happy bird day to me!
Monday, January 31, 2005
DONT EVEN THINK OF ASKING HOW MANY!
Hello dear readers....we interrupt the Burma monotribe to bring you a moment of sheer ego stroking. Well, almost. Strangely I got to celebrate my birthday twice with two different sets of cakes and candles. The first time it was really embarrassing, though, I had tagged along with my younger friend Regan the Kiwi (see ma, I do like 'Regan') to one of his young guys parties, and his friend Sunhi was having a birthday party. As it turned out, they had two cakes, someone had accidentally brought an extra,and he was determined to embarrass me in public.
On the way to the party, I stopped off at Carne Station (ugh.) This is some kind of wallowing trough that represents the worth of both American and Korean cultures. It's a gigantic, all-you-can-eat 'upmarket' buffet whose main attractive feature is the no-name whiskey and well drinks section. Since I'm on antibiotics, that lost most of its appeal; the rest of the food, served in the most unappealing way possible, just didn't seem to measure up to the first time I went there years ago.
Smuggling some hot berry pies out of the restaurant in my coat to Regan and his 'Young Guy' friends, I met them at the local train station and we proceeded to the party only a block away. On the way, we agreed that my age would be 35, since the real number (how dare you for asking!) would be a little bit high for the median age of the party. 35 would still make me the oldest one there, not counting the girls parents.
I can't believe we pulled it off - of course, people had already been drinking for hours by the time we trotted out the lie - and Regan, in a last attempt to make me blush, changed the number to 34, so I adamantly changed it back to 35.
The thing about age in this country is that it is usually one of the first questions Koreans ask. They can't even conjugate their verb properly until they know if they are lower or higher than you in terms of age rank. This age rank thing has got to be one of the most objectionable things Western people find with Confucian culture.
As an example, when there is a fender bender, the two drivers will jump out of their cars and begin accusing each other (this is another problem, admission of guilt is hard to obtain) of being at fault. The language might start dropping in politeness as it would anywhere in the world, and at this point, the older driver might say something like this: How DARE you talk to me that way! I'm OLDER than you..." as if this somehow constituted the logical conclusion to the argument (it doesn't, not even in Korea, because the car remains scratched and has to be paid for - but it sometimes quells further verbal discussion)
This is an ugly side of age rank. There are a lot of good sides as well, such as a reserved elderly seating section on the subway cars (that, in contrast to the west, is never occupied by the young and un-handicapped) and often you will see younger people give up their seat on a crowded bus for an older person. But for me it remains a nightmare; every time I meet someone new, they can't resist asking the question.
Many times I break down and just tell them; and then watch as they grow cold and distantly polite with me, whereas minutes ago we had struck up a warm and interesting conversation. It's a bit like telling people you are HIV positive or something; they're deferential, but a little distant since they know you will die before they do....Ok , maybe that's not the best analogy, but it definately resembles some sort of social pariah status....
This is how I came to have an 'ageist' complex...surrounded by an ageist culture, I don't want to tell anybody anything about my personal details for fear of being labeled, categorized, boxed, and avoided.
But still, you have to admit, two birthdays....now that's a real ego stroking.
On the way to the party, I stopped off at Carne Station (ugh.) This is some kind of wallowing trough that represents the worth of both American and Korean cultures. It's a gigantic, all-you-can-eat 'upmarket' buffet whose main attractive feature is the no-name whiskey and well drinks section. Since I'm on antibiotics, that lost most of its appeal; the rest of the food, served in the most unappealing way possible, just didn't seem to measure up to the first time I went there years ago.
Smuggling some hot berry pies out of the restaurant in my coat to Regan and his 'Young Guy' friends, I met them at the local train station and we proceeded to the party only a block away. On the way, we agreed that my age would be 35, since the real number (how dare you for asking!) would be a little bit high for the median age of the party. 35 would still make me the oldest one there, not counting the girls parents.
I can't believe we pulled it off - of course, people had already been drinking for hours by the time we trotted out the lie - and Regan, in a last attempt to make me blush, changed the number to 34, so I adamantly changed it back to 35.
