thailand 1/19: vorachuck and chatachak

That afternoon, Chuck brought me to the big weekend market. Brunch had been a small (but hip) catastrophe, during which I’d ordered the Exotic Fruit Plate, and received a bowl of elaborately diced apples and bananas. The cha-yen, sweet, burnt-sienna froth and caffeinated malt - cleared any semblance of a hangover.
The Chatachak market, according to Chuck’s cursory expertise of plebian consumer habits, is a quadrangle of offerings: Clothes, Household, Plants and Pets. We perused clothes, and haggled perfunctorily for two pairs of fishermen pants for me. I wanted to most wanted see the Pets, naturally. We ambled through tight, outdoor corridors lined with crated knots of labradoodle and shi-tzu puppy, dazed with heat and petting. . . cat-pink tongues lapping diseasedly at dozens of foreign hands. If I had much more of a social conscience, I would have thought it was sad, but luckily, I don't. I cooed a lot, and continued to smear my dirty hands behind warm ears and across wet noses, and left simply feeling happy that I'd gotten to pet dogs.
We had a Thai dinner at a fancy shopping plaza called the Paragon. There was some good, spicy soup and a papaya salad macerated in fermented fish, which tasted alright, but smelled in a way that precisely captured the essence of rotting piscine innards. There was a standing offer to go dancing again, but the thought of skin-tight Min and liquor terrified me, so I opted for a jaunt at the large night market, where I was disappointed to find no pets, but an impressive selection of ninja stars.

thailand 1/18: temples; tequila

Bangkok. Schmaltzy habitués will no doubt devour a little iconography:



I rose early and walked due west for the better part of the morning, where I explored two of the nine gaudy, golden wats along the river. They were, I daresay, very Thai. Sequined elephants and reclining Buddha and all. It was bearably hot, and I rather enjoy a good sweat and a hearty jaunt, so, following, I ambled along the riverside markets for a spell, examining an unwantable pastiche of ancient cassette tapes, brass, alligator clips, a toy rocket with a broken wing.
It was early evening when I, dusty and full of ideas, returned to the hostel to clean up and forage for fitting Porsche passenger attire (vainly, and in vain) before meeting Chuck.
We dined at a terribly hip spot in a hideously trendy plaza. We desserted at a patisserie resembling a Swedish dollhouse, run by one of Chuck’s flock of slim, expensive heiress friends. We were soon joined by two more heiresses; Jan, who emerged from behind the wheel of an ivory Lexus flipping hair and cigarettes, and Min, of the legendary coif and the very high heels. We clubbed, which Chuck later verified meant standing around, delicately depleting bottle service goods ordered by Other Heiresses. I had about fifteen cigarettes, and a grasshopper, which tasted of knees and seasoning. We moved clubs. More heiresses. It was after two, and I was exhausted. I managed to stay standing by adopting a miraculously potent regiment of tri-hourly swigs of Cuervo, followed by light molestation by a complete stranger. When I finally slipped out of Jan’s Lexus – like a puddle – and climbed noisily - like a pony - into the top bunk, it was nearly four. I imagined that I reeked of tequila, not unlike that time freshman year that I fell into a hanger of cold, flayed Wings and swore never again to touch the stuff.

thailand 1/17: sukhumvit; soft-shell crab

The flight was four-hours and forty minutes long. I craned my neck for an aerial view of Bangkok before landing, but only caught the tropics edition of standard airport-vicinity sights, some sparse palms and deltas reflecting light under the setting sun.
The airport was apparently new. It gleamed with the blithe care heaped upon the recently acquired. I grinned sort of stupidly through customs. I harbored a small, thrilling fantasy of Chuck – a hunched, sneering vision in popped collars – greeting me at the gate, which didn’t pan out. (The latest romantic chimera slain by sedulous, unremorseful financiers) My first purchase in Thailand was a telephone call. Chuck, whose voice sounded harried but wonderfully familiar, instructed me to call a cab to the hostel, and to wait for him there. I disobeyed him, and took a bus instead. I ogled the foreign landscape as we careened at breakneck speed towards civilization. Thoughts of death laced curiosity, like grenadine, but it was without incident that we reached soi 38, a tributary of the bantam boulevard Sukhumvit on the eastern periphery of the densest part of the city.
I spotted Chuck before I saw the sign for the hostel, and rushed into the hello. He eyed my backpack, waited for me to check in, and announced that he was going to take me to a nice dinner.
“I’ve lost my mind,” I gushed as I clamored into the passenger side of his gunmetal green Carrera. I spoke ravenously about the last six months in English, which had been shelved since arriving in Shanghai. We were headed to the Four Seasons Hotel. There, we feasted, over an hour, on tangy catfish fritters, chili ground chicken and soft-shell crab.
Chuck has always been astonishingly easy to converse with, which is something I suspect he prides himself on. I gave him the skinny on everyone from Amherst. He expressed surprise, or dismay, or guffawed at the right bits. That Chuck, endowed with a wicked little wit, laughs when we chat, is richly rewarding. We ran into a couple of his friends having drinks, stylishly, in the candlelit lounge on our way out. I felt a little coarse in cargo-pocket pants and a tired wife-beater. He dropped me off at Sukhumvit, where I, not ready to retire just yet, took a stroll before hitting the sack.

