Archive for July, 2010

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On travelling and on staying put


2010
07.24

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Riding backwards on a bicycle built for three

We’ve been in Myanmar about two weeks now, travelling close to the ground (usually about 6 inches from the pavement when facing backwards on a trishaw) and grinding our way from Yangon to Moulmein to Kyaiktiyo to Yangon to Mandalay to Hsipaw and I’m tired.

For about two days I have been wanting to stay in bed with a book, a cup of tea (strong, milk, no sugar) and no need to look at things. I’m rather fried on looking.  While we were hiking to the hot springs this morning, using a hypothetical map similar to the optimistically wrong one in Yangshuo (the one with the vital bridge that wasn’t yet a bridge), ankle deep in very sucking mud on ox trails deep in village territory in the pouring rain, I started snarking (in my head- I’m not crazy enough to snark aloud just yet) about the concept of endless travel as being a good thing.

I have been living abroad, for the most part, since I was 19, but my tolerance for and patience with long-term mobile travel seems to come shuddering to a halt somewhere around, oh, let’s say, the 2 week mark. My record so far has been 2.5 months in Eastern Europe in mid-winter (starving, freezing, poor) a dozen years ago, trying to kill time in a cheap place between my UK visa expiry and my flight to Cape Town.  I believe I lost my mind a number of times during that trip. Similarly with the trip Doug and I embarked on when we left Turkey, 2 months from Mexico City to Costa Rica.

Why, you may ask, am I so bad at actually travelling when I seem to compulsively need to throw myself into scary, unknown situations on a regular basis?

Good question.

I’ve come to the realization that I’m much better at dealing with places when I have time to slowly work my way in. We’ve been spending around three or four nights everywhere we’ve been so far in Myanmar.

Soaked, muddy and tired

In those places, we’ve been running around, climbing things and shouting hello at everyone who greeted us (so many!) and flagging down motorcycle taxis and trishaws and trying to change money on the black market and trying to fathom what it is that we are doing here.

My introverted, hermitty brain has had a very hard time taking it all in and processing it. Hence the desire for bed and strong tea and a closed door to the outside world. Travelling like this makes my senses reel. I can barely even write about it.

Two years in Kayseri? Certainly! Four years in Istanbul? Yup! Six months in Cape Town? Three years in London? Aye! Places with a quiet space to retreat to, places where I can (slowly slowly) start to make sense of things.

That’s one aspect.

The other thing that’s been grinding through my brain is the idea that when travelling at speed, everything is pretty much a zoo or a theme park. No matter how much you research, no matter how humanely and consciously you travel, you’re still just speeding through someone’s town, looking at them, taking pictures of them, then buggering off. You may strike up conversations, learn some astonishing things, but really, you’re barely scratching the surface.

In the markets

When walking down the roads here, with doors wide open for brezes and shops half poured out onto the sidewalk, I want to peek in and ask the shopkeepers and inhabitants and cooks a million questions:

What are you doing?

What are you making?

What are you eating?

Where are you going?

I want to poke my head in and take photos of their sizzling pans full of curries and noodles, of their babies playing on the cracked bare wooden floor (the ones who shout out Hello!), of their marvelous melange of shop goods and bolts of cloth and electrical surge protectors (circa 1957).

But I find it very difficult to do so without feeling absurd and greedy and rude and horribly invasive.

I imagine being back at home in Canada, sitting on the front steps drinking coffee, when a tourist from RandomStan comes up and says hello in a language I may or may not speak, who then comes up to me and starts taking pictures of me drinking my coffee on my front steps, then says Goodbye! in that language I may or may not speak. Repeat this a few dozen times a day. I’m annoyed already.

When I live in a place for six months or six years, I have time to slowly poke my head into people’s lives, invited, welcomed. The subtle issues become apparent and recognized and dealt with.  There are so many subtle issues in Myanmar that I can’t even begin to tackle them in only 25 days.

We aren’t unwelcome here (Myanmarians are remarkably sweet and open, considering what they’ve been through) but I feel like I’m tip-toeing through their sitting rooms at times (I’m not but, really).

Maybe I should just move here.

Will you be my neighbour?

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On the road to Mandalay, eventually


2010
07.19

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He learned to fix brollies

You can actually fly to Mandalay from Yangon for about $75US, so the romance of the road is somewhat lessened.  After bouncing around the Mon State south east of Yangon for the past week, I’ve come to value the brevity of flights.

