Same Same but Different

I thought for a long time what to write about Thailand, and the theme that kept coming into my mind is the phrase “same same but different,” a rather ubiquitous Thinglish phrase. Anne, Lou, and I debated it, but we couldn’t quite decide what the phrase is supposed to mean. For me though, it expresses the baffling mix of traditional Thai culture, modernity, and western influence that we tended to find everywhere we went. Such as the freshly paved highway four-lane outside of Chiang Mai, filled with a mix of new cars and rickety tuk-tuks, street-side stores selling mini Buddhist shrines people can erect outside their their homes, and “king bling” signs, flags and billboards all around. It was like being on a highway at home, except for the not-so-subtle differences such as those I mentioned . . .

(Note/Tangent: Thai’s absolutely love King Bhumipol, who has been king since 1946. He has no official power, but since he is so revered when he does choose to get involved in politics or other affairs, his opinion is generally followed. The official king color is yellow and on Monday’s (the day the king was born) many, many people choose to wear yellow shirts or entire yellow outfits in his honor. In fact, we learned that there is a king color for every day of the week, with pink, the color he wore when he last left the hospital on a Tuesday, being the next most popular. There are pictures of the king everywhere in Thailand, even giant ones on the sides of skyscrapers. They even have “long live the king” bracelets that look just like Lance Armstrong’s “livestrong” bracelets).

Or take the Black Canyon Coffee shop we frequented on hot days (it had air conditioning), a Thai chain whose menus had descriptions like: “Mocha Glacier Frappe: refreshing frozen and smooth blended Mocha coffee topped with creamy coffee ice cream will remind you of the cold glacier in the ocean! Authentic!”" Here I do tend to wonder if the description in Thai comes out a bit better, but the point being that this coffee shop seemed like one I’d find in the US in so many ways, particularly in terms of its decor, yet things like the menu’s enjoyable descriptions or the overly kind, attentive, and numerous staff members reminded me that I was still in Thailand.

There are so many more examples to throw in, such as the site of a monk in traditional dress filming and photographing his fellow monks visiting a temple, religious figurines at a historic temple dressed in leopard print garb, a Ronald McDonald statue doing the traditional “wai” Thai greeting, that the playboy bunny seems to be popular in ways that seemed absurd to us, or the bewildering Bangkok landscape of ancient Buddhist temples mingling with towering condominiums. Entire books, university courses, and conferences have been held to try to determine just what globablization and modernization mean for countries like Thailand, and my observations are perhaps more amusing than deeply meaningful, so I certainly won’t try to decide in this blog entry what I think it all means. From the standpoint of a visitor, the quickly changing landscape of Thailand was fascinating to observe, and comforting to find that even amidst what may seem the same as the US, there are many differences, small and large, that show that Thailand’s journey towards whatever modernization might be is quite unique.

And one final moment of happiness we found in Thailand to share:

While taking the night train back from Chiang Mai to Bangkok, we stopped in a small village. A new group of passengers boarded the train, including a mother with three young boys who were sitting across from Luthien and I. The mother held one of her sons in her arms, who was perhaps three or four years old. She first had him shake hands with me and then had him greet me with the phrase he shyly repeated after she said it: “I love you.” The little boy repeated this several times for me and then proceeded to greet Luthien in the same way, “I love you.” While all of this was happening, it seemed that the entire extended family of the mother and her sons was standing outside our train window to see them off. There was a group of at least ten Thai people crowded around waving and smiling and watching. As the mother turned her attention to her relatives out the window, the oldest boy, of about seven or eight, paced around our seats muttering absentmindedly under his breath the phrase, “I love you farang, I love you farang.” (farang = foreigner in Thai). The whole moment was enough to keep us smiling all the way until Bangkok.

-Julie

Cooking Classes with Krid

Every restaurant in Chiang Mai advertises a Thai cooking class- it’s the biggest craze here, along with massage classes and “non-tourist” treks. What these places don’t advertise, though, is that if you take a cooking class from them, you will be stuck in a kitchen in the middle of the Hot Season, too miserable and sweating to actually learn anything.We decided to find an alternative.Through another set of random connections, we found out about a Thai cooking class that was held on an organic farm about an hour outside of Chiang Mai (www.yousabai.com) and it was just as wonderful as the person described…

We met the owners of the farm, Krid and Yao, at Wat Suan Dok, a temple on the outskirts of Chiang Mai, where they pick up anyone who is interested in the cooking class or just staying on the farm. The sungthaw filled up quickly with a couple from Canada (Alicia and Xaaq), a girl from LA (Noelle), a girl from Sydney (Christina), and the three of us.

When we arrived at the farm, we quickly realized that the farm was not just for cooking classes- if anything that was just something that ended up happening because Yao and Krid were such good cooks. In fact, the farm was a large plot of land that hosted internship programs, many families, and random people who wanted a place to relax and use their hands, whether it was to help build the huts that people lived in or work on the farm.

