Endings…

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The school year officially ended on Friday last week. What a beautiful, beautiful day. Overall, I’ve enjoyed subbing this year, but it was time for it to end. The general feeling hanging in the air at school was sort of like a tasty dinner that turns into revolting leftovers when forgotten in the back of the fridge for a week – something good that is way past its prime. Or that relationship that you know you should end, but you just can’t quite find the courage to do it. Or that moment before you finally cut the baby curls off your not-so-little boy. A line from Handel’s Messiah kept running through my head: ‘”Rejoice! Rejoice! Rejoi-oi-oi-oi-oice greatly!”

Before the year was officially over, though, I got to enjoy the delights of a student/teacher talent show. The whole school, including the three-year-olds, crowded into the school gym to enjoy a little light entertainment for no fewer than two hours. In the grand scheme of things, two hours is pretty short, but when you are watching angsty teenagers perform Thai love songs, it can feel like an eternity. Fortunately, there were a few dance acts that spiced up the show. Unfortunately, several of these involved ten-year-old girls shaking their booty to songs about “gettin’ it down on the floor.” In yet another sign (other than the exploding expanding torso) that motherhood is imminent, my immediate response was to mutter ‘overmydeadbodywillanychildofmineEVERdancelikethat.” At least the three-year-olds were entertained.

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I love this photo. Everything from the “Done” sign, to the dancing three-year-olds, to the awkward rapping.

The end of the year wasn’t all good, though. There are a bunch of teachers who won’t be coming back next year, and it was sad to see them go (you will be missed!). There was a big staff dinner during the last week of school, and it included a tribute to those who were leaving. The tribute was a karaoke rap song about people dying by Puff Daddy (or whatever his name is now), and included a rewritten verse for every single one of the EIGHTEEN teachers who were leaving. I got to rewrite a verse for one of the teachers, and let me just say that I have a new respect for rappers and the sheer volume of words they manage to spew. My verse was bad enough, but when compounded by a factor of eighteen, it was sheer carnage. One real highlight of the evening for me was the opportunity to wear maternity pants (read: elastic waistband) while hitting the buffet. I don’t care if you’re pregnant or not, or even if you’re a woman or not: you need to wear a pair of these next time you go to a buffet. I promise you won’t regret it.

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This picture contains less than half the people who were *attempting* to rap.

Todd and I decided to celebrate again on the weekend by doing one of our favourite things – namely, binge eating Indian food. We hauled across town to a restaurant in the swanky Chit Lom area, and dove into a few old standbys – Chicken Tikka, Aloo Gobhi, and Saag Paneer. It was beautiful. Todd says that as soon as the chai touched his lips, he could feel the stress of the year melting away. Never underestimate the healing effects of fat and spice.

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I couldn’t even hold still for a photo.

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Notice the ghee glistening on every dish…

And that’s it. Hard to believe that our first (school) year in Thailand is already over. Definitely a time for reflection, pontification, and remembrance. But mostly rejoi-oi-oi-oi-oi-oicing!

Brides, Bikes, and Bannock: totally unrelated alliterative rambling

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Bannock

Well first of all, let me thank you all for the congratulations. It truly warmed the cockles of my heart. Nothing, however, can quite top the reaction of the 5 year olds I subbed for the other day: when they found out that I was with child, one of the students dove headfirst at my belly and kissed it. Several other students settled for a good belly grope, and then spent the rest of the class pointing at my midsection and exclaiming “Look! It’s a little baby! It’s soooo cute!” Not sure how they would react if they could see what my 15 week fetus actually looks like – even as its mother, I can’t honestly say it has reached the ‘cute’ phase just yet.

(This sounds like a tangent but it’s not) Thais love nicknames, and pretty much everyone has one – I’m guessing that this is to simultaneously circumvent their incredibly long names (ie: Nasigorengporn) as well as to channel qualities that they particularly admire: for example, Champion, Win, Best, Bakery. In order to make our child culturally acceptable, we have already chosen a nickname for it: Bannock. The name reflects our Canadian roots (for the uninitiated, bannock is a First Nations quickbread), channels Todd’s obsession with voyageurs, and falls within the acceptable 2-syllable standard for Thai nicknames. Certain members of our family are nervous that the child will be called Bannock for the rest of its life, but we see that as a bonus more than anything.

