I've been meaning to tell about the Sightless Market Minstrel.
We saw her at the really killer Night Market in Prachuap Khiri Khan, wending her way slowly up and down the long crowded, grease-billowy aisles between booths selling watches, fried squid, pet kittens, ball gowns and pineapple watermelon smoothies. (Most Night Markets also have one weapons and knives booth. Throwing stars!) There she was, taking steps so impossible small she couldn't be moving but she was, he eyes pinched close, a blind person's walking stick in her elbow, a music box speaker hung from her neck, spouting all manner of traditional and modern Thai hits, a tupperware balanced on top containing a couple small coins, and a microphone clutched in her hand, pressed to her sweetly singing lips.
Her voice was being filtered through some sort of electronic echo device, and her speaker-box was set at volume HIGH. And there she was! I asked Kyle if I could take a picture. He said no and gave her 10 Baht. That's almost 30 cents. Very generous. She practically owed us a picture, but I abstained, because I'm becoming a monk. Anyway, we fell instantly in love, and saw her several other times that night, somehow navigating the irregular and frenzied walkways, always singing with that echoing voice that sounded almost as pinched as her eyes, like she was squeezing it out of a dry lemon. Beautiful stuff.
But here's the real gem of the story. No less than one week and hundreds of kilometers later, as we were browsing the fried delights in Phitsanulok's own thriving Night Market, what should we hear caught on the oily breeze? Why, the haunted melodies of the Sightless Market Minstrel! And then, round the bend she came, tottering along, all 50 years, 4 feet and change of her, the squat, chubby, wandering little woman of our dreams. But how had she arrived there? Was someone carting her all around the country, sucking up the sympathy one Night Market at a time? Was she a captive slave performer for some heartless opium warlord, milking her talents for a few sorry dimes? Or was this all completely standard? Was she simply completing her weekly circuit? There was no way to know.
But, whatever the case may be, I still regret not exploiting her, and she still owes me a topless photo.
Friday, August 21, 2009
I meant to say about the man-woman from Montenegro that hir story also made me think about relativity, and perspective. That's been another thing we've had to keep in mind here, and that we learned a lot about in the Karin tribe's village. And on the trains.
I want to grab the man and shake him who offers to take my used baggie and beer bottle, and so casually tosses them out the moving window, into the landscape I can't stop admiring. That's wrong, I want to say, you shouldn't do that! But how can I? It was the same in Peru, everyone throwing their styrofoam meal plates out the back of the boat, a thousand rectangular snowflakes drifting slowly down into the Amazon River. That's wrong, I wanted to say, you shouldn't do that! But who am I to tell the people who've used this land for a thousand years how to do it better now?
But some good just seem universal, and not relative, and you just want to.
I want to grab the man and shake him who offers to take my used baggie and beer bottle, and so casually tosses them out the moving window, into the landscape I can't stop admiring. That's wrong, I want to say, you shouldn't do that! But how can I? It was the same in Peru, everyone throwing their styrofoam meal plates out the back of the boat, a thousand rectangular snowflakes drifting slowly down into the Amazon River. That's wrong, I wanted to say, you shouldn't do that! But who am I to tell the people who've used this land for a thousand years how to do it better now?
But some good just seem universal, and not relative, and you just want to.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
taa blu, nee boh nee taa!
"Hello, thank you, and many lucks and good healths upon you!"
(That's the Karin language, the tribe we visited, and they don't bother with any of that folded hands bowing Thai business. The language is actually as different from Thai as German is from Japanese!)
So, yes, we are back in Chiang Mai and we have done many first things, seen many first things and consumed many first things, but we made it and are back and it was everything promised and more. I don't know where to begin.
First maybe I'll explain our trek-mates. First actually, in case it's unclear, trekking is the British word for hiking, so it's the standard word here, though a lot of places take you trekking and there's not much trekking involved. Tee, our guide, told us some companies just drive you to a fake village and feed you opium. We took a Chinese remedy alright, but it wasn't dope, and we didn't smoke it. We snorted it! Kind of.
I've gone too far past my first first. I'll begin again. Our comrades:
Jacob: A 28-year-old vegetarian ex-google-programmer, and it showed! He was a regular pocketbook of information, and his google phone retained service well into the wilderness. An avid trekker, biker and journeyman, he quit his job a year ago and is doing the world with his girlfriend in tow. She stayed in Chiang Mai. He had a beard like Spanish conquistador plus the king of the monkeys. Tee called him Papa Monkey.
