of their Rai. The amazing thing is cutting and burning the field, if you leave these stumps, doesn’t kill the trees! Even as we harvested rice with them we could see tons of young saplings shooting out of the old stumps. This Coppicing technique means the plots reforest super super quickly! I had this amazing moment with Pati (uncle) Coru while asking him why they only planted rice one time per year (some places plant twice) as we cut and bundled rice togheter, and he said… ‘well then the trees would die!” I looked around me at the sea of blacked knubs… “uh…” I said. Thinking, these were about the deadest trees ever…. “look” he says, and point to the nearest stump, sure enough huge sprigs of new shoot were rocketing out from the base. “if we plant twice the roots die, but this way the forest grows back fast”. He pointed out across the valley from our mountain top fields, so a pale patch stamped out of the adjacent mountain. “That’s a Hmong Rai, they plant there every year. The trees die, and the soil is not good.”
The Rai we were harvesting in was a 1.5 hour hike from the village, 1.4 miles of which was up a mountain. The dry brushy jungle/forest opened up to a huge wood piled fence with a ladder over it (keep free roaming village cow and buffalo out) and beyond that the mountainside opened up to a brilliant yellow and green rice field, prickly with blacked stumps, and peppered with intercropped pumpkins, sugar-cane–like sweet grasses, and little resting huts. The Rai was perched over blue and green jungly mountains. Once, a few years ago, a wild elephant had stormed into the Rai, and once (probably more later) Pati coru had shot a couger like big cat there while it stalked his cattle.
Anyway, to start this whole thing off I should really start with our first village experience of the course.
On the way we stopped in a town called Huey Hee, and just as we arrived a yellow dog comes chasing a mama and baby chiken out into the road, chases the chick in circles around the back of our truck. Oh how cute…. Chop! Off he runs into the bushes, squeeling chick in teeth. Meinwhile, mother hen pump her head and struts confusedly back and forth, as what appears to be her last chick disappears. Welcome to Thailand.
( I later found out dogs that eat chicks are beaten or shot, so I’m unsure as to the fate of this first chick. Maybe the dog just ran off with it… )
When we arrived at Huey Tong Kaw, I introduced myself to the village MuGas (aunts = all women are called aunts as an address) and made friends with Muga La Won, so Erin Moody (my roommate for the 5 days) and I went home up the hill with her to her family. I had a kind host dad (the guy from the waterfall pictures), and a grandma who lived with us but spoke no Thai (the villagers speak a norther langague called Bakenyaw, but most learn Thai is school… we were both operating under a second langague). I also had three host simblings, a 14 year old brother, a 8 year old sister Nawng “Jolly”, and a 5 or so year brother (this kid with big eyes and a cool wooden amulet necklace from most of the pictures… the ones with the three kids dancing he is front center, the others are his friends).
Journal excerpts:
Ride there:
I’m on the bus headed to Mae Hong Song. On the trip Marcia nd I made friends with the bus attendant, young Thai man, Catholic, studying to be a priest, very fun. At one point he gave us his cell phone so we could talk to his friend. Later, at a stop, he gave us it again and got off for th stop. It rung again and we answered, hehe. Marica talked to his (friend?) the prurised person who called, for like 20 muinets. It was very funny. I can learn a lot fro her about how to keep a conversation going. She would always come pu with something to say in the silences like “do you like pizza?”. I will go talk more.
…
A we drive further north, into the mountains, the air gets cool. It smells and feels wonderful. Marica quote “like fresh bread made out of grass”
…
After dinner at a nice restaurant in Maehongsong we explored the town, lots of art fiar like shops selling crafts and jewlry. We wondered off the main way and found dragons guarding some dark stairs that led up to the wat on the top of the mountain/hill overlooking the city. We found some Thai men sitting on the steps an asked if we were allowed to climb. They said, laughing, “good luck!”, it wasn’t too hard! The stairs switched back through young teak trees, the city behind was lit up in orange and yellow dots, making rows of streets, and also lights floating into the sky. Tonight is the biggest night of the special Chiangmai holiday Roy Gra Tong where ppl make prayer boats and send them down the river with candles and incense to thank the river spirit and say sorry for anything they might have done wrong. People buy sparklers, and fire works and light paper lanterns and let them go into the sky. We climbed the mountain and flocks of lanters climbed with us into the stars.
-- just read a wonderful email from Grandma J! Thanks Verna!!! Shout out to y’all for your great emails, Beth, Carol. I love the letters! The remind me of all the rich and wonderful details of being home and make me smile!
They also give me alittle prespective for what to write about since, so many things here just seem completely normal now, but they are really so different from things at home.--
…
Today, I’m trying to find joy in every moment. Thailand, well.. its hard to explain… but its like I’m used to living here. “life is life” I’m trying to hold on to an exciting sense of wonder, but somehow everything- even eating squid on a stick in the market, living in a hunt in a national forest, using a squat toilet… its all just seems perfectly normal and expected! (writing it down gives it this weird other-ly outsider sperspective which makes it seem exotic, but really, people are just people all over the world, and everything else is just little details! )
Rice harvest day:
Om! What a perfect amazing day! I got up at 5 Am (oih) but I woke up several imes before that to the roosters going nutzo. [this began to take a serious toll on my after a few days… its was really hard to get enough rest when ever 10 munites you wake up to rooster]. I got up and it was still dark. Mu Gah La Won was pounding rice. (think teadertotter with a mallet going into a bowl of rice on one end and you step on the other end. We had pumpking eggs stew for b-fast then we hked for over an hour in the mountains to get to the rai… the trial opened out on a golden swath of rice, and blackened tree stumps. We harvested rice, tied it into bundles, made sure not to step over any of it, and set them in clups of three on little lumps of the piles grass stumps so the rice wouldn’t touch the groud. I talked and talked with the old village head? Pati Coru (in Thai!) and we talked about everything from natural disaster, to dangerous animals, to rice/ag practices. When we met, my having 5 names/nick names, and Pati Coru says “well if you have 5 names that means you can have 5 boyfriends!” so the on going joke of the entire trip became me and my five boyfriends / Tor and 4 imaginary others. (The whole community was talking and joking about it for days. – Tor even became the topic of a community meeting) Anyway, things we talked about at the rai ranged from relations with natial park officials, to how he shot a big cat (courger size?) that was stalking his buffalo. How he then ate it, and sold the bones for 10$ a kilo. We talked about foods (including ecusadorian foods and marshmallows), and gender and racial relations in the USA and political views on Hillary and Obama and why we liked them all of it IN THAI. It was insame the two of us talked on and off allday. While we farmed the hill and looked over themountians.
The houses we lived in were raised on stilts, we took buckets showers out of bamboo outhousebathrooms (icy! But actually I’ve come to really like them). The houses had square wooden harths, we cooked over wood fires inside the house. The Aerobie was a huge hit in this village. In Huey Tong Kaw it was cool, and in the evenings I wore a sweatshirt and hat. For dinner we all gather around the hearth, sitting on the bamboo slat floor. (when people had a bone, or rice fell on the floor they just nudged it through the cracks and the chickens ate it from under the house).
