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!

A New Normal

There comes a time when the novelty wares off, when things that once struck you as exceptional, now rarely make your head swivel while speeding by at 40 km/h on your motorbike. I would surmise that it happens to most people. It has happened to me, though it took a while to acknowledge the change. My first month in Thailand was marked by over-stimulation – everything was new, funny, odd, amazing, beautiful, absurd, different. It is not an overstatement to say that everyday was an adventure of sorts.

I am both happy and sad to report that is not the case anymore. Life here in Chiang Mai has settled into a comfortable routine, even if the routine is not always comfortable. I find myself having to push harder, drive farther, wander longer in search of new adventures. But there has also been a small-scale transformation over the last six months - the oddities of the everyday have slipped quietly into the normal background of life. Simply put I have become desensitized to Labradors riding circus-like on the backs of motorbikes. Doesn’t that happen everywhere?

It is wonderful to be comfortable living and working in Thailand and it horrible that I have come to take so much for granted. So here is an attempt to re-acknowledge and thus re-appreciate my no-longer-new home.

Things that are now (wonderfully) normal:

1) Monks bedecked in bright orange robes at phone booths and riding escalators in large shopping malls.

2) A plethora of soup stands where one can buy large bowls of meaty soup bobbing with ground pork balls, vegetables, garlic, chili, thick chewy rice noodles – all for the equivalent of less than a dollar

3) Driving by thousand year old temple ruins that abut Shell gas stations.

4) Sipping daily smoothies loaded with bright fuchsia dragon fruit, fingerling bananas, pineapple slices and passion fruit.

5) Getting a massage next to another woman who is decked-out in a deep purple shirt with an enormous white bow attached at the neckline. (I am convinced that Thailand has the oddest fashion sense in Asia.)

6) Encountering baby elephants (not a happy thing) being led through the old city so that tourists will pay to feed them bananas.

7) Riding open-air passenger trucks piled high with eggplants, cabbages and long, knobbly bitter vegetables whose name I have yet to learn.

8) Observing sinewy old men peddle rickshaw bicycles in banana leaf woven hats.

9) Passing spirit houses on street corners and tucked between buildings, complete with offerings of incense, flowers, cookies, Fanta soda bottles, and long trails of hungry ants.

10) And yes…dogs on bikes. Most recently riding alongside a pug who sat upright in the front basket of its owner's Honda, front paws on the rim, catching the breeze.

Wandering Star

Two weeks before the holiday I started hearing cannonballs fire, late at night, from the window of my room. Fighting had not taken to the streets, but firecrackers had. Unhampered by US laws restricting the sale of small colorful explosives, fireworks are set off by anyone and everyone, everywhere – often with little heed to passersby. As we drew closer still to the holiday I would on occasion spy a lone lantern floating away into the night air – a tall cylinder of paper with a flaming circle on the bottom that propels it upwards. I watched them – beautiful and lonely – before bed, not realizing what was in store.

Loy Krathong, is one of largest two festivals in the country and involves the floating of lighted Krathong, small banana trunk and flower decorated offerings to be set to float in the river. It coincides with the twelfth full moon and celebrates the life of the Buddha among other things. In the north of Thailand, the holiday has been combined with Yi Peng, a festival of floating lanterns, ensuring that water, earth and sky are all equally alight. For the three days of the holiday the city takes on a festival appearance, a mix of Hanukkah, Christmas and Halloween with small clay lights lining balconies and walkways, fireworks and lanterns going off and folks flocking to the streets.

How to describe Loy Krathong along the Ping River? Imagine a war zone – It is night, maybe 10 pm, there are bombs going off in every direction, smoke is thick in the air, crowds of people, sparks of light whizz - some up into the sky others colliding with shoes and legs, some explode with a bang, others in a shower of sparks, the river is alight and so is the sky. Got this all in your head? Ok now place this along the banks of a large muddy river along the East side of the northern city of Chiang Mai, Thailand. That’s pretty much Loy Krathong for you.