I’ve learned a few other things here, which I’ll note briefly. I’m saving up most of my ideas and stories for when we return to Shanghai in early August. The three layers of proxies that I have to work through here are exhausting and I lose a lot of material when pages suddenly declare themselves to be invalid.

What I have learned (briefly)

1. After running around Shanghai in a tizzy before we left, trying to hunt down unmarked, uncreased, brand new American dollars in all denominations and failing (I got mostly $100 bills- Chinese banks and Chinese black market changers have very few smaller bills) I’ve discovered that the hotels we have stayed in in Myanmar have not only been not as fussy about the condition of the money as I’d been led to believe, but they’ve given change in dollars that was in better shape than what I’d given them. You must pay for hotels, trains, flights and most tourist sites in $US.  Since you’re only allowed to bring in $2000US cash and there are no ATMs, no places that take travellers’ cheques and no realistic ability to use Visa , the idea that some (if not many) of your dollar bills might be not up to par was terrifying. On the Lonely Planet forums, one fellow said $600 of his $2000 was rejected. So far, only one $50 bill was rejected (by immigration at the airport) but it was later happily converted into new $10s by our guesthouse in Yangon.

2. The fact that we had a very limited chunk of funds that could be refused on a whim (my rejected $50 had a crease), combined with last summer’s debacle in Indonesia where we went horribly over budget due to every affordable hotel between Yogyakarta and Denpasar being booked solid in advance, made us quite nervous about money before we came here. This niggling fear lasted until last night when we did a quick inventory check and discovered that even though we’d been hiring cars and eating in not-so-cheap places and staying in mid range hotels with AC and fans and no bedbugs for nearly ten days out of out 25 total,  I was down to $1700 from my original $2000. Yes. $300 in ten days. Ten comfortable days. I think we’ll be fine.

3. The lack of tourism (read: near isolation) has meant that Myanmar has been an absolutely calm and pleasant place to travel in.

She sells Longyi

People smile and say hello and you smile and say hello. No one stalks you or demands that you take their taxi. In the Bogyoke market in Yangon, no one launched into an unwanted sales pitch. No arms reached out to grab us. Our guest houses have contacted our next guesthouses and booked our accommodation for free; they’ve gone out and bought our bus tickets and train tickets for us. Yesterday Doug needed to get his scraggly scary beard trimmed (not shaved) and Miss Hla Hla (our guesthouse lady) sent one of her boys out with us to get it done properly at the barber down the street.  It feels like we are being gently transfered from one nurturing safe hand to the next.

4. The food is marvelous. I’ll be doing a big post about that when I get back to Shanghai when I can upload my photos. Let’s just say we are considering moving here someday. It’s that good.

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Notes on Yangon (which is also Rangoon)


2010
07.12

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1. Burmese script initially reminded me of the patterns woodbugs make when tunnelling into a two-by-four, then I decided it looked like binary code without the 1s, as seen through a wonky dot matrix printer, and now I’ve finally reconciled myself to the idea that it’s really just a series of counterfeiters’ adaptations of the Chanel logo.

2. You can’t row up to see her house on that lake. Nor can you casually stroll past. There is security.

3. There are , very few tourists here.  We went to a big park around a big lake with a lovely wooden boardwalk encircling the water’s edge and saw no one. We walked for half an hour and passed one other couple. We saw no foreigners except the Frenchman in our guesthouse. We are very obviously not in China anymore.

4. They really do scrutinize your dollars. So far, one $50 bill and one $1 bill have failed to pass muster. Luckily I’m spending all my money in kyats, drowning my unsorrows in tom yam soup with prawns the size of a small cat, chased down with fresh lime gin fizzes and taxi rides in disintegrating taxis.

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From Yangon, with sanity


2010
07.11

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Obviously no one briefed the censors that I was coming. This site is one of the only things out there that isn’t blocked.  Thank you for your trust, Junta. Appreciated.

Sometimes there is a road; Sometimes there isn't

We arrived yesterday morning after a long (and yet not long at all) journey from Shanghai: our flight out to Guangzhou sat on the tarmac for hours, waiting for clearance.They served us meals and drinks and more drinks before we had even taken off. Not a good sign.  It was well after midnight before we were able to steer our sleep-deprived bodies down the long industrial subterranean passages toward the Guangzhou airport hotel. Note to self for future: 3 minutes from Departures doesn’t necessarily mean it’s close to Arrivals.

Look up!

