I’ve had an idea before that Bangkok is not as big as most people claim – or at least, the downtown part isn’t. One of my first clues was when Ben said that the CentralWorld near my hotel looked exactly like the one at Siam Square. I got even more suspicious the couple of times I rode a motor taxi to school, and it didn’t seem as far as I thought it should be. Tonight, however, was the clincher. I took the skytrain with Czar to Chit Lom, where his tailor was, and realized I could see Central World from where we were. I wandered for a bit trying to find Central Chidlom Department store, cause I’ve heard they have yarn there, but to no avail. And then, as I was turning into CentralWorld to go get something to eat, I saw it – the sign for Siam Paragon. I know if you haven’t been to Bangkok none of this makes sense to you, but as I sit here in the food court drinking my iced lychee tea after having ordered myself 2 pairs of tailored jeans (and discovered I’ve lost 3 inches off my waist!), I’m pretty damn pleased with myself.
Lychee tea, yummy as it is, is no dinner, so I have some noodles with duck in them too. I’d never really tried duck till recently – my birthday to be exact – but I have been eating it pretty often here in Thailand and I really like it. It’s quite yummy. It’s very exciting when you’re an expat to be able to find things you didn’t expect from home, and I’m fairly lazy in my eating habits anyway – rice or noodles with some sort of brothy thing is always a sure bet with me, when I remember to eat at all. But I’ve been thinking to myself that I should try more stuff. (But I will still order the three-sauce fajita burrito at On the Border. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.) In the interest of that tonight, I tried some of the konyaku-mitai stuff floating in my soup. It looked interesting, sort of a dark purple brown as opposed to the usual oh-so-appetizing clearish-gray, and I nibbled it a few times before deciding it wasn’t yummy enough to warrant further attention. Instead I went back to eating sprouts and drinking spicy, greasy broth. Odd how when I was in Korea, I dreaded seeing sprouts at lunch, but when left ot my own devices, I quite like them.
It occurs to me as I type this, wondering where it’s going that maybe, sometimes, I should write with an actual point in mind. Just, you know, occasionally. Don’t wanna cause too much of a stir or anything. Though I rarely really consider my audience (someone call me on that, please), I generally ramble on and on in a way that is probably rather boring to people who aren’t as … invested in my observations as I am. Which I think includes just about everyone except myself, and even then it’s debatable if I reread the stuff I write. I certainly don’t bother to go back and edit it for conciseness.
Enough babbling for the time being. I’m going to go find the yarn shop here again, perhaps nip into a store and do some souvenir shopping, and then head home and do my last paper for my course.
I’m sitting here in McDonald’s at CentralWorld, and though I’m ostensibly here to work on my assignments, I figured I could write something about yesterday while I eat, before I get into actually working.
Let me say though, that Thai McDonald’s are some of the lamest I’ve been to. There’s not really much special about them, and they don’t seem to be as popular as in Korea and Japan; though that said, they certainly aren’t rare by any means. The menu seems limited, and there aren’t any of the usual localized foods, except for a broccoli pie and the double big mac that I’ve only ever seen in Japan. Perhaps it’s the abundance of cheap street food here, or that the Thais seem to be more chill about foreigners and foreign things in general. Though they do have a “Samurai Pork Burger” that I’ve never seen before. On some level, it seems odd to me that one of my hobbies when traveling is noticing things like McDonald’s menus. (Maybe Tim’s right, and I really am an anthropologist.)
