Sylvia's Journal

Archive Page 48

Self-generating tasks and sore muscles

Published May 21, 2016 Uncategorized Leave a Comment

A week ago I was flying back from Holland, with a tremendous urge to see my grandkids. We were going to see them this weekend. But the potatoes that we had ordered from the Maine Potato Lady were beckoning and we postponed our visit to next weekend (Memorial Day weekend).

The potatoes had arrived while we were away and had not received the care prescribed on the information leaflet tucked in with them. They had developed thin leggy sprouts and were screaming out to be planted.

Planting, we knew, required preparing the garden. It was one of those self-generating tasks: before you know it you are looking at a long list of to dos that aren’t half as much fun as the planting. A large pile of Essex Gold was deposited on the lawn and needed to be scooped into wheelbarrows, spread over the garden and then dug in – all heavy labor which mostly fell on Axel. It is now two days ago we did this and the muscles are still very sore from bending and scooping and pushing and pulling. I am beginning to think we ought to pay someone else to do this for us.

While we in Ha Long Bay and kayaked and hiked and biked, a young couple from Belgium told me they could not imagine their parents (presumably our age), could do what we did; that made me feel good. I thought about my parents when they were our age. My father would not have been doing what Axel did because he was already dead at 70 minus two months. My mother might have been weeding, which I think I can do until my nineties if I live that long, but probably not the loading of a wheel barrow with heavy dirt.

I cut back the raspberries, fed the shallots, garlic and asparagus and pulled up anything I didn’t like. And when that was done it was time for our houseplants to go on vacation. This meant more wheelbarrowing, more lifting and cleaning the sticky stuff that gets deposited on our plants by the end of the winter, and not just our plants: on the floor, curtains, woodwork and furniture. This too was a self-generating task. potatoplanting-2016

Utopias and maltopias

Published May 18, 2016 Uncategorized Leave a Comment

When I am waiting for planes or in doctors or dentists offices with internet I often go to the LinkedIn site and scroll through all the names that are suggested. It is a bit of a trip down memory lane as the algorithm digs deep into my past and finds people I haven’t seen in decades. Sometimes I sent of a whole slew of contact requests, just for the fun of it.

One woman, who I had met when I was still active in the Company of Friends circle of Boston, decades ago, accepted my contact request. I didn’t even know her that well. Her accepting my invite led to a series of email exchanges culminating in lunch at a restaurant near my work place in Medford on May 18.

I learned that she was a child of China’s Cultural Revolution. She told me how she was forced to do criticize her parents (scientists) and complete obedience to the system. Now, all these years later, deep into her adulthood, she is still battling the remnants of this brainwashing. She got a degree in Astro-Physics from one of the world’s most famous universities. But the stars are not the object of her seeking these days. She studies people and this is what we talked about.

Here, in front of me, was yet another victim of a large scale social experiment that went south. I have read inside stories from the Khmer Rouge experiment, and, on my way home from Holland, finished a book (Pauper Paradijs) of a social experiment done with good intentions but going completely off the track in Holland in the 19^th century. By putting poor people, drifters and others not fitting in, in a colony up north in what was called the Dutch Siberia. The experiment lasted a few generations and did terrible damage to people whose great-grandchildren are now trying to unravel the story of their ancestors; all in the hope of abolishing once and for good poverty.

This story, or rather piece of his-tory, belongs into the collection of ‘Social Experiments Gone awry on a Large Scale,’ where it lives with the Cultural Revolution, Hitler’s racial improvement experiments, ISIL’s religious experiment, the Khmer Rouge’s return to the land experiment and many others. Utopias turned Maltopias.

The causal reasoning about how life works, how poverty and economic growth happens that led the architects of these plans so hopelessly astray, is alive and well in the run-up to our presidential elections. Aside from our capacity to harm each other with intent, we may have an even bigger capacity to harm each other with the best of intentions.

Transitioning home

Published May 15, 2016 On the road Leave a Comment
Tags: Amsterdam, Holland

I arrived in Holland where it was still cold but the sun was shining and all the trees were green. I stayed in a hotel, just blocks from my friend’s house (that has no guest room), very convenient. It caters to young travelers. There were little things that gave this away: one had to pay for internet, 4 euros per device for 24 hours; there was a kettle and cups for making tea or coffee but the packets/tea bags were to be requested at the front desk, which required exiting one building with very steep stone steps, and entering another, with ditto. The beds were made for skinny people, 80 cm wide or made be even 70 cm.

