It's 11:12 am Thursday in Singapore. My plane to Taipei leaves at 2:40pm. Since the Anchorage flight leaves Taipei at 4:15pm, I have to overnight in Taipei - courtesy of China Air. So even though I could make it through the next 48 hours with the clean stuff still in my suitcase, I decided to do some laundry. There is a washer and dryer in the apartment here.
It would have been better had I taken my wallet out of my pants first.
One of the profs at J's program told me about this museum which just opened. Peranakan is the name for people of mixed ethnicities in the southeast Asia area if I understand it right. The descendants of foreign fathers marrying local women. Often this means Chinese fathers.
Given that the US is finally recognizing, officially in its census categories, the concept of mixed ethnicities, I thought it would be interesting to go to this museum.
The pictures of various Peranakan people were spectacular and each had a quote below it. There were also some excellent videos, beautifully placed on the walls, in frames as though they were pictures on the wall discussing the common connections that Peranakan felt with other Peranakan. But there weren't enough of these encounters with real people. Most of the displays are thiings - dishes, clothing, furniture. But there are also diaries, books, letters. 
But I'd say the museum has a way to go in terms of the depth it goes into. And the museum recognizes this in the narratives written on the walls. But this point it makes things seem all so rosy and wonderful. I didn't see anything that even hinted at the problems people probably faced in the past because they were of 'mixed blood.'
I also thought having an Anglo sounding narrator in the intro video talking about the Peranakan as "They" having a lot to teach "Us" to be a terrible choice. Even in their own museum they are not "us," but "them." The narrator should have been a Peranakan welcoming guests into their house.
Here's Kona back home this morning lying up against my hip as I type, enjoying being back home. She's not 100%, but she's much better than we found her last night when we got home. She was barely moving and her gums were white. The vet said bring her in. We got a cab easily - well the first one apparently didn't want a dog, but another showed up right away - and she had blood taken, an iv, and got stuck in a cage for the night. When the vet called a couple hours later she said the test showed nothing - blood was normal, though there was something that indicated the liver wasn't right.
Since it was after hours, she was at the emergency night clinic and J had to go back at 8:30am this morning to either take her home or transfer to the hospital. So I was glad to see her come running in when he got back. Oh yeah, almost S$500 or about US$400.
J went to take his exams. I eventually got myself ready, took Kona for a walk, then came back and walked to Little India. I'll give you a glimpse of my day. I can offer things only for your senses of sight and sound. You can't, unfortunately, smell the garlic or incence, or taste the cardamon tea, or the dosa. Or feel the near 100% humidity that turns the Singapore into a giant sauna.
A park bench. Two men talking. A great trea. Lillies in the pond.
Walking to Little India.
Through the wet market. They called them wet markets in Hong Kong too. It just means the local market, usually in a covered market area. More like things have always been done than a supermarket.
Western Union, even in the age of internet, is still alive. Indian workers in Singapore use it to send money home to their families.
There were lots of jewelery stores in Little India.
A Hindu temple.
There were also lots of restaurants. This one was Veg Only, and looked air conditioned, so I went in. They had idli on the menu. This is a southern Indian dish we discovered in Kerala. I couldn't resist. It wasn't as good as I remembered.
And dosas too. The idly by themselves would have been enough, but flooded with happy memories, I ordered a dosa too. And some cardamamon tea. (Checking the spelling, I learned that the preferred spelling is with an 'm' at the end, but with an 'n' is an alternative. How come I never noticed before?) I couldn't finish the whole dosa, but it was good.
I was going to go into the mall, just to see what was in there, and hoping it might be air conditioned, but you had to check your bags and I didn't feel like doing that.
I've been struggling to find some remnants of the Singapore I saw 40 years ago. The laundry is one. They don't do this in the fancy areas of private housing where J lives.
The Alsacoff Arab School. The building in the background shows up later.
Sultan Mosque
This is the building that is in the background in the picture above of the Alsacoff Arab School.
This just seemed an interesting culinary juxtaposition.
Peranakan is just going to have to wait for the next post. It's turned from April 29 to May 1 while I was doing this.
J and Kona walked me down to the Alliance Francias where the movie was going to be. J stayed outside with the dog and pointed out Anthony, a classmate, to me. I introduced myself. And he pointed to the sign on the counter.
that said that Persepolis was sold out. When Judith came we decided to go to Orchard Road to get something to eat and to chat.
J and I were good with gelato. But Judith hadn't eaten so she and Anthony went upstairs to find some food while we waited downstairs. Kona does tend to attract attention. I wish I could just video the looks on people's faces as they see her.
This lady has a Maltese and couldn't resist stopping, stroking Kona, and talking about her dog.
Then we ate and talked. People were waiting for seats.
So we moved and continued to talk. But people were smoking near us so we moved our convesation once again.
And then we decided it was time to head home.
I want to say that while Anthony's tatoo is striking, I'm afraid the picture above makes too much of it. It's part of him, but as we talked, it's not who he is, and I'm afraid my picture makes the tatoo dominate who he is. So I'm adding this little extra note.
I went to the bird park because they have a Southeast Asian Aviary. I really wanted to find out what some of the birds we saw were. I started off in the wrong direction and didn't get to the SE Asian birds till the way back.
First I saw birds that really shouldn't be here - snowy owls. 
They were in cages in dark, air conditioned corridors. The picture is awful, but I want to stress how small the cages were and how bizarre it is to have these birds in tropical Singapore. You can see about 1/4 of the whole cage here. Maybe in a much larger cage, if there was some good reason to have live birds. They also had two bald eagles. It was pitiful in that cage. They sit on top of trees higher than their cage here.
While it was wonderful to see the kingfishers, you can see how small the cages are. And they weren't over any water.
The ibises and the cormorants were in larger cages, but still, these are birds that use lots of room in the wild. 
The birds of paradise were in much better cages. They were full of lush green plants and spotting them was like spotting birds in the wild. 
There were maybe 4 birds in this cage. It's much better than the kingfishers, but much less space than they would have in nature. 
I stuck this picture in just because it was such an interesting bird. The aviary for the SE Asia birds was quite big, but it also had smaller cages all around the outer edge of the aviary. This peacock pheasant was loose in the big aviary. 
I saw a number of birds we saw frequently in Chiang Mai - magpie robins, coucals (well, I didn't see it, but I was at it's cage and saw the picture), koels, bulbuls, white crowned laughing thrush, and this black naped oriole, that I only saw once in the distance. Here it was loose in the aviary.
The waterfall aviary was enormous. They say this is the highest manmade waterfall in the world - 30 meters, about 100 feet. But I thought it a little odd that they would have it full of African birds. Why take a chance on accidently releasing African birds into the tropical Singaporean environment? 
Again, it's possible that one could justify this sort of show where people buy S$1 for a plastic cup full of worms to feed the birds. These are a type of starling Dianne. Not all starlings are bad. 
Before leaving I sat in on the 3pm show in the amphiteater. I have to say it was breathtaking to have a great hornbill fly from near the stage to the top of the seats, just barely a foot over the heads of the audience. And back down. The back up again. Then toucans did the same, only here they stopped on an audience member's arms. There was some pro-environmental propaganda in the patter. But nothing that was terribly persuasive. Is that enough to justify doing shows like this? On the other hand, who knows if these birds are happy or not? 
On another note, the park had great bathrooms. There's actually a small waterfall coming down from the eaves of the roof. Great way to pee.
Dennis Zaki has some sandhill cranes he photographed on the Alaska Report. I'm jealous, but hoping they'll stick around a week or two so I can go out to the Matsu Valley and see them for myself. In the meantime, I indulged at the Singapore Bird Park today.
I'm ambivalent about putting birds in cages. Not really. I don't think we should put birds in cages, though I accept that if it's done very well, the educational value and the survival value of some endangered species may balance the evil done by capturing and locking up birds. The Singapore Bird Park, in it's large aviaries, does it reasonably well, though the smaller cages, while nicely landscaped, are still small cages. And pictures you take of caged birds certainly don't count as wild bird pictures. The first one is a black necked crane. I couldn't find the name of the second one. Here are the cranes and I'll do another post later, but now I have to go off with J to meet some of his friends and see Persepolis.
For Independent Alaskan who thought the pictures of Singapore looked 'so neat': Here's some graffiti I saw this morning on the way to the bird park
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I haven't posted much about Burma - except the border runs - because what I did hear from people working with Burmese organizations in Thailand wasn't sharable. Thai officials can look away if nothing is explicitly out in the open, but if it is in their face they have to take action. That doesn't mean the new government isn't making nice to the Burmese government, but they also aren't fanatic about dealing with Burmese refugees in Thailand. Though I did hear stories about police having quotas for how many illegal Burmese they had to round up per day in one town. All this is word of mouth from people I don't know all that well. But I heard similar stories from different people.
But this was emailed to me and so it is a little more official, though I note that the location will be announced at the last minute. I don't think it's because they haven't found a place. I don't know if I'm being overly cautious, but I left out the name, phone numbers, and email as well.
INVITATION
Date: April 29, 2008
Dear Sir or Madam,
A warm greeting from ECDF
Ethnic Community Development Forum is cordially invite you to join us on the special event of launching our report "Biofuel by Decree: Unmasking Burma's bio-energy fiasco" on May 1 at (10:00) am to (12:00) am. For the conference place we will informing you on (30 April 2008).
Why we are launching the report on Labor Day, May first because in the implementation of SPDC Jet Suu plantation project is using forced labor, land confiscation and other human rights abuses,
During launching the report we will have some VIDEO show about SPDC forced to the people and including the video clips of interviewing from who are refugees by SPDC Jet Suu project.
However ECDF would like you to join our press conference and if you have any question, you can contact with the spokesperson as below address please.
XXXXXXXXXX
Phone: XXXXXXXX (Thailand call)
+XXXXXXX (International call)
Note: we will send the press release as soon as
With best regards,
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Ethnic Community Development Forum of Burma
Monday, April 28, 2008 almost midnight: J gave me great instructions how to get to the National University of Singapore. J's exam wasn't 2pm and he needed to stay home so he could walk the dog before going to the exam. So I walked down the street to the bus stop.
So far, all the neighborhoods I've seen - and mostly I've been in the private housing areas apparently - have been lush and garden like.
This sign at the bus stop was a little disturbing. No, the need to be on top and the promotion of that way of thinking is a big problem for people. On the other hand, hierarchy is found all over the animal kingdom, so I suspect it is a genetic inheritance and fighting the notion can sound quixotic. I wonder how many of the those who believe in life being about getting to the top don't believe in evolution...
On the other side of the sign were these girls in their student uniforms, or so I assumed.
You get on the bus and touch your card to the pad and move on to your seat. The bus stops are all numbered and I knew the University stop was 21. All very easy. The man sitting next to me was reading a newspaper in a script that looked a lot like what was on the sign yesterday for Sir Thomas Raffles, so I asked him what language it was. Tamil, one of the southern Indian languages.
I got out at 21 and there was the entrance to the University. Actually, this is not the main campus.
WX and I had lunch with another faculty member I knew - JJ. I asked JJ, who had been with the Asian Development Bank when I first met him, about good sources on land reform in Thailand. Which got WX to think about another faculty member he introduced me to after lunch. Dr. O, a Thai with a PhD from Syracuse. We ended up talking a long time and I never got to walk through the botanical gardens and the orchid garden as planned. J showed up after his exam and took me around to meet other professors and classmates. The students above were in a little lounge called the Thinking Corner.
I met a whole group of students from all over - Burma, India, Thailand, Italy, Pakistan, Singapore, Philippines, Japan, China - and we went for dinner together at the same Indian resstaurant just off campus. So the pictures I forgot to take at lunch, I could take now.
