Wai-ing Michelin Men

My diet is almost entirely sustained by food sold on the streets. While we have grocery stores and convenience stores I rarely step inside their air-con interiors, but sometimes when bored I peruse the neon lit aisles for fun. In many ways the commercial landscape mirrors any you might find in a US city. True we have Tesco and Carrefour instead of Walmart, but you can find practically anything there all the same – hair products, tea brands, Skippy Peanut butter – as long as you know where to look and don’t mind paying extra. (I do, so I forgo these comforts of my former life on a regular basis). However most of those familiar brands and stores come with a Thai twist if you look closely. Starbucks sells Thai Ice Tea and McDonalds Thai Tea McFlurries along with Mango McFlurries.

Driving along the moat road of the Old City I often pass a garage selling Michelin tires. Outside they have propped up one of those life-size cardboard cutouts. He’s got the normal rippled dimensions of a man constructed out of tires, but his arms are not raised in a wave or stretched out in a muscular stride. Rather they come together at his chin in a Thai Wai (traditional bow).

A Thai 7-11 has all the usual trappings, but then you look closer and start realizing that you are not in Kansas anymore. Let's take as example Lays potato chips, which we have in abundance. We do have some of the common flavors: Cheese and Onion, Sour Cream and Onion, Salt and Sour, Barbeque, Extra Barbeque. Even Hot Chicken and Lemon is not too out of the ordinary. But Lays varieties do not stop there, indeed most of the shelf space is taken up by the following flavors: Sweet Basil, Spicy Seafood, Spicy Lobster, Nori Seaweed, Shrimp Tempura, Hot Chili Squid, and of course Pla Sam Rod (Fermented Fish). I have sampled almost all of these and can attest to the shocking realization of biting down on a crunchy, oily, familiar looking potato sliver expecting Extra Cheese and tasting Spicy Seafood instead. In such instances I’d rather forgo the semblance of the familiar altogether and head over to the nearest late night food stand for some grilled intestine– at least that way, I’ll be prepared for the taste.

Raining Strawberries and Flowers

It seems that in the past weeks I have been attending increasing numbers of festivals. After sampling a wide range I can say with some authority that there are more similarities than differences between the differing celebrations. The venue and the occasion remain unique. The food stands however, do not. It is perhaps comforting to know that you will always find piles of noodles in varying widths that can be heaped with bean sprouts, peanuts and sugar. There are without question always stands frying tiny pink splayed sausages and others with vats bobbing with silky meatballs. There are also, the same variety of souvenir stands – Lana woven bags, frilled and bowed shirts, odd wooden plaques, and overlarge key-chains. It is as if the same vendors are on constant rotation between towns.

What changes is the theme, at least a few more stands of a particular item, or in some cases a profusion of one particular item. In Bo Sang it was Umbrellas, In Sappong it was Strawberries, in Chiang Mai it was flowers.

But my intention is not to dismiss festivals with a “seen one seen them all” attitude – though I might feel this at times. Instead I continue to seek out and happen upon festivals, specifically in search of the quirky idiosyncrasies.

To offer an example – when TaReva and I drove out to Chiang Dao (72 km away from Chiang Mai) we found ourselves in the midst of a local Winter Festival with all the usual trappings and in addition: beauty pageants, fried toast on a stick and the most bizarre pet stand I have, and probably will ever see. It consisted of a wall of pastel colored cages each containing a miniature bunny that could fit into my palm. Not weird enough? Now put small baby doll clothes on all the bunnies.

In Sappong we perused a whole roadway of stands selling exactly the same strawberry products made by exactly the same company: dried strawberries, strawberry jam and locally produced, vinegar tasting strawberry wine.

The Chiang Mai flower festival is not complete without a flower parade with massive floats composed of flower creatures, flower maps, flower temples, flower elephants, flower kings. There was even a bevy of Indian Princesses pulled in a fleet of rickshaws… I am still confused about their presence.

Then of course there was Chinese New Year that turned Wararot Market red and gold. There were more beauty pageants – this time with three year olds and there were lion dancers balancing on poles.

And then there was one of those moments that I have had on a number of occasions where I am strikingly reminded that I am not in Cambridge anymore. Walking up the line of food stalls and souvenir stands, Lauren and I spied a dragon dance – an impressive many legged, electronically lit body that bobbed and swayed above the heads of the crowd. But terrestrial dancing and swerving were not enough so up it went, wrapping itself around a pole. All of this could have been viewed in a chinatown in the states, but this feat was still too tame for Chiang Mai. And so lets add fireworks into the dragon’s open mouth and set them alight so that they shower the gathered crowd below with sparks!

