Good news: I found a local doctor who speaks English. And he thinks
I'm abnormally skinny.
Not quite so good news: the right leg has a resilient infection that
causes the swelling between skin and muscle. Which explains a goodly
bit. He put me on some special antibiotics after first prescribing a
third round of the citroflox I've been on, and if it doesn't clear up,
I'll be put on IV medication. Fun!
Meantime, maybe this'll be a local med person who speaks English and
can diagnose without wikipedia.
And in the interim, here's hoping the multi-oscopy will provide some
answers.

Sent from Speedy the ipod.

On Peewee and Classroom Management

This is Teacher Peewee with some of the G6 girls.  Last year, Teacher Peewee was my "Classroom Assistant" in G6.  No mention of the absurdity of assigning a 20-year veteran of the school to "assist" someone new to teaching in Thailand.  Fortunately, I sidestepped angering or offending her, and think we came out on friendly terms.  

One of my biggest challenges is keeping the class moving quickly enough to keep the kids from getting too bored.  There's a balance, of course, and to some extent, those who do not understand any English to begin with will be bored regardless of the pace or content; listening to someone blab incoherently, even if he's gesticulating wildly and responsorily, is just straight up boring.  At the same time, there are those classes, like last year's G6.
So far, all of the Thais who taught that class have commented to me how naughty and difficult last year's G6 kids were.
If I did do any good for the worse classes, most of the credit is due to Teacher Peewee keeping the few most obnoxious in check--as soon as someone started spouting foul language at the stupidly0smiling foreigner, she would clock him with her marker bag.  Or twist his ear. Or whack him with a ruler.

And then there was that one kid, in that one class, the guy who's making a third attempt at getting out of 6th grade and grows more facial hair than I do.  After getting smacked upside the head a number of times, after being stood up and smacked for mouthing off, then for being dumb (in this culture, just like it's acceptable and de rigueur to say "you're fat" or "you're skinny" as a statement/observation without the demeaning connotation it has in the West, it's normal to say "you're being dumb" or "that was a really stupid thing to say," or what amounts to "did you really just say something that stupid? Hold up your hand" *WHACK*) the kid blew a line at me.  Teacher Peewee has always been too polite to translate, despite my requests, so I'm not sure exactly how severe it was, but she stopped class and ordered the guy to the front of the room, where he was told to hit himself on the head.  He shot back a retort, and it turned into smacking himself on the cheek.  Go.  Faster.  Harder.  Another retort, and he was smacking himself in the mouth.  Quite hard, eventually.
The impressive thing is that it did nothing to shut him up.
But it certainly scared the hell out of my inner schoolkid, nurtured in California public schools.
And part of my inner teacher absolutely loves the idea of saying, "You! You're being excessively stupid! Stand up and knock yourself upside the head for me!"which you can do over here when you've been through the wringer enough times to be given its handle and guide newbies through the process.

So when I hear "Oohh, six slash one, very bad, very bad class, you remember?" it always makes me smile and look forward to one day having the classroom authority--if not necessarily the exact disciplinary techniques--as a Thai lady who's built about like the average American fourth grader.

Notable Omissions: a story from the lacunae

Very few posts of late, I know.

There's been very little worth saying.  

But maybe a story of the things unsaid will convey sufficient impressions:

No mention of the three days of teaching summer school it took before I knew what I would be teaching in summer school.

Or the boss whose English is almost as good as my Thai, a scary-looking disciplinarian of a battle ax teacher who dives away from any foreigners she sees.  

No mention of the desperate shuffle from class to find a bathroom.

Nor the "after" photo from "Why farangs shouldn't use squat toilets."

I also didn't mention that the energy, enthusiasm, spark, life, love, and emphatic withitness of the 4th graders is amply sufficient to counteract the abdominal distress in preparation for round 8 of the morning.  

No mention of the anti-diarrheal solution that solidified into a concrete-like plug that ripped holes in things as it went (or at least increased the bleeding).

No mention of how much more the edemas hurt without the bike wrecks, or how they kick off sympathetic pains in the healed ribs, shoulders, elbows, knees, and vertebrae.  

No mention of jumping out of a minivan at a red light and spending two hours trying to get registered to get in line to sign up for a medical appointment (despite being confirmed by phone), nor that those two hours made the three hours of un-airconditioned maniacal pursuit of universal carsickness look like a joyride.  

I really should've mentioned that the doctor, for the first time since I came to this country, thought my skinniness most abnormal and certainly concerning.  

I might've mentioned that converting to dollars is dangerous for one living on the Thai economy: sure, it only cost $600 to spend two days exploring the reaches of diagnostic procedures, one day on an IV drip after sidestepping a gallbladder removal, and a final counsel to receive the diagnosis "skin infection."

Not bad, in American terms.  

Another story when, in universal terms, that's 60% of your subsistence income.

Did I mention how relieving it is to have a doctor say that it looks like something is seriously askew?

I know I should've crowed the praises of outside funding.

Or that after experiencing street food on the Gangetic Plain, the prep for a colonoscopy will be proverbial cake?

No mention of the grilling I've received since taking off my shirt and playing in the river with the kids.  

Also no mention of the blackness accompanying the response to, "If you're my boss telling me this is how it is, okay; I'll suck it up and enjoy it.  But if you're asking whether I'm interested in teaching Literature, English, and Grammar to EP grades 7-8-9 in the new campus across town, no way in hell."  

But what the hell, right?  The teeth are already numb while other parts of the body scream louder from more intensive kickings, so why hope to duck out of it now?