Anyway, before I embarrass further with dorkiness – yesterday. (Though when you read this it might just make me look moreso.) I woke up about 10 with a leg cramp and decided that, in light of not going to bed till 4ish and how in general exhausted I was by my CELTA, I was going back to sleep, and I did until around 3 when I woke up and talked to Nick for a few minutes. He was concerned that I might be selling my body, cause I had posted about doing two and a half hours of naked video chat on my Twitter; thankfully, he realized how absolutely ridiculous that was without me being too blunt about it. After he had gone to bed, I debated getting up and doing work on my assignments, but then I remembered that I really did want to check out the yarn shops here in Bangkok, and since it’s my last weekend here, I felt I should do some exploring. I grabbed my camera and headed out, only to discover that the battery was dead about 5 mins outside my hotel when I attempted to take a picture. My motor taxi driver waved at me and had the bike revved up before I even got to the intersection where he chills with his buddies – He drove me the 15mins to Thong Lo, where the yarn shops are, and I really wished I had my camera working. Bangkok can be beautiful when it wants to be, and yesterday was nice. It hadn’t rained, the sky was clear, and I’ve gotten so used to riding the motor bikes that I just lean back and chill with my ipod going.
When he dropped me off at the station I wasn’t sure exactly which way to go, so I picked a direction and started walking, since I had the map in my head. I was in the Sukhumvit area, and it was really nice. Quiet, wide streets and big houses with fenced lots and some posh apartments. As it turned out, I had started walking in the opposite direction of where I needed to go, but I ended up just making a circle and it let me see some of the more residential parts. I found some cute little restaurants, Japanese, and surprisingly, some Korean places too. I finally got to Soi 49 where I was going, and it was a long walk down to the yarn shops, but along the way, I had my epiphany, that I really hadn’t been fair to Bangkok. Ben made fun of me for comparing it to Seoul, and I kinda see why now… I must have sounded really childish. Everything is so different here that I really hadn’t given myself a chance to like it. I could probably come up with some excuse about it, but I’m really almost kind of ashamed of myself for not having more of an open mind. Even though I have complained about the stuff that’s different from Korea, I really have enjoyed myself here, and I probably wouldn’t even mind living here for a year or so if I could find a job that pays enough for me to live and pay the bills I’ve got back home. Though I’d definitely miss cheap Korean yarn and cooler weather. And not coughing all the time.
I’ll write another post reviewing the yarn shops I found, ‘cause I want to cross-post it to the Seoul SnB blog, but I really had fun. I ended up having some yummy chicken and noodles at Big Knits and then getting some of the women there to teach me to needlefelt. So now I have this cute little kitten that I’m making – I’ll see if I can finish it this week sometime, but I don’t know that I will have time, and I’m pretty sure that me taking needlefelting on the plane home won’t work, what with the pointy sharp needles involved. The lady who helped me with the cat taught me pretty much in Thai, but it was okay, ‘cause it was fairly straightforward. She asked me if I would come back, and I told her I didn’t think I could, and she seemed disappointed. I think I will make an effort to go back sometime this week when I have finished my work, maybe Wednesday or Thursday night, and this time take my camera with working batteries.
When I came out of the shop to walk back to the station, it was like stepping into warm water. For the first time I can remember since getting here, I could see stars, and the half moon setting beside some apartment buildings. No night without stars, I thought to myself, (and if you get that reference then you are just as sci-fi geeky as I am), and it really is true. I think I had just forgotten, but the stars are always there, even if you can’t see them. This is important to remember.
And on that poetic and slightly cliché note, I’m going to do my work.
Today was a turning point of sorts. I have epiphanies every now and then, and I realized that I haven’t really given Bangkok a chance, and I should have tried harder to like this city. That’s getting a bit ahead of myself though, so let me come back to it.