All up and down the river food stalls are crammed selling meat on a stick, fish on a stick, piles of soy soaked noodles, pulled violently-orange iced tea, fried rotis, fried eggs, fried chicken. At the river's edge thousands of men, women and children are casting their sorrows into the water carried in the petals of flowers and the origamied banana leaves of Krathong and each with a solitary candle and a small outcropping of smoldering incenses.

From the banks too shoot fireworks – reds, whites, greens, purples. They spin in tighter and tighter spirals arcing out over the water until they land again and are extinguished in a hiss. Others go off with a gun shot and little else. Still more explode into enormous cascades of light. Along one bank a parade makes its slow progression up the street hemmed in by crowds. The bridges are by far the most dangerous. Crowds and fireworks are in closest quarters here and fireworks carve out their priority. Everywhere are huddles of people setting off lanterns (khom fai) into the sky: narrow and long, wide and big, red ones, ones painted with the colors of the Thai flag, ones shaped like soccer balls, hearts, gigantic panda heads. They bob and sway like jellyfish high, high and higher into the sky so that it becomes near impossible to distinguish stars from their glowing imposters. Calm and chaos coexisting for three long, glowing nights.

But the real magic of Loy Krathong came outside the city at Mae Cho University where we headed off to, via motorbikes, late Saturday afternoon. Once at the University, forty-five minutes outside the center of Chiang Mai, we allowed ourselves to be swept along by the crowd making its way to a pre-designated field. The field was stuck with long poles crowned with unlit candles and we eagerly took up our post next to two such poles, leaning large, human-sized lanterns up against them. What followed was an hour long out-door service of monk chanting as the sky grew darker and darker. Lanterns from outside the clearing floated high overhead in a meandering line, an orange-hued milky way. And then we were standing up, thousands of us, Thais, Westerns, teens, adults, babies. The candles were lit and lanterns were hoisted overhead so that the circular wicks would catch flame. Slowly the lanterns around us expanded. We waited. And then, finally, with a signal thousands of hands let go and one thousand lanterns floated upwards. Slowly, gracefully, so at first all we could see was the flickering glow around us and then the entire night sky was suddenly burned out in the glow, our visions consumed by the enormous, circular rings.

One thousand lanterns in the sky create an entire starry overlay to the real celestial landscape, a brighter, closer collection of ever-shifting constellations. For those who have watched Princess Mononoke, the bobbing lanterns resemble Miyazaki’s wide-eyed tree spirits. And when the lanterns finally extinguish and fall slowly back to earth, dusky grey against deep blue, so to do they resemble the spirits' movements, a descent not fluttering or plummeting, but fully bodied and stunningly sorrowful. I have experienced few moments as breathtaking or truly magical as this.

To Enter the Heart

I have covered rain and rambutans, the eccentricities of my college classroom and the traffic rules of Chiang Mai, but there is one entire area of my experience that I have neglected to touch on. That of course is pashaa Thai.

As I mentioned in previous posts, my Thai lessons began informally with my students acting teacher, to their very confused teacher. Thai has five tones: middle, low, high, rising and falling, thus the same collection of letters can have completely different meanings. Having lived in the Kingdom for six months now many of the tones have come to sound very distinct. That was not the case upon arrival.

Just like Kiswahili which has wonderfully similar words (Ona = to see, and Oa =to get married. Or: Elewa = to understand, and Lewa = to get drunk) Thai also has its share of aggravatingly similar sounding words that have the potential to lead you easily astray (Glaai – falling tone = near, but Glaai – middle tone = far. Or Suay – rising tone = beautiful, but Suay – low tone = bad luck).

Learning three words a day from each of my classes, I had, within a couple of weeks, collected a hodge-podge of words that my students thought necessary additions to my slowly expanding Thai lexicon. Pen, pencil, eraser, blackboard, leek, car, fan, sticky rice, dance, door, mackerel.

But my Thai teachers have not been limited to my students. While I have taken some more formal Thai lessons, the best lessons have been those that happen by chance in the markets, at food-stands on the roadside and in the school office.
I have learned colors from my Thai co-workers who explained one morning that each day of the week is assigned a color and that government officials are traditionally supposed to dress accordingly. Monday = Lwang (Yellow), Tuesday = Chompoo (Pink), Wednesday = Ke-ow (Green), Thursday = Faa (Blue), Friday = Som (Orange), Saturday = Mooang (Purple), Sunday = Dang (Red). While many no longer organize their outfits based on the official colors I was told that some do continue to observe by wearing color-coordinated underwear.