Here's hoping the doc doing the triple-level -oscopy doesn't use too much general anesthetic for me to survive bisecting the city on the back of a mototaxi.  

Waterfall Trip

Even with the waterborne childhood, I was overcome.  One pasty white teacher, pale enough to see veins, skinny enough for ribs to cast shadows, vs. a river full of Prattom 4, 5, and 6th graders.  The force may be strong, but the odds are overwhelming.
And after much laughing and screaming and splashing and screaming, the students have named me something that translates like "Teacher Scrawny."

This is Teacher Peewee--my "classroom assistant" last year, who kept things in order--with a group of G5 students.

On neighborly stench

I returned to quite a pervasively unpleasant smell in my room, the sort you notice the next floor down and wonder what sort of uncouth individual could wreak such a rotten stench on the rest of us.
Oops.  Heh heh.  My bad.

So I went on a cleaning binge and got as far as moving the refrigerator before finding a furry growth of what had once been cardboard in a small outcropping of other furry somethings that I did not care to identify or recognize.  Good scrub, nice bit of pine sol, and it's all taken care of.

Morning comes around and it has definitely not been taken care of.

Turns out, the refrigerator has a drip pan.  It's in the back, down low, hidden under the condenser.
A drip pan is a good idea, true, especially since it held close to a half gallon, and it's good to keep such things unobtrusive.  It's just that hiding it in the most unobtrusive spot possible in a refrigerator distributed to Thailand--or anywhere else in the humid tropics, where a half gallon of water left to its own devices turns into a gelatinous green mire full of chunks matched in ugliness only by their smell--seems a bit daft.  Or cruel.  Or at the least horribly inconvenient.

But now I know.

Something of an update, something of a request

I have 4th graders.  Their language skills are mostly nascent, but they are absolutely voracious--they have about three answers, but their vocabularies are a couple-hundred words strong, and they absolutely LOVE strange facial contortions to accompany English sounds.  For the first time--EVER--I have a group of kids who flock up to hold my hands and escort me.
How to say it without sounding dirty... I fell in love with the class, the interest, the enthusiasm...
It's also been instructive to me to see myself in G4 vs G6 or 7: in G4, smiles and cheers, high-fives and public accolade are fantastic.  If someone is pouting and confused, the first "YAY! YOU GOT IT!" is a proud smile.  After that, the praise boosts the ego, and, provided the concept goes through, the frowny face goes smily.
It's about the best thing to happen in a very, very long time.
But there's always that damned BUT.
It's also the only class I've had to abandon mid-lesson in a frantic dash for either a restroom or sheltered corner of the building.
Under other conditions, my quads would be turning into big, chiseled slabs of muscle from the amount of time spent squatting.  As is, I'm planning a fun-filled weekend at the big university research hospital down south.
Physically, things took a down turn.  What I can say is that I've stabilized and been able to check the edemas with dietary supplements: a slab of deep-fried bacon to my morning walk to work, a few skewers of grilled chicken liver to the walk home, and something approaching a kilo of smoked pork whatnots (depending on the night, it's ear, snout, hock, belly, ham, tongue, or intestine) to evening snacking.  And it's just about enough to keep the edemas in check and stabilize the scale.
So here's a request: if you have spare good thoughts over the weekend, shoot 'em toward the gastro section of the university hospital.

Happy Songkran!

I'm walking down the sidewalk amid a flurry of "HELLO! HELLO!" from passing traffic, and a lady with chalky paste on her face steps out from the grounds of a temple.  She gives me a deep, deep wai, carefully approaches, and dabs fingerfuls of water from a silver bowl all around my shoulders, then pulls me down to plant a kiss on each cheek, smearing me liberally with the paste of eucalyptus-scented baby powder on her face, and then she leans back, takes a handful of screaming orange talcum paste, and very delicately plasters my entire face in one swoop.  

One of the biggest lessons of Nepal: Thailand really is a damn happy and easy place.  As obnoxious as the, "HEY!  YOU!  UH!" and "HARRY POTTER HARRY POTTER HARRY POTTER!" can be, they're ejected without malice or spite, sometimes to get a rile from the farang but more frequently to make the cohort chuckle.

In Nepal, Holi was spiked with the thrill of desecration.  When I was ejected from the bus in Lumpini, the kid who smeared purple dye on my face was taking a break from the sanctioned evening activity of beating stray dogs with sticks.  In Pokhara, throwing dye was a violent activity, expunging the old year's frustrations in a puff of vibrant talcum.  Face painting was a half-assaulting slap.  All of it was laughed off, but the laugh came only after a pause and mental check to make sure it wasn't a serious assault.  

Songkran, on the other hand, was punctuated with nearly as many, "TEACHER!  TEACHER!" as "FARANG!" Parents and grandparents were visibly shocked when their little ones squirted or splashed the teacher, and while the lady who kissed my cheeks was one of only three, even the staggering-drunk hoodlums who came up to paint my face did so delicately, and every one of those offered me the drink in his other hand.  And there was never the spite, never the anger, never the malice, just the fun of a water fight big enough to close the main street all the way through town.  

On Lumpini

Get out, now!  Lumpini!