Yesterday was the end of week 3 of my CELTA course. I had a lesson, and I thought it was going to go well, and … it didn’t. It was my first hour-long lesson, and my first below-standard. I was more upset than I should have been, but I think most of that was just being tired. I’ve been working my ass off the last 3 weeks, and though it’s not like I couldn’t have worked harder, it’s taken a toll. I’ve been at school from 830 to 6ish everyday, and planning lessons after that until late, not to mention the stress of being in an entirely new, unfamiliar place and meeting new people and learning so much new material. I will admit that, this course has made me re-evaluate a lot of things I never thought about in my teaching before, and that’s a good thing. I’m much more self-aware when I’m teaching, my planning has gotten better, I’ve learned to anticipate problems, and learned better teaching techniques. At the same time, though, the constant stress of planning and being evaluated has exhausted me, and more unfortunately, sucked my confidence. I know I’m not a bad teacher, but when I teach a lesson and can find very few things that I consider strengths… it’s discouraging. I know I have improved, but being more aware of my teaching has also made me realize that I’ve still got a long way to go. Granted, my trainers always compliment me on the rapport I have with my students, but that rolls off my shoulders; it’s a good thing (great, when you’re working with kids) but it’s not everything, and I know it. I made a comment in one of the input sessions the other day, that we need to remember that this course is only a month long, that we will continue to grow and develop as teachers and that we shouldn’t feel discouraged if we don’t come out of this as super-teachers. Perhaps I should take my own advice. For the most part, I do, but yesterday was just… overwhelming.
But yesterday wasn’t just the lesson from hell. Afterwards was pretty decent. I called my mom and talked to her and Mamaw, which I hadn’t done for 2 weeks, so I had some stuff to fill them in on. They were intrigued to hear about Ben, since last time I talked to them was before I went out to Khao San for the night. (reminds me, I need to write that up…) I wandered out into the hall, stumbled into one of my colleagues, and we went down to the local Irish pub where some of the others were having drinks. I didn’t really want to hang with the subset of CELTA people that were there, so I wandered off to the gay bar that is the other hangout spot for our group and found the people I was looking for. Oddly enough, the people from the pub all showed up at the gay bar shortly thereafter, since happy hour was over, and we all spent a couple hours chilling and talking. There’s some really cool people there; I’m the youngest, of course, but then, when am I not? I tend to stay on the fringes and drink my coke and watch, but I still had fun. After a while, Bonnie, Eric, Czar and Gabe and I left to go get ramen from a restaurant near the pub, wandered into a parking deck to use the bathroom, and then debated going to get a massage before just deciding to go home.
I took the cab with Bonnie and Gabe to Phaya Thai and walked from there. When I got home I was surprised to see it was only 1145. I was going to take a shower and then was so lazy I decided to just go to bed, and then Habib called me and we talked for 2 and a half hours. It was good to see him again, even over a webcam. I’ve missed talking to him, though he has certainly become more cynical than he was. I’m not really surprised, but… sometimes I kinda miss the old Brenton, for whom we had a Facebook group devoted to his deflowering and traumatization. I’ll never forget the day Julie told me he had come to her and told her he had realized that God didn’t fit in a box. She was unimpressed, thought he should have realized that sooner, but I realized it meant he’d come a long way from the first night we had dinner when he asked me, “So, what religion are you?” Wow… that was a long time ago. -sigh- Nostalgia.
And now that I’ve gotten to the point where I would actually talk about today – I’m tired. And I’m going to bed, so my epiphany will have to wait.
Oh my god the airport is so huge. Or not huge, really, but long. I had to walk at least 8 moving sidewalks to get out of the place. It’s concrete and what looks like thai silk and glass – not as pretty as the Kuala Lumpur airport, but all lit up from the outside. The taxis here, lined up outside the airport, are all different colors, fuchsia and green and yellow and blue, and when one of the drivers takes my bag to put it in the trunk I notice the tank in the back that I’m pretty sure is NO2.
Seeing so many hijabis in Malaysia was surprising, but then it occurred to me that it is a Muslim country. What was more surprising to me was that, in order to go thru immigration at BKK, you have to pass a thermo-scan camera; the sign requests that glasses, hats, and hijabs be removed, and I wonder how that works exactly. I guess they don’t have the same religious freedom rules here as in the states.
I went out exploring near my hotel – I’m really not that far away from the busy Pratunam market area, and farther from the skytrain than I would like, but it’s not bad. It’s so very different from Korea – no ubiquitous apartments, coffee shops, bakeries, pharmacies. It’s hot and there are so many cars and it’s smoky and there are no mountains and so many overpasses and broken, dirty sidewalks. I’m reminded of Marie’s comment about China – that she couldn’t wait to get back to the quiet and cleanliness of Seoul. I feel the same way about Bangkok. And I miss cool weather, even after a couple days – I was so looking forward to fall.
