Archive for the ‘Sensory Overload’ Category

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Notes on Memory and Context (and the Decontextualization of Travel)


2012
01.28

Posted in Nebulous Items, Sensory Overload | 27 Comments »

The dragon knows where it's at

I have a terrible memory. When I actually stop to think back on my life, to specific moments or sequences of time and events, I often draw a blank. Or if not a blank then a whole bunch of fuzzy blotches punctuated by non sequential images or impressions that may or may not be accurate.

You know that thing I wrote in my bio, about doing all this writing because after X number of years it gets hard to remember where I’ve been?  That wasn’t a throwaway comment. I really can’t remember. It’s like I have early onset Alzheimers or something.

There was a throwaway comment in Bill Bryson’s book, The Lost Continent, where he says something to the effect that when his father died, he had been taken by surprise to find that a part of himself had gone with him. All of the memories his father had held were lost. Memories of his childhood. Memories of people and places and events they had known together.  Those memories made up part of who he was, part of a very complicated puzzle of identity. He wasn’t just himself alone but rather a collection of other people’s memories. When his dad died, he took a chunk of that with him.

When I first read that book, I was in my early 20s and hadn’t spent all that much time away from home. I was still a part of the collective memory of Vancouver Island, of my rather large extended family, of things I’d known for a long time.  I don’t think that line even registered with me. I felt rooted, secure. Everything and everyone was still around me to tell me who I was and where I’d come from.

I reread it recently and it resonated. Not that anyone died recently, no. But I started thinking about how much self, how much memory is held outside the body, in other people, in places, in contexts. When you grow up, you make associations with sounds and smells and tastes and when you meet them again, your memory is jogged. When you know people a long time, you are continually reminding each other of where you’ve been, who you have been, what you have done.

I’ve been travelling a lot for the past couple of decades. New places every year, people coming and going– mostly going. My memories are spread waaaaaaaaay out in so many directions. I have no idea where half those people or places are. (more…)

18 comments

How Not to Travel in China During the October National Holiday


2011
10.02

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Posted in Nebulous Items, Sensory Overload | 18 Comments »

For about a month, our conversations went something like this:

“How about Thailand? If we fly in to Phuket, we could catch a ferry to X and go diving for 3 days…”

“No, no- what about the decompression time after and before the flight? I’m not keen on getting the bends. And my passport only has two free pages left. The lady at the airport in Bangkok yelled at me about that back in August. ”

“Well, how about the Philippines?”

“I’m not in the mood for a week of lethal public transport. And they’re flooding.”

“Japan?”

“Too expensive. Am unemployed, remember?”

“India?”

“I don’t have enough passport pages for a visa, remember?”

“Lijiang? Dali? Shangri La?”

“Too crowded.”

“Kashgar?”

“Flights are over $1000. Not really worth it for a 5 day holiday.”

“How about…Datong?”

“Datong? Where the hell is Datong?”

“It’s up near Inner Mongolia, in Shanxi Province. It’s the most heavily polluted coal mining town in China. Part of the Great Wall is there. They have the least holy mountain in Taoism. And a hanging monastery. And they are famous for noodles and dumplings.”

“Well, sure, let’s go!”

And so we booked our flight to Datong.  I felt a frisson of excitement whenever I thought about it. 5 days in Datong!

I practised saying it with all the wrong tones, drawling out a gleefully languid Texan Dah Tawng rather than the accurately abrupt Dàtóng. I’m going to Daaah Taaawng, I’d drawl to anyone who’d listen. I’m going to Daaaaaaaaaah Tawwwwnnng an’ am gonna clamb thayut Big Wall o’ China an’ I’m gonna eat me some noodles! Yeeehaw!  

Chinese colleagues scratched their heads in absolute incomprehension. Where? Where are you going? Sorry?

Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa Taaaaaaawg! 

Yes, I am that big of an unsocialized dork.

Look at what Datong has to offer and you can see why I was getting disproportionately giddy over it.

The Hanging Monastery. Photo courtesy of bigguyoz

The Yungang Grotto, by Theodora

And so on.  (more…)

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Pan-Fried Goat Milk Paneer with Chilies, Garlic and Ginger


2011
07.06

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Posted in Learning, Nebulous Items, Sensory Overload | 7 Comments »

Yesterday’s goat milk paneer recipe may have ended on a cliff-hanger. That final photo of the cheese cloth wrapped bundle of freshly drained cheese was only the beginning of the story. Paneer is a beautiful thing, and goat paneer has surprised me by being even better than cow paneer. It’s creamier and milder and a little less rubbery than my previous experiments. Or maybe I’m just getting better at making fresh cheese. Anyway, I just wanted to add a follow-up note for those of you who needed to know what happened next.

