The lead editorial in the April 15 Bangkok Post started out like this: "Despite efforts to make it a national occasion to observe family togetherness and respect for the elders, the Songkran festival has descended into just a long annual break marked by water attacks, heavy drinking, road accidents and untimely deaths. What a way for a country to start a new year!"
The editorial went on at some length in this vein---decrying Buddhist New Year alcoholic excess, viewing with alarm the chaos on Bangkok's streets, noting with dismay the transformation of a holy ancient rite into a commercialized pedestrian-drenching bacchanalia. The Post came down especially hard on the Bangkok municipal government, which sponsored a water gun battle meant to secure a place in The Guinness Book of World Records for the event's duration and number of participants. Thailand did in fact edge out Spain in this under-appreciated area of endeavor.
I used to be in the editorial writing racket myself, so I know that these cautionary lectures are an obligatory feature of major holidays. And just as essential to the ritual is the habit of everybody in the known universe to merrily ignore all the stern admonitions.
By way of historical background, the Post editorial pointed out that "the ancient links [to harvest festivals] are still evident in many Songkran traditions. For example, the use of water to bathe the Buddha images, to pour on the elders' hands, or to splash one another, were all linked to the use of water in ancient rituals to cleanse the house, wash the ancestors' relics, and bathe the elders."
Bathe the elders! Plainly, that's what a gang of twelve-year-old girls had in mind when I went out to pick up the International Herald Tribune Wednesday morning and they came at me with a garden hose, a pail, and a couple of water guns that were the watery equivalents of rocket-propelled grenade launchers. I was prepared---I had a waterproof camper's sack with me and the paper money in my pocket was carefully wrapped in a 7-Eleven bag. As one does, I chortled and walked on. Later in the day, Joe actually went looking for trouble. Appropriately clad, he walked over to Silom Road, where the mayhem was in full splash. The gay bars on Soi 2 were providing the disco thumpa-thumpa and the ten-thousand-plus mob of young and young-at-heart Thais and farangs were whooping and hooting with glee. I took the subway over and peered down on the Silom scene through my lorgnette from the sky walk up above, and then, clutching my IHT in its wrapper, beat it.
We had planned on going to Hua Hin, down on the gulf, for Songkran. But our friends there, Simon and Poe, were away---visiting a sick friend in the U.S.---and anyway we have some loose ends to tie up before leaving for home on the 20th. So we stayed in Bangkok and were glad we did. Songkran was poignant this year. It was the first April in three years when the city hasn't been wracked by political turmoil. This time last year the Red Shirts were occupying the central business district and rampaging around town in their pick-ups and noisy motorbike convoys. There had already been some deadly violence and more was to follow. Sad to say, many of the protesters' legitimate political and economic grievances remain. Discontent continues at a low rumble. Elections set for June might or might not help.
Speaking of which. One thing we are not eager to come home to is the toxic political environment in the U.S. Will somebody please fix that before we arrive in Boston Friday morning?
Our stay in Southeast Asia this year---our fifth---has been less adventurous than before, but satisfying in its own ways. We've loved having our own home in Bangkok and hope we can do it again next year. We've even been productive. I finished a book (RED WHITE BLACK AND BLUE will be out in September), and Joe has made good progress on the Bangkok street food guide he and Poe have been working on. And he's got thousands of great pictures he's trying to figure out what to do with.
We'll miss Thailand, especially (but not exclusively) the food. While you're at it, could some of you please do something about the impoverished American diet before we get home? What we are eager to return to, of course, are the family and friends we love. Don't go anywhere; we're practically on our way. We depart Bangkok late Wednesday, fly for seven hours, spend ten hours in lovely Seoul, fly for 14 hours, spend a night in lovely Detroit (since Delta merged with Northwest, Detroit beckons), and then it's on to Boston early Friday.
Has it stopped snowing there yet?
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Burma pictures
Sayadow U Tay Zaw Ba Ta in Mawlamyine
Before he smoked a cheroot, ate a piece of fruit or anything else, he spoke silently a prayer that lasted for several minutes
My lunch at the monastery. I ate after the monks by myself but before the pilgrims.
All quite tasty.
A rice cracker seller at Indein market at Inle Lake
Rice fields near Hpa-an
The notorious spider at Pindaya. Pa O are the people with turbans and indigo garb
A novice looks on with envy at this hand propelled merry-go-round
Dinner with Miss Ann in her ancestral home in Inle Lake. We were ferried to and from dinner in her private launch that whizzed through the dark waters of the lake to this formidable teak stilted house. Dinner was lovely. She has a wonderful collection of artifacts from the Shan empire that once ruled this region. The government has tried to get its hands on it.
The ice cream parlor in the market
The hand-powered ferris wheel. You can see the extra people at the top that were the weights that set the thing in motion. They jumped off at the bottom without being crushed by the swinging baskets full of people.
The pilgrims' stairway up to the Pindaya caves.
This was a dismal scene. This motorcycle had bundles of live chickens tied together by the legs and hung over the various parts of the bike.
A meat seller at the Indein market
A fresh boatload of tourists make their way across a bamboo bridge.
Boules, bacci?
Tea-leaf salad. A customary snack in Burma. Pickled tea leaves with various crunchy accompaniments. Fried garlic. roasted sesame seeds, peanuts, tiny fried prawns, and other goodies
In Bagan the parched land does not keep the farmers from growing a variety of crops. Cotton, squash, peanuts, onions, potatoes, corn and maise. a grass like corn grown and chopped for the cows.
In Bagan we had dinner at the house of our guide Kyaw (second from left). Our Yangon guide, Spring (far left), joined us with Kyaw's family. One of his sisters uses the table as a desk for teaching students.
Two Chin women on the porch of the family house
On the way to Chin state we stopped for tea and gas. The driver Tanzo sits by a poster advertising a theater group. These groups perform all over the country and we passed several open trucks on narrow mountain roads transporting the large groups of performers, sometimes as many as 30. What interested me about the poster was the variety of acts from traditional to hip urban. They often perform for 24 hrs. Everything from traditional folk tales to comedy and pop music.
Off th main street in Mindat some kids were having a tea-party, I thought. Apparently it was not that but a noodle shop.
This man we ran into in a remote village on a very steep hill. He was out for a walk.
This man was making a basket to sell in the market. He said he would get about $1.80. The young woman was shelling castor beans, which the government made everyone plant a few years ago with the hope of making bio-diesel. The effort seems to have petered out.
Orphans from the Christian orphanage in Kampelet
I told the kids who were being kept very orderly in my presence that when I counted to three they should all jump. We did this about six times until they were all absolutely hysterical. I don't think the elders approved.
