Market Day

With Isaac recovered from his (possibly airplane-food induced) bout of food poisoning, we decided to explore some of the markets around Mong Kok in Kowloon. First we hit up the Goldfish Market, where we cooed over the baby turtles ("Isaac, I want a baby turtle!") and the pretty fish ("Oooh! So pretty.") .



Then we traipsed past the rows of phony Le Sportsac bags and mounds of real polyester panties at the tail end of the "Ladies' Market," pausing only to provoke the proprietor of a fruit stall for dillydallying in front of plums we didn't intend to buy. Next was the Flower Market, where I took lots of photos and Isaac befriended a cat. And finally, we visited the sad little songbirds in their market, but they were so sad we didn't stay long.

My first Lao hippy

I want to be a hippy. Isaac does not. So he didn’t much care for Pi Mai Lao (Lao New Year’s),
when the Lao wish each other well by dousing one another with buckets of water and handfuls of flour for five or six days in a row; for him, that was five or six days he had to use his sun umbrella as a shield and carefully seal his daily essentials—wallet, passport, cell phone—in multiple plastic bags.

Eventually, I also tired of the hourly soaking. But on the first official day of Pi Mai, when we crossed the Mekong to watch the people building sand stupas and I found myself soggy and barefoot, my feet sinking into thick mud, teenagers smearing the soot scraped off the bottom of cooking pots onto my cheeks, I had a revelation. “I can’t go to Korea and earn money!” I thought to myself. “I need to stay here and be the hippy I’ve always wanted to be.”

Perhaps my vision was encouraged by the fact that the day before, I had met my first Lao hippy. Like many hippies, he comes from a family with a good deal of money, and is slowly transforming one of their properties into a gallery/performance space; Isaac and I were walking past on our way to our guesthouse when he stopped and invited us up to the rooftop, where, on a couple of different occasions, we met a Welsh painter and a Chinese yoga instructor and an experienced French expat who explained how easy it will be for us to buy fake work visas and live in Laos forever.

Not surprisingly, our hippy has long hair and a green thumb and self-proclaimed aversion to materialism and bathing, which has provoked some of his neighbors to nickname him “smells-like-turtle-shit-armpits”. The fact that he slathers himself in self-tanning cream in a land of whitening beauty products also prompts them to snicker that he looks older than his seventy-year old father.

But less predictably, he speaks Lao, Vietnamese, Thai, French and English fluently; can credibly impersonate Naomi Campbell and a ladyboy in his one-man walk-off; and has at various points in his life taught Braille, been stalked by the paparazzi while dating a Vietnamese pop singer, and broken off his arranged marriage a week before it was to be consummated. As Isaac put it, “That man has a lot of flavor.”

He always apologizes before mentioning something crude, and professes to hate talking about sex. But he does both readily, and to our delight, he revealed how filthy Lao people can be in their own language. That afternoon I’d seen him gambling with the owner of my guesthouse, and so I asked them if they’d grown up together. “Oh yeah. I joke with her that I knew her when her feet were as big as a snail, and now her snail is as big as her feet” which makes sense after he explained that 1) Lao snails are relatively big and 2) snail is slang for “pussy, and I don’t mean Mt. Phousi, but the real punani.”

We asked for more examples, and he told us that that morning when someone was tailgating him, he turned around and shouted “Why is this great big truck trying to crawl into my little tiny asshole?!" Lest we thought only hippies spoke thus, he had plenty of evidence about what people had to say about parts of his body other than his armpits and what the women he spies on have to say about their husbands after a few Beer Laos.

Ah, Laos. The more we learn about it, the more we love it.

We tried

As we all know, Isaac and I are terrible tourists, good at cramming ourselves full of food and befriending cats and waiters, but not much else. This problem is clearly not just Isaac’s—I was quite on my own when I went to Cusco, Peru, and failed to see Machu Pichu. So upon our return to Luang Phabang, we determined to do some of the touristy things we had neglected on our previous stay.

First we took a trip up the Mekong to the Pak Ou caves, repositories for damaged and defunct Buddha images from the surrounding towns. On the way to the caves, we were deposited at the “Whisky Village,” famed for its lao lao production but now peddling Beer Lao T-shirts and “silk” scarves from China passed off as local products. On the boat ride back, Isaac and I stopped talking because I called him a baby for wanting to sit on the shady side of the boat. In the half hour in-between, the caves themselves revealed some lovely cracked, flaking Buddhas, beautiful in their decrepitude.

Next, I signed up for a cooking class at our favorite LP restaurant, Tum Tum Cheng. We started out with a tour of the local wet market. Most of the produce heaped up on tarps and tables—the multicolored collections of chillies, mushrooms, eggplants; the knobs of ginger and galangal and stalks of lemongrass; the pyramids of silver fish and buckets of snails—were familiar from trips to other markets in other countries, but some things seemed new and distinctly Lao: the spicy bark of a tree used in a traditional stew; the bags of mak toum fruits for tea; the packets of dried brown things with untranslatable names and purposes.