As you may recall, this is where we left off:

My bundle of joy

This lovely little fellow was left to drain for three hours in the sink, squashed by a full kettle of water. If you want, you can catch the whey that drips out and use it in cooking. It’s good stuff.  After it drained, I molded it into a roughly formed rectangle, about 3 cm thick, and put in in the fridge overnight, still in the cheese cloth but kept safe from fridge smells and drips by a zip-loc baggie.

This is what I hauled out this morning and sliced up. It tastes awesome just as is, but quite plain and mild. You could always add chopped cilantro or chilies in the earlier stages after draining but before forming it into a rectangle.

The drained and squooshed paneer is cut into happy little cubes (I did this the day after the cheese-making)

I googled no-bake paneer recipes because I wanted something that could be used in Asia without an oven, preferably with just something wok-like. I found this recipe on Cooktease.com.

For grinding

  • Green chilli – 3 no
  • Lemon juice –1 table spoon
  • Ginger garlic paste – 1 table spoon
  • Thick curd – 2 table spoon
  • Mint (Pudina) leaves – few
  • Saffron food colour – pinch
  • Sugar – 1/2 tea spoon
  • Cumin seed (jeera) roasted and powdered -1 tea spoon
  • Garam masala power – 1/2 tea spoon
  • Turmeric powder – 1/4 tea spoon
  • Red chilli powder – 1 tea spoon
  • Salt – as per taste

Anyone who has ever watched me cook knows that recipes are more like hints or suggestions rather than, say, something to follow. I go for the gist of the recipe.

Things I didn’t have: green chilli, thick curd, mint, saffron, red chili powder, food processor for making a proper paste.

What I did instead: three spoonfuls of Hunan chilli paste from Chinatown (quite spicy- I like my heat furnace-like), left over lemon juice from the paneer (I ended up using about 2 tbs), a 1/2 cm thick disc of fresh ginger the diameter of a quarter (chopped very finely), one clove of super enormous elephant garlic (equivalent to about 1/3 of an average head) also minced super fine, freshly ground cumin, some garam masala powder that I’d bought on a spice farm in Goa years ago but never opened (still fresh smelling), turmeric and sea salt. I just mixed all of these together instead of making a paste.

I’ll show you what I did.

I had googled a recipe but didn't have half the ingredients so I improvised

Marinade close up!

In a wok or a tava, on a low heat (I had it on 3 for electric), with a blorp of oil, fry gently until golden brown on at least two or three sides, if not four or more (if actually cubed and able to balance)

The recipe had called for a spice paste but I just chopped everything up. It worked fine.

Breakfast of champions!

The final product is marvellous: soft, goaty, gentle, creamy inside with a pan-fried golden outside that is spicy and garlicky and gingery and just fried-crusty enough to give it a lovely textural contrast. I think I got about 17 or 18 cubes out of that 2 liter jug of goat milk and we’ve eaten all but three pieces already. I called it breakfast but, damn, I’d eat it instead of pop corn during a film or as a side dish or for anything really.

 

31 comments

Notes on Going Home Again


2011
06.19

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Posted in Nebulous Items, Sensory Overload | 31 Comments »

One thing I’ve learned over the past seven years of blogging is to not post when you are sick, exhausted or pissed off. If you are sick or exhausted, it inevitably comes out in a strained, rather incoherent stream. If you are pissed off, the tone is all wrong and you’re likely to offend (even if writing about unicorns and bunny rabbits dusted with glitter and rhinestones, eating cotton candy in sun-kissed meadows).

Thus, my fortnight of silence here.

This post has had a dozen false starts. It has gone through several title changes. I’ve deleted the first paragraph about six times. It started out as an unfocused mish-mash of lamentations on the rain (yup, still Plum Rains, still humid, still grey), then took on the added baggage of my 5-day mutating flu last week. My half-delirious enforced bedrest took place over last weekend’s TBEX travel bloggers’ conference in Vancouver and the subsequent hockey riots, so there were semi-coherent rambling paragraphs about feeling totally out of the loop in the travel bloggy universe and baffled and annoyed by the idiocy of the rioters. On top of all this was the undercurrent of unexpressed sadness I’d been feeling over the end of term, end of my job, end of my intense two years with my students– my lovely, funny, sweet, bizarre students.

I'll miss you most of all, Scarecrow.

I’ve deleted all of those false-starts. Let’s start again. I want to talk about going home. (more…)

8 comments

Further Adventures in Chinese Baking: Chocolate Coconut Cookies


2011
06.04

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Posted in Nebulous Items, Sensory Overload | 8 Comments »

Rains over the lane houses below our flat. Bouncy rain. Dark skies.