In Bagan I spent an afternoon in the marketplace stocking up on things to bring to Chin state. From previous visits we knew what the most needed items were. We brought various medicines for worms, food poisoning, indigestion, pain of various kinds, bar soap and clothes washing detergent, powdered milk for breastfeeding mothers, toothbrushes and toothpaste, tiger-balm which the old people especially love, lined paper booklets, pencils, pens erasers and so on. We tried to give things out to those most in need and hoped that it would not be sold. One local guide took almost half the inventory when we asked him if he needed anything for his family. We told him he could take one of everything. Opportunity runs like water.
Chin is said to be the poorest in Burma. Things have been compounded by a rat infestation the last two years that has decimated all the crops. It also has meant that there were no seeds for planting. I met a Burmese man working for a French NGO that was trying to provide seeds to the farmers. He was there for three days trying to clear all the government obstacles. The National League for Democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi's organization, has been chastised for supplying rice to the Chin. There were two orphanages in the town of Kampelet. One, which was Christian, had fifty-six children; another Buddhist one had 200-plus. It was unclear why there were so many in this little town. Apparently they were mostly from Chin state. The Christian one was having a difficult time meeting their food needs for the children.
Chin villages around the town of Mindat
The market at Taukkyan, outside Yangon
This woman had just bought a chart from an astrologer. I bet I could tell her fortune too.
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Corrections and addenda
Corrections: Joe returned to Bangkok, read the blog, and pointed out a few errors. There are 8,000 golden Buddha statues in the Pindaya caves, not 80,000. The legendary princesses rescued from the caves by an archer were held captive not by a large spider but by a malevolent nat (spirit being) disguised as a large spider.
Abby Pratt, fellow Burma lover, wrote to tell us that she and her husband Larry once met U Winaya, the renowned sayadow whose body was stolen. She points out that he was the number one monastic advisor to Aung San Suu Kyi.
Abby also mentioned an insane feature of Burma I have not reported on. Passers-by may not assist victims of road accidents until the police arrive and take measurements, conduct interviews, etc. Joe says he also heard that the police sometimes shake down accident victims.
Joe had a good trek in Chin state, but he said the region is even poorer and grimmer than in past years. An infestation of rats has depleted food supplies and seed corn. French and other NGOs are trying to get seeds to people, but the government keeps throwing up bureaucratic obstacles. One Burmese told Joe that this is calculated; hungry people are less likely to be rebellious. True? In Burma, it's far from implausible.
He'll get some pictures up soon.
Abby Pratt, fellow Burma lover, wrote to tell us that she and her husband Larry once met U Winaya, the renowned sayadow whose body was stolen. She points out that he was the number one monastic advisor to Aung San Suu Kyi.
Abby also mentioned an insane feature of Burma I have not reported on. Passers-by may not assist victims of road accidents until the police arrive and take measurements, conduct interviews, etc. Joe says he also heard that the police sometimes shake down accident victims.
Joe had a good trek in Chin state, but he said the region is even poorer and grimmer than in past years. An infestation of rats has depleted food supplies and seed corn. French and other NGOs are trying to get seeds to people, but the government keeps throwing up bureaucratic obstacles. One Burmese told Joe that this is calculated; hungry people are less likely to be rebellious. True? In Burma, it's far from implausible.
He'll get some pictures up soon.
Saturday, April 2, 2011
Burma--Part Two
In The New York Times obituary of mystery novelist H.R.F. Keating, bookstore owner Otto Penzler describes Keating as a kind, sweet man who "carried himself like a Buddhist monk almost." The popular image of monks as serene, contemplative fellows floating through the rough world as on a cloud isn't inaccurate, it just doesn't cover all Buddhist monks. Take U Tay Zaw Ba Ta. That's the real name of the sayadow (abbot) at the Seindon Monastery in Mawlamyine (formerly Moulmein), in moist, green southern Burma. It's hard to distinguish U Tay Zaw Ba Ta from Abe Seckler of Canarsie. The fierce-eyed little seventy-nine-year-old charges around his crumbling teak monastery trailing cheroot ashes, ranting against the government, and yelling imprecations against the police, who help thieves steal architectural details from the nineteenth century building and fence them with antique dealers in Bangkok. The sayadow, ethnically Burmese, is also bitter about the ethnic-Mon building supply dealers who he says cheat him when he purchases wood and concrete to repair the wing of the monastery damaged by Cyclone Nargis in 2009. (The Burmese King Anawrahta of Bagan crushed a centuries-old Mon dynasty in the year 1057, and hard feelings continue.)
The sayadow is not too worked up, however, not to order up tea and fruit for visitors, and to sit down with us---he on a low seat, we on the floor---and to accept a cash offering to help save the monastery. Monks may not touch money, so we presented the donation in an envelope from our room at the Ngwe Moe Hotel. We all grasped the envelope in midair while a lengthy prayer was recited in Pali. My arm was getting tired, and the prayer ended just in time. After the ritual of the offering, the sayadow went on to complain some more about the junta. Monks were instrumental in the 2008 uprising that was brutally put down by the government, and now, the sayadow told us, "fake monks" have been placed in monasteries to spy on the real monks. (Was there a government agent in this monastery? The sayadow didn't say.) Joe spent the afternoon taking pictures in the monastery. (Which was built by Queen Seindon of Mandalay after King Mindon Min died and Burma's next and final king, Thibaw, ascended the throne. Taking no chances, Thibaw's wife saw to it that rivals to the crown and their families were murdered, so Seindon fled south. When Britain completed its conquest of Burma in 1885, Thibaw was shipped off to India to live out his life there with his homicidal consort.)
On our third day in Mawlamyine, we returned to the monastery to say goodbye for another year---this was our fifth visit---and the sayadow pounded us on the back while he prayed in Pali that we enjoyed good fortune and long lives. On the way out, the sayadow pointed out some rebar and cement that an earlier donation of Joe's had helped pay for.
A milder-mannered sayadow is U Thone, at the Badda Myar monastery in Thar Ma Nya, on the way back to Yangon. We had also met this man before---in fact we had twice slept over at the monastery---and were happy to see that his health had improved since we last saw him two years earlier. Though only in his forties, this slender man with an easy way about him and a ready smile, had suffered a number of maladies, possibly made worse by Myanmar's wretched-to-nonexistent health care facilities. (A well-known anti-junta statistic is that then-President Than Shwe's daughter's wedding gifts totaled $35 million, more than the country's health-care budget.)
U Thone, whose politics are about what you'd expect them to be, lives in the shadow of his predecessor, a famous anti-regime figure named U Winaya. This man was so revered when he died several years ago that a shrine was constructed near the monastery and his corpse put on permanent display in a tastefully lighted gold-colored glass box. Not long after we last visited the shrine, however, the body of U Winaya was stolen. Heavily armed men in military gear arrived in two SUVs, tied up the guards, smashed the glass case, and made off with the dead sayadow. The corpse was never recovered. There are a number of theories as to what happened. One is, the government regarded U Winaya as too potent a symbol of resistance and decided to have him get lost. Another is, an anti-regime group, possibly the Keren Liberation Army, took the body, hoping some of its magic could be put to use by them for political purposes. Additionally, some people believe the corpse's magical properties might be good for the thieves' health and stamina, sexual and otherwise. The keepers of the shrine have left it as it was after the theft. Now, through the broken glass of the case, a photographic portrait of U Winaya is visible. Joe took a picture of it. (I used the U Winaya theft as a minor plot point in The 38 Million Dollar Smile.)
