At a peebreak on the road to Khatgal, Khovsgul Lake, we engage in a minor digital camera piranha-style-frenzy. It seems many years have passed since we in The West made fun of Japanese tourists for the same kind of behavior - now I can understand the mentality (especially when you travel rough and don't want to repeat the horrific experience, but don't mind looking at the photos from the comfort of your home)

A reindeer bull grazes by the shores of Lake Khovsgul in Mongolia near the border with Russia. This was taken only ten meters away from our campsite/ger. If you look closely, you can see the trace of a broken hobble, as this is a domestic animal belonging to a local Tsatani family. Just the day before they had asked us for two dollars for taking a picture of their animals - and the next day they were all over our front lawn, free for the taking...

From OUTER MONGOLIA

A blackout in town today (Moron, if you have a good map of Mongolia, in the north central region south of the Khovsgul Lake area) caused us to have no water and I went spinning out looking for a good place to put down the prunes I had recently procured (try an all meat diet for two weeks or more, interspersed with cheese and bread and see if it doesn't happen to you too)

Finally, in a moment of brilliant desperation, I found the high school had an excellent outhouse sitting outside in the middle of what would be the playground, 'wired in series' so to speak....I wonder what the atmosphere would be like here during the school season.

And you thought you'd escape the usual traveler's tales of bowel movements, from the safety of the internet....

gotta cut it here, I'm on a 37.2 kbps modem....

And some more horsey shots here.

Are they wild or not? I suppose the term 'wild horse' in Mongolia is reserved for the horse's ancestor, better known as the Przewalski Horse - but it is possible that this is a group of Feral Horses, the likes of which can also be found in the western U.S., Australia, and Western Ireland...

If you look closely (click to enlarge) you can see the duct tape (undoubtedly Korean-made green duct tape) reinforcing the arrows and the bow itself of this ceremonial archer during the opening ceremony of the archery contest of Nadaam. I thought I had seen all the possible uses of duct tape, but it seems as if we never will.

Horsing around

Trying to deal with my equinophobia, as I prepare for a little horsing around here in Mongolia. The trick is to get out to the outback and rent your horses there, but without western saddles, I wonder how long I'll be able the hard wooden frames of the traditional setup.

Do you think my hat is big enough?

The Last Medieval Festival in the World

The Nadaam festival. Ulan Bataar, Mongolia
It's so incongrous, that I would be sitting here in front of a terminal, air conditioned room, sipping my fermented horse's milk, wondering what medieval viand I'll end up eating for dinner- Lamb Kebab, or roast beef....

I need to back up a bit, and give some background - after finishing my students grades and posting a copy to them, I hopped my flight Sunday, getting to the airport in record time. I even managed to get the 'bulkhead' seat - actually the emergency door aisle- that is so coveted among die hard air travellers. It seemed as if everything was going so well.

I surfed internet until the last boarding minute, then ran down the corridor and got into my spacious leg-room-enough-for-a-basketball-player seat, basking in the warm smiles of the Korean Air flight attendants, and started drinking my last Hoegarden beer. I had also brought a tub of homemade Shrimp Gumbo (in honor of Bubba on Forrest Gump) and some homemade cheese. It was going to be a great flight.

The man in the aisle across from me appeared to be Mongolian. At least that is what I assumed from the evidence: his skin was sunburnt and wrinkled, and he seemed to be uttering gibberish, from a Korean linguistic perspective anyways. Mongolian has that half-russian, half Korean sound to it, and is one of the aurally most dense languages I've heard in my travels.

He smelled of spirits, and strong ones at that. Fine, I reasoned...the man has a reason to celebrate...he's returning home in triumph after having made good money in Korea, and he's just in time for his country's national Festival - what better reason could there be to celebrate?

I assured the very worried looking stewardess that the worst was over, but he kept escalating the situation, getting louder and more belligerent, throwing things and finally grabbing my wrist in a death-grip, I reacted without thinking and bent his elbow around backwards and said quietly 'Stop!'