Lumpini was a fairly easy arrival. A Chinese couple and I were ejected at a wide, T intersection with half a dozen vending “tents” clustered under a tree. People had low, wooden tables on which they sat amidst packages of plastic baubles, packets of snacks, browning piles of produce, bug-screen cages over hunks of freshly butchered meat. Not-quite vertical posts held up ratty tarps or the occasional bit of sheet metal or recycled board scraps. The coolie depositing us waved down the T, pointed at a minivan hollowed out to hold two dozen passengers, and said, “Lumpini.” We walked over to the bus and were intercepted by half a dozen men wearing sarongs and shawls. The youngest might have been a weather-baked forty, with skin wrinkled to deep black lines under wiry gray wisps of hair. The oldest could've been Mowgli's cousin.

“Lumpini?” I asked.

“Lumpini,” a grizzled old guy said, pointing down the stem of the T.

“You want taxi?” said a man with prodigiously large hands, ears, and nose, pointing at a micro-sub-compact car.

“How much?”

“700 rupees.”

“700 for all three?”

“Yes, for all three.”

It seemed a small price for a direct ticket out, especially after traveling through the mountains where transactions are conducted in US dollars and foreigners are to pay, in dollars, what locals pay in (70/$1) rupees.

“How much the bus?”

“42 rupees.”

“For all three?”

“Each.”

I looked at the Chinese couple and nodded toward the taxi. “Costs 230 split three ways, or the bus is 42 each. I like the bus.”

They nodded back and we climbed into the mini bus. And sat. And waited. Gaudy local busses roared past without slowing. An occasional tourist bus—svelte, modern busses with sparkling, uniform paint jobs and curtains drawn behind tinted windows—came up the road we were waiting to go down. And always the stream of bicycles, motorbikes, and rattle-trap jalopies belching decibels and fumes in every given direction.

Lumpini is the modern development around the place where Gautama Buddha was born. Now, there's the rock where he dropped, and a brick-and-concrete lined pool where Maya Vedi, Buddha's mother, took a ceremonial pre-delivery bath. In the local, Nepali calendar—Bikram Sambat—Buddha was born in, um, -585, or whatever you call the year 585 years before the Emperor Vikramaditya defeated the Sakas. In terms of the modern Buddhist calendar, this translates to -100. Or 642 BC. There's also a pillar placed by King Ashoka to mark the exact place of Buddha's birth. This was in 193 BV. On the Buddhist calendar, it was in 294. In the Western world, it happened in 249 BC.

I was going to Lumpini because I was in Nepal with some time and not enough legs left for serious climbing. What better than to see the site where, quite literally, one of the world's major religions was born? Given that my legs were protesting the prospect of level traversing and outright revolted at the prospect of vertical work, how could I pass up a journey of under 60 miles to see where Buddha was born?

Easy to say before spending 14 vomit-crusted hours in a beyond-revival public bus driven by a maniac whose existential edict was to live just past the realm of feasibility while transporting a load of hapless johns from here to there as quickly as existentially possible. Followed immediately by sitting in a gutted minivan with a score of other people, baking in the sun while waiting for more people, most notably a driver, to pile on.

Sometime later, long after the heat cranked to raise the maximum amount of stench from myself and the other passengers, a driver leapt in and, within a second and a half, we were rocketing down the washboard track. We veered around buffalo and cattle and children and bicycles and motorcycles and rickshaws and pedestrians and people who decided to sit in the middle of the road. And then the van stopped and the driver started yelling, “Out here, out here! Lumpini, out here!” and the Chinese couple and I staggered into another open square.

We were surrounded by three-sided hovels half as tall and twice as wide as a phone booth. People sat in these and hooted over the evening's entertainment: in the square, a small herd of children chased stray dogs with sticks, occasionally catching and pummeling one in a chorus of blood-curdling screams and desperate yelping, accompanied by hooting and cheering from the periphery.

Downtown Lumpini Bazaar,
where kids chase small furry animals with sticks

Our first stop was the Chinese hotel. After hearty welcomes and a flurry of Mandarin, the Chinese couple waved at me, and a porter came to show me a room—off-white sheets and bathroom cleaned, in the most optimistic world, with a quick splash of water—for 1500. The Chinese couple stopped, but it was over my budget. I made a less-than comfortable traverse around the entire perimeter of the dog-beating arena, trying not to feel the skin crawling up my spine, to the other guesthouse in town. It was more in my budget, surprisingly so: 300. And it had one wing of dormitory rooms with a communal bathroom. None of the mattresses had sheets, but they all had an ample layer of mold growing across them. Usually, “communal bathroom” indicates a toilet/shower getup shared by the hotel, the amount of... residue in the single open toilet indicated a much, much larger community, especially as the shower nozzle poured, if indeed it produced water, directly into the basin. Regardless, its stench of mold and fecal residue permeated the entire guest wing. And somehow 1500 seemed somewhat more manageable.

When I returned, the Chinese couple were eating dinner.

“You come back!” the woman called around a mouthful of wonton soup.

“Yes!” I waved across the square. “Other place is cheap cheap, but it's no good. You're smart to stick with the best!”

A managerial sort in a business suit took me to look at another room. “Okay, I'll take it,” I said, and I dropped my backpack, relishing dreams of a shower followed by a dinner of north-Gangetic ingredients prepared by Chinese cooks.

“Sorry, sorry,” the lady said. “Water done today and generator not working. Maybe later we get backup power and you have light.”

“No shower?”

“No shower.”

“No toilet?”

“Maybe one.”

“Dinner?”

“Okay.”

Before I sat for dinner, hot and gritty and without prospect of respite, I dug through five menus: three in differing Chinese characters, two in forms of Sanskrit.

“Umm, okay,” I said, patting my belly. “Very hungry. Soup?”