thailand: prelude

I will recount the last week of travels by day, to avoid, to as much a degree as possible, boring the reader. (Blogging, I’ve always thought, is an exercise in vanity, and even more so when waxing poetical about fundamentally self-indulgent excursions.)
I’d decided to travel to Thailand alone. ‘Decide’ is applied loosely; the logistics of the trip were too hinged on impulse, leaving no time to seek out (or request, really) a second opinion. The decision (or whatever) ended up being a very good thing. Here I was able to operate on my own terms. I’ve had the fortune of taking holidays with some very compatible companions – frugal, energetic, interested walkers – but also the experience of traveling with folks whose idea of a trip align all too poorly with my own. The only plan I had for Thailand was essentially to have none at all, and I wanted neither to subject anyone to my quirkiest quirks, nor feel beholden to somebody else’s.
I tossed a couple of tank tops, a toothbrush and my camera into the NCAA’s 2004 DIII swimming swag-bag; a pen, Chuck’s cell-phone number, Stephanie’s copy of The Elegant Universe, and disposable underwear, my favorite on-the-road accessory, which American drugstores are still too stodgy to carry. (I always kept a precious few weeks’ worth in the States, squirreled away from earlier trips to Taiwan.) I wore a light jacket, sneakers, and pants with cargo pockets. It was 2 degrees C in Shanghai.

tea for one

Despite a sad and narrow selection of swim cap varieties, the beverage industry in Shanghai, per observances to-date, is as diverse and complex as anything I've ever seen. Tea is the dominant potable, a variegated family that's monopolized mealtime accompaniments, subway station banner ads and convenience store frigidaires.
The menu at RealBrewedTea -a food court staple that exclusively vends designer libations- is eight-fold, and speckled with attractive image insets of frosted or steaming glasses of bright yellow, lime green and lavender liquids housed in gleaming, curvaceous chalices. Tea may be ordered hot, cold, 'spun' (a texture akin to a slushie), or in tandem with any combination of coffee, fruit and floral flavors. As if the hundreds-some-odd permutations weren't enough, customers also have the option of accessorizing drinks with an exotic edible additive such as diced aloe, pure malt, almond-milk cubes and the more familiar starched pearls.
To date, I've sipped on tea flavored like ginger-syrup (delicious), watercress (not so much), blueberries, mint-pumpkin (pictured), honeyed blackcurrant, pomegranate, roses (fragrant, but bland) and vanilla, to name a few. I find I most prefer a pot of tea for one. It's an inexpensive and delicious way to spend a winter evening, really, warming oneself from the inside out, breathing in some delightful floral musk, pouring gentle streams of steam and amber water, the tinkle of china.
A convenient transition: one deliberate exclusion is Thai Iced tea - that, my friends, I've saved for tomorrow's week-long diversion to Thailand.

