Saturday, March 13, 2010

Bangkok, Thailand

Sawadee khâ (สวัสดี)!

(Hello!)

I’m having a hard time believing that the two weeks we spent in Bangkok are over already. Rolando Montecalvo, a dear old friend and colleague from my days with a translation company in San Francisco, met us with hugs at the airport, the two week itinerary that he had planned for us waving in his hand. After sufficient balking about the sitar and the sheer volume of luggage, he proceeded to pile us into his car (apparently, he had visions of our global gallivanting involving little more than knapsacks and loincloths), he deftly navigated us through the mad traffic of the city to our humble hostel on Soi 11. Rolando and his lovely wife, Asheena, have been living in Bangkok for three years, though they originally hail from Italy and India, respectively. As opportunities to rendezvous with old friends have been few and far between on this adventure, I’m afraid we may have talked their ears off. Still, they managed to harness our exuberance as they, along with their two charming daughters, Isabella and Alessia (whose attention Bella and Cruz would spend the next two weeks fighting over), showed us an incredible time in Thailand. As an added benefit, my lovely sister, Maria, flew in from Kansas to join us for the Thai chapter of the adventure, showering us with presents, love letters, artwork, and homebrew from family back home.

Our two weeks in Bangkok definitely served to charge our batteries, and it went by too fast. In fact, after three months in India, everything in Bangkok seemed to go too fast—the shiny new luxury cars, the ice cold gin and tonics, the pristine, colorful tuk tuks (which seemed to be a different species altogether from those in India), the delicious hoppy American IPAs that Maria schlepped for us from Stateside, the cash..

We spent the first few days in post-India culture shock. We tried to process the flashy lights, the bling bling, the cow-eating, the exuberant excess, and found it hard to imagine how unbelievable the scene would appear to the Indian friends we left behind. Bangkok's blue skies and two-shower-a-day humidity were quite surreal after leaving behind Delhi’s arid, perma-grey smog.

We quickly shelved our Indian contest to find the tuk-tuk with the most passengers piled in. Instead Maria and Cyrus kept a daily tally of 7-11 stores (which seem to be on every corner) and saffron-clad Buddhist monks. (Extra points were awarded for monks found within 7-11s.)

I was surprised to find that the Thai drive on the left side of the road. This was understandable when we were in London, of course, and India where they have their history with the British to blame. But I can’t figure out how the Thais ended up on the wrong side. What was even more surprising, though, was that it took me three days to notice. And then another three minutes to be able to recall, without question, which side we drive on back home. This adventure has most likely rendered me unfit to drive anywhere. It was surprisingly easy, I recall, to acquire our international driver’s license (which are still packed nicely in our backpacks, nearly unused and by now expired). Just show up with your license and a passport-sized photo and presto! If they know what was good for them, they'd just as promptly revoke my driving privileges upon reentry.

We realized pretty quickly that these people were just not going to even try and understand our Hindi. So we found ourselves making small talk with the hosts outside the plethora of Indian restaurants in our new neighborhood. Unfortunately, since we’re all too sick of Indian food to actually go inside, the conversations were brief, and we decided we would have to study the Thai language if we were to have any hopes of a proper conversation. We found a very sweet teacher, Khun Yawalak, who came to our hostel every other morning and taught us some basic Thai over breakfast, which always included Nescafe and a spread of fresh tropical fruits—pineapple, guava, rose apple, jack fruit. This was generally accompanied by a more challenging dish such as diced coconut meat with sticky rice and red beans bathed in coconut milk and sugar, or black-tar-looking jelly squares which were maybe also supposed to be smothered in the coconut milk. And sometimes a kicker of some bright-green, worm-shaped, rice flour concoction that looked a bit too much like fish bait for this Kansas girl. You’ll have to ask Jason and Cyrus what they tasted like.

Thai is the first tonal languages we’ve studied, so Khun Yawalak spent most of her time patiently correcting (but never laughing at) our pronunciation. Thais are extremely polite; in fact, according to Rolando, infuriatingly so. In tonal languages like Thai, one word can have a half a dozen different meanings depending on the tone and pitch you use. For example, the word that we would write as Khaaw can be the number nine, but can also mean mountain, enter, white, news, or rice depending on how you sing it. And Maa can mean dog, horse, or come, depending on your tone. So, most likely, when Maria was attempting to say Tonight we’re going to party like it’s 1999, she was actually saying something closer to The white dog rode up the mountain on horseback and brought nine bags of rice to the party. Nevertheless, Khun Yawalak never made fun; never even cracked a smile. And as a bonus, she’s also an artist and added a shiny new design to the white guitar I’ve been schlepping around the globe since North Africa.

