Going Places (In the Wrong Direction)

I've always suspected that I have a terrible sense of direction, but luckily from the age I've had to seriously navigate myself somewhere , I've had an iPhone. By far, the worst part of leaving my phone at home for an entire month was that I no longer had access to Google Maps, which is a constant presence in my everyday life. A few years ago, I had a conversation with my mom, in which I expressed my concern over the fact that--despite having lived in San Francisco for my entire life--I had no clue where anything in the city, whether it be restaurant, street, or entire neighborhood, was located. My mom responded without pause, assuring me that when I started to drive, I'd quickly figure out my way around.

I've had my license since January, and the only place I can get to 100% of the time without a GPS is my school. Which is a mile from my house. It's honestly ridiculous. 

I tried to force myself to get home from my friend's house in the Fillmore District without my phone's help once, after driving there multiple times. After driving through a few questionable alleys and nearly getting on the freeway the wrong direction, I pulled over, opened Google Maps, and haven't gone without it since. 

Armed with a Boy Scout worthy set of navigational skills, I set off for Thailand.  

My already horrendous sense of direction has not benefited from spending no more than 5 days in the same place, not to mention that I can't read any of the signs or say anything but "hello" in Thai. Hannah will often try to show me on a map where we are, where we're going, and how we'll get there, to which I typically nod and walk off the wrong way. I'm essentially a slightly less competent Dora the Explorer.

The most concerning thing about all of this is that I'm not getting better at navigating. At all. After spending three days in a place, I'm still just as hopeless at getting back to ourguesthouse from the 7-11 around the corner as I was the day we arrived. Likewise, I can't comprehend a map any better almost three weeks into this trip than I could on day one. 

I'm going to try to force myself to make more of an effort to take responsibility for getting us places, in hopes that I do make (some) progress. After all, how lost could I get us in the next week? Luckily, we're heading to Koh Tao, a small island off of the Gulf Coast tomorrow, so I'll only be able to lead us a maximum of seven miles in the wrong direction. Hannah told me the other day that "if you think you're going the right direction, you should turn around." Hopefully by following that advice, I won't do too badly.

But next time I'm bringing my iPhone.

Hungry Hungry Hannah (and Leah)

One of the primary reasons that Leah and I decided to spend thirty days in Thailand was that we wanted to spend thirty days eating in Thailand. So far, the food has not been a disappointment, especially in Chiang Mai. In fact, I'd say that food has figured so prominently in our experience of Chiang Mai that it deserves its own blog post. I understand that by devoting a blog post entirely to describing and displaying pictures of food that you can imagine but not taste, I risk being infuriating in the same way that Guy Fieri is whenever he takes a bite of a delicious, delicious sandwich from a Diner, Drive-In, or Dive that's two thousand miles and ten states away. But because I am secure in the knowledge that no one could possibly be more annoying than Guy, that's a risk I'm willing to take. So, without further ado:

Chiang Mai, My, My, This is Tasty: A Post in Three Meals (Plus Some Snacks)

BREAKFAST

I wake up earlier and hungrier than Leah, so in Chiang Mai I went straight down to the hotel breakfast buffet before she got up. I was, consequently, the only one of us who got to watch the daily 6:45 feeding of the Giant Chinese Tour Group. For those of you who have never seen a Giant Chinese Tour Group at a breakfast buffet, know that there is a simple way to distinguish it from a Giant American Tour Group in a similar environment: where the American Tour Group proceeds in orderly yet interminable single file through the buffet, the Chinese variant will only move as a single entity between stations. First, everyone has to get rice--all at once!--from the giant silver rice crock. Then, the action shifts and everyone has to get pork and vegetables--all at once!--from the pork and vegetable tray. The actions shifts again and we're moving to chicken curry. Huddle around the teacups! Veer left to the tea! Conclusion: the Giant Chinese Tour Group is a highly gregarious species that exhibits a group locomotion similar to that of a team of five-year-olds playing YMCA soccer, complete with the few daisy-picking dreamers who drift over to the American section of the buffet for some French toast and jam.

The disadvantage of eating at the same time as the Giant Chinese Tour Group is that it's really hard to break through and get some tea. The advantage is that the tour group introduces so much chaos into the dining room that the kitchen staff are too distracted to notice me filling up four giant water bottles from the cold purified water dispenser. In Thailand, that stuff is liquid gold.