The man finished the flight handcuffed to a flight attendant's chair in the galley. The police were waiting at the airport and he seemed as amused as ever. I'm not sure what the moral to the story is, but I suppose I got off quite lucky, only having a slightly marred flight experience - at the same time, a friend of mine was 'attacked by a maniac with a tire iron' while enjoying Beijing and wrote me from the hospital. Yes, travel CAN BE dangerous.

Starbucks: Saturday Afternoon. Coffee Junkies in their usual garb.

Let's get a little closer - Hey! what's that girl doing to that Mac?

And a little closer...Oh my God, she's got a knife!...and she's disembowelling her laptop!

Wow! Nice RAM chips.....I mean, nice hands!

Dans L'Escalier

Two rather odd things happened on my afternoon out in Planet Itaewon. For those readers not familiar with life in Korea, I'll attempt to explain the phenomenon that is Planet Itaewon.

P.I. is a neighborhood, formally known as Itaewon-dong in Korean, that has been the traditional zone in which foreigners were allowed to conduct business. Now that Korea has pretty much opened up to the outside world, terms like 'foreigner's quarter' are pretty much historical - though it still does retain an international flavor that other neighborhoods now popular with foreigners, does not have.

Unfortunately, Itaewon is something of a ghetto, if not a textbook caricature of the same. There is a standing mafia, a pretty corrupt police force, substandard housing, and the collection of unpleasant characters that one usually associates with ghettos. On top of this rather unsavory structure is laid an American army base (the headquarters of the US forces Korea) with it's attendant prostitution industry, fist fights in the streets at midnight, and other general ugliness I'd rather not go into here.

Suffice it to say I generally avoid the place, which is actually quite difficult these days, as the place has gentrified somewhat since the nineties, sporting some nicer pubs with imported brews; I've also got some die-hard friends who seem unable to accept the idea that they live in a ghetto, and worst of all, it is the only place in the country that reliably carries my shoe size.

I was there this Saturday with my friend Peter, whose leg is in a rather sci-fi looking black brace, with knobs and levers and buttons that say "Don't Push!". Peter has lived here nearly a decade, the leg brace is a new affect, a gift of a recent scooter accident. He's a decent sort, so much so, that he's the only person I will befriend who has some yuppie traits, like hanging out in the Starbucks all weekend or complaining about Supersizing racism at the Burger King.

There was Peter, in his usual chair, swilling the joe and proofing his latest book about idioms, English Oxygen. There was a new character there as well, a voice talent named Andrew. He had a nice way with words, and we lost no time in verbally abusing the fashion sensibilities of the stream of punters who were filing past us to get their daily drug.

It was in this spirit that we found ourselves, taking the piss out of anything and everything, everyone and anyone, that when a comely young lass came in with a Mac Laptop (sorry, I know it has another name in MacSpeak, but I'm a hopeless PChead) and began disassembling it with a Swiss Army knife (called a 'McGiver knife here). SEE PICTURES ABOVE (clickable)

I mean, it wasn't so much the fact that she was kind of good looking, or a female, so much as of all the incongruous activities one can engage in in a coffeeshop, this has pretty much got to take the cake. I guess Mactops are pretty easy to swap RAM on, or the girl is something of an industry insider - I would never take my laptop apart with a knife in a public place, let alone in a private dust-free NASA facility - but that's just me.

Peter leans over and starts engaging in MacTalk, Backtalk, or something else, but he seems to be getting somewhere, most likely because he already has a girlfriend ( a beauty, at that). That must have been what encouraged me and Andrew, for I leaned over and started snapping the pictures above, but Andrew leaps out of his chair, rushes over and says 'Would you mind if I join you....in a relationship?' It was a kind of pickup line, undeniably, a little flippant, possibly crass to some - but certainly not what I would call a verbal assault.

The friend of the girl reacted before she could: "This is why white guys have a bad name in Itaewon" she intoned angrily, in what had to have been a native-speaking American accent. There was a lot of hostility which apparently had been built up over time, over similar incidents...

