Thai Tidbits

The Semester at Sea run through Asia is a whirlwind: five days in each of four countries with only two days on the ship in between. If I have any chance of staying caught up with the itinerary on my blog, I’m going to have to make these posts sort of quick and dirty, instead of more polished pieces. So here are the bullets on Thailand:
• This country is much healthier economically than I expected. Maybe it was coming from India where poverty and overcrowding are overwhelming, but Thailand seems to be doing okay. There appears to be a thriving middle class. I saw no beggars and only a couple of homeless people in either Bangkok or Chiang Mai. Tourists were everywhere and new cars and trucks were lined up at the dock, ready to be shipped out. Speaking of vehicles, several of us noticed that all the cars and trucks looked three years old or less, still shiny and dent-free. Our guide said that a new Japanese car made in Thailand was much cheaper than a used foreign car. In any case, this is not one of the countries I’m going to go away worrying about, financially at least. The main sour note in Bangkok was the traffic congestion and maddening traffic jams despite a skyrail and subway system, even one of those loaner bicycle programs. The air in Chiang Mai was pretty awful but we were told that was because it is the season of burning the rice fields.
• The Thais LOVE their king! His picture is everywhere, as is a special flag designed for the celebration a few years ago of his 50 years as king. The dress code to go into one of his palaces is much stricter than that for any temple and requires that even your ankles be covered. Fortunately they have loaner sarongs for ladies and baggy pants for men. He and the queen are seen as devoted to the common people and have spearheaded many reforms for their benefit.
• I had one night on my own in Bangkok and took the New York Times’ recommendation for a wonderful inn in the old part of the city, appropriately named the Old Bangkok Inn. Delightful décor, gracious innkeepers, wonderful amenities (including a flat screen TV/monitor and computer to go with the free WiFi), excellent value. You should put that name in your travel dreams file.
• I ended up alone and after dark on a deserted street on the old section of Bangkok, searching for a restaurant that turned out to be closed. Two gracious, middle-aged Thai women came to my rescue. I long ago learned to ask directions from women and luckily found one at the lone lighted store front. She called her son to draw me a map of where the restaurant was supposed to be, one street over. When I discovered it was closed, I decided to just eat at the closest place at hand since I had heard Thai street food is wonderful. As I stood on the sidewalk near a bustling street restaurant, another woman motioned me to sit at her table. In very limited English, she found out my preferences and proceeded to order my dinner for me. Four friends soon joined her and the six of us had a great meal, me eating happily and them chatting away, occasionally nodding and smiling at me. I got the distinct impression that this was a regular weekly dinner for them and I very much appreciated them making me feel like just one of the girls.
• On our SAS tour of Chiang Mai, we traveled, first by bus then in the local favorite transport of covered pick-up truck with two side benches, up a windy mountain road to a Hmong village. Even though it was quite chilly and drizzly, the faces and laughter of the children in the preschool warmed us through and through. The SAS students were uncharacteristically shy so I organized games of London Bridge Is Falling Down and Hokey Pokey which were a big hit.
• I continued to cook my way around the world with another fabulous cooking class in Chiang Mai. Our teacher was a young chef who had learned to cook during his stint in a monastery as a teenager. He was funny, talented and quite the entrepreneur. His classes are held in a large open-air room he had added to his home, with well appointed, individual work stations and spotless equipment. Two neighborhood ladies assisted us and reminded me a lot of the two Fatimas in Fez. We made a fabulous feast of hot and sour soup, paneang curry with chicken and shrimp, chicken with cashew nuts, phad thai inside of an omelet sort of wrapper, and sweet sticky rice with mango. I adore Thai food and I ate a lot of it in my five days in Thailand, but, if I do say so myself, the very best was the food I made for myself!

Faye's Images of India

I was lucky enough to be joined on the trip to Kerala by talented photographer, my friend Faye Serio. Her photographs are truly marvelous and I want to share a couple here. I hope you recognize, from my descriptions below, the kathakali dancer, a houseboat similar to ours and a typical scene along the waterway.

