Amazing things you see. A SE Asian man and an older Thai woman at the next table in the breakfast room of my hotel. For 30 minutes now they both have been talking over each other with no let up. I’m fascinated to see how long they keep it up. Not for one second has either of them stopped talking!
How do they know what to say next?!
OMG, it’s almost been a year since my last RTW! I am planning my next trip back to Thailand to get some teeth in November and to see my sons in Thailand and Hong Kong. I am beginning to anticipate…and remember…
An expat took his laptop battery to the computer shop opposite Makro in Samui to see if they had one or could order one from Bangkok. He approached the guy at the counter with his carrier bag. (There was no one else in the shop, and the guy was not busy doing anything)
“Sawasdee Krap”
(Silence)
“can you help me?”
(Silence)
“I have a laptop battery” (reaching into carrier bag)
“NO HAVE!”
(At this point the battery was still concealed in the bag)
“Can you….?.”
“CANNOT!”
“cannot what?”
“CANNOT!”
“Do you have……?” (producing said battery. He didn’t even look at it)
“CANNOT”
” I see…..Can you order from Bangkok?”
“CANNOT ORDER!”
“Are you saying that there is no shop in the whole of Bangkok where you can get a laptop battery?”
“CANNOT ORDER!”
Another expat:
“In Banphai there is a pharmacy, each time I go in, without looking up the man says NO HAVE. Hello I can see what I want on that shelf… NO HAVE…I go outside and get the [Thai] wife and she asks for the same item. He goes to the shelf and passes item to my wife 80 baht please. WTF.”
You may also encounter Mr. NONO and Mrs. SHOO-SHOO
I think there may be several things going on here.
Mrs. NOHAVE may not understand the request and don’t want to admit it to save face. Also may apply to MR. CANNOT, MR. NONO and MRS SHOO-SHOO.
Mr. CANNOT can not speak English in order to answer the request.
This may be followed up by Mrs. SHOO-SHOO
Mr. CANNOT and Mrs. NO HAVE, Mr. NONO and Mrs. SHOO-SHOO may be tired.
Thais are sick of dealing with farangs who don’t speak Thai
Thais are sick of dealing with farangs
Of course it may be true that they really CANNOT or NO HAVE.
Met a really nice bright young Swiss guy in the breakfast room while at the Sarisanee who has been living in New Zealand. He talked up NZ and of course now I want to go there! He, a self-described punker when younger (you would never know it by looking at him) is living in Karamea on the West Coast of the South Island where apparently there is an enclave of “hippies.” Wikipedia says that in 2006 the population was 423! Wiki also says the Karamea township offers local services including a general store, supermarket, petrol pumps, information centre, cafe, hotel, camping ground, motels, backpackers and art and craft shop. Ha! Must have been written by one of those hippies!
The town sits on the estuary of the Karamea river, 100km north of Westport. A two-hour trip down the river from the gorge is a pleasant way to spend part of the day. Horticulture and dairy farming are important industries to the town.
Wonder how long they are going to keep this place a secret. Hmmmmm.
Joe, a gregarious Dai tour guide who hangs out at the tourist haunts looking for business invited me to join him and his family and friends, including a young French couple, at the new BBQ restaurants on the road along the river…the ones we couldn’t find before. His English was great and we shared many ideas. “My heart is breaking with the pollution in the environment,” he said. I told him about Amy’s International School and it’s mission to bring east and west together. Not against each other, he asked? No I said, entwining my fingers. Together. He liked that, as he entwined his own fingers. I told him he had one foot in each culture. He liked that too. Then he wrote a C on one shoe and a W on the other shoe as we laughed.
It is the Spring Festival here and fireworks are going off everywhere. Over 20-40 small dishes (river snails, cow’s skin, river moss and the like) we raised small glasses of beer too many times to shouted toasts…first among ourselves (we women toasted to our beauty…!) and then with a group of about 20 Anhi teachers sitting at the next table.
The next day a German woman and her son, who is getting an advanced degree in business in Hangzhou (SW of Shanghai), invited me to go with them to a small village on the other side of the Mekong River by ferry and then tuk tuk. She is here, like me, visiting her progeny. Her son has been here three years and is fluent in Mandarin…as are many of the Westerners I’ve met here. A group of American high school girls here in Jinghong on break from on a one year exchange program in Beijing to learn Mandarin amazed me with their ability to speak the language…their futures will be bright with opportunities.
I will be glad to leave the An Ya Jiu Dian Hotel, however. It is newer…clean and very nice with satellite TV and a hot and cold water cooler for about $7…and friendly owners. It’s just up the street from the western-oriented Mei Mei Restaurant on Man Lan Lu. But there is a restaurant down an ally behind the hotel…outside my window…that starts up about midnight…with many shouted toasts…and finally subsides about 3am. Ear plugs only take the edge off.