We made a trip to the local supermarket to get me my favorite foods for dinner, had a glass of wine, toasted to turning 65 and then I returned to my hotel. The next morning IU checked out, walked in a completely deserted Amsterdam (it was Ascension Day) to have my breakfast and prepare my lunch for in the plane. We drove in no time at all to Schiphol. The roads were as empty as I have ever seen them. All Holland was still asleep. I kind of like Holland that way.

Back in the US, one month makes a big difference in spring time. Everything was green, trees flowering and an occasional tulip still going strong. It was nice to be home.

Cooking with Koong

Published May 14, 2016 On the road , vacation Leave a Comment
Tags: Bangkok, Thailand

For my last full day, solo, in Bangkok I took the train to the weekend market early in the morning to see if I could find the lady who had sold me one wonderful top I wanted more of. It is an easy ride on the train, no stops, less than a dollar. Surprisingly I was able to found her again amidst the 7000 stalls. I wandered around a bit more, a strong ice coffee in a little plastic carrying back to keep me awake and hydrated, until I couldn’t stand the heat anymore.

Returning to the train I walked against a stream of thousands, no tens of thousands of people on the way to the market. My timing had been perfect.

For the afternoon I had signed up for a cooking class. After our private cooking class in Changmai last year, this was a very different experience. I counted some 25 people waiting at the assembly point. We were swiftly formed into three groups each with an instructor. We walked a few hundred meters to the mostly deserted vegetable market. We were each given a cute little basket to create the illusion of shopping for the food we were going to prepare though most was already purchased in the morning, when the market was a bit more alive and the produce fresh.

Our instructor gave us a brief intro to Thai herbs as greens are called, sniffed and smelled a few and then, from a pre-arranged pile, we each took some stuff and put it in our basket and headed back to the school.

Three classrooms on three floors were filled for the afternoon session. The morning session was already full and the evening session was too late for me. Our instructor was a peppy young Thai lady who had learned a smattering of Dutch (ik hou can jou, lekker, eet smakelijk), German, Chinese and other languages from her students. My fellow students were two Filipina sisters (one living in Japan, the other in Vienna), a Brit living in Malaysia with his Malaysian wife, two young German men trekking on a low budget through Southeast Asia, and a couple from Singapore.

We donned our aprons and then had our class sitting on the ground, like cooking is done traditionally in most of the world. We each had a sharp knife, a cutting board and, outside the room, our own gas stove and wok. We learned how to make coconut cream and milk (not entirely from scratch), tom yum soup, fresh spring rolls, pad thai, green curry and mango sticky rice. It was more or less the same menu we had in Chiang Mai, except here two helpers did a lot of the prep work, so our cutting and squeezing and pounding was mostly giving us a feel for what it takes to get ready for the actual cooking. Only the wok part we got to do entirely on our own – a row of 9 people standing in front of stoves and the teacher on the other side giving us instructions and doling out the ingredients we had played with, plus more fillers and protein.

After each menu item that we had prepared we returned to the dining area where we sat at tables and consumed the fruit of our, not so very hard, labor. It was an enjoyable experience although I was not very impressed with the green curry. My table mate also pushed it away; too salty, too much fish sauce.

On my way home I had one last foot massage, splurging with the whole hour one for 8 dollars. How I will miss these. Back at the hotel I followed Axel in his plane across the Chinese Sea and then the Pacific and then the great American planes, using the Flightradar24 app which even shows the land (or water) gliding by underneath the plane. When he landed at JFK I was asleep.

I had one more work call for my next assignment, one of only very few work incursions into my vacation, and then packed my bags.