Blank stare.

I pointed at the empty bowls left by the Chinese couple, held up one finger. “Soup. One.”

“Okay, okay.”

“Is there chicken?”

Blank stare.

I folded in my arms and clucked. “Chicken?”

Enthusiastic nod.

“Two: chicken.”

Enthusiastic nodding.

“Rice?”

Rice. We know this one. Okay.

“Soup, one?” Nod. “Chicken, two?” Nod. “Rice, three?” nod. “Okay!”

Twenty minutes later, I received a plate: a small scoop of rice with a fried egg.

I tried to question the server. I tried to find the manager. But I had a half cup of rice with a fried egg. And that was that.

Morning was my downfall. I went to one of the places around the square and scoped out what came from the wood-fired cooking pots: a bubbling vat of vegetable curry the color of baby poop, head-sized donuts of unsweetened rice flour, and squiggly nests of sweet dough deep fried and doused in syrup. I ordered a bowl of the vegetable curry—it was bubbling enthusiastically enough for me to hope any pathogens were neutralized. And maybe they were, maybe it was something else, but from that meal onwards, my digestive tract turned into a wicked fast roller-coaster ride for any form of food or drink.

It was something of a relief to see kids running around with dogs, right until I realized that instead of the kids chasing dogs with sticks, the dogs were helping the kids chase down monkeys to beat with sticks. To the delight of the locals around the square, expressed with cheering and hooting at every successful canine capture and fustigation.

I have since become willing to entertain the notion that plugging a kid into a TV—which is not so possible in a place with electricity for maybe 4 hours per day—is maybe not such a bad idea.

Lumpini's Grande Canal.
Mahayana to the left, Theravada to the right,
Peace Pagoda straight ahead three miles

Lumpini turns out to be a sprawling compound of mainly wild parkland. A fence—three miles long and one mile wide—borders the compound, save where there are entrance gates at each of the cardinal points. Each entrance has a little metal shack in which someone sits to collect 200 rupees from each tourist, or 20 from a Nepali. Just inside the gate, there will be a lineup of rickshaws manned by guys with toothpick legs, gray hair, and sun-baked skin that makes an American football look soft and supple. And they dive on incoming tourists like linemen on a fumble, shouting, “RICKSHAW RICKSHAW RICKSHAW” from a nostril-curdling point blank, waving at their rigs.

Part of me knows that these men depend on people like me to drop a couple hundred rupees for a morning tour of the compound. A bigger part of me looks at legs even skinnier than mine, faces more wrinkled than my grandfather's, the strange proportions of a toothless person without dentures, the stranger sight of three scraggly green teeth, and revolts against the thought of having this particular individual pedal me around in the baking hot Gangetic sun.

Did I mention that the compound is three-miles long? On the brochures, a canal runs down the middle, with periodic boat docks and fountains. Maybe one day it will happen. For now, the concrete walkways along the canal are in place, and there's an occasional work crew lining the canal with bricks. Which is to say, it's an open, baking hot trudge to get from the Maya Vedi temple at the southern end to the Peace Pagoda and museum in the northern quadrant.

Lumpini is divided into three sections according to a German-designed master plan. The southern square mile is devoted to the birthplace itself, with the sacred bathing pool and Ashoka pillar and a large botanical garden. It also has a guesthouse and a few tents selling sacred souvenirs—amulets and braided necklaces and statuettes but no postcards or posters of any part of the place, let alone the photography-restricted sacred areas. The middle mile houses temples and shrines and monks from around the world, segregated into Theravada on one side and Mahayana on the other. The northerly reaches hold the World Peace Pagoda, the museum, two upper-end hotels, and, according to the brochure, a family housing compound, a school, a reference library, a medical center, a pilgrim's rest area, a shopping complex, and a canteen, plus a crane sanctuary. Again, maybe one day.

Buddhism has two main sects: Theravada, which is more common south of the Himalayas, and Mahayana, which is typically found from the Himalayas north. Theravada is considered an older, more austere form of Buddhism, yet it is still common to see a Thai monk smoking a cigarette and talking on a cell phone while walking into a mega-mart store. Mahayana is somewhat more fluid, adapting to and adopting local customs and traditions as it spreads. It tends to be more ostentatious, as in the drums and horns and chanting of Tibetan Buddhism. (In one guesthouse on the Annapurna Circuit, I woke to the blaring of a horn accompanied by frantic drumming. I later learned that the horn was made from a human femur and the drum from two skulls, as is traditional; at the time, it was cold and dark and I was less than pleased to have some yahoo with weak embouchure blasting a makeshift horn with zero resonance and a wonky fundamental up in the high tenor range.)

No drawbridge, but ample gates.

In Lumpini, the Theravadas built on the Eastern side of the canal, the Mahayanas on the West. It's great fun in the morning and evening, when horns, drums, and chanting from the Mahayana side thunders across the plains, and it's easy to imagine the Theravadas welcoming the challenge to retain deep meditation (Theravadas chant Pali sutras at times, but have no practices to match horns and drums). Given that I live in a Theravada country, I made my way up the Mahayana line, hoping to learn about the other side of the Buddhist world.

Just past the rickshaws, I tried to enter the compound dedicated to meditation instruction and retreats, but the gates were locked for the mid-morning meditation session. A few minutes later, I stood under the panopticon eyes of a Nepali monastery and read that my presence would be welcomed in the evening cool. Not before. Likewise the Tibetan, Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Japanese compounds.

