Care for a cup of snake-infested tea?

I have a cold. I am not a fan.

Congestion in my lungs, congestion in my head. I should not be asked to do anything today, nor tomorrow nor the next day. Okay, it’s a man cold, I’m whining, but still. I just want to read and drink tea.

Tea plantation near Ella, Sri Lanka

Tea...

My last trip wandered through two tea producing highlands, the first in Sri Lanka, the second in Malaysia. Both were cool in comparison to the boiling oxygen of the nearby lowlands, but were perfectly suited to a shorts-&-sandals kid from California. Both spanned curving hills with winding lines of tea shrubs like fingerprint whorls, endless vistas of fields, and simple worker housing below large white processing plants.

A single tea bush (apparently) produces 3,000 harvestable leaves annually, which is a lot of work to generate a single pound of tea. (Green and black tea comes from the same plant, just harvested at different stages and processed a little differently.)

Chirlden of a tea plantation in the Sri Lankan highlands

The tea fields of Sri Lanka stood silent and untended for miles, disturbed only by the rambunctious passage of my train, whose insatiable metal arhythmic dance would occasionally disturb or distract a small group of women and children out in the fields, working a job notorious for its poor wages.

The main difference in Malaysia was that I saw only men working the fields. I walked through a few miles of fields on my way to a processing facility, saw men carrying big bags of leaves on rounded shoulders, hooking other bags onto ziplines that carried them down to end in an explosion of leaves at the bottom, and sorting the verdant wreckage in tall piles on the pavement.

Near the zipline's end (background), Malaysia

Anyone who was in the Malaysian fields wore thick yellow rain boots, despite the clear blue skies and absence of mud, I suspect as protection again the venomous snakes who infest the fields.

I have no experience with a life like theirs.

My earliest memories include my British grandmother asking if I would like a cup of tea. I have had a few million cups of it in my life, but never spent a day in the life of a harvester. There’s something wrong there. Why is it only now that I’m back that I realize I should have done something about that?

I’ll have to fly back and change that. As soon as this damn cold goes away.

5 minutes walk to reach Bangkok

The minds behind The Hangover II were clever. I don't necessarily mean that in terms of content, since one could debate whether unknowing/drunken sex with a transgender* prostitute is a manifestation of the transitory Zeitgeist of our age, or just a cheap giggle.

*I apologize if this is not the currently approved phrasing, and to my mother's friends, who perhaps didn't expect to read sentences like that when they clicked on here this innocuous title.

But they were definitely clever when they chose Bangkok as their second setting. After all, what trumps Las Vegas for ostentatious depravity, besides Bangkok?

Did you know Bangkok was the World's Most Visited City on Earth last year? (Don't worry, that's the only actual information I will foist on you.)

Art in a Yangon alley

Coming from Yangon, Bangkok seemed like a cold bucket of modernity to the face. Yangon was moldering building façades, communal tea cups waiting in shallow dishes of water, and people with nowhere in particular to walk, while Bangkok was sky trains, giant neon signs, and an entire mall dedicated to computers.

The name Khao San Road has echoed through the stories of travelers for decades, and I was curious to see this famous festival of traveler degeneracy and extravagance. I checked into a hotel, ate soup, and walked down.

Khao San Road, Bangkok. I only took this one picture.

Not sure what to expect, I was still surprised to find...nothing. Nothing new at least. Aggressive hawkers selling T-shirts, overpriced restaurants serving Western food, and shady guys on the edges offering more illicit entertainment. None of this was new. There was just more of it than usual, and younger tourists than I'm used to seeing.

A woman wheeled a cart past me loaded with fried arthropods and annelids, that is, scorpions and worms. Yes, both of those are pretty gnarly to eat, but in that setting? Crunching down on a roasted locust seemed....kitschy.

But there is far more to Bangkok than Khao San Road. And it's not far away.

A few minutes' walk and I was in another crowd, this time with few white faces, the same shirts for half the price, and foods admittedly less unusual but far more interesting by virtue of actually being what people in Thailand eat.

After a bowl of soup I ambled past vendors headed home, fans resting for tomorrow's heat, and men playing checkers on well worn chess boards.

By the time I got home, Bangkok and I were getting along just fine.

My favorite menu

What the hell is a slider?

