On the Road

Krabi Christmas Eve

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Tony and I celebrated Christmas Eve here in Krabi, Thailand. It’s stunning – towering karst formations, powdery sand, long-tailed boats, mouth-watering food and more. We’re scheduled to go scuba diving on Saturday, and we hope to try our hand at rock climbing while we’re here.

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After checking into our hotel this afternoon, we were told, “We make some Christmas barbecue!” They don’t celebrate the holiday here, but they know it’s an important day for many of their guests. Our hotel set up elegant tables around the pool and grilled seafood kebabs, tiger prawns, steak, pork and chicken, as well as corn on the cob and potatoes. A little salad, a little soup, a couple glasses of sparkling wine, a lot of BBQ, and then we ladeled some Thai dessert into a bowl. Fried bananas in a coconut milk “broth.” Mmmm.

The photo’s a bit blurry, but the buffet was sweet!

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It doesn’t feel very Christmas-y, though. In fact, when the owner of a scuba diving shop told me she was opening late tomorrow, I had to ask why. As we walked from our hotel to the beach, we sang along to the holiday tunes jingling from souvenir shops, massage spas and restaurants (except the Lady Boy Show theatre, which was blaring “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor).

When I Skyped with my family back in the U.S., my nephew, Nico, sang “Jingle Bells.” I could hear the chaos in the background. My heart ached to be with them … just not enough to fly for two days back to the States, where we would likely would have gotten trapped in some airport till the snowstorm passed and wasted half our vacation trying to overcome jetlag.

So I hope Santa knows where we are!

On the Road

Bangkok Smorgasbord

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As we strolled around Bangkok yesterday afternoon, we decided to eat only street food for the rest of the day. Of course, when I say “we” decided to do this, I mean “I” decided that WE would do this.

Tony was a good sport, though, and cheated only marginally. Technically, this Lebanese shwarma stand was part of an adjoining restaurant, but I couldn’t deny that the slab of beef was turning on a streetside rotisserie.

Street Shwarma

He also bought a sausage, which we renamed “not dog” after a few bites. We never really figured out what it was – maybe dense fried noodles – but we know what it wasn’t, and it sure wasn’t a sausage.

The Not Dog Stand

I’m a sucker for tropical fruit, so I had to pick up some papaya and pineapple for a snack. Delish! When we used to travel to Bangkok from China, I would get goosebumps from the anticipation of eating fresh tropical fruit. Now that I eat this stuff every day in Laos, I’m a little too spoiled to get worked up about it. Sad, but true.

Tropical Fruit

Several times in the last couple days, Tony and I had walked past a street stall selling tiny taco-shaped shells with fillings of varying colors. We had no idea what they were, but we intended to find out. Today, we searched and searched for the taco lady to no avail. We had to settle for these little pancake sandwiches, which were quite tasty indeed! We both preferred the cream-filled sandwich, but the taro and red bean versions were also sweet and satisfying.

Sweet Pancake Sandwiches

Sorry, Tony, Dunkin Donuts doesn’t count as street food! I had to draw the line somewhere.

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Final street food purchase of the day: shrimp pad thai, made on the spot for about $1. Good stuff!

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On the Road

Fish Feet

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Strolling down Sukhumvit in Bangkok on the quest for a foot massage, I found something even better – a Fish Spa! You stick your feet in a tank, and tiny fish nibble on your dead crusty skin. They darted between my toes, fighting over the tasty morsels of street-baked cuticles. They latched on to my callouses and tickled my arches. They sucked their way right up my shins. I felt like the Little Mermaid getting a nautical pedicure and foot massage from my little piscine pals. After my Fish Spa, Tony and I indulged in real foot massages performed by humans.

Bangkok Fish Spa

Yummy Toe Jam

When I leaned down to get this photo, Tony muttered from his massage chair, “If you drop my camera in the fish tank, then your camera will become my camera.” He’s so funny.