The thing about age in this country is that it is usually one of the first questions Koreans ask. They can't even conjugate their verb properly until they know if they are lower or higher than you in terms of age rank. This age rank thing has got to be one of the most objectionable things Western people find with Confucian culture.
As an example, when there is a fender bender, the two drivers will jump out of their cars and begin accusing each other (this is another problem, admission of guilt is hard to obtain) of being at fault. The language might start dropping in politeness as it would anywhere in the world, and at this point, the older driver might say something like this: How DARE you talk to me that way! I'm OLDER than you..." as if this somehow constituted the logical conclusion to the argument (it doesn't, not even in Korea, because the car remains scratched and has to be paid for - but it sometimes quells further verbal discussion)
This is an ugly side of age rank. There are a lot of good sides as well, such as a reserved elderly seating section on the subway cars (that, in contrast to the west, is never occupied by the young and un-handicapped) and often you will see younger people give up their seat on a crowded bus for an older person. But for me it remains a nightmare; every time I meet someone new, they can't resist asking the question.
Many times I break down and just tell them; and then watch as they grow cold and distantly polite with me, whereas minutes ago we had struck up a warm and interesting conversation. It's a bit like telling people you are HIV positive or something; they're deferential, but a little distant since they know you will die before they do....Ok , maybe that's not the best analogy, but it definately resembles some sort of social pariah status....
This is how I came to have an 'ageist' complex...surrounded by an ageist culture, I don't want to tell anybody anything about my personal details for fear of being labeled, categorized, boxed, and avoided.
But still, you have to admit, two birthdays....now that's a real ego stroking.
Friday, January 28, 2005
Can Something Be Exotic without being a little Bizzare?
For me the short answer is no. Finding a little something of the quirky, unexpected, sometimes darker nature of the human soul is what the meaning of adventure entails. Greeting me for my first time in this country I had heard so little about was sights like the one above: Getting your ya-yas , as they used to say in the eighties, with things like tribal lady models on coffee ads (instead of sex symbols) and beer with one-celled blue green algae as an additive.
I don't know what you, dear reader, know about spirulina (sorry, no link), but for me it has always been associated with the excesses of vegetarianism. A former vegetarian myself, and certainly not against any but the more extreme forms like 'breatharianism' and stuff *, I was quite enthused when I discovered that it was loaded with protein (something like three to four times more than beef, depending on the cut)
But when I looked at it, it was singularly unappealing. It was, in short, a blue-green powder, the color that only a dedicated Dadaist would color food to make people freak out. Furthermore, it smelled like algae (because it is) and tasted like algae (I grew up on a lake, which filled our mouths, noses and ears with algae).
So, naturally, you can't just hold your nose and swallow the two spoonfuls of blue powder per day just because it contains more protein than a twelve ounce steak.....smart vegetarians blend it in with yoghurt, bananas, sugar, ice cream, anything that blenders well. So naturally I was surprised and pleased and....oh yeah, I almost forgot the passive verb form of 'exotic', but English doesn't have that one, when I saw that these clever Burmese were taking their protein orally - with a kick. Of course you'd probably need to drink a half a case of these things to get the necessary quantity of Spirulina, so....
Imagine, then, my disappointment when I 'Googled' the word combination just now and discovered that Qingdao is also marketing this kind of beer---and probably Budweiser will be next. ("Would you like a Budalina?") Oh well, so much for the exotic factor. Anyways, it seems hard to imagine a country in the world with such a sight as these two billboards present the seer with.
I was tickled pink as our strange taxi (didn't have any taxi markings, but the man had some kind of laminated permission to drive people around for money on the dash, and we had to walk way away from the airport to get into this contraption - My guess is that he didn't want to pay kickbacks to the airport officials), as our strange taxi tooled around the choking dirty streets of this newfound exotic place I had wanted to come to for seventeen years.
that's all for now, folks...please stay tuned, I've got over 700 mb of jpegs on Burma...including a short propoganda film filmed in nuttyvision!