Off he goes

Published May 14, 2016 On the road , Uncategorized , vacation Leave a Comment
Tags: Bangkok, Thailand

It is really too hot these days to do any visits to places that are not air conditioned. Still, we went to visit the Wat Pho temple complex which is worth a good sweat. And best of all, it has a massage school which was founded to make sure the Thai art of massage and ancient healing would not get lost to the tablet and smart phone generation. Part of the temple is dedicated to the art of healing massage with ancient stone tablets explaining which touch heals which body part. I had expected a large waiting time to get a massage but I was wrong, some 40 or so masseuses (presumably in training, though we couldn’t tell), in white dentist uniforms stood at the ready. The prices are a little more than at our local massage place but still little and still worth every baht. I was glad to contribute this way to the upkeep of the magnificent temple complex and the ancient art of massage-healing. We received an expert treatment and our feet, having been massaged so much in these last two weeks, are starting to limber up. I didn’t hear Axel whimper one bit.

We collected ourselves at Starbucks which will forever be associated with respite from the great heat, and less so with free wifi which requires putting in your passport data and more complicated stuff when you are a foreigner.

On the way home we stopped at the massage place and had a Thai massage. The last Thai massage Axel had was in Kabul when the Thai lady walking over his body broek (we think) a rib. I remember Axel letting out a fierce cry. It ahs taken more than 5 years for him to try again. It was a good experience, no ribs broken and much tightness released.

At night we found another mall (all have foodcourts and airco) for dinner and had our first and one and only sushi dinner of this vacation. It was our farewell meal.

A few hours later I helped Axel drag his overstuffed duffle bag (no wheels!) to the train for the airport. He left at 2:30 on China Eastern Airlines, going East to JFK via Shanghai. We whatsapped when he got there and then he settled in for his 14 hour flight and I went to sleep.

Grime junction

Published May 13, 2016 On the road , vacation Leave a Comment
Tags: Bangkok, Thailand

We choose our hotel because of its location. Not as in nice view; we look out on the bare wall of another high rise a few meters from our window. But even if we had a view it would be of overpasses, highways and rail lines. In the streets thousands of motorcycles rev their engines as the light turns green. We are at one of Bangkok’s many grime junctions.

But here is why we chose this hotel, a 3 star for 45 dollars a night (adequate, clean): we are a stone’s throw away from the express line to the airport (25 minutes, less than 1 dollar) and the subway that connects us to the Skytrain and everything that is worth seeing or doing here. And right in between the station and our hotel is a massage place with 8 dollar foot massages (1 hour) and 16 dollar whole body massage. We have become good customers.

We arrived in the afternoon and escaped the heat in the food court of a mall. Words cannot describe the eating frenzy of 1000s of people and the number of eating establishments. An adjacent luxury supermarket can best be described as Whole Foods on steroids.

Axel was fasting on tea and steamed rice to get his intestinal tract back in order before the long plane ride home and so I was eating alone. Making a chocie of where and what to eat took nearly an hour and then I made a series of bad choices. The food looks all great but we have learned that appearance can be misleading. I had mediocre nems, mediocre mango sticky rice. Only the green tea ice cream was great. The no-sugar diet is in shreds but I will return to it when I land in Boston.

Completion

Published May 12, 2016 On the road , vacation Leave a Comment
Tags: Hanoi, Vietnam

We were having our last meal in Hanoi across from the Lenin Skate Board shop which had as logo a rubber ducky. I thought it a brilliant capture of the Vietnamese version of capito-communism.

Earlier in the day we had finally gotten around to try the famous Vietnamese egg coffee. The Vietnamese coffee we had tried so far (‘white café’) drips on top of a layer of sweetened condensed milk. The egg white coffee was served in a dish of hot water. The coffee itself had a creamy yellow foam on top. I imagine it is made from whipped egg white sweetened with the condensed milk. The Vietnamese coffee is strong and got us hooked. One of the curious varieties of coffee in Vietnam is the kind that has gone through the stomach of a weasel or civet or squirrel. The animal digests the outside of the coffee fruit and poops out the bean itself. This kind of coffee is highly sought after and expensive. It is hard to find out whether you are getting the real thing or are taken for a shitty ride so to speak. We bought some coffee that is produced in a non-animal way.

At the egg white coffee café we ran into our young German solo traveler again and shared a tiny table sitting on tiny stools. Our leg muscles are adjusting poorly to sitting with one’s knees at a 45 degree angle to one’s hips but that’s pretty much how meals and drinks are taken by the locals.