I have come to notice that Thai is spoken, at least for women, two to three octaves higher than normal western speech patterns. This was made apparent to me when returning to Thailand after my three weeks away and speaking Thai again for the first time. You smile a lot more when you speak Thai. This is partly because there are certain sounds that can only be made by pulling your mouth back in a wide grin, and partly because (again for women) there seems to be an emphasis on making everything sound extra cute.

Fruit words are my strong point, a direct correlation with the quantity I consume on a daily basis. There are a number of ladies who have helped expand my vocabulary in this avenue. The smoothie woman at the Chiang Mai Gate Market who has come to learn how much I love mangoes was the first to teach me the staples of my smoothies. A woman who runs a fruit stand outside the back gate of CMU quizzed me multiple days running and only when I had successfully repeated malago back to her would hand me a bag of sliced silken papaya. Another woman who runs a stand at the corner of Suan Doak Temple not only taught me the words for Pomelo, Jackfruit and Pomegranate, but had me teach her the English words for her produce and write the English names below their Thai counterparts.

I’ve learned vegetables from Denali’s host mom who runs a vegetable stand, body parts from the women who I receive massages from, and I’ve collected a handful of dirty words from my older students. An old couple that sell noodles at the school cafeteria were first to instruct me in the words for small and large rice noodles and the all important pet nit noi (only a little chili please).

In my linguistic wanderings I have come across a few classic examples of words that are truly excellent when heard with a western ear. Two personal favorites: The Thai word for a pumpkin = Fuck-tong and the Thai word for an incredibly bad smell = Men.

One of the most fun and fascinating aspects of learning Thai is how so many words are a kind of puzzle. Two simple words will be combined to create an entirely new word. There is a kind of poetry to these words and they seem to inherently encourage you to ponder the deeper meaning and understanding of the word. My favorite collection of puzzle words are ones that utilize the word Jai meaning "heart" in Thai. There is:

Tok Jai = “Falling heart” which means: “surprise”
Jai yen yen = “Heart cold” which means: “calm down”
Tang Jai = “Balanced heart” which means: “balance”
Kao Jai = “Enter heart” which means: “understand”

I’ve come upon a theme concerning ‘time’ since coming to South East Asia – perhaps not quite ready for a Nature article, but certainly worth note. It appears that time here moves both incredibly slowly and incrediably quickly, despite these being contradictory statements. There was a time that a three-week vacation would have seemed enormously long. Luckily it still is - in a way, it just also transpires so rapidly that I find myself asking: have I really been away from Chiang Mai for close to a month? But I have, and I did, and I find myself, once again, in front of a classroom pretending to know what I’m talking about and pretending that I am more than just two or three years older than my students. But what of those three weeks? While I will refrain from detailing every single adventure here are some highlights / snapshots/ random occurrences (the kind that are the norm here):

Vietnam:

First of all I’ve got to mention how amazing it is having friends scattered throughout Asia. An hour flight, three hour flight, thirty minute taxi ride and suddenly I’m in a market at night, somewhere in the middle of Ho Chi Min city meeting Carolyn Smith-Lin a fellow PiA-er for dinner! That night we chose to sample one of the street restaurants – an indoor restaurant combined with a food stall, there being table clothes and china on the plastic tables that lined a bustling market alley. We dined on avocado shakes swirled with condensed milk and surprisingly tasty, a massive rice puffball, and an entire fish stuck between poles so as to stare glassy eyed at us.

Riley flew in the following day and from there we set out to explore southern Vietnam. Saturday was for the reunification palace and War Remnants Museum (originally called the American War Crimes Museum), which presents a disturbing picture of American atrocities during the war. Sunday Riley, Caroline and I drove out to the Cu Chi tunnels – an extensive series of underground tunnels that were built to resist the Americans. Some have been widened since, for foreigners to be able to experience. Crawling on hands and knees, or sometimes shuffle squatting in the dark, it is near impossible to imagine the tunnels being any smaller or for anyone having to have lived down there for months.