We even scored a home invite during our brief stay in Thailand. (This pissed Rolando off to no end since he insists that Thai people are extremely reserved and that in three years living and working in Bangkok, he has never been invited into a Thai home.) One of the language teachers I had contacted named Maturot, though she wasn’t available for lessons, invited us over to have dinner with her family. We accepted enthusiastically and headed out one evening to Bangkok's suburbs, which look surprisingly like the burbs back home. Except with unusually high thresholds to keep ornery spirits at bay. (It seems spirits can only travel in straight lines and therefore can’t pass over thresholds.) And on the green lawn of each cookie cutter suburban home, a miniature pagoda called a spirit house, which is stocked daily with incense and fruit offerings to pacify the spirits displaced in building the home.

We convinced the young Thai couple to let us help cook. After a brief Thai language lesson, Jason and Maturot’s husband, Oy, who is a general in the Thai Air Force, whipped up a feast involving more fish sauce than you can shake a stick at... green curry with pea-sized eggplant, flash-fried morning glory flowers, green mango (and all this time I thought you had to wait for them to ripen), tom yum gai soup, chili-dusted slices of fresh pomelo (the gynormous tropical version of grapefruit)—all washed down with Chang beer. Every country seems to have its own nasty version of Coors Light, and Thais choose to make theirs even more tasteless by serving it over ice. Still, their flavor-packed food makes up for what the beer lacks, and we crammed in as many meals as humanely possible in our two weeks.

Bangkok has a wonderful tradition of street food, rivaled only by Mexico as far as I can tell. If you don’t mind some exhaust fumes with your dinner and are willing to pull up a stool next to the chipmunk-sized cockroaches, you can get some damn good grilled satay for a mere 10 baht (30 cents). Or a fat bowl of rice noodle soup, chock-full of fresh basil, chili, bean sprouts, lime, more forms of pork than I know what to do with, and a juicy pair of ping-pong-ball-sized fish balls, which I nonchalantly move to the side (trying hard not to imagine how big the fish they came from must have been). My favorite new street snack, which we discovered in the floating market of Amphawa after a day of biking through coconut groves with the Montecalvo family, was Miang Kung—a tender green betel leaf filled with one tiny piece of a dozen different flavor bursts: a wedge of lime, a dried shrimp, a few flakes of roasted coconut, a peanut, a tiny slice of chili, ginger, onion, and lemongrass, and finally a drop of sweet sauce—and then rolled up and plopped in the mount in one luscious gulp. Pure ecstasy! That and some Thai iced coffee, and Maria and Cyrus and I were in pure culinary ecstasy.

Bella and Cruz, on the other hand, ate a lot of rice. Happily, there is a huge variety of rice in Thailand, so no one went hungry—black, brown, red, and white rice, crab-fried rice, pretty rice (as they refer to jasmine), and our favorite, sticky rice. In fact, rice is so important to Thai cuisine, that it should have come as no surprise to us to learn that to say I'm hungry in Thai is Dichan hĭw khaâw (ฉันหิว), which according to Khun Yawalak literally means I hungry rice.  I grew so fond of this phrase, that I might now have it tattooed on my left ankle, were it not for Maria talking some sense into me at the last moment and convincing me to go with a different phrase (สันติภาพ—peace). Jason opted out of the tattoo ritual, which I was under the impression was a required part of the Bangkok experience. Instead, the following night he, Cyrus, and Rolando went out for a night of Thai kick boxing to get their testosterone fix.

Bella, Cruz, and I learned our lesson from the bull fight in Spain, and instead took Maria out in search of exotic seeds for my expanding future garden just waiting in my backpack to be planted when we have our own soil again. Afterwards, Maria treated Bella and Cruz to a fish massage. This was perhaps their favorite Thai tradition, which involves dangling your tired feet into a warm tank of water filled with a few hundred tiny, flesh-eating fishies who swarm around to happily munch on little toes. The feeding frenzy that ensues under the water generally causing a giggle fest up above.