On Thursday, the Myanmar military government officially ceased to exist. A parliament chosen in last October's phony election took over. (We met one man who said officials came to his house before the election to make sure he was registered and would vote. At the polling site, officials checked his ballot to make sure he had voted correctly.) President Than Shwe retired on Thursday, and parliament elected Thein Sein, a former general, president. Opinion is divided over what any of this means. Many say that it's just the same crew in mostly civilian garb (25% of seats are still reserved for military officers), with a token minority of reformers who will be unable to accomplish anything. Optimists think a semblance of democracy might somehow lead eventually to actual democracy.
The Aung San Suu Kyi-led opposition has fractured, with some progressives favoring the lifting of Western sanctions and others opposed. Daw Suu Kyi seems to be moving toward ending the country's partial economic isolation (which China and Myanmar's other neighbors ignore), but she hasn't said anything definitive. (A superb book on old and modern Burma is Thant Myint-U's The River of Lost Footsteps: a Personal History of Burma. The author is the grandson of former UN Secretary General U Thant. He makes a good case for ending the sanctions that he sees as pointless. Myint-U is also very good at showing the historical roots of the present nationalistic dictatorship. Among those roots are the military and ideological training of a generation of anti-colonial patriots---including General Aung San, Aung San Suu Kwi's beloved father---in the early 1940s in Imperial Japan. Myint-U says that in some ways, World War II never ended in Burma.)
Several reasons why things need to change in Burma:
Item: a woman we know attended a government conference on why the level of Inle Lake has dropped three feet, threatening the commercial lives of the ethnic Intha lake dwellers. She pointed out that water was just running off the surrounding mountains whenever it rained and wasn't being saved. Officials told her, "Those people must take care of their trees!" She had to explain that there WERE no trees; they had been cut down by cronies of government officials. (Recent deadly mudslides in flooded southern Thailand were also caused by illegal logging.)
Item: A writer in Yangon has had dozens of stories accepted for publication in magazines and newspapers, but none has appeared in print. The government censors intervened and rejected them all. One droll true story told of how 30 poor people from his neighborhood often show up at the writer's house to watch television, leaving behind fleas and other insects he's had to get rid of. The censors said, no, showing 30 people who lacked their own TVs reflected poorly on the nation. They said the story was both implausible and unpatriotic.
Item: Burma has over 2,000 political prisoners. We heard of one who was made to sleep in cold water. Many people believe that the political detainees at Insein prison, outside Yangon, are made to drink water laced with lead to destroy their brains.
Item: A young man went out to buy medicine for his sister, who was ill. He was grabbed by soldiers and forced into the military. When he ran away, he was caught and tortured.
Item: After Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest after the election, some people we know went to her house where thousands had gathered to hear "the lady" speak. When she said she hoped for change but counseled patience, a man shouted back, "I've been patient for twenty years!"
Sometimes people have asked Joe and me if we could think of anything to give them hope. For a while, I gave a little speech about how surprising history could be, and how situations that seemed hopeless suddenly got better. I mentioned South Africa, with Mandela in prison for decades, and Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union, and more recently Egypt, a corrupt police state suddenly becoming a messy but far freer emerging democracy. People listened to this, but apparently it seemed awfully remote to them, and not at all relevant to what they see when they get up in the morning. So I stopped saying this stuff. It felt cheap and easy, and it didn't help.
What does help a little is showing up. Show the Burmese they are not forgotten. Spend a little money, donate to a monastery, over-tip. Even Aung San Suu Kyi is now against the tourism boycott. If anybody wants to go, we can put you in touch with the right people there. If you can't go---a trip to Burma is not practical for most people we know---lobby to end the U.S. sanctions, which, thanks mainly to China, have no effect. Engagement can only help, and it's what most Burmese want.
By the time I post this, Joe will be back in Bangkok. He'll have ten thousand more pictures from the saddest, most beautiful place on earth, so keep an eye out.
The sayadow is not too worked up, however, not to order up tea and fruit for visitors, and to sit down with us---he on a low seat, we on the floor---and to accept a cash offering to help save the monastery. Monks may not touch money, so we presented the donation in an envelope from our room at the Ngwe Moe Hotel. We all grasped the envelope in midair while a lengthy prayer was recited in Pali. My arm was getting tired, and the prayer ended just in time. After the ritual of the offering, the sayadow went on to complain some more about the junta. Monks were instrumental in the 2008 uprising that was brutally put down by the government, and now, the sayadow told us, "fake monks" have been placed in monasteries to spy on the real monks. (Was there a government agent in this monastery? The sayadow didn't say.) Joe spent the afternoon taking pictures in the monastery. (Which was built by Queen Seindon of Mandalay after King Mindon Min died and Burma's next and final king, Thibaw, ascended the throne. Taking no chances, Thibaw's wife saw to it that rivals to the crown and their families were murdered, so Seindon fled south. When Britain completed its conquest of Burma in 1885, Thibaw was shipped off to India to live out his life there with his homicidal consort.)
On our third day in Mawlamyine, we returned to the monastery to say goodbye for another year---this was our fifth visit---and the sayadow pounded us on the back while he prayed in Pali that we enjoyed good fortune and long lives. On the way out, the sayadow pointed out some rebar and cement that an earlier donation of Joe's had helped pay for.
A milder-mannered sayadow is U Thone, at the Badda Myar monastery in Thar Ma Nya, on the way back to Yangon. We had also met this man before---in fact we had twice slept over at the monastery---and were happy to see that his health had improved since we last saw him two years earlier. Though only in his forties, this slender man with an easy way about him and a ready smile, had suffered a number of maladies, possibly made worse by Myanmar's wretched-to-nonexistent health care facilities. (A well-known anti-junta statistic is that then-President Than Shwe's daughter's wedding gifts totaled $35 million, more than the country's health-care budget.)
U Thone, whose politics are about what you'd expect them to be, lives in the shadow of his predecessor, a famous anti-regime figure named U Winaya. This man was so revered when he died several years ago that a shrine was constructed near the monastery and his corpse put on permanent display in a tastefully lighted gold-colored glass box. Not long after we last visited the shrine, however, the body of U Winaya was stolen. Heavily armed men in military gear arrived in two SUVs, tied up the guards, smashed the glass case, and made off with the dead sayadow. The corpse was never recovered. There are a number of theories as to what happened. One is, the government regarded U Winaya as too potent a symbol of resistance and decided to have him get lost. Another is, an anti-regime group, possibly the Keren Liberation Army, took the body, hoping some of its magic could be put to use by them for political purposes. Additionally, some people believe the corpse's magical properties might be good for the thieves' health and stamina, sexual and otherwise. The keepers of the shrine have left it as it was after the theft. Now, through the broken glass of the case, a photographic portrait of U Winaya is visible. Joe took a picture of it. (I used the U Winaya theft as a minor plot point in The 38 Million Dollar Smile.)
