time for change

I've found a new home...www.stheory.posterious.com

Hope its a much more simple and effective website.

a werewolf in paris

I think I'm becoming nocturnal, if I wasn't always so. My mother fondly recalls my early years as an infant. Not really. I had somehow decided that I functioned in Eastern Standard Time rather than the China time I was born in. This meant that I slept like a dead log through the day and stayed up crying from dusk until dawn. I went through five nannies. I guess I am a creature of the night.

This is the fifth night I am up late doing at least 8 or 9 different things. I got into this bad cycle after Bangkok, where I found out aside from the Royal Palace, Pat"Pong" night market, and Muay Thai boxing, which I did in one of our five days there, there wasn't much else I felt like except loitering in shiny shopping malls. I were templed-out, monumented-out, night market-ed out, and after a crap experience at Bangkok's most esteemed thai-food institution, even Thai food-ed out. With all of nothing to lure me out of bed in the mornings, I slept until all ungodly hours of the day, yelling at cleaning ladies to ignore my sheets as I was happy in my undisturbed filth, ending up in a competition with myself to see how late I can stay up.

I won with 5 am two nights ago at the Shenzhen airport. I seem to be eternally condemned to catching shit flights that arrive past midnight and connect at six am the next day. I am then so lazy to find a hotel for four hours that I just sit on a filthy bench and wait it out. But I really love the night. Nobody engages me in useless conversations that I cannot wait to get out of, the sun doesn't beckon me into the outdoors, which I love, really, and even the spam in my inbox shuffles in at less frequent intervals. And since I'm one of those people who obsessively check my email for any flicker of movement, that means less distractions.

There. I just completed the daunting task of 'editing' my Facebook "Connections" list. I like how Facebook named it that rather than "Authentic Lifelong Friends", apparently they know what they're dealing with. My connections were getting out of hand, so I just whittled it down by about 700. Besides, I think FB is phasing out, we're going in the direction of multi-platform communication. I have no idea what that means, but it sounds about right. Twitter's the way of the world, and by that declaration I'm not a citizen of the world because China's banned it as of now. Google wave is the way of the future, and it's probably a good thing Microsoft didn't spend a gazillion dollars buying FB out.

Speaking of gazillion, I am overwhelmed with all the activities I have on my plate. Good overwhelmed, not the other kind. I am developing a food tour in Shanghai, so am reading up all I can on the city's back alleys, see-and-be-seen venues, hidden gems, long-standing institutions, traditions and trends. Adlyn has created a monster spreadsheet of tasks for me to complete this month. I said I wanted to work on everything she could hand me, but even for me this is a challenge.

Hias Gourmet work is only a part of the personal goals I want to accomplish this month. I already have an eternally growing pile of books beside my bed that I WILL read by this month. I am on a lounge/mood music binge, so that means I just spent 3 hours ripping 20 cds onto my ipod, listening to them from morning until night. I go to sleep with sweet dreams of Stephane Pompougnac and I in the infamous Hotel Costes. In addition to the vast food literature I'm tackling, I re-caught the lit bug after reading Steinbeck's East of Eden. I need more greats! Give me major Fitzgerald, none of that minor stuff!

I am still working on all my vacay photos. I have set myself realistic goals however, of one city a day, in the order that they occur, and have labelled and organized all my photos in detail for this express purpose. I have just finished sorting through the last week in Beijing. Why the f couldn't god have made the days 50 hours long? That way I may have a chance at completing a respectable fraction of my tasks.

Anywhoo. I think I'm going to enter a photo competition. The grand prize is a ten day trip for one through the safaris of Tanzania. It is my personal goal to win this prize. Maybe if I write it out on the internet for the world to see, I'd feel completely committed, and it will help me in my endeavor. Godspeed to myself.

I have just gone brain dead. It is 4 am. I have to go to sleep now before the light of dawn turns me into a werewolf.



Friedens -the pseudo german term my friend has coined for peace

total eclipse of the heart

I left south east asia today for Beijing. It was a bittersweet ending, the mark of another chapter in my life, closed. I have another month in China, where I'll be doing a lot of miscellaneous work for Hias Gourmet in Beijing and Shanghai, and then it's off to real life back at home.

There were storm clouds all over China this morning, it was impossible to see the longest solar eclipse of the century from the ground. Lucky for me, I was soaring 50,000 meters above the ground at around 10 am when the skies became pitch black for 5 long minutes.

the real laos

Searching for the "real Laos" brought me to a small village 85 km from Vientiane. I went there by myself yesterday as my friend stayed in the city waiting for his Thai visa to be issued.

