the adventure continues

Phew!
It’s been a few days since I’ve been able to have a chance to sit down and write anything, and I’ve only got about 20 minutes before I have to go to a meeting for work. In case you were curious Thailand is still awesome.

Went out on Saturday night with David and Greg, and another CUSO co-operant I hadn’t met before named Dan who also lives in Chiang Mai. It’s illegal to serve customers past midnight in Thailand, (and also, incidentally, there’s a random law against serving or providing alcohol between 2 and 5PM. I’m not quite sure what the logic was behind that decision), so we moved to this place called the Rasta Bar, which had a live band (they’re pretty common in the touristy areas). It was absolutely packed, being one of the only places still open. It was pretty amazing. At one point I looked at my watch and I realized it was 2:30 in the morning, and I was standing in the middle of a bar in the heart of Northern Thailand that was packed with Thai students going absolutely NUTS to Bob Marley.

By the way, somehow Bob Marley is worshipped here. Don’t ask me how that works, but it does. Also, a Korean girl on vacation asked to take a picture with me. I’d never met her before, but I obliged. A lot of the time I find myself walking the fine line between feeling like a total freak and somewhat of a celebrity. Anyway, all in all a good weekend.

Still going to Frisbee, which is going great. There are a bunch of really good players and everyone knows the rules so the games definitely move at a good pace. I’m really happy with the way things have turned out on that front. Also, I went out last weekend with a guy and a girl from Frisbee. They’re both teachers and usually go out Saturday night with a bunch of their co-workers to this club near my place called Warm Up. These teachers put most students to shame they way they partied. They were still going strong at 2 in the morning and were going to go someplace else when Warm Up closed but I decided to walk home instead of staying out.

Sadly, it turns out we can’t apply for the scholarship because the application requires you to submit previously published research, and from what I gather the grant is actually to encourage people to do MORE research, instead of actually funding the research itself. More of a job-well-done-pat-on-the-back sort of thing. And we don’t have any previous original research to submit.

Speaking of research, I really need to start.

Thai lessons start tomorrow (hopefully), I’ll have to give my Thai teacher a call to make sure she’s feeling okay again.

The composting is going really well at the farm. You do get the occasional food wrapper thrown in with all the rinds, peels, rice, and other assorted organics, but all in all it’s definitely a success. Greg and I are helping out as well, saving all our household stuff, and they’ve got a big smelly bag at the office that they throw their compost contributions into as well (although it’s usually not very well sorted and requires some sorting to remove all the unwanted plastic and paper). We've also built a planter box around a trellis just outside the house to start growing passionfruit vines which will really shade the open area in front of the house, as well as keep the temperature down in those ponds you see in the background. Fish don't like it too hot.

Also, the food at the office? AMAZING. I love eating there...well, I love eating anywhere in Thailand really, but I especially like Burmese food. Today we had curried prawns, burmese seaweed, roasted pork, boiled water spinach and squash with vermicelli. IT WAS ALL AMAZING. Especially the prawns. All the flavor is in the head and legs.

I went on a pretty wild adventure Friday afternoon. Thursday evening had been Aung San Suu Kyi’s birthday. She's this non-violent political activist and the leader of the National League for Democracy in Burma. So for anyone interested in social change in Burma, she’s pretty much the Burmese version of Ghandi or Nelson Mandella, leading the struggle against the military dictatorship in Burma. Oh, and did I mention she's been under house arrest off and on since 1989? Anyway, there was this big celebration at Chiang Mai University but on by one of the Burmese student groups, and there were speeches and keynote speakers and a film and everything. A bunch of people were wearing these really cool shirts that said “Free Burma” and had Aung San Suu Kyi’s face on them, and I wanted to get one to let the world know my political views concerning Burma (there was another reason as well but I can’t go into it at this time). When I asked someone wearing the shirt, she said that the didn’t sell them there, and that I had to go to the Burmese Women’s Centre on the other side of town if I wanted one. She didn’t tell me exactly where it was but said that it was by the Chiang Mai Imperial Hotel. The next day, I looked up the Imperial Hotel online, but was completely unable to find anything about a Burmese Women’s Centre. I asked at the front desk of the condo, but no one seemed to have any idea. The manager (Noi, super nice lady) wrote down “Burmese Women’s Centre, Near the Imperial Hotel on Loi Kroh Road” (which were the directions I had been given) on a piece of paper in Thai and said I should ask people when I got there. Then I set off on my bycicle. It took about half an hour to get to the right part of town, and then the search began. Problem was, nobody I talked to had ANY idea where this Burmese Women’s centre was. I buked up one street, and down the next, I must have talked to 6 or 7 different people. The sky was beginning to look pretty threatening rain-wise, so I figured it would probably be a good idea to head home unless I was looking for a nice cold shower, so I asked one more street vendor, intending on leaving when she told me she had no idea what I was talking about. She took the note, scrutinized it, and then shouted to another vendor down the street. He came over, and looked at the note, and then called out to a girl who was crossing the street a little ways up the road. She came over as well, and after some thought said she didn’t know where the place was, but that if I followed her, we could go look together. I said sure, locked my bike, and we set off up Loi Kroh in search of the rare and elusive women’s centre once more. We asked a few more people (her English was good enough that we could talk, and she could translate for me as well which was great), but still had no luck, and had to run under an overhang when it started to pour. It rained (and I mean POURED), for about half an hour, during which time I learned that she had been working at a bar at the Muay Thai complex nearby for about four months now. Her and her two younger sisters (11 and 16) had moved to Chaing Mai from Chen Gao, (maybe 3 hours south) so that her sisters could go to school, which was thought to be better in the City. Her brother was studying computers at Bangkok University and she thinks Chiang Mai is too loud. She also doesn’t like the rain. I can remember all that but I can’t for the life of me remember her name. It might have been Win…or Wan…I hate being so bad with names. Anyway, by the time the rain had stopped the streets were flooded, and I ended up biking home through six inches of water. It was fun! But unfortunately I was new-shirtless so I’m going to go to the Women’s Centre at CMU to rattle a few cages and see if I can’t get an address for somebody. Also, since I’m doing work with an organization that is heavily involved in the Burmese community, it definitely doesn’t hurt to make those connections. Networking is key.