Oh I forgot to mention, for lunch we sat in a hunt in the field and ate delicious pumpkin, and also look closely…. Very closely at the stew in the photo….
.
.
.
Because it has a rat head in it. it was really good actually, no squimies for me. The only problems is they just hacked it up and boiled it so it was hard to get the meat.
…
In the village we learned about herbal medicine, traditional song, basket weaving, making bamboo cups, and blacksmithing from the villagers. We took a hike to this huge waterfall, I did a watercolor. It was very beautiful. We also started the best game ever! It’s a leach bite competition. We all keep count, with witnesses each time we get a leach bite, or kick a leach off our boot. We all made prophesies about how many we would get for the trip and then we all buy a drink for whoever wins! This drinks are split between the person who gets closest to their prophecy and whoever gets the most total leaches! It was great! It totally changed ou perspective on leaches! I made a high prophecy, so the whole time I was keen to get my leach count up! (I actually only ended up getting two. The first one, I just found the little blood spot on my ancle, and I was like. Oh ok, that wasn’t so bad! And then Cristie looks over and is like “Oh My God! There’s blood all on your back! You got a bite on your back!” and I reach back and my fingers have blood on them! Actually, its not bad at all. What was bad was getting a tick on my ear, which is still very sore two weeks later! And then getting BED BUGS, and having over 200 bugs bites that itched for over a week like mad, covering my arms (which were off of my thermarest, and on my mat).
more later, i'm pretty tired of typing, i'm going to do some reading on the oceans....
Hi everyone! Mom, dad, friends and family!
This is Sunday morning, the first weekend I’m back from the forests. Its 7:15 in the morning, which is the time at which my body simply refused to let me sleep in any longer! Yesterday I woke up naturally at 4:00 am… but then, I was on top of the third highest peak of Thialand, and an hour later me and a handful of friends started the dark climb up the steep rocky trail to the top of the peak for sunrise. The top was like an island in clouds, jagged mountain tops rising out of a turning slurry of white mist. The din pre-dawn light settling as lightly on the jungle-alpine flowers as the dew.
But that’s another story….
Forests was a very wonderful course for me. There were no shocking moments, and no ground shaking surprises, but I’ve just come back from spending two weeks living with and learning from probably the most generous people I have ever met in my entire life. I have, probably also, come back from participating in the most environmentally simple life-style of my entire life, and that felt wonderful, too.
I think I may have had a particularly peaceful experience, since my entire life I have been fascinated with ancient subsistence lifestyle. In my heart I have always had a place that wished I was born into a nomadic-wilderness tribe. Not, to say, that the Karen are living either and ancient nor normadic-wilderness life style, but that the simple subsistence tasks, the proximity to nature, and the tremendously tight communities involved echoed well with me.
Excusing the roosters and the bed bugs, I could easily live that life style for a long time. It felt natural, to me.
So what you must really be saying right now, is well?! What life style!! So I guess I better get down to the context.
P.S. pictures are up on Picassa too, if ya’ll want to open that in another tab and maybe read along, it might spark me to type out some explanations for those moments.
The course started out with a 8 hour bus ride to the very north of Thailand. The land is mountainous, and considering it is the “cold season”, I usually like to put on fleece or hat in the evenings . The first place we arrived at was a little town called Maehongsong, we visited an NGO there (The Project for the Recovery of Life and Culture) and rested up, and the next morning we took off for a 4? Hour back of the pickup truck ride into the mountains. We bounced and rattled down a rickety dirt road, twisting and plunging through the hills, all the way out to a little mountain town called Huey Tong Kaw.
Huey Tong Kaw is a ethnic Karen village with 28 houses. The village is budhist with a large serving of traditional animism. It has a public sala, a community of black smithers, a herbal medicine man, one man with a pick-up-truck, and solar panels (prodived by the Taksin administration) which provided electric lighting to each house. It is located sort of on a mountain side/base and my house was the furtherst up the hill. They have low land patty rice fields (called Na), and upland swidden-agricultural fields (called Rai). The Karen are famous (idealiszed?) for having the more env. friendly agricultural techniques of all the different forest tribes. As we found out, this is something they are very proud of, and I was convinced that it is pretty dang good, considering.
Swidden agriculture, also sometimes known as slash and burn, means cutting down a swath of forest to plant, planting it for a period of time and when the soil is exhausted, moving on to a new plot. Rotational swidden agriculture, like the Karen have, means the community has about 8-12 different Rai location, and switches through them each year. While the Rais are not in use (fallow) the jungle grows back over them, the plants repleshishing the soil, and building up organic living matter, so that when the Karen return, cut and burn the plot, all that matter turns into yummy food for their plants.
The Karen have a special style of this rotational ag, where they leave large tree trunks sticking out of their Rai. The amazing thing is cutting and burning the field, if you leave these stumps, doesn’t kill the trees! Even as we harvested rice with them we could see tons of young saplings shooting out of the old stumps. This Coppicing technique means the plots reforest super super quickly! I had this amazing moment with Pati (uncle) Coru while asking him why they only planted rice one time per year (some places plant twice) as we cut and bundled rice togheter, and he said… ‘well then the trees would die!” I looked around me at the sea of blacked knubs… “uh…” I said. Thinking, these were about the deadest trees ever…. “look” he says, and point to the nearest stump, sure enough huge sprigs of new shoot were rocketing out from the base. “if we plant twice the roots die, but this way the forest grows back fast”. He pointed out across the valley from our mountain top fields, so a pale patch stamped out of the adjacent mountain. “That’s a Hmong Rai, they plant there every year. The trees die, and the soil is not good.”
The Rai we were harvesting in was a 1.5 hour hike from the village, 1.4 miles of which was up a mountain. The dry brushy jungle/forest opened up to a huge wood piled fence with a ladder over it (keep free roaming village cow and buffalo out) and beyond that the mountainside opened up to a brilliant yellow and green rice field, prickly with blacked stumps, and peppered with intercropped pumpkins, sugar-cane–like sweet grasses, and little resting huts. The Rai was perched over blue and green jungly mountains. Once, a few years ago, a wild elephant had stormed into the Rai, and once (probably more later) Pati coru had shot a couger like big cat there while it stalked his cattle.
Anyway, to start this whole thing off I should really start with our first village experience of the course.
On the way we stopped in a town called Huey Hee, and just as we arrived a yellow dog comes chasing a mama and baby chiken out into the road, chases the chick in circles around the back of our truck. Oh how cute…. Chop! Off he runs into the bushes, squeeling chick in teeth. Meinwhile, mother hen pump her head and struts confusedly back and forth, as what appears to be her last chick disappears. Welcome to Thailand.
