Elephant Song

I just made myself five pancakes topped with a sliced banana, whipped avocado and a fried egg.  Some of my proudest accomplishments abroad are the most modest feats stateside.  Breakfast, it turns out, is simply a social construct where my desire for a sweaty bowl of milk and crunchy Honey Bunches of Oats with Almonds is not shared by Thais, who prefer a (admitedly delicious) steaming bowl of oily noodles and broccoli with a side of french fries and spicy ketchup.

My host home, a warm nest for my introduction to Thailand, seems to relish in challenging my independence (and breakfast routine) as a form of familial affection.  For example, last week, I walked in the rain from the main drag where the taxi lets me off to my home about half a mile away.  I had had a good day at school, and the rain pattering off my raincoat paired with one of those uncannily appropriate “shuffle” sessions on my iPod made for a pleasant walk.  When I was almost home, Mae intercepted me in a car, informing me that I was sure to get daily bloody noses as a result of rain exposure.  The crusts are even cut off my diagonally sliced sandwiches. 

I understand that the host families do not maliciously limit student autonomy.  After all, I wonder how I would treat a exchange student who chokes on pieces of wood, can’t dress herself appropriately, buys salt-flavored toothpaste by accident and climbs up mountains “for fun.” (Before I went on an 8-hour day hike with my class last Friday, crawling through dense jungle and sliding down steep mud-soaked terrain, Mae handed me an umbrella “just in case.”)

This Saturday, I will move from my host home into apartments with my friends. Just as I was starting to wallow in premature nostalgia, my host family offered a final cultural hurdle.  I had heard a rumor that we students would be performing in a talent show as a thank you to our collective host families.  What I had not heard, was that our respective “talents” were those chosen by the host families.

When I arrived home, mine showed me a wooden Thai recorder that my sister played when she was younger.  Desperate to assert competence in any circumstance within my host home, I snatched the instrument and proudly offered my repertoire of the few songs I remember from fifth grade music class.  I basked in the smattering of applause, and my family continued about their business. 

Glimpsing an opportunity to seize some self-respect, I informed Mae that I wished to dazzle the audience with an authentic Thai song.  Later, I would find out that when Thai students learn to play recorder, they learn the same “American” songs that I did.  Mae said that Fai did not have any Thai sheet music.  Unfettered in the face of this overwhelming hardship, and to determined leave my host family with a burning memory of The Little Host Daughter That Could, I marched into Thai class and asked my teacher to help me find a song. 

Today, my ajaan handed me a slip of paper with several Thai characters listed in a row.  These, she explained, were the equivalent of Thai “do, ray, mee,” notation.  Using this slip, I decoded the notes first into English, and then transcribed these into notes.  I then searched for the corresponding recorder fingerings. 

Though I still lacked a rhythm for what I was beginning to consider a stoic Thai battle hymn, I smugly played notes to Mae when I got home.  She laughed shaking her head, saying “Chan” and “deg deg,” or “elephant” and “little baby.”  It turns out, my battle hymn is actually a song Thai kindergarteners sing (at the tops of their un-tuned lungs, I discovered on YouTube) when they learn what an elephant is.  Mae, head cocked to the side and pursing her lips, told me people will think “it’s childish.”

Though my last ditch attempt to gain credibility from my host family was failing with each knot, I finally resigned all dignity when, an hour ago, Mae interrupted my practicing by handing me a hula hoop.  She told me that if I hula hoop while I play, people will like it better and not be so distracted by the embarrassingly childish song.  Since writing this original post, I have also acquired an "authentic" Thai costume in which to perform... lest someone should think I'm inauthentic whilst playing my baby song and attempting to hula hoop.

Panda Bear

I came to Thailand to experience.  The program, ISDSI, touts its "experiential" approach to learning abroad on every bit of propaganda I read before I (and graciously, my parents) decided to sign up.  I have done little but "experience" in Chiang Mai.