Day by day

It is unfathomable to me that our second semester is coming to a rapid close and our final classes are this week. CMU feels natural. That striding and dancing in front of classes of forty students basically my age, has come to be exactly what I feel I should be doing. Why then is the semester wrapping up?

Over the last nine months I have come to love much about my new home – swerving between cars on my motorbike, slurping gummy rice noodles, struggling to reshape my mouth so as to make some of the more challenging Thai sounds. But I’ll say with utter confidence that more than anything else I have experienced here, I love the teaching and I love my classes.

Yes there are the frustrations – students not understanding, complications with the institution, the finer points of English grammar. Yes there are the worries - how do I explain a vocabulary word on the spot? Will a certain game or assignment work? Yes there is the loss of sleep – the hours spent grading piles of exams at coffee shops, or trolling through websites and youtube clips simply to compile a single hour and a half lesson.

But I would say that all of these are inherent to teaching. Indeed, in a perhaps ironic way, they are essential to teaching, because it makes those moments – a student’s dawning understanding, a game that gets students jumping up and down, even simple laughter – mean the world to me.

Last week I spent hours preparing a review scavenger hunt for my 202 classes. I had students racing all over campus – much to their incredulity – “we have to actually go all the way there?!” Seeing my three successive classes excitedly huddled in circles, flipping through textbooks and huffing back up four flights of stairs after finding a clue on the teacher room’s door made it all worthwhile and more.

In the last two weeks many of my classes have been devoted to presentations, and again and again I find myself close to tears with laughter. There have been the commercials advertising: “ghost wax” and “cupcake perfume.” The skits describing new products – a hat that makes you dance, exercise, or play guitar depending on the music played, and where the students slyly chose a “random” subject to test out the dance function…namely me. There have been the presentations where two of my art student ladyboys dressed and danced in the style of a “Traditional Thai woman from Rama V” and the other as a “Traditional Thai woman from Rama the IX” in order to discuss the changing roles of women in Thai society. Students have sung songs about condoms, lathered their faces with mustard yellow “magic cream” who’s secret ingredient was cow piss; they have impersonated terrible teachers to illustrate the country's educational failings, and they have serenaded us with guitars.

In my own struggles with learning how to teach I often seem to forget how hard English is to learn. I can get easily frustrated with the education system and with the language barrier that still stands partially erect between my students and I. But I think back to my own struggles with language first in high school and then in college. I remember hating to be called to answer questions, let alone to perform - so worried was I that I would make a fool of myself. In this last week I have watched all hundred and forty students of mine get up in front of the black board and put their all into not only practicing English, but doing so with confidence and creativity. I cannot be more inspired.

In the end though, it will be the small things I will miss most – the certain exuberant way one of my social science students greets me every morning, or how one of my art students will admonish the others to “speak English” in a copy of my tone and voice. It is that grin of a specific political science student who sticks out his tongue when he understands a grammar point or when something is particularly funny, or it is the exaggerated way that a collection of my art students greet me with when they stroll in ten minutes late. It is all the many personalities and characters, the class cohesions and the class quirks that I have been honored to take for granted for an entire semester.