Not being a ghetto resident or frequenter, I shut my trap (for I had also been one of those caught snickering red-handedly at the boldness and audacity of it all) but there was a very, very thick silence which suddenly lay over that little region of the coffeeshop, like the moment in Western movies before a barroom gunfight. It was as though we were awaiting the inevitably deadly verbal fallout from this pre-emptive nuclear strike...

Later, mulling this over at home, it reminded me of something I once witnessed at a bar in San Francisco, a total stranger had come in and given this girl sitting next to me (also a stranger) a deep French kiss. It was so sudden, so unexpected, and so totally 'Not Found In the Manual' kind of situation that the girl actually had a beatific 'I enjoyed it' kind of face before she recovered and started protesting her rights, and shooting us at the bar dirty looks for laughing as a reaction, which she interpreted as encouraging such acts.

Yes, in some ways the two things were the same - cultural mishaps, both intra and intercultural in dimension.

And now, I've been suprressing the whole reason why I wrote about this incident. The title of this post refers to a borrowed French idiom which means literally 'On the Stairs' - it refers to verbal retorts, which never seem to occur to one in time, clever answers to a remark only occur to one as they are leaving, or 'on the stairs' on the way out.

Here's my 'dans l'escalier' then, it's not all that brilliant, but at least I can shout out from the safety of my blog, and of the time past:

IT'S GIRLS LIKE YOU THAT ALLOW TIRED STEREOTYPES TO LIVE IN BIG HOMES AND DRIVE FANCY CARS!

Actually, I should say 'Remarks like that' instead of 'Girls like you', because otherwise I just participate in the Stereotype Slaughterhouse Circus, but I can't help but feeling miffed at this sort of Bobbitting behavior which threatens to emasculate any male showing any attention to a woman whatever.

I know from my own experience, from receiving unwanted attention from Gay men among others, from being the recipient of suggestive comments that are unprintable here, that someday we will all be grateful for the attention now long gone. When we are all old, wrinkled and alone (I've already got 2 out of 3) we will pine for that shining moment of misplaced affection, which doesn't make us any smaller, doesn't cost money, or bring us under crosshairs of any kind. They're just WORDS, after all, for chriminey sakes!

Sticks and Stones will break my bones...

But the IRS can really hurt me.

Ciao, Pax everybody as I go to discover Mongolia and the deepest lake in the world.

Do you see anything strange about this young man about to get on a bus? (my bus from Vang Vien to the Capital) - Look closely. Then scroll down.

Now do you see it? Look at where his right hand is in his jacket pocket. Now look below. It's an AK-47 (I think), and he's been assigned to protect the bus from bandits. Cool, isn't it? On this road there hadn't been any attacks this year (yet).

flip flops, anyone? a market stall in one of my haunts near Chun-ge-Chun

LINT

Yes, this represents a new, all-time low in the ephemeral and irrelevant world of blogging- posting a picture of your sock lint.

You see, this lint has come to symbolize my life. Let's just back up for a minute and reflect on where lint comes from:

Lint comes from your skin rubbing your clothing, or your shoes rubbing your socks, like my Doc Martens did to my socks. In case you don't wear 'Docs', the leather uppers are stiff and cardboard-y, so from the action of my heel slapping, tiny, individual fibers are pulled away from the warp and woof and they fall to the bottom of the shoe, where they join other fibers and are matted by the hammer of my heel into lint.

Although you could look at my overpriced Docs as little lint factories, pounding out their products across my foot-miles, another way to see lint is to consider what the bhuddists like to call the Precept of Impermanence - all things must pass, all beings are mortal, even rocks give way to time, etc. To put it simply, lint is clothes death.

As I rushed around on this Friday, the last day of the semester, all the final tests safely behind me, I was determined to get out of this country for the 10 days between now and the next class of Summer Session. I had it all worked out; I would pop over on the boat, getting my visa enroute - or then I had option B, pop over to Bangkok with the stub-end of a ticket I returned to Korea on, essentially costing me nothing.

