Kopi Susu 2

The luggage that meowed

2010-08-03T12:05:00.002+07:00

I'll have some more Flores posts soon, but wanted to say we have all survived the trip from Jakarta to Phoenix more or less intact. Susu traveled in her new soft cat carrier, which she hates as much as she's hated her other cat carriers.

Under the seat

The most worriesome parts of the trip were at certain security checks where we had to take her out and hold her while the carrier went through the scanner. We had put a kitty halter and leash on her, which she hated even more than the carrier.

Still, it was scary standing there holding a squirming cat in an enormous and chaotic airport. The security people seemed remarkably clueless about this and would fire questions at us and demand documents while the cat freaked out and the cat carrier sat there on the scanner belt, already approved for flight but just beyond arm's reach.

Susu was anxious at the beginning of the journey, she was panting with her mouth open, which is a strange and disturbing thing in a cat. I can't say she really got adjusted to traveling but she basically wore herself out after several hours and fell asleep. When we got to the airport hotel in LA she pulled the Invisible Kitty act, vanishing for at least an hour before we figured out that she had climbed up inside the box spring. But by morning she had recovered enough to investigate the room.

After that it was just one more short flight to Phoenix and a well-earned rest for all concerned.

Flying Cat Tips:

1. I found putting a puppy training pad in the bottom of the carrier completely pointless. It just got wadded up in a big lump in the corner. Susu was so stressed out I don't think she could have emitted any waste products anyway. In fact, she had a hard time using the litter box even after we settled into the hotel; I think she got pretty dehydrated.

2. Bring something warm to put in or around the carrier (being careful not to block the cat's air supply). Planes are really cold.

3. Get a carrier with a reach-in zipper so you can pet your cat when s/he is anxious. That really seemed to reassure her.

The hungry turtle and other underwater delights

2010-08-01T11:26:00.002+07:00

We were lucky to have an extra instructor along who came along on our PADI Open Water training just for fun. Sarah did some teaching and brought her new underwater camera along.

Chad and me. All photos in this post by Sarah, with additional editing by me, the Photoshop control freak.

Komodo is famous for its strong currents, so most of our classes were in the gentle waters outside the park. But for our last dive, we went to Tatawa Island, where we got to see the kind of underwater environments that make the place exceptional.

As a snorkeler I’m used to seeing either beautiful coral or a lot of fish. Tatawa had both in ridiculous abundance. We floated along in the current through clouds of tiny glassfish, all moving as one. We found Nemo.

And we hovered over huge, vibrant reefs.

The best part was spending several minutes watching a turtle devour coral. He was really ripping into the reef, crunching pieces in his mouth and scattering coral crumbs everywhere. That’s something I won’t forget soon.

Frogwoman 101

2010-07-31T11:06:00.001+07:00

The amazing thing about learning to dive was how scary it wasn’t. I was prepared to be freaked out when it really hit me that I was breathing underwater and that I was not going to surface anytime soon. But when I got down to the ocean floor with all the gear on, it just seemed kind of normal.

Chad and I high-fiving like the people in the dorky PADI videos. Really. We're not actually dorks.

Even the underwater skills we had to learn – how to find your air hose if it falls out of your mouth, how to breathe using your buddy’s extra mouthpiece, etc. – were more like games than chores. I think the fact that I’ve snorkeled a fair amount helped; it’s easier if you’re already used to breathing with your face in the water and clearing water from the hose just using your breath.

Chad (lying down) demonstrates proper buoyancy control for the instructor while I (with the pink weight belt) monitor my air supply.

The truly scary part was getting out to the boat. The pier had partially collapsed (three years ago, a local guy told me) and never been repaired.

Going out and back required scrambling down one side using the gaps between boards as a ladder, walking over on three wobbly planks, and climbing up the other side. This got even trickier when the tide was up or somebody had dripped oil on the boards.

Dive instructor Sarah walks the planks.

The payoff for all that, of course, was diving. On our last day we went to a pretty cool reef off Tatawa Island, in Komodo National Park. Photos in the next post!

Oops!

2010-07-30T10:29:00.001+07:00

We only planned to spend a night in Kuta, but fate intervened in the form of a stupid mistake. The morning of our onward flight to Labuan Bajo, we realized we’d both forgotten to replenish our supply of contact lenses. We were planning to dive and snorkel around some of the world’s most renowned coral reefs, and we would be as blind as two bats. It might be possible to get lenses on Flores, but we couldn’t count on it, and there wasn’t enough time to find out.

The airport Starbucks was playing Johnny Nash's "I Can See Clearly Now." Seriously.

After agonizing, and checking with the airline, and agonizing some more, we decided to pay the penalty, delay the flight two days and get some lenses.

Staying in Bali wasn’t such a bad thing anyway. With the World Cup in its final stages, Kuta had a bad case of football fever.

I love World Cup time in Indonesia. Everyone stays up late to watch the matches in big groups, often clustered around TVs out on streetcorners. They spend the next day analyzing each team's performance and predicting the next-round results. It's a kind of sleepy happy madness, and it reminded me of our earliest days back in Jakarta, which feels appropriate for a farewell tour.

In another blast from the past, we brushed off our rusty surfing style with a couple of lessons. We graduated from the enormous foam boards and began to master somewhat smaller foam boards.

And finally, lenses in hand, we set out for Labuan Bajo.

Flores: Diving, dragons and digs

2010-07-29T10:22:00.001+07:00

After Burma we enjoyed a lovely week in Jakarta, seeing friends, mailing boxes home, and untangling bureaucratic details . Or perhaps I should say bureau-cat-ic details, since many of them revolved around the absurd process of preparing to take Susu with us on the plane. Who knew that a former half-starved street kitten of unknown origins would require something as fancy (and expensive) as an exit permit?

Susu demonstrates the Flying Kitty pose, blissfully unaware that she will soon be a flying kitty herself

Anyway, after getting things more or less organized we headed out for the last phase of the Southeast Asia Tour: Flores, Indonesia.

Why Flores?

First, there’s the diving, said to be among the best in the world. Second, there are Komodo dragons. What says “vacation” more than “island of giant reptiles”? Third, there are Hobbits. Or at least bones of Hobbits. Chad has wanted to do a story about the archeological discoveries there since before we came to Indonesia, and I promptly volunteered to be the photographer because I love hanging around dig sites.

So we set off for Flores. First stop: Bali.

Best-T Honey toothpaste: Sweet!

2010-07-27T10:07:00.002+07:00

Here’s the answer to those artificial sweeteners that make your toothpaste taste like a chemistry experiment: toothpaste with honey! Because teeth and sugar go together like … er … because sugar is great for … hmm … well, it tastes good!

I bought Best-T in Yangon. It does, in fact, look and taste like honey, and it lists real honey (not artificial flavoring) as an ingredient. It behaved like normal toothpaste, but an hour after I used it, my teeth always felt dirty again. As far as I could tell, I might as well be brushing with a Snickers bar. So it’s back to boring old Pepsodent for now.

Smackdown: Yangon vs. Jakarta!

2010-07-25T11:29:00.005+07:00

Out of all the sprawling Asian cities we visited on the tour, Yangon (Rangoon) reminded me the most of Jakarta. I think most of the resemblance was infrastructural, if I may coin a word: the crazy traffic, the smog, the poorly-maintained roads and the rather sad pedestrian overpasses all felt like my beloved Jakarta.

Beloved? Yes, I do love Jakarta, as much as it drives me crazy. There is a great city locked inside Jakarta's chaos, and it would only take some good management to bring it out. It pains me a little that my adopted city so resembles the abandoned capital of a long-abused nation like Myanmar. But so be it. Without further ado, I present Smackdown 2010: Jakarta-Yangon edition!

STREET LIFE: We didn't have enough time in Yangon to do a thorough survey of markets etc., but I'd have to give the edge to Jakarta. It's hard to match the buzz of the Jak when it comes to people hawking, hustling or just hanging out on the street.

TAXIS: Advantage Jakarta, again. Yangon's taxis lack shock absorbers, and for some reason most of them have lost the inner paneling on their doors, making them look sadder than even the shabbiest Kosti Jaya in Jakarta.

TRAFFIC: Both suffer from poor traffic control and an absence of mass transit, but Yangon is the winner, simply because it's smaller and fewer people can afford cars.

Yangon traffic: not yet Jakarta, but it's getting there

AIR QUALITY: Advantage Yangon (see Traffic).

ROADS: Jakarta by a nose. Lots of potholes in both cities.

MONUMENTS: Sorry, Jakarta, but any city would be hard pressed to top the magnificence of Yangon's Shwedagon Pagoda.

The final tally? A 3-3 tie! That's pretty much how the experts have called it as well; the two cities have vied neck and neck in the lower tier of contestants on the annual Expat Quality of Life report.

Stupas in the sun

2010-07-24T16:05:00.000+07:00

Bagan is Burma's answer to Angkor: some 40 square kilometers packed with more than 2,000 temples.

As you might imagine, it's a bit overwhelming. There are huge old impressive stupas like this one ...

But it was the small things that stayed with me, like a little teak statue

and a (thankfully unrestored) faded painting of a woman with an umbrella.

This being Myanmar, there is a sad side to the story: the junta has been criticized for forcibly relocating people from the area in 1990, and has been accused of degrading the structures' historical value by renovating them inappropriately.

Hawkers and would-be guides at the more famous temples can drive you crazy, but the town itself, Nyaung U, was pleasantly laid-back. Lots of restaurants sold the local yogurt, which was tart, rich, slightly lumpy, and exceptionally delicious. Apparently Leonardo DiCaprio has a fancy frozen yogurt machine in his office, but if I were a Hollywood star, I'd hire someone from Bagan to hang around making the fresh stuff for me.

How to stuff a Jeep

2010-07-23T12:19:00.003+07:00

We spent the third night of the hike in Namhsan, a cute and chilly little mountain town.

The guide booked us seats on a Jeep headed down the mountain to Hsipaw the next day. Chad and I were surprised when the little vehicle pulled up in front of our guesthouse. It clearly had space for only five passengers – one on the bucket seat up front and four on the benches that faced each other in the back. There were already four people aboard, so where were we supposed to sit?

It all became clear after the driver lashed our bags to the roof and gestured for us to get in. I got the remaining bench seat, with Chad on the floor at my feet and our tour guide on the tailgate. And that’s how it remained … until we stopped to take on more people. And more. And more.

In all, we crammed fourteen passengers and a driver into the tiny vehicle: four on the benches, three on the floor, four sitting or standing on the tailgate, two in the bucket seat and one lucky dude sitting sidesaddle on the hood – I kid you not – while clinging to the side-view mirror.

The dirt road down the mountain was swimming in mud. Work crews with hoes and shovels didn’t seem to be making a dent in the mess. The driver did a heroic job getting us to town without getting stuck, or, worse, sliding off the road.

It was a very long five-hour ride: Chad's feet went numb and I felt like I’d been spanked with a two-by-four. But our one-time bad experience is a routine occurrence in Myanmar, where public buses and vans are almost always overflowing with people.

As we stretched our legs at a rest stop halfway down the mountain, I wondered how many of our fellow travelers made this trip monthly or even weekly. Did they dread being crammed willy-nilly into the vehicle, or do you get used to it after the100th time?

A night at the monastery

2010-07-22T08:29:00.001+07:00

Pardon the long outage; we've been roaming around inner Flores, Indonesia, where the internet connections are too slow to upload photos. So, back to the hike from Hsipaw to Namhsan ...

On days two and three, we learned how lucky we'd been on day one. It started raining the morning the second day, and it really didn't stop for the rest of the hike.

Mist clung to the mountains until midday.

Motorbikes put chains on their tires to navigate the treacherous muddy sloughs.

When we arrived for our second overnight, our guide discovered the friend he planned to stay with had gone to Mandalay for business. We would have to bunk down at the local monastery instead. Our guide was rather downcast, since he wouldn't be able to drink, but Chad and I were delighted.

We were shown into the large central room at the monastery. Other than a wooden cabinet for plates and silverware, and some sleeping mats and blankets in one corner, there was no furniture. In the now-familiar Burmese style, there was a fire in the floor at one end of the room. Monks, nuns and travelers drifted in and out, plunking down by the coals to chat, drink tea and get warm. The high mountain location and the constant rain made the air quite chilly.

The monastery cat liked to lounge around by the fire looking outrageously comfortable. As the coals burned down she moved in closer and closer until she was in danger of singeing her fur.

The nuns spread the dinner dishes out on mats on the floor. It was marvelous food: in the front of the photo you can see some shredded local squash, with a simple tofu and herb soup, some wedges of omelet, and a bowl of greens behind. The tastiest dish looked like mashed hard-boiled egg yolks, with a vinegary-sharp taste and a rich, velvety texture. It turned out to be the liquid and bits of solids leftover from the tofu-making process, fermented and spiced with a bit of chili, onion and garlic.

Chad and our guide departed for the men's building, where they watched some World Cup before retiring. I slept on a mat in the big room next to the elderly Mother Superior; we went right to bed at 8:30.

The long (long) walk

2010-07-14T10:58:00.000+07:00

Our half-day hike was only a warmup for the main event: a three-day trek from Hsipaw to Namhsan, up in the mountains of the Shan Plateau. We were told the first day would be the toughest, and that was no lie!

The path was quite good -- a lumber road bulldozed by the Chinese to get timber out of the hills faster. It rose at a comfortable rate and rarely turned downward, so you didn't lose any of your hard-earned elevation.We hiked through agricultural land for a good couple of hours before we started to see any untouched forest. The landscapes could have been from 200 years ago ...

and so could the farming implements.

You can sort of see our guide in the back. He was a chatty guy with a wry sense of humor; he kept joking that we were lost, and honestly, I'm still not sure that we weren't sometimes. He was also a heavy drinker who clearly had a hard time going long without alcohol, which would be a problem for him when we had to stay at a monastery later on.

After about four hours we stopped at a little roadside place for a bowl of Shan noodles, the signature Shan hilltribe dish. In Yangon, Mandalay and even Hsipaw you can find many a bowl of limp, packaged Shan noodles with instant broth. But this was the real thing: chewy, substatial handmade noodles like the ones we'd seen drying the day before, in a real chicken soup with fresh herbs. On the side were tasty chili sauce and some pungent pickled mustard greens.

You coudln't ask for better hiking food ... or food in general, really.

After lunch the road got steeper for quite a while. We were so spoiled for amazing mountain views that I hardly bothered to take photos of them. As I grew tired, my mind wandered in random directions and I spent long stretches trying to remember lyrics to long-lost tunes like "Gonna Lay Down My Old Guitar."

I was pretty excited to get to the village before nightfall. We'd been hiking since 8 a.m., and in our guide's estimation, had covered more than 20k (13 miles).

We stayed at a typical village house, a big wooden structure with one large room and a couple of small side rooms. In the middle of the big room was a fire on a metal grate -- the most wonderful fire I've ever seen, because I could throw off my pack, sit right down in front of it and enjoy the sensation of doing absolutely nothing.. The owner of the house then put on the most wonderful kettle I've ever seen. Since it was a tea-growing village, he grabbed a handful of fresh tea leaves, roasted them quickly over the flames on a dry pan, and brewed them up strong and smoky like Lapsang Souchong. Normally I don't drink caffeine that late but this time I had no worries. Even though we bedded down right on the floor on thin mats, I slept like the dead -- or at least the dead-tired.

Hsipaw: Sitting on top of the world

2010-07-12T12:13:00.001+07:00

Hsipaw is an adorable town a few hours east of Mandalay, down a narrow, winding, ill-repaired road lined with the bodies of buses that didn't quite make it.