A surprise: the Thais seem to be obsessed with Japan. Or there’s a large Japanese population and influence here. I saw Japanese manga in the 7-11 here, and there are so many signs written in Japanese, and Japanese restaurants. Of course, many of them seem to be as much ‘Japanese’ as Chinese restaurants in America, but it still says something. I’m eating at a ramen shop now, in a mall with at least 4 Japanese restaurants, not counting the Mister Donut. They sell sushi at the street food stalls here, 1 piece of tamago or crab for 10 baht or so. I look at them and cringe a bit, because I certainly wouldn’t want to eat sushi that’s been sitting out in the heat of the day… I certainly didn’t expect to be hearing Dong Bang Shin Ki in this ramen restaurant. I started laughing uncontrollably when I realized that they were, in fact, playing ‘Gee.’
There seem to be many bookstores. They serve bottled water at restaurants. I’m not sure I believe the tourist line that Thais smile more than other people, but they seem nice enough. Mostly what I have noticed is that they all look different. I mean, compared to Koreans, at least. Not that all Koreans look the same, but Thais seems to be a bit more heterogeneous. Perhaps this is because of all the inter-marriage here, between Thais and Chinese and other foreigners. More people seem to speak English, maybe this is because there are so many tourists. I haven’t been on the Metro here yet, but the Skytrain is nothing compared to Seoul. The skytrain map makes the city looks so small – there’s maybe 20 stations, max, on 2 lines.
I haven’t seen as many homeless people on the streets, but some of the homes here are pretty far from the American idea of ‘house.’ Perhaps it’s just because I seem to be in a poorer area, but there are so many houses that are just two rooms, which were obviously intended to be stores or garages, with the large roll-up gates in front, or tarps to block the rain. I was tempted to take pictures but I thought that would be rude. It reminds me of some of the poorer, older areas of north or central or Florida – a bit sleazy and rundown and sad. There are dogs everywhere here. Most of them have collars or seem to belong to someone, but they wander the streets looking at you hopefully for food.
well, here we are again. i'm fairly certain 2 months is not the longest time i've gone without posting a blog entry, but it sure feels like it. then again, i dont suppose that much has really happened, in the grand scheme of things. my life still goes on, chill as ever. the only really big deal that's going on is me getting ready for thailand, and leaving korea, and even that just requires a bunch of sorting and packing and other planning.
the year has really gone quickly though, as all years seem to do, i've recently noticed. you go to a place and say you're going to be there for a year, and a year feels like a long time, but it goes so quickly, too fast for you to be ready to leave and to have all your photos edited - though that last bit might just because i'm a horrible procrastinator. i'm not really sure that i'm ready to leave korea, as in leave and not come back - i feel like there are still things for me to do here, and the city hasn't become so full of memories that i feel the need to run away yet. still, i'm looking forward to going home, to spending time with my family and the people who aren't quite family but may as well be. of course, going home means that i will be leaving again, which brings up other thoughts on how quickly time passes and how much of it i spend away from people i love... but i've been through those enough times in my head, and the answer is always the same.
i'm on a bit of a melodramatic streak tonight, aren't i? more later, when im not eating.
Rain, rain, go away
come again another day
I want to go out and play,
and have a yarn crawl tomorrow.
to be perfectly honest, I'm surprised that I'm not napping right now. I felt tired enough for it - today was a long day. Today was field trip day.
It almost wasn't - the idea was that if it was raining when we came to school, we would cancel the field trip to the camp and just have classes. Well, the morning was gray and hazy (and so was the afternoon...) but it didn't start until we were on our way. It drizzled on and off the whole day, and wasn't really pouring until we got back. Now it's very loud, occasionally thundering and flashing outside my window, so I have both my glass doors closed.