Sunday night we hopped on a three hour bus south into the Mekong Delta and the city of Can Tho. Good news – the bus played Avatar, bad news – they turned the volume down and over it had a single high pitched female voice translating the whole movie into Vietnamese. We stayed with two awesome PiA fellows in Can Tho who let us in on the secret restaurants of the city and we woke up at 5:30 to zoom our way via motorbike taxi to the wharf where we bargained our way onto a boat that took us to see the floating markets! Boats upon boats selling everything from dragon fruit to soda, French baguette sandwiches and enormous knobble skinned pumpkins. So that no one is in any doubt of what a particular boat has for sale, a sample is hung high from a pole and strapped to the boat so that the result is an airborne menu of onions, pumpkins, long beans, pineapples.

Heading farther south, we caught another bus and then a boat to the island of Phu Quoc where we rented a motorbike and explored the rutted dirt roads and the white sand beaches the island had to offer. While swimming we came across what we thought was a coconut, but turned out to be a jellyfish– dark brown with stubby tentacle. And then immediately after we emerged from the water and started walking down the beach we witnessed a mob of jellyfish two hundred strong floating their way to where we had just been swimming…On further exploration we investigated the insides of a large fish sauce factory. It looks much like a wine distillery, minus for the incredibly pungent smell. We also did see our first roast dog on a platter…

Then it was back to Rach Gia along the coast where we dined on shrimp muffins, fresh spring rolls and sugar cane juice squeezed with lime. Then back to Can Tho and finally back to Ho Chi Minh by Friday morning.

Singapore:

Arriving off the plane in Singapore Friday night I was met by none other than Megan Schoendorf! Together we met Denali who has seemingly magically flown in at the exact same time from Chiang Mai. Over the next two days we proceeded to eat our way through this very small country – hobbit style: first breakfast, second breakfast, brunch, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, supper, midnight snack, etc. What did we consume?.... Shanghai soup dumplings, Malaysian cheese roti with curry sauce, Chinese rice rolls soaked in soy and savory sticky rice bundled in banana leaves and steamed. We consumed bento boxes of sushi, green tea soba and crispy tempura in a bustling down town mall and bit into rectangles of chocolate, blueberry and raspberry ice cream between thin wafers while sitting on the grass out by the wharf. We sipped Star fruit juice, pineapple juice, rock melon juice. We tasted “carrot cake” lacking cake or cream cheese frosting, but rather consisting of a white tuber that has been mashed and then flattened and then fried on a griddle before being chopped like hash with scallions and soy sauce. In the quiet streets of the Arab quarter we found a dimly lit café were we had a feast of kebabs, yogurt dips, pomegranate couscous salads, pitas, and of course ice Moroccan mint tea. Then immediately after that feast we waddled our way to the bustling Indian quarter to one of the best south Indian restaurants were we ordered extra long paper and masla dosas, coconut curries, masala chai, mango lassis, and, need we forget, plump sugar soaked gulab jamun!

Least it seem like we only dined for 48 hours straight, we did indeed see a little more of what Singapore had to offer besides what came from its kitchens. We visited the beautiful and pristine botanical gardens (complete with a gift shop that reminded me of being back in the states). We hiked up a small hill/mountain in the early morning heat and happened upon some small, possibly poisonous, snake that lay draped between branches, we viewed the city from the height of one of the taller skyscraper restaurants, and we became well accustomed with the jingles that play on the subway…how the community population of Singapore has remained sane is beyond me. And best of all we met/re-met a whole host of awesome PiA-ers who I only hope will now come visit us all in Chiang Mai!

Indonesia:

The last two weeks of freedom were spent island hopping in Indonesia with mom! First stop was Bali. Not having been able to ride a horse in almost two years I found myself on the second day cantering along the beach at sunset and watching, from horseback, a funeral disperse (Balinese funerals end with everyone going down to the sea, before dispersing back to their homes).