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On the Road

The Paler Pee and Other Tales From Bumrungrad Hospital

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Nobody LIKES going to the doctor. But let’s face it. These ol’ bones are getting creaky, and there’s no telling what we’ve inhaled and ingested in our journeys (nothing illegal, I assure you). Better safe than sorry, right? In Vientiane, western-style medical treatment is limited to one doctor at one clinic. Expats generally cross the border into Thailand for comprehensive check-ups or major medical care, and Bangkok offers the crème-de-la-crème of healthcare options with several world-class facilities.

This was our third visit to Bumrungrad International Hospital, so we knew to show up early for our routine health exams. When the doors opened at 7 a.m. on Tuesday, we were there. The friendly nurses at the registration counter were dressed in starched white uniforms, complete with neat little hats. Other female staff members wore pale green silk uniforms with their hair pulled back into chignons; the men wore pants and jackets of the same classy fabric. Everyone greeted us with a smile and a slight bow with hands in prayer position.

After checking our vital signs and drawing a blood sample, a cheerful lady handed each of us a checklist and a locker key. We changed into cotton-knit pajamas and went our separate ways to proceed through the various screenings at numbered stations: EKG, abdominal ultrasound, eye exam, girl stuff for me, boy stuff for Tony. If ever we looked lost or confused, one of those kind silk-clad ladies would peruse our checklist and then escort us to the correct station.

Before long, the waiting areas overflowed with people of sundry shapes and sizes, with skin in all shades of pink, beige and brown. Men from around the world apparently sent each other an SMS calling “polo shirt and jeans day,” while the women took diversity to the catwalk: conservative older Asian ladies in business suits and low-heeled pumps, trendy young Europeans with tiny skirts and massive designer bags, Middle Eastern women holding their veiled heads high, slouchy North Americans in T-shirts and jeans, and so on. The hospital caters to a global clientele and takes steps – such as providing multi-lingual staff members and an Islam-friendly version of the patient PJs – to ensure they meet everyone’s needs.

Tony and I met up at the last station around 10:30 a.m., and the nurse called us in to see the doctor. By then nearly all our test results were available. With a few clicks, she called up ultrasound pictures, mammogram films, bloodwork, and other information. Plus, she had the results from our 2007 visit at her fingertips, so she could track changes. Very impressive!

That was yesterday. This morning we returned to Bumrungrad for routine dental appointments (two thumbs up) and then went back again in the afternoon to pick up the bound reports from our health screenings. With no Christmas presents to speak of, this was the next best thing. We tore into the manila envelopes and immediately flipped through the pages of our respective reports, calling out points of pride and comparing “scores.”

My urine was applauded as “colorless” (while Tony’s was merely “pale yellow”), and my “good cholesterol” was higher than my “bad cholesterol,” but Tony had fewer yellow flags, those minor concerns to monitor in the future. We even compared the sizes of our kidneys, which are remarkably similar. Weird.

“Face it!” Tony said, jabbing his finger into my chest. “You didn’t win in any of the categories!”

Fortunately, just then, we heard a voice ringing out from the Au Bon Pain bread shop in the hospital foyer. “Is that Tony Dent?” Tara emerged from the shop with a box full of goodies. I shrieked and gave her a big hug. Tara was our elementary librarian and upstairs neighbor in China, as well as a tech guru and lovely friend. She and her family now live in Bangkok, and she was meeting a friend at Bumrungrad. We only got to chat for a minute before she had to head home, but I felt so lucky to get a Tara fix.

Now that we’ve been poked, prodded and polished, it’s time for the real vacation to begin! We’re off to Krabi in the morning …

On the Road

One Night in Bangkok

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In the weeks leading up to the long winter break, children at school start getting excited. Their eyes glaze over during lessons, and when you toss a board marker at their heads to snap them back to reality, they often comment, “I was just thinking about our Christmas vacation!” Some will make the long journey back to their home countries for traditional family holidays; others will jet off to a tourist destination like a beach in Thailand or Hong Kong Disneyland.