Not in baseball, I know that answer, but in food. I thought it was a sandwich. My interweb search says it sometimes is, but when I walked into Phil's Sliders the other day, I was surprised to find they only offered itty bitty burgers. I've already had two hamburgers in the last couple weeks, which is my usual number for a year, but oh well, like they say, “When in Rome...” Or in this case: when in Berkeley...do as the haughty foodie university kids do.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed my two wee jalapeno patties, bizarre building-block fries, and happy hour beer, but I stuttered just a second at paying $12 for it. $12? That's at least a dozen bowls of mystery soup on the street in Bangkok...

(queue the wobbly screen of the flashback)

The sun was trying to teach me about Thai culture with a hammer as I left my hotel a few hours after arriving in Bangkok, and my hair went straight from water-wet to sweat-wet without passing go. I wasn't sure which way to walk, so was happy to see one of the mobile street carts that prowl the city set up down the block.

My favorite menu is no menu at all. Dearest of all to me is when you say to the cook, with gestures more than words, “I'll take one” and then sit to find out the answer to “one of what?” That's how it worked at the soup cart. The older lady smiled, and the green visor she was wearing fanned a hint of a breeze my way as she nodded her head, and her hand gestured towards a plastic stool somewhat in the shade.

From the far side of the street came hotel staff, who smiled shyly at me, while the gate on the near side divulged uniformed cops who ignored me from behind their mustaches. Mustaches? In Thailand? I suspect if you are Thai and can grow a mustache you are automatically qualified to be a ranking police officer.

Sergeant Stache.

My soup arrived, slippery noodles, savory broth, and glistening pieces of...mystery. I lifted the first. Oh, liver. Okay. Liver's fine. It tasted a little gamey, a little gelatinous, but not too bad.

I lifted the second piece. Wait, I think this is liver. What was the last one?

The third. Oh. Then what were the first two?

On further examination, it's entirely possible that none of them were liver. Too soft. Too...giggly. My guest guess is that at least one of them was congealed pig blood.

My favorite menu is no menu at all; the preconception of what a slider was lead to a modest disappointment, and I'm not sure I would have ordered the pig blood.

Why is my head so constipated?

The question, comment, or discussion will sound good in my head before I start, all the Spanish/Dutch/Italian verbs lined up obediently, but once I try to bring it into the real world? Nada, nix, niente.

You nailed that song when you sang it in the car, but now that it's Wednesday night at Hulu Island Grill and Tiki Room and there's a karaoke mic in your hand...not so much.

Like this temple, that was an interesting walk.
Why can't I just talk about that?

Why is it that the process of formalizing, realizing, enacting something, even in a basic, beginner form, can so kill it?

I love stories, whether to my ears, from my mouth, or out of my fingertips in this blog, so why do they suddenly seem so alien to me now that I've attended an actual writing conference?

The staff at the Book Passage Travel Writers and Photographers Conference was so accessible, so amiable...and yet the equation still came though.

1. Americans don't read.
2. Americans don't travel.
   Ergo:
3. Americans sure as hell don't read about travel.

But F that, I want to do it anyway. So why does it feel like my word-brain has been anaesthetized and sent home for summer vacation?

There have just been so many distractions and other things that needed doing over the past two weeks! Excuse.

That dog guided me around the out-of-the-way temple in
Bagan. Too bad he's not here to guide me around my head.

The idyllic peace of a Portland summer afternoon is thick comfort and succulent ease! Excuse.

I'm intimidated by the quality of writing of others and fear that I have nothing worthwhile to say. Truth.

So? Start here. Uncork the brain and let the constipated sentences grind their way out.

Some of you might be shifting uncomfortable in your seats at that one. That makes me feel better already.

So here I am on the back porch, a cup of mediocre iced tea close at hand and far too many tortilla chips already eaten, going to start because what the hell, why not?

A precise patriotism

Today's plan kind of sucked. But I've had this rental car for too long already, so I'd drive one hour up to San Francisco Airport, then bring a good book or two for the four hour return journey, which I hoped would distract me from thinking about Europe's public transit network.

Not the most patriotic start.

Vehicles today? Sure. Freeways? No thank you.

But screw that, today is too beautiful to spend it all on buses. I extended the rental by three days and will return it on my way to this Saturday's Thanksgiving Party. That's right, Thanksgiving. Cuz I'm Amurikan, and we do Thanksgiving. And in August. Cuz I'm Amurikan, and schedules do our bidding.

Getting more patriotic by the moment.

So I drove my internal combustion vehicle to the gigantic grocery store, where individual aisles have more food than most entire stores overseas, and the building as a whole could be divided up into a neighborhood. I stood in front of a display case with at least two dozen different types of food ready and waiting, little yellow cards behind each meat dish displaying the independently certified “Animal welfare” rating.

