trees

I'm trying to blog, but I don't take very many pictures! This is Yangsan, where I went for a walk one afternoon.


There was a warning not to swim in the foot-deep fountain water because you might drown.

'bout as high as a building oughta grow

I stopped on my walk home and took pictures in four directions.

Homeward


Back toward my school


Up the hill next to me


And across the street


This is how Jangyu manages to be such a small town with so many people!

telephonin' me

I know I haven't written in awhile, and I do have pictures of a beautiful hike I did with Autumn, and I'm still meaning to post pictures of both of my schools and all that, but today's entry is brought to you by my students.

I love my students.

I work at two large middle schools in Jangyu (small town of 100,000 people.) Each of my middle schools has a little over 1000 students, so my superior math skills tell me that just over 2% of the population of Jangyu are my students. The people on the street around my house after school are probably 60% my students. And it's great. Twice this week middle schoolers have taken time out of their day to help me with every day tasks.

First, on my way home Monday, in order to put some figurative soft, ruffly sunshine on my shoulders I stopped to finally buy the golden yellow ruffly scarf I've been fondling briefly on my way home each day. I asked the lady how much it cost ...and she didn't do the helpful "this many thousands" with her fingers and our misunderstanding grew and then one of my students said, "Hi, Emily" and I said "I want to buy this scarf. Can you tell me how much it costs?" just like any EFL dialogue I would use in my class. And then I bought a ruffly yellow scarf for 10,000 won and then the student gave me part of her donut, unsolicited!

Then, just now I got home to a "sorry we missed you!" sticker on my door from a courier. I'm expecting a package from my mom, and it looked like they were going to try and deliver the package again tomorrow. I went back outside where a few of my students were hanging out in front of a restaurant and showed them the slip. One of them called the courier for me and told them to deliver the package to my school tomorrow instead of my house!

Additionally, my students are funny.

Today in a lesson on giving advice, one pair of students submitted:
Problem: my pet dog is getting fat.
Advice: I think you should eat your pet.

Last week my students made telephone conversations. I told my classes to be creative, have fun, and stop threatening people with box cutters! Some gems:

Australopithecus called Homo Erectus asking if
he can make him a fire.

2MB called Obama to tell him that North Korea is
attacking and ask for help. And money after the
war is over.

(2MB is Lee Myung-Bak, the president of South Korea--2 sounds like Lee.)

God called the Undertaker and asks to wrestle.

God called a bee and asks it to the God-bugs
dance party that evening.

Spiderman called Obama and asks him to a
movie.

I hope my students brightened your day at least a fraction of the amount they brightened mine!

apartment in the sky

This is Jangyu.



It's where I live. It's still really hot here (actually this is the first afternoon I've been comfortably able to leave the windows open and the aircon off.) I like that it's all highrises and mountains. This is why it's a small town with 100,000 people.

It's difficult to see in the picture, but there's a big retaining wall on the right. That wall retains another big hill. This picture is part of my walk to/from my second school, where I teach Thursdays and Fridays.

In my room

Wanna see where I live?

I live in Jangyu, which is a bedroom community of Gimhae, which is a suburb of Busan.

First, I don't have a key. Instead I have this. I don't want to think about the implications in case of disaster.


This is the take-off-your-shoes area. Please try to find an empty spot in those cupboards among my vast collection.


And this... this is my room!


There is plenty of room to hula hoop.


This is the kitchen, complete with a bag of moving-in waste. There is a microwave and a rice cooker under the table. I chose the pink rug myself. That door goes to the bathroom.


This is the bathroom. The shower head is behind the door.


This is my laundry room, which seems like a very inefficient use of space.

Brother bought a coconut, he bought it for a dime

Reasonably, you're going to pay at least ten baht. At least in Ban Phe.

But young coconut is my favorite thing. Stop using superlatives, you might say. What about mango sticky rice? What about karaoke?



Pish. I just really like young coconut. Let me count the ways.

1. It's in a coconut shell. Food that comes with its own vessel is better than food that doesn't. It reduces litter, and it looks cool.

2. It tastes wonderful. Before I came to Thailand, the closest I came to coconut water was the few teaspoons of water in the bottom of one of those old brown coconuts at the grocery store. But the young ones are full to the brim with sweet coconutty goodness.

