This tape and garbage bag basket.
Watching a group of lao men float slowly by on a really haphazard green bamboo raft.
This car, hiding in the trees.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Things that made me happy this afternoon:
Watching the shadows of two butterflies playing mating games in bright sun.
This tape and garbage bag basket.
Watching a group of lao men float slowly by on a really haphazard green bamboo raft.
This car, hiding in the trees.
This tape and garbage bag basket.
Watching a group of lao men float slowly by on a really haphazard green bamboo raft.
This car, hiding in the trees.
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
More than a month!
A record-breaking period of silence. I have not, of course, been keeping my mouth shut in real life, with consequences both good and bad.
In the past month, there's been, hmmm....a lot of rain. Some swimming in pools. Ooooh, a trip to a waterfall, complete with near-death experience. (I didn't have the first-degree experience, but a second-degree near death experience, so I got both direct and vicarious thrills out of it. This is probably something that requires its own paragraph as an explanation, rather than a parenthetical aside.)
Ahem. Yes, at the waterfall. The river was really, really high. We'd already had to hurl ourselves bravely across the strong center stream of it to get to the other, calmer water we could splash around in and walk through. This wasn't terribly scary, as it just meant about 10 seconds of pell-mell (pel-mel?) swimming and then safety. Fast-moving water is sneaky, however. Along one ridge overlooking a waterfall, Intern wandered into a path of really fast-moving, deep water, and was sliding on her back over the edge of the fifteen foot, scary waterfall, when 16-year-old jungle boy grabbed her by the leg and dragged her back to safety. I would have helped, but as I leapt into action, I realized that the water really was too strong for me, and I had to paddle back before I ended up crashing into both of them and taking them over. Great excitement!
So we all lived. Then we found a natural mudslide and slide down it over and over. (I'm still picking debris out of my ass.) We covered ourselves in mud (there was a minor question over whether it was, in fact, quicksand, as Intern and I both got stuck in it for an uncomfortably long time), then rinsed it off, slid along some slippery rocks, found some cool bugs, vroomed home on bikes. I'd missed driving. And the jungle. So hurray.
Other highlights of the past month:
The purchase of a new, pink, flowery cowboy hat that I now wear constantly.
A healed knee, meaning I can run again.
Bright blue kingfishers in the pond.
Feeding butter to kittens.
"Game of Thrones".
In the past month, there's been, hmmm....a lot of rain. Some swimming in pools. Ooooh, a trip to a waterfall, complete with near-death experience. (I didn't have the first-degree experience, but a second-degree near death experience, so I got both direct and vicarious thrills out of it. This is probably something that requires its own paragraph as an explanation, rather than a parenthetical aside.)
Ahem. Yes, at the waterfall. The river was really, really high. We'd already had to hurl ourselves bravely across the strong center stream of it to get to the other, calmer water we could splash around in and walk through. This wasn't terribly scary, as it just meant about 10 seconds of pell-mell (pel-mel?) swimming and then safety. Fast-moving water is sneaky, however. Along one ridge overlooking a waterfall, Intern wandered into a path of really fast-moving, deep water, and was sliding on her back over the edge of the fifteen foot, scary waterfall, when 16-year-old jungle boy grabbed her by the leg and dragged her back to safety. I would have helped, but as I leapt into action, I realized that the water really was too strong for me, and I had to paddle back before I ended up crashing into both of them and taking them over. Great excitement!
So we all lived. Then we found a natural mudslide and slide down it over and over. (I'm still picking debris out of my ass.) We covered ourselves in mud (there was a minor question over whether it was, in fact, quicksand, as Intern and I both got stuck in it for an uncomfortably long time), then rinsed it off, slid along some slippery rocks, found some cool bugs, vroomed home on bikes. I'd missed driving. And the jungle. So hurray.
Other highlights of the past month:
The purchase of a new, pink, flowery cowboy hat that I now wear constantly.
A healed knee, meaning I can run again.
Bright blue kingfishers in the pond.
Feeding butter to kittens.
"Game of Thrones".
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
That was a long ride
The bus trip from Vientiane back up to Luang Prabang was almost comically bad. Every Lao person on the bus, of course, had tuberculosis. The man in front of me couldn't bear to put his cans of motor oil in the overhead containers, and instead stuffed them under his seat, taking up all the room for my feet. (He also apparently needed to push past me every time we got off or on the bus. Rude little prick. He spat on the floor of the bus at least once.)
The three German girls whose row I punctuated like a comma, not a period, had brought a feast of croissants, papaya, cookies, and other snacks for the twelve hour ride. They divided these up periodically and passed them over me to each other, never once asking if I'd like some to share. My seatmate, however, continually offered me tissues, making me paranoid about things hanging off my nose. My seat had one position: fully reclined. The air conditioner worked only off and on and when it did seemed to fill the bus with white, powdery smoke. The "toilet" on the bus was instead the action of stopping every three hours, sometimes at restaurants and shops, sometimes simply by the side of the road, where you could choose to relieve yourself in pitch blackness on a muddy slope behind the bus, or bathe your white ass in the light of the headlights in front.