So I'm rushing around, making plans, breaking plans, forming new plans, formulating ideas, checking the weather, verifying prices, and all the while busily making lint (see picture above). And as it turns out, Sock Lint is all I have to show for all my rushing around; once again, there are no tickets available out of Gilligan's Island-Korea; no affordable destinations (other than Thailand, which sort of bores me now) and no visa possible from the Chinese Embassy in reasonable time (I love the Chinese government and their impossible, thieving, murdering ways, because it gives me something to hate more than my own government)

The travel agent just called. Guy says they can put the fix in for me at the embassy so I can hop tonights boat (the next one is in four days) to Beijing if I want. They ask for 300,000 won (about 300 dollars).

"Is that including round-trip boat fare?" sez I
"No" sez they
"What! 300 for a freakin' visa? It was supposed to be a shopping trip, just there and back in a week" shkreamed I

I guess I'll be here, then. The plus side is I can start blogging again; in China this would have been impossible, as most blogging sites are blocked by the Chinese gov'ment. (gotta love'em, right?)

I'll dish up some more lint later on.

Homage to Lewis Caroll or O Henry? Definately not the most appetizing name for a food establishment -what's all that Business School nonsense about the importance of Branding?

Old paths revisited

I've been off the writing for quite some time, and although I can use the excuse that I have been busy moving into a HUGE palace of a place, cleaning it, planning a housewarming party, catching an unidentified skin disease, healing the same, replanning the housewarming party, and re-cleaning the house again, all 70 square meters of which had somehow managed to gather a huge amount of dust - in fact, if the dust has the right pH level, I can save it up for my roof farm later in the summer....

I want to describe two things; the amazing writing of a popular blog I just discovered, actually a constellation of related blogsites called Festering Ass - so cleverly and realistically written that it blows everything else out of the water. The writing style owes much to the late Bukowski, not only in the imaginative treatment, but also in the gritty nature of the subject material. It is not quite as unpleasant as the parent website domain name would have you think, but for you guys, I'd recommend Tucker Max or Hoo-Ah, whereas women may find a sympathetic node at SlowChildren-AtPlay.

I spent most of this weekend cleaning up for and cleaning up after (no more phrasal verbs please , English Teacher!) my house party, and the rest of my time feasting on Slow Children and Tucker Max. I can't remember having cackled at writing on the Internet in some time.

It even inspired me to dust off my keyboard and make another stab at narrative, and at describing my less-than-drab existence in flashier prose. Tucker Max, for example, has a gift for dialogue - but the man takes no chances, carries around a small voice recorder even while getting shit-faced. That certainly is the kind of dedication (and brazenness) that I need to get my act together.

So in that spirit, I've decided to dig up some of my oldest blogrolls from my times in Beijing, to let you, dear reader, decide whether Korea and my cushy existence here have ruined my prose style or made it slightly better. Here's a sample:


Thursday, 24 June 2004

cat follies
Yuen Lao Shi is the landlord of our courtyard house (in Chinese, four corners house), or is related to the owner of our house, and he lives in the first half of the courtyard, separated from our little foreign enclave by a round Chinese arch/doorway.
He is quite the entertaining sort, by that I mean we have come to love his unique blend of Chinese expressions "Fei Shang Hao! Fei Shang Hao!" and English expressions (he loves to trot out an idiom he's been studying recently), his entertaining way of suddenly bursting into song like some sort of South American Latin romanticentric, and his extreme, often painful love of animal and plant life of every kind.
The pride of his menagerie currently seems to be the cat family he has nurtured from the rooftops to the courtyard floor. There appears to be a floating population in this hutong of anywhere from 2 to a couple dozen cats, depending on whether you count tails or midnight moanings. As the last metaphor implies, the Cat Family is busily reproducing itself into our little ecosystem.
The most recent litter was about two weeks ago, just four days before I got to China. The mother cat apparently had chosen the birth spot to be in our Television Lounge room, in a pile of comforters used by our Weekend visitor Maurice. Apparently she didn't like the cardboard box that Yuan Lao Shi had rigged up for her with blankets and pillows. She scratched the door all night and was apparently all but unapproachable.
Yesterday I came home to find Yuan Lao Shi in a bit of a state. The mother cat had one of the babies in her mouth, and was going around the courtyard in a highly agitated state. According to him, she wanted to move them to a new nest, and was looking for a place.
The problem was, she had already hidden two of the kittens and we didn't know where...they were too small for us to hear our cries, so there was nothing for us to do except watch and follow the mother to find out where they were.
She headed straight for our roommate Joel's room. Joel sleeps on a platform elevated two meters above the floor, accessed by a spindly ladder. The mama cat kept jumping from floor to bookshelf, bookshelf to bed platform, each time an entire meter, wiyh a kitten in her mouth. Then she prowled the parameter of the mosquito net, looking for a way into the bed and cushions.
She did this several times, and finally she gave up. We searched the bed but found no babies. Just in case, I left the mosquito net open and tried to let her go in, in case she had actually hidden some babies where we hadn't looked. But she didn't come back.
Normally I'm not involved in the lives of cats....but this one certainly has even me guessing.