LUNCH

Leah and I generally do most of our sightseeing and activity-ing during the first half of the day, so by the time we get to lunch, we're starving and I'm pumped up in full-on adventure mode, ready to order a lot of something colorful and spicy. Now, i have a pretty high spice tolerance for a white girl (a tolerance no doubt enhanced by the past four years of dumping Cholula hot sauce on half my food at Princeton), so I've actually been able to handle most of the dishes I've been served here so far (though I'm pretty sure that the waiters here aren't really serving me "Thai spicy" when I ask for it). The problem is that I think so highly of myself and my ability to take the heat that I invariably overuse the condiments that grace every Thai restaurant table.

"Look at you, Hannah. You managed to haggle down the price of that songthaew (taxi) ride down by a whole ten baht," I'll think to myself, lifting the lid off the little ceramic jar of chili paste. "Thai-level bargaining skills merit Thai-level spiciness."

On goes a spoonful.

"And now you're eating at what the guidebook says is the most authentic northern restaurant in Chiang Mai! And you managed to navigate here with only one wrong turn!"

Another spoonful, along with the whole bowlful of raw onions that comes with the khao soi. 

"Yep, Hannah, you're no average tourist. You are one adventurous motherf***er."

I'll take a bite.

Because I am not, in fact, that adventurous a motherf***er, I can't know this for sure, but I imagine that eating really spicy food must be something like doing drugs. The first few tastes you have are great. It's only once you stop for a moment and give your body a chance to really react to what you've just put into it that you begin pay for what you've done.

AFTER-LUNCH MISSION

Armed with the liquid gold stolen from breakfast and the side of rice served with my curry, II can usually make it to the end of my adventurous lunch. Once we leave the restaurant, though, internal burning catches up with me, and external heat and humidity catches up with Leah. These are unmistakable signs that it's time for the after-lunch mission: fruit shakes.

We in the U.S. have a truly bizarre, fraught relationship with liquified fruit. At one end of the spectrum, we accept that any juice from Jamba Juice should contain at least four different kinds of fruit, and some sort of mysterious "boost" that may or may not be edible and we publicly ridicule the proliferation of juice cleanses while privately feeling guilty that we're not doing them ourselves. At the other end of the spectrum, we process the pulp and nutrienta out of pureed fruit, decry the juice product as empt calories, and then serve it at snacktimes nationwide without thinking twice. But somehow the rest of the world (or at least all of the countries I've been to outside our hemisphere) has figured out that all you need to do to turn ripe fruit into one of the most wonderfully refreshing beverages you could imagine is to blend it up with some ice and a little sugar syrup, and you're done.

Fortunately, Thailand has the art of fruit shaking down pat.

Unfortunately, Leah and I sometimes get overexcited by the simple pleasures of fruit shakes and end up suffering from their only drawback: brain freeze. 

DINNER

Dinner is our wild card meal. Sometimes, we get Thai food, and I'm a little less ambitious with the seasoning. Once, we got Mexican, just to see how it compared to San Francisco (conclusion: tortilla was overfloured and the cheese was a little unusual, but my God, can Thai chefs make a mean salsa). Because Janet told us to, we had French. And then of course one evening we ditched regular dinner altogwther and instead made a meal out of snacks from the stalls at one of Chiang Mai's famous night market, just as all of the guidebooks insist we do.

Eating at a night market, Leah and I agreed, is a lot like eating at a high school club fundraising festival, a college dining hall, or Hometown Buffet. You walk in there and see all these things that you think you'd like to eat, and you can't imagine how you'll ever decide between them. You walk around for a while, scoping out your options. You get hungrier and hungrier, but are afraid to eat anything for fear of spoiling your appetite for the really good dish that you're sure is just a few steps that way. You realize that these are embarrassingly first-world problems, and get the next thing you see. It's pretty good--not great, but at least good enough to whet your appetite for the next thing you have, which will be even better. You try something else. And something else. And something else.

And after an hour trying a whole bunch of disparate things (some of which--summer rolls with green chili sauce

--were worth it, some of which--whatever mysterious brown paste was wrapped up in the banana leaf on the left

--were definitely not), you discover that you're full but not satisfied, and you're out the same amount of money or more than you would have been if you had just had a regular sit-down meal. And you know that there's only one solution to this, again, embarrassingly first-world problem.