No lack of internet cafes on this street!
And I won’t miss the Asian toilet, if you know what I mean. The shower head is above the open-hole toilet in the floor so one must be very careful where one steps.
Yesterday an older woman from Ireland and I tried to find the Night Market at the end of the bridge over the Mekong River where you used to be able to get great BBQ meat cooked over coal fires. Not found.
Of the many uninterested Chinese we stopped along the way to get information, a young strolling couple with a few words of English helped us. The man called his old English teacher from school on his cell phone so we could explain what we were looking for. But after my simplified request, she kept asking “what do you want” obviously not understanding me. And she was his English teacher, I thought!
Finally we gave up the idea of the Night Market when they said “follow us.” They took us to an open-air shack near the new beautifully lit bridge. In the “kitchen” we pointed to a few vegetables and some pork. In a matter of seconds we were feasting…on delicious food so full of flavor but probably loaded with MSG. Turns out the woman is a doctor at the local hospital but her husband said he “lost his job” at the same hospital. I was curious as to why he “lost” his job but didn’t want to pry. She was six months pregnant. “I want a boy,” her husband said. Knowing the Chinese can pay a fine for a second child I asked how many children they intended to have. “I only need one,” she said with finality!
Later, back at the Mei Mei Cafe where foreigners hang out, a 45 year old good-looking adventure-hooked guy from Belgium who has lived here several years regaled us with stories…many of them dealing with corruption. For example, a few years ago he, through his girlfriend, rented a building to remodel for a cafe. He signed a contract for the rental for five years. But after two years he was informed by the police they were tearing down the building for a big high-rise. So he lost his investment. A contract in China means nothing, he said.
The Night Market is no longer, he says. The Chinese are glad to be rid of it…having been full of prostitution and the drugs coming in from nearby Burma.
Then we discussed the latest biography simply entitled “Mao” that is banned in China. “Yes,” he said, I have it locked up in my room!” “My god,” he said, “if only 5% of it is true…!” We talked about “The Coming Collapse of China” written by a Chinese Professor at an American university which I had mischievously passed on to a Swiss girl studying Chinese economics in Shanghai on my last trip to China a couple years ago. Steven agreed with the tenuous situation in China where the dangerous rate of growth of the GDP can’t continue indefinitely. But the book was written when Deng (who said it was “glorious to be rich”) was President. President Hu, Steven says, is trying to help China avoid a crisis.
Steven, the Belgian, is planning on taking his Dai girlfriend of three years to Belgium for a 12 week visit. He said he could hardly wait to see her eyes! Getting her a tourist visa will be very tedious because so many Chinese try to get into Europe using falsely filled out papers. “They all lie because all Chinese want out of China,” he said. Besides the bureaucratic red tape, they will have to travel to Guangzhou for an interview at the Belgian Embassy. She will only be able to visit with a “Schengen” visa while there. (If you don’t know, the Schengen countries are the ones in Europe (I think there are four) who no longer recognize borders.
Then we talked about the attitude of the dominant Han Chinese toward the ethnic “minorities” as the ethnic groups are called. About one third of the 800,000 people of this region are Dai. Another third are Han Chinese and the rest includes the Hani, Lisu and Yao as well as lesser-known hill tribes such as the Aini, Jinuo, Bulang, Lahu and Wa. These beautiful friendly self-sufficient intelligent people, who live in the mountains with views that Californians would kill for, have historically been viciously discriminated against and the attitude of the Han is that they are dirty and stupid. Consequently the minorities are turning against their own cultures…so Steven has been teaching his Dai girlfriend, Orchid, about her Dai history and origins including that fact that many years ago the huge Dai army once defeated the encroaching Han dynasties. Ironic that it takes a western foreigner to counsel his culturally bifurcated girlfriend. The 37 year old Orchid, who owns and manages the Mei Mei Cafe, is certainly not stupid. Also ironic that since China has discovered that Western tourists are interested in seeing the minorities, it is starting to help promote their welfare as a source of tourism.
With my Irish friend off to Dali, I had breakfast this morning with a lovely woman from Holland who has traveled all over Indonesia. Hmmm. Think Sumatra may be next after Thailand. This is a good time to visit there, she said, as it is not the rainy season. Good! We had a long discussion about China. We agreed that one does not “like” China so much as one finds it incredibly interesting!
Other travelers can be just as enlightening as the country one is visiting…
It is creepy odd…the dirty war at night we don’t see…the bustling life of the Zocalo by day.