It's not really a camp - we went to a place called Kanghwado, an island out near Gimpo. We ended up at this place called Oktokki Space Center, and it was cute. It's a huge building with a large garden out back that had statues of dinosaurs, and inside it's an astronomy and rocketry museum. It was really interesting, and I'd like to go back there sometime. I had an idea - I'd like to do a bike trip that way. You can get there via bus, but if I was on a bus, I couldn't stop to take pictures and explore like I want to... It was beautiful, in it's own way - there were muddy tidal flats like at home, next to rice fields that extended back to the mountains that were obscured by fog, and the same skyscraper apartments that define Korea stuck in the middle. There were even the same white egrets as home, poking about in the paddies for bugs and such. Whenever I travel, I'm always struck by how different so many places are from each other, but mostly by how much the same everything is. The trees here look like the ones at home - we passed a field surrounded by a wall of trees covered with kudzu that almost made me laugh. The tide was out, as were the shallow boats.
I've been struck a lot recently with the desire to learn more Korean - to be able to communicate with the people here, moreso than the broken fragments of preschool commands, and perhaps be less alone. That's not accurate, I suppose. I tell myself that it was my choice to be alone, and it's true; but it's also true that I am in a place where it is very easy for me to be alone, where I am alone by default, and it's not a choice at all. I feel like there is a difference in nuance there, but I am not sure how to describe it.
I took pictures at the space center, and I want to edit them before I put them up - I'd like to get some of that done during my break. I think the ones that I want to edit, but don't have the skills for yet, I will put in an Endnote notebook with my thoughts for fixing them, and go back to them later.
When I came home, I finished reading a book I've been working on for a while, Neil Gaiman's American Gods. Robin gave it to me a bit ago - it's the first of Gaiman's novels that I've ever read, though I have read some of his short stories. It was wonderful and tricky and full of the kinds of allusions to other things that I love. When I first started it, I wasn't sure that I was going to like it, but I got sucked into it. I definitely need to read more of his work now. He's an author that I have always been interested in, but had only just gotten around to reading.
An amazing book is one you know that you will *have* to reread again, before you have finished it through once. This is an amazing book.
I learned some new words today, too, at the museum.
taeyang = Sun. The sun is also called hae-nim, which is interesting. I'm not sure exactly what the nuance of the first part is - I think the common word for the sun, as opposed to taeyang, the scientific word. But the -nim ending is what you use when you are referring to a person, kind of like the japanese -san. I guess it's kind of like saying "Mr. Sun" in English.
eoknyeon = light year. I learned this from reading an exhibit about how far away things were from us.
chigu = Earth.
uju = space, as in, outer space.
sajajari = Leo, the constellation, or the zodiac sign. there was an activity the kids did where they made necklaces with each of their signs, and I got one. You got a little picture with a diagram of your constellation on it, and put dots of glow-in-the-dark glue on the dots marking the stars, and then put it in a little plastic case on a string. They let us teachers do it too.
Now, to get ready for the yarn crawl tomorrow, and also do some emails and budgeting and cleaning up. Oh, and figuring out what I am giving to my swap partner. I have a list of ideas, and a $25 budget.
Seriously. You can make pretty much anything in a rice cooker. Rice, obviously. But, also, cake. Pasta. Risotto (does that count as rice?). Soup. Just google it. So, it stands to reason that you could make rice wine, as well. Or other alcoholic beverages, since I think they need cooking. How is this relevant? Well...
So, a bit ago - a few weeks, not sure exactly; it's probably best not to know - I was going to make some rice for dinner. Or something with rice. As it turned out, I ended up eating out for dinner, or perhaps not eating dinner. I don't remember the details - but both options are equally probably. Anyway - I washed the rice and put it in the cooker with some water. Soaking rice is fine, after all. And then, like I said, ended up going out, so I figured I'd just make it the next night.