Sergev: A 36-year-old Croatia-born Italian, who studied aesthetics and film in Milan, and had his thesis on the philosophical world-view set forth in Monty Python's Flying Circus published into a book upon graduating. Now a working director and writer for television, he was given the opportunity to direct his first feature length Italian film at the age of 21, but got nervous when they told him he'd be in charge of a 70-person crew. He had no experience trekking, had only flip-flops so he had to buy awful bright white loafers at the market as we left town, which thoroughly blistered his tender hooves, and plus he was the oldest and a little bit fat.
*Sidebar: Sergev was fascinating and had a million things to tell us about. If only he could have kept talking as he struggled miles behind us up the swampy slopes. At a stopping point on the ride back to town, though, he told us over a beer about an incredible article he had read about the isolated tribal mountain people of Montenegro, and the author's interview with an old woman living alone in the hills with only the wild wolves and her three cows for company, hours away from the nearest tiny village.
She lived and acted like a man, though she was clearly a biological woman. Apparently in Montenegro it used to be that if a family did not produce any sons, the youngest daughter was raised as a boy instead, dressed as a boy from the earliest age, allowed to drink and smoke with the men, given a boy's name. The practice has since fallen out of use, especially as most of the tribal people moved out of the villages and down from the mountains. And so this old woman the author interviewed was probably one of the last living examples of the Montenegrin girl-men.
He asked her all variety of questions, and her answers were always unbelievable but exactly what they had to be. He asked her if she'd ever seen the sea, and she said No, what use do I have for the sea, nothing can grow on the sea. (She fed herself by farming.) He asked her about her cows, and she talked about them as if they were family, human beings. This one is jealous of that one, and Oh look now she's angry at me, Those two always sleep near each other because the other is often rude in the mornings.
He asked her if she knew that men had landed on the moon. She said, No, it's not true. Impossible. If a wolf cannot jump as high as this wall, no man can go as high as the moon. All the while scowling and pulling deeply on her short fat cigarrette.
Everything about her dress and manner was masculine, and he wanted to know how she negotiated that with being actually physically a woman, so he cautiously asked her about menstruation. She became perfectly still and silent, a blank scowling wall.
He then asked her what she thought about at night in bed. She replied that each night before falling asleep she would think about three things. First, about her father. Second, about her cows. Last, about her great-great-grandfather who, when visiting a foreign Sultan, refused to remove his little Montenegrin cap. (Montenegrins are a very proud people.) After each of these three things had passed through her mind, then she could asleep.
Only as the interview was coming to a close did she admit on her own that she had lately been feeling a little bit sad. She was getting older, and had begun to worry about about not knowing how to read or write, worried because she was the only native person left living up in those mountains. Everyone else was gone. Spinning in a circle she pointed at all the many peaks and spoke their long, beautiful names, but she could not record them and save them, and when she died they would be lost forever. With her death, so much would be lost forever.
The story felt especially fitting after the experience we'd just had in the Karin village, after trekking through the unblighted junle, rainforest, evergreen or deciduous forest depending on the altitude, after slipping up and down the rain-smoothed paths on the hill-side rice paddies, after sleeping in the squat but lovely bamboo huts, after spending a day with people who had nothing to occupy their lives and minds but work, rice whisky and each other, the whole experience and story and Thailand in general all seemed to culminate and reverberate and marinate into one of the Buddha's key concepts: impermanence.
The mountain tribes in Thailand use slash-and-burn farming on the steep slopes to grow their rice. It's much different than the mid-country typical flat-bottomed swampy version, and at first hearing the term slash-and-burn I was a litte concerned. Kyle still isn't convinced, but it's the way they've done it forever! And they cycle the fields by five years, to re-establish good soil fertility, and they keep scattered large trees up and down the hills to prevent erosion, and we saw areas that had only laid fallow a year or two, totally overgrown with tangled thicket higher than my head. Everything those people build and do could be undone and erased in a short matter of years.