*speaking of extremism, I was shocked to discover that spirulina actually represents part of the evolution of plants to mammals - strictly speaking it is not a plant, because it lacks stiff cellulose cell walls, though it has a poorly organized nucleus (I'm paraphrasing here, forgive me cellular biologists) - but, and especially if you were an extremist, you could make the case that this living thing is not plant life and should thus not be eaten by serious vegetarians. What would you call these kind of people? Why, cellulitists of course. Don't blame me that the spelling is so close to cellulitis.
I don't know what you, dear reader, know about spirulina (sorry, no link), but for me it has always been associated with the excesses of vegetarianism. A former vegetarian myself, and certainly not against any but the more extreme forms like 'breatharianism' and stuff *, I was quite enthused when I discovered that it was loaded with protein (something like three to four times more than beef, depending on the cut)
But when I looked at it, it was singularly unappealing. It was, in short, a blue-green powder, the color that only a dedicated Dadaist would color food to make people freak out. Furthermore, it smelled like algae (because it is) and tasted like algae (I grew up on a lake, which filled our mouths, noses and ears with algae).
So, naturally, you can't just hold your nose and swallow the two spoonfuls of blue powder per day just because it contains more protein than a twelve ounce steak.....smart vegetarians blend it in with yoghurt, bananas, sugar, ice cream, anything that blenders well. So naturally I was surprised and pleased and....oh yeah, I almost forgot the passive verb form of 'exotic', but English doesn't have that one, when I saw that these clever Burmese were taking their protein orally - with a kick. Of course you'd probably need to drink a half a case of these things to get the necessary quantity of Spirulina, so....
Imagine, then, my disappointment when I 'Googled' the word combination just now and discovered that Qingdao is also marketing this kind of beer---and probably Budweiser will be next. ("Would you like a Budalina?") Oh well, so much for the exotic factor. Anyways, it seems hard to imagine a country in the world with such a sight as these two billboards present the seer with.
I was tickled pink as our strange taxi (didn't have any taxi markings, but the man had some kind of laminated permission to drive people around for money on the dash, and we had to walk way away from the airport to get into this contraption - My guess is that he didn't want to pay kickbacks to the airport officials), as our strange taxi tooled around the choking dirty streets of this newfound exotic place I had wanted to come to for seventeen years.
that's all for now, folks...please stay tuned, I've got over 700 mb of jpegs on Burma...including a short propoganda film filmed in nuttyvision!
*speaking of extremism, I was shocked to discover that spirulina actually represents part of the evolution of plants to mammals - strictly speaking it is not a plant, because it lacks stiff cellulose cell walls, though it has a poorly organized nucleus (I'm paraphrasing here, forgive me cellular biologists) - but, and especially if you were an extremist, you could make the case that this living thing is not plant life and should thus not be eaten by serious vegetarians. What would you call these kind of people? Why, cellulitists of course. Don't blame me that the spelling is so close to cellulitis.
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Coming into the Country
Landing at Yangon airport, I suddenly had all the feeling of travel in an exotic place, a feeling that had gotten lost in my decades-long self exile from the land of my birth. I had tried to come here in 1987, but things then were so complicated that it just didn't work (another place that happened that way was the Hunza valley of Pakistan, twice I have tried to go there and have had to turn back), and secretly I vowed to come back when circumstances were better.
Well, 17 years on, the Lonely planet has resumed publishing about Burma, people are starting to travel there, and little by little Yet Another Boycott Which Didn't Work (to which we must add, unfortunately, Cuba and North Korea) will work its way into the shadowy pages of non-history. I decided this past Christmas that I finally had to kill my exotic Burma fantasy; why in the time I had waited, the country had even changed names, there had been demonstrations and a bloody Tianenmen-style repression, and Burma continued to grow slowly through the helping hand of China and India.
There was a curious mixture of fear and curiousity as I walked from the plane (walked? when was the last time anybody did that on the tarmac?) to the exotic looking terminal (see picture above). Well, maybe I've already used up my quota on that word, exotic. And perhaps the terminal doesn't deserve it because it looks sort of like a cheezy outlying temple complex building in Thailand. Burma shows its closeness to Thailand, not only geographically, but religiously and through decorations like this.