For our last weekend in Thailand, the Montecalvos took us a few hours southeast of Bangkok to a tropical island not far from paradise and known by the locals as Koh Samet. We spent three glorious days in bungalows on the beach. Jason and I even got to shack up in our own private honeymoon cabin when Maria Poppins insisted on having the kids in her room. The blistering sun, coconut-lined white sand beaches, and crystal blue waters took me right back to Brazil. Except for without the piles of trash, gun-wielding thieves, and pounding music. But, I brought along the guitar, and the Bossanova I learned in Brazil went surprisingly well with the watery iced beer.

We ladies were pretty content lying on the beach, drawing tattoos on each other with the henna I brought from India, and seeing just how many layers of skin we could fry off our children in three days. Nevertheless, on day two, Rolando and Jason insisted on taking a little walk to the tip of the island. During what became a forced march to the end of the world, the men dragged us over amazing seaside terrain interspersed with hidden beaches where we jumped in the sticky, turquoise waves. The last sweaty mile of bush-whacking finally won the distain of the exhausted children, but the men-folk succeeded in regaining favor with a round of ice cream when we finally made it to the point, all the while arguing about whose idea it had been in the first place. When we finally made it back to our own stretch of paradise, Maria, Asheena, and I plopped down on the beach-front massage bungalow for a traditional Thai massage, which seems to be a cross between massage, yoga, and wrestling. In fact, at one point when my therapist/opponent yanked me up out of near-sleep into a compromising full-body twist hold, I couldn’t help but think that it wasn’t entirely different from kick boxing.

Far too quickly for all of our tastes, we were shaking off the island sand and heading back to Bangkok where we parted ways with the Montecalvos. Jason and I took advantage of Maria’s bigheartedness one more time as we loaded her up with two huge duffle bags overstuffed with presents for home and our treasures from India: a hundred, handmade cellophane kites, enough spices to keep us in curry for a decade, our beloved red, papier-mâché mask of elephant-headed Ganesh, two kilos of dry henna, a couple hundred bindis, which Bella and I have not yet gotten out of the habit of affixing to our foreheads each morning, some lily bulbs from the floating market here in Thailand (which I was a bit nervous about sending since I know they’re contraband—but they’re just so pretty), and of course, my new handmade, five-foot-long sitar. Despite her new load, Maria was still smiling when we put her on a plane back to Kansas. It was easier to say goodbye than I expected, knowing that we are only two months from home. As she passed through passport control, I said a prayer that she wouldn't be thrown into a Southeast Asian prison on account of our contraband luggage. Then feeling the relief of being back down to three backpacks, I made a bee-line in the other direction to catch our flight to Vietnam.

And now we find ourselves floating in beautiful, tranquil, drizzly, cold Ha Long Bay, south of Hanoi. I’m huddled here at the bar of our ship with both hands wrapped around my hot cup of bitter Vietnamese green tea to keep warm, trying to remember how two short weeks of Bangkok’s suffocating heat possessed me to send all of our long sleeves and rain jackets home with Maria. I peer out the starboard window into the thick blanket of mist as our tiny vessel navigates between two of the 3,000 dramatic, limestone, jungle-covered islands jutting straight up out of the dark water of Ha Long Bay into the mist, like the spines of a submerged dragon. Fishermen in conical hats float in and out of the silent fog, paddling wooden boats through the deep green water. Some of the islands (which I’m trying not to compare to icebergs) float by almost close enough to reach out and grab a monkey's tail. Here inside the vessel, a dozen Western passengers are being fussed over by as many Vietnamese crew members, as the crystal wine glasses hanging above my head jingle together in rhythm with the waves. This is our first experience being part of a packaged tour with normal tourist-types, and I’m not sure we fit in. I doubt many of our fellow passengers counted on sharing their Love Boat experience with three American rug rats. Still, they’re demonstrating incredible patience. And they all speak English, which has been a bit of a relief since none of the Thai phrases we crammed into our wee little brains seem to be working on the Vietnamese.

Oh, what I would give to have a Babel Fish to stick in my ear and be able to understand all the languages they throw at us. Cyrus and Jason recently finished reading The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, but they say it didn’t indicate specifically where to pick up one of these Babel Fish, and I haven’t been able to find one on e-Bay either. In any case, as a translator I’ll be out of business as soon as they do make it onto the market. So, I guess we’re just going to have to study some Vietnamese. Just as soon as we get back to Hanoi.

For now, it seems that the Capitan has dropped the anchor so that my eldest son can jump into the frigid waters to swim with the shrieking eels. So I must save the rest for later.

Sawadee khâ (ลา)!

(Goodbye!)

Angela