Thursday, July 16, 2009

Bangkok Lights

My top five favorite things about Bangkok:
- The parks
- The food
- The night life
- The public transportation
- The opportunities

My top five favorite places in Bangkok:
- Vertigo Sky Bar
- Lumphini Park
- Chao Phraya River
- Kinokuya Book Store
- The Sky Train

My top five favorite places to eat in Bangkok:
- Siam Paragon food court
- Shabushi Restaurant
- Phahonyothin Rd. street vendors
- Thong Lor Japanese Restaurants
- Chinatown

Descriptions to come.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

The Rainy Season

The ominous low lying clouds moving steadily across the sky have brought rain, the fields are flooded with light brown water and the rice sown only weeks ago is a wash of flowing neon green that resembles the color of a nuclear reaction. Rice planting season in Thailand is under way.

Rice is undoubtedly Thailand's most important commodity, not only within the country's boarders as sustenance but also as an incredibly valuable cash crop. The country itself is the world's leading rice exporter. As an American growing up eating rice once or twice a week (I always had other options for my daily caloric intake) I never realized just how important rice was until I came to Thailand and began eating the simple white grains every single day, three times a day. Rice is the most important staple food for a large portion of the human population as many poor people rely on rice for survival. Like other foods, rice is consumed without much thought as to how it got from the field to the plate. Movies or documentaries on Asia portray the poor rice farmer wading through waterlogged paddies wearing a conical Vietnamese-style hat. They always fail however, to explain the dedication, patience, resilience and effort that goes into cultivating the most important food in the world.

No one plants rice in the dry season. The technique involved in pushing the rice through the mud is impossible if the earth is hard and dry. Rural Thai farmers bide their time during the dry season by either working in Bangkok or lounging around the village, performing odd jobs and taking care of their family. The dry season surrenders to rain halfway through the summer which allows farmers to being preparing the fields. The dirt must be soft and malleable before the farmers can even start tilling. The rice paddies are essentially small plots of land quarantined by earthen ramparts that serve as walls which hold water when the land is uneven. Agriculturally, rice is a crop that needs copious amounts of water, not just for nourishment but also as a stabilizer while the stalks are young and weak. Each plot is designed as a basin for holding water at shin level. If plots at lower elevations are collecting more water than those higher up, farmers will use pumps to defeat gravity and flood the entire field.

The saturated fields are tilled using a automatic push-style tiller which has two wheels about four feet in diameter that look like thin metal waterwheels attached to a gas engine mounted in between and controlled at the helm by long lawn mower-like handles. Before mechanical tillers, farmers relied on beasts of burden to prepare their soil, but now water buffaloes live the good life (wallow, eat, and sleep). The farmer tills the field down and back, covering each corner of the paddy until it resembles a muddy off-road race course.

Before tilling even begins though, right around the very start of the rainy season, depending on the size of the field, a number of plots are set aside as rice stalk nurseries. The farmers carry sacks full of rice seeds through the plot and sow handfuls at a time, covering the ground evenly with the little white pellets. The field will begin to produce a thick green blanket just in time for the rain. Once the rice has reached half-maturity it is bunched together in bundles and cut to the same length, looking like thick bouquets of flowers with the tops cut off. Finally they tie a thin piece of bamboo around the stalks to keep the bunch tight. The rice stalks are incredibly buoyant and just float in the water during planting. When someone needs more stalks, they simply grab the nearest bunch and continue working.

The planting process itself is rather simple but physically straining. The farmer grabs a bundle of rice stalks with his/her off hand holding the roots facing outward. With his/her strong hand, the farmer pinches about ten stalks away from the bundle just above the root, inverts his/her hand facing the ground and pushes the rice through the water and into the mud, letting go when he/she feels resistance. The process is repeated along rows and columns about a half a foot apart until the entire paddy is filled with a bright green grid of lined rice stalks. Quick planters can move at a feverish pace, pinching the stalks, entering the mud, shuffling backwards and grabbing for more stalks without hesitation. But most people talk and laugh, listen to music and take water breaks without hesitation.

But why do they have to plant the stalks by hand? Why don't they just throw the seeds throughout the entire field like they do in the rice nurseries? It's simple: the total grain output would be much smaller considering the distance at which the stalks would grow next to one another. By planting by hand, farmers can determine exactly how close they want their stalks to be, ultimately increasing efficiency. Plus, once the fields are flooded, the seeds are unable to survive under water and will not grow stalks.

In a few months the fields will begin to dry out and fill in and the bright green grid will slowly transform into a sea of top-heavy dark greens that look as though something is weighing them down, bending like a weeping willow; that's the grain itself. In a few months it will be time to harvest the rice.