( I later found out dogs that eat chicks are beaten or shot, so I’m unsure as to the fate of this first chick. Maybe the dog just ran off with it… )
When we arrived at Huey Tong Kaw, I introduced myself to the village MuGas (aunts = all women are called aunts as an address) and made friends with Muga La Won, so Erin Moody (my roommate for the 5 days) and I went home up the hill with her to her family. I had a kind host dad (the guy from the waterfall pictures), and a grandma who lived with us but spoke no Thai (the villagers speak a norther langague called Bakenyaw, but most learn Thai is school… we were both operating under a second langague). I also had three host simblings, a 14 year old brother, a 8 year old sister Nawng “Jolly”, and a 5 or so year brother (this kid with big eyes and a cool wooden amulet necklace from most of the pictures… the ones with the three kids dancing he is front center, the others are his friends).
Journal excerpts:
Ride there:
I’m on the bus headed to Mae Hong Song. On the trip Marcia nd I made friends with the bus attendant, young Thai man, Catholic, studying to be a priest, very fun. At one point he gave us his cell phone so we could talk to his friend. Later, at a stop, he gave us it again and got off for th stop. It rung again and we answered, hehe. Marica talked to his (friend?) the prurised person who called, for like 20 muinets. It was very funny. I can learn a lot fro her about how to keep a conversation going. She would always come pu with something to say in the silences like “do you like pizza?”. I will go talk more.
…
A we drive further north, into the mountains, the air gets cool. It smells and feels wonderful. Marica quote “like fresh bread made out of grass”
…
After dinner at a nice restaurant in Maehongsong we explored the town, lots of art fiar like shops selling crafts and jewlry. We wondered off the main way and found dragons guarding some dark stairs that led up to the wat on the top of the mountain/hill overlooking the city. We found some Thai men sitting on the steps an asked if we were allowed to climb. They said, laughing, “good luck!”, it wasn’t too hard! The stairs switched back through young teak trees, the city behind was lit up in orange and yellow dots, making rows of streets, and also lights floating into the sky. Tonight is the biggest night of the special Chiangmai holiday Roy Gra Tong where ppl make prayer boats and send them down the river with candles and incense to thank the river spirit and say sorry for anything they might have done wrong. People buy sparklers, and fire works and light paper lanterns and let them go into the sky. We climbed the mountain and flocks of lanters climbed with us into the stars.
-- just read a wonderful email from Grandma J! Thanks Verna!!! Shout out to y’all for your great emails, Beth, Carol. I love the letters! The remind me of all the rich and wonderful details of being home and make me smile!
They also give me alittle prespective for what to write about since, so many things here just seem completely normal now, but they are really so different from things at home.--
…
Today, I’m trying to find joy in every moment. Thailand, well.. its hard to explain… but its like I’m used to living here. “life is life” I’m trying to hold on to an exciting sense of wonder, but somehow everything- even eating squid on a stick in the market, living in a hunt in a national forest, using a squat toilet… its all just seems perfectly normal and expected! (writing it down gives it this weird other-ly outsider sperspective which makes it seem exotic, but really, people are just people all over the world, and everything else is just little details! )
Rice harvest day:
Om! What a perfect amazing day! I got up at 5 Am (oih) but I woke up several imes before that to the roosters going nutzo. [this began to take a serious toll on my after a few days… its was really hard to get enough rest when ever 10 munites you wake up to rooster]. I got up and it was still dark. Mu Gah La Won was pounding rice. (think teadertotter with a mallet going into a bowl of rice on one end and you step on the other end. We had pumpking eggs stew for b-fast then we hked for over an hour in the mountains to get to the rai… the trial opened out on a golden swath of rice, and blackened tree stumps. We harvested rice, tied it into bundles, made sure not to step over any of it, and set them in clups of three on little lumps of the piles grass stumps so the rice wouldn’t touch the groud. I talked and talked with the old village head? Pati Coru (in Thai!) and we talked about everything from natural disaster, to dangerous animals, to rice/ag practices. When we met, my having 5 names/nick names, and Pati Coru says “well if you have 5 names that means you can have 5 boyfriends!” so the on going joke of the entire trip became me and my five boyfriends / Tor and 4 imaginary others. (The whole community was talking and joking about it for days. – Tor even became the topic of a community meeting) Anyway, things we talked about at the rai ranged from relations with natial park officials, to how he shot a big cat (courger size?) that was stalking his buffalo. How he then ate it, and sold the bones for 10$ a kilo. We talked about foods (including ecusadorian foods and marshmallows), and gender and racial relations in the USA and political views on Hillary and Obama and why we liked them all of it IN THAI. It was insame the two of us talked on and off allday. While we farmed the hill and looked over themountians.
The houses we lived in were raised on stilts, we took buckets showers out of bamboo outhousebathrooms (icy! But actually I’ve come to really like them). The houses had square wooden harths, we cooked over wood fires inside the house. The Aerobie was a huge hit in this village. In Huey Tong Kaw it was cool, and in the evenings I wore a sweatshirt and hat. For dinner we all gather around the hearth, sitting on the bamboo slat floor. (when people had a bone, or rice fell on the floor they just nudged it through the cracks and the chickens ate it from under the house).
Oh I forgot to mention, for lunch we sat in a hunt in the field and ate delicious pumpkin, and also look closely…. Very closely at the stew in the photo….
.
.
.
Because it has a rat head in it. it was really good actually, no squimies for me. The only problems is they just hacked it up and boiled it so it was hard to get the meat.
…
In the village we learned about herbal medicine, traditional song, basket weaving, making bamboo cups, and blacksmithing from the villagers. We took a hike to this huge waterfall, I did a watercolor. It was very beautiful. We also started the best game ever! It’s a leach bite competition. We all keep count, with witnesses each time we get a leach bite, or kick a leach off our boot. We all made prophesies about how many we would get for the trip and then we all buy a drink for whoever wins! This drinks are split between the person who gets closest to their prophecy and whoever gets the most total leaches! It was great! It totally changed ou perspective on leaches! I made a high prophecy, so the whole time I was keen to get my leach count up! (I actually only ended up getting two. The first one, I just found the little blood spot on my ancle, and I was like. Oh ok, that wasn’t so bad! And then Cristie looks over and is like “Oh My God! There’s blood all on your back! You got a bite on your back!” and I reach back and my fingers have blood on them! Actually, its not bad at all. What was bad was getting a tick on my ear, which is still very sore two weeks later! And then getting BED BUGS, and having over 200 bugs bites that itched for over a week like mad, covering my arms (which were off of my thermarest, and on my mat).
more later, i'm pretty tired of typing, i'm going to do some reading on the oceans....
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Plan
Hey all,
Today i got to skype with tor for the 1st time in 5-6 weeks! It sounds like Ecuador is really, really, really, fun. I can't wait to come visit! Talking to him reminded me of all the things i miss back home, and made me miss his LOADS. *sigh* the only down side of making contact is it reminds us of everything back home...