After two days along the west coast near the sentinel temple Tanah Lot we drove up to our favorite village of Ubud – the art center of Bali. We spent our days walking through the monkey forest and the local markets, making friends with many of the women and buying breakfasts of bright pink and white coconut cakes, babi guling (whole roast pig), tiny succulent chicken satays, and mini green pancakes filled with coconut shavings and palm sugar.

One of our favorite things to do in Bali is to attend temple festivals which are almost literally happening every day somewhere, as there are temple birthdays, weddings, tooth-filing ceremonies, full moon celebrations, rice celebrations, celebrations of metal objects. On our drive to Ubud we drove through a town called Tebonkong where we notice the tradition braided palm frond decorations. So of course we stopped a little ibu (grandmother) and asked what the ceremony was. Apparently there was a big celebration at one of the three village temples starting that evening! We never did really find out what the celebration was for – a cyclic ceremony that happened every 25 years, or every 30 years, or every 50 years. One person even told us – once every 200 years. From another person we were told it was a ceremony to celebrate the completion of reconstruction on some part of the temple. Whatever the reason we returned each day (the Balinese are very welcoming of outsiders at ceremonies as long as you dress appropriately: temple sash, sarong, and a head scarf thing for men).

The first day we seemly walked into Clifford Geertz’s famous essay. In a back corner was a ring surrounded by men smoking clove cigarettes all avidly watching the men in the ring who were preparing for a cockfight. After much talking a signal was made and the betting began. Men waved their arms in the air, calling out certain sounds to signify how much money they were putting on the table (chukachuka, chachacha) with the result sounding like an adaptation of the traditional kecak dance. Then there was silence the cocks were bounced twice on the ground and then brought back to the starting lines. The whole fight lasted less then two minutes, aided by the spurs attached with red string to the cocks' feet. The fight is to the death and the loser, a brown rooster, was than unceremoniously hauled over to the side of the ring where a man beheaded and plucked it before returning to the owner. Cock fighting is technically illegal, but during festivals they still manage to slip into the program. Other nights we attended the services, watching women in long white Kebayas carrying towering offerings on their heads and gamelan groups playing exuberant musical pieces.

From Bali we flew first to Jogja, Java then a drive to the other side of the island to catch another flight from Semarang to Pangkalan Bun, Kalimantan. From there we drove to Kumai with our amazing guide Jenie where we boarded a small boat that would be our home for the next three days and we set out up the Kumai river and into Tanjung Puting National Park. Thirty years ago my parents followed a similar path on their way to spending a month volunteering at Camp Leakey. Why were we heading into the Kalimantan rainforest? To look for Orangutans of course! Over the next three days we hiked into the rainforest to feeding stations to visit and watch some of the most fascinating and captivating animals I have ever seen. Orangutan in Indonesian means “people of the forest” and they truly are – curious, playful, intelligent – you see it in their movements and you see it in their eyes. We spent hours watching them stuff bananas into their mouths, swing between trees and hang one handed as they peered down watching us! Our guide Jenie has grown up with the Orangutans and knows all of them, their age, personality, family history – all of which he would tell us as individuals swung into get food at the feeding stations. (They are fed once a day). Easily the best day was when we went to Camp Leakey and on the dock we were met by Pan – a 17 year old, particularly playful Orangutan who proceeded to wrestle with Jenie and then guide us along the dock holding mine and Jenie’s forearms in his large soft skinned hands. Pan is a particularly smart Orangutan – he has figured out how to paddle a canoe and when it rained (like it did that day on the dock) he created an umbrella out of a leaves and branches he piled on his head.

We also saw Tom, the current king, who is also enormous, and Siswi, the current queen, who was seven years old when my parents were at camp and who my mom remembers playing with all the time. At one point Tom got into Jenie’s bag and found a container of shampoo, which he proceeded to open and use on his arm getting a nice lather and then eating it all up! In the mean time Siswi found and opened an umbrella, which she held over her head until she got bored. Still hungry Tom and Siswi followed us back to camp, trundling along behind us. Back at camp Siswi relaxed on the porch eating bananas and at one point getting into the ranger’s sambal, which she found very hot and which she washed down with some coffee!