3. They slaughter it in front of you. With a big, sharp thing.

4. It's also a snack.

5. Which makes it perfectly acceptable to play with your food. The soft, rubbery flesh is an extra treat that you can scrape into the coconut and drink up, or (and this is kind of my goal in life now, actually) in a young enough coconut remove in one piece from the shell. I can only imagine the satisfying "sqwlupp" sound that would probably make.

6. After consuming the flesh and juice, you can use the shell to make a mobile, helmet, canteen, fish bowl, small boat, flower pot, ash tray, trowel, spitoon, bra, pencil holder, piggy bank, egg cup, ceremonial urn, firewood, jellybean jar, rain gauge, solar oven (suitable for one muffin at a time,) or just use it as a projectile weapon.

More fun than birthday cake. (And on that note, Grandpa, happy 90 today! Have a coconut.)

The rest of the market haul pictured is a barbecue flavored spiral potato on a stick, and vegetarian spring rolls.

there's a light

I love Ban Phe. It's quiet and when I walk through town (town being a straight, two mile road along the water) I always see people I know and that makes me happy. Some people might call Ban Phe boring, but they've probably never seen this random traveling market that cropped up overnight.

Welcome to Ban Phe Municipality, indeed!



You can buy mattresses, shiny wood furniture,



or an entire rainbow of spongy cakes (there was a much greater variety the second time I visited, but I didn't take a picuture, but you can imagine: Taro! Coconut! Corn! Other Flavors as Well!)



And the most popular booth (often the only one with customers) is the Thai equivalent to a $.66 store, the ฿20 store!



I bought some knit shorts to sleep in. They have a panda on them. I did not take a picture.

And the market vanished this morning on the breeze...

This bird has flown.

Alas, the landlord of the swift house next door doesn't want a herd of foreign women touring the place and possibly stealing his proprietary swift-luring technologies.

I have been more aware of the swift houses around me though. The other day I was at TESCO at sunset, and watched dozens of swifts flittering about, silhouetted against the brilliant orange sky as they darted after insects and swooped in and out of a swift house entrance, far and high on the only inhabited building on the block.

In the middle of our street

When I was little I lived in the woods, which was fantastic for tromping around and discovering old abandoned cabins with hot bowls of porridge in them, but it lacked other things. Like sidewalks. On the television, children walk along sidewalks to their friends houses after school. But I had to drive to a friend's house just to go Trick-or-Treating. It was very traumatic, I tell you.

So I've always kind of loved the idea of neighborhoods where you can borrow a cup of sugar or a landscaping implement from your neighbor, and hang out and have barbecues and things.

Oliver's Bar looks like this now


And he's moved some 100 yards or so up the street toward me and Annie and Ryan and Swedish Mike. I realized a few days ago that what I've got now here is a lot like Sesame Street.

One afternoon I was eating at Sa's with Autumn, which is right about in the middle, south of TEFL, across the street from Swedish Mike, and just north of Annie and Ryan. I was telling Autumn about how lovely our little community of neighbors is, and I saw Oliver walking over to Swedish Mike with a small pink plastic container, and I fancied that he was asking for a cup of sugar or something, because that's just the kind of thing these folks will do for one another.

But this was in that pink container


Oliver found it in his bathroom, and his wife insisted on keeping it as a pet! She hasn't named it yet, but she'll let everyone know. Isn't it cute? Still no sidewalks, but this is just as good.

One bourbon, one scotch

Diggery Doggery
Good Monsieur Oliver
Shouts in the morning hours,
"This bar is closed!"

Your people thank you for
So sympathetically
Not just reopening
Armed with a hose.


Higgledy Piggledy
Good Monsieur Oliver
When ladies visit they
Drink just a few

And it goes well until
Just when you've paid you hear
Unambiguously
"Not kissing you!"


Bubbly bubbly
Good Monsieur Oliver
Sure we'll all miss your old
Waterfront bar

All we've got left is that
Victorianously
Now that you're finished you'll
Have a cigar!

Oliver's Bar opened for the last time on Friday. I really, really enjoyed myself.

Cellophane flowers of yellow and green

Sometimes there are schools of hovering pufferfish in small knitted hats.