What can I say about Sentosa Island? It's a "tourist attraction." Here's me along with all the other video cameras. We're sitting on benches looking at toward the beach. There are live performers singing and dancing on the beach. Out across the water a short ways is a mock fishing village up on stilts.
Then we took the train one stop to Vivo City and had a snack.
Vivo City is one of the giant shopping malls with all the expensive international brand names. The food court was cutesy new, but made to look old food stalls. I tried Laksa, a Malay coconut curry with noodles dish. 
I learned a little more about taxis. On the top of the cabs it says "For Hire," "On Call," or "Hired." If the queue is long, as it was here, and there aren't many taxis, you can call one. You pay an extra S$2.50 to $4. You get the taxi number. It shows up with "On Call" in the little taxi sign on the roof, and the taxi number flsshing. So when it arrives people know you aren't jumping ahead of them in the line and you know which cab is yours. They dropped me off and went home.
Monday morning, April 28, 2008 Singapore.
After lunch yesterday, WX and I got a cab to his flat at the National University of Singapore where he's a professor. We originally met in 1990 in Beijing (I think) where he was a lecturer at People's University and I was visiting with a group of students from Hong Kong where I was teaching for a year. Eventually, he made it to Anchorage to get his MPA at UAA and then he went on to the University of North Carolina to get his PhD. Then he got a job in Singapore.
He and his wife XR, who also studied in Anchorage, now have two sons. Most exciting was finally getting to meet WX's parents who are living with them here in Singapore.
He and his wife XR, who also studied in Anchorage, now have two sons. Most exciting was finally getting to meet WX's parents who are living with them here in Singapore. We took a group picture, but I think all the squirming and fussing before hand makes for a better picture.
Then XR and WX and I went to Sentosa Island, an artificial island that is now a tourist attraction, with beaches, a water and light show, cable cars, golf courses, private residential plots, etc. We had a snack at one of the beach restaurants and then went to the water and light show. Kind of touristy, but it was nice to sit and talk in the evening along the water.
I got to swim this morning before breakfast and now I'm headed for lunch with WX and some other faculty at the University. J has his exam at 2, then later we'll have dinner with some of his classmates.
I noted recently that it appeared there were more registered voters than voting age people in Anchorage. Here's a short piece in today's Straits Times from the The Star/Asia News Network:
Kuala Lumpur: The Election Commission has appealed to family members of registered voters who have died to submit death certificates of their deceased kin to help in the "clean up" of the electoral roll.This is also an issue in Alaska. Given that everything is electronic these days, and much of it online, it would seem the computer folks at the State of Alaska should be able to figure a way to check the death certificates against the voter roles and purge them without asking people to notify them.
The commission said that the updating of the roll was a continuous and ongoing exercise, which required assistance from the public.
Sunday, April 27, 2008, almost midnight. Up today early to beat the heat. Yeah, right. We were up early, but we didn't beat the heat.
View from J's apartment.
We left about 8am for what turned out to be about a 3 hour walk. J. lives in an affluent section of town. Although most of Singapore lives in public housing, there is also private housing. Since J was going to school, but had a dog with him, he had to live in private housing which is considerably more expensive. He's in a building scheduled to be demolished and replaced with more high end stuff. So the three bedroom apartment has been divided into three different apartments. He and his roommate are still spending 10 times what we paid for our much smaller and less fancy apartment in Chiang Mai.
It was Sunday morning early, so not many people out yet.
I could hear some church sounding music up ahead and sure enough, there in the Cathedral of the Good Shepherd set up in 1849 or so were people at Sunday morning service.
This is old Raffles Hotel, one of the few things I really remember from my last trip to Singapore (in 1968 or 69), but this is now an arcade and not what it used to look like.
Cricket practice was going on not far away.
Singapore has become a very phallic city since I was here last.
The Singapore River, a center for tourists. These boats ply the river in the tourist trade.
Kona entertaining a Chinese tourist.
Despite the spiritual dominance of money here, there are still people who hedge their bets with offerings to other gods.
I stepped into a super market to see how much more the mangoes were than in Thailand. I couldn't quite figure it out.
Then we had breakfast in an old little coffee shop that had various kinds of foods. We chose the Indian Roti Prahtas.
All the cars coming into the downtown section of Singapore, if I got this right, have to have one of these meters in their cars because driving into downtown is restricted.
The ERP sign has readers on it, as you can see in the picture below, to record in the car meters every time the enter and exit the city,
When we got back to the apartment there were phone messages from WX, a former student of mine, who now teaches here in Singapore. So we met him for lunch in a giant mall and then he and I got in line for a taxi here while J went back to study for tomorrow's, (well, it's now today's ) final exam.
My son met with me a Singapore packet including some money, guidebook, maps, transit pass with S$25 (about US$20), and a chocolate chip cookie. Here we're changing trains.
Just out of the Somerset train station onto Orchard Road. Then we walked up a street that has 1920's style houses still on it to J's apartment - on the seventh floor in a much more Western modern apartment than we had in Chiang Mai.
Among other things on the bulletin board in the lobby is this wanted poster for Singapore's Bin Laden who aparently escaped from prison while on a toilet break.
These two pictures are the view from the balcony of the apartment building across the road.
We dropped stuff off and then took Kona, the dog, for a walk. It was about 10:30pm (I lost an hour coming from Thailand) on the big shopping street Orchard Road on Saturday night. Here's a girl band in front of a mall.
And J and Kona in front of the visitors center that was still open. We went in and I got some advice on things to do while J's taking final exams.
This is the escalator from the airport down to the train into town. We were already 1/3 of the way down.
I had everything packed up by 9:00am, including the few dishes, the electric teapot, and left over food. I started taking things down. Pop, the manager of Baan Nai Lek, and one of the sons of the owner, came up to help bring down the rest. There wasn’t that much. I have a small rolling suitcase and my backpack. J took the big roll suitcase to LA (where she did get to see our daughter going to her flight back to Seattle). Pet, Ping, and Bon, were already downstairs loading the pickup.
We took the bike back to the bike shop and then went to the Buddha Image shopping center. Actually I should have gotten the name. It’s on the way to the airport. A market that has Buddha images, chains of all varieties to wear them on, and places that make plastic and glass covers to put the images in.
This is a whole world of its own. Ping is the expert and took me around while we were waiting. Lewis had asked if I could bring him three more images back from Thailand. We had gotten him a Buddha image at the temple near Sanaoom Luang in Bangkok back in 1968 and he wanted enough for the rest of his family. Of course, we got this done on my very last day, in the very last hour before going to the airport.
I had asked Ping to help me with this since this is his speciality. He brought me three images from his collection yesterday and today we took them to be put in covers so you can put them on chains. These are like any collectable item - there are good ones and better ones, ones that have various different meanings. There made of clay, of stone, of various metals, and he showed me one made of the eye of a coconut. In Thai you don’t use the word ‘buy’ when you purchase an image, you use the word for ‘rent’. The three he gave to me include a metal image of Rian Luang Po Chem a famous monk from Phuket, a white one, not sure what it is made of, of a monk covering his eyes, who brings wealth, and a little tiny one, Phra Rot, that protects against harm
While the man was making the plastic cases, we bought three chains for Lewis family to wear them around their necks.
There are so many worlds hidden away in Thailand and here on my last day, on the way to the airport I got to discover one more, and be reminded of how little I’ve seen, though it seems I’ve seen a lot.
I’m trying to treat this like a border run, I’ll be back soon. We’re talking about December - after the election and after the Anchorage International Film Festival. But it’s hard to leave people you’ve grown attached to.
At the airport I learned the plane would leave 45 minutes late, but I should have time to catch the Singapore flight. There’s wifi, but you have to pay for it. There was a coffee shop outside of security that said free wifi. I think I can wait.
11pm I wrote this at the Chiang Mai airport and I'm posting it from my son's apartment in Singapore. I'm in a bit of culture shock. I haven't been in Singapore since 1968 or so. I knew it had changed and all, but coming here from Chiang Mai is like going to NY City from Anchorage.
I'd totally forgotten about this, because of the land reform meeting at the hotel yesterday and today. But I'd known they were planning this late Songkran festival ceremony where the elders are ritualistically cleansed and asked for their blessings. The compound was totally transformed. It's amazing what one long cotton colored cloth and some umbrellas can do. And the motorized food stand didn't hurt either. 
Doc is being the vendor here. Fortunately, everything was free.
Here the elders are being offered scented water to ritually wash themselves and bless the youngeer ones. The man with the white hair is the head of the board of directors of the Norther Development Foundation. 
Then each had the mike for a little while. The man on the right had spoken earlier. He - I'm not sure when - walked from Chiang Mai to (I think) Ko Samui raising money along the way.
The meeting continued today. Here's my boss presenting. 
At breaks I talked to different people about the usefulness of the two days. This gentleman is working on a group trying to start up a foundation to help farmers. For him it was a chance to meet a lot of people with the same interests. 
This man is Karen nationality and he said the usefulness was in understanding the necessity of learning new ways to do things. The old ways will no longer work. But we also talked about Alaska Natives and how they face many of the same problems that the Thai hill tribes (Karen are often put in that category) face. Loss of language, loss of traditional ways of living off the land, others coming into their world and forcing changes, and general loss of their culture and way of life.
My foot is much better today. It was still a little bigger than the right foot, but I managed to get it into a shoe (normally I wear sandals) and by mid morning I was walking almost normally, but I'm sure it will be a little more time (hopefully days, not weeks) before it's normal again. But the benefits of the massage were very clear when I was riding my bike up hill. I felt really loose and comfortable. I know that was the massage.
When I was leaving the land reform meeting this afternoon, Pet said, "I told you the meetings were a waste of your time." The meeting was tedious, but not a waste. I don't quite know what was all going on. But being there at all, gave me lots of leads for questions to ask, though there isn't much time left. Farmers were there from the three different villages I've been to, so presumably from all the others as well.
The Thai word for information was said over and over and over again. But essentially, my understanding was like the Thai translation in the previous post. I knew a lot of the words, but not quite how they connected. Today was the time for the farmers to talk about their issue and the various organizations supporting the farmers also contributed.
The man on the left is the villager whose house I stayed at when I first went out to a village. The man on the left was the main village speaker at the land reform confrontation in Lamphun.
Anyone recognize this speaker? He was the man at the Fire Break Ceremony who taught us how to say hello in Karen.
The meeting was in the Best Western Hotel, so in a sense, I felt like I wasn't quite in Thai territory any more, though it was still Thai, especially the flower arrangments and the food. We were on the top floor and so I got some views of places I've been in, but never seen from above. And it was pretty clear so the mountains were very visible too.
I left a little before 5pm. It wasn't a waste of time. I have a list of questions, plus I got to connect with people I'd met before. DeLak and Kaew got to see the photos and videos I took in their villages. And some Alaska pictures. But Pet was right - the meetings could be much livlier and have a lot more participation. (Though there was a lot of opportunities to speak, there were also talking heads.) My foot was better than it had been during the night and at the airport, but I thought it was time (since there are only two days left) to get a foot massage at Wat Umong, which I pass everytday. On the way back from the hotel (only about a quarter of a mile past our office, I ran into these cows, something that has never happened before. The massage, I was told, was the best in Chiang Mai. So maybe the could fix my foot. 
I told her in detail about my foot. She immediately attacked my foot and I was in great pain. This was either going to cure me or leave me permantly limping. 
The right foot also hurt as did various other places on my body. When it was over she asked how it was and I could walk much easier. But a few hours later is was probably a mistake. My foot is now noticeably swollen, though I'm walking slowly, but better than before.
I'm discovering how important my feet are. And sleep too, I'll add the links in the morning.