We visited what was once called the ‘Hanoi Hilton,’ the prison where American pilots were held. In comparison to the treatment of prisoners under the French regime in the same prison, the Americans appeared to be treated rather nicely. Most of the prison was dedicated to the struggle with the French. The French regime dealt with political prisoners like they did during the French Revolution with a guillotine and iron foot clamps. The exhibit showed photos and thumbnail CVs of ex-prisoners who had risen to power in North Vietnam. It is quite amazing to think that anyone could have survived a stay of even a couple of months in the French ‘Maison Centrale’ as the Hao Lo prison was called then.

And that was the end of our week in Vietnam. Bangkok tomorrow and the countdown to our return home has started.

Back to the city

Published May 10, 2016 On the road , vacation Leave a Comment
Tags: Ha Long Bay, Hanoi, Vietnam

We said goodbye to our travel mates who returned to Hanoi in order to take the night train up north for a trek in the mountains. Axel and I and our young solo German traveler boarded a smaller boat in the middle of the bay and set course for Cat Ba Island.

We landed on a small pier where bikes were waiting for us and biked into the national park along a mostly level road. At a small village we parked our bikes had a cup of Vietnamese (milky) coffee, then continued on foot for a walk in the woods. The wildlife, apart from monkeys and the unique Langur (also a monkey), consists mostly of exotic insects. We were told there are snakes and our guide used a stick to announce our presence. We didn’t see any monkeys or snakes but plenty of insects.

We returned the same way we had come and had lunch on the boat followed by a swim before landing on another part of Cat Ba Island where a bus took us to the hotel at the end of a long boulevard. The harbor was full of fishing boats and floating restaurants. Everything floats here – whole villages with their ‘gardens’ where oysters, mussels and clams are farmed.

The boulevard strip in Cat Ba looks just like any other boulevard strip in a seaside tourist town (I am thinking of Salisbury, NH). Much neon, tons of hawkers, bars and restaurants and a night market full of cheap China stuff, maybe the latter one wouldn’t find in Salisbury. Large blow up plastic swimming pools for kids were filled not with water but with something that looked like black rice which the kids manipulated with their trucks and buckets as it it was sand.

Our guide invited us for a beer by the harbor where all the locals seemed to have congregated. It was a jolly place with cheap eats and drinks. Whatever didn’t go into people’s mouths was dropped on the ground. The place was a mess – not just there but at all the restaurants – someone must come in the middle of the night and sweep everything away.

Dinner was on our own – we had about 100 choices but followed our guide’s lead, which was a good oneL fried rice, nems, smoked pork in a noodle dish, and fresh coconut juice.

At night the rains moved in, excalty as predicted on my smart phone. The next day the skies were dark and something akin to a monsoon hit the island. As a result our departure was delayed a bit. Men in uniform at the embarkation pier held us back until the rains had passed.

Day 3 of our cruise consisted essentially of cruising back to meet up with the big boat, the same one we had overnighted on and make a passenger exchange before continuing to Ha Long from where we boarded a bus back to Hanoi.

At night we splurged and ate at a Trip Advisor recommended restaurant on a rooftop overlooking one of Hanoi’s many lakes. The cuisine was exquisite, the cocktails and wine yummy, and the bill high. The Vietnamese currency has so many zeros in it that it feels like monopoly money. Only when we did the conversion did we realize how much we had spent.

Our new hotel is smack in the center of something big; when we returned from our dinner the streets around our hotel were completely filled with people (several hundreds is my guess) sitting on the tiny plastic stools, drinking and eating. It was a bit like Bangkok’s Chinatown’s pop up restaurants, but much louder. Rave music pumped through the air, indicating that there were some very popular bars hidden behind the mass of people on their plastic stools.

Published May 9, 2016 On the road , vacation Leave a Comment
Tags: Ha Long Bay, Vietnam

The tourist business is Halong Bay’s main business it seems. Hundreds of tourists, bussed like us from Hanoi and elsewhere, embarked on a variety of junks, ranging from small to large, from junky to elegant. This is why it took so long to pick a cruise operator – there too many choices.

We boarded a small sloop, put on our orange life jackets (everything is heavily regulated) and found our way to our home for the next 24 hours, a midsize boat with, to my relief, its center of gravity at a reasonable level.