Monday was Mike’s last day in Oaxaca. Merilla & Peter, expats from Australia, Mike and Gerardo and I met for coffee at 1:30pm at the Terranova Cafe in the Zocalo. Benito and Jose happened by. Mike mostly entertained the small children who were vending woven wristlets and chiclets…and I was mostly trying to understand the Spanish being spoken at the table.
At 6:30pm, after beer, comida and much conversation, Merilla, Peter, Gerardo and Mike and I retired to the Casa de Mescal for mescal and a cerbeza ultimo. By 9pm we headed home.
Mike left tuesday (this morning) in the dark to catch an 8am plane for Las Vegas. Good-bye house…good-bye friends. Two cents says he will return on November 6 with my son Greg. I truly hope he does. I am ready for down time and Mike can take Greg around.
I am cranky this morning. I was up all night because of a very noisy wedding party in the courtyard below my apartment window. So I went to my favorite food stall in the Benito Juarez market where I had Spanish-English intercambio with Dulce, a 19 year old university student, while eating breakfast of eggs, beans, potatoes and milk with coffee. We will watch my bootleg copy of “Nacho Libre” this evening together…probably in Spanish. It will be fun to watch her reaction to the movie.
Bought a copy of Noticias where I struggled to read an article about the German writer, Gunther Grass, who has just admitted he was in the German SS for a few months during WWII. The press is making a big deal out of this. I spotted a long-time German expat sitting a few tables away, who I had talked to briefly yesterday, so I took my article and joined him for a short but very interesting German history lesson before he had to leave on the bus back to Mexico City. In the absence of any historical insight, we Americans see everything in black and white. And this politically correctness drives me crazy I said. Yes, he said…it’s a disease! It leaves only room for a simplistic view of things, he said. And stops dialogue, I said! With that he gave me a good handshake and left for his bus.
Last night I visited a gentle sincere Oaxacan family that lives about 20 minutes in the mountains northwest of the city in San Andreas Huayapam. The couple roasts fragrant locally grown coffee and delivers it to outlets all over.
I gave them flowers I bought at the 20 November Market and they made some of their fresh coffee…but only after insisting I have a glass of Oaxacan Mescal.
The couple and one of their best friends and my colorful Mexican translator, who spent several years meandering around the States, and I sat for hours at their outdoor kitchen table and talked…about coffee…and a hundred other things. Two other couples stopped by for a few minutes.
Juanita, the Mexican-American woman I met at Pachote Market, will ride down here with me in my car in September…a road trip to Las Vegas to see Greg, to Phoenix to see friends and across Texas to the border at Loredo. On the way to Oaxaca we will stop in Querataro to visit my old friend Patty Gutierrez. Juanita now lives in Guadalajara, where she was born, after raising her children in LA…two blocks from where we lived in Highland Park in 68 and 69! She is in Sacramento now visiting her son and daughter and will take the bus to meet me in Portland.
Her daughter Veronica teaches English to children at the Colegio Motolinta de Antequera, behind la Iglesia de Los Pobres on Dalias Street in the Reforma section of town, where incidently she watched the attack of police on the teachers outside her building a few days ago. She met her husband when she came here for a temazcal workshop in nearby San Jose…her husband’s parents were the instructors and she often translates for norteno participants now.
A Temazcal is a traditional sweat bath. The word is Nhuatl (Aztec) in origin and means “steam” (temaz “house (calli). Temazcals were common throughout prehispanic Mesoamerica and an important component of traditional therapeutic and purifying rituals. The temazcal itself is a small, closed, domed structure traditionaly constructed of adobe. To produce the steam, rocks are heated and herbs and water thrown onto the hot stones. (Claustrophobics might want to think twice.) It has become the fashion, Veronica says, for many Europeans to come here and combine a Temazcal workshop with a traditional Oaxacan marriage ceremony performed by her father-in-law.
Yesterday morning Veronica and I met for a cup of wonderful organic fair trade coffee in the Friday/Saturday Pachote Organic Market. Elvira, a Zapotec woman I have made friends with is a part of a new women’s collective that grows and roasts their own fair-trade coffee…it is not certified organic yet…a long and costly process. Elvira also sells vanillan, pimiento (pepper) roasted pumpkin seeds, fresh strong cinnamon, panela and honey…all grown or made on her little farm. Sweet smiling Elvira comes to the city every week-end five and a half hours each way on the bus. She spends Friday and Sat nights with my friend Sharon before leaving 5am on the bus again Sunday morning.