I think the Plum Rains have started. This has been the driest year so far since we arrived in Shanghai in early 2009, though the low lying grimness hasn’t eased up. When I first moved here, I lived in a 4-story lane house out in the wilds of Pudong. My laundry line was a pair of bamboo poles jutting out from my bedroom window, slid into metal rings at the end. For the entire month of March that year, it rained solidly. I couldn’t dry my laundry as I hadn’t bought (or even found) a folding laundry drying rack and I couldn’t exactly hang them out on the bamboo poles in the rain.  I draped soaking wet jeans over the washing machine, underpants over the shower curtains, shirts over chair backs. I was always cold and damp. It wasn’t a particularly warm flat. It was a pretty flat, well decorated, but cold and poorly insulated. I shivered under blankets and admired the beautifully carved wooden furniture and lovely framed calligraphy.

Two years ago to this day I was running around the city trying to deal with the visa crap brought about by changing jobs, which involved registering with the police at this end of town, going out to Pudong to apply for a temporary visa extension (long story) then back to the police for a second registration with the new details. It rained so hard that the street puddles were shin deep and I was saturated. I squelched getting into my final taxi and left an imprint of my wet form on the polyester seat cover when I got out. Then it began to hail golf balls.

Today, it’s just rainy and dark, which is fine, as I had nothing urgent to do. Also, now I own a really awesome, huge rainbow umbrella so going outdoors isn’t as daunting. The rains here in Shanghai are quite saturating if you aren’t ready for them.

Today, in a fit of domesticity mirroring last week’s flurry of activity making peanut butter cookies for Unbrave Girl, I made chocolate coconut cookies for Doug. Tomorrow’s his birthday and he’s not really a cake kind of guy.

Let me show you how I made these cookies. I started with the bag of desicated coconut, which was a gift from Fiona (along with Yunnanese cheesecloth and a candy thermometer, which will be addressed in a future cheese-related post). The rest of the cookie had to be hunted down at the overpriced import shop. (more…)

16 comments

Baking in China (and other improvisational activities)


2011
05.28

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Posted in Nebulous Items, Sensory Overload | 16 Comments »

A few weeks ago, we were given a hand-me-down counter top oven. Not a toaster oven. Not a microwave oven. An oven oven. The kind that can, like, bake stuff and roast stuff and grill stuff. For those of you in fully developed, non-Asian countries, you may not realize the significance of this fact. I haven’t had a usable oven since I left home back in 1994 (and then left again in 1997, in 2002, etc).  Big burner+oven built-in thingies are not standard kitchen appliances in most of the world.

In Turkey, in my first flat in Kayseri in 2002, I shared a tiny toaster oven with my flat mate Elsa. We made toast. In my second year there, my next flatmate used it to melt the cheese on her crackers. We may have reheated a crappy frozen pizza once or twice.

My otantik Anadolu mutfağı. Note large bag of tea.

When I moved to Istanbul in 2004, I was ovenless for most of my first year until I accidentally invested in what I thought was a full-on counter-top oven but which turned out to be a handy storage unit for extra plates and cutlery. It held heat like an open window in winter.  I kept it for the next four years though, carting it from flat to flat to flat to flat (yes,Virginia, I did move every single freaking year– I’m restless, ok?)  I roasted a few rounds of root vegetables in it (took hours) and near the end I attempted a few skewers of relatively successful tandoori chicken (the yogurt tenderized it enough to endure the looooooooong cooking time required). I left it behind when I left Turkey, along with 85% of my other worldly possessions.

 

My last Turkish kitchen. You can almost see the oven in front of me. Yes, I had no counter. Yes, both burner and oven are set up on a lovely wooden table.

When I first moved to Shanghai and lived over in deepest, darkest Pudong, my flat had a 2-burner stove fit for woks and, well, that’s about it.  Doug’s flat in Puxi came with a device I initially mistook for an oven of some sort but it turned out to be a dish sanitizer (don’t ask), and a small microwave oven that we used for heating up milk for cappuccinos (the espresso for which was very carefully made on a massively expansive burner built for a huge wok, using a carefully bent bit of wire to keep it from plunging into the flame).

Over the past two and a half years, over the space of three different flats, we have invested in a proper rice cooker, an awesome clay crock pot, a well-seasoned enormous wok, and now, thanks to one of Doug’s colleagues who is being blessed with a BRAND NEW OVEN from her landlord, a hand-me-down counter-top oven that is most definitely not a toaster oven nor a storage unit for extra plates.

In the past week or so, I have roasted a whole pumpkin, a ton of garlic (both of which were mashed down into a lovely soup), and baked two rounds of scones a.k.a buttermilk biscuits a.k.a remarkably good improvised lumps of quickbread using available ingredients (yogurt! olive oil!).