Our first morning of cooking classes began with making soy milk and tofu- processes that are more simple than I ever thought possible. For the soy milk, we merely ground soy beans, added some water, separated the pieces from the milk, and then boiled the liquid…and suddenly the healthiest soy milk I’d ever tasted (perhaps a little too healthy) was ready to drink. Because they’d already made soy milk that morning, however, we turned our soy milk into tofu- by just adding vinegar to the boiling soy milk, it quickly curdled into a solid enough mixture that we could put it into a cheesecloth bag and squish it with a giant piece of wood and after 15 minutes Poof! It was tofu, just like, if not better, than any tofu I had ever bought from the store.

The remainder of our three days at the farm were pretty similiar- around lunch and dinner time we would go to the “kitchen”, which was basically a long table overlooking the rice paddies and mountains with three stoves set up in a row, and take the peel off of at least 30 cloves of garlic, chop up vegetables that we didn’t even know existed, and then watch Krid cook some interesting Thai dish. The bottom line of this cooking class was that it was SO MUCH FOOD. Krid would demonstrate how to make a dish, we would eat his creation between the three of us, and then we would make our own version of it and also eat that. This would be repeated three or four times for each meal, leaving us stuffed with vegetables and garlic for pretty much the entire day. When we weren’t cooking, we were swimming in a nearby stream or lying around reading, as really those are the only things to do in the afternoon during the Hot season…all in all, a pretty fantastic environment.

Our creations are all exhibited on the Flickr website, as we were careful to document everything that we made by taking pictures because they were all so colorful and as delicious as they looked. By the end, our full menu included:

1) Pad Thai
2) Green Papaya Salad
3) Ginger Mushrooms
4) Fat Rice Noodles with Thick Gravy and Kale
5) Green Curry (with Thai eggplant and long beans)
6) Fried Bananas
7) Red Curry
8 ) Panang Curry
9) Masamann Curry
10) Pumpkin with Coconut Milk

However, really what we learned is that Thai food must include a few key things, and from there you can make anything: soy sauce (to make it salty), palm sugar (to make it sweet), tamarind juice (to make it sour), and garlic (to always have a little spicy).

-Luthien

the hills are alive…..

….with the sound of flute players following you along the Annapurna Circuit trails, beautiful children asking for “sweets?” thanks to travellers past, bells attached to donkeys’ necks as they carry goods up to the mountains to notify local children in the path, birds announcing the coming of spring, and Dipak (Julie and my guide on our Nepal trek) teaching us phrases in Nepali like bistari bistari (slowly slowly), ukalo (uphill), oralo (downhill), dhanyabad (thank you), dherai ramro (very nice), sundar himal (beautiful mountain), and a few journal pages worth of more…..

I guess it is a bit ironic to start this entry with the various sounds Julie and I heard on our peaceful trek, when in reality the Annapurna region provided the most silence we had encountered since New Zealand– I am writing this entry from a nice internet cafe in Chiang Mai, Thailand, just blown away by the lack of noisy traffic– because both India and Nepal constantly bombarded us with horns and salespitches and “rickshaw, madam?” and promises of friendship prices. While the noise added to the intensity of color and culture in those places, I think my back is instantly more relaxed here in Thailand, because I’m not constantly thinking I may be hit by a motorbike. Ha!

Julie and I attempted trekking in the Annapurna region, initially thinking that we would do a 6-day trek including a hike up to Poon Hill with a guide we had met at an agency in Kathmandu. We were excited to get out of the smog of the city, out of another tourist bubble like Goa (Kathmandu’s Thamel area), and to see some hilltop villagers’ farms and friendly smiles. Plans unfortunately changed a bit when Julie got ill on our second day hiking, which Dipak told us was actually more common than one would expect, especially with people coming from the low attitudes and tropical temperatures of India. I’ll let Julie expand upon the details of her symptoms, but we basically stayed up at the beautiful teahouse in the hilltop village of Jhinu for an extra day, sleeping and recuperating, before heading out along the same trail we trudged in on. Although it was slightly disappointing to not make it to Poon Hill, the variations in our journey taught me a lot about the importance of our health, of learning to be flexible for a good friend, and to just breath in the invigorating energy of that place bistari bistari. I was incredibly lucky to have my health and be able to watch the life along that trail–local people carrying chickens in metal cages, children, wood, greens, cloth, and even grandpa up the steep path in wicker baskets supported by a strip of cloth across their foreheads. Incredible. I was also lucky enough to enjoy incredible natural hot springs after meandering down beautiful moss-covered shiny stone steps to the river, only about 30 minutes from the location where we were “stranded” by sickness.

 We were also lucky to be paired up with such a compassionate, funny, and intelligent guide. Dipak was amazing. Very concerned and accomodating and full of ridiculous stories of his past 15 years as a porter and guide in Nepal…. When I return to Nepal in the future, I will definitely hire him again to accompany me in the Himalayan hills.

I shall return to my exploration of Chiang Mai. Tomorrow we head off to a Thai cooking school for 3 days of organic delicious food on a farm outside of the city–another thing I’ve been looking forward to since we started planning this trip!

Vrede,

Anne