To be continued....The House Party and the Salsa Nazis...

This is basically how I picture my dream retirement scenario. I'm not talking about staring at my hairy, knobby legs, but rather the whole tropical dream thing, the hammock being the archetypical symbol of the same.

One might mistake this picture for the inside of a cheap hotel room in Cuba, instead of Luang Prabang.

Oh Mother earth Nipple pointed at the Mouth of the Sky!

Fruit or vegetable? I can't even remember now; but I'm pretty sure that this is in Laos; the newspaper background is laotian....

A lovely Tom Sawyer Style Waterin' Hole, complete with friendly tree...

Another picture for scale....

A WIZARD OF A LIZARD - A rather large iguana-esque creature (the head is the size of a small pumpkin) who is one of the local celebrities in front of a shop where I drank beer, across the street from the immigration office in Vientiane. A man there with a dirty polo shirt and a whole lot of beer inside him struck up a conversation with me; he had come back from America hoping to see this animal, which has been there for many years and through many regimes...a wise old survivor of man's follies...

The man turned out to be more enigmatic than the herpetezoid, however, when he told me that his former job in Laos was working for the CIA, that he was now a rich man living in Walnut Creek, California. (wouldn't it be dangerous to come back here if that were the case?)

I told him I had an auntie living there - but somehow our two exchanges seemed mismatched, like one of those English textbook exercises where you are supposed to recognize that "Thank you, I'm fine" is not the right answer to "Where are you from?"

The man continued to broadcast the CIA story to any and all who passed on the street, and I, feeling the crosshairs coming a little too close for comfort, finished my beer discreetly, and with a nod to the lizard, slunk on down the street to the market to search for more gooey bee larvae.

We had a yellow sand warning yesterday; when I looked out at the city from the top of our office building, maybe 50 meters above it all, all I could see was nothing. Nothing but yellow fog, that is. It looked sort of like the shop floor of a yellow-car-painting company, or like San Francisco looks if you are wearing yellow sunglasses. Of course my nose, eyes, and face knew something was going on - there was an impalpable suffocation in the air, an unbreathability that most people can only understand after sitting in a smoky bar for a few hours - this stuff is killing us, I'm telling you.

Yellow sand, in case you weren't aware of the phenomenon, is gunk blown off of the Gobi and Taklimakan deserts of central and western China, which becomes airborne in the higher reaches of the atmosphere, before precipitating in Korea, Japan, and sometimes California. Hardly sand, most of the particles are colloidal, meaning that they are smaller than cigarette smoke particles and have a certain ability to actually dissolve partially in the air. (known as a colloidal suspension - this is what milk is ).

There is also evidence that it cools the earth, mitigating the recent global warming trend, so it looks like we are stuck with a necessary evil.