The village of Ban Na, also known as "Elephant Village" is home to just over 100 families. The villagers experienced a mishap a few years ago when their sugar cane crops were demolished by sweet-toothed elephants wandering in the region. They could not control the elephants, but instead came up with a way to subsidize the income they lost in the sugar canes through sustainable tourism. Ban Na is also located at the base of a large conservation area called Phu Khau Khuay, so treks in the region are also usually launched from there.

For these reasons, I expected transportation to the area to be frequent and easy. Was I ever wrong. I walked early in the morning to the station where Lonely Planet said buses left from, and realized I wasn't in Kansas anymore. This was local territory. No one spoke more than one word of English, and I had considerable difficulty telling many people, mostly in sign language, that I wanted to go to a village with elephants. I pieced together that the bus I wanted was not there, but at another station 9 km away. So I took an hour-long journey on a minibus there, cramped in a seat with Lao old and young alike, teenagers and market vendors toting all their trinkets.

Upon arrival at the 'actual' station, I find out, naturally, that there are no buses to my destination. I had to take a 'tuk-tuk', basically a trailer with some seats attached to a smoking motorcycle. These are probably the third surest way to death after land mines and speed boats in South East Asia, and three jaw-clenching hours later, during which I managed to brave headaches and pot-holes to read 400 pages of 'East of Eden', I finally arrived in Ban Na.

This is when it started to pour. At the entrance to the village there was a small house with a storefront where I found refuge from the rain. No one spoke English, but I managed to tell the fifty year old owner of the house that I needed to sit under his roof for a while until it stopped raining. I was getting more and more dejected at this point because it was already three in the afternoon and considering the three hour journey home it was already about time I got back.

But in a way the rain was a blessing. Although the village was not its lively self in the gloomy weather, I sat in the midst of one villager's bustling family life, enjoying a silent sort of interaction with them all. There were no less than three generations sitting on that porch,underneath a covered tarp, the most prominent the group of children, seven or eight of them, chasing each other through the yard and shrieking with delight at each splattering of raindrops on their cheeks. I had a lot of fun taking pictures of them, and they found the photos on my camera absolutely delicious.

When the rain did not let up, I cut my losses and braved the rain and mud into the deserted village. It was such a peaceful walk, past rice fields, durian trees, lush vegetation, a couple of water buffalos, and then a hut on a hill with six little children underneath. They hollered at me from their place of hiding, "What's your name!" Children in Laos speak the best English because their parents instill that it is the surest way to employment. I yelled back and forth with them for a while, answering their questions and asking them questions they did not understand, making them giggle uncontrollably as a result.

Then I asked if I could join them, and they nodded, showing me the hidden route to their place of solace. They were weaving bamboo baskets, a specialty craft in this village. These bamboo baskets were sold around the country as containers for the Lao staple sticky rice. I asked their names, they were Bop,Pop,Kop,Jop,... swear to god. Aged between 9 and 13. One showed me how to weave the bamboo pieces interchangeably to create a firm round ring, and another one how to cut the fray bamboo off with a butcher knife and effortless grace. I showed them my camera and gave them a packet of coconut cookies I had in my bag. Lame exchange, I know.

As much as I would have loved to escape to this wondrous world of basket weaving with these charming kids, I was brought down to earth by the fact that I was dripping wet, smelled like water buffalo, and was getting closer minute by minute to nightfall. I had to leave them, sitting under the hut, joking and chattering, to go back to the village. As I turned the bend in the mud road, I heard them sing in unison a long "Thank youuuuuu!" and their giggles fading into the rain.

before I forget

The power cut out in my guesthouse last night before I finished my post. I had wanted to describe the utter magnificence of Lao's beauty. The slow boat did not bother me despite the delay in our travel plans because of the unspoilt scenery we saw along the way. There are literally no words to describe the strong beauty of the Mekong river as it slowly winds past the lush topiary of the Lao countryside. Brilliant greens layering on top of each other in the most perfect pastures, tall banana trees, rolling hills, and swaying grass. The Mekong river is not the cleanest I've ever seen. In fact it is downright opaque, picking up bankside mud as it rushes past our boat in a shade akin to orange clay. But I love the intensity of the colours. The sky is blue and the clouds white. Every direction I look is a new postcard ready to be sent home, luring people to this completely underrated and overlooked paradise.

If you thought that sounded like a song, don't even get me started on Luang Prabang. I have never seen a more idyllic town. The French colonial architecture fits beautifully onto the backdrop of glistening stupas and temples. The buddhist culture in Laos is as prominent as ever, with hundreds of temples, some dating back to the 1500's scattered on every block in Luang Prabang. Monks can be seen roaming the streets at all times of day, dressed in billowing robes of vibrant orange. By the dormitories inside each temple, orange robes hang on clothes lines drying under the sun. Every morning, the monks form a procession down the main street in an alms giving ceremony where locals give offerings to them of sticky rice and other food items. I will see this take place tomorrow morning if I wake up at 6 am as planned!