Ice Queen

It's pretty rare that I randomly run into people I know when I'm out and about running errands here in Bangkok, but today I ran into a friend of mine while at the pharmacy. It is always amazing to me that I never seem to run into people I know when I'm there to buy face cream or nail polish. It's always when I've got the anti-fungal cream, stool softener, and a turkey baster* that I hear the familiar voice behind me and see that person's eyes glance down at the contents in my hand.

Anyway......

Yesterday I went to my favorite temple here in Bangkok. It's a temple made completely out of marble with absolutely beautiful detailing (I wrote about it once before here). It's like an ice castle. It has fountains that make quiet trickling sounds, and monks wandering around everywhere, and a graceful Buddha, and the ashes of Rama V. I thought that it would make a nice mini-retreat so that I could do some prayer and meditation.

Getting there is an adventure in and of itself, as it requires taking a motosai to the SkyTrain, changing lines on the SkyTrain, and then getting off at the river pier. It then requires taking a river taxi 15 stops, and once you get off you must amble through a flower market in order to find a tuk tuk that will take you the rest of the way. Planes, trains, and automobiles. It is a wonderful journey, perfect for a Sunday afternoon when I SHOULD be finishing my final project for my 45 clock hours of SEI training (which, um, I should be doing right now instead of blogging....). When I got to the temple, instead of the peace and quiet and fountain sounds I was expecting, I was greeted with swarms of people, and tents, and television monitors capturing what was happening inside. The people at the ticket counter said that it was a ceremony for initiating new monks, but that I was more than welcome to go inside and observe it from the back.

I took off my shoes and tucked myself away in a corner of the temple and watched. The monks had their BRIGHT orange ceremonial robes, bright yellow belts, and they were carrying their alms bowls in silk sacks that were slung diagonally across their bodies. I realized after looking through my Luang Prabang photos that I have taken an insane amount of monk photos over the years. I have also purchased many monk photos and monk candle holders and monk teak figurines, and it is pretty safe to say that I have a complete obsession with monks. I think they are absolute works of art--their robes and bowls and chanting and slow, flowing movements. This was the first time that I was ever able to witness, close up, a monk ceremony. The chanting was so beautiful, and the routine of it all was done with a choreographed reverence, and I just closed my eyes and listened. The inner temple is like a candy chamber--stained glass windows and gold dharma wheels and floral offerings--and it was an hour of pure and total peace where I just shut off my mind and absorbed everything in that room. The fluttering hearts and the growling chants and the two-part harmonies and the deep prostrations.

After leaving the inner temple I wandered around and looked at the Buddha images in the courtyard area, and photographed the red Chinese-style footbridges that arch over a small canal that flows between the temple and the monastery, and sat on a bench taking more photos of monks. I truly did not want to leave, but the sky was looking ominous and I had made plans to meet a friend for dinner.

I climbed back into a tuk tuk that took me to the river pier. I bought a green Fanta (omg....green Fanta is CRACK IN A BOTTLE, and apparently not available in the U.S.!!) and sipped it while watching the catfish in the river right below the pier literally climb over one another to catch the breadcrumbs that vendors were selling to passersby. Their bellies were flashing and gleaming like tongues, and the water was churning in a muddy sludge, and the entire mass of fish bodies was peppered with plastic pieces of trash, and they made a fleshy slapping sound as they struggled against one another, and really the whole thing was just terribly unappetizing.

I watched the sun struggle to set through the thick billows of clouds between the emaciated ribs of the Rama 8 Bridge. Once the river taxi came I sat behind an older foreigner with a tidy bun in her hair and a Nancy Chandler map across her lap and the two of us took pictures of river slums and fine hotels and fishermen and tugboats.

I made it home right before the torrential downpour began, and had a lovely dinner with a lovely friend (though the Fanta gave me gut rot and I could FEEL my teeth decaying).

I will miss weekends like this.

*Purely hypothetical :)

Click

Sheesh....lately this blog has been feeling like that relative that you know you should contact more often than you do, but then the more time that passes that you don't contact him or her, the harder it is to get back into contact because you feel like such a douche for not getting in touch earlier so you just end up not doing anything at all and then that person passes away and you feel like an even bigger douche.

