The Bush Doctrine of preemptive war is the first time in history that America has given up on diplomacy as a cornerstone of foreign policy.

The problem is not that Palin didn’t know what the Bush Doctrine was in the ABC interview by Charles Gibson, but that she hadn’t thought about what “preemptive” war and what it means for the country…and that is no end of wars started by the U.S. any time it feels threatened…like the one in Iraq. Palin has indicated the U.S. must attack any country that appears to be threatening.  Is this what we want?  Think about it.

Sunday Sept. 14, 2008 10:48 EDT
Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com

Where is the debate over the Bush Doctrine?

Before it became clear that Sarah Palin had never heard of it, nobody — including the presidential candidates themselves — ever had difficulty answering questions about what they believed about the Bush Doctrine, nor ever suggested that this Doctrine was some amorphous, impossible-to-understand, abstract irrelevancy. Quite the contrary, despite some differences over exactly what it means, it was widely understood to constitute a radical departure — at least in theory — from our governing foreign policy doctrine, and it is that Doctrine which has unquestionably fueled much of the foreign policy disasters of the last eight years.

In 2003, the American Enterprise Institute’s Thomas Donnelly wrote an article entitled “The Underpinnngs of the Bush Doctrine,” and argued that “the Bush Doctrine, which is likely to shape U.S. policy for decades to come, reflects the realities of American power as well as the aspirations of American political principles”; that it “represents a reversal of course from Clinton-era policies in regard to the uses of U.S. power and, especially, military force”; and “the Bush Doctrine represents a return to the first principles of American security strategy.” Donnelly had no trouble understanding and articulating exactly what the Bush Doctrine meant: namely, a declaration that the U.S. has the right to — and will — start wars against countries even if they have not attacked us and are not imminently going to do so:

Taken together, American principles, interests, and systemic responsibilities argue strongly in favor of an active and expansive stance of strategic primacy and a continued willingness to employ military force. Within that context, and given the ways in which nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction can distort normal calculations of international power relationships, there is a compelling need to hold open the option of — and indeed, to build forces more capable of — preemptive strike operations. The United States must take a wider view of the traditional doctrine of “imminent danger,” considering how such dangers might threaten not only its direct interests, but its allies, the liberal international order, and the opportunities for greater freedom in the world.

Put more simply: ” The message of the Bush Doctrine — “Don’t even think about it!” — rests in part on a logic of preemption that underlies the logic of primacy.” A few months earlier, Norman Podhoretz wrote a long cover story for Commentary — entitled “In Praise of the Bush Doctrine” (sub. rq’d) — in which he argued that “To those with ears to hear, the State of the Union address should have removed all traces of ambiguity from the Bush Doctrine.” He, too, pointed out the obvious: that from this point froward, the U.S. “would also take preemptive action whenever it might be deemed necessary.” The extreme deceit that lies at heart of neoconservativism is vividly illustrated by the willingness of their leading lights — such as Charles Krauthammer and NYT “reporter” Michael Gordon — suddenly to proclaim that the Bush Doctrine is far too amorphous for Sarah Palin or anyone else to be able to opine on it, even after their Godfather years ago declared that “all traces of ambiguity from the Bush Doctrine” have been removed for “those with ears.”

That the Bush Doctrine is both clear and central had continued to be accepted fact into the 2008 election. In January of this year in New Hampshire, Charlie Gibson himself asked the presidential candidates about their views of the Bush Doctrine during the primary debates he hosted. Nobody had any trouble answering it:

It appears that the American people don’t want a president and statesman anymore.  They want a hero to save them.  Superman or Batman, anyone?  Or maybe Superwoman?

Had a nice long visit with Greg (oldest son) last week. He tells me about the mini triathlon he ran that day…happy that he is back into running, biking and swimming.  And he tells me he misses his brother, Josh, who stayed with Greg in Las Vegas for a week while he waited for his visa to Hong Kong.  He misses Josh’s job as cook, pool cleaner, conversationalist, companion…all with no demands.  We laughed then.  Doug, third son, is due in to Salem from Thailand on September 7 for a month.  I’m going to make him do some work for his board and room! :)))  

The global expat population has continued to boom – according to the World Bank’s Global Links Report 2007, the number of people living outside their home country has more than doubled since 1980 to 190 million – despite the weakening global economic climate, with companies continuing to bear the higher costs of foreign postings. I believe it! I think this means people of all countries world-wide.