The Odd, the Absurd, and the Embarrassing

Being a tall white farang living in Northern Thailand odd things are normal (I might go as far as to say normal things have become odd). Here are just a few examples of the bizarre quirks of everyday living, and more than one instance of me making a fool of myself (something I assure you happens to me regularly). 1. I will never cease to be amazed and amused by the fashion of Chiang Mai (and indeed Chiang Mai is very fashionable). Most recently I have spotted: pink ruffled shoulder pads that resemble new-age armor and a black and white polka dotted one piece. 2. This is a story that I alluded to months ago, but figured it also belonged here. While driving back late from a dinner party my bike happened to be caught up in the fiercest windstorm I have experience in Thailand. Dust, leaves, and twigs were flying everywhere, but the real measure of the storms strength was that it was able to untie the back of my dress. Normally I would discretely pull off to the shoulder and put myself back together, but that night I happened to be intently following a friend so as to find my way back to my side of town. Thus I was forced to drive one-handed through the outskirts of Chiang Mai with my other hand on my back attempting to remain fully clothed. 3. About halfway through the school year the following sign was taped up over the toilet in the female teachers' bathroom at CMU. “Due to poor ventilation we request no heavy duty use here.” 4. My apartment building has a very kind small Thai woman called Broom Loom (loom means wind in Thai), who sits in the front office every day. And every day I wai her, but sometimes our conversations attempt to go farther. This is greatly hindered by my mediocre Thai and her non-existent English. Suffice to say our conversations never last long, they are however great incentives to keep studying. My favorite encounter was when once I couldn’t understand her (as per normal) and so she proceeded to write out in Thai what she was trying to tell me… 5. 7-Elevens are rampant in Thailand. Indeed they are so numerous that it is not uncommon to stand on the steps of one and look through the front door of another across the street. Struck by the excess experienced in Bangkok I decided to do a little research. There are approximately 5,700 7-Elevens in the country (apparently half of which reside in the capital alone). The population of Thailand is currently at roughly 68,000,000. Lets assume that there are approximately ten people employed in some capacity at each 7-Eleven. That could suggest that roughly 1 in 1000 Thais works for the 7-Eleven corporation. 6. There is no official transliteration from Thai to English. This leads to numerous complications, one of which is the pronunciation of Thai-English nicknames. Take for instance one of my students who spells her name M – I – L – D. How would you pronounce that? If you are a native English speaker, then chances are you pronounce it like the adjective that describe things that are not too strong. Unfortunately you are wrong – its actually pronounced like the English word “My”. Ok that’s not that bad you might say and it really isn’t…for the most part. But you have to be careful, as students will not always correct your butchering of their names, despite their corruption of conventional English pronunciation. I have a student in one of my classes that spells her name: Koi. Take a moment to sound that name out. Now imagine me doing that for most of a semester. Well its unfortunately not pronounced Koi, but rather “Goi”. Close you might say, forgivable… yes for many names it might be…it just happens that my pronunciation translates into Thai as “dick”…oy vey! 7. At English camp two weekends ago I happened to be on the losing side of a game and was obliged to cover my teeth with strips of deep green seaweed and smile broadly for a picture.  8. After nine months I appear to have taken to heart the Thai attitude of sabai. While driving on the highway a couple of weeks back my left-hand mirror flew off. In past times, or in past places this loss of my motorbike's mirror would have caused me some alarm, or perhaps at least a touch of concern. Past selves would have pulled over to the side of the road in an attempt to retrieve it while dodging speeding cars. Even if I didn’t stop I would have, in another mindset, considered such possibilities. None of this happened. I did not dart between traffic, I did not pull over, I did not even turn back and ponder its loss wistfully. Instead my stream of consciousness when something like this: “I love driving. Oh wait was that my mirror that flew off? That was indeed my mirror that flew off. Hmm that’s interesting. Actually that’s sort of funny. Ok more importantly where is the turn I need to take to meet my friend?”

9. After careful observation I have determined that back bumpers and license plate decorations come in two, seemingly opposing, flavors - either Hello Kitty or the Playboy Bunny. Occasionally I have seen both adorning a single car. But none of these can top the exhaust pipe we discovered the other night while pulling out of the parking lot...

A Rolling Cuisine

I would like to make the perhaps audacious claim that Thailand possesses the most scrumptious street food in South East Asia. Festivals see the greatest variety of stands – glistening mounds of noodles, omelets, quail eggs, soups, satays, ice cream, waffles, sticky rice, somtum, candies, chocolates, sodas, bubble teas – I could continue close to indefinitely. But the excellence of our food stands is not limited to fair grounds. For the sake of building the strongest argument I will limit myself to the stands of the everyday.

Soup stands are most prolific - they are the staples of street food dinning. Hungry at any hour you are guaranteed to find one within a five minute drive in any direction. To fully appreciate the complexities of a seemingly unassuming soup stand you must eat with a local. There is never just one kind of soup sold, but rather infinite deviations. Do you want thick toothy wide rice noodles (sen yai), thin rice noodles (sen lek), floss thin rice noodles (sen mee), or perhaps skip the rice altogether and go for egg noodles (ba mi). Then there are the choices of meatballs – pork, beef, fish, chicken – or strips of meat, or boiled meat. There are bean sprouts, mint, fresh morning glory for garnish. Sometimes there are wontons. These are all relatively self evident, displayed behind glass. But then there are the seasonings and spices that can be added to the soups, the ones that are hidden away in the belly of the cart that you don’t realize are there until you are soup initiated. It took me a month and a half to be initiated and to discover the wonders of tumyum sweet and sour spice. And finally if the number of possible choices were not overwhelming enough there are the self service spices that are basically a requirement along with chairs, forks, spoons, and chopsticks, of every Thai street food table – small glasses filled with ground chili, fish sauce, chili with vinegar, fish sauce with vinegar, and of course…sugar.