It’s no different for the teachers. Shortly after school resumes in August, we begin the countdown to Christmas break. By October, most of us have already booked tickets and planned our get-aways. We share experiences from Christmases past, often following in the footsteps of our fellow travelers.

For many international teachers, long holidays kick off with a visit to Bumrungrad International Hospital in Bangkok for a preventive care visit. Our insurance covers a comprehensive check-up, and Bumrungrad offers one-stop shopping for world-class healthcare.

Coincidentally, Tony and I are among a slew of teachers in Bangkok for our health checks this week. We were thrilled to meet up with friends from Shanghai American School – Jiff and Fay (whom you may recall from my posts about Lijiang, China – another serendipitous reunion!) and the Voges (Elaine, Dean, Callum and Owen). We rode the Skytrain to Ban Chiang Restaurant, a restored wooden house with quirky décor and tasty Thai food. Poor Owen left early with a bad headache (chaperoned by his dad), but the rest of us had a wonderful time catching up.

Here we are in front of the restaurant with Jiff and Fay.

Bangkok Reunion

We leave Thursday for some beach time in Krabi, where we’ll see the Voges again! Some other great friends – the Munnerlyns (who now teach in Abu Dhabi) and the Powers (SAS) – are vacationing in nearby Phuket, and they’ve promised to pop over to our neck of the woods on the 28th.

We would have loved to visit with friends who live here in Bangkok, but doctors and dentists ate up most of our free time, and the traffic here is so insane that we could actually fly back to Laos faster than we could catch a taxi across town. So, we’ll see you guys next time!

I suppose international teachers never really say “good-bye”; they just meet up again and again in Thailand.

Daily Life, Laos

Live and Let Dai

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i seriously don’t have the energy to hold down two keys at the same time, so pardon the lack of capital letters…

Oh fine, in the interest of readability I’ll push myself that extra mile … even though I’ve already cycled about 50 today. Yes, you heard me right. I rode 50 miles today on my Chinese knock-off Giant bike.

If I had been traveling vertically instead of horizontally, I would have qualified at NASA to be an astronaut. If I had pedaled off the coast of Florida, I would have reached the Bahamas. If I were an elephant, that’s how far I would walk in one whole day.

None of that really matters or even makes sense, though. The point is that I rode my bike FIFTY freakin’ miles. It’s even more impressive to talk about kilometers:
So, how far did you ride today, Sharon?
Oh, around 80 kilometers, I suppose.
Wow! You must be quite a fantastic athlete! Whoops, you’re tipping over again. Atta girl, hold that body upright.

Since moving to Laos, I’ve heard legends of a mighty group of cyclists who rode from Vientiane to Luang Prabang, an uphill journey of nearly 400 kilometers. My friend, Whetu, and I embraced the abstract concept of this challenge and began “training.”

We take an early morning spin around the city three times a week … except when one of us had a bit too much to drink the night before and/or didn’t get a good night’s sleep and/or had the sniffles and/or couldn’t bear to leave the snuggly comfort of sleep. In such cases, the other person always feels a wee bit of guilty relief to get the text message: “Sorry no ride today. See ya at school.” More often than not, our stick-to-it-iveness has surprised even ourselves.

Earlier this week, we officially joined Team Dai (pronounced “die” unfortunately). One of the organizers explained: “The team name means ‘Can do’… as in ‘anything,’ referring to the ability for a team of committed energetic people to achieve amazing things that they’d never dream of individually.”

This year, Team Dai will ride to Phonsavan, about 400 kilometers northeast of Vientiane, and home of the mysterious Plain of Jars.

Today was the team’s first Saturday training ride. I didn’t sleep well last night, tossing and turning with anxiety that (a) my alarm wouldn’t go off, (b) Whetu and I wouldn’t be able to find the group at the meeting place, (c) Whetu and I WOULD find the group and they’d all be comparing notes on their most recent endurance cycling events, or (d) they would ride too fast, and I’d be left in the dust.

