I called my son Doug yesterday morning. He had just returned from the fish market on Koh Samui with a salad bowl of large fresh gung (shrimp) with heads still on for $1.60 and had cooked up a traditional Thai omelet with puk (vegetables) and prik (chilis) and steamed rice. Doug does all the cooking. Lucky Luk!
Arrived in Bangkok on Jan 3rd on China Air after 17 hours and stops in Anchorage and Taiwan. There has been a cooling in Asia (northern India actually falling below freezing) and it has been mild with a nice breeze here.
Bob is somewhere else in Thailand I guess…he left a New York a few days before I did.
But it has been fun to have Doug and Luk stay with me in Bangkok this last week. We have been running errands…went to American Consolate to get more pages added to my passport and Doug ordered a new passport as his got wrecked when he was drenched in the water festival last spring. Then to Thai Consolate. Luk is delighted to have a new Thai passport with her married name on it! Now there are two Mrs. Goetz’s in Bangkok!
They will return to their home on Koh Samui Friday on the train. I will meet them on the island at the end of the month when my remaining dental work will be completed.
Bob left for Thailand on the 29th. Josh had to work at the restaurant so Amy and I spent New Years Eve drinking wine and champagne…good conversation with my daughter-in-law…and watching “Wedding Crashers.” She spent the night and then left with Josh in the morning to join some friends upstate for a couple days for a little break in the action.
New Years for me was spent cleaning the apartment with a little time to watch “Crash,” set in LA and the best depiction of racial problems in America I have seen.
A town car arrived at 7pm to take me to Kennedy airport for my 10pm flight to Bangkok. Where are you from, the tall elegant driver asked. Oregon, I answered…where are you from? Africa, he said. Yes, I said, but what country? Sudan was the answer. Oh, I said woefully, much trouble there now. Oh, no, he said, no trouble!! Then he spent the rest of the trip analyzing Bush’s foreign policy…most of which I agreed with. He wasn’t married but said that if he ever had children he wouldn’t raise them in New York City, where he has lived for the last 12 years, but that he would return to Sudan. But his insistent denial of trouble in his country that have left thousands dead left me mystified.
After rack of lamb marinated with fresh oregano, thyme, garlic and olive oil; tender gratin of baby spinach in a bechamel sauce with snow crab and east coast clams; brussel sprouts braised with bacon and deglazed with cream sherry; spaghetti squash with maple syrup, butter and cinnamon; tiny green beans with garlic and thyme; a salad with carmelized pears, shaved fresh fennel and a crumbled rare blue cheese; tiny boiled red potatoes bathed in herbs and olive oil…multiple bottles of wine and champagne, and finally Amy’s apple pie, the eight of us at Christmas dinner last night are still full this morning!
Josh and Amy arrived at our apartment Christmas morning loaded up with flowers, sacks of Christmas stocking stuffers, an “egg bake,” a family Christmas morning tradition in her family, and sacks of ingredients to be used for cooking the evening meal. This was in addition to the two huge boxes of food that Josh had ordered from http://www.freshdirect.com and had delivered to the apartment the night before!
Josh and a friend of Josh’s from Eugene Oregon, Gabe, who is also a chef here in New York City and worked with Josh when he was at the Savoy, spent the entire day preparing an incredible dinner…Josh’s Christmas gift to Bob and me. Gabe brought pink roses and a malange of rare cheeses for an appetizer. Gabe’s mother, Bonny, in town for the holidays, joined us as did Gabe’s girlfriend who brought a huge tin of cookies baked by her mother. Later, another chef who worked with Josh at the Savoy and is originally from Bend Oregon and his wife, who was at the New England Culinary Institute with Josh, came by. We toasted Oregon with three Willamette Valley Pinot Noir wines, one of which was a highly respected St. Innocent…the winemaker, Mark Vlossak, formerly a Pediatric practitioner we knew in Salem.
Josh’s restaurant, Toqueville, also has a catering business. It is not unusual for Josh and selected wait staff to provide an in-home cooked dinner for a client…usually business-oriented…costing upwards of 10 to 30 thousand dollars for parties of 10-50 people…Josh often getting as much as a $1,000 tip. Josh is proud that clients often request him personally. Fancy expense accounts. And we are in pretty fancy company!