Things I don’t have: baking sheets, affordable butter, cocoa powder or baking chocolate, mixing bowls, sieve for sifting, measuring cups (though I do have a rice scoop that claims to be one cup), a wooden spoon, granulated white sugar, spices.

Assemble possible ingredients. Note that inventory incomplete for 98% of recipes found in hand-penned cookbook.

One must make do, however. Especially when one is tasked with producing an appropriate Yay For Deciding To Stay in China gift for Unbrave Girl who made the brave decision to stay another term, against her better judgment. I knew I had to make cookies.

So I started googling cookie recipes to find something I could feasibly make with what I had scrounged up from the overpriced expat grocery store. I had flour (Chinese, but organic in theory), rare baking soda and baking powder, coarse dark brown sugar, a rare chunk of overpriced butter still rationed from our white-sauce-making binge last month, part of a jar of rare and overpriced Adams crunchy natural peanut butter, eggs, an inch of olive oil.

So I decided to go with this one, from Smitten Kitchen. The notes in [brackets] are mine.

Peanut Butter Cookies
Adapted from the Magnolia Bakery Cookbook

The brilliance of these cookies is that they have include two different formats for peanuts–three if you use chunky peanut butter. They’re crisp on the outside, and almost cakey on the inside. Bake a batch and then hide the results in the furthest and most forgettable reaches of your kitchen. You’ll thank me later.

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened [had to mortgage the oven for this-- imported Kerrygold all the way!]
1 cup peanut butter at room temperature (smooth is what we used, but I am pretty sure they use chunky at the bakery) [finished off the jar, which can hopefully be replaced for under 75rmb...]
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup firmly packed light brown sugar [all brown, all coarse, rather clumpy from humidity- could be interesting]
1 large egg, at room temperature
1 tablespoon milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract [nope but have some dried beans from Bali, unsoaked in booze]
1/2 cup peanut butter chips [nada]
1/2 cup chocolate chips [should I cut up a chocolate bar?]

For sprinkling: 1 tablespoon sugar, regular or superfine

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a large bowl, combine the flour, the baking soda, the baking powder, and the salt. Set aside.

In a large bowl, beat the butter and the peanut butter together until fluffy. Add the sugars and beat until smooth. Add the egg and mix well. Add the milk and the vanilla extract. Add the flour mixture and beat thoroughly. Stir in the peanut butter and chocolate chips. Place sprinkling sugar — the remaining tablespoon — on a plate. Drop by rounded teaspoonfuls into the sugar, then onto ungreased cookie sheets [no cookie sheets, used notepaper soaked in olive oil, placed over drip tray], leaving several inches between for expansion. Using a fork, lightly indent with a criss-cross pattern (I used the back of a small offset spatula to keep it smooth on top), but do not overly flatten cookies. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes. Do not overbake. Cookies may appear to be underdone, but they are not.

Cool the cookies on the sheets for 1 minute, then remove to a rack to cool completely.

This is how it worked out…

 

(more…)

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14 Notes on teaching English in a Chinese university, in the middle of a quiet burnout and impending unemployment


2011
05.14

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Posted in Learning, Nebulous Items, Sensory Overload, Teaching | 21 Comments »

1.

Two weeks ago I renewed my gym membership, which I had let lapse about six months ago.

Work in pairs, please

Sometime last Autumn, I had  figured that the five flights of stairs I had to climb 8 or so times a day between classroom and office were enough to keep me going through winter, combined with the 5km or so I walked whilst monitoring in the classroom, and the 40 or so minutes I walked to and from work during my commute . I carried a pedometer in the classroom as a clock. I averaged 12,000 steps during a six-hour teaching day, not including my commute.  In spite of this inadvertent regular workout, I still felt drained, exhausted,  and my trapezoidal muscles hadn’t been unclenched in years. My spinal column clicked.

Just after I found out that my job was probably going to disappear at the end of June, I decided that I needed to address my clicky back, my chronic insomnia, my taut trapezoidals, my general feeling of physical malaise.  If my life was going to go up in flames, at least I’d try to salvage my health along the way.  So, I rejoined my gym.

This post is not about the gym though. If I wanted to talk to you about running, I wouldn’t have dragged teaching into it. This is a post about teacher burnout. About what it feels to be somewhere in the middle of your own burn out.

2.

At the gym, I try to do about an hour on the treadmill, just to get the kinks out and to exhaust me enough so I can hopefully get some sleep at night. I haven’t slept more than 4-5 hours a night since we moved to Shanghai over two years ago.  An hour on the treadmill is a tedious endeavour which I mask with podcasts I’ve downloaded. I’m currently midway through a lecture series from Stanford University’s history department (20th Century US Civil Rights Movement). It’s a video podcast, filmed in an actual classroom, in an actual course.  And this is where the teaching part comes in.

3.

