Wednesday 25 August 2010
Thursday 19 August 2010
Lucky Monk
Last weekend a few friends of mine met a monk named Samnang, or Lucky, near our home in Battambang. Then, completely by chance, I met him the next day on my sunset bike ride visiting Cham mosques by the river. Later that night, he came home with two other roommates. There, Lucky met the final roommate from Tanzania. Yesterday I went with Lucky to take facebook pictures for him in front of a fancy hotel in Battambang. He was wearing "normal people clothing".
Pictures of Lucky and unlikely new friends coming soon...
Pictures of Lucky and unlikely new friends coming soon...
Tuesday 26 January 2010
I have an apartment..
here is something I wasted time doing while I was attempting to connect to the wireless internet that's around the corner from my place (supposedly I can on the balcony). I am there now eating coffee ice cream and listening to funny french music with Alanis Morissette interspersed. so odd.
whats in a network name? a lot actually, my life and a good peak into it. it's pretty simple as it's somewhat chronological, but nevertheless a fun game to play about where you have been this year and last.
VOLHQ - doing DNC related volunteer things with denver convention host committee
adams mark 101 - some hotel with some Larabar related trip
apple demo - probably doing some machine repairs or other at cherry creek mall
amberton apts - i have no idea what this is? who lives here? where is it?
205 - again, what? somewhere in denver?
205 high power - something big shot in denver?
CityPark Pearl St Grill - I never used the internet here at this mediocre Denver eatery, maybe its from Stella's, across the street
Stellas2 - the best coffee/work spot with a million nooks to get lost in
amante - uncertain what this is from
beachcomber - a Larabar job in Miami for the marathon
fairmont guest - another Larabar gig, in Newport beach for the huntington beach marathon
Alice NETGEAR - no clue!
cherry_creek - denver.
stellas - another stellas wifi
bobwiley - 542 downing st!!! after i had to rename our network and make it password protected
Hunt - old Larabar boss's house
Hallaran home - CT, parents house
Capitol Hill Hight Speed Wireless - somewhere in Denver, not sure what spot
PennStreetPerk - coffee shop in Cap hill
San.Diego.Airport.FreeWiFi - some Larabar trip or other
SouthwestWi-Fi - using wifi on the airplane! that was fun
The Carriage House- i think this is from the Crested Butte trip which makes me really really really happy
Boingo hotspot - on route to asia, maybe in Bangkok?
PCCW - asia something
Ariyasom - first night with Bro at fun boutique hotel in bangkok
RBC - railay beach club near krabi thailand! cant wait to be back there in two weeks
rbc scanning - again
meraki - aisa but i can't place it
Tri Yaan Na Ros 1 - Bro's first place in chiang mai
CHEDI HOTEL - Bro's second place in chiang mai
YMCA Hotspot - VIA's orientation spot in chiang mai
YMCA Hotspot FL1 - the first floor wifi of VIA's orientation spot in chiang mai
G604 - no idea
LCCT-Internet - KL's low cost carrier terminal, air asia what else?
HS-Citronet-Ramai-Mall - oh, the beloved mall in jogja, indonesia
MOC2 - something i dont know
coffee time - this says jambi!
Kedai Kopi Hotspot Zone! - kedai either in jambi or jogja
kedai_kopi - read above
Ratu hotspot - jambi to the max
Pujanggahomestay - KL!
MandalayInn - where is this? ill remember one of these days
starbucks - probably in KL airport, where I spent the eve of Christmas eve on my way from Indonesia to Cambodia, and another allnighter from bali to siem reap
TP Link - the royal hotel battambang, my extended stay home
Madison - the lovely creperie where i sit and write this now
Lucky Bungalows - in sihanoukville, cambodia - a respectable and good beach town
bt.umma - ive got no clue
really, even if you didn't make it through my list, I encourage you to do your own. it's a funny way to make yourself reflect, something that can be overwhelming, if you're someone like me.
Wednesday 20 January 2010
bilingual kids
Blogging is like flossing is what I once read; if you don’t do it all the time then you rarely do it, and for this you end up feeling remorseful. The difference is that with blogging your friends make you feel bad (please read: Carolyn Nash). No one has ever ridiculed me over the phone for neglecting to adequately clean between my teeth. The other more significant difference is that blogging demands a lot of a person. It forces you to think about yourself and about what’s happening to you and who you are meeting and communicating (or trying to communicate) with and what you feel about all of it and what you like and what you hate and what you like and hate at the same time and how you fit in, and how you don’t fit in and how none of it is going to make sense and how some of it will end up making perfect sense.