Some of the office folks took us to dinner last night, then Pet and Ew picked us up at 4:45am to get J to the airport in time for her 7am flight. [Mook, sorry I forgot to call yesterday morning , things got really rushed.] It was the first flight listed on the board and they didn't open the checkin until 5:45am. I really felt bad people had gotten up so early and then we had to wait. Meanwhile, I did something to my left foot and it was hard to walk on. But I don't think it's too serious. Nothing swollen, nothing red, nothing hot. Just hurts on the bottom when I walk. Ice this morning when I got back helped.
Some people at the office today are going to Presentation training. And there is another meeting on land reform at the Best Western Hotel near the office. I'm going to that one. Bon and I did more translation yesterday afternoon. It's really hard. The translator basically looked up words in a dictionary and put them together. Bon had to explain the Thai to me and I had to ask lots of questions before we agreed on what it should say. We ended up deciding to try to capture the meaning more than the way it was said. There's no way I could have come anywhere close without Bon. Still don't know how close it is. There are about 20 pages. I'm not going to finish this task. But I reassured them that the person they got to translate something else had done a very good job and they should go with that person to finish this.
Original Thai:
3.2) พระราชบัญญัติป่าชุมชน ที่ผ่านความเห็นชอบจากสภานิติบัญญัติแห่งชาติ ซึ่งมีเนื้อหาที่ไม่เอื้อต่อการจัดการและการใช้ประโยชน์จากป่าของชุมชน อีกทั้งยังลิดรอนสิทธิเสรีภาพของชุมชนท้องถิ่น ที่ได้รับการคุ้มครองจากรัฐธรรมนูญในการเข้าไปดูแลรักษาและใช้ประโยชน์จากทรัพยากร ตามบทบัญญัติมาตรา 66 ของรัฐธรรมนูญแห่งราชอาณาจักรไทย พ.ศ.2550 ปัจจุบันอยู่ในระหว่างการพิจารณาของศาลรัฐธรรมนูญว่าจะขัดต่อรัฐธรรมนูญหรือไม่
Translator's version:
3.2) The Community Forest Royal Act is approved from the Legislative Assembly. The content is not contributed for management and advantage from the community forest But it is deprived right liberty of local community. The constitution has protected in take care and take advantage from the resources follow by sector 66 of the provision under the Kingdom of Thailand Constitution 2007. Now is during the commitment of constitution court that is against the constitution or not. [This is one of the better sections. You can see why I couldn't just proof the translation.]
Our version:
3.2) The Community Forest Royal Act was approved by the Legislative Assembly. This law, concerning the management of forest land, is detrimental to the rights of farmers living in the forest. This appears to be in conflict with section 66 of the 2007 Constitution. The courts are deciding this question now.
One of the organizations at my compound, Local Talk, works to increase the coverage of local community issues in the media. I wrote earlier about proofing the English version of their report of a program that taught youth how to be reporters and to report on their communities.
One of my projects here in my final days has been to develop a directory of the organizations and people who work in this compound. In doing that, I learned that some of the organizations have websites. Local Talk's website posts local stories, but they also fill up space with stories from elsewhere. Looking on their site today, I found this story about the problems with farmed salmon, an issue that nearly all Alaskans would agree on. (How many others could we find?)
This is a small world and everything is connected.
J2, the film editor (end of linked post), suggested we meet at a restaurant near her place - the Lemon Grass. The waiter's English was, literally, remarkable. I was wondering if he was even Thai. 
English is hard for Thais - they put tones on individual syllables, while English tones are related to the whole sentence (questions rise at the end, for example); Thai words can end in only nine final consonant sounds (or vowel sounds), so English final sounds are a real challenge. But this guy's English was almost Native level.
Finally I asked him why it was so good. Turns out Gaw (my spelling) lived in Fairbanks where his dad went looking for gold and he'd had two years at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. His dad runs the Lemon Grass restaurant in Fairbanks, Our waiter was also the owner of the Chiang Mai Lemon Grass.
We also had a good talk with J2 who will be going back to LA in mid May.
Green leaves have replaced the giant dead ones on the teak trees
Trees full of bright orange and yellow flowers have repainted the landscape
Strangers are now acquaintances and friends
Words I didn't know, now sometimes roll off my tongue
Sometimes I drag them slowly and painfully from their braincelly hiding places
I know how to get the ice and water in various restaurants
Strange streets are now familiar
But many new questions replaced the ones that got answered or forgotten
The comfortable temperatures of February are gone and even the Thais are hot
The cool dry season has become the hot dry season
But tonight's thunderstorm which has cut our electricity
And washed our streets, foretells more to come.
Drongos and coucals are now familiar friends
As are the man at the fruit stand and various shop keepers and servers
The bats that greeted us our first nights have long departed
A strange collection of buildings and people now all have names
As do things like Khao Soi and Wats Umong and Padaeng
My colleagues have taught me a lot and I hope I've left them with
a few new ideas as well.
And my old sandals, with the holey soles, will stay behind
And new ones will accompany me home.
Two and a half months is a long short time.
J spotted an owl outside our window this morning and I got there in time to see it fly off. We think it might be a collared owlet, but aren't really sure.
Coming back from lunch this afternoon I saw Maya who is back from her trip to Madagascar. That's not a normal side trip from Thailand. She was a Peace Corps volunteer there and has gotten a job in the summer taking some high school kids there. So they flew her over to prepare. While we were talking I noticed a blue rubber lizard I hadn't seen before, on the tree next to us. But when I looked closer this bizarrely colored critter moved.
It was about a foot long.
As we followed him around to the other side of the tree, we found two more like this one.
A couple hours later we had a loud thunderstorm and I had to wait till the rain lightened considerably to ride home. But the temperature dropped 20˚F to 75.
This is NOT about China and human rights; that's been extensively covered. (Actually, not really. The protests about the torch relay has been covered, but the real issues haven't gotten that much attention. And they won't here today.)
My question is about whether China can handle all the foreigners who will descend on Beijing. When I taught in Beijing in 2004 I was impressed with how much had been prepared already for the Olympics. I'm talking about venues that were already built or being built back then. Though I wasn't impressed by the lack of consideration for pedestrians and traffic patterns as neighborhoods were leveled and huge housing developments were being put in.
But a new issue arose that raises other questions. We got J's Thailand ticket through mileage from United Airlines. Her return flight is Chiang Mai to Bangkok and Bankgok to Beijing on Thai International. Then Air China from Beijing to LA. (She'll get back to Anchorage on a separate Alaska ticket.)
So a couple of weeks ago I started trying to get her seat reservations on the return. United says to contact the partner airlines. Thai International was no problem. But the Air China part was. We could find her reservation, after some difficulty, on the Air China website, but there was no way to make the seat reservation.
I emailed and explained my problem. I got an email back a week later with two Beijing phone numbers to call. Luckily I have skype so it's reasonable. I got a recording on the first number. And the second number. They are open 8-5. It was 11am, but a Sunday. Monday I tried again. I got someone who gave me another phone number, and that was a recording. I tried both numbers several times and got recordings, but couldn't get people.
I emailed two former Chinese students who are at universities in the US. They both tried through Air China phone numbers in the US and were given the same number I had in Beijing that they couldn't get through to. Fortunately, one contacted another former student who is in Beijing who eventually was able to get through to someone who says J now has an aisle seat on that flight.
But if getting a seat assignment on the namesake airline of China is so difficult, this doesn't bode well. Their website also had special deals - except they were for 2007. And even though I chose the English option, when I got sent to the next page, it would sometimes change back into Chinese. I realize that frequent flier tickets are not the norm, but tickets issued by other carriers will be common for travelers to the Olympics. How will they handle this with phone numbers that don't work after 6pm or on weekends, or at all?
Is this an anomaly that means nothing? Or is this an early warning signal? Let's wait and see.
Phil at Alaska Progressive salutes Rich Mauer's ADN article on the Young-Abramoff connections today. Phil also talks about Dennis Greenia at Daily Kos whose been working on the Abromovff Scandal for a while now under the name Dengre and whose research has helped Phil in the past and Mauer in this new article.
Phil also links to an October 6, 2006 post he did on this topic covering much of the same ground.
All this relates to an important theme for me (see the name of this blog) - how people 'know' what they know. One wonders about the Alaskan voters who have elected and reelected Don Young all these years despite all the evidence that his response was to shout like a bully at anyone - including constituents - who asked questions about things like Abramoff and the Marianas.
Thomas Kuhn, the physicist who put the word 'paradigm' (see links to Kuhn in an earlier post) into the American mainstream, said that scientitists don't discard their old paradigms - even when they know they are faulty - until they have a better one to replace them with. I think that makes sense here.
I remember the evidence piling up that - despite his denial - Richard Nixon was crook. Yet he was reelected for a second term. People didn't want to believe that there president was a crook. They didn't want to believe that Viet Nam was a mistake and that the great USA was on the wrong side and was losing. (Some people still think we could have won, whatever that means, but we were politically hampered. But looking back from today, we can see that the whole rationale of our being there - to keep the dominoes of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, etc. from falling to Communism - was a model of things that did not accurately reflect what was happening.) While there were questions about Nixon, their beliefs overall were being challenged and they didn't have another belief system to switch to.
So, it has taken a while for the American public to lose faith in George W. Bush.
And it seems like forever for Alaskans to lose faith in Don Young.
Radical Catholic Mom raises a point that I didn't think of this morning: the poisonous role on American politics of one issue voting blocks. In this case she cites the Right to Life over everything else crowd for helping to keep Young in power.
It goes to the heart of the whole "vote pro-life only" camp. I received an email ripping me one for even hinting that I could POSSIBLY argue for voting for a "pro-abort" candidate. I responded that it ain't black and white, honey. Don Young and other Republican corrupt, disgusting, anti-life politicians who shamefully used the pro-life vote to continue in office and push through this Mariana Islands deal where women were raped, again and again and again, forced to abort their babies, and then forced to make clothes for the US consumer reflect why the traditional pro-life vote needs to become CRITICAL. WHO are we electing?
Murkowski said, he "talked with some Bangladesh workers who had not been paid and who were living in appalling conditions." He also described a young woman taken to Saipan as a minor and forced to work as a prostitute. (from Mauer piece)though he continued to publicly support Young and according to the Mauer article
Since leaving office, Murkowski has declined to talk about the Marianas issue.
M had suggested a week or so ago that we do a second night seder and invite the AJWS staff members Grib and A and other friends. It seemed like having a seder in a restaurant would be difficult, so I asked at our place whether we could use the dining area and kitchen. They said sure.
Grib wasn't feeling well, but A was able to come as well as the Thais who'd taken M to their village last week. And W the new volunteer who just got here as well as two of the young men who were at last night's seder. I've never cooked in an industrial kitchen before and it was fun. We shopped yesterday at a couple of the University Vegetable markets and had lots of very fresh ingredients. The fuzziness of the wine bottle is due to high alcohol content of the bottle.
And T and J brought wine made from sticky rice and grapes. A taste, like asparagus, that you have to develop a taste for. It was a very enjoyable evening with people doing interesting things. It's too bad we're just about to leave. But we have an invitation from J2 to visit his elephants when we come back. And it was nice to know that we didn't have to wash all the dishes, though everyone helped get them into the kitchen and we got most of the gunk off of them.
I've had some video on this little, almost hummingbird like bird, that frequents our tree and has a little red splash. But couldn't figure out what it was. Friday I thought I'd figured it out. I got a great view of a little bird that made the same hummingbird like sounds and it matched the scarlet backed flowerpecker in the book perfectly. Can't see it? It's in the lower left. And this picture was already enlarged. It's a tiny bird that rarely stops moving.
The photographer me is battling the birder me about whether to even post this picture. But you can find incredible bird pictures all over the web. This one helps show how difficult those great pictures are. And you can tell that this is a scarlet backed flowerpecker (if you have other pictures and descriptions to compare it with.) But the descriptions I can find are not very detailed.
So, is the bird in the video also a scarlet backed flowerpecker? There doesn't seem to be red on the head and back, just the rump.Watch quickly, then again in slow motion.