On Thursday, the Myanmar military government officially ceased to exist. A parliament chosen in last October's phony election took over. (We met one man who said officials came to his house before the election to make sure he was registered and would vote. At the polling site, officials checked his ballot to make sure he had voted correctly.) President Than Shwe retired on Thursday, and parliament elected Thein Sein, a former general, president. Opinion is divided over what any of this means. Many say that it's just the same crew in mostly civilian garb (25% of seats are still reserved for military officers), with a token minority of reformers who will be unable to accomplish anything. Optimists think a semblance of democracy might somehow lead eventually to actual democracy.
The Aung San Suu Kyi-led opposition has fractured, with some progressives favoring the lifting of Western sanctions and others opposed. Daw Suu Kyi seems to be moving toward ending the country's partial economic isolation (which China and Myanmar's other neighbors ignore), but she hasn't said anything definitive. (A superb book on old and modern Burma is Thant Myint-U's The River of Lost Footsteps: a Personal History of Burma. The author is the grandson of former UN Secretary General U Thant. He makes a good case for ending the sanctions that he sees as pointless. Myint-U is also very good at showing the historical roots of the present nationalistic dictatorship. Among those roots are the military and ideological training of a generation of anti-colonial patriots---including General Aung San, Aung San Suu Kwi's beloved father---in the early 1940s in Imperial Japan. Myint-U says that in some ways, World War II never ended in Burma.)
Several reasons why things need to change in Burma:
Item: a woman we know attended a government conference on why the level of Inle Lake has dropped three feet, threatening the commercial lives of the ethnic Intha lake dwellers. She pointed out that water was just running off the surrounding mountains whenever it rained and wasn't being saved. Officials told her, "Those people must take care of their trees!" She had to explain that there WERE no trees; they had been cut down by cronies of government officials. (Recent deadly mudslides in flooded southern Thailand were also caused by illegal logging.)
Item: A writer in Yangon has had dozens of stories accepted for publication in magazines and newspapers, but none has appeared in print. The government censors intervened and rejected them all. One droll true story told of how 30 poor people from his neighborhood often show up at the writer's house to watch television, leaving behind fleas and other insects he's had to get rid of. The censors said, no, showing 30 people who lacked their own TVs reflected poorly on the nation. They said the story was both implausible and unpatriotic.
Item: Burma has over 2,000 political prisoners. We heard of one who was made to sleep in cold water. Many people believe that the political detainees at Insein prison, outside Yangon, are made to drink water laced with lead to destroy their brains.
Item: A young man went out to buy medicine for his sister, who was ill. He was grabbed by soldiers and forced into the military. When he ran away, he was caught and tortured.
Item: After Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest after the election, some people we know went to her house where thousands had gathered to hear "the lady" speak. When she said she hoped for change but counseled patience, a man shouted back, "I've been patient for twenty years!"
Sometimes people have asked Joe and me if we could think of anything to give them hope. For a while, I gave a little speech about how surprising history could be, and how situations that seemed hopeless suddenly got better. I mentioned South Africa, with Mandela in prison for decades, and Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union, and more recently Egypt, a corrupt police state suddenly becoming a messy but far freer emerging democracy. People listened to this, but apparently it seemed awfully remote to them, and not at all relevant to what they see when they get up in the morning. So I stopped saying this stuff. It felt cheap and easy, and it didn't help.
What does help a little is showing up. Show the Burmese they are not forgotten. Spend a little money, donate to a monastery, over-tip. Even Aung San Suu Kyi is now against the tourism boycott. If anybody wants to go, we can put you in touch with the right people there. If you can't go---a trip to Burma is not practical for most people we know---lobby to end the U.S. sanctions, which, thanks mainly to China, have no effect. Engagement can only help, and it's what most Burmese want.
By the time I post this, Joe will be back in Bangkok. He'll have ten thousand more pictures from the saddest, most beautiful place on earth, so keep an eye out.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Burma
Joe and I are big fans of the Lonely Planet guide books, preferring to be charmed rather than puzzled, for example, by the Burma guide's description of a woebegone, tumble-down little burg called Hpa-an as "small-town Myanmar at its finest." Granted, it didn't help that we were there on one of the hot season's rare cool and rainy days. No town looks good with its mascara running. But even minus the shivering homeless dogs in the restaurant entryways, Hpa-an seemed not so fine to us. Optimistically, Lonely Planet must have been looking beyond the potholed streets and dilapidated colonial-era shop houses to the animating spirit of the town's inhabitants, which, as in the rest of the country, is a mix of quiet humor, vast reserves of patience, and faint but lasting hope. Burma's fineness is mainly in its people, or at least its non-military people.
A man goes into a bank. He wants to withdraw money from his account. At a private bank, this simple transaction would take a few minutes. But this man lives in a town like Hpa-an, too small to have a private bank branch, so his bank is run by the Myanmar military government. Withdrawing $500 takes four hours. Four bureaucratic steps are necessary for completing the transaction, each requiring the attention of a different bank employee. The problem is, the politically connected employees make only $60 a month, so they could care less about pesky clients. While customers wait, they chat on the phone. One or another may hang up a "back in a while" sign and head out for tea. Or they play video games on their computers. The Burmese friend who told us the story of the four-hour withdrawal---explaining why he was a bit rushed the evening he met us---said he factors experiences like this into his daily schedule. Where the generals rule, it's a way of life.
Showing casual contempt for its citizens isn't the worst thing the Burmese junta does; I'll list some far more serious practices in a posting next week after trekker Joe rejoins me here in Bangkok. Meanwhile, I can report that we had a good visit, reconnected happily with old friends, and even covered some new territory.
We had never been to Pindaya. It's a town in the Shan hills not far from Inle Lake that was holding its annual Full Moon festival the day we flew north from Yangon, and Htun Htun Naing, our Inle guide, had arranged a ride for us. You're up around 4,000 feet here, so the air is crisp and the sky as white as grandma's linen. The two-hour drive took us over a decrepit one-lane blacktop road with rocks and mud on either side and oncoming traffic competing for use of the bits of pavement. The rule seemed to be, might makes right. We gave way to buses and shooed motorbikes into the dust. The Shan plateau here consists of a series of dry low mountains and cultivated rolling hills that reminded me of upland Eritrea. There were fields of hay and vegetables and---shade for the farmers---occasional lone mint trees, looking shapely and Magritte-like. Closer to the road were banyans, under whose massive canopies rested the somber festivals-goers whose cheap and unreliable Chinese motorbikes had broken down.