I’d like to be able to attribute my ambivalence about blogging to an aversion to the narcissism involved in tweeting/facebooking and all of these self-aggrandizing cyberspace tools. What it comes down to in my case is not quite simply avoidance and laziness. It’s my propensity to be overwhelmed. Living in Southeast Asia brings an incessant bombardment of new and strange and horrible and delightful encounters with this place and the people in it. I find it exceedingly difficult to address these encounters within myself and then to regurgitate them onto a blog post in any kind of timely fashion. By the time I’m ready to relay these glimpses into the reality I face here, after I’ve managed to understand for myself how I’m feeling and what it means, I’m already being confronted with the next horrifying or lovely experience and the next and the next.
This isn’t going to be an attempt at redemption of any sort, rather I’m going to try and better note the little things for myself here on this thing as a forum for me instead of penning them in my moleskin, or semen gresik notebook, or any other scrap of paper lying around. I have lots of feelings about what I’m doing on this fantastic journey and I have lots of little notes and reminders I’ve put down for myself. So I begin again.
Fish stomach soup. How is that better than bakso ikan (processed fish ball soup)? Or cow tongue or mie (noodles) with ants or pecel lele (catfish) or belut (swamp eel) or sayur asam (sour veggie soup that has a bau and rasa asam – sour smell and taste, maybe the least appetizing of all Indonesian cuisine)? Its not. It’s probably worse, really. But I ate it at lunch today in my new office in my new home in Battambang Cambodia and I didn’t mind. Fine, I swallowed the pieces hole so as not to endure the chewy innards, and I washed it down promptly with half a bottle of water. But after it all I didn’t walk away from lunch planning my escape from this place. In fact, what did I do? I sat with Livina, my new supervisor/coworker/friend and we laughed about screaming nextdoor neighbors, and the harrows of married life, and practiced saying “We are eating rice” in Khmer.
Eating something I once thought inedible actually has very little bearing on my ability to cope here. I just traded my bakso ikan for some fish stomach soup, and I’m feeling pretty good about it.
I’d like to be able to attribute my ambivalence about blogging to an aversion to the narcissism involved in tweeting/facebooking and all of these self-aggrandizing cyberspace tools. What it comes down to in my case is not quite simply avoidance and laziness. It’s my propensity to be overwhelmed. Living in Southeast Asia brings an incessant bombardment of new and strange and horrible and delightful encounters with this place and the people in it. I find it exceedingly difficult to address these encounters within myself and then to regurgitate them onto a blog post in any kind of timely fashion. By the time I’m ready to relay these glimpses into the reality I face here, after I’ve managed to understand for myself how I’m feeling and what it means, I’m already being confronted with the next horrifying or lovely experience and the next and the next.
This isn’t going to be an attempt at redemption of any sort, rather I’m going to try and better note the little things for myself here on this thing as a forum for me instead of penning them in my moleskin, or semen gresik notebook, or any other scrap of paper lying around. I have lots of feelings about what I’m doing on this fantastic journey and I have lots of little notes and reminders I’ve put down for myself. So I begin again.
Fish stomach soup. How is that better than bakso ikan (processed fish ball soup)? Or cow tongue or mie (noodles) with ants or pecel lele (catfish) or belut (swamp eel) or sayur asam (sour veggie soup that has a bau and rasa asam – sour smell and taste, maybe the least appetizing of all Indonesian cuisine)? Its not. It’s probably worse, really. But I ate it at lunch today in my new office in my new home in Battambang Cambodia and I didn’t mind. Fine, I swallowed the pieces hole so as not to endure the chewy innards, and I washed it down promptly with half a bottle of water. But after it all I didn’t walk away from lunch planning my escape from this place. In fact, what did I do? I sat with Livina, my new supervisor/coworker/friend and we laughed about screaming nextdoor neighbors, and the harrows of married life, and practiced saying “We are eating rice” in Khmer.
Eating something I once thought inedible actually has very little bearing on my ability to cope here. I just traded my bakso ikan for some fish stomach soup, and I’m feeling pretty good about it.
Thursday 31 December 2009
Parting Gifts
If you ever find yourself leaving the junior high school in East Java where you've been teaching English for several months, here is something you'll want to keep in mind: gifts. Large and uncompromising presents from each class, and sometimes from class sections within the classes, from the teachers, from individual students. You'll want to prepare for this in one of two ways. Save up plenty of money to accommodate exorbitant shipping costs, or make your limited capacity luggage situation clear to your gift givers in the first place (though I don't know that this latter option would actually make any difference whatsoever). I did neither of these things and was wholly unprepared for the showering of oddly large items I received. The intentions are not just good, they are too generous. These are a truly kind people.
