Birds and Bats

We're like in our own little treehouse with wall to wall windows looking out into the fourth floor level of trees. There are lots of birds - we hear a lot more than we see, and see lot more than we can catch with the camera - and last night we noticed all these birds flying into the tree, but they weren't birds. You can see this bird's long tail, but not the head. I think it's in the magpie/treepie family. Dianne? Catherine? Is there enough here to identify? The tail is so distinctive. It was probably 2 feet long from tip of the head to end of the tail. Maybe longer.




Then yesterday night there were maybe 20 or 30 bats swooping back and forth just beyond our balcony and in the trees. You could hear the wings hitting the leaves. Otherwise they were silent. So I put it on flash and the child/animal setting and started taking pictures. I got a bunch like this one of the trees but with no obvious bats. You can see the fruit in the tree (like usual, you can double click to enlarge the pictures) if you look carefully and the way the were sometimes hovering I assume they were going after the fruit. I couldn't tell for sure what kind of fruit it is.



Then, I finally got one. There's a way to get rid of red eye on people, but there's no way to get rid of white eye I know of, on animals. This seems to happen with dogs (the fox I got at Elmendorf last August had this in the flash picture) and bats. How are their eyes different from human eyes that the flash reflection is different? But that's pretty much all you can see of this bat.




Finally, bingo, I got the whole bat. First you see the eyes, but then you can see the whole animal in flight. I'd say there were 18 - 24 inches in wingspan. Very cool watching them fly around. If you are ever in Portland, Oregon, the zoo there has a bat exhibit with special lighting so you can see the bats clearly flying around, hanging around, and various states in between.

[2/21/08 My son emailed me this:

In mammals, the rods and cones actually face backwards, towards the retina. Dogs and cats have a retroreflective layer in their retina which reflects light back into the rods and cones, improving their night vision.

(retroreflective means reflects back in the same direction it came from. you can get the same effect from the inside of the corner of a cube with shiny sides)]

J made it safe and sound

We've spent the last two days walking around the neighborhood and around Chiang Mai. (Note: everyone is out of the office on various trips and meetings and today is a holiday) Here are the steps down from Wat Pa Daeng, the temple just up the street. We went in and began talking to one of the monks. I pulled out my vocabulary list and we had an impromptu joint English and Thai lesson. Then he posed in front of the Buddha in the sanctuary. Today is Macha Bucha day. I couldn't find a whole lot on line explaining the holiday, but here's a little from Saranair.com

Macha Bucha Day is the important Buddhist holy day (on a fullmoon of third lunar month) celebrates the occasion when:

• 1,250 of the Lord Buddha's disciples spontaneously gathered to hear him preach without any schedule

• all of them were ‘Arhantas', the Enlightened One, and were ordained by the Buddha Himself

• and the Buddha gave those Arhantas the principles of the Buddhism, called "The Ovadhapatimokha".

So on the day like this, Buddhist all over the world would go to the temple to offer food to the monks, Vien Tien (candles light procession), listen to Dharma talk, enjoy the good deeds at the temples.


We'll go tonight at 7pm to vientien - walk around the temple and the chedi three times with the candles and leave an offering for the monks. There were a lot of places selling prepackaged stuff today, but the bucket they mostly come in was too much to carry around all day. I'm hoping we can get stuff at the wat, though this is a reltively small wat. But it is just up the street. And now we know one of the monks.




We also got to see our building from a different angle. We're on the top floor looking out into the trees on the left. In the next post I'll put up a couple of views into those trees.

I'm down in the lobby now using the wifi which doesn't get all the way up to the fourth floor and the dsl connection isn't working right. It says we're connected to the internet, but every website times out and we get nothing. So today/s pictures will have to wait.

We also walked around the Chiang Mai university campus which is very close by. A woman who asked if we needed help turned out to be a graduate of the political science and public administration program so she ended up taking us to see the Dean of the Social Sciences who teaches public administration.

We also checked on the swimming pool at the university. It is Olympic sized, costs B300 a year membership (just under $10) and B30 each swim. So Joan will sign up there. The fancy boutique hotel across the street from us where two nights (about $300) in the cheapest room costs more than one month in our room only lets hotel guests use the pool. We can't even buy our way in, but we can eat at the restaurant. Thanks.