Lesson of the day: Get in touch with that relative. I started writing to my grandfather again several months before he passed away, and I'm glad that I did.

Alrighty......

Luang Prabang reminded me quite a bit of Ubud in Bali. Both places have a ton of hippie backpacking tourists with really intense BO who are all about the local beer and have massive collections of stringy bracelets. Both places have incredibly charming spas, restaurants, and quaint-but-overpriced shops that charge five times as much for an item that you can get at a market for a song. Both places are rich in history and cultural offerings and amazing textiles, and, in spite of being a haven for tourists, both places maintain their absolute authenticity, their unique footprints in the world. They are unequivocally themselves, and in both places I found myself feeling breezy and blissful and like life could just not possibly get any better.

Luang Prabang is great in that you can really see the whole thing in about a day/day and a half, so you don't need to be running around with your nose in your guidebook, checking things off of your packed itinerary while also learning about the history and culture and language and current events in order to make the most of your time. And believe me--I loooove to travel that way as well. However, since I had three days in Luang Prabang and could easily check off all items on my itinerary, it left time for some unexpected little treats.

I talked to a lot of people--from novice monks to ancient hilltribe women to fascinating expats--and one of the most fascinating was an older Dutch gentleman who is married to and has a baby with a Lao woman, and I happened to meet him by pure chance. I didn't pack any books for this trip, as I didn't want anything to distract me from writing in my journal, but as I headed back from the night market that first night I found myself wanting to read something mindless. I hopped into a little restaurant/gallery that has a book exchange (Luang Prabang has a ton of places where you can exchange books, which is awesome and much appreciated by the hippie backpacker crowd), picked up a book about ghost stories, and turned my attention to the photos on the walls. I have always been a fan of photography, but for some reason have become even moreso since living in Asia. There are just so many opportunities for incredible pictures, and the pictures on the wall were an absolute work of genius. There were pictures of hilltribe women in their full regalia, pictures of fishermen casting their nets on the Mekong in the hazy early morning hours, pictures of an opium addict indulging his habit with a boyish oops-I've-been-naughty look on his face. These were like pictures out of National Geographic, except even more raw and human and beautiful. The owner of the gallery--the Dutch man--approached me (wiggly baby in tow) and said that he had taken the pictures. I then spent the next thirty minutes picking his brain about each of the pictures, each of his subjects, and how he was able to do all of this amazing work.

The pictures completely haunted me all day the next day, and then I went back the following day--the day I left--to buy a bunch of postcards of the pictures (and though the postcards are lovely, they simply do not do justice to the work). The Dutch man made me a cappuccino and we sat and chatted for awhile. He talked about the fact that he does commercial and high fashion photography in order to support his family, as his artistic work does not bring in the money, which is just so unfortunate (but a familiar tale of woe for many talented artists). He also talked about photography as an agent of social change, and he has taught photography to impoverished youth in big cities and rural areas as a way of helping them to truly LOOK at the world around them and observe their own transformational power within it. He was interested in starting a sort of photography "school," and told me about some of the other exciting projects that expats and locals were doing in Luang Prabang to help increase the life chances of children. I just sipped my cappuccino and looked at the faces on the wall and just felt like the world is pretty freakin' amazing.

I have to go to work now, and there is a TON that must be done before my contract ends in just over two weeks. I am stressed and frazzled, and the fact that I lost a bunch of important files the other day due to a virus on my USB drive really didn't help matters. I know that everything will get done, and I've mapped out a nifty (if packed) little road map for it all, but I can't help but wish I could be back in Luang Prabang, ambling along the muddy vein of the Mekong, taking pictures of flowers, and feeling completely and utterly at ease.

Heaven on Earth

You know those moments of pure, unfiltered happiness and awe when you're like, "Holy crap, is this really my life?" That's kinda what Luang Prabang has been like. It has been perfection, perfection, perfection. This place is heaven on earth. I have exactly zero desire to leave tomorrow.

I'm in a crowded internet cafe filled with unshowered travelers (um, myself included), and it is starting to smell like feet. I am therefore going to keep this short.