The German temple

I was able to visit the French temple: an open, tile square with a small, white stupa. Next door, the German temple was a fantastic conglomeration of statuary and wild frescoes of scenes from Mahayana mythology. Most of the figures were recognizable from ancient-Hindi mythology and similar statuary parks in my Theravada hometown—the Goddess of Many Arms, the Fearsome Chicken/Hawks, the Fearsome Tiger/Chickens, the Guard Dragons, Pious Worshippers, and sundry Bodhisattvas—but they were of German origin, so instead of the hard, angular lines with ornate curlicue trim, they were the same creatures reimagined by Hummel.

After the German temple, I found myself behind a swarm of Indian schoolchildren on a field trip. Just over half were girls, all of whom were wearing bright and sparkly saris, and the boys were wearing loose cotton shirts over sarongs or loose cotton pants as they swooped and dived around each other in a rollicking stream of rounded syllables and bouncing consonants. And then one of them saw me, barked something, and they all came to an immediate, silent halt. They slowly turned around, easy and nonchalant-like, and stared at me. With nowhere to walk around them, I smiled a stupid tourist smile and walked right through the middle as a few score eyes followed me without blinking under the glare of the sun or glow of blond hair. Once I was a dozen steps past, they erupted in a flurry of whispers and whisper-shouts. And they followed me all the way around the Crane Sanctuary—which looks remarkably like anyplace else in the compound save for the canal—past the upscale Japanese hotels, to the Peace Pagoda. Closed for something.

The Peace Pagoda

According to the map, I could find the canteen and shopping center near a collection of buildings not far away, so it seemed a good opportunity to get some shade and cold water.

Heh.

I did find the museum the map said was there. It featured many large pictures of relics found in Lumpini and elsewhere. And I was ushered to a movie I simply had to see—a colonial-sounding voice narrating the proposed developments to Lumpini as if the tourist haven were already in place. I got to see video footage of all temples with open gates and ornate welcoming displays, a snazzy CG rendition of the grand canal, tour through the elegant cafeteria and staff living compound, and see a museum full of tangible artifacts, not just pictures. I would've been impressed had I not just paced the same terrain.

On the way out, I resolved to hire a rickshaw. I had been walking around in the pummeling sun without food or water for a number of hours—I assumed that, as is the custom in Thailand, the promenade would be lined with carts hawking drinks and food on a stick and authentic memorabilia and knockoff souvenirs and ice cream and chopped fruit and noisemakers and any other device to possibly separate the tourist from the rupee—and it was time for a break, not for a three mile walk back.

Naturally, it turned into the single longest stretch of solo travel I made anywhere in Nepal. Even in the early morning hours or the baking noontime, people and jeeps and cows and busses speckled the Annapurna Circuit. Nowhere else in Nepal did I make it so long without getting hit up to buy or pay for something. And when I did find someone, she had just locked the convenience shop outside the Maya Vedi Temple—no cold water for me.

The Ashoka Pillar, next to the Maya Devi Temple

Hoping to save the best for last, I walked into the low brick edifice of the Maya Devi Temple grateful simply for the shade and relative cool. From the outside, it looks like an adobe fort of Wild West design, save that it has a brick-lined pond instead of a wooden fence. And the Ashoka pillar, which is swaddled in prayer flags and gold leaf as high as the devout could reach.

Inside, the modern structure protects half a dozen brick foundations of ancient stupas. An elevated wooden walkway around the perimeter gives a vantage of these, each of which is guarded by a sign on the railing reading, “NO PHOTOGRAPHY” in five or six languages. Similar signs mark the cardinal walls and the jetty that extends out as an overlook of what is thought to be the exact place where Maya Vedi grabbed onto a tree branch and popped out Gautama Buddha, who took seven steps and said, “That's the last time I'm going through that!”

Now the rock is under a glass case that is completely covered with gold leaf, at the base of a pillar decorated in kind, guarded by a man with an assault rifle. It seemed a little excessive, but it certainly deterred me from taking illicit photographs.

As I stood in the gloom—the only light comes from the front door, opposite the Birthstone Overlook, and narrow slots around an elevated ceiling—I tried to find some sense of the sacred, the quiet holiness that pervades so many pilgrimage sites, but first the guard had a sneezing fit, and then he was sniffing mighty, juicy snorks, and then blowing juicy honks over the railing onto one of the 1^st Century (who knows which calendar) stupas, and by the time he finished, six young men approached with machine-gun chatter that shattered the remaining silence from far outside the door and echoed by the time they were inside. After they'd worked around to the Overlook, each handed the guard a cell phone and filed down to where I was standing. The guard followed, tapped me on the shoulder, and waved me to the back of the overlook so he could take pictures with each of the six cell phone cameras.

The benefit of spending all day in the sun without water was that when a rickshaw driver with especially heinous teeth that paled in comparison to his breath came chasing after me as I was leaving--
“RICKSHAW RICKSHAW YOU GO TEMPLE TOUR?”--I didn't have the voice to retort.  

On Docs. Again.