Since my last post, the whitened pads of my fingers hoisted my weight up a cliff. I shook eggs from the mouth of a Tilapia fish.  My vocal cords trained themselves to distinguish "falling" from "low" tones. Six classmates and I carried a faux-injured girl across a river, racing a thunderstorm and flash-flood.  I stood beneath a waterfall.  A doctor pried back my tongue and inserted a flame-sanitized mirror down my throat, searching out a bamboo sliver.  I have screamed in alternating frustration and encouragement during CrossFit workouts.  I nearly cry out of patronized frustration. I laughed at my own childishness. 

These visceral experiences are earthy and shallow.  They are easy to digest (save the bamboo, apparently).  More difficult to tease apart is the world beneath the surface. Although the word "what" entered my Thai vocabulary immediately, we only just learned the word "why." I don't mean to sound like an undergrad with a soapbox constructed from a couple 100-level Sociology course and a plane ticket (guilty), but it's true that the "culture" of a foreign society is one of the most toughest concepts to sift apart.  9/11's tenth anniversary springs this stream of thought.  I scroll through Al Jazeera's daily news and consume brittle facts that say little about what is actually happening.  This is when I feel the loneliest, though in my ignorance, I am not alone. One of my instructors at ISDSI, a woman who has been living in Thailand off-and-on for three years asked me to explain to her what, exactly, a "tiger mother" was, as she'd heard the term and read its colloquial definition, but missed its cultural significance.  Similarly, the girls I babysat this summer (too young to remember the attacks) asked me why America was nervously preparing for "another 9/11," as the date comes and goes every year. 

Today I circled my submerged feet in a hot spring as I sucked the yolk from an egg I'd boiled in the same water.  The day slipped by, submerged in the bubbling pool of "experience," oblivious of where the tourist-contaminated water flows, not to mention what's happening in war-ravaged Burma, only 70 miles to the west. I grapple with my naivete, and I grapple with my guilt.  Like 9/11, not everything comes with a tidy resolution. 

Humor presents itself as the only viable front against bewilderment.  The Onion's penetrating coverage of today's services ("9/11 Memorial Curators Decide Not To Display Swastika Formed By Twisted Girders Found At Ground Zero") comforts me more than Obama's video address on the matter.  Similarly comfortable, my host family has taken to calling me "Pandah Beaar," after my dangerous run-in with the bamboo shoot.  Feels like home.

Thousands of Miles from Seattle, Still Sleepless

In Chiang Mai, I am the proverbial information sponge. For example, right now I am learning that four cups of even acrid instant coffee will keep me up all night. Somehow, this familiar experience fails to summon nostalgia. So far, I have listened to three “Fresh Airs” and a “Sound Opinions” (actually, I thought Beyoncé’s new album was a “buy it,” Greg). Listening to podcasts feels like cheating, or maybe continent-jumping.If I spent four and a half hours today making Thai vocabulary flash cards (hence the over-caffination) to hasten my immersion in a world where I can’t even create a complex enough sentence to ask to go to the bathroom, then it seems so wrong to hear David Bean Cooley explain Standard and Poor’s rating break-down or Terry Gross review Jeff Bridge’s release (actually, Terry, that sounds awful).

Cheating or not, I feel great. I could simply tally all the good things happening right now to assess myself as happy, but it’s bigger than that. You know those rare moments when you hear a cliché, and for the first time, you understand the truth behind it? That happened to me at this Ancient Eastern Medicine Expo I attended with Mae. She and her colleagues at the public health department ran a booth while I meandered through the displays and exhibitions. Between the flashier “barbeque massage” stand (where I saw a masseuse using an accelerant to light his client on fire with his feet, and extinguishing the flame in fragrant sauce) and the delicious food samples, I walked into a small informational booth on the psychological healing powers of Buddhist introspection. A flowchart I had seen several times before sat on an easel representing the progression of thoughts to actions to habits to destiny. As cornball as it sounds, I stood there open-mouthed letting the brief epiphany soak in as I felt some of my habitual teeth-gnashing unclench.

