Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Grasshoppers
I ate grasshoppers for lunch today. While I was eating the grasshoppers, I was thinking to myself, grasshoppers taste good but eating them just seems wrong.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
What's going on and the Youth Conference
Hello again. For months, I wondered why I haven't posted regular, creative, insightful commentary on my life in Thailand. I like writing and I keep a personal journal that I haven't missed a week in. So why is this blog any different? Why? Because I don't have regular access to the internet.
In this day and age of social updates on facebook, twitter, myspace, blogspot, and the likes, it's easy to write down the thought or idea that just popped into your head. That is, if you have internet access. Believe me, I have things I want to share daily but the internet where I live is not regularly available. Then, once I do get on the internet, I'll sit at the computer, staring at the blogspot "new post" page trying to remember everything I wanted to say. It's more frustrating than helpful.
As a treat, I have included pictures of the Youth Development conference the group I'm a member of hosted during the first week of September.
I had to lead an activity in which participants broke into groups of four and had to lay on their backs with their feet facing in. I would then take a bucket of water and place it on their feet. The object of the activity was to have everyone in the group take their shoes off without spilling any of the water in the bucket.
We had the kids all paint their own designs on the conference t-shirt. Then, we had the conference participants cheer for their favorite designs.
This was our main conference room. All of the youth that took part in the conference are sitting down listening to a presentation.
I was supposed to do an activity in which students had to sit down, link arms, and then stand up using teamwork, but instead I decided to sing karaoke. The boy in front was the first and last person to volunteer to sing. He stole the show. Everyone in the background are volunteers who sang backup.
The opening ceremony was a red carpet affair and I was the host. We had paparazzi, a video camera for broadcasting, and EVERYTHING!
We ended one night with impromptu skits in which the volunteers stood in front of everyone and the audience shouted out a scene for us to act. This scene was, "Sumo." My diaper fit well but my opponents diaper kept falling off.
I was working, I swear. One of the activities I was in charge of was having students build card houses.
The proud winner of the t-shirt competition holds his design up for everyone to see. Pretty eh?
Just a couple happy faces.
We play a game throughout the three days of the conference in which you can put a clothespin on someone outside of the meeting room and if they walk into the meeting room with it still attached to them, they have to dance in front of everyone. I'm usually pretty good about checking my person, but someone got me in that spot I can't quite reach on my back.
A lovely panorama of the conference participants.
In this day and age of social updates on facebook, twitter, myspace, blogspot, and the likes, it's easy to write down the thought or idea that just popped into your head. That is, if you have internet access. Believe me, I have things I want to share daily but the internet where I live is not regularly available. Then, once I do get on the internet, I'll sit at the computer, staring at the blogspot "new post" page trying to remember everything I wanted to say. It's more frustrating than helpful.
As a treat, I have included pictures of the Youth Development conference the group I'm a member of hosted during the first week of September.
I had to lead an activity in which participants broke into groups of four and had to lay on their backs with their feet facing in. I would then take a bucket of water and place it on their feet. The object of the activity was to have everyone in the group take their shoes off without spilling any of the water in the bucket.
We had the kids all paint their own designs on the conference t-shirt. Then, we had the conference participants cheer for their favorite designs.
This was our main conference room. All of the youth that took part in the conference are sitting down listening to a presentation.
I was supposed to do an activity in which students had to sit down, link arms, and then stand up using teamwork, but instead I decided to sing karaoke. The boy in front was the first and last person to volunteer to sing. He stole the show. Everyone in the background are volunteers who sang backup.
The opening ceremony was a red carpet affair and I was the host. We had paparazzi, a video camera for broadcasting, and EVERYTHING!
We ended one night with impromptu skits in which the volunteers stood in front of everyone and the audience shouted out a scene for us to act. This scene was, "Sumo." My diaper fit well but my opponents diaper kept falling off.
I was working, I swear. One of the activities I was in charge of was having students build card houses.
The proud winner of the t-shirt competition holds his design up for everyone to see. Pretty eh?
Just a couple happy faces.
We play a game throughout the three days of the conference in which you can put a clothespin on someone outside of the meeting room and if they walk into the meeting room with it still attached to them, they have to dance in front of everyone. I'm usually pretty good about checking my person, but someone got me in that spot I can't quite reach on my back.
A lovely panorama of the conference participants.
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.
- 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.
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.
Monday, June 1, 2009
A poem about chickens
Is this a chicken conspiracy?
Sleeping soundly sounds impossibly
preposterous, sending me sliding steeply into lunacy.