working out, for fake

Yesterday, I shopped gyms, which are large and lavish and inexpensive, and totally unlike the windowless cave under the Holiday Inn in New York, in which I'd mindlessly treadmill every couple of days. I cashed in the first day of a few trial memberships yesterday, because I was told that there was a pool. A pool! . . . twenty-five cerulean meters in length, at the top of Cloud Nine Towers, which is situated above the Central Hill subway stop, which is just five blocks from here. . . ! I hadn't been swimming for a very, very long time (nearly three years!, after an uninterrupted decade plus), and I was very, very excited. I'd swiped Charlotte's Columbia training suit before I left California, and also a pair of goggles, but no swim cap, alas, so I popped into the athletic shop, and was dismayed to find, that, as in Taipei, they carried no latex and only Lycra and silicon.
The second 'hm' moment came when I discovered that gyms in Shanghai don't stock towels. No bother; I skipped through the locker room and onto the pool deck, which held a subsequent number of small disappointments: three lanes, marked by yellowed, flaccid lane ropes; mostly ancient, pruned patrons floating about. Still no bother, I decided. I hopped in, and was promptly reprimanded by the lifeguard (no diving or jumping, please, miss).
The water was too warm for proper swimming, so I carried on at a leisurely pace for a wonderfully peaceful forty minutes, with only the occasional, gentle collision with some aged floater. Swimming's quite good for clearing the mind, a quiet activity executed in solo. I suppose I never gave it proper credit. My mind was lodged pretty firmly in some honeyed paracosm involving India and rollmops, when I was flagged down by a couple of young men, one of which wanted to settle some bet about swimming times, but who really just wanted a date (I think). Actually, what he said was, 'allow me to be your first friend in China, over dinner', and then recited his telephone number to me a couple of times. Telephone numbers, let it be known, are eleven digits long here, so he might as well have been asking me to please disregard this meeting, and to never call. I've also got to be a bit more wary about friend-making, I think, because, in Mandarin, there is no colloquial term for "dating" or "date" or "boyfriend" - rather, folks "meet" and "become friends".
He - I didn't really catch his name - and his friend left, and I decided to run for a bit. The treadmills face out against a panoramic wall of windows; the view is extraordinary, particularly, I surmised, at rush hour, when scores of neon lights and television screens - positively Triassic in size - begin to flash atop the neighboring skyscrapers, and a hundred million cars are gridlocked down below, and the sky is the color of a bruise. . .
I noticed, after about twenty seconds, that the gym wasn't air-conditioned. Which was normal, I gathered, given that the Chinese also don't believe in ice water, and are bundled to the brim, despite it being no cooler than a rather muggy 17 out. Still, this made running for an extended time difficult, and I retired fairly soon, bathed in sweat and chlorine, and unable to shower, for I hadn't brought a towel along.

day one: of messuisses and monks

Waking up to a virgin city holds, for me, an unmatched joy. Stephanie describes the most tragic symptom of aging as the gradual loss of our sense of awe. If there's any validity to her selection, I'll know that I'm an old woman the morning I lay eyes on an unfamiliar sky, plant these feet down upon sidewalks or soils for the first time, breathe in a wholly new set of odors, and feel nothing. A secondary (and somewhat antithetical) satisfaction is the accompanying ambition to make this alien space mine, in time. Getting lost is wonderful in the sense that, in time, it'll never happen again. The process of becoming educated, and, ultimately, expert at a given endeavor - a game, a language, a musical instrument, a job - through physical practice is, in my esteem, uniquely fulfilling.
On Wednesday, I near-leaped out of bed a seven, and got dressed. I'd packed a light backpack and consulted a map the night before, and had chosen Mei-Luo Cheng - a bustling area of the business district - as a desirable destination.
**A word on writing in Chinese, in English - Mandarin morphemes, as delineated by the English alphabet, sound terrible. I'm can't speak definitively as to whether or not the language is 'beautiful', but crisp, erect sounds like 'gong', 'pau3', 'kan4' and 'ling2' wilt haplessly when pronounced in English. That being said, referring to proper nouns by their definitions is a paltry alternative - as anyone who's eaten at more than one Chinese restaurant knows, there's an obnoxious typicality naming: 'happy', 'lucky' , 'dragon', 'pearl', etc. I'll try, in any case.**
I took the subway (the sterile number 2 line) from Central Hill Park, which is nestled in the eastern axilla of what's known as the Inner Borough of Shanghai. Public transportation in Shanghai, I learned, has two salient benefits: 1) the plastic is valid currency for subways, monorails and taxi cab 2) subway and monorail maps and stations are not laid out like the New York City MTA, which made the trips mercifully simple. I emerged from underground, and it looked like this:

It became clear very quickly that electronics was the trade of choice for the shopping centers. Laptops no larger than six inches in screen diameter, thumb-sized cellular telephones, and mp3 players shaped like stars glittered from dozens of kiosks in matte silvers and neons. A feast for the eyes.
Two interesting things happened in Mei-Luo Cheng. The first was that a pair of monks asked me to accompany them to lunch. Experience shows that religious folk have generally harmless ulterior motives for stopping young girls in the street, so I obliged. They were very kind, and bought me lunch (at one of the ubiquitous KFCs). They preached, I listened, trying very hard to understand. They gave me a pretty religious keepsake, and their phone numbers. We parted ways.