Also: these are a few of the Americans I met at the coffee shop. We've hung out a few times since, but they're leaving in a week to tour Southeast Asia. They're Mormon-tastic.

This is a video I took at a fundraiser last weekend put on by the Art Faculty at Chiang Mai U. It's this burmese theatre group that was raising money for the victims of Hurricane Nargis. The show lasted about 4 hours and I'm sure it would have been slightly funnier if I'd known burmese, but the dancing was really cool and I took some video. By the way, my camera takes WAY better video than I've been able to post here, but when I record using the best quality, the videos end up being HUGE and won't fit on the blog. Anyway, this is Burmese traditional dancing.

Went back to my favorite market yesterday (I think it’s called Warrarot Market) to stock up on fruit. It’s way outside the touristy area of the city, and I think I’ve seen maybe 2 white people there in total out of the four times I’ve been. Now if you have that few white foreigners visiting the market, you can imagine what it does to people when I stroll through. It is about as far outside my comfort zone as I could possibly put myself. I don’t think I can describe what it feels like to walk down the street and have EVERY eye on you. Yesterday I walked by one stall and the gentleman behind the counter burst out laughing. It’s surreal. And awkward. And uncomfortable. And I think it’s exactly the kind of experience I want to walk away from my year abroad having had. I know enough Thai to get by brokenly, and usually when I ‘wai’ and give a polite “Sawasdee Kaap” it blows people’s minds. I don’t know. I’m sure many of my classmates abroad are having the same kind of experiences, but to feel it for yourself kind of changes your mindset. Growing up in a multicultural environment is truly a blessing I didn’t really appreciate fully until now.

the AC in this cafe is cranked way too high

hot off the press: in just-before-i-go-for-an-afternoon-bikeride news, two of the girls from the front desk have offered to trade me thai lessons for english lessons (their names are Ying and Not). the only issue is Ying pretty much speaks NO english at all, and relies on Not, who speaks a tiny bit, to translate for her. I think my Thai is already better than their english, but I said i would give it a shot.

We sat down in the lobby of the condo for about an hour last night and pretty much just talked. It was decent, and I realized that Not's english was much better than I'd figured at first, but she's really shy about speaking in front of people because she thinks she's terrible. I can definitely relate to how she's feeling, but with my Thai. It's intimidating for sure. Especially when you initiate a conversation with someone, like ask a question or something and then have NO idea what they say in response, it's embarrassing. Anyway, I think we may have another session Friday night. I figure I should take advantage of whatever opportunities I can get to learn more Thai.

Now to get down to that bikeride..i don't really have anything to pick up, but I may go check out the furniture market by Tesco to pick up some kitchenware. With using my fridge more, I'll need to expand my dish collection past spoons forks and plastic plates.

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood

If you felt like exploring my neighborhood, Angie (See link in sidebar) sent me a REALLY cool link to a mapquest type site that works with street-level pictures instead of sattelite images.

http://www.mapjack.com/?cncyUjMYacnA

My condo is about 50 metres down the street you see initially, but you can't explore down there (it's a really small street). Click on the viewfinder (upper window) and drag the mouse around to change your view, and you can click on the blue circles to move around. Also, click on the map screen (lower window) to jump anywhere in the city.

Happy travels!

all that and a bag of chips

I'm currently reading about this crazy new plant we're trying to grow at the farm called the moringa. The leaves, flowers, root, seed, fruit, leaves bark and sap all have a number of different nutritional or medicinal uses, and on top of all that, the tree is drought tolerant and fast growing. we're going to try to grow it as a living fence on the farm and then harvest continually. It's also nitrogen fixing, which means it will enrich the soil, AND that the leaves can be mixed into the soil to add further nitrogen to the garden beds.

A dude just walked into the coffee shop and bowed to his associates...these are things you just don't see in Canada.

In other news, I'm not sure if I've posted about this yet, but it sounds like I should be able to wrangle a trip into Burma at some point while I'm here. Janeen said her NGO is going to be organizing an ultimate frisbee tournament in one of the camps in the fall and I'm trying to work it out that I go along as a frisbee specialist of some sort. I'm definitely qualified, the question is will I be able to get a camp pass.

I was talking to one of the students in the program the other day (I was wrong, her name wasn't Thu May Lin, it was something else...she told me again but I forgot. Anyway, I hadn't actually ever thought about it before but it made sense (if you can call it that) when she told me. If you're born in a refugee camp in Burma (or elsewhere I'm assuming), if that camp isn't recognized by the government, you don't get issued a passport. Also, in many of the camps birth records aren't kept. In essence, you aren't a citizen of any country, and aren't recognized as existing by any formal decision-making body. That would make international travel virtually impossible, essentially trapping people in their current unfortunate situation.

The ability to drive/walk/sail/fly/crawl freely across an international border isn't something I appreciated as being a privilege before a few days ago.

My Thai lessons were cancelled on wan ang khan (Tuesday) because my teacher got sick. She said it was her policy that if she cancelled last minute, she would pay the students for their inconvenience, and said that one of my lessons next week would be at no charge to make up for it. She did sound legitimately sick, and said that she was going to be going to the hospital, which was why she couldn't have the lesson that day. I'm kind of up in the air as to how I want to handle this situation. On the one hand, I'm most definitely experiencing the end-of-the-month cash crunch, but on the other...I could likely afford to pay her when it came down to it. It might mean one more peanut butter and banana sandwich dinner instead of going to a restaurant, but I could do it. What would you do?

Speaking of eating in, the fridge is working wonderfully. I had to duke it out with an ant colony before turning it on though. Turns out ants like sugar, and if you keep your sugar in the fridge, ants will set up a nest way in the back behind all your boxes of tea and your bag of cosmetics where you can't see until you go to clear everything out to turn on the fridge. Let that be a lesson to all of you. Anyway, I've switched to eating muselix and soymilk and cut up mango and banana for breakfast instead of going out, and it's just as tasty except you have to make it yourself. Plus I get cold water whenever I want instead of lukewarm. Greg reminded me the other day that we had to pay 3500 of next months rent out of our pocket because we were accidentally overpaid for this month, but I figure I will take that out of next month's salary. Definitely going to try to save more money from now on. I'm going to have to if I hope to do any traveling after my contract here expires.