Although schools chalk up study abroad as a chance to learn about another culture, the most resonating foreign education occurs internally. Over the next few days, my pace of life slowed as I gave myself the chance to appreciate the sweet smell of coconut rice and the thousands of shades of grey slipping though a storm cloud as I pedaled down the dirt road. Kalamazoo College allows for hours engulfed in books about EcoFeminism and a culture of competitive scholarship, but the pace denies students time for simple existence. A high school dropout could easily emerge from their 20’s wiser than a Hornet.

My new visceral awareness is met with the explosion of sensory intake that is Thailand. On Sunday evening, Mae told me to prepare for “an adventure,” which amounted to us racing across town on her motorcycle to the Walking Street night market.

Costumed children dance barefoot on carpets; endless stands hawk jewelry, clothes, bags, hair accessories, and massages; dozens of “bohemien”-and-yet-could-afford-to-fly-here German hipsters debate the merits of heavily-patterned genie pants; food vendors offer fried eggs the size of my thumbnail; peppers synchronize my vision to pulse, frizzled electric wiring pops and fumes; solemn wats reflect the sunset’s bloody finale.; blind men slap box drums to the patter of feet; Americans and Thais, who naturally walk on opposite sides of the street, collide skin to sweaty skin…

For now, I plan to drink in Chiang Mai as an outsider before I begin to latch onto the language and culture, and real life sets in.

Bobby Door

On the morning after I made my last post, I woke up in the hotel having zero idea whose bed I was in, or where the bed was. I rolled over to see the lizard on the wall, removed my earplugs at the faint rumble of hundreds of motorcycles, and it all rushed back. 20-plus hours of sleep will do that to you.

I can't help but constantly compare Chiang Mai to Neilly, Costa Rica, where I spent a gap semester between high school and college. From the daily downpour to the good humor of everyone I pass by, to the jury-rigged storefront electric advertisements, it's hard to keep from speaking Spanish. When I explained this to my mom over the phone, she told me that she observed the same phenomenon between the U.P. with the American south. So maybe different just resonates difference.

We bused from the hotel to ISDSI, the headquarters and classroom of our program. There, we munched on some fresh fruit and lined up like clueless little cattle to be bestowed upon our prospective host families. When they called my name, a sweet, five foot nothin' woman with a pursed smile and kind eyes came up to me and massaged my hand. She told me she was my mother, and hauled me away by the elbow to meet my new Paw. They sat me down, asked me my name, and attempted to pronounce "E-lene" once before changing my name to Arroon, or dawn, after I told them my name meant "light" in Hebrew. "Arroon sawat" means "good morning," and they get a big kick when I say it. Just like in Costa Rica, the proficiency of my humor plummeted as soon as I crossed the language barrier. I did, however, fare better on the name front than a girl named Cat on our program, whom her family now calls "Meow."

Mae, Paw and I went straight to the two-story bustling mall in to buy a cellphone before picking up my sister, Nong Fai, from her high school. Then we burrowed between meat, fruit and jewelry vendors in the sprawling walking market where I bought two surprisingly dashing school uniforms. The white blouse and black skirt that eventually fit were size large. I think there might be something inherently different in a country where an American XS struggles into an L. From there, we drove (on the left and very quickly) to their spacious, comfortable home in a suburb of Chiang Mai where I was shown my own room on the second floor. Nong Fai loves Harry Potter and sleeps adjacent to me. She is shy, smart and very hard-working. She leaves for school around 7a.m., and Mae and I pick her up at 8p.m. The program coordinators warned us against forgetting the difficult-to-pronounce names of our family members in order to avoid an embarrassing inability to introduce them to friends weeks later. I'm still trying to fit my mouth around Porngak and Patchanee Duangputan, but for now, "Mae and Paw" does the trick.

My family and I get along fantastically, considering the language and culture chasm. Mae and I are especially close, and I either follow her or am elbow-tugged by her literally everywhere I go outside of school. Independence is not a pillar of the Thai paragon. On one such dependent occasion, Mae pulled me from bed over to the house next door and introduced me to the non English-speaking neighbor. The woman took a beat, and said,

"She look just like Bobby Door! Just like Bobby Door! Bobby Door!"