Sometimes you walk on a sidewalk in Ban Phe and then you are suddenly in a tunnel of tiny seashells that goes on as far as you can see.



If you turn at any point within this tunnel, you'll be in one of seven identical shops whose walls are lined with magic seashell mirrors, reflecting exotic candies and dried seastuffs.

Strange apparition

There usually aren't cows on my street, until there are.



They appear on the road and graze in vacant lots and front yards, dragging their tethers behind them.



They are generally unmanned and well-behaved. They do their best not to disrupt traffic. On more than one occasion they have disappeared while I briefly looked away.

Happy ever after in the market place

Every night in Ban Phe, there is an evening market that sells food in a little covered area. On Mondays and Thursdays, the market expands, literally and figuratively, to encompass the surrounding land and sell clothing, shoes, perfume, housewares, and pirated movies.

When I'm not searching for rad new tee shirts or practical new belts, I generally visit the same few stalls.

This lovely lady is my Cha Nom Yen smoothie dealer:



She doesn't even ask what I want anymore, because though a rose apple smoothie does sound appealing, I can't think of anything else when I see that steaming, orange, caffeinated nectar waiting patiently in its pot to mingle with sweetened condensed milk and ice in a blender until it's all smooth and perfect.

And these two hook me up with vegetarian spring rolls. They're full of glass noodles, wood ear mushrooms, egg, carrot, cabbage I think... probably other stuff too. Anyway they're divine.



And mango sticky rice, the food of the gods, is the first thing I bought (which is why I didn't get a picture of the goddess who provides it to me) and the last thing I ate, which is why it's the only food item of which I have a picture.



Sticky rice and fresh mango, drizzled in warm, sweet coconut milk.

Into the light of the dark black night

Directly across Soi Suan Son from me, there looms a strange building. It follows the same basic model as the other units on the block, but stands a full two stories taller and, most ominous of all, lacks windows. Instead, aside from small vents where the windows would live on any other building, the only apparent entrance is an unguarded opening visible on the top floor. At night, between the wafts of karaoke and snarling dogfights, I'm sure I've heard unnatural noises coming from that building.

Kinda weird, right?

This is a fairly common sight on the street:


The strange, windowless building in this otherwise vacant block is the only part that appears to be well-maintained and painted. My strongest hypothesis was vampires (of course) who don't understand enough about human culture to realize that painting their building made it more conspicuous. They enter and exit through the roof when they take the form of bats.

I learned the truth this week, and I was correct that it is indeed a part of an entirely new dimension of reality. It has existed for more than 400 years, but I had never known of it until now: bird's nest soup.

Bird's nest soup is, well, exactly what it sounds like. It's not something people eat here in Thailand, but it's a rare, expensive delicacy in China. The nests in question are those of swiftlets, and are made from the bird's saliva. The birds naturally build the nests in caves, but since the things sell for something like $2000 per kilogram, it's a profitable venture to let them get cozy in your vast, empty concrete building instead.

So the creepy windowless buildings are actually birdhouses, and now I'm seeing them everywhere! The reason I learned what they are in the first place is that my coworkers Annie and Ryan just moved into a house down the street, right next door to a birdhouse in the making.



People apparently spend lots of money to modify the inside to be damp and jungle-cave-like, and construction on this house should finish in a couple of weeks. Then (with luck,) we'll then get to tour it before it's closed up and the birds (hopefully) move in.

Ain't there one damn song

I didn't finish work until just before 9:00. I assigned myself the mission to go to the little shop and get some soy milk, but I recognized the looming temptation to walk down to Oliver's instead.

As I left the building, I saw Tim's silhouette returning from Oliver's, so I walked down to meet him and we talked a little and I decided to head down there, at least long enough to pass along a Hello from Celine.

It was a good decision. There were some cool people, some bad jokes, and I sat through the entirity of The Wall album (and giggled through drunk people describing the film to one another) and then... and then there was surprise karaoke!



At first it was just me and Annie (my boss...ish...person) and Pete (how can I describe Pete?)



Soon other people came too, including Oliver himself which is a thrill.



We chose a little karaoke place between Oliver's and the school, where the English song selection is limited to a hip-hop remix of "Zombie," which I sang. I was reminded that Annie can actually sing.



