Joe is back in Yangon from his trek in the wilds of Chin state. He'll be back here in Bangkok late tonight. In an e-mail yesterday, he said the trek was memorable. At a village celebration he witnessed the slaughter of a bullock and a pig and said he may yet become a vegetarian. He has many good pictures, including one of a Chin woman playing a nose flute (but not of a Nose woman playing a chin flute). Photos should appear on the blog later this week.
I'm working on my Strachey book. I've told a couple of people that I now know enough about Thailand to know how little I know. Anyway, I'll just use what it is I know, if only I can figure out what it is I know.
I've gone back over the Myanmar blog and fixed some typos and other minor errors. One was a spelling for Aung San Soo Kye that I think I made up.
I just learned that we will have to do a "visa run." Tourists entering Thailand receive a 30-day visa and cannot have it extended for more than a week. We're not leaving the country until May 4, so we'll have to do what other farangs do---apparently it is a cunning feature of industrial tourism in Southeast Asia---and cross a border and then come right back with a new Thai 30-day visa. Most people take the bus to a Laos border town for the turn-around, so we probably will, too. I've always been curious about that border (last year we flew in and out of Laos). The Laos drive on the right, the Thais on the left. What happens in the middle of the border bridge over the Mekong? Maybe I'll find out. (In 1963 I was in Addis Ababa on the day the Ethiopians switched from driving on the left to driving on the right. People were terrified and traffic moved at a crawl. The problems began several days later.)
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Travel update
Following this are four postings on Myanmar. I'm in Bangkok to work on a book set here. Joe is still in Myanmar on a trek in the wilds of Chin state. He'll be back in Thailand March 31. He has many wonderful pictures taken in Burma but can't post them until he's back in well-infrastructured Thailand. It will be worth the wait. The photos show a lot of Myanmar life and institutions not mentioned in my text or that are indescribable. There is much in Myanmar that is blissful, and Joe's pictures capture that Myanmar beautifully.
Monday, March 24, 2008
Myanmar/Burma
Joe and I are walking down a dusty side street in Mandalay. Although it's 110 in the shade, the Burmese all around us are toiling away, earning their average dollar a day. One of three sweating young men repairing car engines looks up, waves and asks, "Where you from?" "USA," we say. "Ah, America!" This is good, the land of George W. Bush. He overthrew the tyrant Saddam Hussein and maybe, other Burmese have told us hopefully, Bush will invade Myanmar and overthrow its dictators, too.
The engine repairman indicates an older man squatting nearby and says, "He police." The three repairmen laugh. The older guys says, "No police, he crazy." "No, he police," the first guy says, and all four of them laugh.
Later, in another town, we are telling two Burmese men who are interested in our travels around Myanmar that we had observed long sections of the natural gas pipeline to China running above ground. This vital provider of revenues for the military regime looked dangerously exposed as it cut through villages and across rice paddies. It also appeared vulnerable to sabotage. When I say, "Somebody could bomb it," the two Burmese look at each other. Then they laugh, too.
This place is about as schizoid as a country can get. It is deeply Buddhist and fatalistic and accepting and serene, and its people are among the sweetest-natured on earth. It is also a police state, where spies are busy in every neighborhood and temple (fake monks paid by the government worked as agents provocateurs during last September's uprising), and the elected prime minister, Aung San Soo Kyi, has been under house arrest for most of the last 20 years. The economy has been so devastated by the greedy and blundering generals that most men have only two ways of surviving, as monks or soldiers. Women are even worse off. If they aren't in a position to sell produce in a market (or run a hotel or a silk mill, as was the case with two we met), they do heavy labor on the waterfront or repairing roads.
Of nearly 60 million Burmese, 600,000 are monks. Four hundred twenty thousand are in the military, the second largest army in Asia. Wandering around Yangon our first day there, we stopped by a pagoda and noted that the couple of dozen figures snoozing in the midday heat were not monks but soldiers.