I think it's the same bird, but I'm not sure.
Two different kinds of trees are bringing spectacular color to Chiang Mai right now. In unexpected places there is a sudden burst of orange or yellow.
Someone told me the names in Thai but wasn't sure. M said someone told her the yellow ones were 'dry wind' trees, which is the English translation of what I was told was the name of the yellow trees. So I still have to double check on that.
This tree looks small next to the building, but if you look, you can see it reaches to the fourth floor.
This one was in a yard on my way to work.
This orange tree is at Wat (temple) Ramphoeng.
This yellow tree is right near the last orange one at Wat Ramphoeng.
And, of course, orange flowers are dropping down on everything below too.
Tonight was the Passover Seder and we met M and the newly arrived volunteer W at the Centara Duang Tawan Hotel. We sat at the English Speaker's section. Mostly it was Israelis. And it was run by Chabad. As it turned out the English speakers were all put together because we had a Chabad member from New York translating into English for the English speakers - maybe about 20 of us in a room of 200 or more
W, who was in on the original AJWS orientation conference call back in November, finally arrived in Chiang Mai yesterday. He was born in Berlin and his family escaped to Central America and he eventually was able to get to the US and become a US citizen. He now lives in Vienna. He's an international consultant and just finished a job in Ukraine before coming here. Here he is with M.
We were sitting with really interesting people. Next to J was J2 who has relatives in Wasilla and is working on his PhD in Thailand - his subject is elephants. He said that most of the elephants that beg on the streets are owned by rich Thais who lease them out to people to go begging. The sugar cane doesn't help and the people with them are generally doing fine financially. So, their basically using the elephant's ability to connect with people for their own gain, not the elephant's at all.
On my side was F, who was born in Algeria and became a French citizen and worked for 30 years as an Air France pursar, mostly on the Paris - Anchorage - Tokyo run. So he knew and loved Anchorage. It is a small world. He also had very interesting stories about Algeria, France, and many other things. He lives in Thailand now.
We are planning a second seder with M here tomorrow evening. We've rented out the dining area and kitchen downstairs. We got food today. This will be interesting, but after tonight, I have much more confidence in the food we'll eat.
This bug was on the outside of the screen yesterday morning. When I went out on the balcony to shoot it from the other side, it flew off.
We're surprisingly bug free for a tropical country. I don't think it's because they use a lot of pesticides because we have some bugs and downstairs there are lots of frogs that wouldn't survive. I credit it to screens, not leaving food out, and being on the fourth floor.
Mosquitoes are surprisingly absent. Except for early evening if you are sitting with your bare or sandaled feet under a dark table, we really have hardly noticed mosquitoes.
Busy day at work today as time gets short. J leaves next Thursday morning for LA, Seattle, then Anchorage eventually. I'll leave Saturday for Singapore then Anchorage.
After hiding for most of two months, the drongos are now starting to model. Or maybe I'm getting smarter about when they are around. Or it's luck. In this video we finally combine a view of the drongo along with the drongo call - the loud, distinctive two beat almost electric tone. There's also a rapid chatter which we think, but aren't positive, is also drongo speak. Watch for the second drongo in the tree. For previous drongo shots link to the drongo label.
Here's a bit of video left over from Songkran. First from going downtown on Monday. Then yesterday afternoon on one of the side streets in our neighborhood, a small parade.
When there was all the buzz about the Palin biography, most of the websites (for instance here, here, and here) that mentioned it, also had a link to the first chapter. I linked, read, and said, "Oh dear."
But do I need to blog about it? I'd like to think I subscribe to the "if it isn't doing anyone any harm, and if you don't have anything good to say, don't say anything" school of blogging. I've even been accused of being too compassionate to Vic Kohring. (See first comment.) My response was that I'm not here to judge or to condemn, but to understand, to learn, to figure out how to do better next time. But, does writing a review on the book do any of that?
First, book reviews are an honorable tradition. They steer us to good books and away from bad ones. And this book is newsworthy. The most popular governor in the US, talked about as a potential Republican vice presidential candidate. The first ever biography of her. But I could only find one other review online. It was from a Sarah fan (actually, I, personally, think she's been exactly the governor we needed) who seems to be similarly unimpressed with the book, which he apparently got an advanced copy of.
Second, I also think that writing a good book is really hard. So another potential value of reviewing the book is to figure out why this doesn't work for me and perhaps offer something for other authors to consider. This fits the "how to do better next time" criterion.
(As I think about this, the process of writing itself is a way to think through something and understand it better. For me it's like solving a puzzle - why do I think this book is boring? Another problem is that I know Kaylene Johnson, the author. While we hadn't seen each other in years, we did have an enjoyable conversation not too long ago. The book didn't come up.)
So why did I find it boring? The sentences are all complete and the grammar works.
It's taken awhile to figure this out. There are several problems for me:
These mountains would become, like other wild places in Alaska, a place of sustenance and renewal for her boisterous and busy family.This omniscient narrator doesn't know everything. She doesn't know that much at all. She is dependent on scraps of facts she got from the Heath family.
In 1969, the Heaths moved to southcentral Alaska, living for a short time with friends in Anchorage, then for two years in Eagle River before finally settling in Wasilla.
They had a white cat named Fifi and a German shepherd named Rufus, a canine sidekick to the kids who shows up in many family photos. The children often hiked the “Bunny Trail” to the home of a distant neighbor who had kids the same age.
Once a year, the family accompanied Chuck Sr. on a week- long class field trip to Denali National Park, where camping in view of majestic Mount McKinley left indelible memories with the Heath children.
“Dad never stopped lining up new adventures for us,” Chuck Jr. said. The kids caught Dolly Varden off a nearby dock. Chuck Jr. loved to catch the Irish Lord, an ugly, creepy-looking fish, for the pleasure of holding it up to his little sisters’ faces and making them scream.
When the family wasn’t running or hiking, it was hunting or fishing. “We could literally go hunting out our back door,” Chuck Jr. said.
The Heath kids and their friends spent many hours playing ball.
“They made us line up in bathing suits and turn our backs so the male judges could look at our butts,” she said in a 2008 interview with Vogue magazine. “I couldn’t believe it!”If Johnson had gotten more quotes like that the pages would turn. Not because the governor says 'butts' but because it sounds candid and authentic. But Johnson didn't get this quote from the Sarah, she got it from Vogue magazine. They were able to get real stuff from Sarah, why couldn't Johnson?
From the time she was in elementary school, she consumed newspapers with a passion. “She read the paper from the very top left hand corner to the bottom right corner to the very last page,” said Molly. “She didn’t want to miss a word. She didn’t just read it—she knew every word she had read and analyzed it.”If it's true (how many of you read the paper diagonally?), it tells us that Palin does her homework. I think Molly believes this and it may even be true. But how would an adoring younger sister know for sure if her sister "knew every word" and "analyzed it?" Did she give her quizzes, or did it just seem like that?
Yesterday Phra Kamphong told us, when we asked what would be appropriate to bring to the temple today for tham boon, that fruit or flowers would be good. Our regular fruit stand man gave us a discount on the bananas and oranges when he found out they were for tham boon. Bop, the manager of our building, got us a tray to bring the offering on. We went into the Viharn, but people very politely told us this was for bringing flowers and the fruit should go in the back.
Most Thais are Buddhists, and the daily offering of food to monks, called tham boon tak bàat, is one of the most important Buddhist acts. Every day throughout the country, in urban and rural communities, Thai Buddhist monks receive their daily food during a practice known as bintábàat. Walking through the streets and paths in the early morning, the monks are met by people offering food. Food is also offered at numerous religious shrines and is an important part of most Thai Buddhist ceremonies. from answers.com
We got pointed to the little pavilion where we were to make the offering. It turned out that Phra Kamphong was the monk there. He asked if we wanted to make our offering - and get our blessings - from the abbott, we declined and said we wanted to make our offering with him. He asked for the people who died we wanted to remember and we wrote down my father and J's parents names. Then we gave him the fruit. He gave me two glasses, one with water, one empty and told me to pour the water from the one to the other while he chanted. These are the people who followed us there.Making Merit ‑ Tham boon. You will hear Thai people referring to 'boon' or merit. Why is it important to them? It has got to be top priority if they want to move towards enlightenment and improve their lot. Here is how: lead a good life, observe the 5 precepts, be kind, give to the poor, offer food to monks on their early morning round, and donate to the temple. Highest merit points go to those who become a monk or a nun. You can transfer merit to someone else if that is your wish. Thai Buddhists also make merit by visiting the temple on special holidays, see Festivals, their birthday, or any important anniversary. There is no special day for attendance (such as Sunday for Christians). From Pattaya Vacation
...there is also a ritual performed by monks to the relics of the dead in order to pass on merits to them. This ritual is known as Bangsukun Atthi. It will be performed once during the Songkran festival on any of the three days. From ThaiIndian.com
April 15 marks the Thai New Year. This is the most important day of the Songkran New Year celebrations. It is a day traditionally spent making merit and performing charitable acts such as presenting offerings to the monks and listening to sermons, sprinkling holy water on Buddha images and monks, propping up the sacred Bo tree in the temple grounds, and calling on elders to receive their blessings. A bathing ritual is observed in which lustral water is poured over respected elders in a gesture of respect and reverence. The seeking of their blessing or forgiveness for past wrong-doing is also implied. From tat.com.
The rest of the pictures you can breeze through without my commenting.
On our way home, at the bottom of the stairs, just a couple of minutes from home. One last comment on Songkran.
The throwing of water during Songkran is not a mere amusement, but has some connection with the belief of having abundant rain for the coming season of cultivation. According to the popular belief, it rains because the Nagas or mythical serpents sport themselves by spouting water from the ocean. The more they spout the more abundantly the rain will come. The young people continue to sing dance and play games after the last day of Songkran comes to an end, if the rain has not yet begun. from thaiembassy.jp
The water throwing party I posted Saturday stems from the traditional washing of the Buddha for the New Year. This small Buddha and fragrant water has been at the front door of our building for the last three days.
This [Day Three of Songkran] is the first official day of the New Year and on this day people cleanse the Buddha images in their homes as well as in the temples with scented water. from Chiang Mai.com
On the second day of the New Year festival, Thai people traditionaly carry sand into temples compounds in order to build a small pagoda ("PHRA CHEDI SAI" - พระเจดีย์ทราย). These sand piles represent personal pagodas built as part of the merit-making ritual. People leaving a temple during the previous year have taken with them temple dust. Taking sand into the temple during Songkran festival atones for what they have taken out. from Thaiworldview
Here's a sneak preview of today. The same sand pagoda, already filled with flags when we arrived at 7am.
We walked up to the upper pavillion. You can see a sort of fence an wall along the top of the ridge. I asked him what was up there. It's an open zoo. Hmmm, so maybe this is why there are gaur so close into town. The area above would be contiguous with the area behind Wat Umong where we saw the gaur. Pieces of the puzzle show up when least expected.
Here's one of the two almost life sized wooden elephants in the pavilion. The Buddha you can see, he told us, was one who was able to explain Buddhist philosophy in short, concise stories.
These trees were planted here in January. They are sala trees, the tree under which Buddha was born.Having carried the Boddhisattva in her womb for precisely ten lunar months, Maya gave a birth to him. On the full moon in May, passing by the Lumbini grove on her way to her home town, she was captivated by the beauty of the flowering sala trees and stepped down from her palanquin to walk amongst the trees in the grove. As she reached for a branch of a sala tree, which bent itself down to meet her hand, the pangs of birth came upon her. Thus, while other women are depicted as giving birth sitting or lying down, the Bodhisattva's mother is shown delivering her child while standing and holding on to the branch of a sala tree in the garden of Lumbini. From ORIAS.
