Cornhens in Thailand

OK. OK. I have been getting a lot of flak for not writing the blog. I have also been getting a lot of carefully crafted inquires like, “I noticed that you are looking a little round, are you just enjoying too much thai food or do you have news?” So. I am going to kill two birds with one stone and write.  Yes, Jay and I are expecting another baby, due to arrive around the end of October. AND I am happy to report that after a few months of morning sickness where I thought I would die from having to smell and eat food in a country where shrimp paste and fish sauce are the main flavor enhancers that I am also enjoying Thai food again. Actually, the lady who sells curry across the street thinks I am nuts because I have the same thing for lunch every day: Gaeng Kari Tohu with Khao Glawng. Yellow Curry with tofu and Brown Rice. Sometimes I mix things up and have a dragon fruit smoothie as well. Then she knows I am feeling crazy that day!

I should also report that I have not been blogging because a) Jay and Zorah have already flown the coop and are in Boston visiting his parents, and b) I accidentally packed my USB cable in our shipment home and I can’t download pictures. I am wrapping up work here, and basically skulking around the local massage parlors, where I have been averaging about 4 foot massages a week. Today is my last official day in the office, which leads me to the second part of this story: the best present ever:

One of the cleaning staff in the cooking school wanted to give me a going away present but she didn’t know what I would like. Well, she hit it…She taught me how to make kanom krok, my favorite street snack and Thai dessert. It could be translated as coconut pudding, and I had to rip a picture from the internet to show you what it looks like. It is basically coconut cream mixed with flour, sugar, salt and green onions and cooked/steamed on a special pan over a charcoal grill. It highlights what I love best about Thai cooking: the balancing of salty, sweet, savory, and buttery. It is arroy mak (very delicious). I would love to have a cart like the one below fabricated especially for me to ride around Berkeley hawking this incredibly tasty treat…you never know!

We had a visit from Jill, a friend who teaches at King with Jay last week. It gave us a kick in the pants to tour all of our favorite places one final time. We spent a day in Chang Dao, where there is the most incredible wat built into a mountain, a delicious place to eat lunch, and deep caves to explore with a guide carrying an oil lamp. I almost got my belly stuck in one of the crawl spaces to get from cave to cave. In addition to this adventure we ate (of course), got foot massages, toured wats, enjoyed sites like 5 men sleeping on top of a truck load of shallots in the way to market, road bikes through our local villages and rice fields, and then ate some more.

Zorah broke her arm!

She fell playing in the “Blue Mat Room.” This room is Zorah’s favorite place on campus to play. It’s a big covered outdoor space filled with giant pads of different shapes and sizes for the kids to build with and climb on.

She has been incredible through this. She never complains about the pain or not being able to do things. She cheerfully experiments doing all her favorite activities with one hand, running to show us when she learns a new technique of doing something with one arm. She figured out how to take off and put on the cap of all her markers in about 2 minutes. The poor thing walked around for three days before we took her to the doctor for an x-ray, we thought it was just badly bruised. Among other things, Zorah has really learned this year to not complain when she is uncomfortable, lots of train travel, exhausting heat, dust and weird food will do that to you so she was keeping quiet how much it was hurting.

This morning she woke up and something had nibbled on her in the night. We counted 24 bites all up and down the inside of her legs. She will be returning to America next week happy and scrappy!

We had the sad occasion of saying farewell to our friends recently as they took off to various parts of the world, leaving us here to reflect upon one of the best years of our lives. It’s quiet here, crazy quiet.  We’re practically alone in a community that just last week had almost one thousand people working, studying, and sleeping in it.

We made some great friends. It’s hard to believe it’s been only a year considering how close we feel to them, until we realize that we did everything together. Living, working, and socializing with the same folks almost every day…think summer camp, but for a whole year.

A game of cribbage, a friend to have a beer with, or a shoulder to cry on were only a text and 20 seconds travel time away.

One of the most challenging aspects to my job this year was communicating with the farmers. Five Thai men and women who don’t speak any English and one farang women who barely speaks any Thai. It came to my attention early on in the year that they were not saving any seed to use for the next planting, and that each time it came time to plant, they would go out and buy new seed at the market. Having a discussion with them proved to be an exercise in understanding cultural differences. I pointed out that if they let a little of a crop go to seed so they could use it again and again, they eventually would be self sufficient and not have to spend money to grow food. They countered with the idea that buying new seed year after year actually produced MORE vegetables each year and thus they made a profit. While it made no sense to me at all to think ONLY of this year, it is a very culturally Thai was of thinking and also very buddhist.

I am not the only one perplexed by this attitude. There is a wonderful project in the nearby village of Mae Tang that is called Pun Pun, and its mission is to promote the saving of seed in the north of Thailand, and to educate people about the issue. They held a festival to raise awareness. It was like a smaller version of any Northern California festival, music, food, face painting and demonstrations on natural building, seed saving, composting and other eco-activities.

Thursday was the last day of school.  This term Jay taught a class of 2-3 year olds and loved it. The kids were from all over the world, though with the exception of a new student from Japan all of them spoke at least some English. (Fortunately Jay lived through the ‘80’s and was able to say, “Thank you very much, Mr. Roboto” to him.)

The kids are super cute and the class was really fun to teach. Puppet shows, impromptu parades, story-time, nature walks, and no reports to write- what’s not to love? Jay will miss his “Little Explorers” very much.

Yesterday was the last day of school and our days are full of last moments with new friends and a feeling that we aren’t quite ready to go back to our life. We have all been reflecting a lot about what this year has meant for us individually and as a family, how hard and how fun it has been. Zorah got excellent marks in school and is excited for her summer vacation! Jay and Zorah have less than two weeks left here before they go to Boston for three weeks while Kyle finishes up work and a year of life VERY well lived. We have a friend from Berkeley coming next week and expect lots of fun taking her around to our favorite spots, a good chance to revisit everything one last time before we hop back around the globe!

AND…We recently bumped into an albino water buffalo! Of course Zorah had to jump right on to this rather rare animal!

We had an epic weekend, details to follow. Here is a picture of Zorah rocking out at a birthday party.

Friday was a Thai holiday, Visakha Bucha Day. This is one of the most important days in Buddhism because three major incidents in the Life of the Buddha: birth, enlightenment, death, all happened on the full moon day of the sixth lunar month. On this day Buddhists gather to recollect the wisdom, purity and compassion of The Buddha. We went to the temple at the local village, Mae Ann, and participated a bit in the celebration. This included everyone lighting candles and walking around the stupa three times. The stupa in Mae Ann is painted a fabulous pepto bismol pink. Then the village gathers together to walk up the mountain. While we aren’t 100% sure why this happens, we guessed it had something to do with representing enlightenment by going up. Regardless, like any good celebration here, the procession was accompanied by an incredible loud disco truck throwing disco ball lighting over all the villagers who were carrying candles in paper lanterns. Celebrations here always seem to be a wonderful mixture of the sacred and the fun.

Things have really settled down in Thailand, which is good news all around! We are trying to soak up our last eight weeks here by spending time with friends and attempting not to feel overwhelmed by all the things we didn’t get around to doing! While Thailand was in political turmoil, tourism took a major nose dive, which is sad for a country who depends on it. For those of us who live here, there were some incredible deals to be had on empty five star hotels. A couple of weekends ago a friend of ours organized a weekend away at a local resort up in the mountains. It was perched on a cliff, we had to flag down a buggy to get around the grounds! It has been incredibly hot here so this was the perfect, and much needed, retreat.