Dessert. 

Sweet corn with butter, salt, and sugar? Delicious!

Fried banana crepe on a stick with powdered sugar and caramel sauce? Tastes as good in Thailand as it does at the Texas State Fair!

Steamed bun with custard filling? I don't even really know what custard is, but it's heavenly!

Durian ice cream? I don't quite think that durian is tasty enough to deserve its nickname as the "king of fruits"**, but ice cream is ice cream!

{No photo available, unfortunately.}

Chocolate banana waffle? Enough said!

Earlier this year, New York Times reporter Michael Moss released a best-selling book titled Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. I may release a spinoff titled Salt Sugar Fat: How to Save a Confusing Dinner.

In the time it's taken me to write this, Leah and I have moved from Chiang Mai to Krabi, an estuarine town on the Andaman coast of southern Thailand, where we'll be for a few more days before heading east to the Gulf coast. It is astonishingly beautiful.

*Which, side note, sometimes comes charmingly molded into the shape of a heart or a star, like this:

Rice: It's magically delicious!

**In case you were wondering, mangosteen is the queen.***

***In case you were wondering, this is what durian and mangosteen look like.

Durian

Mangosteen

They do kind of seem to go together, don't they?

Podology

The National Institute of Health defines a hypochondriac as someone who "believes that physical symptoms are signs of a serious illness." Wikipedia adds that hypochondriacs "become unduly alarmed about any physical symptoms they detect, no matter how minor the symptom may be." To help you visualize the difference between hypochondriacs and non-hypochondriacs, I've created the following helpful graph:

Now, I'm a tough cookie. Though I am, as we discussed a couple of posts ago, somewhat prone to injury and accident (especially on bicycles), I'm pretty good at bouncing back from anything that happens to me. I don't freak out. Well, at least not initially. I am, I suppose, more of what you might call a "stoic hypochondriac." Let me refer you to another helpful graph.

So when, towards the end of our stay in Kanchanaburi, I discovered that I had an infected ingrown toenail on my right foot, I toughed it out for a couple of days.

"Toe update!" I'd announce to Leah every morning. "I just dug some more crap out of it and now I think it's definitely going to start healing."

"I think you should stop digging crap out of it and go to the doctor," Leah would reply.

"No, no, it's getting better. I'll be fine."

And then I'd spend the rest of the day driving Leah crazy by periodically reminding her of the stabbing pain in my perfectly fine toe.

This went on until the evening that we got to Chiang Mai on Wednesday and I looked up toenail infections online.

"Can you die from a toe infection?" Yahoo Answers asked.

"Yes, if you have a gangrene infection, and if it spreads, it can kill you," the Best Answer Chosen by Voters answered, citing a "Distant relative [who] died of gangrene infection."

"Leah, I need to go to the hospital tomorrow."

As it happens, Chiang Mai is home to The Podology Center--the only clinic in the nearest five countries that specializes in the treatment of skin and nails on the feet. The German founder, Dirk, regularly treats the toenails of, variously, the royal family, the daughter of the man who controls all of the gold in Thailand, and local elephants. Or so we were told by Janet, the sextagenarian expat from Kansas City, MO who's spent the past six years working as an assistant at the Podology Center and who, because Dirk was out of town for the week, picked me and Leah up from in front of Tha Pae Gate at 10:30 last Thursday morning. Janet, we quickly learned, was a little nutso.

As we sped along the highway leading from Old Chiang Mai towards The Podology Center, expounded at length to me and Leah about podology, expat life in Thailand, and the character flaws of her husband. We learned a lot.

"Podology is a science only practiced outside the U.S., mostly in Germany, and is not the same as podiatry. Podologists study the causes of foot problems, but podiatrists just treat the symptoms. It's the difference between pulling off the head of a weed and digging it up from the root. Speaking of which, if you go to a podiatrist with an ingrown toenail, they'll want to pull the entire nail off. If you go to a hospital in Chiang Mai, they'll just chop off the toe. And you don't want that!"

"No," I agreed, "we certainly don't want that."

"Podologists are much better for long-term foot health. My husband and I receive regular treatment. But my husband is such a baby about it. Us women are much tougher. A couple of years back, we went with my girlfriend and her husband on Flight of the Gibbon, that ziplining tour--have you done it?"

