Angkor Wat Area, Cambodia

Dear Friends,

I wish I'd thought to close my eyes in the photo above.  That way, you would have mistaken my profile for that of the Serene Buddha, right?

I've just returned from Siem Reap, Cambodia, where I spent two days touring the temple complexes of Angkor, and two days faffing around in town. I had joked on Facebook, prior to the trip, that I would discover there my inner Lara Croft,  since Tomb Raider was filmed in the Ta Prohm temple. While apparently I don't have one after all (never having been a gamer, and having found the movie too silly to sit through), I defy anyone of my generation not to feel a bit like Indiana Jones while clambering around these jungle temples:

The true inner self that I discovered on this trip, however, was my "foreign correspondent" alter ego.  I was a full month behind on my travel journal, and I had many postcards to write (since that is a medium surprisingly scarce in Bangkok--one can't even find postcards in the airport).  So I spent significant time sitting in bars and cafés, on wicker furniture, under ceiling fans and terrace awnings, alternating between caffeine and cocktails, writing away.  I'm a foreigner and I was working on my correspondences, so that counts as being a "foreign correspondent," right? The aesthetic certainly fit, although I thankfully wasn't in a war zone, like journalists were back in the day.

Below is a photo of a bullet hole (center left) in Angkor Wat itself.  Thanks, Pol Pot.

Here I am on the causeway approaching Angkor Wat, practicing my Wonder-Woman pose:

Below are two photos that I posted together on Facebook, with the caption, "Two spiky creatures whom one might not expect to find in a 1000 year old temple complex in Cambodia: one that looks like a stegosaurus, and one who looks like Dr. Fiona Murphy."

My friend LH commented, "You could be twins!!"

Well, no one would ever mistake me for an herbivore, but there are some similarities.

LH: "You and the half naked lady, not the monster!"

The waist-to-hip ratio is about right. And the celestial nymph depicted in the carving might have eaten the dessert shown below, bought from a roadside stand.  It is sticky rice with coconut, black beans, and some sugar, packet into a bamboo shoot and grilled. Delicious!  And I got to feel like a Panda Bear, peeling away the bamboo to access the deliciousness inside.  

This trip of a lifetime was enhanced 1000% by my amazing tour guide, Chhouk Tong Vatey, of "Angkor Explore" tours.

(Click here for her contact information, and her review page "Trip Advisor")

Cambodia had such a terrible stretch in the second part of the 20th century, but being at Angkor and seeing how deep the roots of this civilization are, witnessing how much a part of daily life religion is to Cambodian people, and appreciating Vatey's intelligence and patience and kindness in our two days together, all these things help put the dark history into perspective.  

Vatey took me 60 kilometers off the beaten path, to Beng Mealea, the most ruined temple in Cambodia, one that has been taken over by jungle and vines.  The area around this complex, unlike those in and around Angkor, was a stronghold for Khmer Rouge forces, so the land was heavily mined, and the reverberations from the explosions destabilized the temple and reduced much of it to rubble.

To hell with the Khmer Rouge. The "foreign influence" that they tried so hard to root out is now pouring money and opportunity into Cambodia,  and the culture, education, and intellectual life of the Cambodian people, that they attempted to eradicate, is only getting stronger. 

Laundry and Lizards, Massages and Nicknames

Dear Friends,

Time flies when you’re having fun. Specifically, time between blog posts flies when you’re learning the ropes of a new . . . OK new everything.

Many things in Bangkok are very fun.  On the “less than fun” list is that it is hard to keep my things clean (and I include my own body under the category of “things”--sweat, sunscreen, bug spray . . . yeah).  

Anyone who has lived in South or Southeast Asia nods in wry recognition when I talk about adding “Dettol” (a serious disinfectant) to the laundry water, to make sure that whatever yuck needs to be killed will be, but that doesn’t help with the stains that never come out.   This is because the clothes washers here aren’t very good. They are top loaded but don’t have agitators, and they don’t use hot water. Also, there aren’t clothes dryers (at least where I live. I assume it’s different downtown) and everything is air dried. So between those last two, clothing gets stretched out quickly.  My clothes are feeling shapeless and sloppy already, and it’s only been 2.5 months.

It’s also hard to keep the house clean because of . . . you got it from the title . . . lizards.  No one I know has any success in keeping little gekko-type lizards out of our houses.  “At least they eat mosquitoes,” everyone says philosophically. “But they poop on the floors and the walls,” everyone adds in weary resignation.  These are predictable exchanges.  And there aren’t mosquitoes in the house if one is careful, so the plus column is artificial.