Nobody who's talking knows for sure how many monks and other peaceful demonstrators were killed or hurt last September and October. The number killed was between a few and a few hundred. The two thousand or so political prisoners who are still locked up include the man who pasted up posters around Yangon showing General Than Shwe's head on the body of a dog.
A widespread hope last fall was that the military rank and file would desert the leadership. Except in isolated cases, they did not. The soldiers' livelihoods depend on their staying loyal. (Also, to go against duty and authority in Buddhism is to risk a decent fate in the next life.) While many soldiers behaved cruelly during the demonstrations, many of them suffered, too. On a Yangon street lined with high-rise apartment blocks, residents who were forbidden to feed the monks threw food down from their balconies. When they moved in to drive away the monks, the soldiers were pelted with household objects.
Burmese hold out some hope that this May's referendum will at least further expose the regime as bankrupt. People plan to go out in droves and vote no to the generals' sham constitution. The integrity of the balloting, though, is in doubt. We have been unable to confirm this, but three people told us independently that there will be no secret ballot. Government agents will go door to door and record family members' votes. (A fourth man says this is just a rumor started by the government to intimidate people into voting yes or not at all.)
China could make a real difference in Myanmar. But its morality of fossil fuels at any cost is likely to keep the regime in power for the forseeable future. China dominates the Burmese economy---and even the country's changing appearance. Its oil, gas, gem and (it is said) heroin money have led to a building boom in cities like Mandalay and Taunggyi. Joe says these new Chinese buildings look like overstuffed sofas made out of tile.
There has, however, been no trickle-down effect from this mini-boom. With the labor glut, wages are as depressed as ever. You see people all over hauling sand on their heads or tarring roads for 50 cents a day. Do these people complain? When Joe takes their picture, they look at him and smile. These generals have a good thing going for themselves in Burma; they know it and plan to hang onto it.
Another way to get a Burmese to laugh is to say you are going to visit Napyidow. This is the country's new "capital" (it has no foreign embassies) built over the last three years in a hazy broad valley a couple of hundred miles north of Yangon off the Mandalay Road. Some Burmese say this ghastly zillion-dollar folly built with Chinese money and forced labor was kept isolated by the regime to protect it against the U.S. invasion the generals are said to antcipate. Others say the generals' astrologers told them to do it. (When the late dictator Ne Win's astrologers declared in the 1970s that he must change the country's currency to notes that add up to the lucky number 9---45, 90, etc.---he immediately did so. This system was later abandoned.)
Joe and I spent a night in Napyidow, and we can confirm that it is madness on a monumental scale: eight-lane concrete expressways with barely a car in sight (other Burmese roads are rutted, colonial-era two-lane blacktop); treeless mile after treeless mile of identical concrete apartment blocks for the government employees forced to relocate from Yangon; a locked-up "ceremonial hall" that looks like a Las Vegas dreamed up not by Trump but by Orwell; office blocks even uglier than the dwellings; Florida-style shopping centers with no shoppers (Yangon shop owners were forced to rent space whether they opened a Napyidow shop or not); a "zoological park" (Are there animals in it? "Not so much," someone told us); and two "hotel zones."
We stayed at the Thingaha. The brochure at this "The Eden Group" property described it as a pinnacle of "business chic." It was. Our immense air-conditioned room, done in wood and fabric in muted old Asia colors (no Chinese acryllics here) had two beds about 15 feet apart; a flat-screen TV on an island in the middle of the room; a tile bathroom in three sections, discrete according to function; recessed lighting, including under the couch; terry-cloth robes; an ironing board. The shower handle stuck, and the power went off from time to time, but we bathed nonetheless and had brought along our own flashlights to augment those provided by The Eden Group. There were 12 other guests, we learned, all government officials. Our room rate was $140, four times what we usually pay in Southeast Asia and a third of the annual income for the average Burmese.
In a bare valley below the Thingaha were the tin-roofed mud houses of the construction workers still laboring night and day to finish the several hotels in our zone. With their nightime candles burning for illumination and their smoky cooking fires, these settlements looked like Civil War encampments in 1863. Matthew Bradey was not there to photograph them however, and Joe was not able to do it either. He had been warned by several people to keep his camera in his bag while in Napyidow.