Went for another Thai massage yesterday, which brings the grand total up to 3. There's a place down the street from our house that does them for the equivalent of about 5 bucks for an hour massage, and not only do they feel good during, but you feel great afterwards as well. There are adverts for massage courses all over the place, and you can get certified fairly easily I think. Maybe I'll have to come home and open my own chain of Thai massage parlors. You need to be careful where you go for a massage here though. The place down the street is totally legit, but you'll want to stay away from the ones with red and blue neon signs and scantily clad women calling out to passers by.

David's in town tonight (former NEED Director), and I think we're all going to go out to a bar in town that has trivia on Thursday nights. I haven't really applied myself to anything overly academic in about a month now, so it might be a good way to get my mind back on the right track before starting my research.

Scholarship

I've received word of this scholarship from Japan that's awarded (I think by the Japanese government) to young researchers involved in environmental or agricultural research projects in Asia. Definitely going to apply. There's a 5000 dollar research grant (which would go SO FAR on the farm) and possibly a trip to Japan to present the results of the project afterwards? I'm going to sit down with Greg later this week to talk about a possible research project. He is going to apply as well, because they are accepting one application from an individual, and one from an organization, and he's going to apply on behalf of NEED. If I am able to get a paper published in my name by doing this, that would be SO huge. Also, if I'm able to structure the project so it lined up with my research for school that would be even better. Although I may have to wrestle Greg for the trip to Japan.

Fingers crossed!

Thai Lessons

Today's the day! I start Thai lessons, which will hopefully let me finally figure out what everyone around me is saying. I have high hopes.

In less cheery news, I'm running really short on money this month. In an attempt to make what little I have left last till the end of the month, I have caved and finally plugged in my refrigerator in hopes that buying groceries will be cheaper than eating out all the time (but remember I still don't have a microwave or any sort of cooking apparatus aside from a kettle)...I wonder if you can cook rice or pasta in a kettle...I have the feeling my next post is probably going to include a paragraph on how I've now broken my kettle.

I think it's all the start-up costs that have eaten up the cash...the bike, the apartment furnishings, the everything else...it adds up.

Also, it doesn't help that little things keep coming up. For example, yesterday morning, I took 1000 baht out of my drawer and said "This has to last me 3 days". It didn't last 24 hours.

In the morning I spent 85 baht on breakfast, then paid 100 baht to reimburse Mr. Khai for the tickets to the theatre fund raiser at Chiang Mai University we had attended the previous night. It was put on to raise money for the victims of Hurricane Nargis, and was all in Burmese, (and lasted about 4 hours) but I'm glad we went. Then, during the meeting in the morning, one of the girls at the office had to be taken to the hospital because she was having terrible stomach pains which had been going on for a week already and she hadn't said anything. The word appendicitis was thrown around, but we couldnt be sure until she'd seen a doctor. Thing is, as I mentioned before, there isn't an 'emergency medical assistance' portion of the budget. Everyone threw 200 baht into a pot to cover her medical fees. That afternoon, I went grocery shopping which ate up another 500 baht, and stocked up my fridge a little bit, and bought some mangoes from the old lady with the highway robbery fruit stand by the mall for another 35 baht. Another 60 baht on dinner just about cleaned me out. It was terrible. I've got maybe another 10 days till I get paid, and it's going to be tight but I will make it work.

We were supposed to go to the farm this morning but it's pouring rain so we've decided to hold off till noon and go then.

Pictures (continued)

Okay, I've managed to load some more pictures from yesterday at the farm, so here they are.


This is Mr. Khai's wife (right) along with two of the students folding the coconut we had shaved earlier into the white dough and then wrapping them in banana leaves to steam. We're sitting in the house at the farm, which has actually expanded quite a bit since I've arrived. The area where we're sitting used to be bare ground in front of the house but they extended raised platform out from the front of the house for people to sleep on (it has to be raised or it would get wet during the rainy season).








All the students were really happy to be able to spend the day at the farm. You can see the shaved coconut in the pot in the middle of the semi circle, and the girl on the right is kneading the dough.

I really like this picture. I had to ask Mr. Khai to take it because I wanted to be in it (I'm not in very many of my pictures). We were all just sitting down to lunch.

That's Lutai on the left, one of the men who works at the farm full time, and the gentleman on the right is a friend. He comes to the farm quite a bit and is quite a joker. He's always got everyone laughing. Greg and I can't remember his name so we just refer to him as 'Animal' as in 'party animal'.

The planting of the rice. This was probably one of the highlights of the day. The rice had been germinated in the bag (you should be able to see the small white shoots coming out of the grains if you click the picture to blow it up), and then would be planted in the paddies.Everyone waded into the muddy rice field and used their feet to mix up the mud and puddles of water and to crush any hard lumps in the soil. You had to be careful of snails though, becuase they were everywhere burried in the mud and you were constantly stepping on them. When crushed, their hard shells are very sharp and thanks to them I have small cuts all over the bottoms of my feet.

This is me building working on my Arakan (one of the Burmese ethnic groups) traditional cooking skills. It's not as easy as it looks, and your fingers get really sticky from the coconut so the dough sticks to them. Or at least it did to mine. Somehow the women were doing fine. In the background you can see one of the guys who had come to the farm for the harvest celebrations on the guitar. He was playing with one of the other younger guys on the farm who's just off screen to the left. I don't remember the young guy's name, but we're told he is a very popular Burmese singer and is here to learn about agricultural and political issues and then wants to go back to Burma and use his music to spread the message. How cool is that?

This is that same dish cooked and ready to eat. You had to unwrap the banana leaves before eating and they were fresh out of the pot so they were piping hot (you can see Mr. Khai's daughter in the background trying not to burn her tongue). It was terribly difficult though, because they were so amazingly delicious that you wanted to stuff it in your mouth all at once.

I'm really happy this worked! This is one of the videos I took of people singing and playing the guitar during the afternoon. Best. Day. Ever.

More pictures

The net keeps cutting out, I think the storm is messing with the wireless signal. I'm not sure how many more pictures I will be able to post, but I will try.