 From Crooks And Liars blog:

The latest Pew Survey on News Consumption, which is conducted every other year, was released yesterday.   Most notably, there was a great section of the report on news-consumer knowledge and sophistication.

About half of Americans (53%) can correctly identify the Democrats as the party that has a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. In February 2007, shortly after the Democrats gained control of the House after a dozen years of GOP rule, many more people (76%) knew the Democrats held the majority.

The public is less familiar with the secretary of state (Condoleezza Rice) and the prime minister of Great Britain (Gordon Brown). About four-in-ten (42%) can name Rice as the current secretary of state. The public’s ability to identify Rice has not changed much over recent years: In April 2006 and December 2004, shortly before she was sworn in, 43% could correctly identify her.

The prime minister of Great Britain is not well known among the public. Just more than a quarter (28%) can correctly identify Gordon Brown as the leader of Great Britain.

Overall, 18% of the public is able to correctly answer all three political knowledge questions, while a third (33%) do not know the answer to any of the questions.

…how humiliating this is to the nation overall. Personal Note:  In contrast, as I travel around the world and talk to English speaking people from other countries, invariably I can hold an intelligent and informed conversation in which Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Rove,  Powell and others are well-known.  They know because our foreign policies have a direct impact on them.

Crooks And Liars:  “But one-in-three Americans got all of the questions wrong. For all the talk about the Democratic Congress, barely half the country knows there’s a Democratic majority.  Maybe my perspective is skewed because I just finished reading Rick Shenkman’s “Just How Stupid Are We?” but at a certain point, the political world is going to have to come to grips with the fact that a striking percentage of the electorate has no idea what’s going on.”
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Watching the Olympics in Beijing has got me to thinking about China again.  I’d like to make a point about the legacy of the damage done in the last 50 years.

You might like to read “The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up” by Liao Yiwu.

Master Deng Kuan, abbot of the Gu Temple, established in the Sui Dynasty sometime around the turn of the sixth century, was 103 when the writer Liao Yiwu met him while mountain climbing in Sichuan Province, in 2003, and Yiwu’s oral histories begin with him.

This is from a review of the book by Howard W. French, a former career foreign correspondent for the New York Times, who covered China from 2003 to 2008 and who teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism:

We know the Anti-Rightist Campaign of the late 1950s, the party went on a nationwide witch hunt for supposed liberals, reactionaries and capitalist roaders. Relating the Chinese experience amounts to a way of averting one’s eyes from something that may seem too hard to comprehend. It also encourages a kind of blurry forgetting, a storing away of things on a high, musty shelf that has been officially encouraged by China’s leaders, who are most keen to manage this story because they have the most to lose from a more vigorous and thorough telling. Thus the famous posthumous verdict by Deng Xiaoping, who judged that Mao had been 70 percent “correct” and 30 percent wrong. Yes, Mao’s errors, like the 30 million or more deaths from starvation caused by the crash industrialization of the Great Leap Forward, were doozies, but by and large he kept the country on the right path, avers Deng Xiaoping. Deng’s past has also benefited from studious airbrushing to avoid mussing up the standard portrait of him as a kindly, strong and nearly infallible second father to the nation. His enthusiastic role in violently suppressing “rightists” in the late 1950s has been placed out of bounds by the gatekeepers who determine which subjects can be researched and which cannot.