For an hour, several times a week, I watch a teacher walk into a classroom, calmly, methodically. He greets his class. The classroom is quiet, except for the few students who reply to his greeting. He starts immediately. He elicits ideas and concepts from the previous lecture. A few students put their hands up and give well thought out answers. Most of the time he lectures, telling stories and reinforcing the sense of place and context. The students take notes. Using pens that they had brought. In notebooks that they had brought. Pins drop with a thud.  For an hour, the lecturer speaks, occasionally elicits and gets at least one or two replies. At the end of the hour he thanks them and bids them goodbye.

If you are a teacher, this is possibly a wonderful moment of pure fantasy.

(more…)

24 comments

Breaking Free: The Karmic Irony Edition


2011
04.30

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Posted in Learning, Nebulous Items, Sensory Overload | 24 Comments »

Borrowed from legalnomads.com via danielbaylis.ca

Somewhere out there, Alanis Morrisette’s lawyer is counting the number of times today I have muttered something along the lines of, isn’t it ironic, don’t you think?

Somewhat akin to rain on your wedding day, or maybe finding a dozen forks when all you need is a knife, on the eve of being filmed for a series about people who have broken free from the metaphorical shackles of a conventional 9-5 cubicle job to live a life of international freedom, I was laid off. From my international, non-cubicle job. The one that lets me travel, paid, 18 weeks of the year.

I’m trying to figure out if I have now broken free from having broken free.

As many of you already know from my endless rants here, I’m a bit uncertain about Shanghai and I was quite uncertain about my job- it gave me a ton of autonomy, a lot of free time and a lot of almost painful solitude and loneliness and frustration.  I was feeling pretty burnt out from teaching and annoyed that I was too tired to be creative a lot of the time.

So from that perspective, the up-coming lay-off is a good thing. I still have a part time freelance examining job that I could do to pay the bills, picking and choosing when to work and how much to work. And I could write! For money, even! I could play my banjo! I could study Chinese again! I could pack up and travel whenever I wanted!

Awesomeness, yeah?

Yeah. No. Because I still live in China, and to live here you need a visa. A work visa. And it can get complicated.

(more…)

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Notes on the First Anniversary of my 7th Blog


2011
04.18

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Posted in Nebulous Items, Sensory Overload | 15 Comments »

Origins

I started this blog near the end of last April, impulsively, after I read the words ‘ephemera and detritus’ in a comment on a blog I’ve long since lost track of.  Possibly from Salon’s now defunct Broadsheet. Rather than just noting it down and having a chortle over the awesomeness of the imagery as I am normally wont to do, I bought the domain name.  Oddly enough, there was no competition for it.

I already had about five other dormant and semi dormant blogs at the time, most under my aliases koangirl and yaramaz.  I collected blogs, just as I had accumulated paper diaries during my Luddite years. Blogs take up less space, luckily, so my parents don’t have to buy more Ikea storage boxes.

 

The first post of my long-running LJ blog, May 2004 (The Further Adventures of Yaramaz in Turkeyburg)

This blog was born near the tail-end of my rather elongated 12-week self-paced writing course through MatadorU (which I do recommend, as it’s a very well-thought-out, very hands-on course). I had entertained vague ideas of trying to be a professional travel writer, as I had been writing about travel since, well, 1994, and people had told me I was rather good at it.  My ego was confident that it could be done, though my PayPal account could not vouch for my abilities. It held only the $50 (minus service charges) I had earned from two articles I wrote in mid-2009.  I am only prolific when writing for free.

Surely I had my 10,000 hours of practice by that point, I thought.  I had been writing since I was four, when I put together a graphic novel about a man, a dog, a house and possibly a cat. I had a box somewhere back home full of hand-written time-travel historical novellas (with detailed illustrated floor plans of secret passageways and hidden lairs) from when I was ten. I had a collection of detailed journals that reached up to my thighs when stacked atop one another. I had decades of awkward and embarrassing rambling dispatches from abroad under my belt.

All that needed to be done now was to fine tune things a little, learn all about new media marketing and all would be well.  But I hadn’t anticipated what actually ended up happening. I overdosed on writing. On travel writing in particular. By summer, I wanted nothing to do with it.

(more…)

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Blue Skies, Fake Britain and Imaginary Friends: It Gets Better (For Now)


2011
03.30

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Posted in Nebulous Items, Sensory Overload | 18 Comments »

Four days ago, I was quite dissatisfied with Shanghai and with living abroad in general. I wanted to go home to Canada, to go live in the forest and bake bread and raise goats and make really awesome goat cheese and to say, quite pleasantly, fuck it to this whole expat/travel lifestyle. I was fried. I’d had enough of being an outsider far from my family, far from my own language and far from my own past. I wanted to remember who I was again. I wanted to feel like I was fully inhabiting my own skin, not just trying on a million others for size.