Though a bit embarrassed that my pajama-clad, messy-haired appearance resulted in a comparison to a male stranger, I just smiled along and agreed as though I get that all the time. It wasn't until I was back in my room that I realized Bobby's true identity: a Barbie Doll.

Smooth as Silk

I made it to Chiang Mai, Thailand, my semi-permanent home for the next few months. It is sprawling, congested, green, noisy, dotted with dazzling temples and friendly. Evan and I departed from LAX on Wednesday night, after a couple relaxing days visiting The Getty Center, reading by Phoebe's pool, saving a baby bird, eating more cheeseburgers and visiting Santa Monica for some last minute price-jacked headlamps from REI.

As if from a time warp filled with delicious airplane food, friendly service, and personal on-demand video screens, a group of 17 Kalamazoo students and about 13 more kids, mostly from Colorado, stumbled out from the benches of our red mini bus and into The Mountain View Hotel on Friday afternoon. The Mountain View Hotel could more accurately be named the Mountain, Ford Retailer, Bustling Highway, Channel, Crumbling Temple, Shiny New Temple, and Crowded Market-View Hotel, but for some reason they didn't go with that.

Everyone seems friendly and excited to be here. We are all trying our best to speak the first few phrases we need in Thai, though almost everyone we've met seems to speak at least basic English. I tried to order a $2 plate of Basil Leaf Chicken in Thai, and when I thought the waiter couldn't understand me, it turns out he just wouldn't allow me to order anything that spicy. He told me the basil is too hot for my white little tongue. I'm just going to assume that they have some kind of 'roided basil here, but the Cashew Chicken ended up tasting very comforting. After I ate that, I slept for 13 hours. I have resolved to overcome the 11-hour time difference by sleeping as much as possible. I don't know if it will help, but I do know that it's 7:40am TOMORROW morning here, and I feel great. If any of you want stock advice, better send me an email before Wall Street opens there.

Sleep Talking in LALA Land

It's 7:39 in the midst of a passive morning in Los Angeles. Jet lag dragged me out of bed and into the quiet living room, but it's nice to feel like you're the only person in the world for a few hours after waking up. Although Phoebe, my host, did hear me stirring enough to wake up and tell me that I kept her up talking in my sleep. If my subconscious is any indication of my preparedness to go to Thailand tomorrow, then I'm still decoding:

"It's fine, they're just curlicues."

and

"Turn around Grandma, it's time for your spankin'!"

I'm indulging in anticipated nostalgia by eating whatever cheeseburgers I can get my hands on. Though, In 'n Out has always had that effect on me. On the other hand, I'll be ready to selectively forget some things about these great states.

On the Dalls/Ft. Worth-LAX leg of yesterday's flight, I was sitting in the widow seat near the back, shyly eyeing my possible seat mates like the new kid on the school bus. Then a 10-year-old girl with her mother, both dressed in matching bejeweled velour tracksuits, whose hair was lighter than my skin and whose sun drenched skin was almost as dark as my hair, sat down next to me with a curious mesh box. Inside, I glimpsed two wet little eyes that I later learned belonged to a ten-week-old Chihuahua named Prada. Prada sat shaking on my lap during takeoff where the girl asked me to hide her from the flight attendant so that she and her mother could finish their reeking boxes of Popeye's chicken. The attendant didn't see Prada as I held her, covered by their leopard-print inflatable neck pillow, but she smelled her about two hours later. The girl, fuming, carried her soiled puppy and carrier to the bathroom to wash. The flight attendant, sitting next to the bathroom doors, looked at me and hissed,

"This is why we don't like dogs on board."

When we returned to our seats, whimpering Prada was reprimanded for being an "idiot dog," and lightly kicked under the seat by the mother and daughter, who then resumed playing Angry Birds on their twin iPads.

Phoebe has to go observe at Warner Brothers Studios today because her uncle is the director of some sitcom, and we figure security forces impenetrable enough to ward off Charlie Sheen are certainly going to keep me out. My fellow Chiang Mai-bound buddy, Evan, who landed last night after I went to sleep and is presumably sleeping somewhere in this house, and I are going to explore today.