Here's a view of Chiang Mai from the Wat Padaeng.After two and a half years of filming in the jungles and mountains of Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and China, "The Music of the Golden Triangle and the Cycles of Life" has moved into post production. The documentary film and CD will be released in 2008.
The Golden Triangle, a Chicago gallery of rare furnishings from Southeast Asia, China and Central Europe, will be hosting a reception to support the ongoing work of "The Music of the Golden Triangle and the Cycles of Life". 22 May 2008
The Golden Triangle
330 N. Clark Street
Chicago, Illinois, 60610.
info@goldentriangle.biz Tel: 1 (312) 755 1266
from Music and the Cycles of Life
I saw Josh Kurlantzick's New York Times article online and two other people sent me links.
But an influx of Thai artists and Western expatriates has turned this quiet city into a vibrant destination in its own right. Design studios have sprung up in town, fusing traditional Thai with modern twists. Age-old curries are now paired with Australian red wines and croissants. The area around Nimanhaemin Road now looks like South Beach, packed with BMWs and Art Deco homes, alongside contemporary art galleries run by young Thais with purple hair and nose rings. But traditional Chiang Mai is still there. Walk away from Nimanhaemin into the old city and you’ll see shaved monks meditating and backpackers chowing down on banana pancakes.
But an influx of Thai artists and Western expatriates has turned this quiet city into a vibrant destination in its own right.Right away, the point of view is not that of someone who knows and loves Thailand (though Josh's bio says he lived in Bangkok and he does know about khao soi, but what taxi drivers could/would pay 150 baht for noodles?), but it's the voice of an outsider. Chiang Mai is a destination. A place to come to and then leave in 36 hours. It's a way to keep one's life exciting. What about the people in Chiang Mai whose streets have gotten so incredibly jammed with cars? Whose small houses and gardens are being ripped apart to build high rises for foreigners to live in? The farmers whose land is being bought from them by speculators and then sold to developers who build Western style gated communities?
Design studios have sprung up in town, fusing traditional Thai with modern twists. Age-old curries are now paired with Australian red wines and croissants. The area around Nimanhaemin Road now looks like South Beach, packed with BMWs and Art Deco homes, alongside contemporary art galleries run by young Thais with purple hair and nose rings.What was wrong with the laid back Northern capital of Thailand with the dazzling temples, gracious people, wonderful food, and cooler climate than Bangkok and other parts of Thailand? Why does it have to be transformed into a South Beach? Why is purple hair a good thing for Thai youth? Oh, yeah, it's to make NY tourists feel at home. Sorry, I forgot. Why should Thais be importing BMW's and other luxury cars while most of the population is on motorcycles, sometimes three and four to a bike? Who are these rich Thais and how did they get rich? There's lots for you to write about Josh. But your superficial fluff makes Chiang Mai into a backdrop for rich tourists to play, not a living city full of interesting people. A variation of home with a twist that makes it a little different, yet enough like home it won't take any getting used to. It's easier to slip into, but is it good for Thais? (For you US readers, Nimanhaemin Road looks absolutely nothing like South Beach. Chiang Mai isn't anywhere near a beach even. In two months I haven't seen anyone with purple hair.)
Packed with crumbling old stupas, jewel-encrusted temples and wooden houses, Chiang Mai’s central old city hasn’t lost its old charm.What does Josh know about Chiang Mai's old charm? According to NNDB he was born in 1976. That makes him 31, maybe 32. When was he first in Chiang Mai? I hate to break this to you, but Chiang Mai has lost 82.29% (I can make things up too) of its charm since I first was here. You have absolutely no idea how charming Chiang Mai was. But 'charm' is a somewhat condescending outsider term. More important, Chiang Mai was a comfortable place for Thais to live and visit. An important cultural center of Thailand - Thai culture, not South Beach.
The bumpy roads can take their toll on your legs. Rejuvenate them at the Ban Sabai Town (17/7 Charoenprathet Road; 66-53-285-204). The spa offers aromatherapy and other treatments, but the specialty is, of course, Thai massage — a method that emphasizes stretching. The masseuse pulls and prods your limbs in every direction, like a chiropractor.I'm sorry. I have come to expect this sort of prose in the glossy tourist magazines every first class hotel leaves in the rooms, but the author of this advertising copy is purported by his publisher (Yale University) to be:
special correspondent for the New Republic and visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He has covered Southeast Asia and China as a correspondent for U.S. News and World Report and The Economist, and his writings on Asia have appeared in Foreign Affairs, the New York Times Magazine, and many other publications.Josh is supposed to be an expert on Southeast Asia and he's writing travel pieces that make Chiang Mai a product, not a living, breathing city full of people who sell vegetables and fruit all day every day, who struggle to put their kids through school driving song thaews, who teach at the university, and who, yes, manage hotels. Chiang Mai is home to people with incredible stories, not an amusement park ride.
Songkran is the Thai New Year, the end of the dry season and beginning of the rainy season. [All photos © www.whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com, use with permission only. And click any of them to enlarge it.]
Chiang Mai.com gives an overview of the holiday of Songkran.
The family sprinkling scented water from silver bowls on a Buddha image is a ritual practiced by all Thais in on the third day of Songkran, known as Wan Payawan. This is the first official day of the New Year and on this day people cleanse the Buddha images in their homes as well as in the temples with scented water. The family is dressed in traditional Thai costume and wearing leis of jasmine flower buds. The water is scented with the petals of this flower.
There was a table at the entrance of our building with a small Buddha and some fragrant water. But when we ventured out into the streets we found the modern Chiang Mai Songkran of tossing water on passers by.
In addition to the cleansing of the Buddha images a traditional Songkran involves the sprinkling of water by younger people on the older people as a tribute of respect and for blessings. This is much different from the water tossing we see on the streets and is a genuinely sincere event whereby scented water is poured over the shoulder and gently down the back of the person. While pouring the water in this manner, people utter good wishes and words of blessing for the New Year. The water symbolizes cleansing, refreshment of the spirit and all good things associated with life.
She wasn't going to just douse me and ruin the camera. She gently emptied the bucket down my back.
J had already gotten wet. But when it's 100° Fahrenheit (over 37°C) wearing wet clothes feels great.
This man had a plastic case to carry his phone in. So did a lot of other folks it turned out.
Chiff.com adds more information:Songkran (สงกรานต์) is the traditional Thai New Year Festival which starts on April 13 every year.The word Songkran comes from the Pali language of the Therevada Buddhist scriptures (Sankhara) and the Sanskrit word (Sankranti) for movement or change.
In ancient times, it was celebrated as a moveable feast, and set to occur as the sun moved into the Aries portion of the zodiac. In modern times the date has been fixed as April 13.
Although the Thai people officially changed the New Year to January 1 in 1940 to coincide with the Western business world, the traditional Songkran Festival is still celebrated as a national holiday.
The festival lasts for 4 days. Maha Songkran Day
is the first day of the celebrations which marks the end of the old year. April 14, Wan Nao is the day between the ending of the old year and the beginning of the new year when foods are prepared for the temples. The third day of Songkran, April 15, is Wan Thaloeng Sok - the day on which the New Year begins and on the last day, Wan Parg-bpee, the ancestors and elders are honored.
This lady will still be at it when we come back home a couple of hours later. 
Even this little guy had a bucket.
There's a lot going on in this picture if you click it to enlarge it.
The shirts totally wet and the pants you can see.
There she is again, still going strong. 
Even these young monks had giant squirt guns.
We slipped into Wat Suandok on the way home.
And walking past the monk housing, we learned that the older monks have power water weapons too.
We had dinner again with AM. She's going to be busy for the next couple of weeks and wanted to be sure we saw each other again before we leave.
We ended up at a Chinese Thai street restaurant where we talked till late. During dinner we were interrupted by a visitor. We'd seen an elephant walking down this road late at night a couple of times when we were in song thaews coming home. This was the first time it was up close.
Andrew Lam wrote for the Pacific News Service back in 2004:
The Asian elephant may still be a revered cultural icon in this country, gracing bas-reliefs of temples and ancient paintings of battle scenes, but it is woefully underemployed. Worse, in a country whose civilization was more or less built on the elephant's back, the mighty creature is fast disappearing. More than 100,000 existed at the beginning of last century. At the beginning of the 21st, there are less than 5,000 -- 2,000 of which are still in the wild.
Classified as an endangered species, the Asian elephant is expected to disappear from the country altogether -- except perhaps in zoos -- around 2050.
Here's the routine. The mahout (elephant handler) hands down bags of cut up sugar cane to his helper who then sells the bags for 20 Baht each. I'd been able to say no to the various kids selling flowers and the stump armed beggar who'd approached us while we were eating, but this was different. How do I justify saying no to people but not to an elephant? I'll have to ponder that. But looking into this elephant's eyes, I know there is a sentient being inside there and I think I'd never pass up a bag of sugar cane if this team came to my dinner table every night.
Then the helper gives the elephant the 20 Baht bill and it 
Then, this environmentally conscious team has you give the elephant the empty plastic bag which he trunks up to the mahout. And then they went to the other side of the restaurant.
This is a modern elephant who gives us the real meaning of tail light while walking the night streets of Chiang Mai. This is a sad decline for the once very proud elephant (and mahout) that is a symbol of Thailand and was instrumental in Thai life over the centuries. As a reminder, here again is one of the pictures that I took ( and recently posted) in Kamphaengphet back around 1967 or 68 of those proud working elephants
Dick Cavett has some useful observations in the NY Times about the language of General Petraeaus. It reminds me of the Jim Boren's When in Doubt Mumble. It would be funny if this weren't the general who is in charge of 'winning' the Iraq war.
It reminds you of Copspeak, a language spoken nowhere on earth except by cops and firemen when talking to “Eyewitness News.” Its rule: never use a short word where a longer one will do. It must be meant to convey some misguided sense of “learnedness” and “scholasticism” — possibly even that dread thing, “intellectualism” — to their talk. Sorry, I mean their “articulation.”...
Petraeus’s verbal road is full of all kinds of bumps and lurches and awkward oddities. How about “ongoing processes of substantial increases in personnel”?
Try talking English, General. You mean more soldiers.
It’s like listening to someone speaking a language you only partly know. And who’s being paid by the syllable. You miss a lot. . .
He should try once saying — instead of “ongoing process of high level engagements” — maybe something in colloquial English? Like: “fights” or “meetings” (or whatever the hell it’s supposed to mean).
We've not had much ex-patriot contact in the two months we've been here. But things have suddenly changed. Melissa, one of the other AJWS volunteers invited people working in OD (Organization Development) with NGO's (Non-governmental Organizations - basically non-profits) in the Chiang Mai area, to meet and talk Friday afternoon. We met at trendy Coffee 94 off Nimenhaemen Street which has a lot of foreigner accomocations. (I had a passion-fruit, banana, ginger slushie, mmmmmmm. About twice the cost of a street stand, but it was air conditioned and had wifi.) The discussion focused on how folks are doing in their placements. We had a couple of British Volunteers, two AJWS volunteers, and a Frenchman. All the others (besides me) are working with organizations involved with Burmese refugees. This is a politically tricky topic here so I won't go into it further. I did ask the Frenchman, who's been working in this area for a number of years, about the radical difference between Thakileik and Myawaddy - the two Burmese border towns we've visited. His response was: Thakileik looks more properous because 70% of the world's heroin has come through it in recent years.
Meanwhile, Ew has been talking to AM who worked as a volunteer with the Canadian Volunteer organization and said AM wanted to meet me. Well, I didn't even know that they'd had this volunteer or that she was still in Chiang Mai working with the Agricultural School at Chiang Mai University now.
So after the NGO meeting, J met me and then we met AM. Appropriately, after the meeting I'd just attended, we ate at a Burmese restaurant the other volunteers had recommended. 