A lot of people wore masks yesterday, and I dutifully wore my fancy microfiber model (although I have a really fancy pancy carbon filter from England, but it's too small for my face and doesn't let enough air through) and when I came home I still felt as though a lot of gunk had gone into my nose. So when I blew it out, all I got is what you see above. Nothing. I suppose that's great news, but then again i remembered that it comes in the form of microcolloidal particles - so even things invisible to the naked eye, like the influenza virus, could be in there (the tv news reported finding influenza in the yellow dust, which would explain the rash of stomach complaints around this time)

When I lived in China I heard some kind of story about the 'yellow sand phenomenon' (called red sand in Chinese) that the government had embarked on one of their legendary, epic, Cecil-B.-Demille-type-employment projects, planting hundreds of thousands of trees in the Gobi in an attempt to reduce the yellow sand phenomenon (Beijing suffers terribly; most of the particles that precipitate there are of the honking big variety, causing even greater respiratory distress).

Naturally they had forgotten to do their homework, and planted some sort of fast-growing deciduous species that all flowered and released pollen at the same time - causing such a rash of allergies in the capital that they had to embark on another Cecil-B.-Demille-project to cut them all down again.

Of course this smacks of urban legend, since I don't have the primary source for this, and its the sort of nonsensical story you'd expect to come from the Sleeping Red Giant....

The laotian flag flies from the canoe we took an hour up the Pak Kading - hardly the heart of darkness, but refreshing and wonderful all the same...

handy little garbage can on the railing of a tuk-tuk (modified motorcycle engine with three wheels and tiny seats in the back for passengers)

Laotian herbs abound in the marketplace - I've always equated so-called 'civilization' with the extent to which the herbal folklorico-pharmacopia has been lost to the big pharmaceutical corporations - in Burma, though there are also plenty of extant herbal remedies, there also seems to be a flood of cheap penicillin from India...

the road leading out to the caves - as dusk falls and as thousands of bats pour out of the limestone-cave riddled karst mountains...

A night of Raving - Stark Raving People, that is

Last night was another of those typical nights in Korea.

The Business night-out, the kind you hurry home to dress up for, you abbreviate your swimming session for, the kind you stuff a quick chicken-soup-to-soak-up-the-alcohol-later for...

I was particularly NOT looking forward to this one, because despite my reason for attending being a chance to get a paying writing gig for the first time in a long spell, I just didn't feel it was worth the price of admission: the night out would be with two chain smokers, who seemed to only like talking about different single-malt scotches. (don't get me wrong, I don't mind the occasional sm scotch, but why the hell sit around and talk about them if you aren't drinking them?)

I get to the bar a little late, after a genius taxi driver who seemed to think he would become a millionaire by creeping along slowly and taking the most congested route possible, and walked in, and to my horror was seated between the two chain smokers.

To my relief they had already smoked themselves out, but to make matters a little complicated, one of them, the Korean professor, was already drunk and starting to make a fool of himself...introducing the bar maids as his 'lovely friends' who hadn't yet had their patience worn down by the man.

This was made up for by the delightful discovery of a NORTH KOREAN BEER on the menu - and even more surprising, it tasted great! What the heck? I guess Kim Jong Il's comeuppance of the South finally came through suds....well, I sort of doubt the plebes up north get to drink much of it - like the poor miserable Cubans who have to watch the tourists drink their beer that they can hardly afford, costing like a twentieth of their monthly salary...

Later we ended up at a Sam-Gyup-Sal (thick bacon slab place) restaurant nearby, more soju (sweet potato vodka) and madness, and we ended up at the Canadian professor's house drinking the fabled Ardbec single-malt. Of course, it had gone from a 20 year to a 12 year to a 10 year just in the space of an hour ( I guess people shouldn't be expected to remember how old their alcohol is)...

The stuff had been advertised as 'peaty-tasting' - now that just sounded like nonsense to me - regardless of whether peat had been used in its manufacture, peat is still just glorified mud to me. I swigged the stuff and immediately was hit by a strong smoky....peat flavor....don't ask me how the heck I should know what peat tastes like - I haven't smelled it burning in over 20 years, and I don't think I put any in my mouth then...but it wasn't a bad combination for a whisky.

Unfortunately after several glasses I was left with a distinct liniment-like taste in my mouth. After a few more glasses I think I somehow materialized in my room and it was morning again.

I lost the North Korean Beer bottle, which I was going to scan and present to you here, dear readers...I'll just have to be more careful next time.