Our tour guide (Dung but call me Danny) presented the program, we got our cabins (small but comfortable), and then came up for a wonderful lunch while we wove our way between the majestic limestone rocks formations that, according to legend, represent dragons sent here to defend against the ever agressive Chinese. Slowly the pack of boats dissolved as everyone went their own own. Only a handful remained on a similar course

At lunch we learned that Axel’s helpful gesture to turn the fish after we had finished one side, brought bad luck, according to our four table mates, two of them from Singapore and the other two from Canada but all with far eastern ancestry (China, Taiwan, Thailand and Korea). That explained that after he turned it no one ate anymore fish

We stopped for a kayak outing, with rather heavily used kayaks being brought to our boat. I was a little anxious about kayaking which I haven’t done since my rotator cuff operation. Luckily we were in a double and Axel would pick up the slack when my weak arm muscles refused to work. After about an hour, and doing 30 paddles at a time, then 1 minute rest, just like my exercises, the muscles started to obey and things got better.

Hot and sweaty we went for a swim off the boat before cocktail hour arrived on the deck, followed by a cooking lesson (fresh spring rolls) that we ate on the spot. We had lively dinner conversations with our co-travelers most of whom had selected the two day/one night cruise and would leave us the next morning. Only three of us continued, Axel and I and our young solo traveler from Germany.

Squid fishing was also on the program but we were too pooped from the various activities and called it an early night. When one of the Flamish travelers told me her parents would never ever take such a trip and do such exhausting things as kayaking and swimming off a boat, I felt OK for being tired.

The next morning we climbed up the nearly 500 steps to the top of Titop Island with countless other tourists. Titop is (was?) a Russian the Vietnamese clearly revered, with an island named after him and a very Soviet looking statue of him sternly looking out over the waters in his crisp granite uniform.

Next on the program was a visit to an enormous cave, called surprise cave, presumable because the large stalagmite that stuck out like a sore thumb looked a bit like a penis, lit with red flood lights for extra effect. We learned that the French discovered the cave. I had a short experience of wriggling through a small hole in the wall into a bit of darkness. It’s not my piece of cake. I think these spelonkers are very brave. I am sure there are thousands of caves more here, waiting to be discovered. The ones that were, up and down the country, were used to hide people and supplies at war time, probably since ancient times.

Pho and other delicacies

Published May 8, 2016 On the road , vacation Leave a Comment

In the evening one of our Vietnamese participants in the recent Tanzania meeting invited us over to a restaurant near our lodgings. We had an assortment of fresh and fried nems and two delicious variations on the green papaya salad that is popular all over the region.

We bombarded her with questions that we hadn’t been able to ask anyone before, about the war(s), about the co-existence of communism with religion and the kind of capitalism that is making Vietnam the fastest growing economy in the region. We asked the same question to our cruise guide later and the answers were the same: we are like that – religion, ancestor worship, temple offerings are part of who we are. Entrepreneurship, from small trade to bigger trade, is what we do to stay alive. You can’t just give any of it up. The USSR and China tried to banish these things too but it never quite worked, the practices simply go underground. People keep praying and keep looking for ways to better their lives and that of their children. I think it is in our genes.

The next morning our host knocked on the door to say goodbye. He was on his way to dancing class in the park. Later we drove by the park and saw hundreds of people practicing classic couple dancing and massive line dancing with complete sound installations to provide the music. There were also people doing exercises with bright red paraols, praticing Tai Chi and Qi Gong, playing tennis, badminton and more; all this very early in the morning, just like we witnessed in China years ago.

The travel agent that we finally selected out of hundreds from Trip Advisor picked us up at 7:15AM on Sunday morning, just when we returned from another wonderful pho breakfast across the street. We are the only foreigners in our neighborhood (right next to the old French quarters). This is kind of nice. It is a little quieter and less focused on tourists we discovered when we walked through the old town. At the pho shops the locals were helpful in giving what they thought we wanted and what we thought they recommended.

We joined 13 other people, twosomes from Belgium, Germany, England, Canada and France and a young girl from Germany on a solo trip of 3 months through Southeast Asia. We picked up everyone at their hotels. The driver of our small bus managed expertly the tiny streets and sharp corners of old town Hanoi.

The drive to Ha Long Bay took about 3 hours with a pit stop in the middle, predictably, at an enormous souvenir complex. We had strong Vietnamese coffee which we are starting to like despite the super sugar-charged condensed milk at the bottom.

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