During the conversation, the “New Yorkers” started making fun of tourists who, emerging from underground subway exits, clog mid-town sidewalks and stumble along with eyes bugged skyward…while the locals frustratingly shoulder their way forward…always in a hurry. Gabe’s bright mom, who is one of Eugene’s city councilwomen had the perfect come-back. And what about those north-bound east coast tourists who clog up the freeways at 30 miles an hour gaping at snow-capped Mt. Hood or the RV’s backing up traffic on Oregon coastal highway 101! A good laugh then!
Twelve bottles of wine and champagne later we ended the meal with a delicious flaky apple pie Amy had baked that morning.
This was the first Christmas we have spent with Josh in the last ten years. And more Christmases than that since the whole family was together…and the first Christmas in three years that we have not spent in some foreign country alone. Thank you dear Josh! Now if only we could have had our other sons Greg, who is in Las Vegas, and Doug, who lives in Thailand, with us…
Our son, Greg, flew in from Las Vegas for a long weekend last weekend. It is the first time we have been with more than one of the progeny since I can remember…and was great fun…out to dinner at the Pearl Oyster in the West Village after a Staten Island Ferry trip…then a quintessential Manhattan cocktail bar that specializes in Russian vodkas.
Greg met some friends at a velvet rope club (meaning there is a dress code and you have to be accepted in). Amy and Josh, saying it wasn’t their thing, took off to meet some of their friends in a cubby-hole bar for cheap beer and wandered back to the apartment at 5am only to find Greg already asleep. There wasn’t enough room for all of Greg’s party so they split up…not knowing where they were going next. Greg, thinking this was too much work at the ripe old age of 38 had jumped in his own cab and took off for home.
Walking Cobble Hill in Brooklyn we found a “Neighborhoodie” store that sells t-shirts and sweatshirts with custom lettering. Greg had two made…a brown shirt with “Brooklyn Is Better” in baby blue lettering for Amy and a black shirt with “Innocent Bystander” in white. “Oh, but you have to put this under it,” said the young hip female clerk as she showed him a picture of a menacing black Uzi rifle! Which he did.
We are sub letting a pleasant newly refurbished two bedroom apartment on Pacific St in a multi-ethnic, gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood called Boerum Hill. Bob and I enjoy exploring New York opportunities and other sites via the internet on our respectie laptops in the four-story apartment building that is WiFi equipped. We have three keys…one for the front door, one for an inner door and one for our apartment door. An Asian mailman drops the mail for the four building tenants onto the floor through a slot in the wall by the front door at the top of the stoop…each occupant sorting out his own mail. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal arrive on the front step each morning. The apartment directly across the street is condemned by the city…a big green rectangle with an X in it sprayed on the wall. Drivers seem to feel comfortable leaving their cars on the streets and there is rarely a vacant parking space—am glad that we left our autos in Oregon.
New York has recently reinstated a recycling program so there are multiple plastic barrels at the bottom of the stoop..one for garbage, one for paper and one for plastic and bottles… we were promptly and curtly corrected as to proper sorting by one of the tenants soon after our arrival. There is a contingent of garbage police and fines of $25.00 are given out if items are sorted into the wrong container.
Plastic bags of empty beer and pop bottles are often hung on the wrought iron fences that someone (a guy, freelancer, I think, who scuries the neighborhood carrying several stocked black plastic bags) will pick up and return to the store for the deposit. Once a month bigger items, like furniture, discarded TVs, microwaves etc., are left out for large item garbage pick-up. One day every other week cars are required to be parked on alternate sides of the street so the mobile street cleaners can sweep by unfettered. They usually just end up double parked on the other side of the street which makes for interesting traffic snarls in the mornings…cars honking as if it would make any difference.
There are two large grocery markets within about four blocks either way from the apartment. We wheel our groceries home in a two wheeled wire cart…just like the locals…and wheel our laundry to the nearest coin-operated facility a block and a half away. Down the steps, to the right and on the corner is the Boerum Hill Cleaners run by a gracious Korean family. Swing around the corner and up the block is the wide Atlantic Avenue that stretches all the way to the East River…which really isn’t a river but a narrow estuary of the Atlantic Ocean that surrounds the western end of Long Island.