Today we had a test in reading/tones/spelling in Thai. I was super freaked out because our class only found out about it yestderday. We hadn't done any practice and have barely barely barely done ANY reading or writing in class, AT ALL. I talked to Ajaan Pongsowet and he agreed that we could spend the day of class before the test studying and practicing reading, writing, and slight differences between different words for the test. (We know at least 6 ways to say and spell the word "cow". Rice, White, He/her, News, Knee, Enter.) I think everybody found that very helpful (and fun too, a break from the normal swing of class. I spent the ENTIRE day before studying (with a break to go out for sushi dinner). The test went O.K. When its not extremely overwhelming, reading and writing is kind of fun, its like solving a puzzle.
I might not get a chance to post again before i leave so i want to say Bye and I love you! to everyone. I'll be leaving monday, for Mae Hong Song, a province in the north. We will be studying Political Ecology of Forests (which basically mean the interactions between people who are trying to deal the environmental issues. Specifically, we are focusing of parks and protected areas, and what to do with the people who lived/live/were kicked out from them. We are also learning about swidden agriculture (also called slash-and-burn) where people cut down forests farm for a while and then move to a new area (soil degredation and weeds get too bad), and the old farmland recovers in the mientime, (often they rotate through several areas). We will also be learning about mountian jungle ecology.
We will be backpacking from village to village, (following old trails, and old trails turned to roads) and living with host families at each one.
I will be gone for three weeks and i think come back on Thursday 20th? if that is a day. Anyway the thrusday closest to the 20th. If you want to send me a package or a letter for me to recieve upon my return! *wink wink* you can send it to
letters:
ISDSI - Gigi Leet
PO BOX 222, Phrasingh, Muang
Chiang Mai , 50205
Thailand
packages:
ISDSI - Gigi Leet
48/1 Chiangmai - Lampang Rd.,
Changpuak, Muang
Chiang Mai 50300
Take care! and good luck and health on your adventures or work!
Love, gigi
Today i got to skype with tor for the 1st time in 5-6 weeks! It sounds like Ecuador is really, really, really, fun. I can't wait to come visit! Talking to him reminded me of all the things i miss back home, and made me miss his LOADS. *sigh* the only down side of making contact is it reminds us of everything back home...
Today we had a test in reading/tones/spelling in Thai. I was super freaked out because our class only found out about it yestderday. We hadn't done any practice and have barely barely barely done ANY reading or writing in class, AT ALL. I talked to Ajaan Pongsowet and he agreed that we could spend the day of class before the test studying and practicing reading, writing, and slight differences between different words for the test. (We know at least 6 ways to say and spell the word "cow". Rice, White, He/her, News, Knee, Enter.) I think everybody found that very helpful (and fun too, a break from the normal swing of class. I spent the ENTIRE day before studying (with a break to go out for sushi dinner). The test went O.K. When its not extremely overwhelming, reading and writing is kind of fun, its like solving a puzzle.
I might not get a chance to post again before i leave so i want to say Bye and I love you! to everyone. I'll be leaving monday, for Mae Hong Song, a province in the north. We will be studying Political Ecology of Forests (which basically mean the interactions between people who are trying to deal the environmental issues. Specifically, we are focusing of parks and protected areas, and what to do with the people who lived/live/were kicked out from them. We are also learning about swidden agriculture (also called slash-and-burn) where people cut down forests farm for a while and then move to a new area (soil degredation and weeds get too bad), and the old farmland recovers in the mientime, (often they rotate through several areas). We will also be learning about mountian jungle ecology.
We will be backpacking from village to village, (following old trails, and old trails turned to roads) and living with host families at each one.
I will be gone for three weeks and i think come back on Thursday 20th? if that is a day. Anyway the thrusday closest to the 20th. If you want to send me a package or a letter for me to recieve upon my return! *wink wink* you can send it to
letters:
ISDSI - Gigi Leet
PO BOX 222, Phrasingh, Muang
Chiang Mai , 50205
Thailand
packages:
ISDSI - Gigi Leet
48/1 Chiangmai - Lampang Rd.,
Changpuak, Muang
Chiang Mai 50300
Take care! and good luck and health on your adventures or work!
Love, gigi
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Last night I was just getting ready for bed, talking with my roomies, when out of the blue my host mom calls me up and is like "are you free?" "Pi la will pick you up in ten minuites!" and off we went to restaurants and bars, and dance clubs and stayed out unitl i was falling asleep as i danced. i could speak so much with them! i've improved so much in the last month! It was especially fun because they love to practice english together, so we had an amazing night flowing smoothy through Thai-glish and Eng-Thai. (usually they speak English and I respond ni Thai). The first place we went was a restaurant surrounded by a garden, with a small live band in cow boy hats playing country music. The second place was a huge almost warehouse sized club, with lights and a huge live band on stage with colorful lighting, there were giant paintings of famous people an all the walls. Every table was full (Thais hang out at hundreds of little tables, and dance at their respective tables with their friends). There might have been 600 people there, and i didn't see any other farang. The live singing was really fun, especially when the band played happy birthday for a lucky 23 year old in the crowd and i could sing along. Aparently usually its even more hoppin' and fun but the princess queen is styaing in chaing mai and the police ordered the best singer to go to where she was, so he wasn't at the dance-club-restaurant-place like usual. After dancing, I stayed at thier house that night, (Rew sneeked into my bed right away!) i woke up disoriented and full off joy. The sky outside my room was full of a rainbow colored sunrise. I played wiht my host brothers, and chatted with the family friends that were at the house before breakfast. Then i called dad/colin real quick and they got to say hello to my host fmaily through skype. Both families were very excited, my Khun Mae was touched when dad and colin said hello in thai.
I keep forgetting to tell everyone, but my host family extends an open invatation to Tor, and family, and friends who will come back to thailand with me to stay at thier house. Khun Mae K will take us around and take care of us. She would really like mum and dad to come visit!
I keep forgetting to tell everyone, but my host family extends an open invatation to Tor, and family, and friends who will come back to thailand with me to stay at thier house. Khun Mae K will take us around and take care of us. She would really like mum and dad to come visit!
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Ecotourism
EcoTourism
So this idea has been on my brain all tipsy night since dinner for Marica’s birthday at the Mexican restaurant across the street, through karyoke at the amazing little place at the top of the labrith of the half abandoned mall (the room with hip-hop murals glazing the walls, three levels of cushioned seats), and to this evening where Emma, Erin and I watched huge lanterns (golden flickering lights) rise off the mountain side and into the starry night above the city.
I’m been thinking about ecotrouism and how it fits really well with lots of my interests and passions. First of all, for me personally, it puts a good taste in my mouth; the whole thing is just rich with the kind of memories I treasure – family, nature, meeting people, staying and getting to know people, helping and visiting the earth. Second it is very close to both trip leading, and making a “artistic home”. Trip leading, my joy and passion, and also something I’m good at is something I’ve been wanting to do for a least a few years sometime in my athletic youth, but I’ve never seen it as a longer term thing because theres just the bigger fish to fry of my life energy to devote to saving the earth. Ecotourism, on the other hand, takes that life drive and applies it! It would almost be like the Wildeness Philosophy House, but for all the time! I could organize the place, work with a team of people, but also have indepence and responsibility, and leadership time, on my own. I would be able to teach and share about rich biology/ecology/environment knowledge that gives the place its flavor, and also get to know and talk with new people all the time. (something that gives me lots of energy). In the ENFP personality type career style, it says they are good working with other people, on their own time (starting their own business), and they tend to make the place they work have a wonderful, unique asthetic. That sounds pretty spot on to me, if I were working at or starting a little ecotrousim resort/camp somewhere.