So, a bit ago - last week sometime - I was going to make some rice for dinner. I think I was going to make chicken and rice, actually. Had my chicken all thawed, and figured I better cook the rice first, cause you know, it takes longer. So I opened my rice cooker up and found this:
Obviously, I had forgotten to cook the rice the next night. Oops. Perhaps you can't see this from the picture, but there's at least 4 different textures in there. It definitely smelled like it was alcoholic, tho I can't imagine what sort of hallucinations you would have gotten from it (or what sort you would have had to been seeing to eat that). I was so delighted that I bounded down the hall to show Donald, who was, let's say, not as excited as I was - I think he referred to it as 'rank'. And neechan, I know you always yell at me for stuff like this, but this was as cool as that time my arm did that exploding thing... I wonder if that video is still on my phone...
Anywho - I guess we won't be doing that again.
In other news - I've been busy this month. I may have mentioned Wrestlemania, the knitting competition I'm participating in. I'm happy to say I have finished two of the projects I started for that - a lacy mohair cowl and the dismantlement of (the gloves formerly known as) my Plum Pudding Gauntlets. Really, even considering my usual disregard for things like 'gauge' and 'recommended yarn', those were just... bad. I've grown so much as a knitter since then, so I decided they needed to die, and be reincarnated as dishclothes or something.
The second thing I finished is this - my Ice Queen. (link goes to the pattern from Knitty) I'm actually really happy with this - for one thing, the yarn is SPARKLY. for another, it's MOHAIR. I luvs me some mohair. Also, despite that I have done lace before, this was my first time doing a feather and fan pattern, which is like, the most beginningest lace pattern evar. And I had to learn 3 or so new techniques for this - so I'm really glad the way it turned out. Now, to figure out what to do with it... I might keep it, or might give it to someone deserving.
paqui = wheel
saja = lion
guishin = ghost. well, a specific kind of ghost. (to be fair, I actually learned this word a while ago, and forgot about it. There's a few ways to say ghost in Korean, but guishin has a certain implication, of the traditional female Asian ghost with long hair, in traditional dress, who's usually been murdered in a grisly fashion by her lover or committed suicide because of aforementioned lover's assholery. Think Sadako from The Ring or Oiwa from Japanese legend.
What else recently? hmm... that's all that comes to mind, really. Got summer break coming up in two weeks - can you say 'excited'? I'm sure I'll miss my kids, god knows I love the lil munchkins, but I will definitely be glad for the time off. Plan to get lots of knitting done, certainly, and hopefully finalize all things for Thailand and find a new job. It's monsoon season, so we're getting wicked rain - I went out tonight and made it as far as the train station before I realized I wasn't leaving Songpa-gu tonight. I came home soaked, accompanied by thunder and lightning. My bathroom ceiling is dripping a lil bit, and the stairwell smells like some odd cross between greens, wet dog, and those silk worms that people like to snack on. Glad to be in my cozy apartment with my trance music and a napping Gizmo.
Now, off to watch the rest of Torchwood: Children of Earth.
Learned a few new words last week, among other things. Post about those later, I think.
hama = hippo
kirin = giraffe
(this one I actually already knew, and it has some interesting etymology behind it. Apparently there were giraffes at the Imperial Zoo in China a long time ago, and they were identified with the kirin, a peaceful Buddhist (?) creature. Giraffes apparently have similar characteristics - not harming things, not crushing grass when they walk, scales...) Kirin are usually referred to as the Asian unicorn, because they only have one horn, but they are certainly not the same thing. For one, the kirin breathe fire at wrong-doers.
But I don't feel like it. Maybe later. Midnight here in the Land of the Morning Calm, and I need to go to bed so I can get up for work in the morning (don't feel much like doing that either, but that's another story.
Here's what I wanted to show y'all. I pulled it out and finished it tonight. I'll start the second one this week.
Here we are, the promised pictures of my recently-finished dragon shawl. Looks damn awesome, if I say so myself. No long-winded nattering about the details of it, since I have been informed that that is boring. :P Feel free to ask though, if you want an earful.
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