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.