This last with a pointed glance into the rearview mirror.

"Um, no, not yet," I offered. "After all, we only got into Chiang Mai last night."

"Well, you simply must. It's enormous fun. At least for me and my girlfriend. Oh, we were laughing...and our husbands were shaking on the platforms!"

I joined in, a half-beat late, to Janet's conspiratory chuckle. Ah, men. What babies!

"Yep, my husband, you know, he even gets nervous when I'm driving! He thinks I go way too fast, and he hates the roads here. In fact, when we first got to Thailand, he refused to drive at all! So then one day, we were out to dinner with my girlfriend, and we suddenly just got up and left him at the restaurant with the car to drive home. Oh, we went shopping, and had such a time! Yes, we were laughing..."

Another chuckle.

"Have you been to that restaurant? La Fourchette?"

Another pointed glance.

"Uh, no. After all, we only got into Chiang Mai last night."

"Oh, you have to! It's wonderful! We have our annual dinner there every year. People offer us extra to get in, but we fill up the reservations so fast! I always make them napkin rings for their Christmas gift."*

By this time, we had arrived at The Podology Center. Janet led us past the German shepherds, iguana, and turtle in the front yard into the clinic, where she sat me down with my feet soaking in a warm iodine bath while she bustled around collecting supplies from where they had all apparently been misplaced by Dirk and his Thai assistants. 

"I'm going to shoot them," Janet muttered audibly. I was concerned for Dirk and the Thai assistants.

After ten minutes, treatment commenced.

Pre-operation consultation.

"We'll start with the left foot," Janet declared. "Wouldn't want you to be uneven, right?"

I felt this was akin to a dentist suggesting that it was necessary to extract your left molar because the right had a toothache. This did not seem right.

"Right!" I replied with enthusiasm, not wanting to join Dirk and the assistants on Janet's hit list.

Janet pulled my foot out of the water and immediately began tsking.

"Your skin is very dry and hard, and you're retaining a lot of water down in here. You've got a corn starting on this toe, and oh, I don't like the looks of this callus on your big toe. I've never seen that before. I'd better take a picture and send it to Dirk."

She whipped out her Samsung, did so, and continued.

"But don't feel bad. I've seen feet that are much worse. Yep, I think I'd better see what I can do here. I'm going to need my power tools. I love my power tools!"

Janet removed a small electric sander from a nearby rack and went to work on my dry, hard, water-retaining left foot. I stayed very still--a wise move for all those who happen to find any part of their anatomy in close proximity to whizzing German power tools wielded by a small, feisty grandmother--and tried not to think about what would happen when Janet began working on the foot that I had actually come to have treated.

What did happen was this. Janet zipped a zip tie around the knuckle of my big toe. Leah was enlisted to hold my foot down in case I kicked while anesthetic was being injected into it. Janet loaded up a standard syringe with lidocaine. Hannah was thankful that there was going to be lidocaine, and that it was not going to be administered with any sort of German power tool.

Post-lidocaine, pre-nailectomy.

And then...everything went great. Janet cut away the offending part of my toenail (while I watched with morbid fascination--it's really quite surreal to watch someone cut into part of your body without feeling it at all), cleaned up the wound, wrapped my toe up with enough tape and gauze to stock Princeton fencing's medical bag, and gave me some antibiotics to stave off any recurring infection. Three thousand baht, four days, and one follow-up appointment later, my toe really does feel fine, and I'm a new believer in the power of podology.

Finally fine!

And that is how I received minor surgery in Thailand for less than a hundred bucks.

*Leah and I did, in fact, eat at La Fourchette the following night, where we each had an amazing three-course French meal, with wine, for less than $40 total.

Purchasing Power

I mentioned in my last post that American purchasing power in Thailand is astounding. You'll recall that Leah and I each rented bikes in Kanchanaburi for 25 Thai baht/day: one US dollar is about 30 baht. Some other pricing examples:

-A made-to-order dinner of green curry and rice at a restaurant = 60 baht ($2). The same meal from a street cart is even less.

$2 worth of food in Thailand.

-An air conditioned guest house room with private bathroom, for two people = 500 baht/night (<$20).

-Laundry service for a week's worth of clothes from two people = 140 baht (<$5), including  cleaning of sneakers caked with mud (requested) and the nylon bag I dropped the clothes off in (a happy surprise).