We both have punctuality issues, so we showed up at the Patuxai parking lot at 6:10 for the 6:30 a.m. ride. We looked for other potential Team Dai members but saw only men walking backwards, a guy riding in circles on an old beat-up bike with a Laos flag, young people doing stomach crunches on the park benches, and barefoot children who couldn’t peel their eyes off us.

Finally about a dozen other riders showed up. The team’s training coordinator, Nick, gave us a primer on hand signals and riding etiquette and then explained the day’s route. We were heading out to the Friendship Bridge and then doubling back, taking a loop around the outskirts of Vientiane and then pedaling back into the heart of town for breakfast at a popular café.

The group maintained a steady but do-able pace, and I enjoyed getting to know this diverse bunch of expats. The riders I met were from England, Luxembourg, Germany, Sweden, Australia, and France, and they all had such interesting stories about their work and travels in Laos. Chatting with them made time pass quickly, and soon we were heading back towards town.

Just as my tummy started rumbling in anticipation of hot thick coffee and fried eggs, Nick turned back and shouted, “Do you guys want to keep riding?” I nearly toppled off my gel seat when the group shouted, “Sure!” So we turned AWAY from town. I refused to let dangerously low blood sugar and ruptured hamstrings quash my enthusiasm, so I stuck with the pack even as a few others veered off for home. I reluctantly waved good-bye to Whetu, who had a flight to catch.

Eventually, the only thing that kept me going was a meditative mantra: Breakfast, breakfast, breakfast, coffee, coffee, coffee … When we pulled up to the restaurant, there were only six of us left. They seemed unfazed by today’s accomplishment, but I refuse to diminish what my flabby body did. That 3-day challenge no longer seems impossible (daunting … unpleasant … kind of insane, really, but not impossible).

In case you missed it the first few times, I rode my bicycle for 50 MILES!!!

Daily Life, Laos

VIS Christmas Party

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Saturday night, we celebrated Christmas with our Vientiane International School friends at The Jukebox, an open-air pub owned by an American teacher and his Lao wife. I served on the organizing committee, but I didn’t do much (other than work with another teacher to compile a music playlist).

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Everything was fabulous! Lovely decorations, delicious food, a bit of dancing, and lots of fun conversations. The highlight may have been Santa Claus, the school’s tae kwondo instructor, who passed out presents and thoroughly entertained us.

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Daily Life, Laos

Mooning the Night for SEA Games Soccer

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The Southeast Asian Games have taken over Vientiane, but it seems you have to be someone or know someone to get tickets. Last week, I begged my Lao language teacher (who is a third-grade teaching assistant at VIS) to let me tag along with her to the Laos-Singapore soccer match. The next morning, she stopped by my classroom to give me a T-shirt that said “Cheer for Laos!” in Lao. Very cool. We agreed to meet at the staff lounge at 4 p.m. to catch our ride to the stadium.

You may be thinking, “YOU wanted to go to a soccer match?” I know, I know, I’m the least sporty person ever. I was in it for the cultural experience.

One of the SEA Games mascots, Champa, playing soccer. He’s so cute! The other mascot, Champi, is a sporty girl elephant.
SEA Games Mascot

When I showed up at the staff lounge wearing my T-shirt, Mai was speaking Lao on her mobile phone. My language skills are limited to asking prices of bananas and telling time, so I couldn’t follow her conversation, but she didn’t look too stressed. When she got off the phone, she said, “We have a problem. We don’t have tickets.” She hadn’t told the other Lao girls who were coming, including the one who was on her way to give us a ride.
The co-dependent, type A, intense Sharon who moved to Laos in August would have gotten a bit upset. After all, Mai had said she could get tickets. However, Laos has a mellowing effect. Everything moves a little slower with a lot less urgency. I consciously decided to enjoy the evening, regardless of how it turned out.

Mai and me looking quite nonplussed that we don’t have tickets to the match.
No tickets?