Downtown is pretty sleepy, with a row of cheap tourist restaurants in front and a local market behind.

Tourists come to Hsipaw to hike, and that's what we did, starting with a half-day stroll to some nearby Shan hilltribe towns.

On our way out we paused for a delicious look at handmade noodles being hung out to dry.

We also got up close and personal with water buffalo.

Every town had a stupa, and these were surprisingly large and opulent considering the overall poverty. They also seemed to be renovated frequently. This one had a Buddha on top of a somewhat idiosyncratic globe: New Zealand was only a word without a landmass, and Laos and Cambodia were missing altogether.

"Why is the Buddha on top of a globe?" I asked our guide.

"Maybe this is after he's taken over the world," he answered.

"But does the Buddha want to take over the world?"

"Who knows?" he said with a mischievous grin.

The brave men of Mandalay

2010-07-07T12:33:00.000+07:00

To my disappointment, the Nylon Hotel was not made of nylon.

Our room boasted excellent views of the city, which we earned with our legs -- it was about 7,000 stairs up from the lobby. The electricity was an on-again, off-again affair, as it is in most of Myanmar. But the front-desk people were quite friendly and the location, across from the city's only ice cream parlor, was highly strategic.

Our first night there, we went downtown to see the Moustache Brothers, Mandalay's most famous comedy troupe. The Brothers offer a vaudeville-style mashup of jokes and musical numbers. They used to do their shtick in Burmese, but now they are only allowed to offer it in English before handfuls of foreigners in a converted garage. They boost their income by selling traditional puppets, which line the wall behind the stage.

Lu Maw (above) is the best English-speaker of the group, so he runs the show. His classically-trained wife does most of the traditional dances.

But the emotional heart of the evening is Par Par Lay, who has served three prison terms, including hard labor. His first arrest was for mocking the regime. The most recent was for leading opposition party members in offering donations to monks after the crackdown on the Monks' Uprising of 2007.

He doesn't do much talking in the show, but you can sense right away why Par Par Lay is one of the country's most beloved comedians. He has an irresistible radiance. When he comes on stage, you don't want to look at anyone else.

I've met a few famous people, mostly politicians -- but shaking Par Par Lay's hand was truly an honor. I can't imagine the courage it takes to laugh in the face of the Myanmar regime. It's something I can only aspire to have.

Yangon to Mandalay: The cold bus

2010-07-05T09:48:00.001+07:00

Back when I was in Russia in the late 80s, whenever you were leaving on a trip somewhere and it happened to be raining, someone was sure to say lugubriously: "Zee SKY is CRYING because you are LEAFING." If that's the case, Myanmar must have been very unhappy to see us coming, because when we arrived that first morning inYangon it rained all day. We went straight from the airport to the bus station, and there we sat, from early morning until late afternoon, watching the rain fall on the buses, the muddy parking lot, and a stack of Max soft drinks.

The nice lady who sold us the tickets got us settled in the bus station restaurant. "What kind of food would you like?" she asked, and when we said "Myanmar food" she said "Oh, thank you!" with a huge smile. The restaurant people stuffed us with curries. Then a kitten attacked Chad's sneakers. They probably deserved it.

The TV was advertising a fascinating lineup of ancient American movies, from "For a Few Dollars More" to a Doris Day-Rock Hudson flick. I stared sleepily at the screen for hours, listening to a Burmese audio phrasebook I'd downloaded from the Defense Language Institute. It was full of useful phrases like "Stop or I'll shoot!" and "Please don't push, there are enough food parcels for everyone."

There are two rules governing bus travel in Myanmar. First, long-distance buses leave in the afternoon and reach their destination at 4 a.m. I have no idea why, but that's how it is. Second, the Yangon-Mandalay bus is FREEZING COLD. Other travelers have confirmed this. I begged a blanket off the bus driver, but the insanely overchilled air from the ceiling vents cut right through it. I went through the 7 stages of extremely cold bus passengers: anger, disbelief, uncontrollable shivering, (fruitless) complaints to the driver, homicidal impulses, crying jag, and finally, surrender. With my fleece hiking hat pulled down over my ears, my wool sweater pulled up over my face, and the help of a knockout pill (Indonesia's Panadol PM, world's greatest cold medicine!), I finally managed to get some sleep.

Everyone had to get off the bus at 1 a.m. to show their i.d. at a police checkpoint. I tried to get outraged about this government intrusion, but mostly I was happy for the chance to restore some circulation to my toes.

And when I woke up again, we were there: Mandalay!

Myanmar? Burma? Burma? Myanmar?

2010-07-02T13:35:00.004+07:00

The first question that arises when you consider visiting the country west of Thailand is: what the heck do I call this place? Myanmar is the name given to it by the junta who have ruled it with an iron fist since 1988. On the other hand, Burma is the colonial label stuck on it by the British, a corruption of the name of the ethnic-majority Bamar, and therefore not really ideal either.

The second question is: should I go? Activists have promoted a tourism boycott against The Country That Shall Not Be Named since the mid-90s, spurred by statements from resistance hero Aung San Suu Kyi, who argued tourism profited the oppressive regime and encouraged it to create tourist destinations using forced labor. But there has been a steady push against the boycott by activists who argue that it hurts ordinary residents and further isolates the country.

Young nuns, near Hsipaw

Here's why I decided to go:

In recent years the government has loosened its grip on the hospitality industry. There are more private guesthouses to stay in so you aren't renting directly from the regime. Furthermore, tourists are no longer required to buy $200 in currency directly from the government when they arrive. In fact, we never changed money at an official exchange office, or even SAW an official exchange office.

Suu Kyi herself has recently been quoted as softening her position on tourism, although the statement is apocryphal since it comes via an unnamed source.

But mostly, I just think it's enlightening to see the place you live in through someone else's eyes. When I was growing up in Northern Virginia, I was always baffled by the hordes of tour buses lining up in front of Mount Vernon Plantation. To me, it was just that big house up the road. The history books said it was important because George Washington once lived there, but what really proved its significance to me was the large numbers of people willing to brave sticky summer heat, sunburn, mosquitoes and $5 Cokes just to go look at the place.

Conversely, when I moved to an old paper mill town in northern New Hampshire, I was amazed at how the local people viewed their hometown. I thought - and still think - it was one of the prettiest places I'd ever been: a valley bisected by a tumbling river and framed by three mountain ranges. People born and raised there, though, mostly saw a struggling mill, a decrepit downtown and a shrinking population. They were surprised anyone wanted to come see the place, never mind move there.

Thus, tourism itself, for all its flaws, carries an important message: this place is on the map. It's beautiful, exotic, interesting. People will put up with hardships (in Burma, significant hardships) just to come see it. It counteracts the isolation imposed by repressive regimes and buttresses people's sense that their country deserves better.

Statue, Bagan Historical Area

It's true I don't feel great about certain taxes and fees going to the government. On the other hand, I wasn't thrilled when I discovered my US tax dollars were funding secret torture facilities, either. The world is full of horrors and it's hard to keep your hands completely clean.

I didn't have one of those dramatic moments you're supposed to have in a place like Burma -- you know, grasping someone's hand and murmuring "One day you shall be free! The whole world is watching!" Instead, I raved about the food, told people they had beautiful babies, gawked at amazing temples, shared in the hideous discomforts of local transportation, practiced English with those who wanted to, spent money at small local businesses, and laughed at the occasional political joke. And now I'm going to tell you all about it.

Is that enough? Maybe. I think so. I hope so.

Dadlands: The thirteenth month

2010-07-01T17:57:00.010+07:00

Tuy Hoa is where my Dad reached the end of his Vietnam tour.

I’m finished!!!!!! I’m so happy and relieved I’m going to burst with joy. It’s so great to be alive! -- August 5, 1968, Tuy Hoa

Apparently, it's common for soldiers in a war zone to grow increasingly anxious about the possibility of death as the end of their tour approaches. That's what happened to my Dad. He expected to get the traditional soft assignment to Bangkok for his last couple of weeks. Instead he got sent back into the thick of things.

I was so darned scared and pessimistic when I found out I was coming here rather than Bangkok. The easiest part of it was the flying. The hardest part was thinking about flying. I couldn’t think of being with you and the kids without thinking of the awful pain if I didn’t come back.

The North Vietnamese have been getting more and bigger guns. Small arms never worried me but the anti-aircraft weapons they are using are too much for a C-130. And when you are landing or making a drop you are really vulnerable.

Statue of a Viet Cong soldier taking a downed US Air Force pilot prisoner, DMZ Museum, Quang Tri

He went on to tell my Mom all the stuff he had hidden from her over the previous 13 months: stories of friends shot down or nearly shot down, and the tale of his own brush with disaster at a small airstrip called Prek Klok. His C-130, carrying 24,000 pounds of high explosives, was ambushed with mortars and gunfire just after landing. Somehow he turned the big plane around, reversed all the way down the runway toward the incoming mortars, and took off again.

When we backed up we created so much dust that we couldn’t see how far we had moved. The airplane feels real strange when you’re backing up at 40 or 50 knots. We stopped and it was evident there still wasn’t enough room so we backed up again. This time it was OK so we poured the power on and I wasn’t sure until we got to 60 knots that we were going to make it. We knocked over a slender pole right at the end of the runway (it shouldn’t have been there anyway) and used every darn inch of it.

The whole crew got the Distinguished Flying Cross. Mom and all of us kids went to see Dad get his medal in Washington after his return. I've seen the family photos from that day, but until I read his description of the ambush I didn't really know what he had been honored for.

Reading the letters has been a great, if bittersweet, experience. My Mom's letters to him are a corker too, full of great period details like the time her mother took my older sisters out to "see the hippies" on Boston Common.

So, the moral of the story is: SAVE YOUR LETTERS, and archive your e-mail and blogs too. You never know who might find them interesting, even after you're gone. These letters survived only because one of those sisters of mine made a point of putting them in a safe place after Dad died.

Also, I'm very lucky to have a guy who lets me drag him to backwater towns, crummy hotels and deserted airfields just because my father happened to be there 40 years ago. The Dadlands Tour 2010 would not have happened without Chad, who sometimes supported it more ardently than I did.

Dadlands: The incursion

2010-06-30T13:35:00.007+07:00

Back to Tuy Hoa for a story from my Dad's Vietnam war letters:

A day off today. We need it after what happened last night. We had just returned to our quarters after having flown until 1 am when the mortars started coming in. They hit in the aircraft revetment area, about a mile away. The fracas brought us all out of bed and we were standing around outside (the mortars had stopped) watching the fires when an Air Policeman came up saying that about 10 Viet Cong had gotten on to the base and were headed in our direction.

I envied him. He was wearing a helmet and flak vest and carrying an M-16. I was wearing underwear and shower clogs and didn’t even have a cigarette.

Tuy Hoa Airport (former air base)

He suggested we get into a bunker and we did. I didn’t like it, though, because there were about 30 of us in there and if the VC really wanted to get personnel (normally they don’t – they want airplanes) they could get us all with one hand grenade or satchel charge. So I left and went back to my quarters thinking that if they really wanted me, they would have to go through all the hootches and find me.

I stayed in the hootch for a while, then got dressed and went outside again because if an evacuation were started, I didn’t want to be left behind. There were 2 helicopter gun ships orbiting overhead dropping flares and occasionally cutting loose with machine gun fire. Suddenly, one of the helicopters wheeled around and cut loose five rockets into an area about a half mile away. Maybe a mile. All the calmness I had regained in the preceding hours left me in a flash but by then things were pretty well under control. An all clear was declared shortly and we went back to bed.

This morning I hear that there were 2 search and rescue C-130s totally destroyed, either by mortars or satchel charges. They killed 9 Viet Cong. Five Americans were injured, only 2 seriously.

Tower, Tuy Hoa Airport

I hesitate writing you about all this but it makes such interesting writing and besides it’s very unlikely to happen again before I leave which isn’t too far away.

Apparently the security people got caught napping. Security will undoubtedly get much better now. The whole thing rattled the base a bit. Somebody remarked that it was almost as bad as Cleveland. -- Tuy Hoa, July 29, 1969

Dadlands: French Onion soup and a steak

2010-06-29T13:06:00.003+07:00

One of the things I find funny and a bit sad about my Dad's old letters is his dogged search for Western food all across Southeast Asia. There he was in culinary wonderlands like Bangkok and Saigon, ordering hamburgers, steaks and fried chicken -- and with such disappointing results!

A couple of nights ago I had Southern Fried Chicken and it was more like Southern Fried Roadrunner. It wasn't much larger than a sparrow and was in perfect condition -- pure muscle. I don't know how they ever caught it. It could easily have beaten back a dozen men. -- Bangkok, Jan. 29, 1968

The irony is, after the Great American Ethnic Food Revolution of the 1980s, Dad became a big fan of Vietnamese and Thai food, along with Afghan, Puerto Rican and all sorts of other cuisines that had suddenly popped up in the strip malls of Northern Virginia. I wonder if he ever looked back on his Bangkok burgers as missed opportunities.

Anyway, I wanted to order one of those classic Dad meals as part of our sentimental journey up the Vietnamese coast. When Chad spotted French onion soup and steak at a place around the corner from our hotel in Hue, we knew the moment had arrived.

Everyone seems to specialize in French Onion soup and most of it is delicious. Most of it is made with a little chicken and ham in it and is quite different from the French Onion I am used to. It is also often served with a lot of cheese mixed into it so that it is quite thick. -- Bangkok, Jan. 14, 1968

This soup was probably a bit more like the French Onion my Dad was used to. There were no bits of meat in it, but the broth tasted like beef stock flavored and darkened by lots of caramelized onions. I could have used more cheese -- I like lots of cheese -- but it was a perfectly good soup.

The steaks were marinated which was just perfect.

I wish I could find a good old American steak. They marinate everything over here. I've never had a steak in a restaurant that wasn't heavily marinated. -- Bangkok, Jan. 19, 1968

They had also been pounded for tenderness, and were quite tasty. In fact, after weeks of sampling as many Asian tastes as we could, it was nice to eat something familiar -- sort of like pushing a culinary reset button. The ice-cold bottles of Tiger beer didn't hurt, either.

Dadlands: The razor's edge

2010-06-28T08:43:00.006+07:00

Barber, Da Nang

I stopped writing for a while to go to 1200 Mass, get a haircut and have lunch. The Vietnamese barber that cut my hair was less than 5 feet tall. They make me a little nervous when they get out the razor. Many of the barbers working at our bases in Vietnam have turned out to be Viet Cong. --Dec. 29 Tuy Hoa

Dadlands: Tuy Hoa

2010-06-27T17:13:00.000+07:00

Well, as expected, Burma turns out to be a difficult place to blog. First of all, they block blogger.com, and secondly, even if you use a proxy to get around the censors, the connections are so slow and unreliable it's just too frustrating to try and post anything.

So now that I'm back in Jakarta, I'll try to get some Burma posts up. But first, I'll wrap up the story of our trip up the Vietnamese coast to some of the places where my father was posted during the war.

For the serious Dad-ologist, Tuy Hoa is the ultimate destination. It's where he wrote some of his best letters, and also, probably not coincidentally, the base he liked the best out of all the places he was stationed in Vietnam.

This is the first time I've really been proud of a troop carrier operation. We've really got a good bunch of people over here. -- Tuy Hoa, Oct 9, 1967

Like many of the old airbases left over from the war, the Tuy Hoa facility has become the local airport. We went down there on a hot, brutally sunny morning. There were no flights scheduled in or out that day and access to the airfield was limited.

I strolled around taking some pictures of the terminal and parking lot and then the assistant director came out to see what we were up to. He said a lot of Vietnam vets come by to look at the place. We chatted a little and then walked back to our waiting taxi. Just as we were pulling out of the lot, the assistant director ran up to say we could walk partway out to the airstrip and take some pictures, which was nice of him.