The engine repairman indicates an older man squatting nearby and says, "He police." The three repairmen laugh. The older guys says, "No police, he crazy." "No, he police," the first guy says, and all four of them laugh.
Later, in another town, we are telling two Burmese men who are interested in our travels around Myanmar that we had observed long sections of the natural gas pipeline to China running above ground. This vital provider of revenues for the military regime looked dangerously exposed as it cut through villages and across rice paddies. It also appeared vulnerable to sabotage. When I say, "Somebody could bomb it," the two Burmese look at each other. Then they laugh, too.
This place is about as schizoid as a country can get. It is deeply Buddhist and fatalistic and accepting and serene, and its people are among the sweetest-natured on earth. It is also a police state, where spies are busy in every neighborhood and temple (fake monks paid by the government worked as agents provocateurs during last September's uprising), and the elected prime minister, Aung San Soo Kyi, has been under house arrest for most of the last 20 years. The economy has been so devastated by the greedy and blundering generals that most men have only two ways of surviving, as monks or soldiers. Women are even worse off. If they aren't in a position to sell produce in a market (or run a hotel or a silk mill, as was the case with two we met), they do heavy labor on the waterfront or repairing roads.
Of nearly 60 million Burmese, 600,000 are monks. Four hundred twenty thousand are in the military, the second largest army in Asia. Wandering around Yangon our first day there, we stopped by a pagoda and noted that the couple of dozen figures snoozing in the midday heat were not monks but soldiers.
Nobody who's talking knows for sure how many monks and other peaceful demonstrators were killed or hurt last September and October. The number killed was between a few and a few hundred. The two thousand or so political prisoners who are still locked up include the man who pasted up posters around Yangon showing General Than Shwe's head on the body of a dog.
A widespread hope last fall was that the military rank and file would desert the leadership. Except in isolated cases, they did not. The soldiers' livelihoods depend on their staying loyal. (Also, to go against duty and authority in Buddhism is to risk a decent fate in the next life.) While many soldiers behaved cruelly during the demonstrations, many of them suffered, too. On a Yangon street lined with high-rise apartment blocks, residents who were forbidden to feed the monks threw food down from their balconies. When they moved in to drive away the monks, the soldiers were pelted with household objects.
Burmese hold out some hope that this May's referendum will at least further expose the regime as bankrupt. People plan to go out in droves and vote no to the generals' sham constitution. The integrity of the balloting, though, is in doubt. We have been unable to confirm this, but three people told us independently that there will be no secret ballot. Government agents will go door to door and record family members' votes. (A fourth man says this is just a rumor started by the government to intimidate people into voting yes or not at all.)
China could make a real difference in Myanmar. But its morality of fossil fuels at any cost is likely to keep the regime in power for the forseeable future. China dominates the Burmese economy---and even the country's changing appearance. Its oil, gas, gem and (it is said) heroin money have led to a building boom in cities like Mandalay and Taunggyi. Joe says these new Chinese buildings look like overstuffed sofas made out of tile.
There has, however, been no trickle-down effect from this mini-boom. With the labor glut, wages are as depressed as ever. You see people all over hauling sand on their heads or tarring roads for 50 cents a day. Do these people complain? When Joe takes their picture, they look at him and smile. These generals have a good thing going for themselves in Burma; they know it and plan to hang onto it.
Another way to get a Burmese to laugh is to say you are going to visit Napyidow. This is the country's new "capital" (it has no foreign embassies) built over the last three years in a hazy broad valley a couple of hundred miles north of Yangon off the Mandalay Road. Some Burmese say this ghastly zillion-dollar folly built with Chinese money and forced labor was kept isolated by the regime to protect it against the U.S. invasion the generals are said to antcipate. Others say the generals' astrologers told them to do it. (When the late dictator Ne Win's astrologers declared in the 1970s that he must change the country's currency to notes that add up to the lucky number 9---45, 90, etc.---he immediately did so. This system was later abandoned.)