And that Pete can make some glorious death metal growls. It was a fantastic, unexpected evening.

My Donkeypede has the silliest features

Today I will talk about the Children's Day preparations that filled my last week. Tomorrow I will talk about Children's Day itself.

Every year Ban Phe has a big Children's Day celebration. Usually Siam English Training School just gives out delicious (smelling) barbecue ribs, which gives the school quite a popular booth. This year, though, the school wanted games and contests and prizes!

On Tuesday, we had a big meeting about Children's Day in the afternoon. Autumn and I would get to make a big, sparkly Children's Day sign:


And I painted a pin-the-tie-on-the-teacher teacher, complete with glittery maple leaf buckle:


And example drawings for the Animal Magic contest, an assignment which Emily relished more than should a professional woman of 26:


Before the big meeting on Tuesday, Autumn and I had planned our outfits over lunch. We settled finally on full-skirted dresses that would allow the glorious combination of freedom of movement, washability and breathability required for a day of herding children in the sun. Our faces gaped in horror when, almost as an afterthought, one of the Thai staff asked what color *shirts* we should wear and the answer was provided: pink.

We knew what they meant. They meant the bubblegum-colored polo shirts from the King's Birthday. Could I endure a *second* well-photographed day looking like a pepto sausage? Bubblegum polo shirts offer little in the way of breathability or freedom of movement. A dark cloud settled over Ban Phe as the rest of the staff emptied the meeting room and Autumn and I sat, staring at one another, unable to speak. The weather spoke for us, and the darkened skies cracked and released more sorrow than we could have expressed in words.

I hate to end on such a terrible note, but you can read about the actual occurrences of Children's Day, including my wardrobe choices, tomorrow.

Come into my enclosure.

Situated just a few hundred meters outside of the "Welcome to Ban Phe" sign with its fancy gold Sunthorn Phu statues, this is the space I call home:



I'm on the fourth floor and the door in the picture goes out to a little balcony overlooking the street. I have windows on two sides which get afternoon sun, and a bed and a closet which is all I need. I share my space with a few geckos, and the karaoke down the street can be noisy at night but my air conditioner drowns it out. I still think it's romantic to fit all my belongings into a suitcase or two. I couldn't ask for much more in a place to stay.

Throw your arms around the world

In preparation for Christmas Eve at Siam School, the boss asked Autumn and I to come up with some games for the children. Collecting party games is kind of an obsession so my enthusiasm made up for Autumn's lack thereof. We borrowed dresses from each other and got all pretty before we realized that we would also be in charge of keeping the children entertained/busy/away from the adults at the actual party. Oh, the children.

In gratitude to Oliver and his bar, the services of which were greatly appreciated after that party was over, we helped our lovely Annie cover the bar in tinsel garlands on Christmas morning. Afternoon, really.



Christmas in Ban Phe is not a big affair, and the three of us we were the only people at the Tawan Inn when we arrived for their fancy, delicious actual-Christmas-dinner. Oh, and I can recommend Zombieland. Happy Christmas, everybody!

Want a Fanta?

One reason Soi Suan Son may be haunted is that most of the buildings do not have spirit houses. Without a spirit house, spirits are left to roam around causing mischief. Siam School used to have a spirit house, but the owners are Mormon and took it away. Spirit houses must be built by special spirt house artisans, or spirits just won't live there. I'm not sure of the circumstances under which a spirit house would need to be replaced, but it does happen. Old spirit houses can't just be tossed out; they are usually left near a sacred tree.

This is part of a spirit house cemetery near the Tesco Lotus grocery store.





Of course the Tesco has an elaborate, active spirit house with plenty of water and incense and the occasional sandwich for the spirits.

More transient businesses, though, like the stalls at the market, can't very well build spirit houses. Instead they place an offering of red Fanta with a straw in it on the corner of their table. Overwhelmingly, the spirits at restaurants and food stalls prefer red Fanta. Oui, a fellow who works at Christie's, says that they would never leave an offering of Coke, but only red or green Fanta. I'm not sure if it's because the spirits don't like caffeine, or that they like pretty colors. He seemed to think these were silly questions.

But when I do drink red Fanta now, I kind of like to know that it's the beverage of choice for the spirits.