India's Dancing Eyes

Instead of Chennai’s cacophony of horns and roaring motorcycles, the sounds of laundry being slapped against smooth, flat rocks fill the air of Kerala’s backwaters. The oppressive heat of the city is replaced by soft breezes and the cool shade of the thatch and wood awning on our houseboat. Chennai’s main river is an open sewer that almost gags me as I cross its bridges in an open-air auto rickshaw. The lake, rivers and canals of the backwaters of Kerala aren’t exactly pristine but I didn’t cringe when I saw people swimming and bathing in them. Yes, I made the right decision when I chose to escape the port city and spend most of my time in India on the southwest coast.
The state of Kerala is noted for the political dominance of the Communist Party since the 1960’s; red flags featuring the unmistakable hammer and sickle are commonly displayed, especially now with national elections coming up in April. Its culture is matriarchal and its people are highly literate, the rate reaching 100% in some areas. A region full of strong women who are leftist and well-read – now that’s my kind of place!
Before this SAS voyage even started, late last summer, I volunteered to organize an independent trip to Kerala for my Spring 05 faculty friends, John and Faye Serio, and myself. We were joined by another Life Long Learner, Joan Walters, who proved to be a wise and gentle traveler and delightful companion. I originally got interested in visiting this part of India after listening to my sister Susan, who is a frequent visitor, tell stories of how beautiful it was. Arundhati Roy sealed the deal when I read her lush and intriguing tale, The God of Small Things, which is set here. Despite some ordinary difficulties in making arrangements through a foreign travel agent, the trip itself went off flawlessly and was a great success. We have been quite the envy of many of those to whom we have been telling our stories since returning to the ship – they all vow to go to Kerala on their next trip to India.
Kerala is most widely known for its extensive network of lakes, streams and canals that stretches from the Indian Ocean easterly across a broad alluvial plain. Many Indian tourists, as well as foreign visitors, explore the region by traditional kettuvalum, one to three bedroom, teak and mahogany houseboats. Ours was staffed by a gracious and capable crew of three: captain, engineer and chef/guide. They provided us with a tour filled with marvelous sights and fed us well with traditional Keralan dishes of curries and masalas. For dinner, we had huge prawns, the size of small lobsters, we bought from a fisherman along the way. We spent an afternoon, overnight and morning gliding gracefully through green water filled with water lilies and a rich variety of birds such as egrets, ibis, fish eagles and cormorants. The fishermen, rice farmers and their families sometimes waved but usually paid little attention to the passing parade of boats and looky-loo passengers. Women washed cooking pots and laundry, as well as their bodies, still modestly clad in their colorful saris. The children went for frolicking swims, as children do all across the globe when they are lucky enough to live on the water. We read, took photographs and napped but mostly rode quietly along, soaking up the serenity and beauty of the place.
Our boat trip ended in the morning at a lovely resort in Kumarakum, on the shores of Lake Vembanad. I was pleased to discover that the other hotel guests were all Indian, leaving me feeling we had chosen a vacation destination popular with locals, not just catering to tourists. Lush, manicured gardens and buildings of local stone and native wood gave the setting a beauty and tranquility unmatched anywhere else I have traveled in India. We visited the nearby bird sanctuary, opting for a small boat tour that took us back out on the water for close-up views of the myriad water birds. Outside the resort grounds, small village lanes beckoned to be explored, where we were met with eager smiles from the local residents. While I took advantage of the hotel’s Internet, John and Faye toured a rubber plantation that John remembered from the Roy novel. Joan experienced an Ayurvedic massage, which turned out to be quite the adventure - she spent most of it in a tiny g-string perched on a low stool!
I must admit to some guilt over the fact that much of my time in India was spent in rest and relaxation. This voyage is not a vacation, but the occasional “pause that refreshes” is very welcome. However, our time in Kerala included one experience that steeped us in local tradition and proved to be both educational and enjoyable. We attended a kathakali dance performance at the Cultural Center in Kochi. The audience was invited to arrive early to see the actors put on their make-up. We sat entranced for an hour as three actors applied dramatic colors, including an almost neon green for the male lead. All the paints were made from natural substances and were contained in traditional stone or wooden pots – no plastic tubes in sight. After finishing his green face, the hero character laid down with his head in the lap of a man who turned out to be the musical accompanist. Two white paper flanges were applied to his cheeks with layer after layer of paste, glue and small torn strips of white cotton fabric – fascinating!
After all the make-up was finished, we were ushered into the thankfully air-conditioned theater where the executive director of the center told us the story and symbolism of the performance we were about to see. One of the actors came out to demonstrate the nine emotions that would be portrayed. His dancing and gestures were accompanied by astounding and dramatic eye and facial muscle movements. The audience oohed and ahhed as he went through his repertoire, including unbelievably rapid movements of just one cheek! By the time the two dancers appeared for the performance, they had donned elaborate costumes and headdresses, transforming them from our new friends playing with colored paints to magical characters in a story from an ancient epic, the Ramayana. Unlike every other cultural play or dance I have attended in my travels, this presentation had been made so understandable and accessible that I felt I could follow the story and appreciate quite well the ancient art form.
Some of you may remember my post about India from my previous voyage,”The Elephant that is India.” (See the blog index to the right.) In it, I used the old metaphor of blind men exploring an elephant, each grabbing a different part and coming to very different conclusions about the creature. The stench and filth in Chennai will forever remind me of being behind the elephant, stepping in fresh dung. We actually had to navigate around some of that material as we strolled through the villages around our resort, but that’s not the part that will hereafter remind me of Kerala. On this my third trip to this incredibly diverse and fascinating county, I finally felt as if I were seeing its true essence. I stared into the elephant’s beautiful, dancing eyes and fell in love with India.