I’ve been doing this (living/travelling abroad) for nearly 17 years now so it’s not something I just jumped into and found to be not up to hyped expectations. I’ve been in Shanghai for over two years now as well. Again, no newbie culture shock to be found there. I mean, it’s not even China that was shocking me. Objectively, I quite like the place, heavily censored internet, heavy metal rice and toxic water excepted. It’s a really easy place to live, to be perfectly honest.  I have a good job with remarkably affable students who make me guffaw with snorty laughter at regular intervals. I live in a lovely flat in a building with non-abusive neighbours. I have unlimited access to really good cilantro and hand-pulled noodles. It’s a good life, objectively.

Yes, a poke in the ear

Unfortunately, I’m not really an objective person. I’m crap at it. I can see the objective aspects quite clearly but that’s as good as it gets. The objectivity is skin deep, penetrating about as deeply as a finger poke in the ear. I could be surrounded by stacks of gold bullion (all mine!), adoring fans, an infinity pool with a Balinese view, and ten weeks of paid holiday per year and I’d still have a small nervous breakdown every Saturday morning like clock work, expressing my deep dissatisfaction with the way I’ve sculpted my life.

I mean, I don’t want gold bullion! It’s meaningless! And the fans are depriving me of my calming solitude whilst affording me no real companionship.  And an infinity pool? Nice, but I miss trees and the ocean and I don’t want to be yet another pampered foreigner in a delusional paradise (at least, not all the time).  And the paid holidays? Actually, those can stay. I like paid holidays.

The thing is, unfortunately, things can be perfectly marvellous in an objective way but if they aren’t what the inside voice is craving, then, well, they’re just wrong. And things have been quite frequently wrong here for the past two years. And before that, for 6 years in Turkey, on and off wrong (but with great, unbridled optimism!), and before that… pretty much more of the same. I’ve been on the move since 1994 trying to find that elusive combination of feeling like I belong, mixed with a lovely sense of surprise, challenge and mystery.

And what could be wrong with living in shiny, modern, international Shanghai, really?

(more…)

27 comments

Notes on Genocidal Tourism in Cambodia


2011
02.27

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Posted in Nebulous Items, Sensory Overload | 27 Comments »

One of the emotionally complicating factors of constantly living in and travelling through countries with troubled pasts is that you will inevitably end up having many conversations with and interacting with people who had lived through that troubled past.

And given that troubled pasts often involved death, betrayal, torture, imprisonment and whatnot, it’s a disconcerting feeling wondering which side the guy selling you a beer was on.  Or whether your student had any immediate family members or friends tortured and imprisoned (which happened in Turkey a few times, including once with a middle-aged business student casually mentioning that his father’s three best friends were executed for being communists after the military coup thirty years ago). Or whether the sweet middle aged Chinese dorm mother you work with daily ever betrayed her parents as a Red Guard, or if she had been pulled out of school to farm millet for her teen years, or if her family had starved to death during the famines after the Great Leap Forward.

(Side note: I’ll probably get myself on the Great Firewall’s bad list for this one. Too many key words. Damn.)

In Cambodia, I kind of knew which side most of the people were on, since the Khmer Rouge pretty much destroyed the country and its people quite thoroughly before finally being run out of town. So I started wondering about all the kind, smiling people we met: the tuktuk drivers, the waitstaff, the guides, the construction workers, the hotel staff, the armless and legless land-mined book sellers on the streets,  the children running after you keening out a phoenetic approximation of monnaieeeeeee monnnnaiiiieee.

I’m making these photos big, by the way, so they can be seen clearly and immediately. They will be wider than the parameters my theme gives me. This is intentional. I don’t want small pictures here.

 

The note from one bookseller

You know that everyone had been screwed over, whether directly or indirectly. It has been pretty hard to be Cambodian in the past 50 years and have not had a rather rough time (to put it mildly).  I read somewhere that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder levels ranged from 50% to 80%, depending on how it was defined.  The genocide took place between 1975 and 1979. I’m 36. I was born in 1974.

If I had been born Cambodian, my family and I would have definitely been murdered: we are full of teachers and educated folk, city dwellers mostly.  As a baby, it would not have been inconceivable that I would have been murdered alongside my mother. In the museum, I saw a portrait of a young mother holding her baby before being tortured and murdered. Both of them. The baby was tortured and murdered too.  It was their mug shot. The Khmer Rouge were very meticulous in their documentation: mug shots just after arrest, shots after torture, shots upon death.