On the next corner is a deli of multi-ethnic food items, fresh produce, and flowers run by Chinese family who speak Cantonese, English and Spanish. Turn right at the deli and the Islamic community fills the next several blocks…a school, apartments, halal food outlets selling California dates and multiple small cluttered storefront shops selling clothing, soap, perfumes, religious cds, books, and other unfamiliar items…in the middle of this mini-world…a U.S. Post Office. The call to prayer can be heard five times daily on the loudspeakers at a mosque nearby.
Across Atlantic Ave.is St. Cyrus of Turva Cathedral Belarussean Autocephalos Orthodox Church. Next to the church is a middle eastern restaurant owned by a Jordanian family with wondrously fluffy pita bread made fresh upon order. Pita bread, lamb kabobs, and a pint each of humus and babaghanouj provides a wonderful lunch with leftovers. Next door is a laid back French bistro (which we learned means “quickly” in Russian) that offers two entrees for the price of one on Wednesday evenings…and Bobby Dylan is heard on the stereo while sipping a glass of French wine. Next is a garden shop. Where do people garden? I wonder. Next is a New Orleans style restaurant with a live jazz trio featuring an older black gentleman vocalist whose style pulls me in, hook line and sinker. Next is a black Baptist pentacostal church.
Down Atlantic the opposite way and is an organic juice and food market. On either side of the market are two more churches…the Iglesias de Dios Pentacostal Church and the Templo Christiano de Brooklyn for the local Spanish-speaking Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. Further down Atlantic on either side of the street are multiple antique shops, retro clothing shops, and many more corner delis.
Tthe Cobble Hill neighborhood is two blocks distant. It is a gentrified neighborhood centered around Smith St — a bit too hip avenue full of French bistros, Mexican, Thai, Peruvian, Italian, sushi, Indian, New York sandwich delis, West Indian, Cuban, soul food, Jamaican, Chinese take-outs and various sorts of fusion restaurants, bakeries, coffee shops, specialty meat markets… most offering free delivery… and upscale bars full of younger after-work clientele just off the subways from their Manhattan jobs.
Interspersed in between are beauty shops that offer a multitude of mysterious hair styles to their black clients. In a stuffed-to-the-ceiling Chinese variety store on one corner ANYTHING needed in an average household can be found. Schools pour out black and Spanish-speaking children in the afternoon and young nannies push their little charges in strollers. Young entrepreneural men and women have developed a business of walking dogs, four, five six at a time, all behaving perfectly on their leashes…the back pockets of the dog walkers full of plastic bags at the ready if needed for dog do-do. There is a $1000.00 fine for not picking up the stinky stuff…Paris could benefit from this law.
The next street over from Smith is Court Street…with even more upscale restaurants and specialty shops. Walking farther down Court St. is an almost exclusively Italian neighborhood with Italian restaurants, bakeries and delis, a couple beauty shops and an old fashioned movie theater with a really bad sound system. The opposite direction on court leads to downtown Brooklyn and its signiture streets of Fulton and Flatbush ……located there is Junior’s , locally famous for its cheesecake… (they will quickly tell you that President Clinton ate there).
And we haven’t even begun to explore Park Slope, Red Hook or DUMBO and the Brooklyn Heights. Josh lives in nearby Greenpoint, a facimile of Warsaw Poland….only Polish heard on the street and Polish magazines sold in the smoke shops…and great pierogi restaurants.
All of these neighborhoods are filled with writers and artists…an inmigration from the expensive artist lofts in “The Village” (you don’t say Greenwich Village) and the hip SOHO district which means South of Houston St. pronouned “Howston.” Bob still confounds Amy and Josh by insisting on calling it Hewston St. by it’s Texas city pronunciation! And, like San Francisco, the locals know you are a visitor unless you refer to Manhattan as “The City.” People from New Jersey are called the “Bridge & Tunnelers.” And there you have it.