The road was thick with pilgrims headed for Pindaya's Shwe Oo Min Pagoda and then the nearby festival. What amounted to a forty-mile long convoy included cars, motorbikes, buses stuffed with people, trucks with pilgrims clinging like geckos to every available surface, and tractors pulling carts containing what looked like entire village populations. Most of the pilgrims were Shan or Danu, with a smattering of Pa-O tribespeople; this was also their national day, so the Pa-O were out and about in their distinctive black outfits and colorful terrycloth (towels, in fact) headdresses.
The Shwe Oo Min pagoda is at the entrance to a series of limestone caves that contain over 80,000 golden Buddha statues. Legend says that seven princesses who came down from heaven were caught in a storm and sought refuge in the caves, where they were attacked and held captive by a giant spider. A prince who was an expert archer rescued the princesses. Images of the prince and the spider abound in the pagoda (later Joe will get some pictures up), but it's the 80,000 golden Buddhas that really grab your attention. The lighting is unsubtle and the mob scene in the cave on festival day chaotic and frightening---I felt like some English dowager standing there exclaiming "My word!" as I was pummeled. But the place is resplendent with real gold leaf---tons of it, it looks like---and the effect is dazzling and somehow---the Buddha's image nearly always accomplishes this---reassuring.
The festival, on the edge of town, was like a big country fair. There were all manner of snacks, gambling---what looked like bocce ball for money---and consumer items. For 50 cents, I bought a DVD---"Classics Film---World Classics Film is Carefully Chosen"---that included "Cheonnyeon Ho" and "Detective Dee." We had the most fun watching festival rides that had a Burmese twist. The kiddie car ride had no motor, just a muscular lad who placed the frightened tots on their seats and then set the thing spinning manually before stepping back.
Even more entertaining was the non-motorized ferris wheel. It was about half the size of an American wheel. The seats were tubular boxes that could hold four people. Since the device had no motor, laws of physics were employed. A young man heaved the thing to and fro manually until each of the ten boxes was occupied. Then, astonishingly, with a key box poised at the 11 o'clock position, six teenaged boys clambered acrobatically up the outer wood and steel structure and hung onto that box. When the sixth boy was in place, they all leaned in the same direction, and the box plunged earthward, setting the wheel in rapid motion. When the key box whizzed past the ground, each of the boys leaped off effortlessly, landing like Olympic athletes. We awarded each of them a score of ten. The perfectly balanced wheel then spun around several times on its own volition until it lost momentum and creaked to a halt. What a show! And talk about green energy.
There were just a few other Western tourists at Pindaya, which was surprising because overall tourism in Myanmar is way up. The release from house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi and then the "election"---more on that next week---have rendered Burma less of a pariah tourist destination. The hotels were busy, and on a number of occasions we noted French tour groups soberly contemplating the food that had been set before them in hotel and other dining rooms. (One of the things you don't go to Burma for is the cuisine.) Our most memorable tourist sighting was in Bagan (bah-GAWN). That's the 11th to 13th century abandoned royal city on the sweltering Irrawaddy plain famous for its thousands of Khmer-style huge temples and stupas. Around sunset one evening, we were riding to dinner at our driver's house (where to our considerable embarrassment family members insisted on fanning us throughout the meal) when we passed what I'm still not sure wasn't an apparition. A convoy of bullock carts was proceeding across a field in a cloud of dust. But instead of bearing sacks of rice or other farm produce, the oxen were hauling...a tour group! Each of the eight or ten carts held three or four Westerners, bouncing and clinging for dear life, and barely discernible through the mist of red dirt. And not only that, but the bullocks were...costumed! They were adorned in little outfits with pink ribbons. The idea of group travel has never appealed to Joe or me---the people in tour groups look too much like convicts in Southern chain gangs in the 1930s. But this bunch was so wonderfully surreal, that we almost, but not quite, wished we were a part of it.
While we were in Bagan, an earthquake hit upper Shan state, about 300 miles northeast of us. Although buildings swayed as far away as Bangkok, we felt nothing. We were dining at the time of the quake in our guide's bamboo house, a safe place to be. Being unable to afford masonry has its advantages. The official death toll was 75, although The Bangkok Post said the real figure was 150 or higher. For the Burmese junta, it was a loss of face. "A hundred and fifty is embarrassing. Make it seventy-five."
Saturday I came back to a Bangkok that is unseasonably cool and overcast, to which---after 99-in-the-shade Bagan---I have no objections.
A man goes into a bank. He wants to withdraw money from his account. At a private bank, this simple transaction would take a few minutes. But this man lives in a town like Hpa-an, too small to have a private bank branch, so his bank is run by the Myanmar military government. Withdrawing $500 takes four hours. Four bureaucratic steps are necessary for completing the transaction, each requiring the attention of a different bank employee. The problem is, the politically connected employees make only $60 a month, so they could care less about pesky clients. While customers wait, they chat on the phone. One or another may hang up a "back in a while" sign and head out for tea. Or they play video games on their computers. The Burmese friend who told us the story of the four-hour withdrawal---explaining why he was a bit rushed the evening he met us---said he factors experiences like this into his daily schedule. Where the generals rule, it's a way of life.
Showing casual contempt for its citizens isn't the worst thing the Burmese junta does; I'll list some far more serious practices in a posting next week after trekker Joe rejoins me here in Bangkok. Meanwhile, I can report that we had a good visit, reconnected happily with old friends, and even covered some new territory.
We had never been to Pindaya. It's a town in the Shan hills not far from Inle Lake that was holding its annual Full Moon festival the day we flew north from Yangon, and Htun Htun Naing, our Inle guide, had arranged a ride for us. You're up around 4,000 feet here, so the air is crisp and the sky as white as grandma's linen. The two-hour drive took us over a decrepit one-lane blacktop road with rocks and mud on either side and oncoming traffic competing for use of the bits of pavement. The rule seemed to be, might makes right. We gave way to buses and shooed motorbikes into the dust. The Shan plateau here consists of a series of dry low mountains and cultivated rolling hills that reminded me of upland Eritrea. There were fields of hay and vegetables and---shade for the farmers---occasional lone mint trees, looking shapely and Magritte-like. Closer to the road were banyans, under whose massive canopies rested the somber festivals-goers whose cheap and unreliable Chinese motorbikes had broken down.
The road was thick with pilgrims headed for Pindaya's Shwe Oo Min Pagoda and then the nearby festival. What amounted to a forty-mile long convoy included cars, motorbikes, buses stuffed with people, trucks with pilgrims clinging like geckos to every available surface, and tractors pulling carts containing what looked like entire village populations. Most of the pilgrims were Shan or Danu, with a smattering of Pa-O tribespeople; this was also their national day, so the Pa-O were out and about in their distinctive black outfits and colorful terrycloth (towels, in fact) headdresses.