Also, half way through our Agroecology course we stopped at this little ecotourism resort called “the Nest” in Chiang Dao. I was –high- off uphoria the whole time we were there. Something about the place, the charm, the integration with nature, the living within a set of environmental values / principles, the friendly/frankness of the woman who owned it, it drove me crazy with excitement.
It wouldn’t be saving the world. I wish I could do that –write policy, report on an coporate scandle, be a env lawyer…. But at least for now… I don’t know if I am that person. I know I could learn the skills, but its hard to chose one, to know which one to devote four + (or however many) years to. Those things are pretty scary, big unknowns to me now. Shrouded in a mist of lack of knowledge, and meek confidence. Plus, where would I live, who would I surround myself with?
It might be a lot of dealing with picky rich people. But naturally, people don’t really tend to get on my nerves. People others can’t stand, I like just fine, so I think… well… maybe it wouldn’t bother me as much as other people.
I don’t know much about it… so maybe that is why it would be a great ICRP (integrated cultural research project) to do for the next month. So that I can get to know it, up close and personal, since it doesn’t exist so much back where I come from. (I could do bio research, voluenteer at a zoo there…. But, well, it might be good to know about third world ecotourism for the future).
Also it would fit very nicely into a Udall Application, as a refined focus I recently got a ton of feedback from Mia, one of the directors of Udall, on my last years application. She says she would look to show focus and commitment. Environmental communications narrows to ecotourism. (I wonder how many ecotourism applicants there are…??? There was a park ranger… kind of like US ecotouism…and I thought she was fascinating/ it sounded like fun) I mean Wilderness House, Land Sea, Nordhouse, Woofer, and then learning about biology/ecology and env poetry / art as ways to engage others in the wilderness and inspire greater value of nature….
I can push that more believably than say env. communications to journalism or lawyer, since I have no experience in either.
Is it big enough to satisfy me? What are my expectations of myself? Honestly, probably not. But maybe combined with some other things, free time to do that art, write those poems….
Can I live comfortably? Well, one thing is clear, if I were living so close to nature I don’t care if I drive and old car, live in a small house, don’t have AC, and get my clothes from Op Shops. If I have time for art and talking to people about nature… what else do I need? (also if Tor was doing ecology research in the nearby areas….) I don’t think I would be my whole life, but for a while…. + It might be a nice lead into teaching???
So this idea has been on my brain all tipsy night since dinner for Marica’s birthday at the Mexican restaurant across the street, through karyoke at the amazing little place at the top of the labrith of the half abandoned mall (the room with hip-hop murals glazing the walls, three levels of cushioned seats), and to this evening where Emma, Erin and I watched huge lanterns (golden flickering lights) rise off the mountain side and into the starry night above the city.
I’m been thinking about ecotrouism and how it fits really well with lots of my interests and passions. First of all, for me personally, it puts a good taste in my mouth; the whole thing is just rich with the kind of memories I treasure – family, nature, meeting people, staying and getting to know people, helping and visiting the earth. Second it is very close to both trip leading, and making a “artistic home”. Trip leading, my joy and passion, and also something I’m good at is something I’ve been wanting to do for a least a few years sometime in my athletic youth, but I’ve never seen it as a longer term thing because theres just the bigger fish to fry of my life energy to devote to saving the earth. Ecotourism, on the other hand, takes that life drive and applies it! It would almost be like the Wildeness Philosophy House, but for all the time! I could organize the place, work with a team of people, but also have indepence and responsibility, and leadership time, on my own. I would be able to teach and share about rich biology/ecology/environment knowledge that gives the place its flavor, and also get to know and talk with new people all the time. (something that gives me lots of energy). In the ENFP personality type career style, it says they are good working with other people, on their own time (starting their own business), and they tend to make the place they work have a wonderful, unique asthetic. That sounds pretty spot on to me, if I were working at or starting a little ecotrousim resort/camp somewhere.
Also, half way through our Agroecology course we stopped at this little ecotourism resort called “the Nest” in Chiang Dao. I was –high- off uphoria the whole time we were there. Something about the place, the charm, the integration with nature, the living within a set of environmental values / principles, the friendly/frankness of the woman who owned it, it drove me crazy with excitement.
It wouldn’t be saving the world. I wish I could do that –write policy, report on an coporate scandle, be a env lawyer…. But at least for now… I don’t know if I am that person. I know I could learn the skills, but its hard to chose one, to know which one to devote four + (or however many) years to. Those things are pretty scary, big unknowns to me now. Shrouded in a mist of lack of knowledge, and meek confidence. Plus, where would I live, who would I surround myself with?
It might be a lot of dealing with picky rich people. But naturally, people don’t really tend to get on my nerves. People others can’t stand, I like just fine, so I think… well… maybe it wouldn’t bother me as much as other people.
I don’t know much about it… so maybe that is why it would be a great ICRP (integrated cultural research project) to do for the next month. So that I can get to know it, up close and personal, since it doesn’t exist so much back where I come from. (I could do bio research, voluenteer at a zoo there…. But, well, it might be good to know about third world ecotourism for the future).
Also it would fit very nicely into a Udall Application, as a refined focus I recently got a ton of feedback from Mia, one of the directors of Udall, on my last years application. She says she would look to show focus and commitment. Environmental communications narrows to ecotourism. (I wonder how many ecotourism applicants there are…??? There was a park ranger… kind of like US ecotouism…and I thought she was fascinating/ it sounded like fun) I mean Wilderness House, Land Sea, Nordhouse, Woofer, and then learning about biology/ecology and env poetry / art as ways to engage others in the wilderness and inspire greater value of nature….
I can push that more believably than say env. communications to journalism or lawyer, since I have no experience in either.
Is it big enough to satisfy me? What are my expectations of myself? Honestly, probably not. But maybe combined with some other things, free time to do that art, write those poems….
Can I live comfortably? Well, one thing is clear, if I were living so close to nature I don’t care if I drive and old car, live in a small house, don’t have AC, and get my clothes from Op Shops. If I have time for art and talking to people about nature… what else do I need? (also if Tor was doing ecology research in the nearby areas….) I don’t think I would be my whole life, but for a while…. + It might be a nice lead into teaching???
Monday, October 26, 2009
Agroecology Field Course Highlights
I will try to recap the last three weeks for y’all, I dunno how much I can get through, but here it goes!