And we had dinner at a Vietnamese place nearby. The food is great. But I was really impressed with the windows. Someone obviously didn't like the dark wall. So I'm guessing they had the wall smashed open put in the windows. But left the wall so you could see how the liberated the room from the dark. It takes a lot of guts to actually do something like this and leave it like this. I think it works and makes a strong statement.

Devi Mandir Chiang Mai

SND_2556 uploaded by AKRaven









We met at Devi Mandir, Chiangmai's Hindu temple. First I met M. who works in my compound but for a different NGO (non-governmental organization, the international word for non-profit) that is working on sustainability. She's been working at home mostly which probably explains why I haven't met her yet. Me and S. and Grib were also there. Mike, who met in Chiang Mai last year when he had just arrived to work for the AJWS was also there, coincidentally, with his brother. The services reminded a lot of Anchorage, though here the room was filled with Thais. The person who led the prayers, a powerful yogi according to Mike, told us afterward he doesn't speak Thai and so he did the talk in Hindi since most of the Thais here do not understand English either (nor Hindi). But they did know the chants. And, as you can see in the pictures, this is a much more ornate temple than the one in Anchorage.

It turns out that Mike lives just down the street from us, less than a quarter of a mile away.

There was a heavy downpour while we were in the Temple, the first rain since I've been here. I was also able to pick up a good (save looking) electric teapot and what I thought was a hot plate at the Central Department Store at the mall. But I'm not sure how to make it work and the box says induction cooker. I have to look it up on line.

Catching Up

Well, catching up never happens, but rather than worry about getting things up from Friday, I'll just put up some stuff on today and let the other stuff get up when I can do it.

My bike ride to the office is a delight. I pass a couple of wats (Buddhist temples) and more or less rural areas even though we are in town. A few noodle shops, mostly homes of various sizes and styles. I'll try a video one day soon. You've seen some of that in the house hunting post. The weather has been cool - down into the sixties at night - and the humidity low so it's been comfortable. I stopped here for breakfast this morning.

The office is getting empty. There's a meeting in Lampang, neighboring province, and others are going to Bangkok. I've been getting into the office close to 9am the last two days and today I was the first one there, so my 10am arrivals weren't all that bad. So hardly anyone is around this week which is good since J comes tomorrow morning. Everyone is gone so I was wondering how I would pick her up. But Grib came by today and offered to pick me up to get Joan. Since no one was there - at least in my organization, there are other people from the other organizations - I left early and went back to the market I'd been in last night. Most of the shops that had household stuff were closed last night. Today I did fine and got some of the things I wanted before Joan got here - hangers, a pair of plates, bowls, mugs, and fork/spoon/knife sets, a pot, and flowers. Actually they look like much less than when I bought them. But there are two bunches of mums, a bunch of orchids, a bunch of roses, and a clump of fragrant gardenias, and a jasmine bud necklace. I cleaned things up this morning and when I got the hangers home hung up Joan's clothes that I brought along.

Poor J is somewhere between Tokyo and Bangkok. And won't be here til tomorrow morning.

Tonight the AJWS volunteers in Chiang Mai are meeting tonight at the Hindu temple. There's something going on and then vegetarian Indian buffet afterward. I'm going to see if I can get an electric burner on my way, so we can do a little cooking in here.

Here's a view from the bedroom. The living room view is similar. I've seen already a lesser (I think) coucal and a red whiskered bulbul (the link has a great photo) and another bulbul like bird that had an red/orange chest and white neck. I couldn't find anything like it in the book.

I can sit at my desk here and be bird watching. At night we have interesting bird sounds. I recorded some, but realize I lost it. But that one has been back each night. We also get roosters crowing out there from about 4am on and sometimes the neighboring dogs get yappy. But it hasn't been disturbing for some reason. I saw a bunch of roosters around the closest wat this morning when I rode to work.

And I've learned there's another word for organic. This one basically means 'safe from poison".