Our guide as I said was named Tee, and was most distinguished by his somehow perfectly trustworthy and familiar face, his sarcasm and his two little front teeth, with a centimeter between each and another before the molars kicked in on either side. He grew up in a different Karin village than the one we visited, which was called Ton Kyew, but most of the customs and culture were the same.
We were accompanied on our trek by Tee's best Karin friend Yao, whose house we ended up also sleeping in, with his wife and two young sons (5 and 6), and who also ended up being Ton Kyew's resident shaman, the holy man. Man and wife choose each other in Karin culture, no arranged mess, and operate very much as an equal team, sharing the farm and housework evenly, tending the children, fixing the roof, making dinner, all according to who's busy and who's not at any given moment. Each family gets a plot of the community's rice fields according to its size, plants it particular heirloom rice variety, harvests and stores it all once a year, then gets ready to do it all again. One family may grow sticky rice, another brown and another white. They simply trade each other if they want something different one day.
I'm becoming very sleepy. Last night wasn't the greatest sleep on the wooden board, and there's too much to say. I'll have to keep going tomorrow.
*Teaser: Maggots roasting on an open fire.
One more thing to leave you with, a meditation exercise on impermanence. It's supposed to be repulsive at first, and then liberating.
You think about your dead body rotting!
But you've got to through all the stages, worms a creeping, loose skin a peeling, bones held together just by tendons, tendons falling away, loose disjointed skeleton, bones bleached by the sun, bones scattered in an untidy pile, bones pulverized into dust, and finally dust on a quiet, cool breeze...
... and actually finally maybe dust getting into someone's eye, or falling into a shaker and peppering someone's morning scramble.
Doesn't that feel good?
Buddha's love,
Kandy-Boots
(That's the Karin language, the tribe we visited, and they don't bother with any of that folded hands bowing Thai business. The language is actually as different from Thai as German is from Japanese!)
So, yes, we are back in Chiang Mai and we have done many first things, seen many first things and consumed many first things, but we made it and are back and it was everything promised and more. I don't know where to begin.
First maybe I'll explain our trek-mates. First actually, in case it's unclear, trekking is the British word for hiking, so it's the standard word here, though a lot of places take you trekking and there's not much trekking involved. Tee, our guide, told us some companies just drive you to a fake village and feed you opium. We took a Chinese remedy alright, but it wasn't dope, and we didn't smoke it. We snorted it! Kind of.
I've gone too far past my first first. I'll begin again. Our comrades:
Jacob: A 28-year-old vegetarian ex-google-programmer, and it showed! He was a regular pocketbook of information, and his google phone retained service well into the wilderness. An avid trekker, biker and journeyman, he quit his job a year ago and is doing the world with his girlfriend in tow. She stayed in Chiang Mai. He had a beard like Spanish conquistador plus the king of the monkeys. Tee called him Papa Monkey.
Sergev: A 36-year-old Croatia-born Italian, who studied aesthetics and film in Milan, and had his thesis on the philosophical world-view set forth in Monty Python's Flying Circus published into a book upon graduating. Now a working director and writer for television, he was given the opportunity to direct his first feature length Italian film at the age of 21, but got nervous when they told him he'd be in charge of a 70-person crew. He had no experience trekking, had only flip-flops so he had to buy awful bright white loafers at the market as we left town, which thoroughly blistered his tender hooves, and plus he was the oldest and a little bit fat.
*Sidebar: Sergev was fascinating and had a million things to tell us about. If only he could have kept talking as he struggled miles behind us up the swampy slopes. At a stopping point on the ride back to town, though, he told us over a beer about an incredible article he had read about the isolated tribal mountain people of Montenegro, and the author's interview with an old woman living alone in the hills with only the wild wolves and her three cows for company, hours away from the nearest tiny village.
She lived and acted like a man, though she was clearly a biological woman. Apparently in Montenegro it used to be that if a family did not produce any sons, the youngest daughter was raised as a boy instead, dressed as a boy from the earliest age, allowed to drink and smoke with the men, given a boy's name. The practice has since fallen out of use, especially as most of the tribal people moved out of the villages and down from the mountains. And so this old woman the author interviewed was probably one of the last living examples of the Montenegrin girl-men.