Like most airstrips, it was a whole lot of nothing, but it was still cool to stand out there for a minute and watch the windsock flutter.

Some of the structures certainly seemed old enough to be original. Looking around, it was easy to imagine myself 40 years back in time. The hard part was envisioning this vast emptiness bustling and full of people.

Dadlands: Dong Ha

2010-06-14T09:44:00.000+07:00

After the lovely visit to Quang Tri we pretty much blew through Dong Ha. We stopped to look at a war monument north of town. A lot of these monuments look like they've been shipped in by the boatload from the old USSR. They don't do much for me, personally.

To take the edge off the coffee, we stopped for a bowl of beef noodles at the stall next door to the memorial. They were extremely tasty and, instead of the usual plate of bean sprouts, scallions and basil, they came with a mound of local watercress. It was mustardy and peppery and delicious in the soup, and we polished off the whole plate.

Dad related the following tale about Dong Ha:

We have our own special brand of fireworks here. The last holiday we had (I forget which one) the guys at Dong Ha fired off a bunch of flares in celebration. One of the flares dropped in the bomb dump and blew the whole thing up, making for quite a display. Blowing up ammo dumps seems to be a favorite sport. They blew up one at Hue and another in A Shau valley. -- July 4, 1968, CCK Air Base, Taiwan

Dadlands: Quang Tri

2010-06-14T09:43:00.004+07:00

Sign advertising DMZ tours, Quang Tri

Dad was stationed in Quang Tri, right up by the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) dividing North and South Vietnam, for a couple of weeks in late 1967. This was well before the southern highway there became the “highway of terror”, but it still wasn’t a particularly pleasant place to work. First of all, it was a dull assignment, overseeing shipments of supplies into a newly-established Marine camp.

There is really nothing to write about at all. We had a few airplanes in today and it rained. That is pretty much the news. It rained, rained, rained and rained. -- December 13, 1967 Quang Tri

In the second place, he was supposed to go back to the relative comforts of Da Nang on the last plane out every night, but he often got stuck in the field instead.

I am spending the night here at Quang Tri. ... The Marines have given me a cot and an air mattress (which they call a rubber lady) and I have found a nice sleeping bag and a pillow. -- December 2, 1967 Quang Tri

Bomb, Vinh Moc tunnel historic site, Quang Tri

Thirdly, and most important, it was a scary place to be. Quang Tri was a “soft” assignment compared to what a lot of ground troops were facing, he wrote after wrapping up his stint --

but we still had small arms fire around the perimeter and mortars and artillery going off constantly and quite frequently air strikes just outside the perimeter. B-52 strikes up in the DMZ used to roll us out of the sack. I am tired of sleeping in a sleeping bag and worrying about being overrun and I am really thankful to be going back where I can sleep in peace again. -- Dec. 14, 1967, Saigon

Chad and I drove up to Quang Tri on a motorbike from Hue and tooled around town, which didn’t take very long -- it was pretty well flattened in the war and remains small today. On the road behind the train station, we were hailed by some people at a café.

The sheer radiant force of their welcome reeled us in. Soon we were sitting around drinking coffee and looking up words in the phrasebook.

The coffee was awesomely potent, so concentrated it was thick and almost chocolatey. It came in the spotted glasses that everyone seems to use on the north central coast. Were they originally sold with jelly in them, like the glasses my mom collected in the 70s? Did an enterprising gas station give them out free with fill-ups? Or did some super-salesperson make the rounds of every coffee stand and soup stall for 100 miles around?

Yes, they had that much condensed milk in them. And yes, they needed it.

The coffee also came with tiny cups of similarly potent tea, as is often the case up north. I'm not sure what the story is behind that, but it left me buzzing.

We figured out everyone’s ages and how many kids they had, and then our host, Phu, had to leave. We downed our last life-giving gulp of coffee and hit the road too, glad to find Quang Tri a much friendlier place than Dad experienced in 1967.

Dadlands: Hue

2010-06-13T20:31:00.001+07:00

Dad didn't write much about Hue, probably to avoid upsetting my mom. Only by way of a picture caption in one of his letters do I know that he was there at all. (The picture has since disappeared.)

All it says is:

Hue. We were flying a medical evac mission. This was not long after Tet.

Hue was among the bloodiest and most grueling battles of the Tet Offensive, so, depending on what "not long" means, I'm guessing flying medical evac from there wasn't very pleasant. Also, Dad hated blood, needles and anything else having to do with hospitals. But he liked being useful. Shortly after beginning his tour, when he started flying combat-related missions, he wrote this:

The flying is interesting and challenging and best of all, it's important. The Army and Marines depend a great deal on airlift. ... Sometimes we evacuate the wounded troops which is a job I don't like to do. I'll do everything in my power to get a wounded kid out though. It's a great comfort to the troops over here to know that they will be evacuated very quickly if they are wounded. -- Oct. 6, 1967, Tuy Hoa

As for me, it was horrifying to realize that American bombs had destroyed Hue, with its walled palace compound modeled on the Forbidden City.

The compound only dates back to the early 1800s, but the place has a magic beyond its years. The sprawling, leafy grounds practically insist that you lounge around for an afternoon.

Some of the structures have been spectacularly restored since the war while others are still in shambles. You can wander to neglected spots and feel like you're the only person who's been there in decades.

We did, in fact, lounge around the grounds for most of the day, watching the caretakers whip the place into shape. The biennial Hue Festival was just a few days away and there were statues to polish and lanterns to hang.

They were even making decorations out of conical hats, one of the city's most famous products.

Hue. Magical. I can only hope it stays undisturbed for centuries to come.

Dadlands: Flying with the stars

2010-06-12T19:28:00.002+07:00

From my dad's Vietnam War letters:

Yesterday we started off at Da Nang expecting to make a couple of trips to An Hoa. I could think of a lot of places I'd rather go. When we got to Da Nang we found that our loads weren't ready so they asked us if we wanted to take a USO troupe to Saigon. Are you kidding?!!

USO starlets entertaining the troops in Vietnam, late 1960s

The troupe included 4 or 5 guys and a blonde who looked pretty sharp. I decided it was time to take a group snapshot that we could put up on the bulletin board with the caption "War is Hell." It was a bad decision. At closer range she looked tough as nails. It turned out she had nothing on under her thin pullover blouse and that she was very proud of that which was unsupported. She took such a deep breath of air and pulled her stomach so far in that I was afraid she would explode and injure me. Her conversation was full of the show world "darling" etc. etc. I disliked her enormously.

We started off for Saigon, which is a pretty good haul, and I made a second decision. Since we are constantly in contact with radar sites en route, I thought it would be novel if she made one of the transmissions. It was decided she should make the initial contact with "Portcall" Control, a particularly jovial bunch. We wrote out a script for her and cued her on the mike.

My gosh, what a mess she made of it. She expanded that 5 second transmission to 30 seconds by inserting extraneous "darlings," "babys" and "lovers." Once she had started there was no way of turning her off. I slunk down in my seat, covered my face and blushed like crazy. Bill Von Thaden, the navigator, hid his face in his arms on his table. We couldn't believe it. When she finished Portcall screamed “Speak to me baby!" but there were very few other comments. We later decided she had stolen their thunder by saying it all. We all got a kick out of it and roared with laughter at the bar last night.

Much as I don't care for show people, I had to admire them. They had been to some pretty grim places trying to cheer the boys up. That takes guts. Some of the things they saw weren't very pleasant. They didn't have to come over here if they didn't want to.

June 24 Cam Ranh

Dadlands: Da Nang

2010-06-11T17:52:00.002+07:00

Our chosen vehicle for the ride north was something the tour companies call an "open bus": it hits all the tourist towns up and down the coast, and you can jump off anywhere and then get back on a day or two later without having to buy a new ticket. They also feature "sleeper" buses with tiers of beds, which is a pretty exciting concept when you've been trying to sleep on regular buses. We figured this was not only a pretty cheap option ($25 from Saigon to Hue) but would assure us a decent, non-overcrowded, non-smoky bus.

In the tour company's defense I will say this: only once did the bus actually break down in the middle of the highway and have to be pushed by the passengers until the engine cranked. But in many other ways, the open bus was a disappointment. On the sleeper from Nha Trang to Da Nang, they stuffed in so many passengers that several people ended up sleeping in the aisles. And when I woke up in the middle of the night, someone was sneaking a smoke. Grrr!

Anyhow, eventually we got to Da Nang: a no-nonsense city often overshadowed by its more scenic neighbors, Hue and Hoi An. Still, it has pleasant sea breezes and some cool old buildings.

If you get up early enough, you can stroll around town and see people exercising: some doing circuits on their bicycles, others walking or stretching. These two women were playing badminton on a side street. I think this must be a political thing; in the USSR, too, everyone was encouraged to exercise in the morning.

Dad didn't write too much about Da Nang, except for one story about a USA troupe which I will devote a full post to later. He also mentions making a supply drop from air for the first time. As the war went on, North Vietnam was getting increasingly effective anti-aircraft weapons, and the Air Force began dropping loads rather than expose its planes to harm by landing and offloading cargo.

It was quite an experience. There are supposed to be a bunch of panels laid out on the ground to help you line up and to be used as timing points. I never did see any of them. I think the wind must have blown them away. I knew we were lined up about right and fortunately Glen Burnett saw some guy holding up a piece of one panel so he was able to give me directions on the run in. Glenn did a beautiful job of directing us in. Of the three airplanes that made drops, ours was by far the best score.

I remember that a tune kept running through my mind which I finally recognized as the theme from "12 O'Clock High." That struck me as being absolutely absurd. -- October 18, Tuy Hoa

Dadlands: Cam Ranh Bay

2010-06-10T13:23:00.002+07:00

Our first stop on our way up the coast was Cam Ranh, only we didn't stop there. There wasn't enough time, partly because I had given my knee a good whack in a fall at Angkor Wat and wanted to get it checked out at the international clinic in Da Nang. (No worries; it was just a bad bruise and is well on its way to recovery.)

I was ambivalent about Cam Ranh anyway, because honestly, Dad never had anything nice to say about it.

This is still a dreary place even though they have added on an entirely new kitchen. I don't really know what it is about this place but there is something that makes it less than pleasant. It is the poorest place that I know of in Vietnam.

I did have enough time to snap a picture of the naval base as we flew past it on the bus.

There's a monument, too.

Happily, "air power" is taking on a completely new meaning on this part of the coast.

Burma-bound!

2010-06-09T22:17:00.001+07:00

We're off to Myanmar a.k.a Burma early tomorrow morning. I'm not sure how much internet access we'll have, so I've set up the next few posts to go up automatically. After that perhaps I can update from wherever we are. Nauq twe dhe da paw! ("see you later" in Burmese)

Shwedagon pagoda, Yangon (Photo: http://tourism.goldenlandpages.com)

Entering the Dadlands

2010-06-09T13:18:00.002+07:00

So, as you know if you've read as far back as Udon Thani, part of the rationale behind this trip to Vietnam was to go to some of the places my Dad talked about in his letters home in 1967-8 during the war. If you start in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), swing east to the coast and work your way up, you can bag quite a few Dad towns: Cam Ranh Bay, Tuy Hoa, Danang, Hue, Quang Tri, Dong Ha. So that's what we decided to do.

I guess this is as good a time as any to say a few words about my father, for those of you who are not my siblings, haha.

Dad was a career Air Force guy. He flew fighter planes in Korea. Then he got married and had five kids, the youngest of whom -- me -- was in diapers when he got assigned to fly fighters in Vietnam. He promptly swapped assignments with a colleague, which doesn't even seem like it should be possible, if you ask me. I mean, you can trade military postings the way third-graders trade sandwiches in the lunchroom? Anyway, he traded fighter planes for the less glamorous duty of flying enormous C-130 cargo planes so he would have a better chance of coming back to us alive.

How did he feel about the war? I hesitate to extrapolate much from the letters, because he died several years ago and isn't here to explain them himself. Furthermore, they were a) subject to military censorship and b) designed to be positive in order to keep my Mom's spirits up. But I can highlight a few things:

He was a product of his era and saw Asians as different from Westerners. Here's what he wrote about the orphanage he visited in Udon Thani:

We have it so good in the States that it's impossible to imagine the plight of these people. The Bishop will only allow Catholic couples to adopt the children because Thai couples of other sects and religions might make slaves of the children. That sounds unbelievable but in a nutshell I think it embodies their attitude toward life. No wonder we can't understand the East. -- June 10, 1968, Udon Thani

On the other hand, he never demonized or dehumanized the other side. Here's what he writes about picking up a load of prisoners in Qui Nhon:

The prisoners were mostly North Vietnamese and were the most pathetic bunch I have ever seen. Many of them were just kids. They sure looked scared and I felt sorry for them. One of the prisoners had only one leg and was reputed to have killed 50 Marines. Some of the guys were angry with him because of it. Maybe it was wrong of me, but I wasn't angry with him -- I was sorry for him. He was only doing his job just like our own people do. It isn't his fault that he did it well. It just points up the ultimate stupidity of war. -- October 9, 1967, Tuy Hoa

He did not revel in the alleged glories of war. By the time I was old enough to remember, he never told war stories. He didn't pressure us to join the military -- although he couldn't possibly have been prouder when my brother graduated from the Air Force Academy. Here’s what he wrote at the end of a stint near the DMZ, where mortars and light arms fire were a nightly occurrence:

War is not a part of my nature and I feel sorry for the poor guys who live through this kind of thing day and night. I hope they are better equipped for it than I. Dec. 14, 1967, Saigon

I think Vietnam made him more cautious about the use of military force. And I think greater exposure to other cultures softened his view of divisions between nations. Toward the end of his life he tutored kids at our local high school, many of whom were immigrants from all over the world. He also mentored kids from various backgrounds at our church Youth Group. I think he welcomed the chance to make up for the tragedy of the war in some way.

Anyway, that’s my Dad as I remember him. Perhaps my siblings would like to chime in? Sadly, I don’t even have a picture with me to post. Just imagine a guy with a flat-top haircut working on our family’s motley assortment of second-hand cars on a Saturday afternoon, with just the family dog for company. Or imagine him showing my brother how to fix engines, or going to my sister’s flute performances, or single-handedly getting me through high school Physics despite my nightly fits of tears.

That’s my Dad. I can almost see him now.

Puppets on a pond

2010-06-07T11:24:00.001+07:00

I was in a lousy mood when we got to the water puppet show. I was tired and hungry and sweaty, and we'd been walking around a Saigon park for at least 40 minutes searching for the exceedingly well-hidden puppet theatre.

But it was hard not to be won over by two birds engaged in a courtship dance ...

or a dragon boat full of powerful men setting out to sea ....

Or a set of dancing ladies turning in unison.

Water puppetry was devised in North Vietnam as a rice-paddy entertainment. As with Indonesian shadow puppets, it also serves the ritual role of appeasing the spirits and engendering harmony. A small group of musicians provides the accompaniment and also supplies narratives and voices.

The grand finale was a fire-spitting dragon, which also sprayed water over the audience. Rawrrr!

Cool, baby

2010-06-03T07:57:00.000+07:00

In Saigon, the women wear floppy hats, masks, dark glasses and even cotton gloves to protect themselves from the sun. And so, by extension, do their babies.

Full-on Saigon

2010-06-02T15:48:00.001+07:00

Saigon is not the kind of city that lies around waiting to be discovered. Saigon grabs you by the throat and demands attention.