Mai explained that her friend’s mom’s friends, who were supposed to buy the tickets for us, came up empty handed. They told her the tickets were sold out. Mai then took another call from a friend who was out at the stadium. She told us not to bother driving out there as nobody was selling tickets, not even scalpers. Weird. Before I realized it, the school’s receptionist was calling a woman who has two kids in our school and often substitute teaches. Her husband works for Tigo, a mobile phone company and SEA Games sponsor. She informed us that her husband was quite frustrated because, for some unknown reason, government officials had confiscated all the tickets. The plot thickens.

Mai broke the news to Ton, a teaching assistant who had also hoped to attend the match. The three of us walked dejectedly out to the school gate to meet another friend of Mai’s. Keo is a lovely little wisp of a woman who writes for the Vientiane Times. Her brother pulled his Toyota truck up to the school gate, and we all piled in. Mai rattled off some Lao, which again didn’t seem to involve fruit or numbers, so I didn’t understand it.

Keo’s brother drove us to a market, where we found an unmanned SEA Games ticket counter and shopkeepers who just shrugged their shoulders when we said we were looking for soccer tickets. As we pondered what to do next, Mai and Ton got distracted by street food. They bought grilled beef-and-veggie kebabs and some absolutely delicious lettuce-wrapped snack, neither of which I would have dared to try on my own. Mai said the lettuce wrap is very time-consuming to make and involves cooking sticky rice, leaving it outside to dry in the sun for a day and then cooking it again. Kinda glad I didn’t know that before I ate it.

Here we are hanging out at the market, from left: Mai, Keo, Ton and me (the gigantic white Amazon woman).
On a Ticket Quest

Nobody selling tickets!
Nobody at the Ticket Sales Counter

Mmmm… street food!
Mmm... kebabs!

More Yummy Street Food

Back in the truck, we all agreed it was hopeless to go to the stadium. Instead we drove to a Mekong-side restaurant called Moon the Night to watch the match on the big-screen TV.

Moon the Night - hee hee

I asked the girls if they knew the meaning of “moon” as a verb. They were quite surprised to hear the definition, and they made me use it in sentences for different situations. “Hey, that guy is mooning me out his car window,” I said. “Or maybe you’re in your university dorm room and you see some drunk friends down on the street, so you moon them.” Why did I feel compelled to start this discussion? It only went downhill from there.

The match was arguably the most boring soccer I’d ever seen. Final score: 0-0. Nevertheless, I had a great time getting to know my new Lao friends. We finished off our street food and then ordered from the menu. Mai told the waiter to go easy on the chili, but I still had to drink a liter of Beer Lao to put out the fire on my tongue.

Watching the Match

Daily Life, Laos

Wat ‘O’ the Week – Wat Sithan Neua

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I’m cheating a little bit with this Wat ‘O’ the Week post. I actually visited this temple on the same day I went to Wat Phia Wat with Catherine.
We had hoped to visit with a monk she knew here, but unfortunately, we were told that he had gone to the States to study for a year.
Wat Sithan Neua is tucked in a back alley just a block from the Mekong River. The monks were hard at work landscaping the temple grounds.

Sithan Neua Monks Working

We found a monk who spoke a little English and asked him about the temple’s “sim” (ordination hall). He said it was about 70 years old, but he refused to indulge our request to unlock it.

Wat Sithan Neua's Sim

The small sim featured muted colors and delicate designs, but the building was in serious disrepair. A peek through the crack in the ornate front door revealed restoration work underway inside.

Sithan Neua Sim Detail

Sithan Neua Sim Detail

Sithan Neua Sim Door

A flashier new addition to the temple stood nearby with rickety scaffolding rising out of piles of sand and up to bright red and gold paintings. The old sim literally paled in comparison.

Scaffolding!