I know I slept some, because I don't remember checking my phone and seeing a time between one am and three am (roadside piss break!) and then again between three and five. When I woke up at five, however, I couldn't quite accept that the incredible grayscale scene out the window was actually real. The black trees sketched against the receding gray mountains had to be--I rubbed my bleary eyes--a painting on the side of a building we were scraping? I didn't want to believe it could be a real place and the have it taken away from me. But we rounded a bend and it became the actual landscape: black peaks rising up out of silvery pools that looked like mercury lakes but were actually cloud. We skirted around the sides of mountains, barely above the low-lying clouds, and then the sun started to rise and the thick, white mist turned orange and the black mountains grew green and we plunged down into the fog and then up out of it again and I would have signed on for another night, and another, and another, just to see it.
The three German girls whose row I punctuated like a comma, not a period, had brought a feast of croissants, papaya, cookies, and other snacks for the twelve hour ride. They divided these up periodically and passed them over me to each other, never once asking if I'd like some to share. My seatmate, however, continually offered me tissues, making me paranoid about things hanging off my nose. My seat had one position: fully reclined. The air conditioner worked only off and on and when it did seemed to fill the bus with white, powdery smoke. The "toilet" on the bus was instead the action of stopping every three hours, sometimes at restaurants and shops, sometimes simply by the side of the road, where you could choose to relieve yourself in pitch blackness on a muddy slope behind the bus, or bathe your white ass in the light of the headlights in front.
I know I slept some, because I don't remember checking my phone and seeing a time between one am and three am (roadside piss break!) and then again between three and five. When I woke up at five, however, I couldn't quite accept that the incredible grayscale scene out the window was actually real. The black trees sketched against the receding gray mountains had to be--I rubbed my bleary eyes--a painting on the side of a building we were scraping? I didn't want to believe it could be a real place and the have it taken away from me. But we rounded a bend and it became the actual landscape: black peaks rising up out of silvery pools that looked like mercury lakes but were actually cloud. We skirted around the sides of mountains, barely above the low-lying clouds, and then the sun started to rise and the thick, white mist turned orange and the black mountains grew green and we plunged down into the fog and then up out of it again and I would have signed on for another night, and another, and another, just to see it.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Things it is difficult to find in LP
hairbrushes
eye drops
contact lenses
picture frames
oranges
In abundance:
puppies
pollen
pineapples
clouds
the color green
Essays of the day: art deco, klezmer, kitsch, Alphonse Mucha if I have any energy left.
Question of the day: Why do I suggest topics like "Kitsch" for these bloody books of essays, knowing I'll have to try to cram a discussion of democracy, popularity, quality, Kant and the western definition of art into 350 words at a sixth grade level?
eye drops
contact lenses
picture frames
oranges
In abundance:
puppies
pollen
pineapples
clouds
the color green
Essays of the day: art deco, klezmer, kitsch, Alphonse Mucha if I have any energy left.
Question of the day: Why do I suggest topics like "Kitsch" for these bloody books of essays, knowing I'll have to try to cram a discussion of democracy, popularity, quality, Kant and the western definition of art into 350 words at a sixth grade level?
Monday, June 6, 2011
Siem Reap
The baby--she looks two or three--can already say "phone." "Phone" and "you" and "give" in English. Also "dad"--she grabs my iPod with her sticky fingers and says "dad phone!" (I don't explain that mine is not, in fact, an iPhone; that I'm much more down to earth than that.) She expertly slides through the screens and is totally unimpressed with the photo I take of her.
Her brother, maybe six, joins us. He's much more into the camera. He also tells me "my dad has this phone." Then he tells me his dad "isn't coming." He jumps from that comment to his name, spelling it for me in the air. "The one that goes like this"--making a very fast, very dramatic swoosh in the air for an artistically huffy C. He asks my name. Periodically, he reminds me that "my dad isn't coming."
My bus, however, is coming, and I have to go suddenly in the middle of our kinetic spelling. "Are you listening to me?" he calls after me, as I run for the door after several quick goodbyes.
I think I'm wearing his mother's shoes. Someone took mine in the night.
Her brother, maybe six, joins us. He's much more into the camera. He also tells me "my dad has this phone." Then he tells me his dad "isn't coming." He jumps from that comment to his name, spelling it for me in the air. "The one that goes like this"--making a very fast, very dramatic swoosh in the air for an artistically huffy C. He asks my name. Periodically, he reminds me that "my dad isn't coming."
My bus, however, is coming, and I have to go suddenly in the middle of our kinetic spelling. "Are you listening to me?" he calls after me, as I run for the door after several quick goodbyes.
I think I'm wearing his mother's shoes. Someone took mine in the night.
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