The instant we stepped off the bus from Phnom Penh, a guy with a little bottle of glue was trying to fix Chad's sneakers (which were, in fact, badly in need of repair). Half an hour later, when I set out on the search for a guesthouse, a guy came up to me and bellowed "CHEAP ROOM EIGHT DOLLAR." He led me down a little alley where I walked through various families' living rooms -- TVs blaring, kids squabbling -- and climbed up narrow spiral staircases to examine their rental rooms.

Down another alley I decided to splurge on a small hotel with air conditioning and wifi. The room was so tiny, the door only opened partway before hitting the bed. But for $10, you can't expect lots of wasted space!

The intersecting network of alleys was a constant jumble of motorbikes, food sellers, kids playing, and people just hanging out. All the residents leave their front doors open in the hope of catching a cool breeze. You can walk down the alley and see what everyone's watching on TV and eating for dinner.

It's hard to square all this commercial activity with the idea that Vietnam is a Communist state. It couldn't be more different from the USSR in the late 1980s, where I spent four months as a student. There, everything for sale (and it wasn't much) was gray or brown and shaped like a box. The common refrain was "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us." Saigon is a riot of shapes and colors, and everyone seems to be working around the clock ... even those who look too young to hold down a job.

X-Men for Boss

2010-06-01T20:39:00.000+07:00

X-Men for Boss may be perfumed, but it is definitely a guy's shampoo. You can tell by the ass-kicking name, the masculine brown color and most especially, the nubbly little dots on the side of the bottle. As you will recall from our previous exploration of Watchout Soap, there is nothing more manly than nubblies.

PS: Don't forget to brush your teeth.

How to move furniture

2010-05-29T06:53:00.000+07:00

On your bicycle taxi, in heavy traffic, while smoking a cigarette: That's Phnom Penh style.

Eating lotus

2010-05-28T18:51:00.000+07:00

It must have been lotus season in Cambodia because people were selling them everywhere as snacks. These women were hawking them outside our bus at the Cambodia-Vietnam border.

To eat them, you have to rip open the fibrous flower head.

Then you peel off the seed's little green jacket. You're left with a pure-white rounded cylinder that looks like a little pill or maybe an earplug. They have a slightly foam-like texture, like a mushroom but crunchier, and a mild planty taste like cucumber.

It wasn't my favorite snack ever (I think that would still be the glorious curry puff), but it was fun to try, given the importance of the lotus to Asian culture and religion -- and the number of lotus statues, bas-reliefs and paintings we've seen over the last few weeks.

The Killing Fields

2010-05-27T20:55:00.026+07:00

Warning: disturbing images!

Going to from the ancient splendor of Angkor Wat to the modern horrors of the Khmer Rouge in two days is a dizzying experience. I'm not sure I'd recommend doing it that fast. But I definitely recommend the Killing Fields memorial site, which does an admirably unflinching job of telling a terrible story.

The trail points out the areas where trucks stopped to unload frightened, blindfolded prisoners. It takes you to the mass graves where their bodies lie. It describes the awful ways in which people died.

The matter-of-fact tone encourages you to put yourself in the place of those terrified prisoners ... and also in the place of the murderous guards, who after all were human too. Some probably needed only the slightest encouragement to become executioners, while others were persuaded to kill after being threatened with death themselves. What would I do in their shoes?

The image you may already know from the Killing Fields is the skulls. They're housed in a clear-sided memorial stupa where visitors can see them up close. They're alike, of course, but each a little different, and they say more than a thousand pages in a thousand books.

From the Killing Fields we went to S21, the prison where people were held and tortured before being transferred for execution. Here it was the photographs of the victims that spoke loudest.

Who were these people? Who would they have become?

Less is more: The Siem Reap-Phnom Penh bus

2010-05-27T08:25:00.001+07:00

The ticket from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh was a great deal even by Southeast Asian bus standards: $4.50 for a 6-hour ride. But it followed that unwritten bus rule of less-is-more: pay less money, get more noise.

First were the music videos, which were pretty fun. Some guys in the back started playing their radio at the same time, but our hero, the bus captain, strode down the aisle and told them to knock it off. After that came a Jet Li action movie, overdubbed into Khmer by two men with husky voices. About an hour into the show, the picture froze. Then the movie commenced again from the beginning, but with the soundtrack turned off and pop music blaring instead. After a few minutes, all attempts at movie-watching were abandoned and there was a period of blessed silence.

We stopped at a roadside stand and had some delicious anise-dominated beef curry with noodles. (I think of anise as Chinese-y, but I've been surprised to find it in force in Northern Thai and Cambodian food too.)

After dinner we were treated to a stunning sunset.

We optimistically put our headphones on and started listening to a podcast. But it was not to be. As darkness gathered, 90 minutes away from Phnom Penh, the bus driver put the radio on over the loudspeakers. I got all caught up on my Cambodian news, but I'm sad to say I didn't understand a word of it.

Ta Prohm: The rhythms of rubble

2010-05-26T18:51:00.000+07:00

The last temple we visited at the Angkor Wat complex was Ta Prohm, which has been kept in a semi-natural state to show how the temples looked before they were rehabilitated.

The rhythms of rubble compete with, and sometimes seem to complete, the rhythms of order and beauty.

And roots add their own architecture to carved rock.

Bayon: Tower of faces

2010-05-26T16:58:00.000+07:00

One thing I didn't know before I went there: Angkor Wat refers only to the central temple of the whole temple complex. As far as anyone knows, Angkor Wat itself has been in continuous use since it was built in the 12th century. Surrounding it are numerous other temples which were abandoned and later restored.

While Angkor Wat was built as a Hindu temple, Bayon temple has Buddhist origins. It rises up as a wall of 216 eerily serene faces. On every tower, a face looks out in each of the four directions.

Peek around any corner and you'll be confronted by that wispy all-knowing smile. Some say the face is modeled after the bodhisattva Lokesvara; some say it is the face of the king who built the temple, Jayavarman VII. Others say it's both.

The inner chambers are like a maze, having been built and rebuilt over the centuries to suit different kings. Little altars are scattered inside and out, where you can light a joss stick and make a small donation.

All around the outskirts of the building are little extra bits of temple, some of which make a nice dog-sized shelter on a blazing hot day.

Angkor Wat!

2010-05-26T13:05:00.002+07:00

Angkor Wat presents a challenge to the blogger: How to describe the indescribable?

How to even begin? There are the soaring towers, of course.

I also loved the long, graceful terraces flanked with columns.

A series of bas reliefs stretches the whole length of the terraces, bringing to life, among other tales, the battle between Hanuman's monkey army and that of the demon king Ravana.

When monkeys attack - with long knives!

On a more spiritual plane are the apsaras, celestial nymphs who smile from corners and columns in nearly every chamber.

My favorite, though - and I guess it's no big surprise, cat lover that I am - was the lions. They may be corroded, with crumbling faces, but they still have powerful haunches that look coiled and ready to spring.

Next I'll blog about some of the other temples in the complex. But I repeat, you just can't capture Angkor Wat in a few words or photos. It is steeped in history and radiant with a dozen different kinds of magic. If you can find a way to get there, go. I don't see how you could regret it.

Junk food purveyor of the week: 7-11

2010-05-25T16:52:00.000+07:00

When I was a kid in Northern Virginia, there were 7-11 convenience stores everywhere. Over time their numbers dwindled. Now I know where they all went: Thailand.

In Bangkok especially, you can hardly walk a block without passing a 7-11. While this may seem excessive, it's a sensible business strategy, because that's about how far you can walk in the 100-degree heat before you want another cold drink.

Among 7-11's many culinary offerings is the completely-unrefrigerated Shredded Pork Sandwich. I had my first SPS one day in Chiang Mai when I was really hungry, and I thought it was the greatest sandwich ever: pork salad sandwiched between cheap white bread with a couple of slices of pork sausage, and heavy slatherings of what seemed like some kind of yellow jam.

On closer inspection, the SPS proved to be made of pretty cheap and appalling materials. What I thought was pork salad was just floss, the highly-processed dried meat product that is also much-loved in Jakarta. The "jam" was margarine, but it must have sugar added to it because it's distinctly sweet.

Despite its obvious crappiness, I still have a certain love for the SPS. There's just something great about porky-sweet-salty flavors (think bacon and maple syrup), especially if you've been pork-deprived for four years.

Exhibit B is something I initially found horrifying: the Corn Pie. I think corn is okay, but I'm a little baffled by the Southeast Asian corn craze. I don't mind the cups of it sold as mall treats, and even the corn-and-ice-cream combo. But something about a pie full of corn disgusts me.

That being said, this was more tolerable than I expected. There isn't too much corn, and it's accompanied by a pleasantly distracting cream-cheese-like substance. I finished my half, so it must not have been too bad.

Karaoke on the go

2010-05-24T18:26:00.001+07:00

Getting on the train? Need a quick round of karaoke first? No problem, if you're in Udon Thani. Just duck into the little booths in the night market right next to the station.

The ghosts of Ban Chiang

2010-05-24T10:46:00.000+07:00

We didn't do a lot of touristy stuff in Udon Thani, but we did make it out to one remarkable place: the Ban Chiang archeological site, about an hour west of downtown.

Photo: Freer and Sackler Galleries

The people of Ban Chiang produced distinctive red-patterned ceramics. In fact, it was the pots working their way to the surface, like flags of an underground nation, that alerted a grad student to the presence of an ancient settlement in the late 1960s.

The people of Ban Chiang scattered pots over the bodies as part of their burial ritual. The earliest graves are believed to date back to 2100 BC. They suggest that Southeast Asia, previously thought to be a bit sluggish at developing Bronze Age tools, actually reached that landmark at a pretty respectable pace.

Afterward we walked around the little town with our heads full of bones. Lots of Ban Chiang houses are on stilts, making them look a bit like Maine or North Carolina beach houses, which added to the pleasant jumble of continents and millennia in my brain.

All the manhole covers in town are painted with patterns from the ancient pottery, which is a nice touch.

Lunch was a bowl of vegetable soup with wide, fried noodles at the bottom. It wasn't spicy, but the accompanying jar of chopped chilis in vinegar certainly was!

The invisible orphanage

2010-05-23T07:32:00.003+07:00

My last stop on the Dad trail in Udorn was St. Mary's Church and School. He had visited there a few times and described the children in his letters home.

The kids mobbed me. They all wanted to be picked up. They are all toddlers from a few days old to 2 or 3 years. Many are adopted by Americans and taken to the States. A large number lost their mothers in childbirth. Sister said a lot of the mothers from the back country die in childbirth because of sanitation. It's easy to believe since even the water in the best hotels is not safe to drink. Sister said that quite a few of the kids had twin sisters or brothers who had died. - June 10, 1968

I picked up one little girl and the diaper pin came open as I did. Darn near jabbed her a good one. Sister gave me a new one and I pinned her back up. I hadn't forgotten how! - June 12

Chad and I got over just as school was letting out. We asked at the main office whether anyone there still remembered the orphanage, but a school employee said all the old nuns were gone. She directed us next door to the church, a very funky, Dr. Seussian sort of building.

We couldn't find anyone on the church grounds so I started snapping pictures through the windows, hoping to roust out a suspicious caretaker.

Finally we walked around some more and found a diocese office. Nobody there remembered the orphanage either, but they arranged for me to come back the next day and talk to the recently-retired bishop, who had served for over thirty years.

I can still see those kids' faces: Joseph, Francesca, Tony, Caroline, Buddha. Buddha got his name from being so pudgy. Caroline was a little mean. She would pinch the faces of the other kids, I think out of jealousy. She wanted to be picked up but wouldn't come close enough. The rest of the kids hung around my legs and crawled into my lap if I sat down. I hope the picture of Joseph comes out. He was perpetually smiling and always gay. If I could have walked off with him we would now have 6 children.

One little girl just sobbed uncontrollably when I tried to tickle her and make her smile. I've often wondered if I somehow reminded her of her father. I guess I'll never know. - June 25

I met with the former bishop the next morning and gave him a printout of Dad's descriptions of the place for their records. The bishop was very kind, but he didn't remember the orphanage either, and he wasn't aware of any surviving photos or descriptions of it. Apparently it was run pretty independently by the nuns. He said nowadays the church has an orphanage up on the Laotian border for kids of HIV-positive parents.

He told me the church building was 50 years old, so it would have been there when Dad was there. It wasn't as much as I'd hoped for, but it was at least a tangible connection to those years.

Udorn Hotel

2010-05-22T19:00:00.015+07:00

We are staying at the Udorn Hotel in town since the BOQ [Base Officers Quarters] isn't too adequate. The hotel is surprisingly nice in most respects although the bed is hard and lumpy. The room is large and air conditioned and we have a bathtub but the hot water is brown with sediment.

-Dad, Sept. 9, 1967

I wasn’t too sure about the Udon Hotel at first. It looked a bit too nice to be one of Dad’s old Air Force hotels, and parts of it seemed more recent in vintage. The woman at the desk told me it dated back only 30 years.

But the more I looked, the more clues I noticed. The chair and table sets next to the plate glass window overlooking the garden, for example, were kind of groovy. Were they copies of the originals, or merely chosen to match the period floor tiles and light fixtures? Who knows? Not me, that's for sure.

It was the sign on the front that convinced me, though: "Udorn Hotel," just like he spelled it. There were birds nesting behind the letters. Just as I was snapping photos of it, Chad walked up. The property manager had approached him in the parking lot after getting suspicious of the foreigners shooting pictures of his hotel. He told Chad the original building dated back 50 years. A new wing had been added 18 years ago.

I got up about 9 this morning and went downstairs for breakfast. Afterward we went across the street to a combined park and zoo which was pretty interesting. It is a primitive place but they had bears, llamas, wild boars, monkeys etc. in cages along the sides of the park. - November 5

I'm pretty sure this was the park he was talking about. The bears, llamas et al are gone, mercifully, since I'm sure they were kept in tiny, sad cages in the hot sun. The field is partially paved and used for festivals now. It seemed a bit lonely and deserted. While we were walking through it, a Coke truck came across and kicked up a whole lot of dust.

Margaritaville becomes Curfewville

2010-05-20T19:53:00.000+07:00

Hi all! I had hoped to put in a solid couple of hours of blogging tonight on further Udorn stuff, but it will have to wait because we're in Bangkok and all the internet cafes are closing early to comply with a curfew in the wake of yesterday's unrest. Things seem very quiet here now and thousands of protesters were sent home today.

Early tomorrow we head off to Angkor Wat. Cambodia will be the first country on this trip that's new for both of us. This crummy hotel computer refuses to pull photos from my camera, so I'll post a stolen photo of Angkor:

Photo: sacredplaces.com

The plus side of the curfew is that we can expect a nice quiet night even though we're staying on Khao San Road, Bangkok's famous backpacker street, which usually a riot of beer joints and street stalls at night. More soon!

The ghosts of Udorn

2010-05-18T09:08:00.006+07:00

Living in the hotels at Udorn is a real unique experience. You start out well equipped – soap, towels, ice bucket, ice and ice tongs, and water glasses. The longer you stay, however, the more the stuff disappears. The housegirls take all the dirty stuff but don’t leave any clean. Last time I outfoxed them and brought a towel of my own. They took that one too.

I was not surprised to find Udorn full of ghosts. After all, it was a ghost who brought us here. My late father, who wrote the paragraph above, stayed here intermittently while flying C-130s during the Vietnam War. He died a few years ago, leaving behind a year's worth of letters he'd sent to my mom and us kids.

One of the places he stayed in Udorn (now more commonly known as Udon Thani) was the King Hotel.

Remember the picture I took of the building being constructed next to the Victory Hotel? It ended up being the King's Hotel which is where we are staying now. I have a small single room with air conditioning which is nice.