Enough, I quick nap and then off before it's dark. I brought a rear bike light from home. I called Sak at the bike shop about buying a new one tonight on the way to the temple, but he's playing tennis, but he said to call on the way back, maybe he can open the shop for me. That's Thailand.

Overnight in the Farmers House

Monday, February 18, 10:50pm [I decided to leave blogger to do its own time stamping and that I would try to add my local time and date at the beginning of the posts.]

[You can see the details on the pictures much better by double clicking on them.]


After the fair we walked back to the house we were going to stay with the honor, who had whiskers on his chin and a warm smile with bright eyes. He opened the mats where we were going to sleep, pulled out some sheets and blankets, pillows, and giant green mosquito net. I was pretty wiped out and climbed into bed. But the wife brought out a tray of food at 11pm. You can see Doc and the Farmer eating, shot through the green mosquito net.

We laughed because Doc was cold and I said I was warm. We guessed at the temperature - it was 25C or 77F. Outside that sea of air we walk through hit us now and then with a cool current. But I got up first in the morning and you can see Doc still snoring in the mosquito net.

You can slso the wife (sorry I don't have her name and would probably not use it if I did - and yes, I did ask permission to post the pictures) cooking breakfast - the one in the video a couple of posts ago. Across is a picture of her grand daughter getting ready to ride her bike to school. I got a couple of her drawings which were pretty remarkable for a seven year old. I gave her the camera and she took the picture of Doc sitting alone at the table.



Finally there's a picture of one of the villagers sitting with Doc. M had collected surveys for Doc's doctoral dissertation about the villagers and their relationship with the new factories.




I took a short walk and got this rice paddy, the corn that is being grown for Cargill Coporation, this weed which they all said was medicinal, and the viscious guard dog on the bridge.


I'm really tired and need to go to bed. I'll do more about Friday morning in another post. But I do want to say that going out there was both personally and for work, a great thing to do. I have a much better understanding of the sophistication of the farmers as well as how well the organization is doing. Doc was clearly a favorite of many of the people we saw. You'll see in the next post on this the posters they had made which show their way of life, all the different vegetables and herbs they grow, what things the women of the village do, and even the seeds from all they grow.

As I close this off, J should be at the airport, even on the plane in LA for her long, long trip here. Just got an email from my mom who is back from taking her to the airport.

The Fair

The fair was put on to raise money for the school on whose football field the fair is being held. Everyone had to pay to get in. And then there was food and drinks. Lots of drinks.




We're in Northern Thailand so there is a lot of Northern food, including roasted beetles.

Doc is getting some of the food to bring back to our table.













This guy brought along his own stash of Shark brand liquor.











There were only a few fireworks and by the time I got the fireworks setting on my camera, they were over. So this shot gives you an alternative view.



In the background you can see the dance stage. The band played loud Thai songs, I wouldn't even hazard a guess what I would call the style. How about electified Thai. As part of the fund raiser, people paid Baht 10 per dance to go up on stage to dance. Each time masses of people went up the ramp for the privilege. The people around me were urging me to go up too and I agreed on the condition that Doc does as well. He said he didn't dance. I did have thoughts like, "I wonder how many people that stage can hold without collapsing?" and "Is it close to capacity?" Doc said that they have collapsed because there were too many people.







I generally do not use the flash, because it totally changes the atmosphere. The darkness of these pictures captures what it was like much better than a flash, even if you can't see all the details. But on request I did take some flash pictures too.

Note the red and blue ice buckets. One of my thoughts - sorry that's just how my brain works - was, who's going to clean all this up? This is a Thursday night. I asked if people had to go to work in the morning. They did. And would there be school? There would.






Doc got hold of the camera for a bit.





They kept persisting I should go up and dance. Being pestered to drink and dance and such things was common when I was a young peace corps volunteer, but the last few times I've been in Thailand people were told by my 'handlers' to not insist and they didn't. But here I was with farmers and factory workers who were, in some cases, drinking themselves sily - see below - I was the farang in the crowd. "I said I would dance if Doc dances." "He is going to dance." They said triumphantly. The picture with the squiggly lights gives you a much better sense of the night and the dancing stage than had I used a flash.