The dinner with AM lasted several hours not only because she had worked in my organization, but she's a very lively and interesting Canadian woman. (When I mentioned French-Canadian, she corrected me. "No, I'm a Canadian. The others are English-Canadian.")
I got a lot of background about the people in my office. Hers was a rather different perspective from mine. We figured that some of the difference stems from my age and gender compared to hers. I'm glad we met and I got to hear her stories and I'm also glad that I didn't hear these stories until now when I've had a chance to form my own impressions. It was also good to hear the Ew had been telling AM very good things about the impact I'm having at the organization. I do think I'm raising possibilities and options that haven't been raised, but it's good to hear that independently. On the other hand I also wring my hands and wonder whether my being here has done any good at all. I realized Friday that I've only been here two months, which is no time at all.
It also followed up a good meeting that afternoon with my boss about what I'm doing and what I should focus on in the two weeks I have left. This meeting had also confirmed that they thought my time there was worthwhile. Just the fact that we can talk openly about things is a good sign. He asked when Joan was scheduled to leave - two days before me. He said he'd take her to the airport. Then I asked, "What about me?" "No, you're staying here."
I booked my flight to Singapre through Air Asia. It’s a low fare airline, but for new users like me, there are a couple of things to beware of:
1. You have to book each leg of the trip separately. So my Chiang Mai - Singapore trip had to be booked
A. Chiang Mai-Bangkok, then I had to start all over with the second booking
B. Bangkok - Singapore
You have to fill in the forms all over again. OK, my computer had the info ready to plug in, but still. And if the second flight isn’t available, then there’s a hefty fee for changing the first flight. It might be better to call and let them check on these things before you commit your credit card.
And if your first flight is late and you miss the connecting flight on Air Asia - you lose your fare and everything!!
2. The prices are wildly deceptive. They show you the price for the flight. The Chiang Mai - Bangkok leg was listed as 449Baht. Somewhere on the page it says not including fees and taxes. But when I got to the next page it was 1386 Baht including a fuel surchage of 550 Baht.
3. Very limited luggage. 15 Kilos (about 33 pounds) is your limit. Carry on is 7 Kilos. How much if you have more? In Thailand it is 80 Baht per kilo extra (almost $3) and between Bangkok and Singapore it’s 186 Baht per kilo.
And since each flight is separate, you have to pay the extra for each leg of the flight.
This is fine for short term trips and as long as you know all this in advance, you can plan which trips would work best on Air Asia. I’d guess the best time to use Air Asia is for single flight trips with minimal luggage.
twenty or thirty times it calls
penetrating deep into my sleeping brain
it's not even light yet, go back to sleep.
several days now this morning racket
just out our window
today it is light
I groggily get up to see
Not the drongo call I know
My brain still in bed as I watch him
fly away
[Photos © whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com All Rights Reserved]
To hear this guy, watch the video here.
Burmese exile Kyi May Maung put links to my Border Run posts on her blog this week. She's also got two poems in a new anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, & Beyond. She has glowing praise for the book from the likes of Nobel Laureate, Nadine Gordimer, Pulitzer Prize Winner, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Howard Zinn, People's History of the United States. Also lots of links to sites about Burma.
And Refugee Nation, the Laotian American theater group out of LA that wowed the audience at Out North last fall, has started writing on their blog again and will be performing in April in Berkeley.
April 25th Benefit Tickets:
Center for Lao Studies / Legacies of War
April 26th Tickets
La Pena Cultural Center
So this is a warning to my Berkeley/Oakland readers (both of you that I know of) to check it out. They offered a great view into what it means to be Laotian-American today. Their blog seems to have started in Alaska last November at the end of their national tour and petered out after they got back to LA.
Just consider for a moment all that traveling: planes, trains and automobiles from June to December in and out of town from New York, North Carolina, Massachusetts and Alaska, the miles, the people, the energy and effort, the changes in time and weather...it's exhausting! It's work!! So we felt we needed to take a breather. Calm ourselves. Be with ourselves. Be down with ourselves and during that time we took time to evaluate 2007 and all it's struggles and successes and take that knowledge to plan out the 2008 series of Refugee Nation events to come. We hope you follow us again because our batteries are fully charged and we look forward to making impact with people, places and things...promise. So come along for the ride or better yet come see us in person when we are in town. It's a lot nicer face to face, smile to smile.
Something was snagging up this video - either some audio, some frames from the video, or the final titling. I rebuilt the video piece by piece and saved it until it started balking again. So here it is. After the title you have to wait about 10 seconds to see the drongo fly by the first time (it seems much longer). But wait for the slow motion version of each shot, especially the second one. Then you can see the tails clearly. I cut out the stills, but you can see them in the previous post.
[Click the picture to enlarge it]
The racket tailed drongo is always followed by these two long tail feathers which seem to disappear just before there's a wider feather and then the end of the tail. There are several that fly around here, but they've been incredibly hard to catch with the camera. [Go here for an even better shot taken the next day.]
But persistence pays off. Here are two on video. It's all explained on the video. To hear the drongo's strange electronic call, listen to the end of the video here.
[I don't know what's happening. iMovie keeps crashing while it's trying to save the video. I need to remake it I think, but I don't have time now. I'll add it in later when I get it figured out.]
I was telling Bon at lunch today about seeing the gaur and the monk at the temple on Sunday. She reacted with surprise and said she saw a story like that in the newspaper today. When we got back to the office she showed me. I guess you could say I had a number of exclusive stories, like the village protest over the land survey. But as far as I know, no one else covered them. This is the first one that I've posted that I know of that was posted almost simultaneously in a national Thai newspaper. But only my loyal readers and a few people in the office are likely to know that.
I have to admit, their photographer got a lot closer than I did, but I got more story - and background on gaurs. 
Of course, remembering the sign in the temple about boasting and bragging, I'm just letting you know that my surprise at this wild animal living so close to this populated area and befriending the monks was news for the Thais too. (You'd think I'd never been in Alaska, let alone had moose sleep in my backyard, but this is Thailand, the land of the endangered species.)
This one was really clear and easy to identify using the binoculars, but you couldn't tell in the photos. I wouldn't have known he was there if I hadn't seen him fly to the perch. In the upper photo, he's on the far left on the highest branch coming out of the side of the frame. He was there for all of maybe 15 seconds. I realize I've set up unrealistic standards, wanting to not only see the birds, but to photograph them too. Anon, I'm going to look into a camera like yours when I get back . My serious birder friend Dianne doesn't even have a camera. What you can't see in the picture are his bandit black stripes over his eyes, his other black markings on his tail and underparts, and his reddish beak.
And, coming soon, are pictures of the racket-tailed drongo in flight. These guys show themselves for five or ten seconds at a time. I finally figured out their flight path from our balcony - just a short opening - and knowing they were in the area, just kept the video camera on until they flew by. I'll try to edit the video tonight.
The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas Austin has about 65 Mike Wallace interviews from 1957 and 1958 on their website. The people he interviewed were all very well known names at the time, some still are. I haven't had a chance to listen to them yet, but this seems like an incredibly interesting way to connect to American history and to get some perspective on how some things have changed, how other things haven't changed at all.
There's a tendency to think that the time you live in is when people really know what's going on. But I've always been amazed reading books from the past at how aware and 'modern' people from previous centuries and millennia were.
I've picked a few of the interviews to give you an idea of what's there. Great for those with ipods to listen to in the car or at the gym. Find out how we got to where we are today. I've included the brief bios since many of the names will not be familiar to a lot of people today. (And Monica, no I didn't know who they all were either. The first one's for you though.)
Thanks to reader JM for this great tip, which he found when Salon.com discussed the interview with Pearl Buck.
Mortimer Adler
9/7/1958
Mortimer Adler, president of the Institute for Philosophical Research, former professor of the philosophy of law at the University of Chicago, and author of The Idea of Freedom, talks to Wallace about conceptions of freedom, capitalism, socialism, and the American worker.
Charles Percy
7/6/1958
Charles Percy, president of Bell & Howell, talks to Wallace about the role of government in the economic system, about private enterprise's involvement in public services, tax reform, and the soviet economic system.
Henry Kissinger
7/13/1958
Adlai Stevenson
6/1/1958
Adlai Stevenson, former governor of Illinois and twice the Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States, talks to Wallace about American politics, the difficulty in persuading good people to become involved in politics, diversity, elections, and the need for the average citizen to be involved in government.
William O. Douglas
5/11/1958
William Douglas, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, talks with Wallace about freedom of expression and the freedom to exchange ideas. In Douglas's book, The Right of the People, he wrote, "In recent years, as we have denounced the loss of liberties abroad we have witnessed its decline here in America."
Salvadore Dali
4/19/1958
Salvador Dali, the surrealist painter, talks to Wallace about genius, the subconscious, weakness, old age and luxury, death, religion, and dreams.
Reinhold Niebuhr
4/27/1958
Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr, vice president of Union Theological Seminary in New York, on leave to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and one of the most important and challenging religious thinkers in the world, talks to Wallace about the separation between church and state, Catholicism, Protestantism, anti-Semitism, communism, and nuclear war.
Oscar Hammerstein II
3/15/1958
One of the most successful and controversial figures in show business and Broadway lyricist for such classics as Oklahoma!, The King and I, and South Pacific, Oscar Hammerstein II talks to Wallace about sentimentality, racism, religion, and politics.
[He was like a father to Sweeney Todd composer Stephen Sondheim]
Pearl Buck
2/8/1958
Pearl Buck, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning novelist, talks to Wallace about American women, marriage, career versus family, and the difference between men and women.
Walter Reuther
1/25/1958
Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers, talks to Wallace about his plan for profit sharing for auto workers, which was being attacked as a "giant step toward socialism."
Drew Pearson
12/7/1957
Drew Pearson, syndicated columnist, talks to Wallace about Sputnik, a third world war, Eisenhower, Nixon, Kennedy, and about being called a vicious liar by prominent politicians.
Eleanor Roosevelt
11/23/1957
Eleanor Roosevelt, former first lady, talks to Wallace about Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Republicans, Democrats, the Soviet Union, Westbrook Pegler, her son's relationship with Dominican leader Rafael Trujillo, race, and garlic pills.
Kirk Douglas
11/2/1957
Kirk Douglas, a film star who had recently completed two films, Paths of Glory and The Vikings, talks to Wallace about acting, fame, the charge that Hollywood films misrepresent America abroad, Nazis, Communists, and European versus American women.
[Michael Douglas' father]
Malcolm Muggeridge
10/19/1957
Malcolm Muggeridge, former editor of Punch Magazine and one of England's leading intellectuals, talks to Wallace about his article in The Saturday Evening Post in which he created an international furor by criticizing Queen Elizabeth.
Orval Faubus
9/15/1957
Orval Faubus, governor of Arkansas, talks to Wallace from the Governor's mansion in Little Rock during his standoff with the Federal Government over the integration of Little Rock Central High School. Faubus had called in the National Guard to bar the African-American students from the school and had met the day before this interview with President Eisenhower in an effort to resolve the conflict.
Margaret Sanger
9/21/1957
Margaret Sanger, the leader of the birth control movement in America, talks to Wallace about why she became an advocate for birth control, over-population, the Catholic Church, and morality.
Frank Lloyd Wright
9/1/1957 and 9/28/1957
This interview was recorded in two parts. Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the greatest architects of the 20th century, talks to Wallace about religion, war, mercy killing, art, critics, his mile-high skyscraper, America's youth, sex, morality, politics, nature, and death.
Thanks to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation for their cooperation in presenting this interview here. This interview is available on home video through the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.
Eddie Arcaro
9/8/1957
Eddie Arcaro, the most celebrated jockey in America, winner of 5 Kentucky Derbys and 22 million dollars in purses over a 25-year career, talks with Wallace about horse racing, gambling, drugging of horses, and the pressure to win.