Luckily for us, the hotel is still standing, and appears to have changed little over the last 43 years. Take the groovy chair/endtable combo, for example.

I love the little rack of glasses nailed up next to the bathroom door.

The battered bottle-opener dangling on a chain looks about ready for the Museum of Pop Culture History too.

Even the renovations only seemed to shine a spotlight on the past, rather than cover it up. This light switch must have been next to the bed at one time. Now it's stranded just above the floor, with only a metal stool for company.

The bathrooms vent into the corridor so you can hear, in our case, the guy next door shower for hours on end while making terrible chest-clearing sounds as if trying to launch a lung into orbit.

It was all deeply evocative and a satisfying way to begin time-traveling. We plan to check out a few other places Dad talked about in his letters. More later.

The chicken baskets of Gowalo

2010-05-17T23:21:00.002+07:00

Our Chiang Mai hike took us through several Karen hill tribe villages, some as small as three or four houses.We stayed overnight in one, called Gowalo, although I'm not sure of the spelling.

The village was clean and organized, and compared to some Dayak villages we've been to in Indonesian Borneo, the tribal culture seemed pretty intact. People went about their business and didn't pay us much attention. The kids didn't ask for money or candy.

A lot of the residents still wore traditional clothing.

My favorite thing about the village, though, was the chickens: each one had her own little hand-woven basket to nest in.

Good walls make good neighbors

2010-05-16T17:44:00.001+07:00

I think every town should have ancient defensive walls and a moat.

Not only are they pretty, but they're a gentle reminder that you are neither the first nor the last person on earth.

Chiang Mai's wall and moat are hundreds of years old, but the wall is only partial and is largely reconstructed. They form a square in the middle of town, so if you ever get lost you can just look for the wall and follow it around till you're found.

As a defensive strategy, however, the wall/moat combo was not a big success: Chiang Mai fell to the Burmese in 1556 and was ruled by a succession of conquerers for 200 years. It even sat empty for two decades in the late 1700s before finding its feet again as the unofficial capital of Northern Thailand.

*Title credit to Robert Frost: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15719

Eggsicles

2010-05-15T16:56:00.000+07:00

I've seen a lot of things roasted on sticks since I've been in Southeast Asia: chicken intestines, bugs, whole squid, etc. But eggs, complete with the shell? That was a new one on me.

They were at the night market near Chiang Mai's southern gate. Chad ate some porky Tom Yum soup, and I just got a soda water because I had an unhappy stomach. But we saw these as we were leaving, and with my love for hard-boiled eggs and my other love for things on sticks, I couldn't pass them up.

Back in our room (that's our scratchy hotel blanket in the background), we peeled them cautiously. They turned out to be smoky-tasting, as you would expect, with a brownish-yellow hue and with a surprisingly velvety texture, like custard. There seemed to be hardly any difference between the yolk and the white, as if they were dissolving into each other.

I figure the eggs must be boiled before roasting, but I'm still perplexed as to how they acquire that texture. A quick Google search yielded no answers. Anybody out there know?

The temperature rises in Bangkok

2010-05-14T12:28:00.003+07:00

As you may have heard, the Thai government clashed with the Red Shirt protesters last night and a rebel general leading one of the more rabid factions was shot. I was impressed and amused by the coolness of the New York Times story, since the reporter who wrote it was interviewing the general at the moment he got shot. This is how colorful he is permitted to wax about it:

"The reporter, who was two feet away and facing the general, heard a loud bang similar to that of a firecracker"

when clearly what he was thinking is more like: "HOLY CRAP! One second I'm talking to the guy and the next second he's got a bullet in his head! And I don't see a shooter anywhere! I hope that sniper doesn't get trigger-happy!"

Seriously, it must have been terrifying. Kudos to him for getting the story in.

General Seh Daeng. He is reportedly in critical condition.

Asked to comment on reports that the general was shot by a sniper, a government spokesman said the government could not break the law. *Please excuse me while I snort coffee out my nose. There, that's better.*

Today feels like a crucial juncture and it's unclear which way things will go. Can the army round up the Red Shirts relatively peacefully? Will things disintegrate into hand-to-hand combat in downtown Bangkok? Will Red Shirt factions in the countryside start stirring up trouble? The protesters appear increasingly factionalized and leaderless, so it's tough to know what they'll do at any given moment.

I'm hoping very hard for a peaceful resolution, but even if that happens it's hard to see an end to this political divide. Each side has legitimate grievances and each side has some sins to answer for. Even a new round of elections seems unlikely to address the ever-growing mountain of bad feelings. Of course, civil war isn't a great answer either.

Meanwhile we are still in Chiang Mai but probably heading to Udon Thani tomorrow. Things are quiet here; the one change I can see is that the cafes around the corner from our hotel are now blaring the news on their televisions, whereas yesterday they were showing badminton.

The thirsty earth

2010-05-13T17:17:00.002+07:00

An Aussie civil servant once told me Jakarta was widely considered a "10k posting." Happily Chad and I haven't put on 10 kilograms, but we're definitely feeling flabbier after four years of getting practically no exercise while eating lots of food that's fried or stewed in coconut milk (sometimes fried AND stewed in coconut milk).

So part of the agenda of our 3-month Southeast Asia trip is to get outside and get back in shape. To that end, we signed up for a 3-day hike in Chiang Mai, the hiking capital of Thailand.

I was expecting jungle, so I was surprised to find the landscape hot and blasted. It's the tail end of the dry season, so the soil was dusty and a lot of the trees were brown.

The trek took us through forests, rice paddies and pastures, past the occasional curious water buffalo. The buffaloes looked pretty parched too.

The termite community, however, seemed to like the conditions just fine.

It didn't help that this is the time of year when people traditionally burn the fields to clear them for planting. On the first two days we breathed smoke and came close to fire a few times, but it was only on the last day that we actually walked through it.

We had stopped at a waterfall to cool off, and we could see flames on the hill sloping up from where we were. When we hiked out, we found the fire had burned straight through a rubber water hose and was marching down to the falls. We walked through with low but steady flames burning on both sides of the trail.

I don't know whether that hose was meant as a firebreak, or whether it was merely carrying water to some other location, but it isn't doing much of either now.

Internet massage

2010-05-10T13:13:00.000+07:00

I suppose it was only a matter of time before someone figured out the technology.

Chiang Mai, near Tha Pae gate

Three smells, five fillings

2010-05-09T16:28:00.002+07:00

Another day, another bus ride -- this one a 10-hour marathon from the big station in Bangkok to Chiang Mai. It was a 2nd-class bus, so it stopped in every hick town along the way, which turned out to be a lot of hick towns.

I enjoyed getting out to stretch my legs and check out the snack shops, though. I'm a bit of a mochi fanatic so I was excited to see big stacks of it on offer.Naturally I couldn't resist the promise of three smells and five fillings.

They looked so cute in their many artificial colors, but they were a sad disappointment: crumbly and tasteless and generally having "more in common with sand than mochi," as Chad put it.

We stumbled off the bus dazed and hungry. The tuk-tuk driver cheered me right up, though. He had a dog who rode with him everywhere, snoozing right through hairpin turns and sudden stops.

Tech mall

2010-05-04T16:26:00.003+07:00

The Asian electronics supermall: it's a place we've come to know well, whether it's in Jakarta, Singapore, or in this case, Bangkok.

It's a beeping, blooping, blinking, booming and buzzing mountain of every high-tech toy you could need, and many you never will.

Our errands there took about 11 times longer than we expected. Luckily there was a good food court on the second floor to collapse in. At the juice stand, you can pick a cup of fruits and vegetables and the woman will blenderize them for you with ice, sugar and a bit of water.

Chad played the "Order what the guy in front of you ordered" game at the food counter. He must have been standing behind a pork lover, because we got a crumbled pork stir-fry and a side of braised pork, both pretty tasty. It's too early to make a definitive judgment, but I would say Thai food shows happy signs of being, like Indonesian food, better as it gets cheaper.

"You should probably ask before you take pictures of a monk," said Chad.

"But if he doesn't see me, I don't have to ask," I countered.

Chad is really a better person than me, when you get right down to it.

In the Zone

2010-05-01T23:50:00.006+07:00

Our first morning in Bangkok, we made our way back over to Chitlom to check out the Red Shirt encampment. The roadblocks that had been in full effect the night before now had openings big enough for cars and people to pass through. A few tourists like us wandered in, taking photos, while local people hurried past on their way to work or shops or schools.

The barriers are made of tires interlaced with razor wire and thousands of sharpened bamboo poles. If that sounds insubstantial, remember that bamboo is so strong it's frequently used to make scaffolding and external supports for construction projects here. The roadblocks do not look like they will be taken down very easily, or very soon.

Several blocks of central Bangkok have become a Red Shirt market. Vendors were hawking red bumper stickers, hats, flags and of course shirts, while speeches boomed out of large amplifiers set at regular intervals along the street.

"Joy is what you make of it," proclaims a BMW billboard next to a roadblock. The Red Shirts say people like them, in the countryside, are not getting their fair share of joy. Most of it stays in the city, they argue, in the glossy shopping malls and pricey restaurants.

Many analysts agree the protesters have a point. But as long as the demonstration lasts, the Red Shirts are cutting off the supply of joy to businesses in the Red Zone and impeding its flow to the entire economy.

Our old hotel, the VIP Golden House, is inside the zone. It will stay closed until the protesters leave, said the woman behind the desk with a stoic smile.

A traveling carnival was also sitting empty, as amusement-free as any amusement park I've ever seen.

Things I like about Bangkok

2010-05-01T21:08:00.000+07:00

Soda water in heavy glass bottles.

The mango-with-sticky-rice cart.

Losing Chitlom

2010-04-30T22:36:00.001+07:00

"Chitlom," we tell the driver as we get into a cab at the Bangkok airport. We are feeling rather pleased with ourselves, because the hotel we like is in Chitlom and everyone knows the Red Shirt protesters are hunkered down in Silom where they won't bother us.

As we cruise down the toll road at alarming speeds, the driver fills us in on the latest strife.

"Blam blam blam," he says, imitating a machine gun. "Accident. Pow pow! Accident!"

"Sounds like there have been more clashes," I say to Chad, shaking my head. "What a shame."

Then we exit the freeway, make a turn or two and come to a sudden stop in front of a spiky, homemade barrier. Sharpened bamboo stakes jut out from among piles of tires.

"Chitlom," says the driver, pointing at the Red Shirt roadblock.

At last we realize the true meaning of "Blam blam blam! Accident!" which is something like: "You can't stay in Chitlom, you fools! Someone might shoot you by mistake!"

Scrambling, we have the driver drop us at a nearby hotel. I immediately fall for its tacky extravagance but the rate is four times our budget, even after a Redshirt-Season discount. So we get on the wi-fi and hunt up a hostel across town.

Our new room is tiny, and the mattress is so hard it could be Chinese, but it's a cheerful place. As for the protests, we're fine -- they're far away and we're staying out of the area at night. We did go down and take some photos of the encampment today. More soon!

Eating and Rambling in KL

2010-04-30T12:20:00.002+07:00

Chad has already raved about the benefits of visiting our food-writer friends in Kuala Lumpur here, to which I can only add: yum! Among the highlights were Robyn's own Sichuan beef with toasted rice powder, the steamed-and-fried Hokkien fish in Chad's photo, and the roti canai (Malaysian flatbread) with curried dal at this street place in KL's fabric district.

Afterward we wandered around looking at bright cloth ....

and slightly eerie scarfed heads.

The next day we took a long walk through a local park (local! park! It's an exciting concept after four years in the middle of intensely-urban Jakarta).

Tapping rubber in the park

It was a good way to ease into on the hiking we plan to do in Thailand, and a sobering reminder of how soft we've gotten lately. After an hour or two of gentle hills, my legs were as rubbery as the stuff collectiing in this bucket. And two days later, I'm still getting hate mail from my calves.

Another plug for Robyn and Dave's mouthwatering blog: http://eatingasia.typepad.com/. They're also on Twitter (@EatingAsia) and Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#!/pages/EatingAsia/111526995552726?ref=ts).

Singapore to KL, Super VIP style

2010-04-28T16:27:00.002+07:00

The bus to KL said SUPER VIP on the side in big letters, and in fact it was pretty swanky. We reclined our plush seats nearly all the way back and gazed out the window for 6 hours as endless fields of oil palm trees flickered past. (Malaysia and Indonesia have been tearing down their jungles in a race for the dubious distinction of being the world's biggest palm oil producer.)

As evening set in we pulled into a rest area for dinner. There's something universal about bus rest stops: the merciless fluorescent lighting? the gift shops full of useless trinkets? the sad plastic trays? Maybe it's all three. If I squinted a bit, I could almost convince myself I was in a Greyhound rest stop somewhere in New Jersey.

Neon-bright boxes of Poosh! candy from Argentina only enhanced the sense of being both everywhere and nowhere.

A tasty plate of flat rice noodles (kuihteow) placed us firmly back in Asia, though.

Sprinting through Singapore

2010-04-27T17:17:00.001+07:00

Well, we've done it. After four years we've bid farewell to Jakarta, in a goodbye-for-now way. We've quit our jobs and wrapped up freelance work, or most of it, and we're heading out to travel around Southeast Asia for three months before heading back to the US where I am set to enter grad school in the fall.

I envisioned leaving in an organized, well-paced manner: leisurely spells of packing punctuated by get-togethers with friends and philosophical blog posts looking back over my time here. Of course it turned out to be chaos. But somehow, over a tumultuous two weeks, stuff got sorted into piles, piles disappeared into boxes, and a very few items made their way into our backpacks. Sunday night we got onto the late (ie cheap) flight to Singapore to begin our life on the road.

Singapore is a good place to start, because we know the drill. Forget hotels: the expensive ones are too expensive, and the cheap ones have all the ambience of a jail cell. Go straight to the Inn Crowd hostel in Little India and get a private room.

The Inn Crowd may not be high-class, but it has heart.

The next morning we ran around doing all those little things that are easy to do at home and hard to do on the road: rescheduling a plane ticket to Bangkok, finding a bus to Kuala Lumpur. (For various reasons, it made sense to visit our friends in KL first and then move on to Thailand). Luckily, just as we got everything sorted out, a drenching rainstorm forced us to take refuge in a cafe. The coffee was gloriously strong, with just a hint of condensed milk.

By midafternoon we were across town at an old shopping mall featuring several dubious-looking karaoke joints and the Beyond Friendship Marriage Agency.

The 3:00 bus would take us on to the first truly new stop on the trip: Kuala Lumpur.

Gong Xi Fa Chai!

2010-02-28T19:13:00.010+07:00

.... is what you say on Chinese New Year in Jakarta (along with Gong Xi Fat Choi and innumerable variations). Chad and I went up to Glodok, Jakarta's Chinatown, this year but we missed the boat a little -- we went on New Year's day itself, and a lot of stuff was closed. So I'm going to use last year's pictures, which I never posted due to the Great Kopi Susu Outage of 2009.

We went with our friends Howie and Haviva, who have since tragically moved back to the US (we miss you, Havowie!). It must have been just 2 or 3 days before the holiday because the place was hopping.

Inside the main temple, people were lighting big bunches of incense, doing a short prayer ritual, and leaving the incense sticks burning at the altars. Temple employees were buzzing around removing the sticks almost as fast as people put them down, but they were still pressed to clear enough room for the oncoming waves of worshipers. The air was so thick with spicy smoke, everyone was red-eyed and coughing.

Out back there were candles as tall as your head, which you could buy and leave burning in the temple courtyard for days.