Joe and I spent a night in Napyidow, and we can confirm that it is madness on a monumental scale: eight-lane concrete expressways with barely a car in sight (other Burmese roads are rutted, colonial-era two-lane blacktop); treeless mile after treeless mile of identical concrete apartment blocks for the government employees forced to relocate from Yangon; a locked-up "ceremonial hall" that looks like a Las Vegas dreamed up not by Trump but by Orwell; office blocks even uglier than the dwellings; Florida-style shopping centers with no shoppers (Yangon shop owners were forced to rent space whether they opened a Napyidow shop or not); a "zoological park" (Are there animals in it? "Not so much," someone told us); and two "hotel zones."
We stayed at the Thingaha. The brochure at this "The Eden Group" property described it as a pinnacle of "business chic." It was. Our immense air-conditioned room, done in wood and fabric in muted old Asia colors (no Chinese acryllics here) had two beds about 15 feet apart; a flat-screen TV on an island in the middle of the room; a tile bathroom in three sections, discrete according to function; recessed lighting, including under the couch; terry-cloth robes; an ironing board. The shower handle stuck, and the power went off from time to time, but we bathed nonetheless and had brought along our own flashlights to augment those provided by The Eden Group. There were 12 other guests, we learned, all government officials. Our room rate was $140, four times what we usually pay in Southeast Asia and a third of the annual income for the average Burmese.
In a bare valley below the Thingaha were the tin-roofed mud houses of the construction workers still laboring night and day to finish the several hotels in our zone. With their nightime candles burning for illumination and their smoky cooking fires, these settlements looked like Civil War encampments in 1863. Matthew Bradey was not there to photograph them however, and Joe was not able to do it either. He had been warned by several people to keep his camera in his bag while in Napyidow.
Myanmar index
Babbling seer 1 dollar: average daily wage in Myanmar.
1 dollar: average daily wage for goverment school teachers in Myanmar.
$80: monthly salary of Ko Htun Htun at a boarding school in Mandalay Division for working 24 hours a day, seven days a week as a teacher and dorm supervisor. (Htun Htun was forced to give up being a tour guide last fall when tourism collapsed in the wake of the uprising.)
$60: Amount Htun Htun sends back each month to his wife and three children a hundred miles away in Taunggyi. (There is no place for them at the boarding school. Htun Htun sleeps in the dorm with the students.)
10 cents: bus fare from the outskirts of the city to downtown Yangon before last fall's price hikes.
20 cents: bus fare after the increase.
$2.50: price for a gallon of gas last August.
Over $5.00: price in September. (Food and other costs went up more or less proportionately.)
50 cents: cost to enter Mahabandoola Garden, a "public" park in downtown Yangon. (When we visited it, about 20 people were relaxing in this three- or four-acre nicely manicured oasis.)
$50 million: estimated value of wedding gifts received by General Than Shwe's daughter a few years ago.
$3 to $5: Daily wage paid to hundreds of thugs hired by the government to beat monks and other demonstrators last September and October. (Each man hired also received a free breakfast and a club.)
Between 11 and several hundred: number of non-violent demonstrators killed by police, military or paid gangs.
4: number of times the power went off for anywhere from one to four hours in Malamyine (Moulmein) on March 11, 2008. (Rolling blackouts are a way for the government to save fuel. No one knows when they're coming, but in many areas the electricity is off about half the time.)
6 miles: distance part way up the mountain from the "base camp" at the Shrine of the Golden Rock in Kayin state, a holy site where a huge gilded boulder is balanced atop a single hair of the Buddha.
$3: Cost to ride in a truck cab up the mountain.
$1: cost to ride on plank seats in the truck bed with 50 other pilgrims. (We rode up in the cab, down on the planks.)
Unrecorded number: the serial number of the truck we rode down on. (After the smoking truck ascending barely made it to the top, our guide checked the serial number of the descending vehicle to see if was a "lucky number." It was.)