In the meantime I suppose I will continue my run-down of yesterday (Read the previous post first to bring yourself up to speed). Yesterday was such a huge deal because it was the day of the rice planting. Traditionally, in a Burmese community, everyone gets together and has a party to celebrate the rice planting, and again after the rice is harvested 4 months later (that's an even bigger deal with a correspondingly sized celebration, so I'm definitely looking forward to it). You could immediately tell that the students from the office were ecstatic to have a chance to get outside for the day They were laughing, and joking around (in Burmese), and most of the time when I've caught glimpses of them at the office, they look fairly somber. Also, usually when we go to the office for meetings, all the students (mostly female at the moment) scamper upstairs and aren't really seen. I think that's also a cultural thing, but it hasn't really given me a chance to get to know any of them particularly. That's another reason yesterday was such a valuable time, because I actually got a chance to talk to some of the students. They sort of stuck to themselves at first, but partway through the morning I noticed one (whose name I subsequently learned with Thu-Lin-May (the only name I remember), using a beer bottle cap to scrape the meat out of a coconut shell. I asked if I could help and when she agreed I sat down and set to work. Her English is way better than I had first thought, since she's never really said anything past 'hello' in our past interactions. A bunch of the students english is actually pretty good and the ones with better english could help translate for the others (though they don't all speak the same language...) Two of the girls are from Arakan refugee camps, and I would have LOVED to get the chance to sit down with them and talk to them about their experiences growing up in a refugee camp. Unfortunately there wasn't the time, and I didn't want to seem too pushy the first time we had a conversation. I'll be here for a while though, and hope to get the chance at some point. Anyway, it turned out the coconuts were being scraped into a bowl which would be used to cook a Burmese sweet to be eaten after lunch. The bottle caps cut my thumbs up pretty good, but the ladies seemed to be doing just fine so I stuck with it. After the coconuts were shaved, it was time for lunch, which consisted of this amazingly tasty but insanely spicy dish made with prawns, as well as water spinach and okra. Mr. Khai snapped this picture for me just before we dug in for lunch, and you can sort of see how the food dishes are all in the middle of the table while everyone has their own separate place of rice sitting around the edge. After lunch, Greg and I went into town to get some more drinks for everyone, and when we got back the women were sitting in a circle using a sticky rice ('cao neao' in Thai, 'gai nea'(I think) in Burmese) and corn starch dough to wrap up the coconut (which had been mixed with this clear syrupy stuff) into little packages resembling perogies. When I went to sit down, I turned and looked at the guys, who were all sitting at the other end of the house drinking beers and talking, and suddenly they all turned and started laughing hysterically at me. I turned back to the women to see why they were laughing, and I couldn't see anything funny, which made the men laugh even harder, the women joining in at this point. I turned back to the men and they were hardly able to contain themselves (Greg included), tears of mirth rolling down their cheeks. I could not for the life of me figure out what was going on, but the moment passed and we made the perogies. After they were made, they were wrapped in a banana leaf and placed in a pot to steam. Once they were all in the pot cooking, I went over and asked Greg why everyone had been laughing. Turns out one of the girls had made a penis with her dough and was waving it around behind my back every time I turned around. It must have been hilarious to everyone watching.

In recent developments, I've just made friends with a group of 5 Americans who are here teaching english. We're all going to dinner and a movie Friday night. Awesome.

These pictures are NOT loading.

Anyway, after making the perogies it was time to plant the rice, which was SO much FUN. It was basically this giant field of mud, and everyone got in and stomped around while the sprayed water on the field to mix the mud up. Then the fields were smoothed out with this long piece of bamboo and the rice seed was thrown out of this big sack where it had been germinated. I have some awesome pictures/video of all this, but it still refuses to load. After the rice was planted, the logical way to clean off seemed to be to jump in the pond. So we all did. it was kind of smelly, but everyone had a lot of fun spalshing around and generally being silly.

In even more recent developments, remember the students I was talking about a moment ago? Their professor just arrived. He's in the International Development Studies department at Brigham young university in Utah, and he's here for the summer. He knows a bunch of the professors at Mat Joh University as well and he's told me to get in contact with him about my research. This couldn't be more perfect. Anyway, the rest of the day consisted of guitar, singing, playing football on one of the old rice fields, and general all-round good times. I wish I had time to load more pictures, but the internet is painfully slow and the cafe is closing in a few minutes. I'm going to go talk some more with these students and their professor because I think that networking right now takes precedence over blogging.

*Added 24 hours after the original post*

Hey! The pictures loaded after all.

This was a panorama I snapped on my bike trip halfway up the mountain the other day. You can see most of the city, it was really really neat.


On my way back down, the sky got really dark and grey, and I snapped this picture with a storm rolling in fast. You can see it already raining on the right side, but the sky to the left is still clear and sunny. It was eerie. I had to mess with the camera filters and the white balance a bit to make the clouds show up, but I like how it turned out. In case you were wondering, I didn't make it home dry.
We've built trellisses over a number of the field plots since we've been here, and are planning to grow beans on them. This will provide shade, as well as to allow us to get more produce from each square meter.

Things grow INSANELY fast here, and I snapped apicture of these beans as four inch sprouts about 6 days ago...I'm astounded at how fast they've shot up
We weren't sure whether or not the composting bin we started up would be put to use, but it seems to be working so far. And we're taking the fruit scraps from our apartment and using them as well.
This is a picture of a bunch of the guys from the farm transferring some baby snakehead fish (which are really valuable when sold) from the large pond to one of the smaller ones, (all the ponds have filled up with water in the past few days from all the rain)

Hopefully the pictures work this time

Right, I'm back in the cafe, which doesn't close for another 4 hours so hopefully I will have time to load all the pictures this time. The net connection is painfully slow, but I'll update as they load. On a side note, it's about to POUR. The sky is so black, it's ridiculous, and it's just gotten really windy (all you climatology buffs out there will know that's called a 'gust front' and usually travels ahead of large thunder storms). The lightning and thunder are kind of a giveaway as well. (And just before you get all 'what? using a computer during a lightning storm? this is madness!' on me, relax. I have a powerbar. Besides, this is Sparta)

moving on,

Yesterday was awesome. I had so much fun. It started unassumingly enough, going to the farm with Greg for 6:30AM (though we were originally aiming to be there for 6 which meant I was up at 4:50), because Mr. Khai had told us that the guys start work at 6 in the morning every day.

As a side note, Greg’s bought a new motorcycle which is really great because I no longer have to hold on for dear life when we go somewhere. I had no idea that gear shifting was supposed to be a smooth operation on a motorcycle. Also, it’s nice because now we can keep up with traffic on the highway.