The first place was arrived were the villages in the northern corner of Thailand. The people were the Palong Dang, the grandfathers of the villages had fled Burma because of the violence/internal conlict there and were living on diffing degress of small amounts of land between national parks and private land. The first village we arrive it we met a man named Pi Ja Wat who showed us his Agroforest. Agroforests are plots of lands planted to minic a normal forest but are planted with all useful and valueable plants. They produce food and market products and take almost no imputs, they repair the terribly degraded and eroded soil! Pi jaw at says he used to work all day, now to work he sits on his front porch and lets the forest grow.
Ok. Wowah. There is just tooo much to write.
Er.
We spent two days hiking from village to village learning from the people there about how the farm, what problems they face, and the role of this NGO Upland Holistic Development Program that is helping them switch to more sustianbilbe food sorucesl ike the forests, backyard gardens, ext and helping get them citizen ship, ext. Then we lived at UHDP for a week and learned, there they we did a week long homestay in the selfsufficiency first oriented, organic farming community of Mae Ta.
Coolest things:
- in one village I wet out on my own while the other students were hanging around the bunk house, I met a group of kids and made friends. We talked and talked and sat down under a tree and talked more, then they invited me in to their house and we hung out and I had lunch with them. They fed me fruits they grew in their own garden! One girl wants to be a teacher, the other a journalist. The journalist girl was very easy to understand and had great questions!
- All the kids I talked to at all the villages said the liked to go to school, and liked to work in the fields.
- We slept in huts made of bamboo split into a bunch a slats and tied to a frame. One night it rained very hard, and it was very exciting.
- The roosters crowed like loud, angry, drownding mega-phones starting at about 4:00 am.
- While hiking through the foot hills of the mountains, through corn fields, and bamboo trees, we turned a corner and there was an elephant! It had a guild on its neck, and two tourists on its back.
- We killed a pig at UHDP. We took it out behind the center in a cage. I had orgnianlly expected some kind of ceremony, but although the community did come together for the event, ti wasn’t exactly what I expected. We were all gathering around, looking about for what was going to happen and then all of a sudden they let it out of the cage and a man hit it over the head with a hoe, and it was screaming an we lifted it onto a platform and our guide helped one student stab it in the heart with a knife. A lot of girls cried, and most people were shooken up. I expected to take it hard and have this ground shaking emotional experices, but I didn’t, which at first was disappointing. However, it has really cool to pull apart how and why I responded like I did (or didin’t). I think growing up with a rich love for understanding nature, playing cave people, and with the kind of childhood that helping Alli’s grandpa butcher a deer was a treat, made it so that the whole thing didn’t ruptrure my world view, rather it fit quite well into it. The pig clearly didn’t want to die, and we human, wanted it to since we had raised it to eat it. The pig had lived a better life than his bacon making realtives in CAFOs in the US, and it was probably the most sustainable meat I’ve ever eaten. It was like the best dissection ever. It was so cool. I was fascinated. It was very intense, but it was cool to be so connected to the real food chain for the first time. It was interesting to see when it changed from being a pig to being pork. For me that was about when it stopped moving, but it was really different for different people. we covered it with a burlap bag (Pi Apot said “go to sleep” to it in English, which was so funny and helped break the tension) and poured boiling water over it so we could scrape off the hair with machetes. Then we cut it up. I got to cut off the head. By then the boys were already hadning out pieces of the grilled tail. It was good, a bit crunch from cariclage. The organs went into a bucket, and (the girls but not exactly by rule just by our cultural training I guess) went over and cleaned them. We pooped the intestines (fun and crazy). Pi Gurd held up the membranous sheet that held the organs in (whats it called?) like lace. The organs were so fun to hold in our hands. We ran water through them to clean them and turned them inside out and they whirled like streamers under the hose. You could see and feel the micro-felia in the intestines. Once it was clean it was poped on a fire, grilled, and we ate it with salt. It was really really good. We butchered it and cleaned it and had a barbeque and ate it. It was delicious easily the best pork I have ever eaten.
- At the debrief after sam who killed it has a great insight. He said, when we eat animals, we like to thank them.but the truth is we want to thank them to make ourselves feel better. I wanted to thank the pig afterwords, but that wasn’t right. That pig did not want to give us anything, it did not want to die, and it was going to do everything it could to keep us from killing it. If it could say anything to me now it would be Fuck You.
- One day we visited a church in a near by village.
- We harvested and cooked a meal made entirely ofjungle plants and animals the UHDP raises there. We had smashed up frog sauce/paste. Spiky bitter vine heart becomes soup.curry. meat cooked in banana leaves. Fried crickets (amazing, better than pop corn) and many deilciosu things besides.
- Everything in Thailand that is not horribly horribly bitter is called “sweet”
- One night, some of us played cards with Pi Gurd, one of the staff of UHDP. She told us all about her life. At 14 her mom tried to marry her to a 35 year old rich man from Bangkok, but she refused to, and how she used to be very skinny and all the boys would fight over her, (from tons of different tribes too) but she was a “tom” (same word as in English) and wasn’t an object. Now she is married to Pi Apot (our guide for the outdoorsy bits of learning about ecology and farming) who she seemed luke warm about and said he was a good man because he eidnd’t drink and hit her. She wanted to go to school for the environment, but had kids, and has a sponser now but can’t go because of her new baby. When we asked her if she was happy with her life she said causually, I dunno.
- We ate strawfruits that grew on the hill side.
- One morning I got up early, and Britney and I hiked to the papaya farm up the hill and she wrote and I painted the papayas and the hills.
- One evening I sat in a hut on the hillside and watched the sun set. I drew the hills and fields below.
- Across from the center were conventional corn fields, they burned part of the fields one day and we saw all the smoke coming up.
- There was a friendly dog at the center named Fu.
- I made friends with a little girl and we wandered all around the center. She didn’t speak much (Thai or antyghitn) but she knew the words to smell good and to smell bad, so we walked around sniffing everything and its uncle. Also pulling leaves of plants and trowing them.
- I got to know many of the other students really well, we would stay up nights talking and learning about eachother.
- After the pig slaughter we had really great nightly brief and we all talked about our experiences.
Mae Ta
- The house was very nice/impressive. It was mostly raised up on stilts, with blue tile floors under it and in the kitchen. It had big brown wooden treetrunkpoles holding it up. It was surrounded by a concrete wall, and had pretty wooden trimming around the top. In thai style the rooms were pretty bare. It had a big t.v. and lots of benches. We ate on mats on the floor in the living room.
- I lived with Anglea, who is far and away the best student at Thai, which was really cool because sometimes we would only speak Thai when we were together, and I could learn a lot about my family, but other times it was difficult because the conversations with our folks would fly over my head and i’d feel fustrated with myself.
- At one point my Paw said, whle Angela, him and I, were sitting in the back behind the house, grilling stuffed crab heads, “you have a boyfriend already! you don’t have to be shy” !
- Angie and I would stay up hours after bed time talking in our room, then we would look at our watches and see it was 10:30 pm.