-A 250 mL bottle of sunscreen at 7-11 (the cheapest and largest we could find) = over 300 baht ($10). Yeah, we can't figure that one out either.

Sunscreen notwithstanding, the enormous difference between the prices of goods and services in Thailand as compared to the United States or Western Europe emphasizes the income disparity between developing and developed countries to a degree that is impossible to overlook. The average per capita income in Thailand is around $8,200/year, or just over $22/day, meaning that even students like me and Leah can easily afford purchases that most Thais cannot.

But purchasing power and the privilege it bestows is a double-edged sword.* It is, obviously, wonderful to live in a place where a taxi ride pretty much from anywhere to anywhere sets you back only a couple of bucks. Leah and I have run into a bunch of Australian, European, and American expats who have moved to Thailand for that very reason. Yet I'm always beset by a sense of guilt when I hand the cabbie his hundred baht--a feeling that even though I'm almost certainly being charged way more than standard fares for locals, I'm the one ripping the driver off by not paying him nearly as much as he deserves.

One can make many points to fend off the guilt. Tourism bolsters the local economy. Even a small amount of my money goes a lot farther in Thailand than I realize. Standards of living are much lower here than they are at home. Money doesn't buy happiness, and essentially all of the Thais we've met seem perfectly happy. People don't want charity, and even if they did, I can't even come close to helping everyone. I tip more generously than a lot of people do, anyway.

At the end of the day, though, these are all rationalizations, and they're uncomfortably similar to the ones that I make on a regular basis in the U.S. whenever I encounter a janitor, taxi driver, or gas station cashier. Indeed, one of the blessing/curses of travel is that it forces me to acknowledge the ubiquity and degree of such rationalizations in my everyday life.

I'm reading a book right now called The Fortune Cookie Chronicles about the intricacies of Chinese food in the U.S. and the rest of the world,** which spends a chapter discussing the economics of Chinese restaurant labor. Over the past several decades, thousands and thousands of Chinese immigrants have paid up to $70,000 each (a large sum to the average American, and astronomical to the average Chinese) to be illegally smuggled into the U.S. Many, speaking little or no English and therefore facing limited job opportunities, end up working twelve-hour shifts seven days a week for decades at Chinese restaurants scattered in nowhere towns across the U.S.

I'm sure that the situation is similar for restaurant workers from other developing countries as well. And this is something that I overlook with a 20% tip.

This post is clearly of a much different flavor*** than prior and forthcoming posts. Leah and I have been talking a lot about these issues, and as you can see, we haven't really resolved any of them--nor do we expect to. But we welcome thoughts or comments that any of you might have!

While we've been talking, we've also been traveling. In lieu of a full recap of the past several s\days, we'll be posting a kind of photo essay later today. And I'll pick up next time with details of how I used my Thai purchasing power to receive minor surgery for a hundred bucks.

*Of course, travel to any country (even one in which you don't benefit from a favorable exchange rate) is a privilege in and of itself. Business Insider reported that in 2012, about 1 billion tourists traveled internationally--less than 1/7 of the global population. Assuming that many of these are repeat travelers, the percentage of people in the world who have ever left their home country is considerably lower: less than 5%, by some estimates.

We're some of the lucky few who get to see places like this.

**From which I'm learning some fascinating things, by the way. There are more Chinese restaurants in the U.S. than the number of McDonald's, Burger King, and KFC establishments combined. There is an enormous black market of smuggled shipments of chicken feet and pork trotters thrown out by Chinese restaurants in the U.S. (which are patronized by Americans, who don't like them) to supply Chinese restaurants in China (which are patronized by Chinese, who do). General Tso's chicken is named after an actual general. Soy sauce from La Choy Food Products, Inc., the company that produces over 40% of the shelf-stable Asian products sold in the U.S., doesn't actually contain any soy.

***And length, because I'm now in Chiang Mai at a hotel with computers in the lobby that are much easier to type on than Leah's iPad.

Pedal Power

I do not, historically, have an excellent relationship with bikes. To those of you familiar with my talents as a runner, fencer, and general athlete, my ineptitude on two wheels may be something of a surprise. To those of you familiar with my distinct lack of talent in walking gracefully and without injurious incident on two feet, however, it's really really not.