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How much would YOU pay to be bit by a rabid monkey: More good times in Phnom Penh


2011
02.08

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Have I ever mentioned how much I loathe monkeys?  In India, on an island just off Mumbai, a monkey once mugged me with a snarl for my bottled water; in Ubud, in Bali, a monkey lunged at me and dug his claws into my leg and wouldn’t let go. I wasn’t even teasing him with out of reach bananas like the other people in the monkey sanctuary.  It was spite, pure and simple. Monkeys hate me. In Chinese astrology, I’m a tiger, and a tiger’s mortal enemy is apparently the monkey. I am rather inclined to agree.

I had finally recovered enough from my bout of inexplicable tummy bug to haul my exhausted, drained self out with Doug and his parents to tick off the sights of Phnom Penh. Bad move.  I should have known it would all end in tears- after all, this was the year that saw two of my laptops die in one week; this was the year where my wisdom teeth went apeshit on my jawline and wreaked all sorts of collateral damage; this was a year where all sorts of things had gone horribly awry. I should have known better than to tempt fate by going to Wat Phnom, the Wat that is at the top of a hill littered with wild monkeys. Yes. Wild monkeys. My favourite kind.

I steered clear of the monkeys. I have photos of myself off in a far corner away from the monkey, petting a very nice cat whilst the other tourists took pictures of a rather photogenic monkey that was apparently looking after two kittens. Only after the monkey walked away did I venture near the kittens to have a look.  Did I mention how much I loathe/fear monkeys?

My nemesis and the adorable cats

So, yeah. Cute cats, no monkey, I moved in closer. Aaaaaaaaand, yeah, the monkey leapt up from its hiding place and bit my arm, drawing blood from both tooth and claw.

Since I didn’t fancy dying of rabies on my holiday, Doug and I caught a tuk tuk to the local international medical clinic where I was lectured sternly for having lost my immunization records (they are somewhere in a garbage dump in Turkey, I imagine) and for having failed to have my booster shots for rabies, typhoid and diphtheria when my original vaccinations expired.  That would have been some time around 2008 when my yellow fever also expired. I’m a bit of a careless traveller.

Do you know what happens when you haven’t had your booster shots? You need an immediate round of immunoglobulin shots. How many you need is based on your weight. Oh, how I wish I could have been, say, 10kg lighter! If only I’d done a lengthy ashtanga yoga retreat before coming here! I could have saved about $200– not that $200 is a big deal when your total bill comes to $1299 (including a nice, new round of typhoid and diphtheria and rabies shots!).

Here, let me show you some pictures to remind you to get your freaking booster shots when they come due. Avert your eyes if you can’t handle pointy metal things or bleedy bits.  There were about 12 shots in all: one on each shoulder, 4 or so around each of the two puncture wounds and another on each hip, just above the underwear line.  Apparently I was the bravest little soldier they’d ever had in that clinic when it comes to rabies shots as most need to be held down, screaming for mercy. I cracked jokes.

The tuk tuk driver who took us out there (and who took Doug to the hotel and back to grab my credit card when we found out what the bill was going to come to) told me that we foreigners were just wasting our money on these fancy, expensive clinics. Whenever Cambodians get bit by a monkey, he said, they just cover the bite in Tiger Balm. After all, tiger is the nemesis of the monkey just as the monkey is the nemesis of the tiger. No worries.

Scary bits below the cut.

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Shouldn’t it be…harder?: On Travelling in Comfort


2011
02.07

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They named a whole street after me

Let me introduce you to a few key examples of how I have traveled in the past.

Let’s start at the beginning, when I was barely 20 years old. In 1994, I spent two months sleeping on my friend’s sofa in a small flat above a pagan shop in Galway, Ireland. I lived on packets of soup stretched with veggies from the market and a few pints of Guinness per day. I walked a lot. I hitch hiked. I looked out at the water and wrote a lot. I think I spent $3000 in just over three months.

On my way back home via London, I couldn’t afford a hotel so I took the tube out to Heathrow the night before my morning flight and slept on the benches in the Concord waiting room. They were crenelated benches so there were ridges digging into my hips and my shoulders. I couldn’t afford airport food so I just didn’t eat. It was a logical conclusion.

When I finally got home after a three day bus-ferry-tube-bench journey from Galway to Vancouver, I had to go to the doctor for muscle relaxants because I’d done terrible things to my trapezius from all my awkward sleeping positions combined with an ergonomically cruel backpack.

In early 1998, I spent a month in a small shack outside of Accra, Ghana, sharing a foam mattress on a wooden platform with my ex London flatmate, Jan.  We had no electricity, bucket showers, squat loos. I read a lot, wrote a lot, ate fufu and kenke and jollof rice and rode in trotros on pot holed red dirt roads with bags of chickens in my lap. I had flown to Ghana on Balkan Airlines via Sofia, Bulgaria. We had stowaways on our flight and most of the carry on baggage consisted on enormous square plastic zip-up bags full of the passengers’ life possessions. I spent approximately 150 pounds sterling that month.