Yes, that’s right, one can be minding one’s own business inside one’s own home and see a little lizard scurry across the floor. Or wall.  I know they must be terrified in seeing me, and I just act like we are playing a game: “OK, I’m going to pretend that you’re not there, and you pretend that I can’t see you, and we’ll both be fine. Please don’t poop in my house. And tell you friends not to do so either.”   

Better lizards than snakes any day of the week. I haven’t seen a snake yet, and will happily go through my entire time in Thailand (and everywhere else, for that matter) without doing so.  

My townhouse is at the end of the row, giving me a whole wall of windows and French doors overlooking the neighborhood park, which is great. It’s green and lovely, I can see and hear the fountain, and in the afternoons and evenings all the neighborhood kids and young families are playing there, which is cheerful.  The location also makes my side yard particularly inviting to cats, and I’ll often look outside to see a cat slinking through. Or not even slinking, sometimes walking through like they own the place. Cats.

My yard in Arkansas also tended to attract feline visitors, my thought upon seeing one of them would be either the neutral, “Oh, a cat,” or the generically positive, “Oh, hello Kitty Cat.  How are you, today?”  Here, my first thought is, “Oh good. If there’s a cat, there’s no chance that there’s a snake.”  

I’m not sure my logic is unassailable on that one, but I’ll stick with it as long as I can.

By now, I’ve gotten used to the laundry situation and I don’t think about it that much, but a few weeks ago, it was really bothering me.  I was able to shake that off one Saturday when I biked up to the my neighborhood’s main drag to get a pedicure, and on my way home, with my little toesies looking fresh and pretty and my feet feeling buffed and pampered, I ran into a friend and stopped to chat.

She was on her way to get a massage, and she invited me along.  Massage is such a part of life in Thailand that even in my little neighborhood there are about 5 spas, and those are just the ones I’ve noticed. Surely there are many more on side streets.  Once doesn’t need to make an appointment; one can just show up, so that’s not as weird as it sounds, that I could just join her on the spur of the moment.

So I had a great massage, and afterwards, we decided to pick up some lunch. At the end of the afternoon, I did the math.  I got a pedicure, a hour-long massage, and lunch, all for the equivalent of $13.  And I also enjoyed a nice chat with a friend, because this is a place where people often socialize casually.  I love that.

I get between one and two massages a week, at 200 bhat (about $6) for an hour, or 300 bhat (less than $10) for two hours.  It’ll take a lot of massage over a long period of time to break up the knots I’ve got, but this is the place to do it.  

When considering that, the laundry and lizard situations don’t really seem like such a tough trade-off.  

To change subjects, I wanted to say something about Thai names.  Many of my students have Western nicknames, which makes things much easier on teachers, since it’s always hard to remember a room full of students’ names, and with very long, totally unfamiliar Thai names, it would be truly daunting for us Farang.  

These Western nicknames can be either recognizable first names (“Mary,” “Dan,” “Junior,” etc.), or they can be more fanciful adjectives or nouns, which I find charming.  “Earth,” “Proud,” and “Best” are students of mine.

I have started teaching Sunday School, and I have an adorable set of 10-year-old triplets named “Sing,” “Sang,” and “Song.”  The words themselves are easy to remember.  Assigning the right name to the right child is not yet one of my proficiencies.  

Then again, I’m having issues with my own name, here. Because the Thai government is so bureaucratic, all of my paperwork had to match.  For instance, when I was still in the U.S. preparing for the trip, I needed to change the name on my Teaching Certificate from “First + Last Name” to “First + Middle + Second Middle + Last Name,” since that is the name on both my Passport and my Berkeley Diploma.  

The end result is that my “name” in Thailand has become my full legal name.  On all of my school paperwork, at any doctor’s office, in any hotel, on the Ministry of Education’s paperwork, on my Work Permit--it’s all the whole shebang. That means having to write a lot of signatures of a really long name.  

Yet I’ve also acquired a short name, also unintentionally. When I give my name to be called (say, at a taxi stand, for example), I abbreviate it, with the goal of making life easier on the other person.  Surely “Fi” is easier than my given name for a foreigner to hear and write down, no?

No.

If the person speaks any English, it always comes back to me as “Free.”

My Thai name:  “Free.”

I’m truly going native.