Two weeks into my freshman year at Princeton, I flipped off my bike and had to get six stitches in my chin. A month ago, I crashed during a family bike ride in Cape Cod and suffered abrasions on my left shin, led knee, left elbow, left hand, right hip, and both thighs that have yet to fully heal. When I went to Israel with BBYO in tenth grade, we had to ride these tandem bike things around a very long loop for mandated fun, and I got very sweaty and grumpy.

So it was with outward bravado and internal terror that I suggested to Leah that we spend our first full day in Kanchanaburi riding rented bikes to a guidebook-recommended "wat" (temple) about six miles away. And it was with guarded optimism and entirely undisguised and well-founded fear for my safety that Leah ultimately agreed. We left our hotel, casually walked the Death Railway along the Bridge Over the River Kwai into town,

Hoping that the Death Railway isn't taking us to the death-by-bike way.

 and stopped at a laundromat-cum-bike rental shop, where we each traded 50 baht for a two-day rental of single-gear bikes and locks and were off. (50 baht is about $1.80. Tourists have a lot of purchasing power in Thailand.)

Imagine you're playing Mario Kart on one of those city mode levels; you know, the ones where there are all kinds of other cars and giant caterpillar buses zooming around and honking. Now imagine that instead of karts, there are all kinds of moped/scooter things; instead of shells whistling up behind you, there are stray dogs chasing at your heels, and instead of smiling billboards of Mario, there are giant pictures of King Bhumibol. That's about what the first half of our bike ride was like.

Once we got out of the main city center, things were considerably less chaotic. In fact, we even had time to take some pictures. You can re-appreciate the one I showed you last time:

Not the wat what we wanted, but still somewat beautiful. 

and also appreciate these other ones:

Leah at the wat.

Chinese cemetery in the countryside.

Since getting out of the city took a lot more time and many more wrong turns than we were expecting, though, we didn't actually make it to the wat we were heading for. After biking in the countryside for a little while, we turned around, Mario Karted ourselves around some more wrong turns in the city center for a while longer, and eventually gave up and hailed a taxi to take us and our bikes to a restaurant for lunch. For all of you following the analogy, this felt aswonderful as getting a Chain Chomp in your item box.

Sweet salvation.

The we went to the pool, took a nap, and ordered vanilla milkshakes from room service. Conclusion: rented bikes can be an enjoyable way to see a new city. Especially when they're sitting next to you in a taxi.

Stay tuned for scenes from our next episode: 

https://www.facebook.com/OnsThaiIssan?ref=ts&fref=ts

Super suave

After spending the weekend reading reports of delayed and cancelled flights in and out of SFO due to the Asiana crash, Leah and I were relieved to take off from San Francisco on Air China Flight 986 at 3 PM on Tuesday afternoon (though it was sobering and not a bit unsettling to glance out the airplane window as we taxiied from the gate and see the charred wreckage of the Asiana Boeing still blocking an adjacent runway). We were especially pleased with ourselves for having each brought only a sngle suitcase and small backpack with us, a fact that we continually congratulated ourselves on as we glided suavely around the other passengers in the airport. "Look at all the giant bags that Asian family's trying to check!" I cackled. "Those Indian parents are never going to be able to fit those Costco bags of pistachios and cartons of Tang into their carry-ons!" I don't think you can fully appreciate the joy of traveling light until you've spent a decade hauling a 45-pound fencing bag with you on 90% of your trips.

    Super suave

Our journey continued to be relatively pleasant and uneventful for the first several hours of our flight. Leah watched a movie on her iPad and I finished a book. Our first moment of excitement arrived with dinner. Now, since I'm used to the pace of meal service on American airlines (a pace at which the people in row 24 can easily finish eating by the time the people in row 28 are deciding between chicken and pasta; at which you can read three chapters of "Into Thin Air" in between getting your food and the complimentary beverage that comes with it; and at which anyone with a special meal becomes so ravenous while waiting for their food that they end up eating a thousand calories' worth of yogurt trail mix by the time they get their 200 calories' worth of steamed carrots and rice, Leah and ithought it was safe to wait a little bit after receving our food to start eating.

    All 200.