Anyway, when we got there, the guys were just rolling out of bed and hadn’t had breakfast yet, so we sort of sat around and scratched our heads trying not to look awkward while everyone sort of did their getting-up routine. Greg called Mr. Khai who was at the office in town and needed to look over a legal agreement concerning the lease on the land for the farm, so we headed back into town. Mr. Khai looked over the agreement on Greg’s computer, and we went into the city to look for a place to print the file. Unfortunately it was 8:15 at this point and none of the printing places really opened until 9 so we found a nice café and sat and had a coffee (or in my case fresh squeezed orange juice because I’m not a fan of the coffee). The café where we stopped also provided internet access upstairs and that’s where I snapped this picture.

I thought it was really neat the way it was designed so people had to sit on the floor and sort of recline on those triangular cushion things. It’s incredibly reflective of the relaxed atmosphere in Chiang Mai. You see those cushions a lot of places around here.

Anyway, things opened up at 9 and we printed our documents and headed back to the farm. Mr. Khai was there when we arrived and he had brought his wife and daughter as well as the few students currently living at the office. There are also maybe 9 guys at the farm now. Today was a big day because they were celebrating the planting of the rice. You need to understand that in Burma, to say that rice is kind of a huge deal is a serious understatement. I don’t know what the actual statistics are off-hand (I’d Google them to make myself look more informed except that I don’t have an internet connection as I’m writing this.) but to be sufficiently vague, rice is an incredibly important dietary staple as well as a source of income for a large portion of the population. To put things in context, when Greg asked David how he should approach Mr. Khai about switching to a different rice planting technique, David sort of scoffed and said "Good luck. You don't tell a Burmese man how to grow rice...you just don't do it." Needless to say the new technique never really flew.

Oh! Excellent, the first set of picture just loaded. I will explain these while the second batch are loading.

First off, this is a picture from Natasha's (my boss's wife) muay thai boxing match. I realized I never really followed up on that one. It was really really neat. The match itself took place in a venue in the heart of the red light district. Basically there was a big ring in the middle and a bunch of bars aroudn the outside where you could get drinks/food if you were so inclined. Depending on where you sat in the crowd, you would be approached by the waitresses from the bar that served that section. There were 5 matches, organized by weight class from 60 pounds to 160 pounds. The 60 pound kids couldn't have been older than 8 or 9 and I wasn't quite sure how I felt about watching 8 year olds in a ring beating the stuffing out of each other. You could also tell that muay thai was a sport laiden with tradition...

On a side note, the rain's just begun to come down in buckets and I just watched a sopping wet policeman sprinting down the street for cover.

Each fighter went through a ritual before their match, which involved walking around the ring, kneeling and bowing to the crowd and to their oponents. All in all, it was a good night. Unfortunately, Natasha lost her match, though if I were judging I think I ould have given her the win.

Eee, I'm right by the door and the rain is coming in...my computer's getting slightly wet.

This is a picture I took while riding my bike around the city. You can see the moat which surrounds Old Chiang Mai, as well as remnants of the original wall that used to encircle the city to protect it from attack.

This is a Buddhist temple, or 'wat', one of many that can be found inside the city, and all over Thailand. They are usually ornately decorated and the architecture is quite intricate. Monks study and train at the 'wats', and you see them around the city swathed in their orange robes. Actually, when Greg and I went to work really early yesterday morning, there were monks out everywhere. I'd never gone outside that early in the morning, but I suppose this happens every day. The monks each had a metal (brass I think) container around their neck which was for donations of money or food. I think the Buddhist belief is that basically giving donations to the monks is the equivalent of building up good karma in this life so as to improve your stature in the next life and bring you that much closer to achieving nirvana. But I could be wrong. I want to pick up a book on Buddhism the next time I pass a used book store.

This is a picture I took on that long bike ride partway up the mountain the other day. (Oh bother. The connection cut out and I have to start loading the pictures again). If you click to view the picture full size and look at the top of mountain peak farthest to the right (sort of close to the middle of the picture) you can just make out Wat Doi Suthep.

This last one was one I just throught was neat. It's the playground in front of the Japanese restaurant down the street from our building.











Okay, I'm afraid the internet connection is going to cut out again and prevent me from posting, so I'm going to put up these and try for some more later. I realize I still haven't explained in full why yesterday was so awesome, but it will come in due time.

Pictures for everyone! (or maybe not so much...)

Right, it's getting on in the afternoon, and I want to head over to the market to buy some fruit before everything closes for the night. I went out on my bike last night looking for mangoes but my search was 'fruitless' (I'm sorry, I had to do it). But seriously, it was terrible, riding around the city, not a fruit in sight. I ended up having to go to the "highway robbery fruit lady by the mall", or at least this is what I've dubbed her, because her prices are sky high. 40 baht for three mangoes? give me a break. And they weren't even that tasty...

Anyway, I'm going to upload a whole bunch of pictures instead of giving a wordy progress report.

For those who've been asking, the bike I bought has a good mountain bike frame, and I paid to have them replace the mountain bike wheels it came with with thinner road tires with less tread. Wider than an actual road bike, but not as wide as the fat mountain tires. I think I may want to buy a pair of the bigger tires as well though, because I want to take a bike trip up the mountain and down the other side. I've heard word that there's a trail through the forest, but considering the fact that it's the rainy season and "a trail through the forest" could mean any number of things, I would likely be wise to get some more rugged tires.



Greg and I took a trip up the mountain to Wat Doi Suthep yesterday (which you can actually see in one of the pictures). It's about 15 km from the bottom to the top of the mountain, and it's really steep, so I'm going to have to train a while before attempting this trip.

This morning we got together (myself, Bill and Sam) to discuss the building design for the training facilities. It's grown from one to two floors now, because we couldn't make it as big as we wanted it to be without sacrificing some of the surrounding farmland, so we extended upwards instead. After the meeting I pedalled around the Chiang Mai University campus becasue I haven't really explored that part of the city yet. It's a gorgeous campus with lots of nice smooth roads for riding. On my way out, I happened to pass the CMU library, and popped in for a look. My UofT student card was a lifesaver, because I still don't know how to say "I'm an international developement studies student from canada looking to do some research for my thesis" in thai yet. They don't have as extensive a collection as the UofT library, but there was some good stuff on agriculture. I'm definitely going to be going back at some point to look around some more. There is also Payap University farther outside the city which should have a library as well.