Skip to the good stuff: today's return visit to the hospital.  I was determined to get better than, "Tests show normal so you're okay" at the end of an exam that started with "You so skinny!" and "5-15 times per day with nighttime vomiting."
This time, there were no tests.  There were no blood draws.  Nothing.
"You dehydrate," the doctor said.  "You live here, now?"
Huh?
"You need live here tonight for IV fluids and tomorrow I take out you gallbladder."
Huh?
"You stay for IV to rehydrate.  You lips dry, you need fluid."
Okay.
"And tomorrow I take out you gallbladder."
WHAT?
"You gallbladder..." the computer screen gets tilted toward me, and google pops up to show me what the gale/ gal/ gallblat/ galbllat
"Two 'L's and two 'D's."
"Oh, okey."
"Why do you want to take my gallbladder out?"
"Have seen with farangs it helps."
"It helps? Huh?"
"With farangs who do not like Thai food.  It maybe helps."
"But I don't want my gallbladder out!"
"Okay, okay, you go get IV."

So they ushered me out to the lobby, presumably while preparing a semi-private room.  For most of an hour.  A perky nurse appeared alongside a grizzled old guy pushing a wheelchair.  "You come, sit, okay?" she said.
I stood to walk but was not allowed to step over the threshold to the elevator.
The perky nurse deposited me in an utterly unremarkable semi-private room--quite a bit more dirt in the corners, mold on the ceiling, and use on the furniture than we'd see in the west, but otherwise the same basic setup--and disappeared.  For lunch hour.
By the time someone came back, I'd been there for close to four hours without food or drink and stood to receive treatment for dehydration--this bodes ill for any tech trying to find one of my normally-flimsy veins.  It didn't help that the first candidate was an internist who reached for my left hand.
"Maybe it's easier here," I said, pointing at my right elbow.
"Is okay, okay," she said.
And ruptured the vein.
"Is okay, okay."
She moved to the vein coming off my left thumb.
And ruptured it.
"Is easier here, really," I said.
"Okay, okay, is okay."
Pop goes a vein on the back of my wrist.
And then in my left elbow.
Twice.
She disappeared and came back with a very large syringe.  "Inject for muscle pain in stomach."  She flipped her hands around.  "You lay over."
Huh?
With one hand, she picked me up by my belt, rolled me to my side, and pulled down my pants.  It would've been nice if she'd closed the curtain, especially since I was in the first bay next to the hallway with the scrawny pastiness of my bare butt shining at a steady stream of passing hospital staff.
She disappeared again and came back with a senior nurse, who looked at the five patches of taped down cotton and said, "Oh."
"Here, here.  Is easier here," I said.
"Okay, okay," she said.  She disappeared and returned with a tray of sterile torture devices.  "Here: is for little baby.  It goes in okay, no?"
She blew the vein on my right wrist.  I tapped my right elbow and resolved to leave if she didn't try there or ruptured even that.  But she hit it, and started a saline drip.
"Okay, you sleep.  I come back tonight."
I almost worked up the gumption to say, "Okay, okay, but I'm hungry and have to pee."  No such luck, though.  She closed the curtain, and that's the last I saw of humanity save for nurses who came bursting in looking for the man screaming in Thai.  I cranked the IV up to the maximum flow and read the National Geo carried from Kathmandu, and the two finished at about the same time.
After I pressed the call button, a gaggle of nurses flocked around the guy two stalls down.  They left, returned, left, returned with trays.
Dishes clattered.
I rang the bell again.  A buzzer sounded down the hall.  And kept sounding.  No footsteps.
After a while, another clatter of dishes.  A flurry of footsteps out into the hall, down the hall, and a hurried return.
"Bag is empty, can I go now?"
"You want leave?"
That's an understatement.
"Okay, okay.  I pull out needle and call chair for you."
"No matter, no matter, I can walk, okay?"
And I left without any tests, any drugs beyond the butt injection, or any treatments.

I guess the good news is that, in American terms, the medical care is pretty darn cheap.  It's just that this culture operates on a matter of face: if the doc can't find a bombastic sort of cure, or at least make a sweeping prognosis, there can be nothing wrong without the doctor losing face.  So if it's not something cool, it's nothing at all.
So here's to square one, eh?

On Busses

Climbing through the prayer flags and curtains of luggage and garments adorning the ungainly stretch into a Nepali bus is as close to walking through the gates of Purgatory as most living people can get. As your feet leave the dusty parking lot, you hope and pray that you will survive the journey and disembark in a place you'd rather be, but that's a very long ways away on the far side of enough calamity to occupy a retirement home gossip circuit for a week. To the practical, rational, logical Western eye, nothing about the Nepali bus system should work. It could only work through something akin to the Improbability Drive, but even then, where Western newspapers run a “snow report” or “surf report” or “crop report,” the Nepali daily papers run the numbers of people killed in vehicular accidents, and at least once per grade the bus squeezes past a burnt-out wreck scavenged and pushed half-heartedly out of the lane. But that's getting ahead.

Nepali busses all leave at 7:00 sharp. If you are staying in a decent guesthouse, there will be great kerfuffle the night before: you must be ready at 6:30 to pay and ride to the bus station with the proprietor's brother. At 6:45, the proprietor will probably be finished clearing his nose and scratching his junk (with his right hand, which is the clean hand used in all transactions), and wave you toward a taxi, “Hundred rupees. Cheap for you, no?” (In Nepal, if you have whitish skin your blood runs with dollars and euros.) The typical westerner will be sweating by 6:55, wondering if they'll hold the bus, if the ticket—a carbon-copy slip paid for at the guest house without any cross-referencing or recording with the bus line—will even be valid, if there will be another bus.