- The first morning we came out of our room and Mae was sitting in the driveway next to a baby pool full of live crabs. She would reach in, pull out a crab, rip off all its legs and then break its shell in two. We would then scrape out the yellow gills into a bowl.
- We did our laundry in the sun, washing out of big tubs.
- The food my Mae, and Pi cooked was really good. One fish soup was sour and sweet and tangy and lime-y. yum yum
- One morning we went to visit a wat and the morning market. The wat was a social gathering place, everyone chating. We added little boquest to golden platters full of candles and flowers, and gave good to the trays of all the monks.
- Huge bugs would fly into our house all the time. The biggest (Ann Fraser guessed a katydid) was the coolest thing ever. It was as big as my hand, like the spirit creatures out of Pan’s Labrinth, and it crawled all over. You could see it expandind its chest when it breathed. It had huge mandibles. It was bright green. Its wings were just like leaves. It was the best day of my life.
- One night we went next door and did aerobic dance in our neighbos driveway it was dark and the music was lively. All the women were steping and steping and pumping their hips. It was lots of fun.
- My Paw saw so sweet and nice, only I couldn’t understand barely anything he said, he was always joking with us. He told us to eat lots here, since in Mae Hong Song (where were heading next) they “don’thave any food”.
- Each day we would ride the motorcycle to the Suan (garden/fields). One day we fished and caught 23 fish from their Tilapia pond. We used long pieces of bamboo with a bit of line and hooks. The pond is surrounded by a fence and the fish are raised with ducks and chickens (nutrient cycling!). We took the fish home and grilled them whole over a charcoal grill for dinner.
- We ate passion fruits off the vine.
- On market days our family would stay up till midnight, harvesting during the day and packaging it up at night. A few hours later they would get up and drive to Chiang Mai or Chaing Dao to sell at the organic markets there. Mae was so proud of her goods, she would package them just right so that they were just beautiful.
- I stayed up with her until she was done.
- Maybe the best moment of the whole stay was this. It was just the two of us still up. We sat on ltitle wooden stools in the drive way surrounded my stacks and bins and piles of produce. Mae ahd a big bucket of live skuddling crabs, which we were putting into plastic bags to sell. She made it seem so easy to reach in a grab them up, but when I tired it I couldn’t do it! I had to fight every animal instinct to will my hand into a bucket of live crabs, and close my hand down. I kept thinking it should be easy, but it was so hard! When ever I took hold of one it was like my hand, watching for its own well being, would drop it like a hot coal! Sometimes i would get one by the leg, only to have it pop off in my fingers. Me and Mae giggled and giggled. Mind over body. Mind over live scuttling crabs. And plop the thing into a bag.
- At the end of the night. When everything was all Riep Roy. I told my Mae thanks, and she told me thanks, and I told her “I don’t talk much, but I like my mae a lot” and she just reached out and she popped a great big smile, and grabbed my arms in a geature of unexpected happiness and affection.
- We took a hike through the jungle to see the watershed. There wre leaches everywhere! Ahh! They would sit in the middle of the path, rise up from and wave their sucker mounths in the air sniffing for a warm foot to lach onto. I kicked three of them (one a big fat one) off my boots. We obsesedly/paranoidedly checked our boots and ankles every few muintes (or every few steps!). one there was a monsterous one just menacing at us from the middle of a steap rocky bit of trail and we just ahd to bolt passed it and high tail it down the path and hope to god it couldn’t grab on.
- The hike was really cool. We ended up at a sting seaping out of the hill side, benath a big teak tree. Spring in Thai is called Dton Nam (Source of Water) and that is the Thai Nick name given to me my family! Dton Nam got to see the Dton Nam. It was really cool. I felt, connected to my new Thai idendity there. The water was so clear/pure we could drink it. We would reach down and cup a handful out of the mass of roots and sticks it filtered through on the forest floor. It tasted great, alive and clean. Snake! Waoh! Me and another student had been standing not two feet from a coiled up, bright green, viper of some sort chilling near the cool water!!! We hadn’t even seen him. Everyone lept away and lept forward at the same time (to take pictures). Then WOAH! There was another one right over there, not two steps from Will! Eeps. Pi Pui managed to get us to at least not advance with our eager cameras and the village guides scared them away with sticks.
p.S. yesterday we went to Burma to renew the something to do with our passports os we can stay in the contry. The otherisde of the bridge was met with hundreds of people selling and vending. Women roasted chestnuts in little stands (hot and nutty flavor), and there was just wall to wall shops of ever sort of knock off imaingable. The streats were lined with pirated DVDs, clothes, sunglasses, jewlry, jems, ext. Some stands had bones, knives, and real wild cat pelts and what looked like monkey skulls. I asked to take a picture and they said no! no! Agela dn I got a Tuk Tuk to take us around (we only had two hours there) which was an excellent choice. we went to a giant golden temple/spire on top o a hill that overlooked the city, ther were beautiful hills all around. There, we released birds to make religious merit. From little girls outside the temple we bought orchids bouquets and live little brown birds in little wicker balls. We got to know a woman at the temple and she helped up us give our prayers and give our orchids to the alters to the days of the week on which we were born to make merit. Iwas born on a wendsay. We prayed and put our boquets of orchids, and candles to put on the alters, and released the birds. They high tailed it to the hills. (mine after a bit of nudging). They might be trained to come right back, or get caught again, im not sure. It was really, really cool. Burma was mostly sad though. There were so many beggrs. Emma said she saw a begger man draggin himself along the streat by his arms because his legs were horribly mangled. Men with trays of cigarettes accosted at every streat corner. It was hard to know what to think.
I wish i could tell more, but there is just so much to tell. I love you all and hope things are going well back home and on your respective adventures.
Also check out all the pictures on picasa (there were 900, but i only loaded 200 and then gave up due to slow internet and loaded the best of the rest). Also i got an AMAZING Thai hair cut, seriously amazing. It was such an adventure. Its very sylish-badass and very cute. There are pictures too.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Castle in the Clouds
The apartment is beautiful. The family dropped me off and i was really sad to leave them, but next weekend we are all going camping together, so i will get to see them again soon. Leaving my host familyw as like growing up 10 years in a day. I realized, since coming to Thailand i have been living in the mentality of a ten year old. My biggest responsiblities have been walking home from the bus stop alone, or doing the dishes, andplaying with my bros, and suddenly we were living with our peers, going grocery shopping, and going out to dance bars. In some ways it is like mvoing into a competley new city.
My roomates are so so so much fun, and i feel super close to them already. I can't wait for our adventure to come. The aparment is quite nice, as well. The floor is blue tile, there is a bathroom, two betrooms a sitting room and a balcony. Cody and Emma share one room, and erin and I share the one huge bed in the other. The balcondy looks out over the city of chaing mai (8th floor) and on huge blue and green mountinas, practically a stones throw away. On the top of one of the mountians we can see the temple of Doi Sutep that we hilked to last weekend. In the night, it is lit up ang glows like a golden castle. Because the moutinas are so dark and close, in the evenings the temple looks like a it is floating in the clouds.
