ข้าวเหนียว Tasty Treat

This is my current street food obsession. It's sticky rice cooked with coconut milk and then wrapped in a banana leaf. It comes with a little packet of white sugar ground with deep fried crispy garlic pieces and dried shrimp. You dump the spice packet onto the leaf, break the sticky rice into chunks and dip and snack and repeat.

Krushing Koreans

Yesterday I spent three hours in a small, gray classroom repeating unhearable tones to a thin woman who never stopped smiling, even when the Japanese student got ten out of ten wrong. She is Kruu, or teacher. Kruu started class by having us practice vowels. Having not really thought about vowels for a very long time, it was kind of hilarious sitting in a classroom making the O face to practice long o sounds with five other adults. Also, Thai has some huge ridiculous number of vowels. Did anyone know there are like six ways to pronounce U? I did not.

Kruu gave us some listening sheets and she would pronounce different sounds, and we had to fill in the sounds she made on the sheet. I've always felt I was pretty good at languages, and I'm also quietly competitive, so I was irrationally angered when the Korean girls got perfect scores on the listening. I want to be the best! I want to get all the right answers! It made me feel better that the Spanish guy and the Irish guy did worse than me, but still. Schadenfraude only gets you so far in beating the Koreans.

Luckily, their Waterloo was yet to come: tones. In addition to multiple and ridiculous ways to pronounce the vowels, there are also tones in Thai. There are five tones: low (talk like you imagine a sexy telephone operator would talk), mid (normal), high (like when you get really mad and the ends of words start to go up in pitch), rising (gets confusing here: basically make the word dip, high on each end but low in the middle), and falling (reverse of rising, shockingly enough). While I admit I struggle to hear the tones when regular Thais talk, I can definitely hear Kruu's tones, probably because she talks as if her class is full of retarded bears.

I can't wait to see what today's class brings! Also, I vow to crush the Koreans.

While this looks very impressive, it's actually just me writing all the numbers to 100. I love the way some thai letters have hats.

Bangkok Arts and Culture Center

Some art is about the future. Or being in a tanning bed.

Some art is about fourth-grade gym class.

This art appears to be about awesome paper mache, but actually it's about Burmese migrant workers. Art can be tricky like that.

This art is about twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.

This art is about being the food, instead of the food eater.

Pictures from Thailand

New Year's Eve Update: Drunken Finnish Boy Declares Maybe He Likes Guys. Calamity Ensues.

New Year's Eve at our guest house, Respected Older Sister put on quite a meal. I promise pictures, as soon as I can find an internet cafe with a card reader. There was fried mackerel, laap, pad prik king, snapper braised in coconut milk and red curry paste, and more than I can remember, because there were also buckets of booze provided as a New Year's Eve treat. While Respected Older Sister is a hilarious force at this guest house, the yang to her yin is a man that we will call Fake Hippie. FH is maybe the owner, maybe ROS's husband (or brother)- who can know? I certainly couldn't figure it out. FH has long flowing hair, loves pot, and wants everyone to "be happy!" Forced merriment is a concept that simply doesn't work; it's like willing someone to love you. It is doomed to fail. Unless you ply your subject with intoxicants, which is what FH did.

There were eight or nine Thai hipsters that were staying at the guest house, two weird Dutch guys, a Russian couple (his name was Vladimir. No, really. He didn't seem that excited that my bicycle was also named Vladimir), a dude of indeterminable origin, as he never deigned to talk to us, and the three Finnish boys. I say boys because their mom must have had to pry the Nintendo controllers from their hands to send them on this trip. The Finns have unpronounceable, unremembered names, so we will call them Ulrich, Helmat, and Paco. Helmat and Paco were brothers, and Ulrich lived across the street from them in Finland, and they had been friends since kindergarten. Ulrich told us this joke: "Poles drink water. Russians drink vodka. Finns drink vodka like water." And so they did, except it was Thai whiskey mixed with Red Bull.

After dinner, almost everyone walked down to the beach for star-lit dancing and really bad techno, followed by fireworks. On the way, Helmat asks me if I have a girlfriend and I said no, I'm gay, that's my boyfriend, blah blah blah. That's when Helmat says "I think I might be gay too. I mean, I have a girlfriend now, but when I watch porn I usually watch gay porn." I don't really know what I'm supposed to say to that, so I just say "Uhhhhhhhh, maybe you should have a boyfriend instead of a girlfriend, then?". He says, with out obvious irony, "I'll think about that."

At this point, the Finns are getting drunk enough that they keep getting lost on the beach, in sight of each other, so Josh and I decide to go down the beach and do some good old proper nightswimming. So while the fireworks went off, I was floating in the South China Sea, thinking that maybe I am the luckiest person alive. The next morning, we wake up to find out that Helmat and Paco had gotten in a fist-fight over his revelation that he maybe likes guys when he is drunk, and their friend Ulrich had to pry them apart. Moral of the story: swimming at night is less dangerous than being Finnish. K Thanx Bai!

Beach Causes Retardation

**Because of the mentioned retardation, I posted this to the wrong blog, so now I am setting it right.**

No really. It does. Sitting in the sunshine and then running off to splash in the waves is making me dumber by the moment. I have spent the last two days memorizing EIGHT thai vowels. And I'll be honest. I'm not sure I actually have them down. But thanks to the side effects of the sun and water, I have become too dumb to notice.

Tonight, on the final day of the year, there are gigantic speakers being set up on the beach, as well as ridiculous amounts of beverages being laid in by the beach-side bars. The full moon has decided to sync with the evenings events, piling even more tinder onto the bonfire of twenty-something beach goers that are ready to puke into the surf to celebrate another passing year. Hurray! A pinnacle for western civilization!

I'm being entirely too cynical, because I plan to have more than the recommended dosage of beer and dance my ass off under the stars. Don't be surprised when I drunk dial you at your mom's house.

Eating Asia: Part The Second

So, we're back in Asia. Thailand this time. J. is studying advanced Thai in preparation for a possible fellowship in Bangkok, so I am coming along so that when we arrive this summer I will be able to ask for the bathroom and drinks. Why learn Thai, people ask? Because I often need the bathroom and drinks.

Anyhoo, thought we might start looking at food again, and this time I might actually continue posting. Sorry about that last summer. Things got busy and then everyone was mad and I cried.