At 7:05 the taxi driver will pull into what looks like a wreckage yard lined with hulks of shagged-out busses built as larger siblings if the early Vanagon generations. To-be-gaudy rigs line the lot like the reject room for Austin Powers auditions, slumped and slouched while coming off the bender that got them there in the first place. Nowhere is there a terminal, a ticket counter, a sign indicating a destination, a sign indicating a bathroom, just a crazy crosswork of cabs full of faces as confused as yours, a patchwork of touts selling syrup-water coffee or tea, fresh fruit juice or genuine knockoff souvenirs, and dudes with flat-billed caps turned sideways smoking and pulling their pants not quite far enough up. You'll pull up to one of these groups and the driver might say something through a window cracked just enough to let in the stench of diesel and open sewer but not the heavy scent of syrup coffee or—gasp--fresh air, to which one of the sideways-hat hombres will grunt and hint at a gesture with his cigarette. Or maybe the driver will just say, “Get out. This one,” and you will strive to remind yourself that the driver and the proprietor exchanged half a dozen words, so he must know where you're going.

Here's where it helps to have spent some time in developing places. It really is as close to entropy as it looks: there is a dirt lot full of hawkers and homeboys and lined with busses that were outdated—stylistically and structurally—by 1970, presumably driven by the homeboys, who presumably know where they're going and how to get there, while a steady flow of dinky little sub-micro taxi cabs brings ungainly people with glowing hair and skin and burnished clothes. Every once in a while there will be a wild eruption of facial hair, tye-dye, and trail grit. Someone will grab your bag and throw it to someone else who's sitting on top of one of these shagmobile busses. The person catching your bag, a solo or maybe one of two dudes, looks like the sort who would not be allowed inside the bus even if he wished to enter, and his role is to protect your luggage enroute. And you do not think about who watches the watchers. Newbies are easy to spot: they're waving their tickets and getting worked up about destinations and times and seat assignments. God help us if there's a connection somewhere—then the critical assurances that it is THIS bus and THIS driver and it's supposed to leave at THIS time and stop at THIS place become overwhelming.

My take is to confirm a city name with the guy schlepping my bag—just say the name, and if he nods, I'm set to climb on and stake out my seat. But no rush: the only force in the world that could get the 7:00 bus rolling before 7:30 would be me showing up at 7:02. Then it would leave on the dot. The key indicator is when a truckload of locals show up—no matter what time that happens to be, it means departure in 3 minutes, tops. And if the sewer stink has jarred some associative impulses, it's squeeze time. This is also where it helps to have some in-country time: it's easier not to gawp when you're looking for the toilet sign and see some dude watering the back fence. Or when you look again and see a lady in the same place, in the same position, hiking her skirt a bit and fortifying the same fencepost.

Driver and Coolie I in a bus

If you're lucky, the bus looks like a cheezy throwback exhibition in a museum of modern kitch—curtains, glitter, prayer flags, airbrushings, psycho vinyl colors, chrome splashed with the delicacy of a tsunami, and none of it kept up or cleaned, save through use, since it left the factory. If you are unlucky, the bus was fitted by a sadomasochist instead of shag artist, or the vehicle spent a while transporting livestock in conjunction with tourists.

I like to sit just behind the front axle because it makes for a smoother, forward ride without being so far forward I can see what's coming. The front area is walled off, presumably to protect the driver's concentration, but there's a padded flop spot over the transmission and a few seats for groupies, coolies, or those too old and infirm to stand once all the double-wide seats have three or four people. For some reason, the little old lady in traditional garb, who looks as though she's never been in a moving vehicle in her life, always gets shoved into one of the cab seats, where she faces a full-frontal onslaught of the approaching traffic, and where her noisy and copious wretching can have the most effect as it wafts and splatters down the entire length of the bus, igniting explosively sympathetic heaving with every whif and splat. Most likely, one of the coolies will keep occupied running up and down the aisle with little black baggies that people fill and toss out the window.

Each bus has a handful of coolies, among whom are the dudes riding the roof rack, and two, three, or four guys—generally either growing into roof rack levels of disrepute or already grown into an inclination toward reputability—to wrangle the interior. Sometimes they hang out in the cab on the transmission pad, sometimes they hang out of the door, sometimes they perch in the stairwell, and sometimes they're kept roving the aisles with the said barf bags. At every “stop” (i.e. when the bus slows down in each successive conglomeration of dwellings wide enough for the bus to pull onto the shoulder while two lorries pass in a flurry of motorcycles) the coolies step out and shout incoherently—maybe the route, maybe the destination, maybe the equivalent of a Hail Mary. If there are passengers to load, one coolie will grab the luggage and toss it aboard or atop the bus, and the other will bodily herd the poor sod with wide and wild eyes up the precipitous staircase that might possibly be moving as slowly as a saunter, although a jog is more likely. And as soon as the first coolie has one hand on a rail, the other slaps the side of the bus and hops onto the structural chromework.

At a time with no rational explanation, the bus will stop in a wide spot or town large enough to host a crossroads. The stop will last between five and fifty minutes, which might be announced in Nepali. Safer to stay within a quick grab of the bus.

If it's a wide spot in the road, well-trod trails will lead to an embankment from which both men and women stand and play waterfalls. It may be a place as civilized and developed as a small village, not quite big enough to be a crossroads. In this case, the dirt-ish road runs through half a dozen hovels slapped together from tin, cardboard, plywood, grass, or bamboo. If it's a ridgetop town, the street-facing windows will be on ground level, while the opposite windows are held up by poles stretching to a paddy three or four floors below. This is a lucky stop, too: who doesn't love peeing off the side of a cliff? Otherwise, you're just peeing on a road and in a town in the middle of a crowd of people very curious about foreign anatomy?