Next on my “most frequented” list are the fruit stands. These consist of long plexiglass boxes filled with rainbow layers of sliced and bagged fruits. Cubes of pineapple, ovals of Rose apple, half moons of dragon fruit, serrated papaya, Asian pear and cantaloupe. Often there will also be bags of coconut water, small whole roasted coconuts that can be cracked open with a machete, eight inch bottles of fresh squeezed orange juice.

Coffee stands are also common. I frequent a particularly delicious one at the end of my soi. The man there mixes up bright creamy orange chai yen – Thai Iced Tea, brimming with sugar and condensed milk. His dark wood stand is stacked with empty condensed milk cans and plastic containers of Nestle coffee. Tucked into a shelf between cans is a plastic Chinese cup filled with chai offered up to a miniature plastic Buddha. He also serves, though I have not sampled, a variety of coffee drinks as well as powdered drinks mixed with milk that are available in every color of the pastel rainbow.

For late night desserts one should keep an eye out for milk stands, distinguishable by the case of freshly fried chromosome shaped dough. These stands serve dough with a jelly like green icing, or for those less enticed, green slime. To accompany them, the large vat set into the stand holds steaming soy milk, rice milk, and the strongest ginger tea I’ve tasted (it is the kind of tea perfect for burning away throat layers). There are also the standard roti stands of which I have already written about, where you can get your fried dough with any combination of bananas, eggs, chocolate, strawberry jam and blueberry jam. Sugar and condensed milk are a given.

Possibly the most frequent, but also possibly the least appetizing to some, are the squid stands. Small-wheeled carts with tables displaying vibrantly yellow squids and dried cuttlefish, the texture of faded newspaper. Such stands swarm around bars and clubs starting at midnight. For impatient customers they offer bags of shredded fish, for those who can wait they grill squid in front of you. Night air in Chiang Mai is awash in the pungent smell of squid.

When shall we all meet again?

When shall we three meet again? In Wats? Markets? Or at CMU? What if the three witches of Macbeth were transformed into street children selling Jasmine flowers and all the Thanes became Thai politicians? How would this change our understanding of the famous Scottish play and how would it influence our understanding of current events in South East Asia? This is what we have been pondering for many months now. How to transplant the misty moors into tropical jungles. How to set Macbeth within the Kingdom of Thailand.

Macbeth is easily my favorite Shakespeare play. Of course I'm biased after acting the role of the First Witch, the Final Messenger and the doomed son of Macduff back in 7^th grade. (Yes I still know almost all of my Witch’s lines.) For a number of years I have fantasized about being able to produce the play and this fall with an odd mix of luck and persistence I managed to convince the Faculty of Humanities to allow me to Co-direct Macbeth for the English Club’s annual play (and indeed the only play to be performed in English each year on CMU’s campus).

We gathered in the monsoon season, otherwise known as the end of August, and presented the students with an edited script (60 pages down from 90). We played the human machine, freeze games, and held auditions. Our performance, fours shows over three days, took place on a mid-December weekend in the Faculty's main building: HB7 on the top floor auditorium – the same auditorium where I sat on stage months before for teacher appreciation day. Those are the bookends (minus the truly hilarious cast party with over fifty people that followed a week after the show). But what happened in between?

There is unfortunately no way that I can do those interim months justice. Instead I will attempt for snap shots only. There were the early meetings held in the garden where we rambled off into musings on corruption both local and national, and there were the hours spent pacing barefoot in empty classrooms running lines, re-running lines, holding impromptu Muay Thai boxing lessons and dance offs.

From our discussions the witches took on the appearance of street children selling jasmine flowers as we decided they were the ignored part of society who actually had a strong understanding of what was going on. On stage they would sew garlands, play with rubber band jump ropes, and off stage – before the show - they would sell flowers to the audience. The porter became a cleaning woman with bright orange gloves who polished the floors and the heads of audience members a like. The Thane of course became politicians. No specific names or titles were chosen for cautionary reasons.

For our backdrop a simple array of curtains was agreed upon. Color of course was a weighty decision as Red and Yellow are so clearly politically charged. Ultimately we cut and sewed strips of orange and black (Princeton style) that allowed us to be politically neutral and also related to our specific surroundings – tying into the stone walls of Chiang Mai’s old city and the robes of the multitude of monks that reside here. On the curtain we projected Thai inspired images and, during two scenes: the Witches final scene and Lady Macbeth’s death, we projected light from back stage so as to incorporate Thai shadow puppetry.

And not only did we apply Macbeth to Thailand, but we did the opposite and I found myself considering aspects of the play I had previously failed consider. For example why is it that the former Thane of Cawdor is declared a rebel? What did he actually do? Or, possibly the most striking realization – the Buddhist undertones of Macbeth’s most famous speech.