$18: cost for a white person to be carried the last, steep mile (no trucks allowed) on a palenquin by four slender, sweating brown people in the 100-degree-plus heat. (I rode, Joe walked.)
10 pm: the time on March 9 when the monk-noviate initiation ceremony at Thamanya monastery in the building next to the one where we were sleeping took a break for the night. The ceremony included powerfully amplified music on percussion instruments that repeated clonk-clonk-clonk-bonk-clonk many times.
3:55 am: the time the ceremony---and the music---resumed.
2004: the year the venerable Thamanya Hill Sayadow (abbot) Bhaddanta Vinaya died. His corpse is on display for pilgrims at a shrine near the monastery, and despite the sayadow's not having been embalmed, he "still has not spoiled."
$3: amount foreigners (but not Burmese) must pay to enter Kaw-Gon Cave, in Kayin state, where over a thousand 18th-century Buddha statues are arrayed. Pilgrims come from all over to pray here. A monk told us many foreigners complain about the fee.
$0: donation to Kaw-Gon monastery made by the Myanmar prime minister during a visit. He admonished the monks over the dirty floors.
2: number of cigarettes smoked simultaneously by a babbling seer and counselor giving Dr. Phil-style marriage and personal advice to pilgrims who queue up inside the cave and pay for this service.
$3,500: cost of roof repairs at Seindon Mibaya pagoda and monastery in Moulmein to keep this ramshackle architectural and spiritual Burmese treasure from crumbling even further. ($500 came from Aung San Soo Kye's brother in New Jersey.)
Hundreds of thousands of dollars: estimated value of wooden carvings and other pieces of the 18th-century pagoda stolen by thieves with police complicity and sold to Westerners in Bangkok antique shops.
1: number of women from Lenox, Massachusetts Joe ran into at Seindon Mibaya on March 11 while spending the day there photographing the monks' daily life. (He thinks her name was Lisa Galvin.)
1: number of times we have heard of anybody's sandals being stolen when left outside a Buddhist temple anywhere in Southeast Asia. The theft victim was a Greek-American geologist living in Bangkok who travels often to Myanmar for "research." He told us, "The government thinks I'm a spy." Is he? "No, those guys approached me in Bangkok, but they don't know anything." Good answer.
Myanmar or Burma?
The regime calls it Myanmar. Opponents of the regime outside the country call it Burma, the British colonial name. (They also call Yangon Rangoon.) The local people we've met, even though they may hate the regime, say Myanma (without the R at the end) is historically correct. It's more inclusive of the many tribal groupings of the land---Bamar, Shan, Mon, Kachin, Kayin, Chin, etc. But the two names, Myanmar and Burma, are emotionally charged raised banners now, so neither is going away. I go back and forth, depending on who I am addressing.
Notes
Aviation Note: When the cover popped off the emergency-door handle and the handle itself dropped with a clank on an Air Bagan flight from Bangkok to Yangon, the man seated next to the door---which luckily did not open---asked if he could sit elsewhere. There were no empty seats available, but the cabin crew located a monk who agreed to switch. We were seated nearby and noted that the monk sat looking serene, in that way that they do. He did, however, keep his seatbelt securely fastened throughout the remainder of the flight.
Law-enforcement Note: Every police station in Myanmar has a sign out front in Burmese and English that asks, "May we help you?", not, more fitttingly, "May we hit you over the head?"
Monetary Note: The day we arrived in Yangon, we exchanged U.S. dollars at a rate of about 1100 Myanmar kyats (pronounced "chats") to the dollar. Two weeks later, we received under 1000 kyats per dollar. The kyat is one of the world's pariah currencies. What does this mean?
Law-enforcement Note: Every police station in Myanmar has a sign out front in Burmese and English that asks, "May we help you?", not, more fitttingly, "May we hit you over the head?"
Monetary Note: The day we arrived in Yangon, we exchanged U.S. dollars at a rate of about 1100 Myanmar kyats (pronounced "chats") to the dollar. Two weeks later, we received under 1000 kyats per dollar. The kyat is one of the world's pariah currencies. What does this mean?