Not so. We were halfway through our entrees when we realized that the flight attendants were already plowing up the aisles with their garbage carts. "If I down this yogurt really fast, I think I can make it!" I hissed to Leah. "Oh God oh God," she muttered in response, ripping the plastic wrap off her container of cubed melon. The garbage carts advanced towards us with frightening speed. We stabbed sporks into salad. We barely managed to dump our trash with the Chinese blitzkriegers before they zoomed past us, and counted ourselves lucky that we were able to avoid an additional thirty minutes sharing our economy tray table space with a few leftover grains of rice and the one piece of honeydew that we all leave behind.

As it turned out, though, we hadn't seen the last of the meal service commandos. After dinner and another movie, at around 8:30, Leah and I began to try to trick our circadian rhythms into thinking that it was bedtime--a delicate, hour-long process that involves much flossing and tooth-brushing and Ambien-taking and staunchly avoiding looking at that irritating passenger with his window shade cracked to reveal the bright sunlight outside. By 9:30, we were ready for sleep. By 10 we were asleep. And at 10:30, we were jolted out of sleep by the cries of "ESSUSE ME!? ESSCUSE ME?! YOU OLDEL SPESSAL VEGGIE MEAL?" Coming from two Chinese flight attendants bent disconcertingly close to our faces with trays of second dinner--something that i had believed was unique to college campuses, but apparently exists om Air China as well. Before we could think twice, we had accepted the meals that our brushed-and-flossed selves had no intention of eating. And so it was that, despite our earlier efforts, we ended up spending quality time with cantaloupe.

I'll condense the rest of this blog post by saying that we made it to the Beijing airport, the Bangkok airport, and our airport hotel in Bangkok without further significant incident. We're now in Kanchanaburi, a town a couple of hours outside of Bangkok, where we'll be based for the next few nights. We'll update you more on our activities here shortly, but here's a teaser:

Of Cookies And Songs

If you followed my last and first* blog two years ago, you may remember that my packing for a trip is essentially, if both unintentionally and unwillingly, a reenactment of Laura Numeroff's "If You Give A Mouse A Cookie."**

A masterpiece.

So far, though, I've almost completely managed to avoid the circular tale that is my packing process, primarily because I've almost completely put off packing altogether. Instead, I've been doing other very important things to prepare for our upcoming trip. For example, I've spent about three days trying to come up with good titles*** for this blog. Most of my best ideas have come from song titles. For example:

Thai and Love and You

Thai Wanna Dance with Somebody

Hannah's Song (Oh, Thai Thai Thai)

Every Thai-le A Memory

ThaiMCA

Since Leah was about ready to punch me after I suggested ThaiMCA, we actually still haven't come up with a name for the blog. I'm writing this right now with a placeholder title. I'll be fascinated to see what title we agree on by the time this post gets to you. (Hopefully we do actually agree on a title at some point. If we can't, I'm not optimistic about our cooperative capacity over the next 30 days.)

And yep, that's about all I've done on the "preparing to leave" front so far. Well, that's not strictly true. I had been planning on entering a 4th of July bake-off at a community center near where Leah horseback rides at Stanford, but another commitment came up and I wasn't able to make it. So this evening I held a private bake-off against myself at home. I totally won.

                  Another masterpiece.

Moral: If you Give A Hannah A Packing List, it might be kind of like Giving A Mouse A Cookie. Or she might just Bake Herself A Pie.

Footnotes

* I find it fascinating that the meaning of the phrase "last and first" is so different from the meaning of the phrase "first and last." Seems like it violates some sort of lexical symmetric property.

** You may also remember that the independent genius of "If You Give A Mouse A Cookie" was somewhat undermined by the sequels "If You Give A Moose A Muffin" and "If You Give A Pig A Pancake," which were in turn further undermined by "...Cat A Cupcake," "...Pig A Party," "...Mouse To School," and "Mouse To The Movies." I must report that, as of Fall 2011, we can also Give A Dog A Donut.

Probably not a masterpiece.

I'm not sure that I'm qualified to speak on the principle of Dog Donut-Giving in general, but I can confidently aver that my pets do not need any more calories. Furthermore, the release of Numeroff's latest title underscores a striking double standard in contemporary children's entertainment. Why is it that we condone Numeroff Giving Cookies, Cupcakes, and Donuts to various Animal Species, but are upset when Cookies are Given to Monsters? Trekkie Monster would be outraged.

*** Meaning titles that involve enough of a pun to make me happy, but are at least relevant enough to our trip that Leah doesn't reject them outright.