After the market, we returned to the open-air kitchen to find all the ingredients perfectly prepped for us and a Taiwanese television crew ready to film an episode of “blah blah China”—I can’t remember the name, though I had to toast it twice for the camera, once with real lao lao, and once with water in my shot glass. And so our token shallot chopping and sips of mango wine and turns timidly pushing vegetables around a wok were narrated in Mandarin by hip hop dancer Locking Elmo. If you get a chance to see it, I am the frizzy-haired white girl instructing a cute Asian boy in “Sexxy Tigger” T-shirt how to stuff a spring roll.

Our third foray into organized tourist activities involved a morning of elephant riding. At first, as we ambled along through the teak forest on our little wooden platform, Isaac’s sun parasol shielding our fair skin, the mahout singing to his beast, I felt like we were shooting a sequel to Indochine. But when the mahout jumped off the elephant’s neck, ordered me to take his place, and turned his attention to photographing the two Scandinavian girls in tank tops riding behind us, only occasionally reprimanding our elephant when it wandered off into the bushes for a snack, I was once again another tourist clutching her Stay Another Day propaganda.

Our fourth excursion, a trip to the Kuang Si waterfalls, never happened, our burst of activity at the beginning being more than enough for one month. Instead, we went back to our old ways, drinking coffee all day at Joma and retiring at night to play Uno with the boys at our guesthouse.

Vang Viang, Part Two

I couldn't let my yesterday self get the last word in on Vang Viang. Bob Marley is still wearing out the stereosystems around town, but this morning we woke up to sunshine and fluffy white clouds decorating the karst formations across the river from our bungalow.

Although the surrounding area has scores of caves to be explored and roads to be bicycled, we, quite predictably, have done nothing. After breakfast, the owner, who speaks Lao, French, Thai, English, Russian, Hebrew (from his days as an agriculture student in Israel), and Hungarian (from his further studies in Budapest) serenaded us with Beatles covers on his acoustic guitar; this impromptu concert segued directly into lunch, during which we watched groups of naked little boys splash around the opposite bank.

After lunch we hailed a songthaew headed for the post office so we could mail some fair trade stuffed giraffes to Isaac's new niece and my nephew-to-be. School kids pedaling earnestly home streamed behind our truck, the girls shaded by frilly sun parasols, the boys shouldering floppy satchels, the novice monks in bright orange. As Isaac has been fond of repeating since we arrived in Laos, I love this country.

Vang Viang, Part One

The other day I allowed myself the pleasure of eavesdropping on a threesome of expats at a slick Vientiane cafe. A member of the trio, an American-sounding woman doubtlessly working for one of the diplomatic or NGO outfits whose money ensures stores are well stocked with wine, pate, and imported cheese, made a disparaging remark about Vang Viang. Apparently, she had heard such horrid things about the place--like girls walking through town in their bikinis, just the sort of behavior Isaac and I also like to allot self-righteous Good Tourist/Bad Tourist labels to--that she had stayed away her first four years working in Laos. When she finally did go, some of her worst fears were confirmed: the town was itchy with backpackers eating banana pancakes and abusing Skype.

At the time, I dismissed her comments as the snotty insecurity of long-term expat. Why so much hatin'? But the moment we stepped onto our cramped, rundown Korean "VIP" bus stuffed with tourists clad in T-shirts advertising Beer Chang or proclaiming that they were "same, same--but different" all my old horror of South East Asian backpackers returned. Isaac told me, in more refined language, to stop being such an intolerant bitch, but I had flashbacks of sweating it out in the back of songthaew in Koh Chang while a cheap Londoner, balking over her $2 share of the fare, asserted her right to save her money over the vocal protests of a white-haired, white-skinned lothario anxious to get his two young brown honeys back to his love shack.

This time, our fellow passengers turned out to be perfectly quiet and innocuous. Still, as we were walking through town today in search of some chocolate, something the snotty but strangely wise expat said came back to me. Friends. Oh yes, Friends. At each of the neighboring three cafes with benches-instead-of-tables we passed, curly haired twenty-somethings were leaning back on their pillows watching old episodes of Friends. Yikes.

A Seedier Singapore

Fellow travelers have all sorts of snippy things to say about Singapore, its love of social engineering, its smoothly functioning modernity--as if, being in Asia, Singapore has a duty to be exotic. But as a tourist, I love it. I love its cleanliness, its excellent public transportation, its punitive measures to discourage driving. I love its hawker centers, its tropical fruits, its beautifully landscaped parks. I wouldn't want to live in a paternalistic one party democracy, but I'm glad Tiger Air will give me an excuse to return again and again.

That said, we were still excited when our friend Sherry and her police detective boyfriend Steven promised to show us the seedier side of Singapore in the red light district of Geylang.Because Geylang is almost as much about food as it is about sex, we started out the evening with some excellent dim sum. Isaac claims it was the best cha shu bao he's ever eaten, but he tends to lavish superlatives on whatever is currently making his stomach happy.