The Shwe Oo Min pagoda is at the entrance to a series of limestone caves that contain over 80,000 golden Buddha statues. Legend says that seven princesses who came down from heaven were caught in a storm and sought refuge in the caves, where they were attacked and held captive by a giant spider. A prince who was an expert archer rescued the princesses. Images of the prince and the spider abound in the pagoda (later Joe will get some pictures up), but it's the 80,000 golden Buddhas that really grab your attention. The lighting is unsubtle and the mob scene in the cave on festival day chaotic and frightening---I felt like some English dowager standing there exclaiming "My word!" as I was pummeled. But the place is resplendent with real gold leaf---tons of it, it looks like---and the effect is dazzling and somehow---the Buddha's image nearly always accomplishes this---reassuring.
The festival, on the edge of town, was like a big country fair. There were all manner of snacks, gambling---what looked like bocce ball for money---and consumer items. For 50 cents, I bought a DVD---"Classics Film---World Classics Film is Carefully Chosen"---that included "Cheonnyeon Ho" and "Detective Dee." We had the most fun watching festival rides that had a Burmese twist. The kiddie car ride had no motor, just a muscular lad who placed the frightened tots on their seats and then set the thing spinning manually before stepping back.
Even more entertaining was the non-motorized ferris wheel. It was about half the size of an American wheel. The seats were tubular boxes that could hold four people. Since the device had no motor, laws of physics were employed. A young man heaved the thing to and fro manually until each of the ten boxes was occupied. Then, astonishingly, with a key box poised at the 11 o'clock position, six teenaged boys clambered acrobatically up the outer wood and steel structure and hung onto that box. When the sixth boy was in place, they all leaned in the same direction, and the box plunged earthward, setting the wheel in rapid motion. When the key box whizzed past the ground, each of the boys leaped off effortlessly, landing like Olympic athletes. We awarded each of them a score of ten. The perfectly balanced wheel then spun around several times on its own volition until it lost momentum and creaked to a halt. What a show! And talk about green energy.
There were just a few other Western tourists at Pindaya, which was surprising because overall tourism in Myanmar is way up. The release from house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi and then the "election"---more on that next week---have rendered Burma less of a pariah tourist destination. The hotels were busy, and on a number of occasions we noted French tour groups soberly contemplating the food that had been set before them in hotel and other dining rooms. (One of the things you don't go to Burma for is the cuisine.) Our most memorable tourist sighting was in Bagan (bah-GAWN). That's the 11th to 13th century abandoned royal city on the sweltering Irrawaddy plain famous for its thousands of Khmer-style huge temples and stupas. Around sunset one evening, we were riding to dinner at our driver's house (where to our considerable embarrassment family members insisted on fanning us throughout the meal) when we passed what I'm still not sure wasn't an apparition. A convoy of bullock carts was proceeding across a field in a cloud of dust. But instead of bearing sacks of rice or other farm produce, the oxen were hauling...a tour group! Each of the eight or ten carts held three or four Westerners, bouncing and clinging for dear life, and barely discernible through the mist of red dirt. And not only that, but the bullocks were...costumed! They were adorned in little outfits with pink ribbons. The idea of group travel has never appealed to Joe or me---the people in tour groups look too much like convicts in Southern chain gangs in the 1930s. But this bunch was so wonderfully surreal, that we almost, but not quite, wished we were a part of it.
While we were in Bagan, an earthquake hit upper Shan state, about 300 miles northeast of us. Although buildings swayed as far away as Bangkok, we felt nothing. We were dining at the time of the quake in our guide's bamboo house, a safe place to be. Being unable to afford masonry has its advantages. The official death toll was 75, although The Bangkok Post said the real figure was 150 or higher. For the Burmese junta, it was a loss of face. "A hundred and fifty is embarrassing. Make it seventy-five."
Saturday I came back to a Bangkok that is unseasonably cool and overcast, to which---after 99-in-the-shade Bagan---I have no objections.
Friday, March 11, 2011
Old and new
Among the features we prize when we come upon them in this streamlined vital metropolis are bits and pieces of serene, funky old Bangkok. Until 30 years ago, Krung Thep (its other Thai name) was a swampy conglomeration of canal-laced neighborhoods full of teak dwellings and stucco two-story shop houses with tile roofs and pretty fretwork over the second-floor shuttered windows. There's still some of that vanishing Bangkok left in Chinatown and over around the Grand Palace, but not much elsewhere.
So what a pleasure it was last week when Al Roberge, the former Broadway musical performer we met in Hua Hin, suggested we dine at the Ratsstube, a German restaurant on the grounds of the Goetha Institute, a ten-minute walk from our condo. We had looked down on this leafy oasis from our room at the Pinnacle Hotel when we stayed there, and we had ambled down the quiet soi that leads to the German cultural center. But we'd never thought to venture past the front gate.
The food was excellent---we shared a big plate of sausages, sauerkraut and fried potatoes---and even better was the gorgeous old house with its tiles and dark carved wood and flowering bushes and trees that were as an organic a part of the architecture as the interior decor, which Joe described as Siamese Bavarian shloss. The economic pressures on throwbacks like this place must be fierce---similar former multi-acre refuges are now occupied by shopping malls---so I don't know how long this place can last. The same goes for the old Baptist Seminary across the soi from us. Historic preservation does go on here, but it helps if the government or the royal family are involved. One wonders if the Baptists might eventually be seduced by the almighty baht. There's another condo tower about to go up down the soi from us, and we aren't happy about this. We've lived here for under two months, and we're already complaining about more people like us moving in.
It's always fun to do things with Dick Sandler. He's an American who has lived here since the late '60s, knows everybody and everything, and speaks Thai like an erudite native. Yesterday, we met Dick at the Royal Hotel for another excursion into the inner recesses of the old city. The Royal is a dank Edwardian heap of marble not far from the Grand Palace. It's not much of a hotel anymore---we met some Americans who fled from their grim room in February---but it's famous for housing the Thai students just back from Paris who led the 1932 revolution that put the monarchy out of business until King Bhumibole revived it after World War II. The Royal is also where the bodies were laid out in 1973 when the Thai military put down a revolt by shooting nearly 200 university students. It was one of the darkest events of modern Thai history.
We chose the Royal simply as a place to meet, before Dick led us to one of the best small restaurants in the city. The New York Times of October 12, 2005 ran a piece by R.W. "Johnny" Apple, the Times's beloved political reporter and insatiable gourmand, about his favorite place to eat in Bangkok. (You can easily Google up the article.) In the company of his friend Robert Halliday, Apple dined at Chote Chitr, a tiny family-owned place on Prang Phuton. This is an out-of-the-way area behind a former minor royal palace, circa 1910, that's now a health clinic. Apple's descriptions are wonderful and his joy infectious. Halliday tells Apple they have to order the banana flower salad, which is "one of the wonders of the world, up there with the late Beethoven quartets." Writes Apple: "The banana flower salad was stunning indeed, another example of a standard transformed. Prawns, chicken and the shredded red buds of the banana tree, among other things, went into the dish, but its brilliance, as with all the best Thai dishes, lay in the complexity of its seasonings---sour in the front of the mouth (tamarind pulp), fiery in the back (dried chilies), and sweetly nutty at the top (coconut cream). Eating it left me punch-drunk with pleasure."