But Yangon. We are in Yangon or Rangoon or Bob or whatever it ought to be referred to as these days. It smells like incense and Tom Yam paste.  It’s hot but not as hot as Shanghai tends to be. It’s humid but not unbearably so. I glow after a long walk. My skin looks better than it did in China and we’ve only been here 36 hours. It’s possibly from all the fresh lime juice and chilies.

We walked over 22000 steps yesterday after we landed, marching around the city, playing hopscotch on the mishmashed paving stones. Like in Ubud last summer, there are huge gaps in the pavement that a dog could get lost in. Others tip and tilt. If you walk home at night, it isn’t much lit and it is easy to find yourself in a ditch. We were careful.

In Yangon there are streets lined with fortune tellers and with bookstalls.

The bookstalls aren’t so much stalls as collections of old books: 1950s guides to repairing circuitry, carefully re-sewn collections of colonial writings on aged paper, useful phrases in English, books in Burmese in a scripts I have yet to fathom.  People read a lot here. So many people can be found at their stall or on a step or in a tea stall, hunched over something, anything wordy. I find it very soothing.

Curled up with a good book

Fat, rich, well read

The fortune tellers are equally ubiquitous. We caved and had ours done near the end of yesterday before the afternoon rains broke.  We had interviewed a few for the job to see if they had enough English to make sense to us.

The one we chose in the end told me that 1. I am good with books, travel and playing the lute and 2. I’m very fat and will get even fatter as my life progresses, which is apparently a really great thing and 3. I’ll write a novel, win the lotto twice, buy a white car, and 2 houses (I’ll rent the less-nice one out) and 4. I’ll have some stomach ailments in my 60s (not needing surgery) and will die in old age at home, very pleasantly.

Doug’s was the same, nearly, except he won’t get fat, nor will he write a novel or get 2 houses or a car.

He will  win the lotto 3 times, besting my 2 times.

You can see it all here

Masala Toeshay and strong, spiced chai

In the mornings, the streets and their crooked pavements are lined with vendors, with their bottoms and their wares placed firmly down on the ground: all sorts of veggies, plucked chickens with uncomfortably wrung necks, vats of boiling oil frying long dough sticks for breakfast.

There are pans of samosas, pakoras and bhajis.

We walked a lot, before everything opened. When things started opening  this morning, we stopped in the New Delhi restaurant and I drank strong dark spiced chai from a metal cup in a metal saucer and Doug ate many chapatis with dhal and tamarind and chutney.  Breakfast of champions.

For lunch, we had biriyanis from another Indian place across town, with huge stacks of spiced  rice and veggies and lime pickles  for a dollar.

This city reminds me of Mumbai, which was unexpected given its geography.

Also unexpected is the very visible Muslim population and the plethora of churches.

Everyone is very calm.

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(101 Things About Shanghai) Fake Books


2010
07.09

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One of these books is 2 kuai lighter than the other

One of the things about living in faraway lands that can be frustrating for a nerd like me is the frequently limited access to English books. In Turkey, they were quite pricey but I bought them anyway. A girl has needs, you see.

I had to leave 75% of them behind when I left (there may still be a MaryAnne Memorial Library in the teachers’ room at EF Levent), amounting to about 1000 lira’s worth of abandoned books. I could have travelled in Bulgaria for a month on what I had spent on books. However, books are a necessary part of my sanity.

Enter Shanghai and the marvellous Chinese disregard for copyright law.

You can buy real books here in many places and pay real book prices. You get a pretty good selection too, if you want to follow that path.

There are, however, alternatives.

There are the guys with the wooden carts that park themselves on random street corners in neighbourhoods known for their laowai populations. They veer heavily toward zeitgeisty business tomes, like Microtrends or Outliers or The Black Swan, as well as rather unexpected Haruki Murakamis or Candace Bushnells or Salman Rushdies. I’ve bought a few shrink wrapped novels from them. The same titles can also be found in fake dvd shops, again and again and again. These ones generally sell for around 15rmb (just over $2).

Yesterday I discovered a new source on Shanxi Nan Lu, near Nanchang Lu: a bookshop that mainly stocks Chinese books, with a shrink-wrapped laowai section at the front. I found a few books there that I hadn’t seen in other places. Since we’re going away for a month to Myanmar tonight, I thought I’d stock up on reading materials. I asked the woman how much my books cost. She took each one separately and weighed them. The thicker book was 10rmb, the lighter one only 8rmb.

I think this was the first time I’d ever bought books by weight.