LEMON OIL

HOW CAN ANYONE BE SO CRAZY?

This is how it happened (plot twists only believable in a movie)

A friend told me about an auction held by the U.S. Embassy disposing of USIS (a code name for the CIA) goods....so I turned up, never one to turn down a flea market opportunity. (notice how I used two parallel idioms in the same sentence?)

Then I was hooked. It was a sealed bid auction. Meaning that I had no idea whether a few dollars or a few hundred would win. I used a shotgun approach, put down small ten dollar bids on about 70 or 80 items, many identical.

Well, not exactly ten dollars, more like thirteen dollars and two cents. The thirteen was chosen because most westerners, whether they admit it or not, feel the number to be unlucky, and thus would be more likely to pick ten (the number of fingers) or twelve (the number of apostles).

The two cents was to account both for people who put a zero at the end of their bid without thinking, and two also would win over those who think about it, but put a 'one' at the end of their bid to win out over the others with identical bids.

Well, I was shocked and scared when they told me I'd won 24 bids. That's 24 lots of furniture, that is, sets of furniture.

So, 78 hours later, after furious email and sms texting activity on my part, I rounded up 4 of the 30 new teachers on our staff, most of whom were looking to acquire some furniture.

So I managed, somehow, to share the bounty (they paid the 13 bucks in most cases) and the labor (they definately got the short end of the stick on that account) and 7 weary hours later, we had moved THREE truckloads out of the embassy compound and into our offices and houses and whereever we could stuff them.

In fact, we ended up abandoning two desks, two end tables and a dresser to the dirty acid rain of the day. Sopped and furniture-sated, we finished off the day with kalbi and korean sake.

THE NEW SQUALOR

I hope to include this Laotian foot in my 'Feet Around the world series' someday - Just haven't decided whether it will be a flash animation or static pictures....

COMING AND GOING

This is the University Dormitory Parking lot behind my house, where apparently they use this improvised 'Denver boot' to immobilise an illegally parked car. I suppose what I like most about this is the sense of immediate, personal reaction; in my experience, people in America would rather call the tow truck and hide behind the anonymous (and ugly) facade of the tow truck company and the aggressive demeanor of the truck driver. But this, this is up close and personal; and most likely the driver of this car will learn their lesson without having to pay an arm and a leg.

although the smoke from slash-and-burn agriculture in the area ruins most long shots like these, the solitude of the fisherman with the pole on the mighty Mekong is truly something to see in person.

Here's another mystery fruit from the market in Luang Prabang; I didn't do my homework carefully and so I don't know what the heck this thing is. It may look like a fig but the seller seemed to be implying that it wasn't very sweet.

The richness- and strangeness - of the Jackfruit, which, like the martian Cacao fruit, springs straight out of the trunk without the help of branches...

The Courtyard of Wat Aham, Luang Prabang, just after sunrise and a fresh sweep by a squadron of monks. As usual, click the picture to see a larger version.

what could be 'greener' than having even the waste container made completely from renewable organic materials? It looks nice too, beside this lovely stretch of river in Luang Prabang

A monkboy picks his teeth on the stupendous curving riverbank of downtown Luang Prabang, one of the most exotic-sounding cities I've ever been to....though plenty overrun by other tourists seeking exotically named cities.

The picture that inspired the series 'Furniture Haiku' - one early sunday morning, undoubtedly after the drinking crowds had passed through the night before, I found this tableau of urban existence on a subway bench....It sort of ties in with the whole buddhist/tourist thing of stacking little rocks on top of eachother in impossibly high pagoda formations....

Another Furniture Haiku from Pra Athit Road in Banglampu, Bankok. Sorry I had to be so obvious as to paste in the blowup, but I didn't trust you to know that you could enlarge the picture by clicking on it (Flash would solve my problems, but then I'm not sure that 'Hello' can load it)

Maybe it's just me, but does anybody else see the resemblance to Imperialist (Fascist) Japan's flag? A professor got fired here last week for coming off as pro-Jap empire, but look at the damn chicken boxes! I'd be a little bit incensed if I was a korean flag-waver...