At Pachote (and also found on the street and in the other markets) you can eat food prepared by indigenous women…tacos made from blue corn, drink atole, a hot frothy sweetened Oaxacan corn gruel drunk plain or flavored. You can eat chapulines, toasted grasshoppers…a Oaxacan delicacy. It is said that if you eat chapulines, you’ll be sure to return to Oaxaca. You can eat memelas, small soft torillas spread with asiento (rendered pork lard and bits of chicharron (called chitlins in southern U.S) and topped with crumbles of fresh cheese. If you are really hungry you can eat chicken mole, a sauce based on ground chiles and spices…sometimes with chocolate. There are 7 different moles prepared in Oaxaca, most of them referred to by color…colorado (red) coloradito (little red), amarillo (yellow) verde (green) and negro (black, plus chichilo and manchamanteles (tablecloth stainer.) You can eat quesqadillas, a corn tortila filled with cheese and squash flowes toasted on a hot comal or clay griddle. My favorite for breakfast are the tamals…corn masa filled with mole red or green often with bits of chicken…wrapped in corn husks and steamed. Or you can just drink a big cup of tejate…a traditional drink made of corn masa, cacao, mamey fruit seed and rosita de cacao flowers dipped by the tejatera from a huge wide, shallow bowl. I’m still learning to like this drink.
Veronica showed me those little round avocados that you can eat with the skin on…panela, dark sugar wrapped in corn husk made smoky-flavored after sitting around a charcoal fire…little mild round red peppers called canarios…small round sweet squash…baskets and bags made out of high-sierra pine…home-made Mescal, a Oaxaceno specialty made from the Maguey plant. It is recent (hot and strong), reposado (aged and smooth) or anejo (aged for several years in oak barrels with the flavor of cognac (expensive) and often above 50% alcohol. You can buy beautiful Oaxacan pottery fired without lead, huge purple flowers together with spindly orange flowers that remind me of the Indian Paintbrush that grows wild in Eastern Oregon…all good stuff…you see where my money goes.
Through Veronica I met Willy, a very sweet Swiss expat whose sister lived in her little casita for 20 some years. When she died a couple years ago, Willy, who had often visited, moved into her home. Willy cooked us breakfast of egg and tocino (bacon) tucked into grilled bollios (Mexican buns), cheese, fresh orange juice, and rich dark organic coffee made in his French Press coffee-maker in his little open-air kitchen with an incredible view of the surrounding valley. He showed us his “poleo” leaves, drying in the sun for tea…”la yerbo de boracho” Veronica laughs…boracho meaning “drunk.”
We talked about other local delicasies…like “huitlacoche” or what sounds like parasytic mushrooms that grow on husks of fresh corn that is fast disappearing because of pesticides sprayed on the corn. Veronica lamented that out of a thousand varieties of mushrooms only a couple hundred are still extanct because the locals pull up the “whole family” by the roots instead of leaving the “children” to grow larger in the future…destroying the plant…thinking of the “short term” need for subsistence.
Willy says he was an industrial design engineer by trade…but here he really is an artist…designing lamps made out of sticks and branches from around his home. I told him he could market that stuff in New York City…but he is not interested. He is also helping an international non-profit based in Europe to design an eco-education program in his beloved Sierra…not building buildings…but just to take people in on treks and teach them about local ecology. Willy is bilingual and is the most respectuful of local expats I have met….preferring to leave the revolution to those who know best how they want to conduct it for themselves.
And this is just the beginning of what’s to love about Oaxaca.
Took a tour of Colonial Reforma today…in the northern part of the city. Went to immigration to get my year-long visa and on the way the bus driver got into a stand-off with a car whose driver was yelling something at him at a stop-light. The bus driver gave him what-to…never heard so many madres and pendejos (assholes) in one sentence before…and he kept it up. The light turned green and the bus won…cut the guy clean off and forced him onto another road. I think I was the only passenger interested…the others have seen this before no doubt.
But on a bus going the wrong way back to the Centro…took a tour through the entire Colonial Reforma…gears grinding…brakes screeching…music blaring…and over those damn topes (speed bumps) every 50 feet, up and down the hills. The driver yells at me…where you from…in English. I know better than to say the US…that’s obvious. Oregon I said. Oh, I was there four months he laughed…strawberries I asked…yes he said…he was in Phoenix four years and Fresno for six years. You like Oaxaca? Yes, I love it! I noticed he didn’t ask me if I liked “Mexico” He asked me if I liked Oaxaca. I think he likes it too!
Have run into several young guys at the market who have picked strawberries in Oregon…their English quite good. Willamette Valley strawberries are the best in the world by the way…thanks to cheap labor by migrants from south of the border.
Laughingnomad 