casa

After over three years without setting foot on American soil, I finally had to opportunity to go home over this Christmas break. I spent two fantastic weeks hanging out with my parents and my now-all-grown-up baby sister, siteseeing in St. Louis and lazing around the fantastic downtown apartment where my newly hip(ster) mom and dad are enjoying their first child-free years in nearly three decades. My mom organized what turned out to be an incredible reunion of all my favorite Springfield people, the family friends and high school buddies I´ve missed so much, at an Irish bar we frequented for years. I at last had a chance to enjoy the American culinary variety that has been sadly missing from my life; I ate a reuben, a pan of mac´and cheese, a tex-mex feast, Rice Krispie treats, Christmas cookies, gourmet hamburgers, pad thai, Toaster Strudels, cheesecake, Starbursts (don´t judge, you miss weird stuff when you´re away so long). I think I drank somewhere in the neighborhood of ten pints of Guinness and enjoyed my dad´s two-week tour of the bars and pubs of downtown St. Louis.

Incredible food and drink aside (it really is better in America than anywhere I´ve ever been ) the highlight was seeing my family. The hardest thing about living abroad is the distance between me and my loved ones. My parents and my sister visited me in Zafra in 2011, but I hadn´t seen anyone else since I departed in August of 2010. So this was the first time I´d been with them in a good long while. The cousins who were little kids when I left are now talking about college. The ones who were toddlers and kindergarteners are now kids old enough to politely fib that they remember me. I hope to never again go so long without a visit.

The only disappointment of the trip was not getting a chance to see my great grandfather who, due to the truly wretched weather in the Midwest, was unable to make the trip to the McDermott family party. A Skype date is definitely in order. Love you Great Grandpa!

All in all, a fantastic trip. I can´t say I was sad to leave the 14 below weather in Chicago, but I already miss my wonderful family. It´s 50 and sunny here, guys. Come see me!

basura

The Madrid trash workers are on strike. They´re facing wage cuts as the city tries to trim down it budget in light of the current economic crisis, and they are clearly unhappy about it. We´ve gone over a week now without trash collection. The ever-growing piles of bagged garbage are fine. Unsightly and stinkier every day, but I can live with it. The people who keep this city clean don´t deserve to have their salaries cut, so fine, let it pile up.

But they decided not to just let it pile up. Apparently afraid that simple heaps of rotting trash wouldn´t make a strong enough statement, the angry workers took to the streets on the second and third day of the strike to tip over gabage cans and dumpsters, scattering their contents far and wide.

The city center is a distaster zone. It looks like a tornado has ripped through the place, somehow managing to leave the buildings in tact but obliterating every trash recepticle in its path. The Lavapies plaza, the heart of our bohemian little barrio, already a touch shabby under the best of circumstances, looks positively apocalyptic. Every breeze kicks up torn newspapers and candy wrappers, and passing dogs have lefts trails of half-eaten, rotting food on the sidewalks. Even the pot dealers on the corner and the drunks on the benches look a little uncomfortable in their newly disgusting surroundings.

The newspapers say the strike may go on a while. God help us.

back

After only fifteen months away, here we are again in Spain. I couldn´t be happier. Thailand was a great experience, but it certainly taught me that I would just really rather live in the developed western world. Our little flat in the center of Madrid has hot water, high-speed internet, a flush toilet located in a bathroom inside of the dwelling itself, an oven, sinks in the bathroom and kitchen, sufficient and comfortable seating...after Thailand, and especially the jungle container, it´s pure luxury. Three months in I still emerge from every hot shower amazed at how fantastic it is to have a hot shower. I´ve been cooking elaborate meals in my fully-equipped kitchen and haven´t once had to scrub mold off the walls. Life is good.

I´ve also been struck by how much easier this transition has been than any of the previous moves I´ve made. My study abroad time in Argentina was six months of culture shock; I never fully adapted because I couldn´t speak the language well and it was the first time I´d really experienced a culture other than my own. When we moved to Zafra, it took me months to being truly understanding the accent, and adjusting to small-town life was difficult and often frustrating. Living in Surat never stopped feeling insane--just when I would start to feel at home, a spider the size of my hand would scuttle across my floor, or my neighbor would proudly present me with an entire octopus and wait expectably for me to eat it, or my school would throw an enormous celebration (the motivation for which I was never once able to fully understand) in which the students would dress up in traditional Thai dance costumes and drape Buddhist scarves around a statue of the virgin Mary, or ceremonially give me a bath towel with a bow wrapped around it. There were days when it was just wholly, insurmountably foreign.