You think they've had enough? Back in the old days - yeah I know that phrase gets tiresome to hear - at least the places I was, the women, at the very most had a few sips of weak beer. If women's liberation is measured by drinking with the boys, some of these women were liberated.



Remember the blue and red ice buckets. Well, here are all the lids together, the water buckets together, and the buckets together the next morning.

When are we? Time Zones and the Blog

My blogger account is set for Alaska Standard Time. So the last post, for example, says on the top "Saturday February 16" and on the bottom of the post "8:28pm". But I'm in Thailand and I just posted it. Here it's Sunday February 17, a little after 2pm now.

What makes more sense? To just leave it? Or to change it?

Blogging Comments on Immigration and Education

I made a comment over at Independent Alaskan. It got fairly long and required a fair amount of time, so I thought I'd post my response here too. Independent Alaskan wrote about Gil Sanchez running for the Anchorage School Board. Rocknak commented:

Well, if this happens, I'm sure he will do whatever he can to make it easier for the illegal children in the district to make it through the system. Thank you NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND. Let's see how dumbed down our schools can get!

Here are some facts for taxpayers:

The ASD bilingual department currently serves about 4,700 students, plus there are another 2500 that "exited" the system last year who need to be monitored for two years. The current budget for this year is $11,015,820. It goes up to $11.77 million next year.

That 11.77 million would be a great help to the thousands of underpriviledged American children in this state.

It's pretty common for humans everywhere to divide people into us and them and then to pick facts that reinforce the how them are screwing over us. So here was my response to Rocknak:

Rocknak, here are some different facts for taxpayers:

The average home value in Anchorage is $275,999. We pay about 7/10 of one % of home value for ASD. I calculated this from the How to Read a Tax Bill page on the muni website.
So the average household that pays direct property tax (not people renting who pay it through their rent) pays about $1,855 a year to the School District. I would also note that a portion of the bilingual education money is federal money, not from Anchorage property taxes. So the $11 million that you cite, Rocknak, wouldn't all be available if you cut the program to use the money elsewhere.

Now, if you have kids or grandkids, and most households in Anchorage do, that's an incredible deal. The Northern Academy tuition in Anchorage ranges around $12,000 (varies by grade levels). I couldn't find the tuition for Anchorage Christian Schools on their website.

But even if you don't have kids, the community advantages of kids having a public education available are significant, even if we only talk about the crime rate if large numbers of kids never went to school.

And let's remember that when comparing costs of private and public schools, that private schools don't have to admit the most expensive kids (one's with various severe disabilities - physical, mental, social, or emotional). And when comparing test scores of private and public students let's also remember (in addition to not having to keep 'problem' kids) private schools have kids whose parents care enough to pay more for them to go to private school and parental interest is a big factor in how kids do in school.

And some more facts. Rocknak suggests that we should reallocate the money we spend on "non-American" kids to "American kids." The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that Anchorage households spend an average of $529 a year on alcoholic beverages. That's 28%, or more than 1/4, of what my calculations above show they pay for ASD through their property tax. But I guess Rocknak thinks that it's better to take the money from the bilingual program rather than dipping into his beer money. I'm not saying we shouldn't consume alcohol, but when we compare how money is spent, we often restrict our comparisons. Why just look at other ASD expenditures? Why not look at all the other uses of our money? According to the same BLS list, Anchorage per household expenditures on entertainment were $4,297, more than twice the national average, and more than twice what we pay ASD through taxes.

Another way of responding to Rocknak is to ask: what is the difference between an American child and a non-American child?

What causes someone born in the US to be worthy of special privileges that someone, say born in Brazil, shouldn't have? Maybe Americans shouldn't be allowed to listen to Bossa Nova music since they weren't born in Brazil. It's just an accident of fate that one human soul gets born in the US as opposed to somewhere else. A human child is a human child. Why should a selfish, lazy American citizen (no I'm not saying all Americans are like that, it's an example) have more opportunities than a public spirited, hard-working non-American? (Nor am I suggesting all non-Americans are saints.) I'm just pointing out that in terms of human rights, national boundaries are completely artificial and change frequently over history. The US took most of California, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona by military force from Mexico, for example. That raises other questions about who the illegal residents of those states really are.