Speaking of Payap, I decided to ride my bicycle to the ultimate frisbee drop-in on Saturday. It took an hour and a half. I got lost. I felt like such a tourist, having to stop by the side of the road countless times to check my map. By the time I got there, the sky was black with rainclouds and it started to rain just as I'd stashed it under the bleachers. The though of cancelling the drop-in was never even a possibility on anyone's mind. We ended up getting soaked to the bone, but I had the time of my life. I had fortunately purchased cleats on my way to the game, so I wasn't slipping as much as other people were, and the rain made the ground nice and soft for diving. There were quite a few people there as well, I hope the turn-out is as good next week.

These pictures do NOT seem to want to load...I think I'm going to have to sign off and try to upload them another time. I really don't think I can go another night/morning without mangostines. I've also got to research suitable leguminous trees for the farm. We're looking to try using living fences to divide the fields.

Oh! and before I go: the number to call (or text) if I need to be reached is

00166898534500 (I think).

Also: Text message spam? I didn't think it existed, but I get useless texts in thai all day about offers i don't want. Supposedly everyone gets them here.

lost and naked in the city again

Went on my inaugural bike ride yesterday with the new bicycle. She rides like a dream.

I started out by heading up to the 700 year stadium with Sam. The stadium is this big sports complex with an Olympic swimming pool and a bunch of stadiums and things which were built for the Asian games. I’ve never really understood why cities would pour such huge sums of money into complexes like this which are showcased once and then are sort of used occasionally afterwards. It kind of seems like a waste to meAfter touring the stadium for a bit (the grounds were beautifully manicured and there was hardly anybody there), I said I wanted to go back to the old city to buy some mud guards from the bike store. Cycling in the rainy season is a messy business without them. Sam came with, and after we’d got the guards, he said he wanted to go home and take a nap. I wanted to explore the city some more in hopes of familiarizing myself with it to the point where I wasn’t constantly getting lost, so we parted ways. I toured the cool back alleys and side streets of old Chiang Mai for about 35 minutes before realizing I was completely and utterly lost. I decided I would make random turns and hopefully eventually end up somewhere familiar (why that seemed like a good idea at the time I will never know). 20 minutes later I was still lost, so I decided to go with logical. The convenient thing about a square city is that if you go in one direction long enough, you’ll hit the moat, regardless of which direction you’re traveling. So I did. Once I got to the moat, I still didn’t recognize where I was, so I went left and decided to skirt the perimeter until I reached the corner closest to our place. Then it started to POUR rain. Fortunately I had thought to pack my raincoat before we left, so I put it on and it was back to riding. The rain was coming down really hard so my bottom half was drenched in about 9 seconds, but my top half stayed nice and dry. Or at least it would have if I hadn’t been sweating so much from the hard riding. I would have stopped and waited for the shower to finish but it was about 6:30 by this time and the sun had just set so it was getting dark quite quickly, and also there was no guarantee that the shower would stop any time soon (actually in the end it went on for about 2 hours). Also, I was having the time of my life riding in the rain and didn’t really want to stop. I think I went around the city perimeter twice. In fact I’m sure of it, because I passed the same street market in front of this huge park a second time. I must not have recognized the right corner in the fading light, but I found it the second time. I was really glad I invested in a front and back light for the bicycle though, because they definitely came in handy. I ended up making it home at 7:15, happy but completely exhausted. After going to dinner with Sam and Greg I went straight to bed.

Today I’ve got to recopy the map I made of the farm yesterday. I spent about 4 hours measuring the perimeter, the ponds, the house and all of the vegetable beds so as to make a scale drawing of exactly where everything was. We’ll be able to use this to plan for future bed locations as well as use it to draw up a crop rotation schedule. I think it will also be good to be able to show potential donors interested in the farm exactly what it looks like, because they don’t have another map with this kind of detail.

I am also writing up a funding proposal for help funding a new sidecar for Greg's motorcycle. The farm is currently producing MASSIVE amounts of vegetables (beans, eggplant, okra, morning glory, etc), about 5kg a day. These vegetables are 100% organic and would fetch top dollar at the market, but we currently don't have the infrastructure set up to sell them. We were thinking of marketing to other NGOs or schools in the area, but we also don't have any way of delivering the vegetables. That's where the sidecar would come in. We could use it to make veggie deliveries as well as to transport people to and from the farm when needed.

I think I will also go for a bike ride and pick up some more fruit. Two mangoes for breakfast are a lot cheaper than french toast and muselix with fruit and yogurt, and just as delicious as I found out this morning. I bought this new fruit yesterday which is small, red and has soft green spikes. It tastes somewhat like a lychee, and you eat it in much the same way, but I don’t like the fact that it’s got a chewy rind in the centre that you can’t really separate from the seed so you have to chew it up. I think I’m going to stick to mangoes and mangostines from now on.

It's just begun to pour again. So much for the bike ride..I suppose I will work a while until it stops.

Laundry day

Written May 3, 2008

7PM

Today’s been a pretty busy day. We had a meeting at the office this morning which started at 9:30 and didn’t stop really until 3:30…except for lunch, which was fantastic. Then went to Office Depot, where I needed to pick up some graph paper because I’m supposed to go to the farm some time in the next day or two to map out exactly where everything is and since I’m somewhat artistically challenged I figured graph paper wouldn’t hurt. I think I’m going to call that lady from the flower shop and see if she’s in the night market today to try and get on those Thai lessons. On our way home from the store we passed a lady running an old-fashioned pedal powered sewing machine by the side of the road and I made a mental note because I have a few clothes with holes in them. Anyway, after getting home from the meeting I grabbed the clothes and went to a net café down the street and had an iced milk tea (yes, I feel the mundane details are necessary…they help to put things in context) which was also delicious and used the internet for two hours. On the way home I stopped by the lady and stood there awkwardly while she fixed my clothes. I was kind of conflicted because on the one hand, I’m basically saying “Hey you! Fix my clothes for a pittance!” but on the other hand income is income…is that right, even though I could easily afford to pay way more? I don’t have the answer to any of these questions. I do know that I would far rather take my clothes to a lady on the side of the street than go to one of the more major operations that you see along the road in stores, because I know that all of my money is going directly into her pocket.