This move hasn´t been like that. I understand what people are saying. The things they do make sense to me. I can get everywhere easily, whether my bus or metro, without walking miles through unmarked village streets or risking my life on a questionable motorbike. I can buy any food I need or want. With three years under my belt, teaching is a breeze. The challenges I face every day are normal life challenges, not ´´I can´t figure out how to order food without chicken guts´´ type challenges.

Happy to be back.

leaving

I haven't written in a while because I've been a bit gloomy and didn't want to put any of that negativity in words. I've been feeling stuck--I was ready to leave Thailand a while ago but the way things worked out, we decided it was in our best interests to stay still September. So I've kind of put my head down and powered through.

But now we're two weeks from out of here, and I'm starting to reflect on my time here. It hasn't all been great. It turned out that Thailand isn't a good fit for me, or, more fairly put, that I'm not a good fit for Thailand. I didn't adapt well to the tropical heat, or to the frustration of the language barrier, and I have never come to feel at home here. But the thing is, despite the downs, I've never for a moment regretted coming. I don't wish we'd gone somewhere else instead, or that we'd stayed in Spain, or even that we'd left sooner. It's been hard, but I think if it hadn't been so hard, I wouldn't have learned as much.

Leaving always makes me look more positively on a place--In my last weeks in Zafra, the claustrophobia of small-town life stopped bothering me so much. Right before leaving Bloomington, it sorta seemed ok that hipsters and hobos regularly pissed in the alley five feet from my bedroom window. So now that we're on the verge of departure, I'm coming out of my grumpiness and starting to remember why I came here in the first place.

Thai food, while something of a minefield of weird animal parts and peppers that set your mouth on fire, is some of the best stuff I've ever had. I'm to the point where I always crave curry breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I hit this vegan place every day for tofu green curry, mixed vegetables and sauteed seitan rubbed with red curry paste. It's honestly one of the best meals I've ever had. The red curry and penang and Sweet Kitchen, a riverside restaurant that Levi and I visit two or three times a week, is extraordinary.

The jungle that surrounds our little container house really is breathtaking. I've never gotten tired of just staring into the tangles of trees, flowers, and vines. I spend Saturday and Sunday mornings laying on our bed with the container door flung open, reading a book and watching the palm trees sway in the breeze, electric blue birds and butterflies the size of my palm floating by, the occasional thunderstorm rolling in, bending the palm trunks at  incredible angles and pouring rain on the tin roof.

And the people here, both my coworkers and the locals, are fantastic. It's been pretty rare that I've encountered an unpleasant person. It's the sort of place that lends itself to a laid-back attitude, and seems to attract that sort of person. So even in my occasional irritation with Surat, I've been happy for the opportunity to get to know some really great people.

So we're off to Madrid in two weeks. We'll be there teaching for a year, and if all goes according to our current plan, Levi will continue teaching and working on his photography (which is getting more incredible all the time) while I do a year-long masters program in archaeology at a university in the city.

I'm thrilled to be going back to Spain. Oddly enough, it took a teaching job in Thailand to make me realize that what I really want to do is live in Spain and eventually quit teaching. I'm also happy to be moving to a big city--it will be fantastic to have international restaurants, import-stocked grocery stores, museums and live music at our fingertips. Madrid is well-connected by public transportation to the whole province, which has several beautiful cities and national parks to explore.

I'm ready.

en route, old friends

Katie and a coconut.

 My friend Katie, the very same Katie who spent two weeks with us in Spain about a year and a half ago, just departed from her visit here in Thailand with a promise to see us again in our next destination. She's amazing. A day after her arrival, we left town to spent three days on Koh Phangan, an island off the coast of Surat province famous for its landscapes and parties. Our time on the secluded beach of Haad Yuan consisted largely of drinking beer in the sand and reading on our beachview terrace, but the journey there, in retrospect a dark foreshadowing of the rest of Katie's Thai experience, was....arduous.

The view from our bungalow. Nice place. Bad, bad bathroom.

Getting to Haad Yuan, a beautiful (albeit touristy and way too boho) beach on the west side of the island, entails the following: Drive motorbike to bus station. Park in slightly sketchy enclosed lot near bus station. Take minibus on a one-hour ride to the port. Wait at the port, normally for less than an hour, but for nearly three if they happened to have changed the departure times that day without telling anyone. Play cards and eat overpriced food to pass the time while grumbling about the Thai inability to keep to a schedule. Board the ferry and sit for 2.5 hours, during which time you will be incredibly hot and dealing with various waves of unpleasant smells. Nice views though.

Katie and I on the taxi boat. It's much nicer in the daytime.