It's traditional to give money away for the holiday, so poor people had packed the temple's whole front yard. Some of them ride trains for hours all the way from Central Java to get in on the charity. Train tickets and food are relatively cheap, while rich businesspeople sometimes give away substantial sums of cash, so the math makes sense. I hate crowd scenes like these, and fatal stampedes are not out of the question, so we didn't linger long here.

Of course, New Year's isn't just about going to the temple, any more than Christmas is only about church. The streets were packed with cool holiday stuff, including complete outfits for kids.

Flower-sellers were out getting their share of the holiday spending ....

Haviva's bag of luck

and all sorts of holiday treats were on sale, including golden coins (chocolate, I assume) and the impenetrable kue keranjang.

Chinese New Year is so widely celebrated here, not only in Glodok but in malls, advertisements and public events throughout the country, it's hard to grasp that it was all illegal just a decade ago. Under Suharto, Indonesians of Chinese descent couldn't publicly celebrate their holidays or use the Chinese language. They were required to carry special i.d. and were systematically eliminated from the higher levels of government and military.

Today, the discriminatory laws have largely been revoked (although there are reports of crooked officials still applying the old citizenship restrictions or extorting people for extra money to get around them). Jakarta is certainly more joyful, colorful and delicious as a result.

Stew and goo

2010-02-20T12:13:00.000+07:00

As far as I know there are only two places to get food from Papua in Jakarta, which is a shame, because it's delicious and quite distinctive. It's also fun to play with, as you will see. One of the two outlets is in Blok M, which is relatively nearby, so I go now and then to get my fix.

The signature dish at this place is a fish stew served with papeda, or sago palm porridge.

The stew is spicy-tangy with lots of fresh herbs. It has strong citrusy flavors suggestive of lime leaf and lemongrass. There's a brightness and complexity (and hotness!) to the taste that reminds me of Thai food.

But the best part is the papeda, which is served with a pair of three-pronged wooden forks. It's more like a gel than a porridge, with a thick, gluey texture. It's very bland and has just a hint of rooty flavor like potato or yam. It's also very filling, turning a bowl of soup into a hearty meal.

To transport the papeda from the serving dish to your bowl, you pull a hunk of it up on the forks and then keep twirling the forks, one over the other, so the goo doesn't fall off. When you reach your bowl, you use each fork to scrape the papeda off the other.

Of course, they could just bring you an individual serving of soup with the papeda already in it. But what would be the fun in that?

Junk food of the week: McDonald's Beef Prosperity

2010-02-19T13:35:00.011+07:00

Every year around Chinese New Year's, McDonald's puts out a special Beef Prosperity burger in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. I told my friend Pinta I thought the picture on the billboards looked nasty, but she said Beef Prosperity was in fact delicious, so I figured I'd give it a try.

Beef Prosperity is a sort of elongated burger on a special bun. McDonald's cleverly douses the burger in black pepper sauce to hide the inferior quality of their meat. The sauce is actually pretty tasty.

For some reason the burger is kind of wavy-shaped instead of flat. It comes with raw onions on it, which are not my favorite, but at least they're mild ones.

In case this is not enough calories for you, the Beef Prosperity is offered in a set with fries and a Mango Float. This consists of Sprite (I think) with a whipped topping that was heavier than Cool Whip but lighter than soft-serve ice cream. It was creamy and didn't melt and I really don't know what it was. Both it and the burger were enjoyable in that so-bad-it's-good way that characterizes most fast food.

The strange thing is, even though Beef Prosperity is clearly a Chinese New Year's item (in Malaysia they even include some kind of ang pao, the traditional little red envelopes given out at that time of year), the placemat that came with it showed a Greek zodiac. Huh?

Perhaps this astrological confusion accounted for Beef Prosperity's decidedly un-prosperous effect on us. Chad and I both had some pretty serious digestive upsets after eating these. OK, maybe that had more to do with the food than the placemat, but here's the kicker: that same afternoon, I had my cellphone swiped from my bag at a nearby department store! Prosperity FAIL, as the cool kids say.

Warning: Cute kitten photos!

2010-02-17T12:33:00.003+07:00

This time it wasn't us. It was our housemates who fell victim to the adorable, scraggly kitten who kept meowing at the door one rainy weekend.

Rugrat wouldn't take no for an answer, and before long he was settled right in on the rug. He was a pretty scruffy little guy!

Two baths, one trip to the vet, and what seemed like several pounds of kitten food later, however, he's looking much more presentable.

He and Susu have become great friends, which means they spend all day chasing each other and wrestling.

He even pitched in when we shredded newspapers for the compost the other day.

Drew and Melanie don't want to keep him permanently, so a friend came over today for a pre-adoption meeting. Novia has a house with a garden outside town and two young adult cats who love to wrestle, so it sounds like the perfect situation for a little rugrat. But it must have been obvious how hard it is for all of us to give him up, because she paused at the gate on her way out and said, "You can still change your mind, you know!"

Battling plague and cold sour teeth

2010-02-07T13:19:00.001+07:00

I originally bought this toothpaste in Manila because it promised to help remove plague. What with all the H1N1, H5N1 and fan death going around these days, you can't be too careful.

Only later did I realize this toothpaste also prevents "cold sour teeth". This is a bit of a puzzle because in my experience, teeth live in your mouth, which is, you know, warm. They might get cold when you eat ice cream, but then where does the sourness come from?

But the real problem is, propolis itself tastes lousy. The reason for this became clearer when I realized it's a resinous mixture that honey bees collect from tree buds, sap flows, or other botanical sources and use to plug holes in their hives. Yum, bee cement.

I'm not sure propolis breath is any better than garlic breath. For that matter, I'm not sure it's better than having the plague. Luckily, the tube is almost empty now and we don't plan on resupplying during our lifetime.

Sculptural vegetables: Dili's traditional market

2010-02-01T11:47:00.009+07:00

Dili's traditional market is sort of like a small-town Indonesian market: a long wander down an alley lined with ramshackle stalls. Evil smells mingling with wonderful ones. Slimy stuff of uncertain origin underfoot.

But while Indonesians usually arrange the produce in large pyramids, in Dili they create single-portion sculptures, like these little towers of tomatoes.

These are stacks of seaweed. Behind them, the guy is holding a frozen chicken from Russia -- another thing you don't usually find in Indonesian markets.

Here are some nicely arranged betel leaves, sold for chewing along with betel nuts.

Mung beans and eggs -- I'm not sure what the connection is, but I like how they look together.

The tofu-seller wanted me to take a picture of his daughter (or wife?).

The other Dili

2010-01-28T19:48:00.001+07:00

It's good to go to new places with nothing but a vague sense of foreboding. Then you can be surprised by every good thing you find.

Such was the case when I went to Dili. To me, Dili has always been about oppression and struggle, from when my high school debate team spent an entire your researching and arguing the East Timor occupation in 1984 straight on through the unrest of 2006. What I never realized in all that time was that Dili is also a lovely little town ...

where the mountains come right down to the ocean ...

where the air is breathable (well, unless you're stuck in a traffic jam) and there are no buildings taller than four stories.

And the beaches! Men in uniforms come out in the morning and clean them! You can stroll along them to a cafe and then sit and watch the sunset while sipping a drink. I've heard there's some lovely snorkeling too, but we didn't really have time. For a long weekend, just strolling around, looking at the ocean, and hanging out with friends was plenty.

From Kupang to Dili by bus

2010-01-27T22:01:00.001+07:00

Our friends John and Shelley have been in Dili, East Timor for two years now. It took us forever to get our act together, but we finally dashed out for a visit as they are wrapping up and getting ready to go back to Australia.

Flights into Dili through Bali are absurdly expensive, so instead we flew to Kupang, on the opposite end of the island. You will recall that East Timor voted for independence from Indonesia in 1999 after decades of occupation and resistance. Now, the east half of the island is independent while the west half is a province of Indonesia.

We got to the hostel in Kupang at midnight and discovered the only bus we could get seats on was leaving at 4 a.m. The room was, shall we say, pretty basic. My favorite part was the bathroom sink that emptied directly onto the floor rather than bothering with any kind of pipes. But the beds were beds and we managed a couple of hours of sleep before getting blearily onto the bus (actually just a van) in the still-dark city.

The ride from Kupang to Dili is an 11-hour marvel through all kinds of terrain: jungles, little villages, mountain forests, rivers, beaches. I napped a bit while it was still dark, and then I just stared out the window drinking it all in. I especially liked the thatch-roofed huts, which looked like big hairy beasts.

After the first several hours of drowsy window-gazing, punctuated by bursts of loud syrupy Christian ballads on the driver's tape player, we got to the border. There we grabbed our backpacks, paid our $30 (US, cash, exact change only please) and entered East Timor to meet the vehicle that would take us on to Dili.

The border was surprisingly low-key, especially considering the destruction Indonesia-backed militias wreaked in East Timor just a decade ago. We made our way through a series of buildings which, as Chad said, "resembled chicken barns," chatting in Indonesian with friendly guys in camouflage fatigues. We sat in the hut above, which turned out to be a medical office, for about five minutes until someone came by and told us we didn't need to be there.

Once the paperwork was sorted, it was on to a new vehicle (an SUV), a new driver, and new music (Beatles hits and slightly-wrong Asian covers of random old country songs). We hurtled through the last three hours to Dili taking hairpin turns at terrifying speed and sometimes hitting 75mi/120km per hour on straightaways. We were mighty glad to get our tired, sweaty selves off the bus and put our feet on solid ground and John and Shelley's.

"Come in, nice to see you, pull up a bear!"

2010-01-14T22:19:00.009+07:00

Somebody's going home from the mall with a giant-shoe chair.

I can only hope they will pair it with the bear chair I saw a while back at an uber-fancy Jakarta furniture store. I think the problems of scale (ie the shoe being larger than the bear) would only add to the cozy sense of surrealism.

Street sitar

2010-01-07T12:13:00.006+07:00

I was walking to work a few weeks ago when I came across this Javanese woman, dressed all in batik, playing and singing for money. I stopped to record and she told me the instrument was a sitar. It's smaller than the Indian kind and played in the lap instead of guitar-style. Despite these differences, I suspect it's a throwback to the old Javanese Hindu kingdoms of the 14th century.

While she was singing, a snack vendor (dumplings, I think) came by and added his own rhythm to the mix.

All I had on me was a 50,000 rupiah note (about $5 US) so I gave it to her. Then she chased me down the street trying to sell me the sitar.

At long last, pinakbet

2010-01-06T13:15:00.005+07:00

Pinakbet has long been one of my favorite words, along with ramekin and clafouti. Someday I'm going to throw a dinner party involving all three, and maybe some of my newer favorites like the Indonesian pulang (to go home) and meninabobokan (to sing a lullaby).

In all the years I've loved pinakbet, I've never actually tasted it. But I knew it was from the Philippines -- more precisely, as Wikipedia tells us, it is a northern Filipino stew generally featuring bitter melon, eggplant, tomato, ginger, okra, beans and chilis -- so I was looking forward to getting my hands on some during my trip to Manila.

During the first couple of days I asked around for it but didn't find any. Finally, on my last night, I ran across it in a mall food court. I was skeptical, having eaten a lot of mediocre Indonesian food in Indonesian food courts, but there weren't going to be any other chances.

And indeed, this pinakbet turned out to be suspiciously mediocre. It was kind of bland and mushy and I didn't detect any bitter melon in it. Some hot sauce and vinegar perked it up a bit, but I remain convinced that the pinakbet of my dreams is still out there somewhere.

A homestyle New Year's Eve

2010-01-03T14:18:00.016+07:00

I always find New Year's Eve a bit challenging, whether in the US or Jakarta. Some part of my brain can't let go of the idea that I should be wearing a long backless midnight-blue velvety dress with spangly things on it and dancing to a live band in a ballroom somewhere, with big chandeliers and finger foods and tuxedoed waiters, and champagne at the stroke of midnight.

That actually wouldn't be too hard to arrange in Jakarta, but it would be frightfully expensive, especially compared to our usual entertainment budget (i.e. $5 movies and $2 beers). Lots of the hotels and upscale clubs have special parties, but the tickets range from $40 to above $100. Our frugality and tendency toward laziness combine to make this sort of thing impractical.

But the trouble is, clubs need a special permit to be open on New Year's, so cheaper places like the karaoke joints we tried to go to 2 years ago stay closed.

Add all this up with insane Jakarta New Year's traffic, and you've got a compelling argument for spending the evening at home. Which is what we did.

Me, Wendy, Chad, Ashlee, Pinta

First we went out for brunch with work friends at Koi, a cafe in an upscale neighborhood of South Jakarta. After a mushroom-blue cheese omelet, a Bloody Mary, a Passionfruit Collins, some borscht, a tablewide plum pudding and chocolate souffle, and four hours of good conversation, I was feeling pretty sleepy.

Dwayne, our beloved former intern, and my co-editor Pinta

The chocolate souffle

We went home and watched some Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 2 -- which was OK but I have to say, I still don't really get what all the fuss is about. We also caught some of the New Year's celebration on TV, live from Ancol theme park in North Jakarta. Rhoma Irama, the King of Dangdut, was in fine voice and playing a cool guitar. His backup singers were extra-trippy.

Video swiped from TPI TV. As always, my translations are approximate. Corrections/ improvements welcome!

Remarkably, we got hungry, so we went down to the marketplace and got some of our favorite Aceh-style spicy noodles. The market was busy and festive, with people honking horns and setting off firecrackers.

After midnight we sat outside for a while watching the beginning of the lunar eclipse.

It turns out lunar eclipses take a long time. By 2 a.m. we could just barely see a shadow creeping in on the upper left. We could also barely keep our eyes open, so we went to bed.

Happy New Year everyone!

Eating Manila

2010-01-03T11:20:00.001+07:00

"That stuff with the blood in it." That's what other Westerners warn you about if tell them you're going to the Philippines. My boss went on at some length about a variety of blood-based dishes, until I began to wonder if any Filipino food didn't have blood in it.

As it turns out, the dish is called Dinuguan, and it's made out of pork. It was a thick stew, almost gel-like, with dark and meaty flavors and hints of chili and vinegar. It was tasty, though I confess the blood part did put me off a bit.

I expected Kare Kare to involve curry, but in fact it was a rich peanut stew with vegetables, kind of like an African groundnut stew. Yum!

Filipino food relies less on chilis than Indonesian food. Instead of sambal, you'll often get vinegar and soy sauce on the side.

Vinegar and soy sauce went nicely with this cold half-eggplant with tomato and onion, which I got at a fast-food place. If only McD's and Burger King served eggplant! That's a chili sauce on the side, by the way, although as I recall the emphasis was on musky, fermented-fishy flavors as much as on spicy heat.

One problem with blogging too far after the fact is that the details get a bit foggy. I don't remember what this dish was called, but I'm guessing it was a kind of tapa, which Wikipedia tells us is "a traditional dish of salt-cured beef that is similar to American-style beef jerky." It certainly wasn't that salty, but perhaps it was soaked before being cooked up in a sauce. It was a meaty, stick-to-your ribs kind of meal with scrambled egg and rice, served up at another little fast-food joint.

Street bingo in Manila

2009-12-27T21:41:00.001+07:00

While wandering around Manila back in October, I ran across this bingo game in a little side street of a scruffy neighborhood. It was sponsored by a local politician. They were still in the early stages with relatively small prizes -- 5 or 10 dollars, I think. But there were going to be some big things later, like a TV.

People were playing several cards at a time and really getting into the game, shouting and clapping. If Manila really is like Jakarta, this is probably one of the few things they'll ever get out of that politician.

The hamsterballs of Mekarsari

2009-12-25T20:48:00.014+07:00

I had never before seen a giant floating hamsterball for humans. But as soon as I saw one, I knew I'd been looking for it my whole life.