Not long after leaving the monks, I was solicited by a man who claimed to be giving away gifts for a French spa brand. Experience in this department suggests that salon canvassers generally do have unsavory (financial) ulterior motives for stopping young girls in the street, but I was feeling pretty safe, given that I had zero dollars and about six inches on him, so I allowed myself to be solicited. I followed him into an edifice, where I was forcibly given a facial and a massage by a very nice young woman, who then demanded money of me. I had none, but I wanted the remainder of the massage, so I asked if she wouldn't spot me, promising that I'd return the next day to pay her back. This rather lame offer, delivered in accented Chinese, worked, for some reason, which made me happy, because I liked the idea of swindling swindlers. She asked for some collateral to ensure my return. I gave her my expired driver's license, which I had no intention of returning to fetch, and, feeling clean and refreshed and well-fed, carried on to a bookstore, where I picked up a dictionary, an abridged translation of Oscar Wilde stories, and some children's books, for practice.

greetings. . . from the future!

And I'm here! Jet-lag has even been conquered, to a reasonable degree, thanks, in part to some new safe-sex campaign on United 857. (Will it ever be humane to approach a haggard young parent and say, with feeling, "I hate your baby"?) Fourteen hours of scrapple dreams / three PG films / four odd East-West fusion plates later (rice noodles and tomato sauce, e.g.), we touched down at PuDong International, and filed through hallways lined with ominously-labeled doors: "Foreigner Interrogation Sector 1-D", "Quarantine Facility", "Disease Control Testing". I arrived at my uncle's doorstep around 10 Tuesday evening, and spent a pleasant couple of hours reading and stroking their decrepit Golden Retriever, aptly named Rusty (who still sleeps, with labored breath, at the foot of my trundle). It's 7:00 AM, finally, a reasonable hour to take off and explore, eat, comparison-shop for motorbikes.

exchange rates

. . . are a tricky business, but are also only the beginning. I devoted a portion of today (last day on earth as I know it) to managing all issues financial in preparation for the tomorrow's departure. Calibrating costs in a new area and making economic decisions accordingly is an interesting education, equipped with inevitable pitfalls, and (thankfully) a steep learning curve. I expect to automate conversions for at least a little while (one U.S. dollar is valued at approximately 7.75 rmb), since it's only natural to consider foreign experiences relative to familiar ones. I hope, however, that to have a rough sense of "expensive" vs "inexpensive by the end of the week.
Along the same lines, I set my computer's virtual weather feed unit to 'Celsius' this morning. It's currently "12" in Shanghai. Some sloppy mental math tells that I can therefore expect a relatively mild winter climate. Time zone recalibration will be simpler - Canton is exactly thirteen hours ahead of New York. It's, as of now, unlikely that I'll remain out there long enough to internalize the metric system (or, on a grander scale, the language), but I'd be curious as to how long this process takes. (My mother, having been an American for slightly over half of her lifetime, says that she still dreams exclusively in Mandarin, although she slips effortlessly between the metric and English systems.)
Much more on this, when I have actual knowledge.

a note on packing

Two doctrines, with regards to the above: 1) to curtail the process of preparing for a flight, to ensure safe arrival of belongings, to be able to zip straight from the terminal to public transportation, I don't check baggage when avoidable. 2) I've determined, that for me, the levity of luggage >>> importance of having stuff. If I can't sprint comfortably through O'Hare, then I've most likely over-packed, and will be punished in oxygen debt, just-missed connections, sweaty nights spent at the gate, etc. Accordingly, I've compiled a loose pilot case and a backpack of start-out essentials: sneakers, hygienic sundries, a dictionary, a camera, and, per Monica's parting words, two pounds of hazelnut coffee ground. Everything else, I figure, can be purchased for the small price of freedom and democracy upon arrival.