Master Deng’s life, and almost every other oral history in Liao Yiwu’s new book, appropriately subtitled Real-Life Stories, China From the Bottom Up , gives the lie to this entire vision, making this a deeply subversive book. I do not mean the reader should expect a tract or treatise on Chinese politics. Instead, Liao casts aside the official “facts” of events and replaces them with “memories”–with the resulting contrast between the censored record and interior consciousness revealing a post-1949 China that has never stopped being a traumatic place. At their root, all of Liao’s “real-life” stories share something fundamental: a fantastic, dreamy and nightmarish quality. Each story provokes a moment’s thought about its relationship to the truth.
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With an unlimited budget, China’s most illustrious film director has achieved a lush multimedia feast that I cannot imagine will be surpassed anytime soon. As expected it was embedded with the political…for local consumption as much as for the world.

Images…visions…symbols…and then…mirage…illusion, the ideal…and then…if you pay attention: signs.

In Tai Chi, movement in one direction often begins with a movement in the opposite direction… perfect alignment is created as hundreds and thousands of actors move as one when they have perfect awareness of where their neighbors are…water moves gracefully away from resistance and conflict…but then soldiers march to drumming rumble…

Soldiers? At an Olympics opening?

Great propaganda, China!

Oregon is most delightful in summer! Everything is so green. And my mouth has been watering for local strawberries, raspberries, peaches and cherries. And Walla Walla Sweet Onions! Cars obey the rules, garbage is picked up and motorcycles don’t try to run you down. And sweet faces of old friends are a joy.
This blog has just been sitting here while I have been planting flowers and maintaining the house for the last month since I’ve been home. I’m not used to house maintenance. I’m not used to making appointments and keeping them on time. My inner mechanisms are a jambles. The world news is upsetting and I’m sick of the negative campaign and mindless pundits. So I have been planting flowers. And enjoying my home. It’s like being in a 5 star hotel after all the cheap guest houses in Asia.

A couple weeks ago I was treated with a visit from two of my sons…Josh and Greg. They were on a mission to see their 92 year old grandmother in Portland. Josh was in between jobs so he spent a few days here and treated me and some of our old friends to a wonderful dinner here at the house…4 hours in the preparation of. Just like old times. I loved the banter. I miss it now. Then he flew to Las Vegas with Greg where he spent a week or so before flying to Hong Kong to join his wife Amy and begin work. They are happy to finally be out of mainland China…especially with the Olympics coming.

I’ll have a month of peace before Doug arrives from Thailand the first week of September…leaving the end of October. And time to catch up on my reading. Finished “Bangkok Blondes,” a book of short stories by expat women living in Bangkok. And “Tales From The Expat Harem,” also a book of short stories by expat women living in Turkey. Now I’m reading a short history of the Balkans where I hope to go next fall.

I am looking forward to leaving the house in the care of a renter in November and returning to Oaxaca Mexico for a couple of months before going to Cuba and Guatemala with an American expat friend in Oaxaca. Then I hope to go on to other Central and South American countries before returning to Oregon next summer. So that’s the deal…taking advantage of a window of time while I am still able to walk and before the cost of airline fuel prohibits any more travel.

In the meantime I spend time on www.couchsurfing.com making friends in all the prospective countries I will be visiting. It’s an online community where you hook up with friends and arrange to stay with them…and they with you. And join CS activities in their local communities. If you travel try it! You’ll like it!

The demonstrators are still at it in South Korea, I see on CNN tonight.

When I was in Hanoi this month I was sitting on the front steps of my guesthouse waiting for a van to take me on a day trip when all of a sudden a tall, young good looking guy appeared at my side. He was obviously Asian, but never knowing if you are talking to an American, or an Asian from some other country, I asked where he was from. South Korea he said. Then we traded travel stories.  He is traveling long-term.   He has excellent English and is obviously well-educated. Hmmm, well-to-do, I thought. He wissoft-spoken…not anything like his older countrymen that I have come across.  I said that I had noticed that a lot of South Koreans weren’t happy these days. He laughed. Oh, yeah, he said, we don’t like your country selling your beef to us. But, I said, we aren’t getting sick from Mad Cow Disease. Then we get down to it.