Anyhow, after getting my clothes mended, I went to get my hair cut. I was pretty apprehensive about how things would go, but I ended up quite satisfied with the results and am planning to go back. I couldn’t tell you for the life of me what it was called and it took about 20 minutes to walk there, but if you’re ever in Chiang Mai, check out the Third fourth barbershop on the left past Wat Suan Dok. (‘Wat’s are Buddhist temples and they are everywhere in Thailand. They’re usually really ornately decorated with gold and things, and the architecture is really beautiful. You’re allowed to visit them, but you have to dress modestly and take off your shoes while you’re inside. I have yet to go, but there’s a really cool wat at the top of the mountain that you can see from Chiang Mai, so I want to go there at some point). After the haircut it was time to do laundry, and then to go back to the café where I’d used the internet because I realized I had left my disk in the computer…I got back and started writing this post, and now it’s time to go downstairs because I think the laundry should be finished. Sam bought a bicycle. I want one too, but I’m torn between getting a really good one and trying to ship it home at the end of the year, or getting a lousy one and leaving it here. I just don’t want it to break before the end of my time here. The other thing is, bikes are a lot cheaper here. I also wanted to buy a bike just after I got home, but I wanted it to be a hybrid bike, and all the ones I’ve seen here are either mountain or road bikes. Decisions decisions…shoot! I forgot! The laundry.

sitting in a cafe down the street...

Written on Monday June 2, 2006

I’ve spent a fair chunk of my time the past few days locked in epic battle with my broadband internet connection. It worked the first two or three days after I’d moved into my apartment but, has since come to the conclusion that it would be easier to do nothing at all.

For those of us who understand computers, it is having trouble renewing my IP address when I try to log onto my apartment building’s server. I have it set to detect the address automatically, but there seems to be something on my computer that is preventing it from getting one. I’ve played with every setting I can find but it nothing has made any difference.

For those of us who don’t understand computers, it’s broken.

In any case, I gave up yesterday afternoon and asked the building manager to cancel my internet connection. There are two cafes within walking distance that provide free internet for the price of a delicious beverage so I figure I can do most of my internet work from there. One is called the Lana café, I discovered it a few days after we moved in. It has local fair trade coffee (I didn’t even know Thailand grew coffee), and though I’m not a coffee drinker I’m glad to reward their sense of social responsibility with my business. Not to mention they make a mean banana pancake. One of my favourite breakfasts is yogurt with fruit and granola, because the fruit is so fresh and amazing…

I bought a cutting board and a knife and plates yesterday. This may not seem like a huge deal to you, but for it has opened up worlds of possibilities. I can now purchase fruit and eat it at home. Think about this. I bought a huge bag of mangoes yesterday for a dollar. As I sat at my computer reading about nutrient balancing through crop rotations and stuffing my face with sweet juicy mangoes (my notes are somewhat sticky as a result), I came to the realization that life doesn’t get much better than this.

On a somewhat related note, I now have ants. They are tiny and infuriating. I have been trying so hard to keep my apartment meticulously clean (and by meticulously I mean ‘kinda’) so I didn’t get ants, but it hasn’t worked. I am watching one crawl up the bottom of my screen as I type this. I brushed him away, but he’ll be back in no time with reinforcements, I know it. I’ve found the source, a loose tile on my balcony. There is a stream of ants to and from this loose tile, which means there’s likely a nest in the wall somewhere. Not cool. If they get into…augh! I keep having to stop and brush them off my desk as I type. Does anyone have any clever ideas for dealing with ant infestations? I’d like to avoid fumigation if possible. I went to 7/11 this evening to see if they had any ant traps or bait, but I wasn’t able to explain what an ant was to the cashier. It was pretty much downhill from there. I hope they don’t crawl into my computer and break it…I opened it up to write this post and one skittered under my keyboard. For all I know he’s in there munching away on my circuits and such. I don’t know what the allure of my laptop is anyway…although maybe they’re eating the three years worth of crumbs that have slipped under my keyboard and been forgotten…until now. Either way, they’re a nuisance.

There are also tons of other bugs on my balcony…and not the cool ones either. They’re these gross black beetle things that die for no reason. You see them crawling around on the balcony in the evening and you go out in the morning to water the plants and they’ve all gone and died all over the place making a mess. The nerve of these creatures.


Speaking of plants, I’ve bought a whole bunch of plants. I believe my collection is up to five now, four of which are orchids which are AWESOME because they don’t need to grow in soil…which is why you see all the dangly bits in the picture. You just spray the roots with water once every few days and they’re happy as clams. And three of them are blooming so the balcony smells great as well. I also picked up a hanging basket with a mixture of mint and…some edible thai herb. The lady told me the name of it in Thai but I don’t remember. She told me to chop them both up and mix them with ‘bpla’ which is fish in Thai. I didn’t tell her that I didn’t have a frying pan or even a hotplate because she seemed so excited about the prospect of me cooking with her herbs, so I let her have her fun. I figure I will use the mint to make tea when it grows a little bit more, and if the other plant doesn’t seem to be useful I’ll rip it out so that there’s less competition for the mint. All I’m looking for now is maybe a vine or two to climb the poles of my balcony railing…And before you accuse me of spending my hard earned living allowance on plants, bear in mind the most expensive one I bought was an orchid for the equivalent of about 6 dollars Canadian…I’ve seen orchids for over a hundred dollars in Canada, plus they don’t grow very well, so I’m taking advantage while I can.