My roomates are so so so much fun, and i feel super close to them already. I can't wait for our adventure to come. The aparment is quite nice, as well. The floor is blue tile, there is a bathroom, two betrooms a sitting room and a balcony. Cody and Emma share one room, and erin and I share the one huge bed in the other. The balcondy looks out over the city of chaing mai (8th floor) and on huge blue and green mountinas, practically a stones throw away. On the top of one of the mountians we can see the temple of Doi Sutep that we hilked to last weekend. In the night, it is lit up ang glows like a golden castle. Because the moutinas are so dark and close, in the evenings the temple looks like a it is floating in the clouds.
Apartment Life
9-29 2009
Today was a basic unit in my life since moving into the apartments. I got up, was huntrey, got ready for school and bagan our road side journey down the busy streamts, and then the supper highway to get to school. I stooped and bought breakfast from the roadside stand. It was lots of rice, a bit of Tom Yum soup (lots o muscles yum, and fish balls, not so fum) and also a fried egg. This was supplemented with buns and a pulled pork sandwitch from “7” (eleven). Thai class was its usual wmotinol roller coasted with a few high moments being talking about different kinds of iwld animals and a low part being when pongsowet would just repeat the same sentence, faster and faster, when it was apparent that no one besides Angela understood. There was also a moment when Mike was trying to understand theuse of thee word boy. “ofen” in a sentence and Ajaan (clearly frustrated with our not understanding repeatedly) quipped “you don’t understand often”. I was schoked and angry at this, but I took a moment to remember that in Thai culture it is much more O.K. to state things that are abvious, even if those things aren’t very nice. It reminded me of the my host family teaching me the word fat, and shamelessly and repeatedly calling people in the family fat. After Thai, I ate lunch with Binney and family which was lovely as always, and lSeminar was very interesting. We talked about the “Green Revolution” and why it came about, tis pros and cons, ext. I like how in our agroecology course we always look at both the pros and cons of every issue. So often, in the environmental circles I’m part of things (ext. GMOs Genetically modified Organisms) are always attacked as terrible horrible things. This approach is neigher as valied nor as effective as examining the good and bad, and aknoleging where the “Ifs” lie. Like “if” we could make a crop that was more efficient and drought resisent, it could be env beneficial by cutting back on the expansion of agriculture into wild areas that lie in airable places, and “if” a genetically modified strain of a plant were to escape it could “contaminate” native strains and create a new kind of super invasive plant – and/o bring down genetic variation.
After School Cody, Emma and I chilled out for a bit in our room, goofed around, talked, and cooled off , (in our bras …not Rip Roy) while getting a start on the HUGE amount of homework we have each day. We did a work out, including runningthe stiars, abs ext. which was quite sweaty. And showered. We went out to a cheap and DELISIOUC sushi place for dinner, just across from our apartment. I had the BEST tempura udon, it was so sweet and flavorful. Then we went to the gocery store in the basement of the mall and bought some breakfast and snack food, and came back and workedon finishing the reading. Although I had read all through Emma and Cody’s naps, they caught up with me! Darn social studies people and their super reading skills! Near the end Erin made us some wonderful pear-sprite, other wise known as throat warming- candy drinks, and we had a grea evening laughing and joking until (not too long later) we were all too exhausted to continue and had to head to bed.
Nearly all my time, is take up eating, sleeping, showering, excersizing, homeowrking, walking, or schooling. I barely have time to finish my school work, and not nearly as much time as I would like to study Thai language or journal and reflect. There are bits of time the girls and I hang out, but they are usually double tasking , and I just need that time to decompress and –live- a bit. By the end of the day I am so exhausted there I sno way I could go down to the bars in the evening, and socialize with the locals or other students there. Oh, how many good things and how little time….Wishing there were about twice as many hours in a day (only those assigning homework didn’t realize this)
Gigi
Today was a basic unit in my life since moving into the apartments. I got up, was huntrey, got ready for school and bagan our road side journey down the busy streamts, and then the supper highway to get to school. I stooped and bought breakfast from the roadside stand. It was lots of rice, a bit of Tom Yum soup (lots o muscles yum, and fish balls, not so fum) and also a fried egg. This was supplemented with buns and a pulled pork sandwitch from “7” (eleven). Thai class was its usual wmotinol roller coasted with a few high moments being talking about different kinds of iwld animals and a low part being when pongsowet would just repeat the same sentence, faster and faster, when it was apparent that no one besides Angela understood. There was also a moment when Mike was trying to understand theuse of thee word boy. “ofen” in a sentence and Ajaan (clearly frustrated with our not understanding repeatedly) quipped “you don’t understand often”. I was schoked and angry at this, but I took a moment to remember that in Thai culture it is much more O.K. to state things that are abvious, even if those things aren’t very nice. It reminded me of the my host family teaching me the word fat, and shamelessly and repeatedly calling people in the family fat. After Thai, I ate lunch with Binney and family which was lovely as always, and lSeminar was very interesting. We talked about the “Green Revolution” and why it came about, tis pros and cons, ext. I like how in our agroecology course we always look at both the pros and cons of every issue. So often, in the environmental circles I’m part of things (ext. GMOs Genetically modified Organisms) are always attacked as terrible horrible things. This approach is neigher as valied nor as effective as examining the good and bad, and aknoleging where the “Ifs” lie. Like “if” we could make a crop that was more efficient and drought resisent, it could be env beneficial by cutting back on the expansion of agriculture into wild areas that lie in airable places, and “if” a genetically modified strain of a plant were to escape it could “contaminate” native strains and create a new kind of super invasive plant – and/o bring down genetic variation.
After School Cody, Emma and I chilled out for a bit in our room, goofed around, talked, and cooled off , (in our bras …not Rip Roy) while getting a start on the HUGE amount of homework we have each day. We did a work out, including runningthe stiars, abs ext. which was quite sweaty. And showered. We went out to a cheap and DELISIOUC sushi place for dinner, just across from our apartment. I had the BEST tempura udon, it was so sweet and flavorful. Then we went to the gocery store in the basement of the mall and bought some breakfast and snack food, and came back and workedon finishing the reading. Although I had read all through Emma and Cody’s naps, they caught up with me! Darn social studies people and their super reading skills! Near the end Erin made us some wonderful pear-sprite, other wise known as throat warming- candy drinks, and we had a grea evening laughing and joking until (not too long later) we were all too exhausted to continue and had to head to bed.
Nearly all my time, is take up eating, sleeping, showering, excersizing, homeowrking, walking, or schooling. I barely have time to finish my school work, and not nearly as much time as I would like to study Thai language or journal and reflect. There are bits of time the girls and I hang out, but they are usually double tasking , and I just need that time to decompress and –live- a bit. By the end of the day I am so exhausted there I sno way I could go down to the bars in the evening, and socialize with the locals or other students there. Oh, how many good things and how little time….Wishing there were about twice as many hours in a day (only those assigning homework didn’t realize this)
Gigi
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