Brides

Ok. Enough about bread, quick or otherwise. On with the brides! On Saturday, we were lucky enough to attend the wedding of Te and View (note the Thai nicknames), two of our friends from church. Here’s a sample of the conversation I had with View (the bride) one week ago:

View: “Congratulations on your pregnancy!”

Me: “Thank-you!”

View: “I have some good news, too: I’m getting married!”

Me: “That’s wonderful! When?”

View: “Next weekend!”

I have never met anyone who pulled a wedding together in one week, but it magically came together. It was a small gathering, with an evening ceremony in the garden of a hotel. The bride and groom were adorable, and alternated laughing and crying throughout the service. As usual, my photography skills were in fine form, and this is the best photo I have of the ceremony:

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A wedding ceremony seems like an appropriate time to check your phone…

After the ceremony, there were plenty of photo opportunities. Sometimes I forget how massive I appear in this culture, but every now and then, I get a friendly reminder. Wearing a dress that hits the prego-ness in all the wrong places doesn’t help my cause.

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What every wedding needs: a couple of large farangs to make the bride look even more cute and delicate.

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The beautiful/indestructible cake arrangement

 Bikes

The following day, we had another cause for celebration: we finally bought bicycles. We have been talking about buying bikes since we set foot in Thailand, and it took us merely a year to figure it out. We kept tossing around different ideas: “Let’s get folding bikes! Let’s get mountain bikes! Let’s get village bikes! Let’s buy pieces-of-junk-from-the-grocery-store bikes!” In the meantime, our biking souls shrivelled. Todd finally decided that enough was enough, and started checking Craigslist religiously. For a long time, he found nothing but uber expensive top-of-the-line bikes and pieces-of-junk-from-the-grocery-store. When he finally found an ad for decently priced Trek touring bikes, he jumped on it. A couple who had cycled around SE Asia wanted to unload their bikes before they flew home. The only catch was that they wanted to sell them as a pair. Due to my *ahem* knocked-up condition, I wasn’t planning on buying a bike. However, the deal was too good to pass up, so I’m going to putz around on my sweet new bike until the belly makes me too top (gut?) heavy, and then we’ll re-sell it.

Once we handed over the cash, we realized that we were faced with another dilemma: how to get our new joyrides home. We were halfway across the city, and there is no way that we were going to bike all the way home through Bangkok’s insanity. We thought of taking them on the Skytrain, but that still wouldn’t get us close to home. Our only real hope was a jumbo-sized taxi, a rarity in Bangkok. We tried phoning for a big taxi, but were informed that it would have to come all the way from the airport, and would take 1.5 hours to arrive. Todd started hailing random taxis, and asking the drivers if they had friends who drove big taxis, but came up with nothing. Finally, we stood on the side of the road, and begged every taxi that came by to take just one person and one bike, but no one was interested. After 5 or 6 taxis, we were giving up hope, when an angel arrived on the scene. When we asked him to take one bike, he looked at us like we were crazy, and told us that he would take both.

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“Just need to remove the engine, and there will be plenty of space.”

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Look away, Math Teacher. This isn’t the time for an analysis of spatial dimensions.

He heaved all the tires into his back seat, and stacked the frames in his trunk. Half of both frames were hanging out of the trunk, but this didn’t seem to bother him – he crunched the trunk over the frames and bridged the two-foot gap with the aid of a suspension cord. He informed us that we’d have to avoid the highways, or the bikes would fly out. Not a problem. An hour later, we pulled up in front of our apartment. Taxi drivers often get a bad rap in Bangkok, but this one was a jewel.

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Want a suspension cord?

The bikes have already been fantastic, and we are kicking ourselves for waiting so long. I’m getting depressed about giving up biking, but then again, there seem to be zero safety standards in this country – once Bannock is born, I can probably just balance him/her on my lap while I cruise through traffic.

Thailand’s growing population

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It seems that EVERYONE in Thailand is procreating these days:

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A friendly neighbourhood dog and a few of her septuplets. Her eyes just scream: “All I want is a good night’s sleep, and a chance for my teats to breathe.”

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Our friendly neighbourhood crocodile farm. I have no idea who produced whom.