Among other dishes, Apple also had the tum yum pla, "the eye-poppingly vibrant fish soup" that was "hot, rich and sharp" and which "owed everything to the liltingly fresh, vividly perfumed lemon grass, ka-prao or holy basil, coriander and kafir lime leaves that flavored it along with the obligatory chili."
So guess what? Chote Chitr was just closing when we arrived at about 12:30; the proprietors were taking a week off to visit family in Chiang Mai. Phooey. The owners did, however, advise us to try a place down the street. We did, and its hard to imagine that the food at Chote Chitr could have been better. After all, this is Thailand. We had a curried crab dish that was as exciting on the palate as it was on the plate---all red and orange and tumeric yellow---and a sweet soup with chunks of omelet in it and a crunchy, flavorsome green vegetable of unknown (even to Dick) origin that was kale-like but not kale. We shared a bottle of red soda pop, because we had been wondering why the bottles of pop left by prayerful merit-makers at spirit shrines around Bangkok were always red Fanta and never orange. We asked the restaurant owner about that, and he said it was a Chinese tradition that's taken hold in Thailand. To the Chinese, red is a lucky color. After lunch, we walked across the little park behind the former palace and had dessert at a shop that sold nothing but coconut ice cream. You could get it with fruit or nuts or corn kernels on it, but we just had unadorned dishes of the most intensely coconutty dish I ever tasted. It was more icy than creamy, and in the 97-degree heat, just the ticket.
What else have we been doing? Joe is sorting through 50,000 pictures of dried squid on a stick. We saw True Grit---Joe became impatient with the cliches, but I loved the Coens' fresh variations on them. We went to the drag show at Dee Jay Station, a gay club. Unlike the mind-boggling gay "fuck show" (the vivid Thai term) we took in on our first trip to Bangkok, this one was not raunchy, it was FABULOUS. My favorite act---basically a diva lip-synching, with a couple of Isaan lads flinging themselves about on either side of her more or less in unison---was "Don't Cry For Me, Argentina" done to a disco beat. The gorgeously be-gowned diva had a couple of rhinestone encrusted chandeliers dangling from her ears, and affixed to her head were what appeared to be three black minks. Not mink hairpieces but actual minks. The audience---80 percent young Thais, 20 percent young and old farangs---cried out with glee over these antics, and so did we.
This blog is about to go to sleep for two weeks. We leave for Burma on Monday. I'll be back in Bangkok March 26, trekker Joe a week later. We'll be incommunicado in AOL-free Myanmar. We're looking forward to meeting Burmese friends and hearing their stories---the "election," the release from house arrest of "the lady." We'll tell some of those stories when we get back. So-long for now.
So what a pleasure it was last week when Al Roberge, the former Broadway musical performer we met in Hua Hin, suggested we dine at the Ratsstube, a German restaurant on the grounds of the Goetha Institute, a ten-minute walk from our condo. We had looked down on this leafy oasis from our room at the Pinnacle Hotel when we stayed there, and we had ambled down the quiet soi that leads to the German cultural center. But we'd never thought to venture past the front gate.
The food was excellent---we shared a big plate of sausages, sauerkraut and fried potatoes---and even better was the gorgeous old house with its tiles and dark carved wood and flowering bushes and trees that were as an organic a part of the architecture as the interior decor, which Joe described as Siamese Bavarian shloss. The economic pressures on throwbacks like this place must be fierce---similar former multi-acre refuges are now occupied by shopping malls---so I don't know how long this place can last. The same goes for the old Baptist Seminary across the soi from us. Historic preservation does go on here, but it helps if the government or the royal family are involved. One wonders if the Baptists might eventually be seduced by the almighty baht. There's another condo tower about to go up down the soi from us, and we aren't happy about this. We've lived here for under two months, and we're already complaining about more people like us moving in.
It's always fun to do things with Dick Sandler. He's an American who has lived here since the late '60s, knows everybody and everything, and speaks Thai like an erudite native. Yesterday, we met Dick at the Royal Hotel for another excursion into the inner recesses of the old city. The Royal is a dank Edwardian heap of marble not far from the Grand Palace. It's not much of a hotel anymore---we met some Americans who fled from their grim room in February---but it's famous for housing the Thai students just back from Paris who led the 1932 revolution that put the monarchy out of business until King Bhumibole revived it after World War II. The Royal is also where the bodies were laid out in 1973 when the Thai military put down a revolt by shooting nearly 200 university students. It was one of the darkest events of modern Thai history.
We chose the Royal simply as a place to meet, before Dick led us to one of the best small restaurants in the city. The New York Times of October 12, 2005 ran a piece by R.W. "Johnny" Apple, the Times's beloved political reporter and insatiable gourmand, about his favorite place to eat in Bangkok. (You can easily Google up the article.) In the company of his friend Robert Halliday, Apple dined at Chote Chitr, a tiny family-owned place on Prang Phuton. This is an out-of-the-way area behind a former minor royal palace, circa 1910, that's now a health clinic. Apple's descriptions are wonderful and his joy infectious. Halliday tells Apple they have to order the banana flower salad, which is "one of the wonders of the world, up there with the late Beethoven quartets." Writes Apple: "The banana flower salad was stunning indeed, another example of a standard transformed. Prawns, chicken and the shredded red buds of the banana tree, among other things, went into the dish, but its brilliance, as with all the best Thai dishes, lay in the complexity of its seasonings---sour in the front of the mouth (tamarind pulp), fiery in the back (dried chilies), and sweetly nutty at the top (coconut cream). Eating it left me punch-drunk with pleasure."
Among other dishes, Apple also had the tum yum pla, "the eye-poppingly vibrant fish soup" that was "hot, rich and sharp" and which "owed everything to the liltingly fresh, vividly perfumed lemon grass, ka-prao or holy basil, coriander and kafir lime leaves that flavored it along with the obligatory chili."
So guess what? Chote Chitr was just closing when we arrived at about 12:30; the proprietors were taking a week off to visit family in Chiang Mai. Phooey. The owners did, however, advise us to try a place down the street. We did, and its hard to imagine that the food at Chote Chitr could have been better. After all, this is Thailand. We had a curried crab dish that was as exciting on the palate as it was on the plate---all red and orange and tumeric yellow---and a sweet soup with chunks of omelet in it and a crunchy, flavorsome green vegetable of unknown (even to Dick) origin that was kale-like but not kale. We shared a bottle of red soda pop, because we had been wondering why the bottles of pop left by prayerful merit-makers at spirit shrines around Bangkok were always red Fanta and never orange. We asked the restaurant owner about that, and he said it was a Chinese tradition that's taken hold in Thailand. To the Chinese, red is a lucky color. After lunch, we walked across the little park behind the former palace and had dessert at a shop that sold nothing but coconut ice cream. You could get it with fruit or nuts or corn kernels on it, but we just had unadorned dishes of the most intensely coconutty dish I ever tasted. It was more icy than creamy, and in the 97-degree heat, just the ticket.