I will post more upon my return (though the next two weeks are gonna be hell on earth with everything that needs to be accomplished), but I just wanted to go on record as saying that this has been a truly delicious trip, and I want to remember this feeling and these images forever.

Weeks

The time that I have left in Thailand can now be measured out in weeks, which is so strange, because there were many times when I felt like it would never, ever end. That there were just these huge, gaping expanses of time that seemed like they would just...go on...forever. By the way, this has been both a good thing and a bad thing at times (though more often than not a GOOD thing). And now....I have three more weeks of work left, after which Peter and I will be traveling to Vietnam and Chiang Mai, and then it's back to the U.S. for good.

I am feeling strangely at ease with everything. I still have quite a few loose ends to tie up at work, I have some specific purchases to make for myself before I go, and I want to to a whole lotta gift shopping. I need to finish some scrapbooks and make sure that my pen and paper journals are all updated so that all of my little adventures are documented, I need to finish my online class for my 45 clock hours of SEI training in order to keep my AZ certificate valid (which has been a HUGE pain in the ass), I need to visit Ayutthaya and maybe do one more beach trip, and, um, I need to FIND A JOB (the whole job search process has been a lot more complicated than I had anticipated, but something will work out), but I am feeling calm about it.

I am feeling very sad, but I also have a wonderful sated feeling. I think part of it is because, once my loose ends are tied up, I will have accomplished everything I set out to do, seen everything I wanted to see, done mostly everything I wanted to do (I would need ten lifetimes to REALLY do everything I wanted to do), and then some. I did not finish my memoir (there's time for that later) or learn Thai (yeah, I kinda gave up on that one....), and LORD KNOWS this experience has had its massive, massive, gut-wrenching imperfections, but one thing that I have realized is that you don't learn nearly as much when things are easy from start to finish. As Peter told me on the phone the other night, if you are not making mistakes, you are not challenging yourself enough.

I'm off to Luang Prabang, Laos, in an hour. This trip is significant for three reasons: 1.) It's the first trip where I actually took a day off of work in order to extend it, 2.) It's a place I've been DYING to see for so long, and 3.) With the exception of my Ayutthaya trip and possible beach jaunt, it's my final solo journey. After this, all of my trips will be with Peter.

I don't think I can really fully prepare myself for how much my life is going to change in the next few months, but I really feel ready for anything. And for now, I'm going to go buy some textiles (though I reeeeally don't need more stuff to ship back to the U.S., so I will try to restrain myself....but, textiles! Hand woven! As part of a rich cultural tradition! Yay!), eat some baguettes, visit some temples, and enjoy my final moments of alone time before beginning life as part of a cohabitating couple.

I'll write about my trip upon my return!

The Plague

We had a meeting today to discuss possible school closure due to swine flu. This meeting took considerably longer than usual on account of having to pause every time the roll o' thunder that is my horrific hacking cough emanated from my mouth. After reviewing a comprehensive list of swine flu symptoms, my coworkers eyed me suspiciously and then suggested that I go see the doctor. While backing away slowly. And spraying the air around me with disinfectant.

No worries...there is no swine flu wreaking havoc on my immune system. Just your garden variety chest infection. In any case I've been ordered to wear a medical mask whenever I venture out in public and the doctor gave me a nifty stay-at-home note that I cashed in for the afternoon. I'm supposed to stay at home tomorrow also, but sadly there is just no time for that. In any case, it is an interesting experience walking around in a mask while hacking violently. People give you a wide berth. As I was walking through the breezeway of my condo behind another woman (and, of course, coughing with great alacrity), she turned around to check whether it was a human or a wild boar behind her, and when she saw my mask her eyes became saucers and she stepped up the pace. That is not a reaction that I am used to receiving, and the fact that I was able to make a Thai person increase her gait means that I am probably pretty as a postcard right about now. This comes just after my face has finished healing from getting my freckle infestation lasered off two weeks ago (I'll post pictures soon...it was totally gnarly....). So I can't quite get a break.