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Not sure if these two are parents yet or not, but I think they would make a good go of it. 

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No one is going to steal these babies. (
http://mysodotcom.tumblr.com/post/43324475741/funnywildlife-giraffe-in-a-tree-monkey-family
)

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Ugh. But no one can say she didn’t give it the ol’ college try. (http://www.boredmd.com/science/unique-spider-pictures)

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“What is it?”

With all these procreating friends, we had to hop on the bandwagon: Baby Facetious Farang coming in November 2013. Just doing our bit to ensure the continued viability of Thailand’s farang population.

Butter Beef and Other Treats

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Well, the blog has been a little mother-centric lately, and I’m sure she’s starting to feel just like Todd sometimes does (“why does it feel like YOUR blog is always about ME?”), but I had to do one last post on Momalot. Actually, it’s more about the food that she cooked while she was in Bangkok than it is about the gal herself. Homecookin’ is no mean feat when you are operating in an Elfin Kitchen in a strange land, but she rose to the challenge. Momalot has never been one to let a few minor roadblocks like emergency hospital trips prevent her from feedin’ her chilluns. Here are a few of the gems she produced:

1. Butter Beef

Butter Beef is one of my favourite things in the world. It’s exactly what it sounds like: beef cooked in butter. Momalot learned this handy trick from her Dutch mother-in-law: buy some meat (any kind will do), and huck it in a pan with a bunch of butter. Let it simmer for a few hours, then serve it alongside a pile of carbs. You cannot go wrong. This was one of my favourite dishes growing up, and due to its fat-bomb consistency, Momalot would only make it on birthdays. Remembering the few times that I chose something other than Butter Beef for my birthday supper leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

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First, simmer the butter. Don’t skimp.

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Make sure you’re wearing a cute apron when you add the meat.

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Let it cook…

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And cook some more. 6-10 hours should do it. A Canadian potholder will greatly enhance the flavour

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Momalot wishes to state that the meat shouldn’t be quite this black – our stove didn’t offer a low enough temperature to properly cook it. The blackness tastes amazing, though.

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Get yer carbs ready (Yorkshire pudding in this case)

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And mow down. I apologize for the lack of artistry in this shot, but if you knew how hard it was for me to resist eating while I took a photo, you’d forgive me.

I am salivating as I write this. Fortunately for us, Momalot was not content to rest on her laurels. Once we’d digested the Butter Beef (this took a few days), she got to work baking

2. Bread and Cinnamon Buns

My parents are basically the original hippies, minus the drugs and free love – they had a manual push mower long before it was trendy. When I had to mow the lawn as a child, I wished that they were a little less “progressive,” but now that I have no lawn to speak of, I have fond memories. They also bake their own bread from scratch on a weekly basis. It was no problem at all for Momalot to bake bread in our little oven. She hucked some flour and some yeast into a pot, let it rise in the Bangkok heat, and bob’s your uncle: ready to bake.

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“Are you dissing Uncle Bob again?!”

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And apparently we consumed the finished product so quickly that I didn’t even get a photo. Dang.

Finally, Momalot repeated the steps for making bread dough, but this time she also made her own sauce, lined one of our wire mesh racks with aluminum foil, and voila, cranked out a

3. Pizza

This was probably my second favourite meal as a child (after Butter Beef). Unlike Butter Beef, we would often eat this on weekends, as apparently it was not as rough on the ol’ arteries as fat-drenched animal protein. I often wished that we could order takeout pizza instead, but now that I am an adult and have eaten my share of truly dire pizza topped with mysterious meats, I see the error in my ways. There’s just something about knowing where all the ingredients come from that allows you to stuff your face with far more panache.

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Momalot also stocked our cupboards and made us numerous salads, but sadly, I did not document this with my camera. If you want more specific instructions on how to make Butter Beef, let me know, or ask any Dutch Oma who lived through the war. Just like Momalot, she’ll probably have some buttery tricks up her sleeve.