A food delivery poster/menu from a local restaurant. Proof that there's some kind of psychedelic drugs in Korea...I always thought those delivery guys were whacked, the way they zip around in heavy traffic with only one hand on the scooter handlegrips, while the other holds the heavy metal food container.

it's all melted now, but it's hard to imagine my backyard this beautiful ever again, even with the dog and chickens disappeared...

Have a look at this couple, the girl shyly smiling 'cause Jeezuz is in her heart....but take a closer look at how they market this Campus Christian group in these posters I found near my office elevator...

But when I look at how they acronymyze the word FISH in this poster I really wonder if it is a case of learner's English, or if they really do understand how to use using sex appeal to sell the product...

By Tanarug copyright 2004

Now I know what it was!

Now I know what was so special about yesterday! Not the sudden three inches of snow dumped in March, not the almost two hours I taught (should have been four, but I let them go early as per tradition on the first day). No, none of that.

What was so unique about my day is that I spent half the day going round to two clinics, the first for an examination, the second for a full blown treatment. Nothing too serious, just my back was acting up for the first time in a long time (I got lazy in Laos and didn't do my daily situps), so I went round to Hyungi's office near my neighborhood.

He really fixed me up good - he's one of the only three doctors in the world who have been able to deal with my strange lumbalgia - resulting from a full on car accident in San Francisco many years ago, I was struck by a car while I was on a bike and went high in the air (according to witnesses).

Anyways, he hooked me up to this electric vacuum pump apparatus, something that administers mild fibrillation while holding on to you with its suction cups. For the uninitiated it feels a lot like what being devoured by alien raptor worms must feel like. Or maybe, on a more earthly level, like jumping into a bathtup with a toaster under your arm, while simultaneously jogging through an automated carwash. It certainly challenges your use of metaphor....

I'm fine now. I just have to take it a little easy in prep for the big ski trip this weekend. I even passed up a drinking night with my two barroom buddies in Seoul (sorry guys)

dead things

Today the snow was a good omen. As it usually is where things concerning school are. I mean, how many of us prayed for a snow like this when we were tired of school? It really seemed like a gift from the heavens (literally) back then, and it seems no less now. Now Seoul is quieter, warmer, and more tranquil looking with its new snowjob.

Speaking of which, I nearly put a picture of my long-dead and unnamed cricket up. The reason is that I left the laptop at the office and am typing from the desktop at home. That is, the reason that I nearly put a picture of the cricket up....not the reason he is long dead and still unnamed. A linguist would point out all the ambiguities in the above sentences, but I'll just stop there. The cricket is already dead enough without beating him more with descriptive functional linguistics....

anyways...(another curious thing; I apparently am the ONLY native speaker of English to say 'anyways' instead of 'anyway')...I decided, instead of the aforementioned long dead and nomenclature challenged arthropod, to give you a nice cheery picture of a painting by a friend in Thailand, TANARUG (aka 'Bird') - who personally I consider one of the best artists I've ever known (are you reading this, Bird?)

Also don't even THINK about stealing his images for commercial use (this blog is still listener-supported) or I will hunt you down. However, if you'd like some of his artwork, I can hook you up with him (shameless plug - I told you bird, it's Picasso's legacy to the artworld)...

I better end this blog here before you figure out that I'm too tired from the stress of first-day-of-class hysteria to write decently.

and before I go, for those of you who like to chill, I'd like to recommend the music of Carla Bruni, in case you haven't discovered her yet. The sound of her breathy notes makes me believe that puppy love is possible even for old pokes like me....yes, I LOVE that woman's voice!

UPDATE! AS I Blogged the thing below, this was happening outside my window

.....And this

clearly child's play

First Day of School!

Just thought I'd put up this image, though I don't teach young children, it was what I enjoyed most about Laos, the kids play in the street, have a true, innocent childhood.

If you are patient, I'm currently cutting down all my trip pictures down to size, and instead of making you wait to see them one by one, I'm going to schlock them all into country folders that you can circulate through all at once or even put them on slideshow mode.

till then, kiddies!

Kelly