On a lovely Sunday, September 4, 2005, Bob and I followed Josh and Amy to a specialty jewelry store in our gentrified Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn to pick up their hand-crafted rings. Amy’s mother, Debbie, works at a Safeway division office in Denver and the office had recently auctioned off small bags of “lost and found” items to it’s employees. Debbie had bid on one small bag…for $60.00…that yielded a diamond in a garish setting that no one thought was real. So Amy’s wedding ring has been set with a nice one karat diamond given to her by her mother. Two smaller diamonds, set on each side of the larger one, were from a pair of earrings that her mother had also given Amy when she sent her off to Whitman College in Walla Walla Washington. Lucky Josh!
The following Friday, September 9, Amy’s parents, Sid and Debbie, her sister Melissa and her husband Pat, and Bob and I, tripped along the slate sidewalks of Brooklyn with Josh and Amy–all of us in casual street clothes—to the courthouse a few blocks away. On the second floor we joined a long line of other variously dressed couples and their little clumps of supporters. Josh and Amy had already filled out the marriage application. It was 2pm and Josh and Amy now had to hand it in along with a $25.00 fee.
Tender interest and kindly officiary have their place at weddings but apparently not at the Brooklyn courthouse where probably upwards of 50 other couples had yet to be shooed through the line before the 3pm cut-off. Suddenly all extraneous members of our group, other than the couple and the witness, were tersely instructed in the spirit of strict bureaucracy to leave the line and sit in an adjoining waiting room. Where is Amy’s mom! She went to the bathroom! Someone go get her!
So we all dutifully sat and waited on red plastic chairs in the sterile yellow-cream colored room and watched the batches of the to-be-betrothed and their modest parties of three or four or five, clutching flowers and forms and purses and each other. Some seemed like young couples straight from high school or college, a dapper African-American man with a red handkerchief poking out of the pocket of his pin-striped suit, young Hispanic girls dressed to the nines in chiffon and spike heels, a pudgy middle-aged lady in a white blouse…maybe there for the second time…blue blazers, blue jeans here and there, perhaps a flower in the hair…..a cacophony…..
What a hoot! “Isn’t this fun,” Amy giggled! Josh grinned. The rest of us happy that this day had come! Bob and Amy’s mother excitedly taking pictures of all. Amy had scoffed at flowers being hawked by the vendor outside the courthouse doors. But she wore a lovely new black sheer blouse to go with her green slacks for this day.
The clerk calls out the name of each party which then files into the chapel. We all looked at each other weirdly when we heard “Ryan and Amy!” called out. Ryan is actually Josh’s first name but no one ever calls him that. The clerk stops us just outside the door of the chapel. “Where’s your witness?” she asks. As anyone with business on the second floor should know, so far as marrying goes, the witness is the indispensable person…without him/her nothing happens. Which means that three is the critical number. A bride and a groom hanging onto each other and a straggler with a camera in their hand. In our case five other stragglers. Amy’s sister Mellisa is the witness…and Bob is at the ready with his video camera to capture the proceedings as best and quickly he can before the whole thing is over.
We walk up two steps where the ash-blond clerk in a plaid jacket and black slacks closes the chapel door. We sit on the one seat…a bench against the wall…while the clerk gently informs the bride and groom that they should step up before the brown wooden podium that serves, one supposes, as Brooklyn’s secular analog to the altar…a 70’s red, orange, yellow and blue plastic “stained-glass” mosaic adorns the wall behind the couple, the podium and the clerk. 
The “ceremony” immediately begins which entails a few seconds of legal boilerplate for each-the bride and the groom-followed by a quick call for objections. “Where are the rings? Should we put on our rings now or just wear them after the ceremony,” Amy whispers, sensing the whole thing might be over before they do the ring thing. The clerk reminds them they can kiss now…a sweet one…and we all smile. Suddenly it is over. The clerk hurries us out and our happy couple emerges from the room with smiling faces…a marriage certificate in hand. We head off for the elevators and the clerk calls for the next couple…
A few days before we left Portland for New York City, our son Josh, who is currently a chef at the Tocqueville Restaurant near Union Square in Manhattan, asked us to keep the following weekend open…giving us no idea what was going to happen. We are going out to dinner at his restaurant, I thought. But the whole weekend?