South Korea has a strong long-held tradition of dissent. My son’s best friend, Mike, who lived in Seoul for 10 years teaching English told me once that many young demonstrators are paid by in-country interest groups, like the many unions, to demonstrate. Every week almost, there is a demonstration against something…they’ve got it down to an art, he said once.

However, in this case South Koreans are not so much unhappy with the U.S. as they are with their own new President. He has disappointed them. He is not conforming to the will of the people on many issues, my friend in Hanoi said. Like why do we have to buy beef from the U.S. which competes with our own farmers. And your beef is more expensive than ours. Why does our president have to do everything the U.S. wants? Seems his new president is a little too chummy with us. You wouldn’t know this from listening to the media reports in the U.S. But, he said, we have a soft spot in our hearts for you Americans because you defended us in the Korean War. Then we talked about how the U.S. wants a lot of things from many countries. Then his van arrived. I have to go, he said, as we shook hands and said goodbye. As he darted for his ride, he looked back and said, “I don’t want to leave you!” Of course I loved that conversation! This is one of the great moments when traveling.

Wikipedia says instant Run-off voting is a voting system used for single-winner elections in which voters have one vote and rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate receives a majority of first preference rankings, the candidate with the fewest number of votes is eliminated and that candidate’s votes redistributed to the voters’ next preferences among the remaining candidates. This process is repeated until one candidate has a majority of votes among candidates not eliminated. The term “instant runoff” is used because IRV is said to simulate a series of run-off elections tallied in rounds, as in an exhaustive ballot election.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting

Sounds good to me! What do you think?

After 19 hours traveling from Bangkok to Tokyo to Portland, I am finally home…of course still waking up at night and napping during the day…a vicious cycle.

This is what I have come home to:

Retired Major General Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its casualties.

Now, CNN’s Barbara Starr reports: “One thing perhaps worth noting in this report, is the forward, the preface to the report was written by retired major general Anthony Teguba. He’s the army general that led the investigation into the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. in this report the general says, ‘there is no longer any doubt that the current administration committed war crimes.’ The only question is whether those who ordered torture will be held into account. pretty tough words from a man very well regarded inside the army when he conducted the investigation into Abu Ghraib. For its part, the pentagon continues to say that it deals with detainees in a humane fashion, that there is no policy towards torture, and if there was any misconduct, any abuse, it was in violation of government policy. But this report clearly is a pretty damning indictment if it stands on its own.”

Note: Just before I left Bangkok I was told that to get a visa to Burma an American now has to apply for it in Washington D.C.

Well, enough of politics and the weariness of world crises.

When I couldn’t get a visa for a three day trip to Burma (should have used a travel agent instead of going to the embassy myself) and to keep from losing the money for the flight, my Thai friend and I changed the destination to Hanoi. The whole junket was ill-conceived so I shall not talk about it. Glad to be back in BKK.

On the bright side, my son Josh has accepted a position as Chef de Cuisine at the American Club in Hong Kong.  The American Club has nothing to do with America, Josh says, so will have to find out why it is named this. His wife Amy will be teaching history at an international school there. So while waiting for the movers to pack up his things in Beijing, he is flying to Bangkok on the 9th to see his mother and have some dental work done. Or rather he will have some dental work done and see his mother! On the 11th we will taxi it down to Hua Hin for a couple days so Josh can get a little beach time.

Am also waiting to welcome old friends from Josh’s dad’s medical school days who are flying in today.

I fly out to PDX on the 15th. Will be nice to be out of the heat after four months in Asia.

The world must not forget.

China’s Grief, Unearthed

NYTimes.com
June 4, 2008

By Ma Jian

FOR three days last month, China’s national flag flew at half-staff in Tiananmen Square to honor the victims of the devastating earthquake in Sichuan. It was the first time in memory that China has publicly commemorated the deaths of ordinary civilians.