However, intentions must be tabled at some point. The last minute present ceremony left me with the following large and uncompromising gifts: (in the order they were received)
1. two foot wooden horse statue (the symbol of Rongolawe, the hero of Tuban)
2. model set of tuak merchant's stand in enclosed glass case. tuak is the local palm wine. the glass case was not unlike a medium sized fish tank.
3. party box (wrapped cardboard box with a hole covered with clear plastic on top to peak in) with entire traditional javanese costume; batik sarong, lace shawl, and coolie hat (rice paddy hat)
4. Large oleh-oleh (souvenir) sized shrimp flavored krupuk (prawn crackers)
5. Variety bag box. I was literally handed five large handbags in a box with cellophane.
6. Photo album of my departure ceremony
7. Batik fun pack: two batik shirts and one batik shawl
Some of these items unfortunately have not left that small East Javanese town with me, but they will forever remain, in all their splendor, in my mind. They really serve more as a representation of the great capacity of the students of SMPN1 Tuban to rally and upstage the rest of the millions of kids in Java. I'm sure of this. As for the rest of the gifts, they should be at my parent's house this week, baring any unforeseen postal service errs, which essentially means they might get here by the end of the winter. Really from the first offering of the horse statue by a neighbor student before school at 6:30 am, I should have seen it all coming.
Pics of me with departure favors to come!
However, intentions must be tabled at some point. The last minute present ceremony left me with the following large and uncompromising gifts: (in the order they were received)
1. two foot wooden horse statue (the symbol of Rongolawe, the hero of Tuban)
2. model set of tuak merchant's stand in enclosed glass case. tuak is the local palm wine. the glass case was not unlike a medium sized fish tank.
3. party box (wrapped cardboard box with a hole covered with clear plastic on top to peak in) with entire traditional javanese costume; batik sarong, lace shawl, and coolie hat (rice paddy hat)
4. Large oleh-oleh (souvenir) sized shrimp flavored krupuk (prawn crackers)
5. Variety bag box. I was literally handed five large handbags in a box with cellophane.
6. Photo album of my departure ceremony
7. Batik fun pack: two batik shirts and one batik shawl
Some of these items unfortunately have not left that small East Javanese town with me, but they will forever remain, in all their splendor, in my mind. They really serve more as a representation of the great capacity of the students of SMPN1 Tuban to rally and upstage the rest of the millions of kids in Java. I'm sure of this. As for the rest of the gifts, they should be at my parent's house this week, baring any unforeseen postal service errs, which essentially means they might get here by the end of the winter. Really from the first offering of the horse statue by a neighbor student before school at 6:30 am, I should have seen it all coming.
Pics of me with departure favors to come!
Tuesday 3 November 2009
unintentional tour of dutch colonial empire
So I am reading a book on the "new order" period in Indonesian history and I'm reviewing my knowledge of the dutch colonial empire when I realize that I have made a habit out of traveling to or temporarily living in the east indies/west indies...How did I not come to this realization earlier? I don't know! Here is my working list (in chronological order based on my experiences):
South India (definitely a stretch I know), Bonaire, Aruba, St. Maarten, Cape Town, Indonesia
This realization really took me by surprise, enough to write about it here, but I guess if you think about it, the dutch really had their hands on everything for a good three or four centuries. Not only that, but they got serious about spices, and thus you'll notice that most of the aforementioned are equatorial.
In other news, I saw a KFC (Indonesia's first favorite fastfood joint, with Pizza Hut following at a close second) with minarets and a dome on my way back from a trip to Malang in East Java. Yes, a KFC as a mosque. Just what exactly is going on here.
Included here is a picture of Tuban's crown jewel. This mosque does not, incidentally, double as a KFC.
Meanwhile, here a little boy waits after maghrib (prayer at dusk) for his fastfood ala Tuban.
South India (definitely a stretch I know), Bonaire, Aruba, St. Maarten, Cape Town, Indonesia
This realization really took me by surprise, enough to write about it here, but I guess if you think about it, the dutch really had their hands on everything for a good three or four centuries. Not only that, but they got serious about spices, and thus you'll notice that most of the aforementioned are equatorial.
In other news, I saw a KFC (Indonesia's first favorite fastfood joint, with Pizza Hut following at a close second) with minarets and a dome on my way back from a trip to Malang in East Java. Yes, a KFC as a mosque. Just what exactly is going on here.
Included here is a picture of Tuban's crown jewel. This mosque does not, incidentally, double as a KFC.
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