As my lovely assistant (and housemate) Melanie demonstrates, you get into the hamsterball and have it blown up around you with the help of a big air hose. Then you get closed in with a surprisingly robust zipper-and-velcro affair.

You can't stand up for very long on the water, but it's fun to run like a hamster on a wheel until it gets unbearably hot and suffocating, which takes about two minutes. Unfortunately the ball is tethered to the shore so you can't hamster your way to the middle of the lake and then pass out in a dramatic heap and require rescuing.

The hamsterballs are at Mekarsari, a big recreational park outside Jakarta. Mekarsari seems to specialize in strange floaty things, including these big colorful rolls.

There were also bicycle boats. My lovely assistant (and housemate) Drew stood gazing at them longingly until someone came along and let us rent them. They were good exercise and the access to oxygen meant we could ride them around a lot longer.

After that, everybody needed some coconut water. It was served the traditional way, right in the coconuts, with a spoon so you can scrape curls of flesh off the inside walls.

Cinderella and the Flying Horse

2009-12-23T10:11:00.001+07:00

Here's a classic bit of mystical soap opera (sinetron mistis) -- the same genre as the amazing Snakelady Sinetron I posted a long while back.

This one is about your typical evil-stepmother situation. The pretty girl is forced to wait hand and foot on her stepmom and obnoxious stepsisters. As the scene opens, she's just been ordered to sell her necklace, one of her few connections to her lost family, in order to buy them food. But she has a magical helper: the White Fairy, who appears in the form of a dove, a small lizard, or in this case, a flying horse.

Naughty or nice?

2009-12-22T11:58:00.002+07:00

One of the little shops in the basement of the mall where I work has this novel take on holiday party attire.

Ronaldo: The rest of the story

2009-12-20T21:02:00.012+07:00

Our rehab cat with the broken leg acquired the name Ronaldo. (I was planning to have him neutered, so I figured he should have an extra-manly name to boost his self-image, and who is more manly than Cristiano Ronaldo?)

Ron, as he came to be called, faced a tough recovery. His leg needed surgery and the time lapse between the injury and the operation made the repair more difficult. He went crazy whenever I tried to change his bandage, so I had to take him on the long, hated car ride to the vet's place in Pondok Labu every 2 or 3 days. Finally I wised up and arranged to board him there for a while, which I think was easier on both of us.

Still, Ron is an intensely cheerful type, and he never lost his sunny personality. Even when he was groggy from anesthesia and obviously in pain, he would limp over and rub up against anyone who came to visit him.

Finally his incision healed and he came home.

It didn't take Ron long to get comfortable. Soon he was mooching around the kitchen trying to steal food, and snoozing just as flamboyantly as Susu. (I promise we didn't give him beer, though.)

I can't say Ron and Susu became fast friends, but from a growling and hissing start they came to a point of mutual tolerance. I think they would have been pals if we'd kept him. Their fights, which were never very convincing in the first place, were clearly turning into games by the end. And they trusted each other enough to doze in the same room.

But it's pretty silly for us to have one cat, nevermind two, so I put the word out on Facebook and e-mail. I was thrilled when my good friend Pinta said she wanted him.

Pinta took him to her mom's place on the southern end of town. Ron has a real house now on a quiet street. He eats a lot, sleeps on Pinta's old bed and generally seems to live like a king.

I think Susu missed him for a while. She used to sleep in his old cage. Besides the Ron factor, I think she liked having all those walls to lean up against.

Now we've moved, and the cage has gone into storage. It's already hard to remember what being a two-cat household was like.

Carma strikes again ... and again

2009-12-17T10:15:00.011+07:00

Only in Indonesia would the hero and heroine of a sappy love song get run over by cars -- not once but THREE times.

Some enterprising scholar could definitely earn his or her Visual Anthropology PhD by writing about the Indonesian pop culture obsession with vehicle-versus-pedestrian accidents. They are such a staple of soap operas and teen movies, Chad and I will sometimes play the 'who's going to get hit by a car' game when we're flipping around the TV channels. It's not too difficult, because there are generally two kinds of people it happens to: the very good, and the very bad.

If you're bad, you drink alcohol, slobber and stagger around as if you have a serious neurological condition, beat people up, steal, gamble and curse like a sailor. When you are finally struck down, everyone understands it's the Hand of God.

If you're good, you're a cute teenager -- usually a girl, but it can happen to boys too. You could be troubled or impoverished or a bit of an outsider; you could be the idol of all your friends. When you get run over, everyone knows it's Fate, but they're left to puzzle out What It All Means. Possibly your donated organs save someone else's life; possibly you come back to haunt your friends and remind them to Make Every Moment Count.

Why cars? I'm not sure, except that of course Indonesian traffic is crazy and there are no concessions to pedestrian safety, so we all find ourselves wading out into busy roads on a daily basis. I don't find Indonesians particularly reckless behind the wheel; in fact, they're more attentive than American drivers. But there's a certain leap of faith involved in crossing the street. You're flowing around the traffic, and trusting the traffic to flow around you, and at that moment you're painfully aware of how large and dangerous cars are.

The lyrics of the song are so simplistic they're hardly worth translating, but here they are:

Betapa hati rindu pada dirimu, duhai kekasihku
Segeralah kembali pada diriku, duhai kekasihku

Aku juga rindu lincah manja sikapmu
Aku sudah rindu kasih sayang darimu

Semoga kita dapat bertemu lagi seperti dahulu
Supaya kita dapat bercinta lagi seperti dahulu

Gelisah, hati gelisah, sejak kepergianmu
Tak sabar, hati tak sabar, menanti kedatanganmu

Tenangkanlah hatimu, jangan gelisah
Aku tahu kau menanti
Sabarkanlah hatimu, sabarlah sayang
Aku segera kembali

How my heart longs for you, my darling
Come back to me now, my darling

I miss your naughty attitude
I miss your sweet love

I hope we'll meet again like before
So we can love again like before

Anxious, my heart is anxious since you left
Impatient, my heart is impatient, awaiting your return

Calm your heart, don't be nervous
I know you're waiting
Make your heart patient, be patient my darling
I'm coming back now

The note on the pad of paper is kind of interesting: "Opportunity doesn't come just once." This is a clear contradiction of the American "opportunity doesn't knock twice." But it still leads back to the same conclusion: Make Every Moment Count.

Nothing says it better than a speeding automobile!

New look!

2009-12-16T12:07:00.009+07:00

I'm mentioning the blog on some grad school applications these days, and when I opened it up I noticed:

1. There weren't very many entries lately and

2. The old design was looking a tad dumpy.

So I upgraded to the New Blogger where I was promptly underwhelmed by the template offerings. But after finding a layout I can live with and spending a ridiculous amount of time wavering between CC8844 and CC9955 for the Page Header Corners Color, I'm relatively satisfied. (Of course, I'll probably change it to CC9933 tomorrow).

I'd like to get back into posting again, partly to save myself from the madness in my head. The first year of a new job always gives me a bad case of tunnel vision. Now that it's been a year and a half, it's time to start thinking about something else for a change. And time to reconnect with some old interests, such as amateur toiletology.

I went back to the US last month to visit some of the aforementioned grad schools, and it only took a brief stop in Japan to remind me who is producing the really cutting-edge toilets these days. (Hmm, perhaps cutting-edge isn't really the term I'm looking for, but whatever.)

This one has variable bidet water pressure and an adjustable-volume flushing sound you can turn on for as long as you want, to provide sonic privacy. There wasn't any air dryer but I've heard those are available on some models.

What I want to know is: when will the US close the Toilet Gap? And what is the Obama administration doing about it?

Manila. It's not Jakarta.

2009-10-06T09:21:00.009+07:00

I got sent to Manila for a conference last week. It was my first 'new' country in almost two years, and it filled me with the kind of exploratory thrill that inspires blogging.

"Manila is just like Jakarta," people will tell you. But to me everything seemed different. For example, would a conference in Jakarta start with a 2 minute video praising Jesus and asking for His guidance in understanding Search Engine Marketing? No! No, it would not! And would a Jakarta hotel room have a Fold-Out Gospel Card? I rest my case.

The conference was in Makati, an upscale neighborhood plunked on top of a former swamp by the Ayalas, one of Manila's leading families. It has parks and outdoor cafes and enclosed pedestrian walkways.

Another thing people will tell you is that Makati is yuppie and fake. But I loved it. The air was breathable (they must have emissions laws). People didn't smoke in the restaurants. There were sidewalks and bookstores and little Vietnamese noodle shops. Everything looked clean and bright and cheery. After you've stewed in Jakarta's aggressively unvarnished reality for a few years, a little yuppie fakiness feels like paradise.

There was this one little hitch: the SuperTyphoon of the Century was bearing down on Manila, which was still soggy and exhausted from a devastating storm the week before. I had Saturday free to wander around, but I didn't stray very far because everyone was waiting for the storm to hit. Instead I just walked around Makati, ate interesting food, and took pictures of the rain.

Magically, Saturday night, the typhoon weakened and veered off, sparing Manila. It still did some damage, but far less than feared. On Sunday the sun even made some tentative appearances over the city. Maybe the Almighty decided to take an interest in storms instead of search engines after all.

When the bombs went off

2009-07-20T22:03:00.013+07:00

Police riot shields at the bomb site. By Chad.

It was a strange week even before the bombs went off.

It seems like ever since President Yudhoyono got re-elected in a landslide a couple of weeks ago, little creepie-crawlies have been coming out of the woodwork. For instance, there was a string of shootings in Papua near the enormous Freeport gold mine ... shootings the police blamed on indigenous separatists, but that a lot of analysts blamed on turf battles between the police and army over who should get paid to guard the mine.

Then there was the assault on the Anti-Corruption Commission. Rumors were flying around that top officials there would be arrested on various charges, thus decapitating the commission and leaving it to bleed while the legislature fails to get around to approving a new anti-corruption law. Even the president, who ran on his reputation as a reformer, was making worrisome noises about the anti-corruption people having too much power. Reporters were camped out at the commission offices every day, waiting for the police to show up, and it felt like watching a murder in slow motion.

It felt like there were tectonic undersea power shifts happening after the election, and I couldn't see the movements themselves, but only the ripples they caused on the surface of the water. It felt like there were rats in the kitchen at midnght, grabbing all they could while the lights were out.

So I was pretty unnerved even before the bombs went off.

I got the message on my phone just after 8 a.m. while I was having my morning bowl of muesli. As a newspaper web editor, I had to get to work right away. I tried to organize myself to take a quick shower but I was so discombobulated I just stared at my face in the bathroom mirror and left.

I went straight to the office and stayed there for 17 hours. Chad went to the bomb site, though, and took some pictures

of the blown-out windows

and the police

and a man who looked sad or maybe just tired.

The bombing felt like another tectonic shift. But it felt weirdly old-school. Before the bombs went off, Jemaah Islamiyah was on the run, terrorism wasn't in the news, and the country seemed to have moved on to a new set of challenges. Financial analysts were calling Indonesia the new China. People -- even Westerners -- suddenly seemed to be able to find the place on a map. Now those guys in the Arab-wannabe clothes were back to drag everyone through the muck again.

I was almost despondent that first day, thinking all the progress of the last few years had been undone. But now I'm feeling better. The death toll is low, so the bombings will fall out of the headlines soon. India had Mumbai, which was much worse, and people are still calling India the new China. It was tragic and pointless, but maybe the impact won't be too catastrophic.

So maybe everyone can get back to the real problems soon, like corruption, and Papua, and climate change, and poverty, and lack of education, and all the other rats in the kitchen.

Ooops, we did it again

2009-06-21T15:22:00.009+07:00

Getting sleepy at the vet's office as the anesthesia kicks in.

We were on our way to the movies on a lazy, go-to-the-mall kind of weekend, when we stopped to look at a litter of kittens across the street. Just as we were leaving, an adult cat limped past with an open wound on an obviously broken leg.

"Poor cat," said the woman on the corner who runs a bottled-water store. "He got hit by a car. I feel so bad for him."

We did too, but I confess we didn't stop and do anything right then. The cat slunk away to a hiding place and we walked off with heavy hearts. We got dinner and saw a movie. But we couldn't get the image out of our heads. By bedtime, we knew we had to do something.

We got up the next morning ready for battle, figuring this was a streetwise cat who wouldn't take kindly to being shoved in a basket. But when we went down to the Posko (security post) on the corner, where the cat hangs out, we found him asleep and utterly pliable. The bottled-water seller picked him up and put him right in Susu's cat carrier, where he settled down and started munching treats.

After a traumatic, howling taxi ride (sorry, mr. Express taxi driver!), I got him to the vet's. She put him on the table and gave him a shot of anesthesia, and it quickly became clear that this was a former housecat. For one thing, he was sweet as pie. He kept rubbing against my hand and purring even after the evil vet jabbed him with needles and poked around in his wounds. For another, he's fat -- 4 kilograms, or about 9 pounds, which is enormous for a Jakarta cat!

As the shot took effect, the cat got wobbly and his eyelids started to droop. Then he threw up all his kitty treats, poor guy, as well as some fried rice he'd stolen that morning and a long, wiggly, very-much-alive worm. Our agenda promptly expanded to include de-worming. The vet also checked out a wound on his side, which I figured was associated with the car accident. Not so, she said -- it was a burn, probably caused by somebody tossing boiling water on him.

As the vet bandaged him up, my treat-and-release plan dissolved in front of my eyes. The cat needs to stay clean and out of danger for another couple of weeks. He really can't be limping around in traffic and dumpster-diving for his meals. So, inevitably, I brought him home.

And that's where he is now, gradually coming out of the anesthesia. I got him a cage to protect him from Susu and keep him out of trouble when we're not around. He's going to live in our home office while he's recuperating.

We're taking care of him till he's better but we're NOT keeping him forever. I know you don't believe me -- I can see you shaking your head with a knowing smirk -- but we're not. We are going to find him a home.

So ... one sweet, cuddly, box-trained, down-on-his-luck Jakarta kitty is looking for an angel. Could it be you?

The many snoozes of Susu

2009-05-13T07:50:00.000+07:00

Susu has such long legs, sometimes she has a hard time figuring out where to put them.

The Overhang

The Brick House (letting it all hang out)

Yoga Kitty

The Bear

Cold Nose

Death comes to the Mini Market

2009-04-29T20:08:00.002+07:00

I couldn't resist this juxtaposition of the Grim Reaper and a Marlboro sign.

Demon toes: a study

2009-04-28T21:35:00.000+07:00

Green demons have black toenails.

Red demons have white toenails.

Purple demons have long, lavender toenails -- with hair!

Monster bash

2009-04-27T19:20:00.000+07:00

As I mentioned, I went down to Bali at the end of March for the Nyepi holiday, which I've always wanted to do.

The idea behind Nyepi is to scare evil spirits away from the island by having a huge street party and making a hell of a racket. Then, the next day, on Nyepi itself, everyone stays absolutely silent so the monsters will think the island is empty and won't come back.

Seriously, has a better holiday ever been invented?

The party is focused around a parade of demons. For weeks in advance, teams of people in the villages make effigies of monsters.

On the afternoon before Nyepi, these are carried out into the streets so everyone can admire them.

Some are quite frightening and gory.

But my favorites were the smaller ones made by children. Ghost on a Vespa, for example, was awesome.

The Vespa ghost also carried a message of harmony, which was a nice touch.

After the public admiration session comes a parade and a contest to choose the best monsters -- followed by the actual day of silence. More on those later!

Pizza Hut's war on pizza

2009-04-23T22:33:00.003+07:00

Even before I moved here, I suspected Pizza Hut had been bought by some shadowy person or persons intent on destroying Italian-American cuisine from within. Now I know this is true. After all, how else can one explain Corn and Mayonnaise Pizza (with slices of chicken hotdog)?