Like pawns placed perfectly
around the perimeter perniciously
forming a feather flapping filibuster
preventing me from dreamily freely floating far from reality
Tossing my torso to and fro
'til the tumultuous throaty torture tips me too far
flipping, flying, frustrated
further towards the floor in a furious fixated fervor
fearing finally my mind to me must meticulously muster energy to main my enemy
maliciously.
But honestly, can it really be
that the enemy with a brain like a pea has it in for me?
Or is it me and my conspiracy theory convincing me subconsciously
of an imaginary chicken wake-up spree.
I hate chickens.
Sleeping soundly sounds impossibly
preposterous, sending me sliding steeply into lunacy.
Like pawns placed perfectly
around the perimeter perniciously
forming a feather flapping filibuster
preventing me from dreamily freely floating far from reality
Tossing my torso to and fro
'til the tumultuous throaty torture tips me too far
flipping, flying, frustrated
further towards the floor in a furious fixated fervor
fearing finally my mind to me must meticulously muster energy to main my enemy
maliciously.
But honestly, can it really be
that the enemy with a brain like a pea has it in for me?
Or is it me and my conspiracy theory convincing me subconsciously
of an imaginary chicken wake-up spree.
I hate chickens.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Mass transit is good
Bangkok is a cool city but anyone who lives there or has even just visited will agree, there's just too much traffic. I like maps, but I especially like this map.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
The decision I've made
A long long time ago, I decided I wanted to join the Peace Corps after I finished college. It was a decision I made that would determine which paths in my young life I was to take. It would be years before I could complete my goal but the paths happened to be very straight and flat. I finished high school, entered college, finished college, joined the Peace Corps, and now here I am with less than one year left in my service. Everything that was placed in front of me while on each path had been easy to pass. I was preparing myself for that one ultimate goal, the Peace Corps, and I knew exactly what I had to do to complete it.
It's looking like I am going to finish my service successfully, which begs the question, now what? Even though I have 11 months left, "Now what?" is becoming a real part of my future. A long long time ago, I decided I wanted to join the Peace Corps, and then...I couldn't say. I drew a blank if I tried to plan for my future after my service, like someone who knows nothing about quantum mechanics pondering theoretical physics. I hit a wall and as a result, couldn't think of one good option.
How could I have been so irresponsible? How could I care so little about my future to just brush my inability to plan my life aside? How could I ignore the fact that I wasn't sure of anything after Peace Corps? But hey, back up, back up. These questions are valid enough to be asked but it wasn't like as though I never had something in the works. The truth is, after I was unable to decide during college where I would go after Peace Corps, I told myself the decision would be made within those two years of service. I did have a plan, even if it wasn't planned, and it worked.
The decision I've made for once I complete my service is to work at an international school in Bangkok and I'm going to pursue it passionately. I can say with no hesitation that I like Thailand. I know the people, I eat the food, and I speak the language. I'm comfortable here, almost as comfortable as I am in Michigan. Positions will open up starting in October and I will begin applying immediately. My decision was not made in haste. I've been thinking about where I want to live and how I want to live for over a year now. Bangkok is a big city with a few drawbacks, but for each drawback, it has something I like. International schools are popular in Bangkok and I'm hoping at least a few positions open up. Even though I was unable to plan for my life after Peace Corps, I was certain I'd figure something out.
What's my future look like now? It's time to eat rice.
It's looking like I am going to finish my service successfully, which begs the question, now what? Even though I have 11 months left, "Now what?" is becoming a real part of my future. A long long time ago, I decided I wanted to join the Peace Corps, and then...I couldn't say. I drew a blank if I tried to plan for my future after my service, like someone who knows nothing about quantum mechanics pondering theoretical physics. I hit a wall and as a result, couldn't think of one good option.
How could I have been so irresponsible? How could I care so little about my future to just brush my inability to plan my life aside? How could I ignore the fact that I wasn't sure of anything after Peace Corps? But hey, back up, back up. These questions are valid enough to be asked but it wasn't like as though I never had something in the works. The truth is, after I was unable to decide during college where I would go after Peace Corps, I told myself the decision would be made within those two years of service. I did have a plan, even if it wasn't planned, and it worked.
The decision I've made for once I complete my service is to work at an international school in Bangkok and I'm going to pursue it passionately. I can say with no hesitation that I like Thailand. I know the people, I eat the food, and I speak the language. I'm comfortable here, almost as comfortable as I am in Michigan. Positions will open up starting in October and I will begin applying immediately. My decision was not made in haste. I've been thinking about where I want to live and how I want to live for over a year now. Bangkok is a big city with a few drawbacks, but for each drawback, it has something I like. International schools are popular in Bangkok and I'm hoping at least a few positions open up. Even though I was unable to plan for my life after Peace Corps, I was certain I'd figure something out.
What's my future look like now? It's time to eat rice.
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