Cape Town Pictures

Sorry, I couldn't get these to add onto the written piece.

Filling in the Rainbow

South Africa calls itself the Rainbow Nation. Lavinia Crawford-Browne, who recently retired as Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s personal assistant, spoke to us about her native country as a microcosm of the world, with all its hopes and challenges. On my previous trips here, the extremes of this society presented themselves to me: I have tried to understand the lives and culture of black South Africans living in poverty in the Cape Town townships and was also a guest in the barricaded and beautiful home of an extremely wealthy family in Johannesburg. This time, I had opportunities to glimpse the lives of middle class South Africans and also the Cape Malay people, who are still referred to as “colored.”
Our Semester at Sea ship, the MV Explorer, was docked at the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront, offering every Western convenience imaginable just steps from the gangway. On our second day in port, I ventured off the ship early, searching for a cup of coffee and a newspaper. At 7:45 am, the mall was deserted except for an attractive, thirty-something, black couple on a similar quest. They led me to a delightful café and invited me to join them.
Leanne and Zain live in Durban and were on holiday, the first of their four years of marriage, and the first time either had left home. Zain works for an import company while Leanne works for FNB bank. They explained that they had gotten these jobs out of high school, drawn not by an interest in the work but because the companies offered tuition for higher education as a benefit. Leanne wants to be a lawyer, but first, both of them want to go to university. They were bright, gracious, articulate and clearly in love. We had a delightful time chatting and then exchanged emails. I judged them to be reasonably affluent, up and coming young people and half expected them to offer to buy my breakfast. When that didn’t happen, I offered to buy theirs. The look on their faces was enormous relief, delight and gratitude. Even in that very upscale mall, our three coffees, my bran muffin and the breakfast platter they shared came to about $8.00. The rand is not doing too well against the dollar these days. They may not have college degrees now or much disposable income, but Leanne and Zain have bright futures ahead of them. I heard lots of talk of the brain drain out of South Africa but I think these young people are committed to staying. They gave me hope for this country I care about a lot.
The Cape Malay people are primarily Muslims, the descendents of slaves and other laborers brought to South Africa in colonial times from India, Indonesia and Malaysia. They and all people of mixed race origins are still called “colored”, apparently without the pejorative connotation Americans are used to. They were given slightly preferential treatment over blacks in the days of apartheid. These people live in Bo-Kaap, a prime piece of real estate near the center of Cape Town. Although they used to be mostly low income, many of them have done quite well with small businesses. I continued my culinary mini-tour of the globe with an SAS-organized trip focusing on the food of this community.
We began with a walking tour of the Bo-Kaap neighborhood, passing by the mosques and the brightly colored houses that are its signature structures. We visited a spice shop with an overwhelming number of curry mixtures and basic spices. While the local cooks might buy a particular curry combination like leaf curry or garam masala, they always have a special ingredient they add that makes their dish unique.
Our cooking class teacher/hostess was a gracious, cheerful and patient Muslim woman with whom I immediately identified. She was about my age and body type and had three teenaged boys. We could hear them and their friends upstairs watching a rugby match, occasionally bursting into loud cheers. Even with such a distraction, when the call to prayer rang out, they filed downstairs, paused to nod politely as their mother introduced them and then went off to the mosque. When we arrived, we saw that their home was lovely but somewhat in disarray. Our hostess explained, with more good nature than I could have managed, that she had arrived home to find the mess the day before. Her husband, who has an apparantly successful construction company, had chosen that day to begin her long-awaited kitchen remodel – the day before she had 12 guests arriving for a cooking class! Undaunted, she had a propane burner set up for the curry and plywood tables on sawhorses elegantly draped with cloths for our work stations. Floor space was tight as we maneuvered around displaced cabinets and new high-end, stainless steel appliances, still covered in plastic. We had so much fun that no one seemed to mind a bit.