Crowds were allowed to gather in the square to express sympathy for their compatriots. Despite a death toll that has risen to nearly 70,000, the earthquake has shaken the nation back to life. The Chinese people have rushed to donate blood and money and join the rescue efforts. They have rediscovered their civic responsibility and compassion.
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Aid to Burma
Wednesday June 4
Press Conference with Doctors Without Borders
Foreign Correspondent’s Club of Thailand in Bangkok

Question: How many people still need help?
Answer: Cannot estimate people who still need help…there are little huts among many little rivers…don’t know what was a village…was it there…how many huts were lost. Could get into the west…were obstructed from getting into the east by the authorities. So we cannot say how many people still need help.
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Tuesday May 27 2008

Dr. Surin Pisuwan, Secretary General, ASEAN, reporting at the Foreign Correspondent’s Club in Bangkok Thailand on the donors’ conference Sunday with Gen. Than Shwe of Myanmar and UN chief Ban Ki Moon in Yangon. The key issue has been the loosening of strict controls on foreign aid workers pressing for unfettered access to the disaster zone. To counter Burmese fears of “hidden agendas” by Western workers, ASEAN has agreed to coordinate all relief efforts.

What has been achieved is far more than what was expected. A new humanitarian “space,” however limited, so that ASEAN with the support of the UN can engage with the Myanmar authorities. That humanitarian space needs political support because in and of itself it cannot be sustained. The secty general of the UN and ASEAN has asked for the full cooperation of the aid community.
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Well, I gave up on getting a visa to Burma. “You retired? What was your last job? What organization did you work for?” And he didn’t like my passport. Too many stamps from too many countries. Maybe I am a journalist? “We’ll call you,” he said. Never got a call. So I went back yesterday. “We’ll call you,” he said.

My Thai friend and I are scheduled to fly on the 29th so yesterday, she sweet-talked Air Asia into letting us change our route from Bangkok to Hanoi. That’s the only way to do it in Asia, she says. “I need very much a favor from you,” she said to the customer service rep.

So we have reservations for the 29th through June 1 at the Classic Street Hotel in the Old Quarter Hanoi…my third visit there and very much looking forward to it.

My son the chef!

Here is a picture of me and my chefs!!

Josh says: “The two in the grey are myself on the right, chef de cuisine of “One East On Third” Restaurant in the Hilton Hotel in Beijing, and Ivan, on the left is chef de cuisine of “Elements,” another restaurant in the Hilton. In the blue in the front is Boris my pastry chef, the guy in white on the left is William, the exec sous chef, and the guy in white on the right is Jason Ong the exec chef.”

Can you guess the sports??
Enjoy
Josh

The Bangkok Post review says that this timely book by Thant Myint-U, published by Faber and Faber London, rewrites 3,500 years of Burmese history “in order to enrich today’s debate on Burma and establish a strong base for future analysis and consideration.”

The author is critical of the “absence of nuance” and the “ahistorical” nature of current debate on the country. Therefore, Myint-U focuses on why Burma’s military machine developed into such a powerful force by General Ne Win, the country’s “supremo” from 1962 virtually until his death in 2002, and why the country became so isolated.
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This morning, while reading the Bangkok Post outside a certain BonCafe near my guesthouse in Bangkok, I had to LOL.  Writing about the movie “Iron Man” the Thai reviewer/humorist says “Iron Man saves a bunch of Afghan families…highlights Hollywood’s obsession with heroes, a yearning for the cure and maybe a strange antidote for guilt, and thus Iron Man is both noble and naive, like a democrat. 

In a review of Street Kings he starts out “Unlike Bangkok, where all policemen are pure and uncorrupted, LA, in this James Ellroy story…” and ends with “If it had been a Thai film, the police would have wanted to censor it.  But here enjoy.”

Then turning to my email I find that somehow I have gotten onto the RNC mail list requesting donations. A letter from John McCain states that by the end of his first term he will have solved all of America’s problems and the Iraq War will have been won.

Riiiight! Politicians think we are stupid…and maybe we are.