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Myanmar next
Later today, we fly to Yangon (Rangoon). On our Burmese tour, we'll follow essentially the route we took last year: the Golden Rock shrine (an enormous boulder balanced on a single hair of the Buddha), two monasteries, Malamyine (Moulmein); then Bagan, Mandalay and Inle Lake. We'll have roughly the same mix of guided private tours and time to range around on our own. We'll have the same guides as before; both are people we became fond of. One is now a high-school teacher, and he agreed to come back and serve as our guide for three days. We're doing it this way partly because we want to see who and what has changed.
Our plan is for me to return to Bangkok March 25 to work more on the Strachey book, and for Joe to remain in Myanmar for up to a week longer to do some hill-tribe-area trekking. When we tried to book my MAI (Myanmar Airways International) return to Bangkok, the travel agent said I'd have to do the booking in Myanmar in a week or so for the March 25 flight. MAI doesn't plan that far ahead.
We have received conflicting information on internet in Myanmar. So we might or might not be able to blog from there. If we do it, it will be discreet, maybe to the point of pointlessness. You'll know.
Our plan is for me to return to Bangkok March 25 to work more on the Strachey book, and for Joe to remain in Myanmar for up to a week longer to do some hill-tribe-area trekking. When we tried to book my MAI (Myanmar Airways International) return to Bangkok, the travel agent said I'd have to do the booking in Myanmar in a week or so for the March 25 flight. MAI doesn't plan that far ahead.
We have received conflicting information on internet in Myanmar. So we might or might not be able to blog from there. If we do it, it will be discreet, maybe to the point of pointlessness. You'll know.
Pictures of Djibouti
Pictures of Addis Ababa
Dinner the first night at the home of Getachew and Kelmwa 
Former students: Worku Sharew and Tadessa Beshaw, with their former teacher, Mr. Richard
Getachew and Dick with Addis in the background
A picture Getachew had of him and Dick in 1962 
A farm girl at Getachews' farm outside of Addis
With some of the hands at the farm
Addis, the old and the new
Road construction workers
After dinner at the home of Worku and Abeba
Abeba roasting coffee beans (in the living room)
Worku and the girls (Misgana and Betamariam)
Mumbai pictures (a very narow slice of a very big city)
The meat market (closed the day I was there)
The porters rested in their baskets
Early Morning market
A hand operated ride
Did you ever wonder where banana chips come from?
Grinding garam marsala
Life in the streets
An alley
Garland makers
The air in Mumbai
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Ten reasons we are happy to be back in Thailand
1. On the way into Bangkok from the airport at six Friday morning, the taxi driver answered a call on his cell phone. His "ring" was a little kid laughing.
2. Our friend Poe Suwatchie phoned us at the Pinnacle Hotel to welcome us "back to paradise." He always says this---and then laughs, because he knows it is both not true at all and entirely true.
3. At the hotel, we had trouble making outgoing calls from our room. We notified the front desk, which placed our calls for us. Also, within minutes a cheerful guy appeared at our door carrying two screw drivers.
4. Soon after we arrived, Joe walked around the corner to use the ATM. He reported back that among the food vendors set up on the sidewalk---selling exquisitely aromatic noodle soups, dumplings, meat on skewers, spicy seafood salads---were two young woman with an espresso machine. He bought a cup and it was excellent.
5. We slept for a few hours Friday morning---after having sat zombie-like on the plane from Bombay through the night---and then called room service and ordered tom yam and tom ka gai. It was the best food we ever ate---until we went out from the hotel later and ate again.
6. The small shop down the street where we use the internet still has---along with seven or eight computers---its own seamstress.
7. Saturday morning we had an appointment to meet Henry Nyan Htun, manager of Peace House Travel, the Burmese agency that is arranging our upcoming visit to Myanmar. It took us a while to get across Bangkok, and we arrived at ten, concerned that we might have kept Henry waiting. He came in at 10:10 and said, "Ah, you're right on time."