[Sports scandals with drugs are nothing new]
Senator James Eastland
7/28/1957
Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, who has been called "The Voice of the White South," talks to Wallace about segregation, slavery, the Soviet Union, voting rights laws, and the Ku Klux Klan.
NOTE: This interview contains language that may be offensive to some people.
[Listen to a Mississippi Senator when segregation was still the law in the South]
Bob Feller
8/4/1957
Bob Feller, one of the great baseball pitchers of all time, talks to Wallace about ballplayers' salaries, the reserve clause, rich ball clubs, Pay TV, beer companies as sponsors, bean balls, gambling, and Joe DiMaggio versus Ted Williams.
Charles "Commando" Kelly
6/30/1957
Chuck "Commando" Kelly, recipient of the Medal of Honor in World War II, talks to Wallace about his financial troubles, unemployment, the Korean War, and nuclear weapons.
Steve Allen
7/7/1957
Steve Allen, comedian, musician, and television personality, talks to Wallace about his rivalry with Ed Sullivan, his television show, and awards.
Gloria Swanson
4/28/1957
Gloria Swanson, one of Hollywood's most spectacular stars, talks to Wallace about why she is not making films, sex appeal, Hollywood in the 1920s, marriage, plastic surgery, and cancer cures.
Eldon Edwards
5/5/1957
Eldon Edwards, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, talks to Wallace about the South's attitude toward the KKK, the Klan's membership, segregation, the NAACP, communism, and J. Edgar Hoover.
[Double click on any picture to enlarge it]
In addition to passing Wat Umong everyday on the way to work, I also pass a sign about Wildlife Conservation, but the road goes uphill. And it's hot. But one morning about a ten days ago, I rode up and discovered . . .well I'm not quite sure what. There's an office.
There's a huge bird cage full of bulbuls, and even when they're in a cage I can't get a good picture. I'd been thinking about cages and how awful it is to put birds in cages. This all arose from watching the birds off our balcony and how much space they use.
There were also some caged deer. I got to them from the backside so there were lots of fences between us.
And there was a free family of white crested laughing thrushes. I'm guessing this was the pair we'd seen at the garden restaurant behind Wat Ramphoeng a while back - it's less than a quarter mile away as the thrush flies. (It's on the tree trunk, lower left. Like always you can double click to enlarge the pictures.)
So as we walked around the lake after the monk chat and I saw a paved road that looked like it went out, I began to wonder if it went to the wildlife conservation area. It did. And now it was around five pm, cloudy, cool, and we saw the thrushes again. J moved very quickly when she saw a snake go by (I never saw it) and so we went past the picnic area to the nature trail.
It's the end of the dry season, so most things are very dry. But there was a small damned up lake and a kingfisher flew across. There were lots of birds, I got some on camera in just brief glimpses, not very good. And these red flowers.
Then we ran into this monk with a wheel barrow of old leaves and cow dung. He asked us what we were doing here - in curiosity, not challenging us - and we had a long discussion about birds, living things, where I work, Buddhism (this was where my Thai vocabulary began to fail me, but he did say that all living things love life more than anything else and there was a sign near by that said the same thing.) Which made it all the more curious when he spoke about an Alaskan friend - in the Air Force - who comes to Thailand frequently and is an avid fisher and hunter who likes antique guns. Then he told us there was a wild woowa. (I think cow must be the only animal we have in English for which there is no generic name for both the male and female - well I guess there's peacock too, and if I think about it I might think of more.) He said the monks can walk up to it and feed it and it licks their arms. Did we want to see it? 
Well of course. So he walked us over to see if it was there. It was. It was this huge wild bull. Later I thought of the word gaur, googled it, and sure enough, that's what it was. It was staring straight at me in the distance as I tried to keep up with the monk. Joan stopped earlier. And it clearly wasn't comfortable with me either, so I stopped as the monk went on.
There were some small deer that appeared to be caged down there, but the bull was free and later ran off through the wildlife area. I have to say I was amazed to see a huge animal like that loose right here on the edge of Thailand's second biggest city. But from this area, it really looks like it's forest all the way up the mountain side of Doi (Mt) Suthep. And clearly this gaur has found friends among the monks who do feed it. I know we wouldn't have seen it had the monk not taken us over there (though we weren't far away) and that the gaur would have run off if we'd gotten close. As I think about it, it looked at us the way a moose does - trying to figure out who we were and whether we were a problem. We weren't wearing orange monk's robes.
The ultimateungulate has this description:
Body Length: 250-330 cm / 8.3-11 ft.
Shoulder Height: 170-220 cm / 5.6-7.2 ft.
Tail Length: 70-100 cm / 28-40 in.
Weight: 700-1000 kg / 1540-2200 lb.
The dark brown coat is short and dense, while the lower legs are white to tan in colour. There is a dewlap under the chin which extends between the front legs. There is a shoulder hump which is especially pronounced in adult males. The horns are found in both sexes, and grow from the sides of the head, curving upwards. Yellow at the base and turning black at the tips, they grow to a length of 80 cm / 32 inches. A bulging grey-tan ridge connects the horns on the forehead.
Ecology and Behavior
Where gaurs have not been disturbed, they are basically diurnal, being most active in the morning and late afternoon and resting during the hottest time of the day. However, where populations have been molested by human populations, the gaur has become largely nocturnal, rarely seen in the open after 8:00 in the morning. During the dry season, herds congregate and remain in small areas, dispersing into the hills with the arrival of the monsoon. While gaurs are dependent on water for drinking, they do not seem to bathe or wallow. When alarmed, gaurs crash into the jungle at a surprising speed. Gaurs live in herds led by a single adult male. During the peak of the breeding season, unattached males wander widely in search of receptive females. No serious fighting has been recorded between males, with size being the major factor in determining dominance. Males make a mating call of clear, resonant tones which may carry for more than 1.6 kilometers. Gaurs have also been known to make a whistling snort as an alarm call, and a low, cow-like moo. The average population density is about 0.6 animals per square kilometer, with herds having home ranges of around 80 square kilometers.
Family group: Small mixed herds of 2-40 individuals. Adult males may be solitary.
Diet: Grasses, shoots and fruit.
Main Predators: Tiger, leopard.
Distribution
Tropical woodlands in India, Indochina, and the Malay Peninsula.
Countries: Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, India, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Malaysia (Peninsular Malaysia), Myanmar, Nepal, Thailand, Viet Nam (IUCN, 2002).
I'm used to eucalyptus trees from growing up in Southern California, but I've never seen bark like this. It's a piece of art. The monk showed us a birds nest just on the other side of trunk.
Chiang Mai Forest Cicadas uploaded by 
Last Wednesday I rode my bike to the bike shop to get the rear brake tightened. He fixed this and that too and then I rode into the old town to meet J for dinner. Since she doesn't have a bike here or show an interest in one, she walks a lot. (If you ride anywhere besides the back sois I take to work, you really have to ride in the traffic.
No bike lanes, no sidewalks you could ride on - you can barely walk on them. So it can be pretty intimidating.) So we walked home - it took about two hours. Just before we got home I realized we needed bananas and I was ready to ride up Thanon (road) Suthep. But my bike was weird. I had a flat in front. So I just pushed it the rest of the way home. And the next day we left for Mae Sai.
So yesterday (Sunday) I borrowed a monkey wrench and took the front wheel off and we walked to a little shop that fixes flats.
We left the wheel there and walked up the road to Wat Umong. This temple is known as the forest temple. I ride past it every day on the way to and from work, but I'd never been in it. J had gone in once to look around. This is a major wat that tourists go to, but it isn't in the middle of town. For most people, you have to work to get to it. So it seemed like, since it's in our neighborhood, we ought to check it out.
After looking at a few books on Buddhism, environmental issues in Thailand, meditation, we moved on.
Looking at the map, we decided to just follow the trail. This is not your average Wat. It's in a forest and the buildings are scattered here and there amongst the trees.
First we went to the library. I haven't been in one for a while, so it was nice to browse the books - they had English as well as Thai and other languages.
The middle sign is in English and says there will be Monk talks in English on Sundays from 3-5 at the fish pond. It was four. The blue arrow signs points to the fish pond.
So we wandered down and found about 15 foreigners sitting in a little round pavilion next to what was more a small man made lake than a pond, listening to a British (I think) monk talking about Buddhism.
A young man asked for a definition of Enlightenment. The monk explained why simple explanations were problematic. Then he described enlightenment, using his hands, as two sheaves of grass leaning against each other. One is a person, the other is reality. Then his hands collapsed. When man no longer sees the world from his subjective view, when this separation between a man and the world collapses - that's enlightenment. (I've fudged a bit because I can't remember exactly the words he used.)
I was struck by how this parallels one of the points of post-modernists who talk about how we objectify the world instead seeing ourselves as being part of the world. (That's not quite right either, but there is a connection here that I can't explain well.) The monk had to attend to things at 4:30 and so we wandered further along the trail around the lake.
[The internet connection ended last night at this point. I was going to write more on this post, but it's long enough and I'll do a part 2 later to finish Sunday. I'm in the office again, working on my presentation that will be sometime this week. No one else is here again - they were supposed to get back yesterday (Monday) night - so I have a quiet place to get this powerpoint so it makes the points I need to make in a fun way. They really have a lot of their planning in place - thanks in part to the requirements of the original grant application to Oxfam. Now it's just a question of being able to break down the major expected outcomes (it's taken me a long time to learn that in Thai well enough to roll easily off my tongue. In Thai it translates as "results that we expect to receive" or ผลที่คาดว่าจะได้รับ)
into steps that need to get there. Maybe I'll do a post on that too. So this is it for now. I'll do the monk and gaur in part 2.)
I don't make predictions often or lightly because there are just too many unpredictables, especially in politics, but I'm getting a strong sense of where things are going in the US presidential election.
CNN has become a gossip station, focusing on the day-to-day scraps of information
We had a little time before the bus left and we found this organic shop. Since my organization is working on these issues, I naturally take an interest in all these shops - how are they doing, how they advertise, who their customers are. I talked with one of the people working in the shop. They are making a slight profit. They have sponsorship of the Queen of Thailand which certainly doesn't hurt. They have customers from across the board. And organic wild honey they have to process themselves because it tends to come in with things floating in it.
Some of the farmers my organizations works with grow organic strawberries and I've been saying that jam has to be an option if they don't sell them all fresh. So, here is some strawberry jam. 
When we got off the bus, and got into a song thaew for the ride home. Then it suddenly filled up with foreigners. Here's a Thai traveler who talked loudly the whole way, whose lived in Ireland for several years. Next to her is a Dutch woman.
This first man was a Scot who'd just spent 28 days traveling through Burma. He said he saw no signs of trouble anywhere, though there were places that were restricted to foreigners.
J has put up with a lot from me over the years, so now and then it's time to just kick back and relax in something resembling luxury. So before we left I scanned the internet and found the Laluna Resort in Chiang Rai. On Sawadee.com it has about half the price it was on its own website. So we enjoyed the last part of the trip by the pool.
Here's the view from our room.
I really like open showers, like this one on the other side of the plant.
J relaxing by the pool.
And a nice leisurely breakfast.
We went back into Thailand, then went to check out the riverside guest houses for lunch. Our Lonely Planet book says about the guest house in the picture,
Unfortunately, the great river views are overshadowed by a general lack of upkeep. If you stay here, pay close attention to how to find your way in and out, and pray that your hut hangs on just one more night.
Now, here's the real reason Tachileik is a destination for Thai tourists - shopping for Chinese goods. I finally found a pair of sandals - I can feel the ground through my old ones - a case for my camera, and a longyi for a friend who asked for a pakama. Will a Burmese man's sarong do instead Lewis Since he doesn't read this blog to my knowledge, I don't have to worry. Des, don't tell him. 
Ron ZZ, I really have no idea about these fishing reels, but this will give you another reason to put Northern Thailand on your travel list. 