For most of the mid-to-late 1990s, I slept in dorm rooms. Mostly in London, but also all over Europe. I rarely set foot inside a restaurant. Baguettes and cheese and tomatoes were my mainstays. A room of my own seemed laughably decadent and wasn’t even considered. I walked, I took buses, I walked even more. For three years, I lived out of a backpack.

I won’t bore you with an itemized list of all the ways in which I ruined my health and musculature and sanity with endless night buses and train station floor beds and bread, bread and more bread. I won’t rattle on about my daily calculations and re-calculations of budget and the gnawing I felt inside knowing that my 1500 pounds had to last from, say, November until June. I made it work. I’m still alive.

Phnom Penh decor

However, nearly 17 years since I first started traveling overseas and 9 years since I was first able to afford a room of my own (which was in Kayseri, in Cappadocia, Turkey, when my school provided me with my very own room in a shared flat), I am still hesitant to step out of my discomfort zone and embrace the fact that, by gum, I can afford to be comfortable, well fed and not in constant stress mode. I don’t have to pull back muscles getting from here to there. I don’t have to coast on the edge of self imposed poverty.

I’m in Cambodia right now, with Doug and his parents. Three Clevelanders and a Canadian in Phnom Penh. Yes, Virginia, Americans do travel.  We’re staying in a really cushy guest house near the riverside. Our room has a private pool. Yes. A private pool. And wifi. And a few loungey pillowed platforms for reading amongst our ferns beneath the lovely sunny skies. And A/C. There is a gorgeous reed tapestry on the wall. We’re paying $75 a night for this. For the next two weeks, we’ll be staying in similar places in Sihanoukville and Siem Reap. We’ll be hiring taxis to drive us from here to there. I think tonight we’ll be taking a boat cruise on the Mekong. We’re eating in restaurants– with cocktails on terraces, appetizers, mains, white table cloths. We’re eating out three meals a day. In restaurants. With white table cloths. Not bread and cheese, or more aptly, not noodles.

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Chinese New Year II: Explosions, Bunnies, Shuttered Doors


2011
02.03

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So the incessant festive explosions of last night continued until very very late, late enough for me to have filmed several chunks of an hour’s worth of explosions around midnight and still had time to upload, edit, save and upload to YouTube and then add it to yesterday’s post before it was calm enough outside to even try to get some sleep. That was sometime around 3am.

Around 5:30am this morning, a very enthusiastic fellow in our parking lot below decided to greet the new year with a long series of sunrise explosions. Throughout the day today there have been a million tiny, ear-breaking explosions everywhere. Children gleefully tossing lit firecrackers at my feet. Firecrackers burning, wedged into any crevice available and exploding as I pass. The startle factor is always near. The streets are littered with spent gunpowder and exploded red paper. The street sweepers with their home made twig brooms are kept busy.

Right now, on the first night of the new year, the skies are booming again. It sounds like Beirut, or maybe London in 1940. Boom boom boom boom, boom boom boom.

Hopefully it will ease up a little so I can get some sleep. Why do I need sleep? Well, because tomorrow we are flying to Cambodia for our Year of The Bunny 2-week New Year holiday!

The package came with 2 bunnies; we now have one in the kitchen (see above) and one on the front door.

(Feel free to reference the Dead Kennedys here. I’m okay with that. Also Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia.)

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Chinese New Year in Shanghai: Bunnies Gone Wild


2011
02.02

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As a Rooster, Doug’s mortal enemy in Chinese astrology is the Rabbit. And lo, come tomorrow, we shall be fully immersed in the Year of the Rabbit. There are bunnies EVERYWHERE. It’s like Donnie Darko with lots of red and gold and glitter. There are sparkly cutout stickers of bunny silhouettes on department store glass doors. Shop windows have huge bunny heads placed atop mannequin necks, as if rabbits wore feathered Ugg boots and cute tops.  Most household doors are decorated with one of the cardboard cut out new year signs, all red and gold and boldly bunnied. Including ours, which is totally bling. Ours has a creepy glued on emerald rhinestone eye. The bunny is watching. All Roosters beware.

A mean streak a mile wide

The streets are nearly devoid of humans now. Sidewalks are walkable for the first time since, well, last year at this time.  There are no cars and only a few bicycles. Shops are shut, shutters slammed down. I’d say there ain’t nobody here but us chickens, except the Doomed Chickens seem to have packed up and gone home to their filial Doomed Chickens back in their hometown. I don’t have to reign in my inevitable wave of sadness when walking down our street, noting the bound ankles of the ducks and the hugely puffed feathers of the chickens shivering in their cages, a foot away from the blood and feathers of their companions.

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