8. The "letters" page of The Bangkok Post is as lively and free-wheeling as ever. On Thursday, deposed Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra returned to Thailand to face charges of corruption. A letter on Saturday said, "I wonder if upon his fanfared return Mr. Thaksin took some time out between kissing the ground and getting into his limo to take a look around his great achievement, Suvarnabhumi Airport. I wonder if he noticed the poor acoustics, the meager and filthy restrooms, the stained and cracked floors, the flimsy baggage carts, the endless snaking lines waiting to clear customs...." The new airport, built by cronies of Thaksin, isn't quite that bad. And plainly this letter writer has never been to Bombay or Newark.
9. Today, Sunday, local elections are being held all over Thailand. No alcohol was served in the country yesterday and none will be served today. Also, perhaps coincidentally, a ban on smoking in most public places went into effect yesterday. We saw French and German tourists in the hotel lobby looking anxious.
10. After Africa, and especially India---a nation of Larry Craigs---it's nice to be back in a country where being gay is just fine. I'm setting a Strachey book partly in Bangkok. (We're dining on Tuesday with a gay police official who is a friend of Poe's.) The book begins:
"Mr. Strachey, do you believe in reincarnation?"
"I've never given it much thought."
"So you won't mind my telling you I think the whole idea is perfectly absurd."
"Go ahead."
2. Our friend Poe Suwatchie phoned us at the Pinnacle Hotel to welcome us "back to paradise." He always says this---and then laughs, because he knows it is both not true at all and entirely true.
3. At the hotel, we had trouble making outgoing calls from our room. We notified the front desk, which placed our calls for us. Also, within minutes a cheerful guy appeared at our door carrying two screw drivers.
4. Soon after we arrived, Joe walked around the corner to use the ATM. He reported back that among the food vendors set up on the sidewalk---selling exquisitely aromatic noodle soups, dumplings, meat on skewers, spicy seafood salads---were two young woman with an espresso machine. He bought a cup and it was excellent.
5. We slept for a few hours Friday morning---after having sat zombie-like on the plane from Bombay through the night---and then called room service and ordered tom yam and tom ka gai. It was the best food we ever ate---until we went out from the hotel later and ate again.
6. The small shop down the street where we use the internet still has---along with seven or eight computers---its own seamstress.
7. Saturday morning we had an appointment to meet Henry Nyan Htun, manager of Peace House Travel, the Burmese agency that is arranging our upcoming visit to Myanmar. It took us a while to get across Bangkok, and we arrived at ten, concerned that we might have kept Henry waiting. He came in at 10:10 and said, "Ah, you're right on time."
8. The "letters" page of The Bangkok Post is as lively and free-wheeling as ever. On Thursday, deposed Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra returned to Thailand to face charges of corruption. A letter on Saturday said, "I wonder if upon his fanfared return Mr. Thaksin took some time out between kissing the ground and getting into his limo to take a look around his great achievement, Suvarnabhumi Airport. I wonder if he noticed the poor acoustics, the meager and filthy restrooms, the stained and cracked floors, the flimsy baggage carts, the endless snaking lines waiting to clear customs...." The new airport, built by cronies of Thaksin, isn't quite that bad. And plainly this letter writer has never been to Bombay or Newark.
9. Today, Sunday, local elections are being held all over Thailand. No alcohol was served in the country yesterday and none will be served today. Also, perhaps coincidentally, a ban on smoking in most public places went into effect yesterday. We saw French and German tourists in the hotel lobby looking anxious.
10. After Africa, and especially India---a nation of Larry Craigs---it's nice to be back in a country where being gay is just fine. I'm setting a Strachey book partly in Bangkok. (We're dining on Tuesday with a gay police official who is a friend of Poe's.) The book begins:
"Mr. Strachey, do you believe in reincarnation?"
"I've never given it much thought."
"So you won't mind my telling you I think the whole idea is perfectly absurd."
"Go ahead."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)