It appears that the cyclone has done the Burmese generals a big favor in their genocide against minorities. The International Herald Tribune reports that the junta is stealing and stockpiling food and supplies…doling it out only to those favored…the Burmese. Bloggers in Burma report that the Karen and others are fleeing by the hundreds across the border to Mae Sot Thailand.
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Bought plane tickets a month ago to go to Burma with a Thai friend. But Air Asia won’t let us cancel our tickets without losing the money. So I spent all afternoon in the embassy office with a few others waiting for the official to appear at the window. But don’t know if I’m going to get a visa or not…you are retired? What was your last job? What organization did you work for? He really looked over my passport closely…too many stamps in too many countries? Maybe I am a journalist traveling around the world? We are only offering visas on a case by case basis, he said. Your application will have to go up to headquarters, he said. And instead of the usual one day turnover, it wouldn’t be available for another 10 days. So I gave him my phone number and he will call and let me know if my application has been accepted. I doubt it. But my Thai friend who wants to go with me has two students at Kasetsart University that are from Burma and whose parents work for the government. They are going to call the embassy on my behalf. We’ll see.

Then on the way back to my hotel I was surprised by an exhibit at the Phrom Phong BTS station. There in front of the Emporium Mall were the same Herd of Cows that we saw in the plazas in the center of Prague in 2004. The life-size fancifully painted cows were culled however. Most of the most suggestive and political cows were missing…the humorous ones probably not translatable.

BTW, I highly recommend new friendly Som’s Guesthouse on a little soi next to Queen’s Park Hotel on Sukhumvit 22. Beautiful large room with wood parque floor, refrigerator, TV with scads of channels, free breakfast and best of all free WiFi…all for 800 baht ($25) a night!

Flew back from Kuala Lumpur Malaysia to Krabi yesterday. We are staying in the J Hotel…same one we stayed in last time here…on the top floor with a view of the ocean and karsts for 450 baht…about $14.

The karsts are as beautiful as ever but the left-overs of the Burma cyclone are causing rain, wind and the roughest ocean Doug has ever seen here. No long-tail boats to be seen anywhere.

Amazed at the development since the tsunami! Seems like double the number of businesses and they have become upscale. Even though it’s low season the streets are full of European tourists.

Will fly out to Bangkok tomorrow noon. Short stay. And Doug and Luk will drive on down to Trang to spend some time with Luk’s mother and pick up Ting Tong before driving back to Samui. After being with them for over a month I will miss them.

From a revealing blog (The Twisted Stethoscope) by a Malaysian, Jason Leong, who attended medical school in Ireland.

Part I

Here is a list of criteria one must comply with to be truly Malaysian. You may be a Caucasian expat who has lived in Malaysia for decades, or you can be a hip 15 year old girl with belly piercings. Anyone and everyone can fulfill these criteria. Simply said, almost anyone can be Malaysian.
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The U.N. is reporting as many as 100,000 dead and more missing.

International media is reporting that most countries wanting to send aid to Burma, including the U.S., are waiting outside the country in ships, helicopters and planes…waiting for permission from the junta to let them enter. NGO’s insist on distributing the aid themselves but the junta wants it to go through them…of course…and then they’ll snag much of it and take the credit for the rest…not wanting to admit that they can’t handle the catastrophe themselves.

Commercial flights, however, have partially resumed. The web is awash with people in Asia wanting to help. Yesterday a woman posted this:

I am presently talking w/ my colleagues back in Myanmar at the International School Yangon (Rangoon) and they are setting up a fund raising ‘relief’ fund in Singapore that they will be able to access to directly help the people of Myanmar without governmental interference – soon. Most likely I will find out tomorrow, Friday May 9, some more information and will be able to share that with you. Our school is putting together several community service projects to rebuild homes, provide safe water, food and other services. I will post the information as soon as I have it.

A Swiss guy living and working in Rangoon has this to say this afternoon:

“To my knowledge most of the money donated to charity will end up in administration and of the money that actually makes it to Myanmar a huge percentage will end up in the hands of the corrupt Junta. The best thing would be to bring in the money in cash and hook up with a NGO who can distribute it directly to the places where it’s most needed. I was in Bangkok during the disaster but some friends went to buy rice and gave it straight to the people on the street. That’s also a way to do it. I’m going back to Yangon tomorrow with lots of candles and purification tablets.”