But still, even Don Muang Airport in Bangkok was just another airport, generic terminal bays, taxi ranks, all that jazz. But here was this - this monstrosity, and whether you cared for that kind of SE Asian gaudy baroque or not, for better or worse this place was different and visibly so from the outset.
The taxi ranks were also different, as we (I had hooked up with an intriguing Dutch couple by this point) found ourselves walking past the parking lot and down a dirt road with this taxi driver, who for some mysterious reason (not mysterious, it's always about money) parked half a mile away...in fact, as I looked around, after two minutes, it was easy to forget we were even at the airport - here were houses, trees, streets....no sound of jets....weird kind of space-time warp.
I better call it a night. We'll delve into the seamy underside and the gleamy overside of Yangon next.....
Well, 17 years on, the Lonely planet has resumed publishing about Burma, people are starting to travel there, and little by little Yet Another Boycott Which Didn't Work (to which we must add, unfortunately, Cuba and North Korea) will work its way into the shadowy pages of non-history. I decided this past Christmas that I finally had to kill my exotic Burma fantasy; why in the time I had waited, the country had even changed names, there had been demonstrations and a bloody Tianenmen-style repression, and Burma continued to grow slowly through the helping hand of China and India.
There was a curious mixture of fear and curiousity as I walked from the plane (walked? when was the last time anybody did that on the tarmac?) to the exotic looking terminal (see picture above). Well, maybe I've already used up my quota on that word, exotic. And perhaps the terminal doesn't deserve it because it looks sort of like a cheezy outlying temple complex building in Thailand. Burma shows its closeness to Thailand, not only geographically, but religiously and through decorations like this.
But still, even Don Muang Airport in Bangkok was just another airport, generic terminal bays, taxi ranks, all that jazz. But here was this - this monstrosity, and whether you cared for that kind of SE Asian gaudy baroque or not, for better or worse this place was different and visibly so from the outset.
The taxi ranks were also different, as we (I had hooked up with an intriguing Dutch couple by this point) found ourselves walking past the parking lot and down a dirt road with this taxi driver, who for some mysterious reason (not mysterious, it's always about money) parked half a mile away...in fact, as I looked around, after two minutes, it was easy to forget we were even at the airport - here were houses, trees, streets....no sound of jets....weird kind of space-time warp.
I better call it a night. We'll delve into the seamy underside and the gleamy overside of Yangon next.....
Saturday, January 22, 2005
So I bought a little Cyclotron
OK, so you're disappointed, because you thought you were going to see a lot of pictures of Burma right away....well, they're coming, but I want to squeeze a story out of them if you don't mind.
In the meantime, I'd like to relate my latest adventure. Shopping in Asia has always been an adventure. Often the worst part of the adventure is finding out that you can't buy something, something you took for granted, something you thought might be universal. China is the biggest shock for shoppers, especially when they discover that most of the things, especially nice things, that are made in China are simply not for sale in that country.
Korea has always been that way, I remember years ago trying to hobble together the ingredients for a simple hamburger to put on the menu at my bar: the meat, bun, pickles, lettuce, and tomato all came from different stores or markets in completely different parts of the city - so I travelled probably about 50 miles to pick them all up. Exhausting.
Which is why, when I saw a salad spinner for sale here, I regretted not buying it on the spot. Actually I didn't have money on me at the time, but I could have returned the next day to snap up the only model in the store. As it turns out, when I finally got back to the store, it was gone. Not the spinner, but the whole store. wham.
About two months later I found another store that also had one, just one model for sale. But I didn't like this one as much as the previous one, because it was too big. My house is only a 10 by 10 square little box of a studio, so I have to have Japanese-y ways of conserving space. And this thing was BIG, maybe almost double the size of the one from the out-of-business place.
So I passed it up, thinking, maybe if I made a concerted effort, I'd be able to scare up a more decent one. I couldn't.
When I went back to the store the other day, practically hopping from the bitter cold, it was still there. Well, almost. The shop lady and I had to hunt it down, she took my conviction as evidence that such a thing existed and that I would buy it, so she started pulling things off the shelf and digging to the back. There it was, gleaming aquamarine, my very own spinner.