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(101 Things About Shanghai) Sidewalk? You want to walk on the sidewalk? Whoaaaa!


2010
07.08

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You want to walk on the sidewalk? Yeah, no, sorry, sidewalks are for, like, naps

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(101 Things About Shanghai) Fast Food for Sino Taste Buds


2010
07.08

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My close up, Mr DeMille?

One of the things I’ve noticed in my years of living elsewhere, is that multinational fast food places seem to try really hard to court their local markets by attempting to mould their products into something vaguely resembling the local tastes.  I remember seeing a Mc Turco in Turkey, which was some sort of scary meat product on a fake pide; in London, there were (Mc) masala spiced fries and vegan burgers; in Cape Town, with its huge Muslim population, all KFCs were completely halal and noted that fact quite clearly in big signs above the counter.

Here in Shanghai, you can buy taro root pies (they are soft purple and look like they should contain a synthetic grape-flavoured custard) or banana pies at Mc Donalds. At KFC you can get battered scallops, congee (watery rice porridge), Beijing duck wraps, and shaobing (round  toasted cakes covered in sesame seeds).

When I was walking to Nanjing Dong Lu to get my mystery meds for the first aid kit yesterday, I passed through an underground walkway, where the walls were completely covered in KFC ads. What I found fascinating about them was how they had ever so slightly tweaked the generic norm to fit Chinese tastes.

Bitter gourd, rice, mushroom sauce and chicken strips

1. A great big heaping pile of rice in the center of the plate. No meal is a meal without a shitload of rice. No rice? No meal!

2. Bitter gourd as a side dish. I dare you to serve stir fried bitter gourd at a KFC in St Louis.

3. People eating everything with spoons. This one confused me- gringos would have used a fork and I thought people here would use chopsticks. Maybe a spoon is seen as a halfway point in the globalization of fast food?

4. Food served in lots of thick sauce. The Shanghai taste runs toward heavy, sweet, thick braised foods.  Fungi are big as well, hence the mushroom sauce. Gotta have your fungus.

5. Red background- Luck? Fortune? Prosperity?

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Compare and Contrast


2010
07.07

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I’ve been stupidly busy this week, between finishing up my year’s marking (done!), trying to find brand new, unmarked, unfolded American dollars for our trip to Myanmar on Friday (the junta is fussy about money and they don’t have ATM machines or take credit cards anywhere), and trying to assemble a first aid kit in pharmacies which not only don’t carry the brands or generic names I’m familiar with but also have a whole other system of medicine based on entirely different principles (got an upset stomach from street food? Hm, how’s your qi? Maybe your spleen is too warm?) and written in a script I still can’t read.  I’m still not wholly done the latter two.

Since not only internet access but also basic electricity are not exactly reliable in Myanmar, I don’t know how often I’ll be able to update this. I have a feeling photos may be out of the question. We’ll see.

For now I’ll leave you with this:

Shanghai in the pouring rain (from our flat) last week:

Yongjia Lu in the rain

One of the, er, mistier days last week

Very nearly almost a starry starry night (but not quite)

It all cleared up yesterday’ish and tonight, we saw our first almost-sunset in ages.  As you can see from the photo above,  visibility has increased from nil to greater than nil. I do appreciate having a 16th floor flat with big picture windows on nights like tonight.

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(101 Things About Shanghai) Plum Rains


2010
07.04

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Last night around 10, my immune system decided it felt like inviting a cold around for a visit.  Just as I was readying myself for what ought to have been a full night’s sleep, my nose went awry and my eyeballs hummed. This alone would have been fine, except that when I finally dozed off around midnight, I was woken at 3am by a massive explosion, with light and noise and the lingering sound of water falling.  I immediately thought the AC above the bed had decided to follow in the footsteps of our previous bedroom AC, which was renowned for its nocturnal waterfalls.

This, I soon realized, was not an exploded AC. Shanghai had decided to spring the full force of  its June weather on us a bit late. The Plum Rains had finally begun in earnest.

Nocturnal Puddling

I padded into the darkened living room and looked out our big wall of window. The city from 16 floors up was a deep dark gunmetal grey with rain visibly falling at a vertical angle and sheet lightening illuminating the skies, bolts only a second apart from the thunder. The building shook. I didn’t get much sleep. I sniffled with my cold and stared at the ceiling that was dark and then very very bright and then dark but soundtracked with deep rumbles.

By morning, the puddles were gone and we walked to get our coffee, umbrellas unopened.