Arrive at Koh Phangan at sunset. Pile into tuk-tuk with several European strangers and embark on thirty-minute ride of terror through the hilly, curvy terrain of the island, at the mercy of a driver who appears to have consumed a dangerous dose of amphetamines. Arrive at Haad Rin, the party beach. Walk ten minutes through the garbage of last night and the crowds of the young evening to the shore, where you will hire a taxi boat. It's a wooden longtail with a car engine strapped to the back. The driver will go at a speed you judge to be way too fast for nighttime along a rocky coast, but you've just gotta trust that he's done this a million times. Arrive at destination, find an available bungalow, sit at beach restaurant and order beers immediately.

Western luxuries in tourist paradise.

But after we had gotten through the trials, and with Katie now familiar, on her second day in Thailand, with about seven forms of Thai transportation, we enjoyed ourselves relaxing on the postcard of a beach. Levi and Katie even woke early one day and walked to the bar, where zonked-out hippies were still raving in strobe lights to nineties trance music well after dawn. Quite an experience. And our ride home was much smoother; we even had the luck of an air-conditioned ferry. We rested up in Surat for a day before embarking on our next journey: Thai New Year. More to follow soon; it deserves a focus of its own.

gang som and salt fish

Thai food is some of the best stuff in the world. Pad thai, rich coconut curries, spicy stir-fries and sweet, milky iced tea--amazing. All of those are wonderful treats, and the versions you get in Thailand are superior to the sanitized, less-flavorful versions available in the west.

But here's the thing: it's the best of Thai food, sanitized though it may be, that made it to the other hemisphere. The rest of of, quite justifiably, has no market where a European palett reigns. That coconut curry the waitress sets in front of you smells amazing, but stir it up a bit before you dive in--it's probably full of chicken feet and bits of intenstine. Anything you'd call spicy would be tasteless to a local, so the dish is so full of chilies that you've got tears streaming down your cheeks by the third bite. The shrimp in your pad thai is whole-vein, head, and all, and the chicken is full of gristle and fat. Your otherwise delicious noodle soup is full of what appears to be black tofu, but turns out to be balls of congealed pig's blood.

If you know where to look and know how to say "mild" in Thai, you can eat pretty well. Some of the best food I've ever eaten has been right here in Surat. But during the school year, while I was working at the elementary school, I would often stay and eat the free lunch that the school generously provides to the teachers. Some days, it was something simple and pleasant like fried rice or sweet curry, but every once in a while, after already committing to a plate and a drink, I'd find myself face to face with the unholy combo: gang som and salt fish.

Gang som is, from what I've gathered talking to Thai coworkers, a favorite dish of southern Thailand. It's also the most disgusting thing I've ever tasted in my life. It's a watery curry of a strange grayish yellow-green color, full of fish and bitter vegetables, with a sour/sweet/deadly spicy flavor. I can't compare it to anything because I've never tasted anything remotely like it. The cafeteria cooks generally saw fit to serve it with another Thai delicacy that turns my stomach: salt-cured fish. It's an entire fish, cold and crispy and highly salted all the way through. There's no way to really separate the meat from the bone, so you just do your best and get the occasional sliver stuck in your throat.

After being burned a few times, I had to just admit to my Thai coworkers that I hate the stuff and excuse myself whenever it was served. They laughed at me for my lack of fortitude, but even they had to concede that it isn't for everyone.

libros

I'm teaching prepositions to my second graders, making it visual by stacking kids on top of one another, balancing notebooks on their heads and having them stand on, next to, behind, in front of chairs. I make a couple kids squeeze themselves under a desk and have one hold a chair on his head. I swear this is educational.

I pull one kid's desk out of his row and into the front of the class. I tell him to stand on it. He breaks into a huge, gap-toothed grin when he realizes what I'm telling him to do, but before he jumps up on it, he presses his hands together in front of his lips and bows to the desk, the wai gesture that Thais use to show respect.

As I continue bringing up groups of kids to stand in various silly formations with each other, furniture, and their school supplies, I notice that every kid wais the desk before standing on it. I'm confused; I've only seen this gesture used to show respect to people, temples, and other things that you would naturally assume garner respect. Not pieces of furniture.

So after class, I ask my Thai assistant teacher about it. She tells me it isn't about the desk, but what's inside of the desk.

Education is highly valued in Thailand. Teachers are very well respected; in Surat, if you're being treated with the rudeness usually reserved for backpackers, dropping an "I'm a teacher" in Thai will turn things around. This respect carries over to books; as the tools of education, they are treated with care and reverence.

So my students, before putting their feet (the most unholy part of the body) on the desk, were showing respect for the books.