I wanted to hang them on my balcony and saw some hemp string at the night market. The lady selling it assured me it was ‘very very strong’ when I bought it, so I rushed home, excited to test out my new super-string. She lied. It’s terrible. As you can see in the picture, I had to spend about forty minutes winding this stupid string back and forth between the air conditioning unit and the pipe on the other side of the balcony before I thought it would be strong enough to hold the plants. And it’s just occurred to me that being organic, the string will rot to nothing as soon as the rainy season comes. Blast…

Also, work is going really well for me. The meeting with the funder last week went really well (once he got to the farm, it turned out he knew the sister of the man we rent the land from, so they had a great old time swapping stories, and he seemed really enthused about what we were doing as well). I am definitely having to get used to the way things work here though. Here’s an example:

I was scheduled to be at a meeting with Mr. Khai and Greg and Sam and David at the office this morning at 9. I woke up at 8, exercised, showered, got dressed, and then the phone rang. It was Greg. He said he’d just got a call from Sam who’d been told by David who talked to Mr. Khai who had said the meeting should be postponed until tomorrow. So Greg and I went to breakfast at Lanna Café instead. Over breakfast Greg was expressing some of his frustration at the fact that he felt he was basically being given the brush-off at the farm. He would suggest something, and Mr. Khai would say yes, that’s a good idea, and then nothing would happen. That’s something else I’ve noticed. People don’t say ‘no’. My time here has already made me realize how blunt North American culture can be. In Burmese culture (and I’m not sure, but I think Thai culture as well), it is frowned upon to make someone look bad, or to embarrass someone in public. Part of this seems to involve agreeing with everything. It seems to me that it would be far simpler to say exactly what you mean, but of course this is me speaking from a North American frame of reference. It does make things difficult sometimes though. After breakfast, Greg called Mr. Khai as I was paying (he relayed the conversation to me later).
Greg: “Hi Khai, would it be a good idea for me and Leslie to come out to the farm to do some work today even though the meeting is cancelled?”
Khai: “I don’t know, would you like to come to the farm?”
Greg: “Well we could come if there is any work you needed help doing, because otherwise we could stay here and go over building plans.”
Khai: “Okay that would be good, but you could come if you wanted to”
Greg: “Is there any work you needed doing?”
Khai: “If you like”
Greg: “We could be doing work here as well, so it is entirely up to you Khai”
Khai: “Would you like to come to the farm?”

It went on like that for a bit, until Greg decided we may as well go and we could stake out the area designated for the new farm building even if there wasn’t any other work to be done. We arrived, and they had finished working for the morning mostly and were all sleeping.

(On a side note, that’s another thing. There’s no 9-5 at the farm. It’s more like:

5:30-6:00AM Breakfast 1
6:00AM-7:30: Work
7:30-8: Breakfast 2
8-9:30: Work
9:30-1: Relax because it’s hot
1-1:30: Lunch
1:30-3:30: Nap after lunch/Relax because it’s hot
3:30-6:30PM: Work

After work, I don’t know what they do really. We usually leave around 5:30 so that we can get home before it’s dark because the motorcycle Greg drives currently doesn’t have a headlight.)

Most of them got up once we arrived. We sat around for a little but, and then it turned out that Monsai (another one of the Burmese gentlemen…please note most names have been changed at the request of the individuals) was coming in the afternoon with a measuring tape to help us measure and stake out the size of the new building. The fact that we’d had the same idea was purely coincidence. While we waited, we decided to start work on a composting project for the farm. (Greg had talked to Mr. Khai about it on numerous occasions in the past, I think I even have a picture of him explaining it to him in a previous post, and Khai always said yes, this was a good idea but no moves were ever made to do anything to make the idea a reality). In the end, we figured we would start on it ourselves and if people had an issue with it they would say something…or maybe they wouldn’t, as that seems to be the Burmese way. Anyway, Khai found us a suitable spot in the bean patch, and we then proceeded to spend an hour walking around the adjacent field picking up cow poop with a shovel. Cow poop just so happens to be packed with nitrogen and other really great nutrients for starting a compost pile. For a field with cows in it (two to be exact), it was surprisingly difficult to find the poop in the tall grass. By the time we had enough, Monsai had arrived with his measuring tape and we all sat down to a lunch of boiled eggs, rice, beans grown on the farm mixed with egg and chili powder, and a really spicy chili sauce. There was also okra and other boiled mixed greens from the farm.

This is the field with the cows in it...I snapped this picture just before running inside. It rains almost every afternoon, but I've only seen one torrential downpour. I've been kind of dissapointed. I've never seen a real monsoon rain before and I was looking forward to it. The rainy season lasts for another three months though, so there's still plenty of time.

When eating in a communal setting here (and in Burma as I’ve gathered), food us placed in small bowls at the centre of the table (or mat as it were) and each person gets a plate or bowl of rice and sits around the food in a chair, or cross-legged on the mat. On the farm they give spoons, but I noticed that many of the men eat with their hands, so I do as well. There is definitely an art to it. When eating with your hands, you only eat with your right hand, (because the left is traditionally reserved for cleaning up after going to the bathroom). You also you pass things with your right hand as well, either with both hands or holding your right forearm with your left hand if you want to be polite. I haven’t seen a knife used as a utensil once since I arrived, as all of the food is already in bite sized chunks (he typed as he watched an ant zig-zag lazily across the upper right corner of his computer screen). A spoon and fork are used, but the fork is mainly reserved for sweeping food onto the spoon, which is held with the left hand (you can’t hold them BOTH in your right hand). Chopsticks are quite common in restaurants, and you often find yourself using them because no fork or spoon have been provided. Fortunately I knew how to use chopsticks before I arrived, and have no problems with all the practice. Someone told me that chopsticks actually aren’t Thai at all, and have been recently introduced from China…you don’t usually think of cutlery as ‘catching on’ do you…

Anyway, after lunch, we staked out the building and built the compost bins out of woven bamboo. It took quite a while. By the time we finished it was time to go, so I think we’re going to make the actual compost with the manure tomorrow. Right, I’m going to go eat mangoes and watch the last part of ‘Amelie’, a burned DVD I picked up for 2 dollars at then Night Bazaar a few days ago. It’s in French with English subtitles but I highly recommend it.

Before I go, I should mention briefly that I played some pick-up Ultimate Frisbee at Payap University on Saturday and had a blast, met a guy who was in town with his girlfriend on vacation and said we should all go to a really good live Jazz bar Tuesday (tomorrow) night, but he hasn’t called. I also started talking to a lady in one of the flower shops and it turns out she works in the student night market down the street from us selling school uniforms. Thing is, I also told her I was interested in learning Thai, and she said she knew tons of students who would be willing to tutor and that I should drop by. We exchanged phone numbers, but I haven’t had a chance to call. Also, I’m starting to need a haircut, but I’m not sure where to go.

PS I’ve just solved the mystery of the dying beetles. They’re attracted to the light on my balcony, fly into it and then die.

PPS I keep getting lost…Chiang Mai is the most confusing city EVER. Streets go off in every direction from EVERYWHERE and there are random side lanes and alleys all over the place.