Last year, they started in early June. Sudden deluges, thunder, lightening, puddles deep enough to lose a cat in. At one point, whilst I was trying to hail a taxi to get to the police for residence registration before they closed for the day, it started hailing golf balls. In June. Then it rained even harder, leaving the icy golf balls bobbing in the sudden puddles. By the time I found a taxi, I squelched and left a full body imprint on the cushion covers in the back seat.

In the early morning rain

They call them the plum rains because in places where you can see nature, plums will grow with help from these rains. There is little to no nature here so we just accept the nocturnal explosions and ankle deep puddles and lack of consoling plums.

This evening we went out to eat at the Dong Bei place down the street where we always go when we are too lazy or tired or bored or overwhelmed to cook or shop for groceries. We walked with our umbrellas as walking sticks, closed. It was humid but not raining. Did I mention how humid it is these days? The air is heavy and thick and makes my chest ache from its weight. Elegant women walk past with huge sweat stains forming under their arms and in the small of their back.

We  ate our braised cabbage and garlicky broccoli and spicy fried eggplant and peanutty gong bao ji ding and sipped at our melamine cups of semi-chilled Harbin pilsner and watched as the skies exploded and threw down an impossible amount of water in a brief period of time. The waitress threw open the door and watched it fall until the customers next to the door complained and she sheepishly closed it.

And yet no plums in sight

People don’t like the rain here. They tend to leap out of its path as though it were falling acid. When the skies briefly opened this afternoon on our way back from our training course (which I did on no sleep due to the storm, with a raging cold), at the first drop of rain the man walking toward us jumped and shrieked (literally) “Oh shit!” In English. With a Shanghainese accent.

Anyway, the waitress shut the door and everyone went back to their rice and braised veggies.

When we left twenty or so minutes later, it was still raining and the sidewalks were lakes.

My feet were completely submerged. The puddle was ankle deep and extended part way across the road. We waded through and walked home, rain pounding on the taut fabric of our umbrellas.

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What I Do


2010
07.03

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How I Spent my Saturday ***

I haven’t spoken much about my job here. I have another site for that; if you want to subject yourself to much rending of garments and gnashing of teeth you can go there for the finer details. On a much broader level, I thought I’d introduce you to what I do.

There is a widely held mythology out there (especially on EFL forums) that says 1. all teaching jobs in China are easy peasy oral English positions that don’t require much more than Caucasian features, an intact cerebral cortex, and an ability to speak English to a convincing degree, and that 2. teaching salaries are crap in China.

Not true. If my job consisted solely of no-brainer oral English classes I wouldn’t have to spend this weekend doing professional development for marking writing exams. If salaries are truly crap here, I would never have been able to afford that 50rmb passion fruit margarita afterwards at Cantina Agave on Changle Lu.

I work for an Australian university that has joint-venture degree programs in Shanghai. There are many, many similar programs in universities all over China, requiring varying degrees of experience and qualifications. You teach academic skills (like essay writing or presentation skills) to Chinese students who want to study abroad (or whose parents tell them they want to study abroad).  The hours are sane (no evenings or weekends and for me, only 4 days a week) and the holidays are long (I work about 8 months of the year). The workload is often heavy though, and I usually have piles of papers stacking up that need marking. I definitely earn my salary.

For those of you out there (and there are many) who disparage EFL as a cowboy backpacker field full of maladjusted  losers who can’t get a job/date/life back home and who really ought to just go back to their home countries and settle down and get a real job, I’d like to put forward an idea:

What we have going on here is pretty damn real. We may not be in Cleveland or Vancouver or wherever home is, and we may not be working in a cubicle or making car payments or defining ourselves or our goals by conventional social markers, but we are definitely living our lives in a real and serious way (well, actually, no, not really- see my fake essay marking criteria above). The longer I live away from home, the more possibilities I see for other ways of living your life.  There really are no rules. It’s very liberating when you finally realize that. We feel quite settled here, in a really unsettled, nomadic kind of way.

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I’m #8! I’m #8! I’m #8!


2010
07.02

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In China, anyway. Andrew at Go Overseas.com has just sent me a purty li’l badge for me to attach to the lapels of this site. If only I could figure out the code for lapels. If someone could tell me how to permalink this thing (somewhere other than just my writing page where I gave up and put my NaBloPoMo badge) I’d be grateful. My coding skills suck. I may be a nerd but I’m not that kind of nerd.

Here’s my prize:

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