We learned to make the Cape Malay version of samosas, harkening back to the ones I had made in Fez. These had a meat filling and a slightly different folding technique. I tried to memorize the motions as our teacher’s beautiful brown hands created a pocket with the first two folds to securely contain the filling. I found out that folding in the opposite direction produced a nice hole in one corner of the triangle from which my mixture quickly leaked. We watched as she made the chicken curry and were assured that we’d be receiving the recipe as we left. The most fun was making the roti, a type of bread that is one of my favorites in Indian restaurants. I discovered why it tastes so good: it’s slathered in a huge amount of butter in the preparation of the dough. After the final step, the disk of dough, looking a lot like a tortilla, was ready to cook. She put it in a dry skillet because there was so much butter already in it. After a few deft turns to brown it, she put it on a plate and scrunched it up with her fingertips, like the tissue paper topping for a gift bag. Instead of noodles or rice, this roti was to be the base for the curry. We then received the genuine gift of a delicious meal and fascinating conversation at her long, makeshift table. I think I could make a habit of these international cooking classes; I’ve got another scheduled at the Chinese Cuisine Training Institute in Hong Kong.
Two SAS trips to the townships, one with Operation Hunger and one to enjoy music, got my return business. I didn’t get to see Vicky in Khayelitsha, who, some of you may remember, runs a B&B and enriches the lives of many of the children in her neighborhood. She is a special friend of Dave and Katie’s and those kids are the recipients of their generous support. With the help of friends who did go there, I sent pictures of them with Savannah and Asher, and she was reportedly thrilled.
The music workshop was as wonderful as I had remembered. This time I actually got a little lesson in marimba which I loved, as well as drumming and dancing. The charismatic leader of that program must have been separated at birth from his twin brother, Ron Hardy, who runs an identical program for the young black men in Ledbetter Heights in Shreveport. Both are passionate teachers, devoted to the music and the kids, and the love between them. They both believe that each culture’s traditional music must be preserved, but also that learning can be a vehicle for character-building and possibly future employment. I predict that the success of both men and their students will continue for a long time to come. Ledbetter Heights and Khayelitsha are lucky to have them.
The rest of my time in Cape Town was mostly spent on guilty pleasures and one day of stomach troubles that kept me from venturing very far. I had several fabulous meals with friends, complete with delicious South African wine, and a welcome feast at the sushi-on-a-conveyor belt restaurant in the V&A mall. No, I don’t think that caused the aforementioned problem – it was the freshest fish I have ever tasted. I enjoyed shopping and getting errands done. I even took in a movie, Doubt, which happened to be starting as I was walking by. Best of all, I was able to Skype with four of my kids and their kids, luckily catching a few at home and on their computers on a Saturday morning. The highlight was seeing that adorable Asher asleep on his father’s lap. Then Dave called me back a few minutes after our lengthy chat was over because the baby had waked up and I could get a better look at him. I purely hate not being able to be in Seattle right now but, with the help of technology, I felt like I had a very special visit with my baker’s dozen grandbaby and his proud papa.