Next, we made the rounds of the groups of street girls, who each staked out a different block: the beautiful and expensive young women from mainland China in their tiny, tiny shorts, glittering belly rings, and push-up bras; the more casual Filippino women; the handful of Indian women dressed modestly in saris; the transvestites and lady-boys; and saddest of all, the China mothers, women who have been allowed to accompany their school-age children but denied working visas and so prostitute themselves in order to maintain their family.

We finished our tour next to the carefully numbered bungalows serving as legal brothels with "fishbowls" of Thai women lounging around in lacy underwear: apparently, the Singaporean government has decreed that only the Thai shall be prostitutes. Isaac and Steven were given two minutes to go inside.

As we threaded our way through some back alleys, we also spied on card tables layered with pornographic DVDs or serving as platforms for rolling the dice. The more serious gambling is tucked away inside, only accessible to those who know somebody, as is the limited amount of drug dealing which still goes on, despite the mandatory death sentence for drug trafficking.

We finished off the evening with more food, heading for a string of roadside fruit stalls piled with mangosteens, rose apples, star fruits, lychees, dragon fruit. After warning us not to over-indulge in rambutans or dukus, which are considered "heaty," the proprietor filled up small pink plastic sacks with fruit. But this was just a diversion: we had been brought here for the high-grade, D-24 durians selling for 10 Sing dollars a kilogram at a stall on the corner. All over SE Asia hotels and other public spaces guard against this fruit's offensive smell by posting "no durian" signs. But to anyone who has encountered the Bangkok-sewer smell of stinky tofu, the durian's odour isn't so off-putting.

Optimistically, we bought a beautiful 2.5 kg specimen and some cooling fresh young coconuts, durian also being notoriously "heaty". We each took a chunk and Isaac, being the type to scald his tongue on chocolate chip cookies fresh from the oven, stuffed his mouth with the creamy flesh, which he immediately spit out. After he had swished out the taste with enough coconut water, he passed his judgment: rotten onions. Sherry and Steven were incredulous, defending, as many people from the region do, the "king of fruits."

Isaac, with his prodigious sense of smell and imagination, is also the type to declare perfectly good food "soapy" or "moldy" or "footy," but this time he was dead-on. The durian tasted like rotting onions. Still, I ate my share, one nibble at a time, hoping this was an acquired taste I could achieve. I was punished for this adventurousness with durian burps all night long.

Blind Man Drives Autorickshaw; No One Hurt

New Year’s morning found Isaac inordinately crabby and complainy, even for him: I slept for hours as he warned of mounting hunger pangs, and when we finally made it out of our guesthouse I deemed Kashi, our favorite café in Fort Cohin, too crowded with tourists for my taste, dragging him to a malarial “eco” garden restaurant where he waited yet another forty minutes for stale toast. A subsequent cold coffee at Kashi restored his spirits somewhat, but what really turned his frown upside down was seeing the flag drop for The Rickshaw Run, in which over sixty autorickshaw teams from countries with traffic laws attempt to race each other over the potholed, cow-infested streets between Fort Cochin and Katmandu, a distance of over 2,000 miles, in two weeks. He rhapsodized about the race all day, until our new expat friend Mathew, who keeps an autorickshaw handy for dissertation breaks during the monsoon season, offered to let him drive his.

Several days later Isaac and I met Mathew in front of the Santa Cruz Basilica and drove south to the Veli field, a dusty parade ground adjacent to the municipal crematorium and the Little Flower Church Cemetery. Isaac wasn’t the only student that day: we saw ladies being tutored by the St. Jude’s School of Motor Driving and Mathew’s wife Susana, who never learned to ride a bike growing up in Cairo, was practicing independently on a rusty three speed without working brakes.

Isaac had some trouble starting the autorickshaw, but once Mathew got it going, he took right off. Of course, if you give a license-less man a taste of motorized power, he is loath to give it up, and Isaac made three or four long passes before he stopped to take us on as passengers. We bumped around the Veli field with Isaac changing gears, dodging novice scooter riders, honking the horn; Mathew proclaimed him a natural. But perhaps it’s for the best Mathew remembered he had laundry to drop off at the dhobi khana next door and interrupted our jaunt: Isaac, grown bold, was anxious to try some “maneuvers”—perhaps reversing at full-speed, as Mathew had rehearsed in his former capacity as an Iraq-bound Australian diplomat?

Alas, no stunts for Isaac. When Mathew tried to re-start his vehicle, it simply shuddered with the same painful metal-scraping-metal noise we had briefly heard and ignored earlier, on our ride to the field. This time, though, the noise persisted. The left axle turned out to be broken, and divine intervention must have kept it functioning long enough for the blind man to have his ride. Eight hundred rupees and one enterprising mechanic eventually fixed the problem, but that afternoon, Isaac’s driving lesson ended with the boys pushing the vehicle into the shade while we sat and waited for help. But I don't think this is the end of the story...

Mathew has plans to cover his autorickshaw with chrome paint (the black-and-yellow is reserved for taxis); unbeknownst to him, Isaac has plans to adds plans to add airplane wings and film a music video. And I have a sure-fire way to lure Isaac back to India.