Not convinced? Check out the FishChips Pizza, with chunks of fried fish and a little pile of potato chips in the middle. For those who are concerned about getting their Recommended Daily Allowance of mayonnaise, it comes with artful drizzles of mayo crosshatched with drizzles of sweet, artificially-flavored and -colored chili sauce from a 50-gallon drum they keep out back.

Having gotten a good start against pizza, they're now tackling pasta. What exactly is Corn Salsa Sauce, and how did it turn out green?! Never mind, don't answer that -- I'd rather be able to sleep tonight.

The 44 turns

2009-04-19T20:44:00.006+07:00

Maninjau is two hours from the aiport in Padang. About one hour of this is spent doing hairpin turns.

Well, that's how it feels, anyway. The lake is in a volcanic crater so the journey up or down is, shall we say, rather steep. The road is famous for its 44 turns. You do switchback after switchback until everyone in the car is turning green and queasy.

Just when you've almost convinced yourself there can only be three or four turns left, you realize some cigarette company has put up a numbered sign at every switchback. And you realize you actually have fifteen to go. Thanks, cigarette company! No wonder everybody loves you guys!

The views of the lake do offer some consolation, though.

Victorious water buffalo

2009-04-18T13:51:00.005+07:00

West Sumatra is the home of the Minangkabau people. Their traditional houses have distinctive, peaked roofs that draw up the heat and pull in fresh air.

The pointy roofs also mimic water-buffalo horns, and that is no accident. The word Minangkabau comes from an old legend having to do with water buffalo.

Centuries ago, the story goes, a Javanese army attacked Sumatra. Somehow the local people convinced them to gamble the outcome of the battle on a buffalo fight. The Javanese brought in the biggest, meanest water buffalo they could find.

But the Sumatrans chose a baby water buffalo. They kept it from its mother for a few days until it was quite hungry, and then sharpened its horns so they were like razors. When the two animals met on the field of battle, the hungry juvenile ran under the adult and tried to suckle, stabbing the larger animal to death.

(Oh cute, clever little Sumatra! Oh big, stupid, bullying Java! is undoubtedly the subtext of the story, reflecting the age-old resentment many smaller tribes feel toward Indonesia's most populous and powerful ethnicity.)

The area became known as Alam Minangkabau, or World of the Victorious Water Buffalo. And so it remains today.

Biking the Lake

2009-04-18T12:14:00.006+07:00

We rented bikes and went out for a ride late in the day, following the afternoon rain. The air felt very clean and the light was amazing -- even my little cellphone camera could tell.

There was a big hill at the beginning of the ride and I had to stand on the pedals and pump with all my might to get up it. Some women sitting on a porch yelled and cheered and laughed at me in a friendly way. Sadly, I couldn't take their picture, or I would have fallen off the bike.

I did capture some other people, though ... like this farmer returning from the fields for the day.

And this man in a sarong and boy wearing pajamas, standing in front of a nice little house. I wonder if it's a vacation home.

This house is not so upscale. There were a bunch of children playing, but they all yelled and laughed and ran inside when I tried to take their picture. Then they kept peeking out at us from behind the safety of Mom.

It was a great ride. Even the trip back to the bike shop, down the narrow main road crowded with tourist buses, worked out fine. I was amazed that the drivers of big cargo trucks would stop and wait patiently while I slowly pedaled my way around a parked car and back to the side of the road.

We got back just before dark, and sat down to a meal of "tako," which turned out to be a big savory stuffed pastry, plus some deliriously tasty fried eggplant.

The star of the meal was a large wedge of fried mashed potatoes studded with chopped vegetables and local herbs. Here, inside the restaurant and with darkness falling fast, the cameraphone failed to do justice to the subject. So you'll just have to believe me when I say it was extremely tasty.

Escape to Lake Maninjau

2009-04-17T11:20:00.009+07:00

It's tougher to get out of town now that Chad and I both have full-time jobs, especially since we work a lot of Friday nights and Sundays. But we're starting to get the hang of dashing out of town whenever we have 2 or 3 days off in a row.

Last time this happened we hadn't really planned ahead. So we just stuffed some clothes in our backpacks, went to the airport, and bought tickets. We ended up going to Maninjau, a crater lake in the hills of West Sumatra.

We got there in the evening after a long drive with an annoying driver who kept saying, "If you need a ride to the airport, just call me! We have an office in Padang! Just call the office! If you need a ride to the airport! So, when are you going to the airport?" (We pretended we weren't sure.)

The next morning we woke up to this view, which made it all worthwhile:

Rice paddies are like health food for the eyes. They're so intensely green. I couldn't get enough.

Just around the corner from our little cottage was the lake, which wasn't exactly an eyesore either:

There were little wooden canoes all over the lake, but no-one was sitting in them. Instead, the boaters were in the water, standing about waist-deep and jiggling sticks that pointed straight down at the bottom of the lake. As it turned out, they were collecting tiny clams.

I went to get my camera, and when I came back, the clammers were taking a break. I waved at them and started snapping pictures.

The clammers took out some containers of rice and began making eating gestures at me. At first I was taken aback, because this is sometimes how beggars ask for money in Jakarta. A moment later I blushed to the roots of my hair, because I realized THEY were offering ME food. I said no thanks, although I was a little curious to see what they were eating.

After taking some pictures of little flowers, I wandered back to our cabin for a mid-morning nap, wondering what other vestiges of the Big City I was carrying with me.

Junk food of the week: Green Peas Stick

2009-04-05T10:19:00.005+07:00

What could be tastier than a bunch of green peas, all mushed up, and then rolled into logs, deep-fried, and coated with salt and sugar?

Well, okay, probably lots of things. But Green Peas Stick are what we have, so you might as well eat them.

(I spent the Balinese day of silence in Bali, blogging ... so more posts are on the way over the next couple of weeks.)

A Very Dangdut Christmas

2009-01-27T22:52:00.000+07:00

I'm falling seriously behind on my holiday blogging. I'm still on Christmas, and we've already had a whole bunch of New Years: Javanese New Year, Muslim New Year, Chinese New Year, and New Year New Year. More on those later!

Anyway, last month some friends of ours organized a Very Dangdut Christmas party. This involved hiring an dangdut street band that our friend/colleague Ade wrote this lovely story about in the paper.

I didn't have high hopes for the band. Most of the dangdut outfits that come to our neighborhood just wander around blaring out-of-tune music on really terrible sound systems. But these guys were pretty good. Here's a couple of minutes of video; as you can see, it's a big band, with keyboard, drums, guitars, flute and singers:

Questions: 1. Why do I always seem to be videotaping in the dark? And 2. who is that mysterious mustachioed man?

Junk food of the week: Meat Filled Chicken

2008-12-29T17:02:00.000+07:00

It's easy to see how this tragically bad translation happened. Someone must have looked up the Indonesian name, pastel ayam, and discovered that pastel is "meat-filled pastry" and ayam is "chicken." One little noun-confusion later, we arrive at "Meat Filled Chicken."

So, what is Meat Filled Chicken actually like? It's been several weeks since I tasted these, and all I recall is a kind of crumbly paste inside, and a strong flavor of salt.

I don't even want to know what you have to do to a chicken to make it shelf-stable for a year.

Note that the box says "A Gift From Indonesia," so now you all know what you're getting if you ask me to bring you a present!

Ho ho ho and a bottle of rum

2008-12-24T13:13:00.011+07:00

It seems like the malls here get a little more Christmas-crazy every year. Some of them have pretty inspired interpretations of holiday traditions, such as this "pirate Christmas" display.

Pirates with Christmas-wreath hats? Yeah, we've got that.

Treasure chests overflowing with ornaments? Stuffed Christmas parrots? Why not!

You can even get your whole family's picture taken with Santa -- though not on his lap, luckily for Santa.

Plus there's a tower of "gifts" stretching all the way to the top of the second floor, lest anyone forget the True Meaning of Christmas.

The pirate display also gave me an excellent opportunity to take sneaky photos of the pembantus, or nannies. It's very common to bring your pembantu to the mall; the more expensive the mall, the more pembantus. They're easy to spot: they're the ones in a white or pastel uniform, pushing a stroller while carrying someone else's baby and 37 bags of someone else's shopping.

Pembantus are often country girls who move to Jakarta in search of opportunity. They usually live with the family and work long hours for less than $100 a month. I'm sure most of them get treated okay. But it's poignant to see them rushing around wiping kids' noses or feeding them spoonfuls of rice from a plastic container - in some cases spoon-feeding ten-year-olds - while the moms study Prada window displays or drink Starbucks coffee with the other mall ladies.

Don't make me come down there and kick your ass

2008-12-16T10:38:00.003+07:00

Susu perching high atop the upended mattress in the spare room, aka The Climbing Wall.

Seriously. Back away from the mattress slowly. Put your hands where I can see them and stop making that scritching noise. You don't want to know what these claws can do. I am a hunter. A fighter. A cat.

Seriously. Don't make me.

Goats Seen and Unseen

2008-12-12T19:03:00.016+07:00

Every year when Idul Adha rolls around, the sidewalks of Jakarta fill up with goats and cows.

Excuse me, I have an urgent phone cow

Every Muslim of means is supposed to buy an animal, or at least part of one, to be slaughtered on the Day of Sacrifice. You get to keep a third of the meat; the rest is given to the poor. For some people, it's the one time they eat meat all year.

I always tell Chad we should buy a leftover goat the day after Idul Fitri -- when there are sure to be big discounts -- and keep it in a little tent on our rooftop terrace. It could eat our garbage and we could sell the manure as compost. I used to think we could make goat cheese, too, but it turns out all the Idul Adha goats are male.

A handsome pet

Chad proved to be unreasonably resistant to the pet goat idea again, but we decided we would participate in the charitable part of the scheme and buy a goat to sacrifice. Our downstairs neighbors, Drew and Melanie, offered to chip in too.

We asked a few people how much we should pay, including Bu Dena, the woman who runs the warung across the street. She offered to take us to a friend who was selling them.

That afternoon, Dena led us to a perfectly ordinary house a couple of streets over. We were confused because there was nary a goat to be seen -- just some construction debris and sand.

Dena at the goat house with two of her kids, Dina (left) and Putri

Only when you walked up the driveway and looked into a sort of carport on the left did you see a couple dozen of them, held in by a wooden gate.

Hidden goats

Dena's friend led out a few different goats for us to look at. The first cost 1.9 million, or about 170 dollars -- within our expected price range of 1 to 2 million, but a little more than we wanted to pay. The second was 1.7 and the third, a much smaller one, was 1.2. Being pragmatic types, we settled on Goat Number 2.

I told myself not to fall in love with our goat, but of course I did. Instantly. This was a bad move.

Once we paid, the next step was to take the goat down to the mosque, where he would stay for the next couple of days until his moment of sacrifice. As it turned out, Goaty didn't want to go to the mosque. He bucked and balked and shouted in a terrible, almost-human voice. It took all the goat-man's persuasion to get him around the corner and down the street.

When we finally completed our melancholy Dead Goat Walking journey, Chad registered Goaty for the sacrifice and got our receipt. The mosque would handle the slaughter and the distribution, including delivering our portion to our door. I was relieved to get our part of the process done with.

On the walk home, as I was still struggling with goat-related sadness, Bu Dena turned to us and asked an odd question: "Have you seen my husband?"

Chad and I looked at each other and scratched our heads. Come to think of it, we hadn't seen him around in a while.

"He's left me," said Dena with a funny smile. "He's already married some other woman across town."

I was floored. I didn't know what to say -- partly because of language limitations and partly because it was so shocking. Those two have seven kids together, plus some more from previous marriages. And I had just taken all those photos of him a few months before, playing the proud daddy at their baby-naming. The betrayal was staggering.

"Amazing, isn't it?" Dena went on, still with that odd smile on her face. "For Jakarta men, marriage is a hobby!"

I wanted to call her ex terrible names, but the kids were crowding all around so I felt I shouldn't. I shook my head and told her I was very sad, and that it was, indeed, amazing.

We walked the rest of the way home thinking about goats of all kinds.

Going Solo

2008-12-02T22:56:00.013+07:00

Chad and I are both working at the newspaper now, so it's pretty rare for both of us to have the weekend off. One of those weekends happened unexpectedly about three weeks ago, so we decided to make a last-minute dash to Solo, Central Java.

We stayed at the Novotel which is pretty cushy for us -- not only flush toilets, hot showers and a nice pool, but in-room broadband and culturally appropriate statuary!

Solo is a famous cultural destination. There was a fancy map at the hotel showing all kinds of interesting places to visit.

Unfortunately we didn't go to any of them. Mostly we just stayed in our room and typed on our laptops, because we were doing National Novel Writing Month and we were both struggling to keep our word counts up.

NaNoWriMo involves writing a 50,000-word novel in a month (the month of November, specifically). That's 1667 words a day. If you fall behind, your word deficit starts piling up faster than unsold SUVs at General Motors.

We did manage to get out to one place -- the kampung batik or batik neighborhood. It's a cute area of narrow streets full of small shops making and selling batik, such as the shirt above.

Chad wanted his picture taken at the Ryan batik shop, because there is a famous serial killer named Ryan who's on trial for murder right now in Jakarta. I had bought a cheap, crummy paperback book about him at the airport to read on the plane - one of those books full of fuzzy pictures downloaded from the internet.

The worst thing about the book is that, since Ryan is gay, the author felt it necessary to put lots of things about his domestic habits in quotation marks. The result reads something like Ryan and his "partner" decided to "spend some time together" at the apartment, and then Ryan cooked dinner like a good "wife." Every time I see those marks I imagine the author making a little "quote" gesture, and after a while I feel exhausted from all the gesturing ... nevermind the unpleasant sneering tone.

After the Ryan shop, we saw an awesome sign about The Power of Underwear.

We also saw a garage door that had been extensively decorated by Slank fans. Slank is a Jakarta group that inhabits that gray area between rock band and cult. Slank graffiti is everywhere, and if you go to any kind of big celebration, like the annual Idul Fitri street celebrations, you'll see kids waving Slank banners.

Interestingly, Slank gave out free pairs of underwear with one of their recent CDs, as a reward for purchasing a legal copy instead of the black-market version. The power of underwear, indeed!

So that is all we saw of Solo. We even ate all our meals at the hotel, pathetically; every time we tried to go out to eat, it started raining. Luckily the hotel food was good. Plus they had the local specialty, nasi liwet: chicken and shredded squash with some coconut milk sauces, sambal and of course, rice. It was tasty.

Best of all, we both completed NaNoWriMo successfully this past Sunday! Woohoo!

My Busway Day: Kota

2008-12-01T20:35:00.006+07:00

There's a famous old train station in northern Jakarta that I've always admired from the bus window. Since I was being a transportation geek anyway, I figured I'd go have a look inside.

Like so many buildings in Jakarta, Kota Station is blockaded by fences and barricades. It's a bit of a chore to get in. But it's worth the effort.

It was built around 1870, with this really lovely vaulted ceiling. It's still a working train station.

The route map filled me with travel desires. After all, who wouldn't want to go to Cikadongdong, Gadobangkong or Tagogapu?

Unfortunately, almost as soon as I got to the station my camera batteries died. I decided to walk down to the Glodok marketplace to buy more. On the way out I bought some lumpia from the Bicycling Lumpia Man.

Lumpia are the Indonesian version of egg rolls. These ones were small, greasy and tasty. They came with a little baggie of sweet peanut sauce that seemed to proclaim: sure, this is a Chinese-derived snack in a Chinese part of town, but still, it is JAVANESE food.