Daily Life, Laos

Conjuring Up Christmas One Cookie at a Time

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At my bridal shower 17 years ago (!), Tony’s mom gave me a book of recipes for some of his favorite dishes. I nearly collapsed with laughter, barely able to blurt out, “Oh, you don’t really expect me to cook for this man?!”
Actually, I did try to cook for him in those early days, but we both felt a great sense of relief when Tony patiently wiped away my tears of exasperation and gently released my grip from the pot full of unidentifiable burnt crustiness. We knew the kitchen was no place for me. Since then, I’ve whipped up the occasional fried eggs or Campbell’s Soup Infused Casserole, and I do make good use of the George Foreman Grill. Otherwise, the kitchen is Tony’s domain.

However, there is one recipe from Catherene Anne that makes an appearance every Christmas: Peanut Butter Blossoms. I know these are common cookies and probably don’t seem very exciting to most people, but for Tony and me, they fill the house with the smell of Christmas and remind us of his mother, who was truly a brilliant cook.
So there we were – in Laos, recipe in hand, on the hunt for very un-Lao ingredients. Luckily, we live in Vientiane, a capital city with embassies from around the world and markets happy to cater to the expats who work here. At the little mini-mart across the street from our house, we found the easy items: white sugar, butter, flour (there were three kinds, all labeled in Lao, so I just closed my eyes and picked one), milk, eggs, and surprisingly, vanilla. I almost bought a bag of MSG, mistaking it for sugar, and fortunately I noticed the small graphic of a shrimp on a bag of tempura breading before using it as flour. Fishy peanut butter cookies? Hmmm … that might be popular here…
Tony rode the motorbike to another swankier shop to get the rest of the ingredients. There were no Hershey’s Kisses to be found, so he bought a couple bags of Hershey’s Nuggets. In all, one batch of cookies cost us around $50.

Saturday morning, I plugged in the iPod and turned on some holiday tunes while I searched in the kitchen for bowls, spatulas, cookie sheets and the rest of the paraphernalia. (When you don’t visit the kitchen very often, it’s rather frustrating to suddenly take on a big project such as this.) I soon found that Daeng had scrubbed all the Teflon off my cookie sheet, but no worries, I used a lasagna pan instead. Mixing flour into the peanut butter mixture is back-breaking work, and the fact that our kitchen was designed for midgets started to grate on my nerves. The counters come to my upper thighs, so I nearly had to double over to hold the mixing bowl. The Christmas songs also began to irritate me after just a couple minutes. They felt out of place in this tropical weather. I switched to some soothing classical stuff. I needed soothing.

Finally, I had a pan full of dough balls ready to pop in the oven. Except I didn’t know how to turn on the oven. I summoned Tony, who solved the mystery. He discovered our oven has a knob with two settings: Off and Max.

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Not one to deviate from a recipe, I pulled out the first pan after exactly 10 minutes and smushed a Nugget in the center of each ball. As I always tell my students, we must make mistakes or we’ll never learn. I learned that 10 minutes wasn’t long enough, and a whole Nugget is a whole lotta chocolate. I left the rest of the cookies in for 15 minutes and used half a Nugget on each one. Perfect! Well, perfect enough.

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The cookies met with resounding approval (if not some skepticism over who baked them) at our school’s Christmas party last night, and even the Lao staff enjoyed them. As Tony said this morning after gorging on the few remaining cookies, “I feel like Courtney Love, and Peanut Butter Blossoms are heroin.”
Here is Catherene Anne’s recipe. Enjoy!
Peanut Butter Blossoms
1 cup sugar
1 cup packed brown sugar
1 cup butter
1 cup creamy peanut butter
2 eggs
¼ cup milk
2 tsp vanilla
3 ½ cups flour
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
2 packages Hershey’s Kisses
Pre-heat oven to 375°F, assuming you are lucky enough to have an oven that tells you the temperature.
1. Mix together sugars, butter and peanut butter.
2. Fold in milk, eggs and vanilla.
3. Add flour, baking soda and salt.
4. Roll into small balls. Roll the balls in sugar.
5. Bake on an ungreased cookie sheet (or lasagna pan) for 10 minutes.
6. Unwrap Kisses while cookies are baking.
7. As soon as cookies come out of the oven, put a kiss in the center of each one.
Yum!

Adventures in Teaching and Travel