We spent our final days in Jogja, first visiting the stunning Borobudur temple (we had it basically to ourselves because a little thunder, lightening and rain deterred almost everyone else) and then turning to art and a two-day batik workshop where we learned about both drawn wax and tjap (printing wax) designs.

And then seemingly suddenly we were on a plane back to Singapore, I was saying bye to mom, and I was finding Denali in the Chiang Mai airport. And now here I am again standing in front of new classes, figuring out lesson plans and trying to learn a whole new set of a 150 students’ names: Pink, Tar, Gong, Mint, Pin, Bee-Bright…

Raindrops are falling on my head and other ponderings

Roads and Rivers

Monsoon season has come to Chiang Mai – though later and lighter than in past years and less than is desired. But while much of the time we wonder where the rain has gone there are a couple of occasions were we ponder the opposite. Since coming here I have learned that monsoons can last anywhere from ten minutes to five hours. They can be nothing but a light drizzle and they can pound down with such force that you start to wonder if you should brace your windows or whether Noah might be itching to get back to sailing. On a few truly hilarious and spectacular occasions the rains have come at such ferocity and for such lengths that the gutters have overflow and the streets have transformed into rivers – one prime example is my street. I have now, on a number of days, entertained myself by watching trucks and motorbikes drive down my street leaving watery wakes in their path.

Rats
Like almost any large city, Chiang Mai has rats. They are large and a dark, muddied color, the kind that would accompany the word “filth” in the dictionary if colors were a common part of definitions. They are most often seen scampering along the Old City moat or across shadowed fences. Cars regularly hit them, allowing daylight to expose just how large they are. In many places road kill will barely last a day before it is whisked away and turned into someone or something’s dinner. Not in Chiang Mai. Here, even the stray dogs do not ordain to partake in them. Indeed I have never seen a city where the stray dogs are more groomed and cared for then in Chiang Mai. Only the flies partake of the rodents and they hardly leave a mark. So the rats are reduced to lying for days, getting increasingly flattened into the pavement until finally they morph in undistinguishable black spots, or a monsoon rain pries them from the pavement and sweeps them unceremoniously into the gutter.

Politics
For those who have been reading the news, there has been a slight increase in cardinal and canary activity. I will refrain from discussing matters in a written forum, but will be more than happy to delve into the subject at length when I am back in Cambridge.

Things on Bikes

It has been a number of months since I drove my first wobbly meters on my bike (since dubbed “Simba” because I miss Swahili, my bike reminds me of a lion, and its fun to think of exploring Chiang Mai via lion back.) Since then I have become very much attached to speeding through the city, accustomed to squinting while driving through monsoons and navigating the fastest way between cars to get myself to the front of a line of traffic. But equally exciting to speeding down Huay Keaw road, is making note of how others drive or what they transport via motorbike.

I have seen bikes strung with dangling and bobbing bags of fried pork skin. There have been bikes attempting to grow gardens with the quantity of vegetables strapped down. I myself have balanced pillows, challahs, and 9” cakes on my bike, driving through the streets, my legs either delicately wrapped around the parcels or sticking out beyond the bike altogether. I have once driven opposite a man carrying a tall stack of Styrofoam trays that he secured with his chin like Gus Gus and corn kernels. When it rains, drivers will relinquish one hand from the brakes so as to hold umbrellas against the downpoor. When it is sunny I have seen women do the same to block the rays. Families of four or more on a single bike are so common they are hardly worthy of note. Rabbits in plastic boxes that their handlers carry balanced on their lap are less common, but can be found. Dogs in particular are frequent passengers. Small froufrou toy dogs fit easily into front baskets and command a full view of the road ahead. Larger dogs poke out between the knees of their chauffeurs: A Husky on an old yellow Fino, a Golden retriever on a teal tinted model. Once while driving into the old city I drove for a while beside a man on a bike. With him was a fully-grown black lab who stood on the passenger end of the seat balancing like a circus stunt through the streets of Chiang Mai.

Look for the boy jumping from the tree into the very small pool of water that is part of a series of waterfalls Riley and I hiked up to on one particular hot afternoon. I don't think even I would have the guts to make that jump.