A Crazy Mothah of a Month

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Uh, oops. Sorry, folks. I know the blogging has been a little patchy in general, but 2 weeks has to be a new low, even for me. It’s been a crazy mothah of a month, mainly because my crazy mothah of a mother was visiting. After she left last Tuesday night, Todd’s dad – AKA Papa Dawg Dave – blew in on the evening breeze for a breezy, very brief 2 night visit. He stayed just long enough to partake in a whirlwind culinary tour of Samut Prakan. Currently, we are feeling like the proverbial fatherless/motherless child(ren), and trying to readjust to life as a twosome. I thought I’d recount one of our more memorable adventures from the past month of parental visits.

Momalot’s trip to the hospital

Momalot is generally a hardy soul. She likes to take the stairs just to make us look lazy for taking the elevator (all right. When you live on the third floor, I guess taking the elevator would qualify as slothful behaviour), and in her heart-of-hearts, I know she wishes that she’d been born in the pioneer era. She’d probably be the person hauling the wagon after the horse dropped dead. She does not, however, deal well with heat. We’re not sure if her health scare on her last weekend in Bangkok was due primarily to the heat, but it definitely didn’t help the situation.

On Friday night, we went to a movie at the mall near our house. Halfway through, Momalot said she didn’t feel well, and went to get some water. When I checked on her a few minutes later, she was feeling nauseous and dizzy, so we took her home. By the time we got there, she was also experiencing tingling sensations in her arms and heart palpitations. We decided it was time to phone an ambulance. The weird/disconcerting thing in Bangkok is that there isn’t a unified 911-type service (or if there is, I haven’t found it yet). Rather, you phone the hospital that you wish to visit, and they send their own ambulance service. We phoned a hospital that we have used in the past – it wasn’t the closest, but we knew it would provide good care. Once we’d given the hospital our address and requested an ambulance, we tried our best to look after Momalot until it arrived.

It was a little disconcerting when the ambulance took almost 40 minutes to reach us. Fortunately, by the time it arrived, Momalot was feeling a little better, but it was sobering to think of what the situation would have been like had she been more seriously ill. The ambulance was equipped with a doctor and several nurses, though, so once it arrived, we felt that she was in good hands. Todd and I rode in the front of the ambulance, and it became clear to us why it took so long for the ambulance to arrive – we were once again reminded that we live in the middle of nowhere. Also, no one yields to ambulances in Bangkok – we even got cut off several times on the way to the hospital. The ambulance also had to stop and pay the tolls on the expressway we were using.

When she got to the hospital, Momalot was thoroughly checked out, and while her pulse was still quite fast and she felt dizzy, the doctors assured us that her heart seemed to be ok. Perhaps the craziest thing for this socialized-healthcare-Canadian was having to deal with insurance paperwork while we were still trying to focus on my mother. One of the hospital’s claims people was even asking my mother (very politely – this is Thailand) to sign documents as she groggily lay on her emergency room bed. I realize that to Americans this probably sounds like standard protocol, but we found it disconcerting.

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Disconcerted.

While Momalot’s heart looked ok, the doctors decided to keep her in the hospital for 2 nights of observation/tests. It turned into an unexpected cultural experience. At this particular hospital (Samitivej), even the most basic rooms are like hotel suites, with fold-out beds for guests, arm chairs, fridges and microwaves. You can order food from a  menu, and cute, tiny nurses with elaborate hairstyles check on you at all hours of the day or night. They like to ask questions like “Madam. You need go pee-pee?” By the second day, Momalot was feeling much better, but she was still under hospital arrest. We took her to the coffee shop in the hospital lobby in her swanky Thai hospital outfit, and tried to entertain her on her forced vacation.

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“Madam. I check pulse.”

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Almost 48 hours after she was admitted, Momalot was released from the hospital. She came away with some random hospital swag including branded water bottles in a branded hospital bag. Nothing substantial showed up on the tests, and we are still a little confused as to what happened to her. On the plus side, she had a bunch of expensive tests done that she would have had to wait months+ for in a socialized system. Her travel insurance really came through (for travelling Canadians – RBC insurance was fantastic), and covered the whole visit. Nothing like a 1000% return on your investment.

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The view from her room’s balcony

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And an outdoor sink in case you want to have a barbecue, or something

All in all, it was a frightening experience for all of us, but I’ll wager that it’s created a cultural memory that Momalot won’t soon forget. I doubt any Canadian nurses will ask her whether Madam needs to pee-pee.

Next up: the food Momalot managed to cook for us when she wasn’t in the hospital.