And this is one of the shops that carries animal parts - many if not most prohibited in most countries. But they no longer have tiger skins, just small pieces of tiger skin.
I have no idea what the sign says. But it's to the left.
Two monks walking onto a backstreet from the main street. You can see J in the background in the new shorts she got at the Textile Fair while we were waiting for the bus back in Chiang Mai.
Just behind the temple we wandered down this back street with seemingly tiny crude houses. Actually, these were shops and the house was below on the hill. 
Here they had birds to put in tiny cages to sell to temple visitors to release. You're supposed to get merit by setting a bird free. But I could never understand how this all worked out. Since you must lose merit by putting the bird in the cage in the first place. So, by buying the bird to set free, you really encourage capturing more birds. 
I noticed this tattoo on the back of one of the men and he consented to have me take a picture of it.
And then a picture of him from the front. One of the people in the small shop spoke Thai fairly well so we could communicate.
We came across this woman drying peanuts and she spoke very good Thai. A friend of hers sold us 20 Baht worth of bananas and then they invited us into the Thai-Yai village that we could walk through to the main street again. I was only vaguely aware of the word Thai-Yai. Here's what Wikipedia has to say:
The Tai-Shan people are believed to have migrated from Yunnan in China. The Shan are descendants of the oldest branch of the Tai-Shan, known as Tai Long (Great Tai) or Thai Yai (Big Thai). The Tai-Shan who migrated to the south and now inhabit modern-day Laos and Thailand are known as Tai Noi (or Tai Nyai), while those in parts of northern Thailand and Laos are commonly known as Tai Noi (Little Tai - Lao spoken) [2] The Shan have inhabited the Shan Plateau and other parts of modern-day Myanmar as far back as the 10th century AD. The Shan kingdom of Mong Mao (Muang Mao) existed as early as the 10th century AD but became a Burmese vassal state during the reign of King Anawrahta of Bagan (1044-1077). Note: the Mao people are considered a Shan subgroup.
After the Bagan kingdom fell to the Mongols in 1287, the Tai-Shan people quickly gained power throughout South East Asia,
Our casual destination was the large pagoda we'd seen from the hotel all lit up last night. But this exquisite pagoda caught our attention first. We wandered around the temple grounds and out the back to a flight of stairs.
At the top we met a couple of young Thai monks coming down.
There was a smaller pagoda at the top and views through the trees of the town. And this young monk having fun on the bike.
Just across a small road was a short walk up to this gate and the pagoda we'd seen from the hotel. It was beautiful and quiet until we heard the roar of.....then around the corner came tuk-tuk thundering up the hill with a couple of tourists. Then another, another, another, about a dozen altogether shattering the peace and quiet. We were really glad we'd turned down the hour tour of town by tuk-tuk as we got off the bridge.
Here are the noisy tourists. Looking at the picture I can't confirm that this was the group of Swiss tourists who got to immigration just before we did and thus made our two minute wait into a 30 minute wait. But because of the wait, we got to meet the head of the Korean Cultural Center in Chiang Mai who gave us his card and invited us to visit when they have open house on Friday nights.
Here's the pagoda we saw from the hotel last night.
And this is a view of Tachileik from pagoda. I looked, but I'm not sure if our hotel is in the picture.
And another view of the houses just below the pagoda
A young monk followed us from the pagoda demanding a payment. A Burmese man scolded him and J decided he wasn't quite right in the head. Soon after we saw this butterfly.
Our room was on the 5th floor. In the evening we were going to walk down the stairs to the lobby, but discovered that only the 5th floor had lights. My crank up flashlight didn't put much of a dent into the complete blackness of the fourth floor so we took the elevator down. But in the morning, we took the stairs and could see the swimming pool. You can also see the shops underneath. All around the border area are shops with everything from pearls to dried everything imaginable. This was mirrored by similar stores on the Burmese side.
J is by the window having breakfast at the hotel before we head for the border crossing to get another 30 days in Thailand stamped into our passports.
When we crossed a month ago at Maesod, it all seemed much more imposing. Here we have just gone out of Thailand and are on the bridge. This one was much shorter than at Maaesod. I guess we survived that wtih no problems and so this time it was no big deal. But we didn't get captured by an English speaking guide on the bridge this time so we had to do our own interpretations. 
Here's the river that separates Thailand and Burma at this point in the Thai far North. 
If you have a big screen you can see the Welcome to Myanmar on the blue sign on the right.
I'm not even going to try to say what anything means. All I can honestly do is show you the pictures and add a little more context. Any interpretation would simply be me imposing my own stories onto what I see. As we walked up this street, we heard, blaring out of a music shop, "Freedom.... Freedom Now..." It was a music video in English. I thought it a little interesting to hear this blaring into the street in this country where there have been government arrests of monks not that long ago. I went in and tried to engage the young man and woman about the music and what it meant. They apparently spoke no English or Thai and had no idea of what they were playing. Or they pretended not to speak Thai or English, not knowing who I was. While a lot of people we met spoke Thai, my gut says that they really had no idea of the message they were blaring out into the street.
Tachileik seems much more prosperous and lively than the Burmese town across from Maesod. Perhaps it's because we crossed at 9am (Burma time is a half hour later than Thai time) instead of 1pm. It was relatively cool and monks were still out with their begging bowls.
Note: I've spelled the name of the Burmese border town both Thachilek (the Thai Anglicization) and Tachileik (the Burmese version.)
We got into the Mae Sai bus station about 6:45pm and it was almost dark. Lonely Planet talked about the guest houses lining the river to the left of the border crossing, and their recommended guest house is "about 150 meters beyond what seems like the end of the Th [road]." That didn't seem too appealing in the dark, and the Wang Thong was right in front of us and the border crossing, so we stayed in this giant Chinese hotel all marbled up. It really reminded us in looks and smell (not bad, just distinctive) of mainland Chinese hotels in the 90s. But for 850 Baht (about $28) we got a decent room and breakfast. It even had a nice pool which we never had a chance to use. (The guest houses run 150 - 500 Baht.)
The front desk steered us over to Rabiang Keaw, where these folks from Phrae asked us all sorts of questions and at the end gave us their card and told us to call them when we want to visit Phrae. They also put a new light on the role of this border town that is a funnel for goods coming in from China through Burma. Thais come here to buy Chinese products much cheaper than when they make it to the stores. But these people were here because they made denim shirts and sold them here to be exported to Burma and China. 
We ordered Tom Yam Kai and Pineapple chicken Op. Op means roasted and isn't that common and we had no idea what to expect. Well, here's what we got, a pinapple full of chicken and pinapple. 
After dinner we strolled down the street a ways. It wasn't too active (nothing like it would be the next day) but I couldn't resist the foot massage for 79 Baht out on the street. Joan wandered off on her own while I got rubbed. I couldn't help taking this picture of a couple of nuns buying a dozen or so bras right in front of me as I was getting my massage. I'm assuming they had come over from Burma. I don't think I've ever seen a picture of or even thought of nuns buying bras.
I like getting places at night because it means I really get to two different places. First I make my way in the dark and fill in the blanks with my imagination. The next morning I can compare my imagination's artwork to what's actually there. (Double click the pics to see them larger.)
The first shots are at the end of the road before the border crossing bridge into Burma.
[Phil at Progressive Alaska has linked here in his weekly blog roundup and to the fact that
he's having to travel, on the road from Chiang Mai to Mae Sai, right through the area where Richard Armitage earned his chops in the underworld of off-the-books U.S. intelligence ops, helping Khun Sa come to power in Burma, and feeding the needs of Armitage's so-called "import-export business," based between 1976 and 1978 in Bangkok.For the record, the point where Burma, Thailand and Laos all three meet is officially, "The Golden Triangle" (upper right hand corner of the map) but this whole region was a major poppy growing area. I guess I'll need to get Armitage's book when I get home. But I haven't even gotten the posts to the border yet, so I better keep posting.]
Thursday, when we left, was an unusual day because the sky was actually blue. Haze, smoke, and other pollutants generally make the sky less the bright blue, but Thursday was as though everything had been washed clean. (It didn't last)
Given the level of geographic illiteracy in the world, I should have done this long ago. I'm still pushing it, I know, by using Alaska as the reference point for the US, but it and Hawaii are the only states that show up on the same map as Thailand. 
And here's Thailand and its immediate neighbors. We are in Chiang Mai. I was thinking on this trip that Mae Sai is closer to China than it is to Bangkok. But looking at the map, so is Chiang Mai.
When we got our tickets and found we had two hours to wait, I checked in the little maroon duffel bag, and we went walking. Of course, J's umbrella was in the checked bag, but the streets were shady. We really hadn't explored this side of town at all, so it was a good chance. We lucked into a Textile Fair at the Northern Industrial Promotion Center. They had really nice stuff at reasonable prices. We were almost the only foreigners there. 
Here's the motorcycle parking lot at the bus station. Well, here's one of them. It was 10 Baht for motorcycles, further down it was 40 B for cars. I didn't think to look at for how long. A day I'm guessing. 
Not huge, this textile fair was still pretty big. Here's a glimpse. We ended up buying a few things - not really what you want to do when you are leaving on a trip and have to carry stuff with you. But we didn't have much. 
This man is a German linguist doing research on a language in the region spoken by about half a million people if I remember correctly. And his wife and baby. They were eating next to us at the textile fair. They knew about it because they live around the corner. 
Walking back to the bus station, we passed this tuk-tuk (three wheeled motorcycle taxis) customizing shop. 
Here's the genius behind the red tuk-tuk. Well, he was working in the shop and said I could take the pictures.
We're back in Chiang Mai. I just downloaded 135 new photos. Let's see if I can give you a glimpse of this trip in a series of short posts with the best of the pics (or at least the one's that tell the story best.) Let's start with getting there and back. A look at Thai buses.
There's a thriving private sector bus system across Thailand. The bus stations are major transportation hubs like airports in the US. We didn't make reservations - I know you can go to the bus station and buy tickets in advance, but don't think you can do it on the phone. Ew got our tickets to Kamphaengphet in advance because she knew someone working for the bus company. And most times the buses are trying to pick up last minute arrivals as the bus heads out of the station. And then along the way.
We thought we'd get the 11:30am bus to Mae Sai. Hah! The bus station was packed. We got tickets for the 2:15 air conditioned bus. So we had almost three hours to wait. I'll talk about that next post.
Here's our bus to Mae Sai. Although we were on the Green Bus Company, the bus was white. There is a reason to bring long sleeves - the air conditioning on the buses. I pretended I was in Alaska. Although this was an air conditioned bus, it wasn't a VIP bus. That means it makes lots of stops. It took us about four and a half hours to Chiang Rai and another hour to Mae Sai, getting us there just as it was turning dark.
This was yesterday's bus from Mae Sai (the northernmost town in Thailand, on the Burmese border). It turns out there are buses about every 15 to 35 minutes from Mae Sai to Chiang Rai. So if we hadn't wanted to wait, we might have gotten an earlier bus to Chiang Rai, and then caught a local bus the rest of the way. As you can see, the air conditioning in this bus consists of keeping the windows open. But it was also a very friendly ride. The bus driver and the woman collecting the money could have been husband and wife and there was a good deal of joking among the passengers.
There were a couple of checkpoints. I think this is because we were coming from a border area, but not totally because we had one today on the way to Chiang Mai. The police in this case, are fairly aggressive in their patting down people and going through luggage. They didn't even ask for our passports, but everyone else had to show id's. Concerns are with smuggling goods and illegal aliens. They aren't very friendly and I suspect at least some of them are getting off on their power over people. But also note the inside of this mom & pop bus company. And compare it to the VIP bus we had today from Chiang Rai back to Chiang Mai.
The bus ride gives some folks a chance to catch up on a little sleep. J snoozed too.
And here'