What else have we been doing? Joe is sorting through 50,000 pictures of dried squid on a stick. We saw True Grit---Joe became impatient with the cliches, but I loved the Coens' fresh variations on them. We went to the drag show at Dee Jay Station, a gay club. Unlike the mind-boggling gay "fuck show" (the vivid Thai term) we took in on our first trip to Bangkok, this one was not raunchy, it was FABULOUS. My favorite act---basically a diva lip-synching, with a couple of Isaan lads flinging themselves about on either side of her more or less in unison---was "Don't Cry For Me, Argentina" done to a disco beat. The gorgeously be-gowned diva had a couple of rhinestone encrusted chandeliers dangling from her ears, and affixed to her head were what appeared to be three black minks. Not mink hairpieces but actual minks. The audience---80 percent young Thais, 20 percent young and old farangs---cried out with glee over these antics, and so did we.
This blog is about to go to sleep for two weeks. We leave for Burma on Monday. I'll be back in Bangkok March 26, trekker Joe a week later. We'll be incommunicado in AOL-free Myanmar. We're looking forward to meeting Burmese friends and hearing their stories---the "election," the release from house arrest of "the lady." We'll tell some of those stories when we get back. So-long for now.
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Still eating, raving and getting about
Culture One rave "outfit"
These women were passing out a caffienated drink with vodka
SALT
South of Bangkok on our way to Hua Hin, along the Gulf of Thailand, one passes paddy after paddy where salt is produced. Here is a description I found on the internet of the process.
In the making of budu (fish sauce) used in cooking, Thai southerners depend on salt from Pattani, as this southern province is the major source of sea salt in the region. The taste of Pattani salt is not as strong as salt from other parts of the country. Salt production in Pattani dates back to over 600 years ago. The production technique of Pattani salt has been transferred from generation to generation. Most salt farmers are men. So in the salt fields there can be fathers and sons, younger and elder brothers, grandfathers and grandsons, or fathers and their sons-in-law. Women take part only if there is a shortage of men to work the fields.
Pattani salt farmers say local salt fields tend to be clustered in Bana, Tanyong Luloh, and Barahom subdistricts of Muang Pattani district and in Bang Pu subdistrict of Yaring district. The production depends on the weather. It lasts long and gives high yields in a dry year, but in a rainy year, producing sea salt is difficult or even completely impossible.
The production usually starts in January, when salt farmers build earthen dykes around their salt fields. They make the dykes and the fields firm with rollers made of hard wood or coconut trunks.
In February the farmers allow a small amount of seawater into the fields to test their soil. If a thin layer of salt remains when the water evaporates, the fields will be ready for full production. Farmers usually keep the level of seawater in their fields at about the depth of their index finger and wait for 10-15 days. A low level of seawater will quickly produce salt that is not too salty. A high level of seawater will yield more salt, and make it more concentrated. Pattani salt farmers favor a taste that is not very salty, unlike their counterparts in Phetchaburi province, whose product has a stronger flavor. The time of the salt harvest in Pattani is in March and April.
Salt sales occur between May and July, but farmers do not have to rush. They can wait for satisfactory prices because their product never rots, and salt prices certainly climb if they wait until the rains. The salt sale period is the prime time for the farmers. Traders from many towns get their salt supply from Pattani as they are impressed with not only the good taste and cleanliness of Pattani salt but also the long-standing business culture of Pattani salt farmers.
One important tradition is that farmers willingly give customers one part of salt for every ten parts purchased. Ancestors of Pattani salt farmers told the younger ones not to take advantage of their customers. They explained that salt might spill while it is being shoveled, so the one-tenth giveaway compensates for the spill. The giveaway culture still remains when customers buy salt directly from farmers, though it might not be applied in markets where standard measuring tools are used. Although the old-time culture has been replaced to a certain extent by technology, Pattani salt farmers still possess the spirit of fair trade and are ready to pass it along to future generations. The ratio of one part given away for every 10 parts sold continues to complement the uniquely pleasant taste of Pattani salt
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The only food I have bought on the street that I really didn't like was this candied gourd. I threw it in the river.
Amok
In South-East Asian cuisine, "mok" or "amok" refers to either the process of steam cooking a curry in banana leaves or to the resulting dish. Thick coconut gravy and galangal are classic ingredients, added to a wide range of possible kinds of leaves and staple ingredients. Amok is major national culinary tradition in Cambodia and a major dish in Laos and Thailand. This one was a light fish pudding covered with a sticky-rice-flour and coconut cream.
Deep fried barracuda head
My favorite snack
are these hot, not
too sweet banana
fritters covered
with sticky rice-flour
batter with coconut
Some of the endless skewered grilled offerings on the street.
Just when you think you can't eat another thing, comes the smell of some wonderful freshly made concoction that might change your life for the fourth or fifth time that day. Do you really want to take the chance of possibly missing out?
A pork curry with tons of fresh ginger
A curry stall in the market by the Grand Palace
Duck hanging in a shop in the market
Steamed seasoned rice in lotus leaves
Grilling is very common. Here we see a very popular preparation where fish is coated with salt; some of the fish in the back are filled with stalks of lemon-grass and herbs
Near the amulet market is a soi where they are making Buddha images and depictions of revered monks.
Hua Hin, from the balcony at the condo lent to us by our friends Simon and Poe
Children with their mother releasing fish into the Chao Phrya river and getting a lesson in merit making. The market nearby sells small birds, turtles, and fish. People believe that by releasing them they are freeing them and will be rewarded with merit in their next life. There was a young girl in the water who had an entrepreneurial spirit. She was gathering up those released and selling them back to the vendors.
Pigeons become part of the architecture
February 18 2011 Makha Bucha Day / Magha Puja Day
This is in commemoration of a spontaneous gathering of 1,250 Sangha followers who came to meet Lord Buddha 9 months after his first enlightenment. They were ordained by Lord Buddha and enlightened. Celebrated with candle light processions three times clockwise around the temple, usually in the evening. It is also a day when many people give alms like instant or canned foods and necessities like robes, incense and candles to the monks.
The date changes from year to year. It is always on full moon day of the 3rd lunar month, Makha. In Bangkok, went with Poe to celebrate this day in the evening with a few thousand others parading up the 366 steps to this hilltop temple overlooking the city. Below one could see other glowing lines of monks and devotees making their way around surrounding temples in the area. The only noise came from the ringing of bells, gongs, sermons broadcast over loud-speakers and of course Celine Dion, and JayZ piping up on a cell phone.
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