If the place is an actual crossroads, or a larger village in the flats, it will accommodate a three-sided shed full of ramshackle tables and cracked or caving in plastic stools. An embankment or pseudo-shade over semi-isolated holes in the ground will be out back, just past the kitchen. Running water comes straight from a dipper bucket. Don't bother looking for a sink or soap.

Most places have a traditional tandoori oven. One or two guys will be rolling out roti dough to cook by tossing on the wall of the barrel-like fire chamber. Most likely there will be a large aluminum vat of something that looks distressingly like something you just saw out back. Maybe there will be a chicken or portions thereof on an iron rod stuck down into the flaming pit. Perishables will be kept nearby—maybe in the same space as the oven, maybe just around a corner—stacked in open shelving along with firewood.

Just inside the back door, there'll be a service window manned by a stout guy whose paunch is covered with grease spots. For anyone brave enough, he will grab a compartmentalized tin plate a little larger than a steering wheel, use a soup bowl to scoop on rice from a pot the size of a laundry tub, and ladle out doses of the unmentionable-looking stuff from more large aluminum vats. Those who sat and dug into plates of lunch, dipping fingerfuls of rice in the glop carefully compartmentalized around the edge of the truck-size hubcap, appeared to enjoy it almost enough for me to overcome my natural reaction. But even after picking up a parasite and squirting myself down to a critical weight accompanied by continuous, gnawing hunger, the prospect of bouncing and winding around for an unknown stretch of hours on the bus overwhelmed the potential nourishment.

Due credit should be given to the coolies and drivers who regularly travel the overcrowded and underdeveloped roads. About the only way a Westerner could successfully—which is to say, drive from one town to the next without being the direct cause of any loss of life, structural damage, or greater-than-normal evasive maneuvers—navigate any distance on Nepali roads would be at the helm of an armored assault vehicle or in the anonymous midst of a convoy. Otherwise, the lack of direction, lack of organization, overabundance of slow-moving or speeding vehicles, omnipresence of livestock or farm carts, axle-eating potholes, or single-lane switchbacks up and down precipitous slopes would very likely provide a brief and terminal introduction to driving in Nepal and a solid goose to the daily death toll in the papers.

Typical town on a local bus route

Nepali roads, even in the best possible circumstances, make any stretch of steep and curvaceous road through the Alps look fairly tame and unexciting. As a buzzard soars, three villages might be within six kilometers of each other, but the middle one will be at the top of a ridge while the others are at the bottoms of adjacent valleys. And ridgelines in the Himalaya are not nice, gentle, rolling hills but sheer outcroppings scalable via ladders between narrow terraces of rice fields. A watermelon seed spit from a ridgetop village might stand a darn good chance of landing in the next village, especially if it has a bit of a tailwind, but a bus is going to take fifteen kilometers and forty minutes to switchback down the thousand-meter ridge. And instead of a nice, smooth, flat road through the valley villages and a nice, smooth, flat road across the ridgetop plateau with an occasional nexus at a village large enough to host a crossroads, the road must connect each and every village with its neighbor, so to cover ten kilometers of a buzzard glide, the bus will take a hundred-some kilometers over three switchback-sick hours.

Flat stretches of road are hardly any better. Rarely is the road what a Westerner would consider paved—there are patches of pavement, just like sunlight might dapple a forest floor. For the most part, the road consists of dirt packed around large stones, or more precisely, the swerving gaps between the said stones. And as the roads drop into the more populous flatlands and the density of development increases, so does the density of extra-vehicular traffic: herds of cows and goats, children on oversized bicycles, older kids standing around looking for something to do, adults squatting curbside looking for something to do, and the occasional gaggle of youths who snag the passing chrome lattice and hop a ride on top of the bus.

Okay, here I am, what now?

And then, no matter where you are, no matter where you're going, the bus will dump you. With luck, the bus will come to a complete stop at a crossroads, one of the coolies will lean over and say your destination and when you nod and confirm, he will grab your bag and lead you out of the bus (I saw this happen once, when a three-generation family of very large, very blond, very vocal family was disembarked at a connection for a popular tourist spot). More likely, the bus will slow down to a brisk walking pace while a coolie hauls your startled keister from the uncomfortable seat and shoves you down the walkway toward the briskly-passing dirt of... someplace.

Somehow, as you stand in pummeling sun in the midst of a ramshackle collection of lean-tos and hovels that harbor dozens of eyes staring at you, your solitary self, in your disoriented and bleary delivery, the cheesy chrome and waves of vomit roaring off across the Gangetic Plain become a link to familiarity and safety, a ticket back to the known world, and its disappearance in a cloud of rattling dust is almost as acute as the side-effects of a local diet.

Yet there you are, holding all your worldly goods, left to figure out what comes next and how.   

Critter pics!

Royal Chitwan National Park

on fun

The good news is that with Southern Thailand flooded and experiencing severe rains (still) all airports are closed, all rail lines are down, and all bus routes are cancelled, so I have nowhere to be but here where I am.  The bad news is that I've spent about 32 of the last 36 hours in and out of fever dreams punctuated with flying trips to the toilet.
I did make it to a druggist yesterday--"Bad, bad diarrhea" was not enough, I had to give an exact number of times, and when I did, all help was off and I had to walk to the next strip mall, where "Many, many times" was enough to get carbon pills, antibiotics, and oral rehydration salts.
So now the goal is to get to the south intact and hope the flooding delays summer school long enough for the docs down there to get a plug in my system.  Whee.