Now I could get down to the serious business of making salads (Korea is one of the best places in the world to buy exotic salad fixings, like dandelion and chicory and the like). Not that I couldn't eat salad without a salad spinner; it's just that since I'm eating mostly water anyways, I'd rather have most of the water on the inside of the leaf than on the outside...call it an affectation of mine.
The only problem is, when I got this monster home, I realized just how damn big the thing is. I mean, it's only marginally smaller than the new CERN cyclotron in Switzerland which will smash protons in an attempt to detect smaller subnuclear particles. I wondered if my new device would get up to the same speeds, and if so, what the accentuated g-forces would do to my poor parsley...
Somehow, I wondered what the Koreans had been thinking when they designed, cast and molded such a device....was it intended as a backup in case your washing machine's motor gave up and you needed to spin most of the water out of your clothes? In America it would most certainly come with a large red Dumb People Beware Warning Sticker: something like this:
"WARNING! This device acheives high molecular velocities! Do NOT attempt to dry small children or pets by putting them inside the spinner bowl. Do NOT stick fingers or sharp pointy things inside device while operating."
Still, it's a lot of fun operating it, even if I'm secretly afraid the crank will get out of hand and break my arm or something.
Thanks for reading...the next post I'll attempt to deconstruct Burma.
In the meantime, I'd like to relate my latest adventure. Shopping in Asia has always been an adventure. Often the worst part of the adventure is finding out that you can't buy something, something you took for granted, something you thought might be universal. China is the biggest shock for shoppers, especially when they discover that most of the things, especially nice things, that are made in China are simply not for sale in that country.
Korea has always been that way, I remember years ago trying to hobble together the ingredients for a simple hamburger to put on the menu at my bar: the meat, bun, pickles, lettuce, and tomato all came from different stores or markets in completely different parts of the city - so I travelled probably about 50 miles to pick them all up. Exhausting.
Which is why, when I saw a salad spinner for sale here, I regretted not buying it on the spot. Actually I didn't have money on me at the time, but I could have returned the next day to snap up the only model in the store. As it turns out, when I finally got back to the store, it was gone. Not the spinner, but the whole store. wham.
About two months later I found another store that also had one, just one model for sale. But I didn't like this one as much as the previous one, because it was too big. My house is only a 10 by 10 square little box of a studio, so I have to have Japanese-y ways of conserving space. And this thing was BIG, maybe almost double the size of the one from the out-of-business place.
So I passed it up, thinking, maybe if I made a concerted effort, I'd be able to scare up a more decent one. I couldn't.
When I went back to the store the other day, practically hopping from the bitter cold, it was still there. Well, almost. The shop lady and I had to hunt it down, she took my conviction as evidence that such a thing existed and that I would buy it, so she started pulling things off the shelf and digging to the back. There it was, gleaming aquamarine, my very own spinner.
Now I could get down to the serious business of making salads (Korea is one of the best places in the world to buy exotic salad fixings, like dandelion and chicory and the like). Not that I couldn't eat salad without a salad spinner; it's just that since I'm eating mostly water anyways, I'd rather have most of the water on the inside of the leaf than on the outside...call it an affectation of mine.
The only problem is, when I got this monster home, I realized just how damn big the thing is. I mean, it's only marginally smaller than the new CERN cyclotron in Switzerland which will smash protons in an attempt to detect smaller subnuclear particles. I wondered if my new device would get up to the same speeds, and if so, what the accentuated g-forces would do to my poor parsley...
Somehow, I wondered what the Koreans had been thinking when they designed, cast and molded such a device....was it intended as a backup in case your washing machine's motor gave up and you needed to spin most of the water out of your clothes? In America it would most certainly come with a large red Dumb People Beware Warning Sticker: something like this:
"WARNING! This device acheives high molecular velocities! Do NOT attempt to dry small children or pets by putting them inside the spinner bowl. Do NOT stick fingers or sharp pointy things inside device while operating."
Still, it's a lot of fun operating it, even if I'm secretly afraid the crank will get out of hand and break my arm or something.
Thanks for reading...the next post I'll attempt to deconstruct Burma.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