As the weeks progressed the dynamics subtly shifted. The actors’ confidence grew, the theater games became increasingly louder, more boisterous. Posters went up around campus and Macbeth T-shirts suddenly appeared for all involved.

Two weeks to show time our extended cast started to multiply. For weeks it had been just our small crew – cast and stage managers. Twenty people at most. But suddenly other students started appearing, just a few at first. As to their purpose I did not know. A week to go, we finally moved into the auditorium and even more students started appearing. They would fill up back rows and watch, talking quietly. Some would come bearing water coolers and large rectangular snack tins for the actors. The girl in charge of makeup came one afternoon and returned the following day with a team of six. Tuesday before the show I walked back stage in search of some particular actor and found the back hall filled with twenty underclassman sewing the orange and black curtains that would hang as our back drop – Where had they come from?! Two days left and there was suddenly a lights crew, a sound crew, a puppet crew, and still there were yet more students sitting in the back of the auditorium whose role I had yet to deduce. They turned out to be the ticket team, the film team, the passing-out program team. By opening night our band of twenty had swelled to one hundred strong.

And what of the performances? I spent the four shows standing in the back of the darkened theater alternately biting my nails and silently dancing in circles – to the amusement of the ticket team. Each show was better than the one previous. After the shows, at 11-pm, midnight we would head en mass to get fried pork, toast, milk drinks. We would discuss flash mobs, college life in Thailand and America, theater. It was like returning to college in the best way possible. There were no teachers or students in the end, just actors. We quoted Shakespeare at each other non-stop – in the theater, in the halls, on facebook walls. No one could say “see you tomorrow” without at least two or three others chiming in with “and tomorrow and tomorrow.”

I only wish that it was true and tomorrow we would all be still working on the play!

Hot, Cold, and Wet

There are three seasons in Thailand. Perhaps to make up for the lack of a fourth, the three that do exist come in extremes: Hot, Cold, and Wet. When it is hot its bone melting hot, the kind of hot that feels like a wall when you attempt to walk outside, and that slowly smushes you into the ground if you do not immediately retreat. When it is cold, it is…well not cold…ok I confess anyone back home would say I’m a wimp…but you try riding in a t-shirt and a skirt on your motorbike at 7 am at 50 degrees! I will leave it with – it is comparatively cold. When it is wet, you swim. No more need be said.

Yet after saying all this I must confess that this year has been different. After being warned that rain would fall with reliability and regularity daily from June through August we had barely two weeks of monsoons and instead went through a wide-spread drought. When I returned from mid-semester break at the end of August I was told that the non-existent rains would have stopped and the cold would have set in. Instead I came back to a hot spell. A week later the temperature did drop, not only dropped but plummeted – from 80 to 50. We shivered for a week, pulled out scarves, considered purchasing jackets, until….it went back up to the 80’s a week later. (I will note that when we did go further north into the mountains a week ago I nearly froze my toes off because it got so cold at night, at least some parts of the country are indeed brisk).

There was one gorgeous weekend shuffled somewhere into November where I woke to crisp air and blue sky, the kind I relish in mid-September back in New England. When home, I love to go apple picking and gorge on Cider donuts. Lacking both, I satisfied myself with sugar donuts and a trip to the zoo.

We are now firmly in the cold season, but already the temperature slowly seems to be rising – where was this supposed cold season? Today was grey and cool, but the kind of cool that foreshadows spring, the kind of cool with the earthy undertones. Again I know we don’t get snow, but we did just seem to march rapidly through three seasons in a little less than two months.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not complaining. There are no complaints from me when the weather is usually between 80-70 and the sky is cloudless blue. But what the relatively warm weather has meant is that I now have a warped sense of time. I know empirically that holidays and celebrations (Rosh Hashana, Thanksgiving, Hannukah, my birthday, Christmas, New Years) have come and gone. And yet none of them felt particularly real. True I did teach Thai students about the tradition of over-stuffing oneself at a thanksgiving dinner for American Culture students, and there was a two story white and purple tinseled Christmas tree in the mall. I even spotted a man up in Laos bedecked in a Christmas hat with framing strings of pompoms that strangely resembled papayas. But somehow these things failed to convince me that the actual holidays were upon us. Weather has been the culprit. Instead of feeling deep down that we are indeed in the middle of January, I am half convinced someone has pressed pause at the cusp of September and we have progressed no further.

But for all those who do reside in countries, cities, islands, and mountains where the seasons and months have carried on as usual and with them their respective holidays – I wish you all a (somewhat belated) Happy Hannukah, Merry Christmas and a Good New Year!