In other news, this past weekend found me on a wild goose chase for belly dance costumage, yay for sparkly metal bras and beaded skirts, to a place that my belly dance teacher called "Nana Plaza." I found a place called "Nana Square," and I did not see a belly dance costume shop there (though it's possible it was closed). I asked around, but of course, no one had any idea what I was saying, and gesturing to my undulating belly was not helping matters either. I finally found someone who spoke a little English, and I asked where Nana Plaza was, as surely I must not be in the correct place if my store was not here. She took me outside and pointed across the street. "Nana Plaza is there, behind the Singha sign. But," she said as she placed a well-meaning hand on my shoulder, "I don't think you will find your store there." I just chalked it up to the language barrier, thanked her, and let my optimism be my guide.

Nana Plaza is not a place you want to be. It is filled with bars, which are filled with creepy farang men and neon signs flashing "pretty pretty lady," and "strip show," and there are stilettos and skirts hiked up around the hoo ha as far as the eye can see, and seedy rooms with darkened windows above the whole electric scene. I became disoriented and sunk mid-calf into a puddle of filthy rainwater. Yeah, there was clearly not a belly dance costume shop in sight, though I can understand why the undulating belly would have confused people as to my intention.

It never ceases to amaze me how Bangkok can be so painfully beautiful until you make a wrong turn, and BAM! Its unsavory underbelly rolls over and suns itself. This place is filled with endless nooks and crannies, endless mystery, endless things to see. There are so many incredible, incredible details. Girly bars notwithstanding, I am going to miss these details tremendously.

Forever Young

Tuesday is Max's birthday. He would have been 27. It's been almost nine months since his death, and the pain of it is still so raw and searing. Since Max's death our group of friends has become close once again (though the magic of Facebook!), exchanging our typical loving and caustic banter and planning reunions. But I miss them, I miss Max, and even though I have made so many fabulous friendships and had so many fabulous experiences in the years since leaving Phoenix, I think I will always be haunted by the fleeting perfection of that time, that group of friends, that level of absolute trust and love and comfort.



While the title of this post may seem a bit cliche and cheesy, I chose it because it reminds me of one particular moment that I will remember forever. We had been up in Springerville, where Max was from (and the site of many happy memories), for Memorial Day weekend. It had been an absolutely incredible weekend of escape from Phoenix's inferno and white hot skies. We drank lattes made with Mexican chocolate, cured our hangovers at Max's grandmother's restaurant, were overwhelmed by the amount of stars we could see, and passed out on air mattresses. None of us wanted to leave, and I had even gone for a run to further delay our departure (side note: running in high altitude locales is not terribly pleasant if you are not used to the oxygen deprivation). As the sun started to set we finally said our goodbyes to Max (who was staying up there for the summer to work at his grandmother's restaurant) and piled into our cars.

I rode back with my friends A. and B. and their bulldog, Eleanor. A. drove slowly as she navigated the winding mountain roads and watched for elk, and the trees were a blue-black blur under the impossible banner of stars overhead. We listened to a mix that A. had made, and when "Forever Young" came on we did our best Napoleon Dynamite impressions, and then things got quiet for a little while. Eleanor had plopped her wrinkly head on my lap, and I remember feeling like it was an absolutely perfect moment. It was one of those moments that I will look back on when I'm old and decrepit and I can think about how I had weekends in the mountains with friends whom I loved, and how our lives felt like they stretched ahead of us as far as the eye could see, like mountain roads framed by stars.



I don't think any of us could possibly conceptualize how much our lives would change after that. We flocked to all corners of the globe, went through break-ups, changed careers, found true love, grew up. None of us could have possibly imagined that we would have to say goodbye to Max.

I remember his birthday three years ago. I had gone with Andrew to the Mexican supermarket, where I had to serve as translator as we purchased a pinata, princess decorations, balloons, and all of the ingredients for carne asada fajitas and homemade salsa and guacamole. We drank and drank and drank (K. had brought some rather potent to-kill-ya that was so smooth it was like drinking water) and gathered the candy from the broken pinata. Max was drinking beer out of his gigantic beer stein and fell on top of A. when he was showing us his Lord of the Dance moves.



(Alcohol and Lord of the Dance moves are not a good combination)

Our darling, darling Max. You are missed. I will be joining my Phoenix friends in drinking a memorial cocktail at 5 p.m. on Tuesday (though, um, I will be drinking mine twelve hours earlier than they will), and celebrating some incredible memories.