Most were Level Three, meaning no crates or cages, “enriched environment”, and “enhanced outdoor access”.

I was ready for some enhanced outdoor access of my own, so I took a sandwich, chips, and a drink down to the beach. And not just any sandwich, it was smoked turkey, pepperjack cheese, bacon, avocado, spinach, and...was it “sun dried tomato” aioli? (All on a “Dutch Crunch” roll, which no Dutch person has ever heard of, because we're Amurrika, we'll tell you what you eat.) The chips: unsalted potato goodness, cuz we offer that here. The drink: kombucha, cuz we offer that too.

And they say America has no cuisine of its own. I've never seen a sandwich like that anywhere else, and here they're in the bloomin grocery store.

On the path down to the beach I helped a lady call the phone number on a lost dog's tag, then we all chatted up a lovefest when he showed up to collect Sammy, whose golden retriever smiles were wide and juicy.

Americans are nice.

One opalescent mussel shell was sunbathing where I sat down, and behind me played four year-old Taylor, all blond hair and enthusiastic statements, under the watchful eye of his grandma and grandpa. (Yes you literalists, they had one eye, it was a gorgon family.) He cajoled grandpa into filling a sandcastle bucket with water so he could make cereal (Raisin Bran!), though by the time they got back it was ice cream (chocolate!).

I ate my sandwich with sun on my shoulders, amid a pleasant scatter of affable folk who didn't notice the dolphins cruising east, the otters sliding west, or the pelicans diving straight ahead south, but did see the seal slurking around every which way just offshore. Taylor announced that it was the mama seal.

Perhaps “patriotic” is not the right word, but it's good to be back.

A Symphony of Corny in Hong Kong

I finally got to see a big dumb Hollywood movie the other day, and once I realized that the awfulness of Pacific Rim was exactly why it was AWESOME, then I enjoyed the spectacle immensely.

A lighter version of that forgiveness happened in Hong Kong, where the famous Victoria Harbor that separates Hong Kong and Kowloon is the setting for a "Symphony of Lights" display every evening at 8:00.

I walked down Nathan Road to the harbor in a stream of tourists emerging from their hostels like ants with body odor. We all went down the steps to the subway together to cross under the busy Salisbury Road, then splintered off in various directions as we all tried to navigate the bizarre underground mall that opened before us like the Gates of Hades. It was kind of like The Amazing Race, as we all tried to solve mazes of handbags and blouses just to cross a street. (The team that stays above ground and just runs across traffic would win by a good ten minutes.)

But finally I made it out, price tags stuck to my shoes, and walked on to the "Avenue of Stars", which is an awful lot like Hollywood's "Walk of Fame." I only knew a few of the names written beside hand prints in the concrete which formed a path down the scenic promenade. It's a swell place to walk, with lots of excited energy and cheesy posing next to the movie set statues, and at least one guy taking a mimicking pose in front of the Bruce Lee statue every second of the day.

Normally it's crowded, but at 8:00 PM it's packed. I found a spot along the rail where the crowd thinned to three rows deep, and watched as the music and lights show started.

It was...
um...
fantastic.

It was the corniest thing I've seen since Universal Studios in 1989. The music had the sort of bouncy enthusiasm normally only seen at a cheerleader convention, and the lights across the way blinked in time to the tune with the brainless regularity and obedience to the beat that you get from computer programs. I was laughing out loud, loving every second. I couldn't understand why everyone around me was so serious.

It was the same campy enjoyment that I got from the ladyboy cabaret show in Thailand, but that's another story...

Hong Kong is a city trying to reach the stars, and as a result it has enough light pollution to make sure you never see them, but all around me blinked a cosmos of LCD screens held up to capture the show. Those in groups took pictures of each other, singles took "selfies," and couples...ignored all that and just made out.

How do you say "tonsil hockey" in Cantonese?

(If) another candidate, (then) more pics...Hong Kong.

Well shucks. What to say about Hong Kong? I tried to explain a bit and it went on for a few thousand too many words. So for now, I'm going with just some photos.






Suffice to say, I was impressed. I'm still not sure I could live in a city like that (although I don't if there ARE other cities quite like that one), but wow, that is one helluva place.

Marvelous chaos

I assume they were already dried when they were set there

The little one seemed okay with it
by the time they succeeded.

This dude was loving it, but his coworkers
were even more.