And in your calculation Rocknak, you didn't distinguish between the American kids (legal US citizens born in the US) who get bilingual aid. I would guess that many if not most of the kids in the program are American citizens. So, the money spent on them IS money spent on underprivileged Americans. Though not all of them are underprivileged, just like the kids in speech or other special ed programs are not necessarily underprivileged.

The issue shouldn't be, take the money from these kids and give it to another group. The issue should be how do we pay for a reasonable education for all the kids. And it isn't just the kids that 'get' the education. We all get the collective benefits of kids who do well in school, feel good about themselves (and thus aren't as likely to cause trouble), and who can eventually make positive contributions to our community and society. If you don't believe that look at the economies of countries where kids don't get access to education.

Brief Thai lesson

This started out as a post on the village fair I went to Thursday night. But the intro seems worthy of a separate post all its own.

All Thais have nicknames. The person at work who took me to the village is nicknamed 'Doc'. Actually, I think I've spelled it 'Doc' in English because he's a doctoral student, but I don't think it means that in Thai. I'm not sure how it's spelled in Thai so it's hard to look up. I think (I started to write 'know' but I realize most things that people have told me in Thai, it's safer to think of as "might be') someone said his nickname starts with the letter ต rather than ด
The ต has a little dip on top and is pronounced as though you were saying Tea, but without breathing out a puff of air. If you put your hand in front of your mouth when you say Tea out loud, you'll feel a little air coming out. Linguists call this an 'aspirated' sound - because breath comes out. Now try to say it without the air coming out. (Unaspirated.) That's the ต sound. The ด is like the English letter D. The two letters are very similar, but not the same. Listen here to the difference. NOTE: Click on the yellow arrow NOT the link which will take you to jamglue.

Thai letter ต imported by AKRaven

Thai Letter ด imported by AKRaven

(In the second audio clip he says the Thai sound of the letter - is we would say "dee" - and then the word that starts with the letter that is used when kids are taught the alphabet. In this case the word is 'dek' or child.)

It can be pretty hard to hear the difference, but think how people learning English must feel. We have so many more different sounds and some with very subtle differences. This is no more difficult than the difference between, say, "rode" and "wrote". And if you listen to how people actually say these in a sentence, they often don't even say the sounds. The difference is really that you hold the 'o' in rode but you stop it quickly in 'wrote.' Or bead and beat. Or 'slip' and 'slipped'. We barely make the sound. For Thais who don't have a final 'd' sound or a 'pt' sound it is very hard to hear the differences.

Another subtlety of Thai are the loops in the letters. I didn't look closely enough and instead of ด, I typed ค, which is one of the aspirated K sound letters. Can you see the difference between the two letters?*

Attribution and Technical Note: I got the sounds from http://www.thai-language.com/ (You can go to each letter through the purple box on the left panel.) But to embed them in the blog so you could listen to them here instead of finding the right buttons on the website, I uploaded them to www.jamglue.com and then took the embed code and put that in my post. It is pretty incredible what tools are available to do this with. Thanks to the invisible techies who make all this possible.

*Difference between the letters: Look at the direction of the loop in the middle of each.

Breakfasts

There's lots to post about, I'll start slow. This was a typical breakfast at the Pooh Guest House for me. Rice soup with fruit and vegies. You could order eggs or whatever. Comes with the tab of about $30 per night. I think this was Thursday morning.
Friday lunch I was taken to a vegetarian center. If you only have one item with your rice the price is 0 Baht. I had several different dishes so it came to 25 Baht. The official exchange rate is about 32 Baht to the dollar.

This was Friday's breakfast which was sticky rice and four other dishes of greens and fish.
. Doc and I spent the night at this home in the village about an hour out of Chiang Mai. Below is the video of part of the breakfast talk. My understanding is that it is Northern Thai dialect, which is pretty close to Central Thai just pronouncing the words a little differently and some different words altogether.


[February 18: I was going to give a brief synopsis of the conversation at breakfast, but decided that given the Northern dialect and the rustiness of my Thai, that I better not. Good thing. I did get bits and pieces, but I put them together wrong. The guy was complaining about how the factories are not hiring workers over fifty now.]