Josh’s lovely significant other, Amy, whom he had met at Whitman, picked us up at the airport from our Jet Blue flight from Portland on a rainy Tuesday and took us to their apartment in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn so we could see Josh for a few minutes before he left for work and before we continued on to our new abode. “This Friday Amy and I are getting married,” Josh said with a grin.
In mid-July, a year after leaving the States to travel through Eastern Europe, taking the Trans Siberian Train through Russia, Mongolia and China and then to Thailand Vietnam and Laos, I arrived back in LA on China Air…then Portland on Alaska.
The next day, after picking up one of the cars that had been safe in the garage of a friend, I was back in the Portland airport to meet my son Greg who had flown in from Las Vegas where he had been in his anesthesiology practice for the last year. Over the weekend, Greg would attend his 20th year reunion of his South Salem High School graduating class and I would embark on the “couch tour” since the renters were still occupying our home.
Bob arrived in Portland a couple weeks later and after visiting grandma and other family members and running a hundred errands, we climbed into a Jet Blue airliner for a non-stop flight to Kennedy airport in New York City. We had arranged to sublet the apartment of my son Josh’s Whitman College roommate who had already left for Walla Walla Washington to complete a four month stint as visiting professor in art at his alma mater. We were delighted with the recently refurbished apartment in a gentrified neighborhood of Brooklyn…and relieved to finally be in one place for awhile.
In Bangkok we got a good deal for a month in a beautiful completely furnished apartment on a dead-end street in the upscale Saladaeng area…close to the Skytrain and the new subway that is running again after a recent accident.
Many delicious food vendors just outside the front door were well-placed for the two towers of business offices at the end of the street. After a week Bob took off for northern Thailand and I stayed in Bangkok…taxiing back and forth to my Tufts university-trained dentist who employs a group of specialists…all women…on Sukhumvit 24. With two new porcelain caps and a root planing, I will return in a month for prep work on two implants that will be completed in another 4 months…all for about a 7th of what it would cost with no dental insurance at home.
Doug and Luk took an overnight train from Krabi and stayed with me for a few days while a friend babysat their dog Ting-Tong at their house. They eat very small meals many times during the day…Thai food being what it is…so it seemed like we were eating constantly. One evening Doug took us up to the top of one of the tallest towers in Bangkok where we looked down from an outdoor bar/restaurant sitting on the very edge of the building…refreshing cool breezes blowing our hair…jaw-dropping night lights of the city down below. But mostly Doug and Luk just hung out in the air-con apartment with me…dreading the return to their “fan-cooled” (a uphemism if ever there was one) house in Krabi.
Bought a 20 hour wireless card I use with my Mac computer in any of the many Starbucks around town…handy for uploading blog notes and updating software…visiting with other computer users like the young guy from London who just moved here for a two-year tour with his company…paying as much for the freight on his furniture as it all cost in the first place. Our visit ended when a Thai-boy sat down at the Brit’s table…shooting me a look that could kill. Apparently I was interfering with their date.
Visited the six floors of Panthip Computer Shopping Mall several times where you can buy any high-tech item you could ever want. There are hundreds of stalls selling CD’s and DVD’s and at one I spoke to a rough-looking character standing next to me. “I come here often for R&R,” he says looking at the Thai girl standing next to him. (One in 30 Thai women have said to be working as prostitutes although they don’t call themselves that…they just want an ATM guy to exchange sex with.) “Most things are cheaper if you order over the net,” he says, apparently except for the handfulls of games and software he is buying for his employees in his computer center in Iraq.
Checked out the Foreign Correspondents Club, one of many around the world (I used the one in Phnom Penh Cambodia) that honor each other’s members. In the penthouse of a Bangkok tower you will find the club with a bar/restaurant that hosts speakers from around the world…recently the Dalai Lama spoke there…has a state of the art media center for journalists, jazz on Friday nights…and expats to speak English to! The night we were there ASEAN was hosting an open conference regarding Burma.
Laughingnomad 