He asked her all variety of questions, and her answers were always unbelievable but exactly what they had to be. He asked her if she'd ever seen the sea, and she said No, what use do I have for the sea, nothing can grow on the sea. (She fed herself by farming.) He asked her about her cows, and she talked about them as if they were family, human beings. This one is jealous of that one, and Oh look now she's angry at me, Those two always sleep near each other because the other is often rude in the mornings.
He asked her if she knew that men had landed on the moon. She said, No, it's not true. Impossible. If a wolf cannot jump as high as this wall, no man can go as high as the moon. All the while scowling and pulling deeply on her short fat cigarrette.
Everything about her dress and manner was masculine, and he wanted to know how she negotiated that with being actually physically a woman, so he cautiously asked her about menstruation. She became perfectly still and silent, a blank scowling wall.
He then asked her what she thought about at night in bed. She replied that each night before falling asleep she would think about three things. First, about her father. Second, about her cows. Last, about her great-great-grandfather who, when visiting a foreign Sultan, refused to remove his little Montenegrin cap. (Montenegrins are a very proud people.) After each of these three things had passed through her mind, then she could asleep.
Only as the interview was coming to a close did she admit on her own that she had lately been feeling a little bit sad. She was getting older, and had begun to worry about about not knowing how to read or write, worried because she was the only native person left living up in those mountains. Everyone else was gone. Spinning in a circle she pointed at all the many peaks and spoke their long, beautiful names, but she could not record them and save them, and when she died they would be lost forever. With her death, so much would be lost forever.
The story felt especially fitting after the experience we'd just had in the Karin village, after trekking through the unblighted junle, rainforest, evergreen or deciduous forest depending on the altitude, after slipping up and down the rain-smoothed paths on the hill-side rice paddies, after sleeping in the squat but lovely bamboo huts, after spending a day with people who had nothing to occupy their lives and minds but work, rice whisky and each other, the whole experience and story and Thailand in general all seemed to culminate and reverberate and marinate into one of the Buddha's key concepts: impermanence.
The mountain tribes in Thailand use slash-and-burn farming on the steep slopes to grow their rice. It's much different than the mid-country typical flat-bottomed swampy version, and at first hearing the term slash-and-burn I was a litte concerned. Kyle still isn't convinced, but it's the way they've done it forever! And they cycle the fields by five years, to re-establish good soil fertility, and they keep scattered large trees up and down the hills to prevent erosion, and we saw areas that had only laid fallow a year or two, totally overgrown with tangled thicket higher than my head. Everything those people build and do could be undone and erased in a short matter of years.
Our guide as I said was named Tee, and was most distinguished by his somehow perfectly trustworthy and familiar face, his sarcasm and his two little front teeth, with a centimeter between each and another before the molars kicked in on either side. He grew up in a different Karin village than the one we visited, which was called Ton Kyew, but most of the customs and culture were the same.
We were accompanied on our trek by Tee's best Karin friend Yao, whose house we ended up also sleeping in, with his wife and two young sons (5 and 6), and who also ended up being Ton Kyew's resident shaman, the holy man. Man and wife choose each other in Karin culture, no arranged mess, and operate very much as an equal team, sharing the farm and housework evenly, tending the children, fixing the roof, making dinner, all according to who's busy and who's not at any given moment. Each family gets a plot of the community's rice fields according to its size, plants it particular heirloom rice variety, harvests and stores it all once a year, then gets ready to do it all again. One family may grow sticky rice, another brown and another white. They simply trade each other if they want something different one day.
I'm becoming very sleepy. Last night wasn't the greatest sleep on the wooden board, and there's too much to say. I'll have to keep going tomorrow.
*Teaser: Maggots roasting on an open fire.
One more thing to leave you with, a meditation exercise on impermanence. It's supposed to be repulsive at first, and then liberating.
You think about your dead body rotting!
But you've got to through all the stages, worms a creeping, loose skin a peeling, bones held together just by tendons, tendons falling away, loose disjointed skeleton, bones bleached by the sun, bones scattered in an untidy pile, bones pulverized into dust, and finally dust on a quiet, cool breeze...
... and actually finally maybe dust getting into someone's eye, or falling into a shaker and peppering someone's morning scramble.
Doesn't that feel good?
Buddha's love,
Kandy-Boots
first
I've been meaning to tell you the chickens here are velociraptors. Almost humanly erect, clever, quick, stringy, gleaming multitudinous color schemes, blues, greens, reds, browns, yellows. Dinosaur birds. I always thought a chicken was a white pom-pom pillow.
Monday, August 17, 2009
ALSO!
There won't be any updates for a bit because tomorrow at 6 am we set off on an eco-trek for two days. The man who runs the operation is named Pooh, but he's a wise fellow nonetheless, and out of all the operators this definitely seems the most friendly and symbiotic way to see nature unblemished and how the tribal people really live. We won't be bathing elephants or seeing them perform any sort of comedy shows (we've seen the ones on the street with neck-chains and their hook-wielding masters and that's about enough). We won't be white-water rafting on bamboo boats, and we won't see the villagers do a dance for us, but we will be doing some genuine jungle hiking, and we'll learn how the local people cook their food, and make their rice whiskey! We'll live right in among them!
Our actual guide's name is Tee and he is as clever and straight-talking a gap-tooth as I've ever met.
In two days I'll let you know how it went! Gotta go get some sleep for the early start.
Peace!
(Also we saw the queen on TV today, all lipstick and blue frills. I forgive her for everything.)
Our actual guide's name is Tee and he is as clever and straight-talking a gap-tooth as I've ever met.
In two days I'll let you know how it went! Gotta go get some sleep for the early start.
Peace!
(Also we saw the queen on TV today, all lipstick and blue frills. I forgive her for everything.)
becoming buddhist monks
Today we learned a few techniques of meditation from a monk at the mountain-top temple in Chiang Mai. The room was also full of reading materials about Buddhism, the 4 Noble Truths, Eightfold Path, meditation, the relief of suffering, that sort of thing. It was an enlightening afternoon, and I became teary-eyed at one quotation about there being nowhere near enough time in life to spend any of it on hate.
When doing a sitting meditation, when your back begins to ache, you don't move, you just bring awareness to the pain. You say over and over in your head, aching, aching, aching. You ride the experience.
We did a walking meditation too. Everything in threes, and every intention thought out loud so to speak. You begin by closing your eyes and scanning up and down your body three times with your hand, then think-saying standing, standing, standing, and then intention to walk, intention to walk, intention to walk. Then as you start walking you say right foot first, left foot first, right foot first, left foot first, and so on. Then when you get to the end of where you're walking, you say stopping, stopping, stopping, and then turning, turning, turning until you're back facing the way you came. Then all over again! If you accidentally start thinking, you simply bring awareness to it. Thinking, thinking, thinking, oops!
Before that we had wandered the glittering golden colorful gleaming palace of the temple itself (after mounting its 400 steps) and found a little fortune-telling shrine. Some girls finally taught us how to properly perform the kneeling triple bow thing, and we did that, then shook the fortune sticks and received a key to our destinies. We both got the same number, 14, which is nice because I like 4s and Kyle likes 5s (1+4=5!). So, both of us need to carefully heed this advice from the Buddha above:
The 14th number tells that you should be patient and don't be in hasty. Everything will be all right. Don't think about the lover.
Monks it is!
When doing a sitting meditation, when your back begins to ache, you don't move, you just bring awareness to the pain. You say over and over in your head, aching, aching, aching. You ride the experience.
We did a walking meditation too. Everything in threes, and every intention thought out loud so to speak. You begin by closing your eyes and scanning up and down your body three times with your hand, then think-saying standing, standing, standing, and then intention to walk, intention to walk, intention to walk. Then as you start walking you say right foot first, left foot first, right foot first, left foot first, and so on. Then when you get to the end of where you're walking, you say stopping, stopping, stopping, and then turning, turning, turning until you're back facing the way you came. Then all over again! If you accidentally start thinking, you simply bring awareness to it. Thinking, thinking, thinking, oops!
Before that we had wandered the glittering golden colorful gleaming palace of the temple itself (after mounting its 400 steps) and found a little fortune-telling shrine. Some girls finally taught us how to properly perform the kneeling triple bow thing, and we did that, then shook the fortune sticks and received a key to our destinies. We both got the same number, 14, which is nice because I like 4s and Kyle likes 5s (1+4=5!). So, both of us need to carefully heed this advice from the Buddha above:
The 14th number tells that you should be patient and don't be in hasty. Everything will be all right. Don't think about the lover.
Monks it is!
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