A Thai friend and I bought tickets for Rangoon a month ago. Hmmmm.

KL is a big cosmopolitan city vibrant and alive especially late at night. Luk noticed it right away…watching the 20 something girls dressed in the latest Asian fashion. Today she came out of her hotel room sporting a white mini skirt with over the knee black stockings with lace at the top and new black patent shoes.

Populated mainly by Malays, Chinese and Indians and various other groups, it’s difficult for me to identity the ethnic origin of many of the people. Certainly few Thais. Islam is on the rise in Malaysia and you see many muslim women with hibabs (called tudongs here) and long dresses but haven’t seen many full-face covers from the middle east that you often see at Bumrungrad Hospital in Bangkok. If it’s multi-culturalism you want this is the place to come!

Chinatown pretty ratty. Wide four-lane streets in parts and narrow meandering streets in the rest. The Golden Triangle could be NYC…mall after mall after high-rise mall with expensive stores and restaurants of all kinds. And then there are the Petronas Towers and the Kuala Lumpur Tower…stunningly lit at night. The transportation system is excellent…trains and monorails go to all parts of the city.

We’ve eaten at Mexican and Chinese restaurants, at Malay food stalls where you never know what you are eating, had Turkish coffee and roll-ups and I still want to eat at a Lebanese restaurant next to our hotel…the Sungei Wang Hotel (probably Chinese) on Jalan Bukit Bintang. This morning the breakfast at KFC was pretty bad. Today lunched at Shakey’s Pizza for $4…pretty good. Outback Steakhouse across the street but at 45 ringit (about $15) it’s too expensive for us. Very few clubs. You have to know where they are. Last night we ate at a Malay restaurant….not what we were going to get. Turned out it was Murtabak (kind of an omelet) Mee Goreng (Hokkien noodles with a kind of cut up doughnut underneath and distinctive sweet sauce on top). There is a Hokkien indigenous group in China and there are many Chinese in Malaysia so I guess this is where the noodles come from. Doug had pepper steak ($4) and the waiter tacked on Nasi Goreng which we didn’t have…so we just figured that was his tip.
Yesterday we went to a fish acquarium with the longest underwater tank in Asia. Doug and Luk went to see “Iron Man” in an iMax theater (they loved it) and today Doug is taking Luk to see her first iMax movie entitled something like T Rex. I declined…

Last night the police herded about 30 young guys into an official police “bus.” For what I don’t know. I do know that the government is cracking down on young muslims many of whom like to imbibe in the clubs. And they round up illegal immigrant girls who are here to accommodate them if you know what I mean.

The big news in the media here now is a debate about whether women should get permission from their families to travel alone. Can you imagine the snarl this would cause in train stations and airports? And I guess a single woman with no family here would be SOL.

I have a sense there are a fair number of westerners living and working here…walking down the street like they know where they are going…like in many other Asian cities. Some Australian and European travelers are hauling backpacks. Why they travel with such big loads is more than I know.

Sitting behind me in the patio, under the mister fans, outside a Starbucks…on Wifi…is a Malay twenty-something. She’s been on MySpace all afternoon.

We’ll take the train all the way to the airport Sunday morning…about 70 km outside the city. Doug will have his Thai visa tucked safely away.

Last week Amy, Josh’s wife, flew down to Samui from Beijing with a colleague from her international school where they teach history. Four short days but it was a treat to see them!

Koh Samui to Trang to Krabi

The day before they left Doug, Luk and I drove to Trang to leave Ting Tong, their dog, in the care of Luk’s mother during our week-long trip to Kuala Lumpur Malaysia to renew Doug’s Thai visa. We had planned on spending the night in Trang before driving over to Krabi International Airport to catch a plane to KL but that was not to be. We checked into the hotel at 11am and was told the rooms would be vacated at noon. Noon came and went and so did 1pm and 2pm. Rooms were supposedly being made up for us. Finally at 2:30, with absolutely no concern being shown by the dour desk clerk, we decided just to drive the 1.5 hrs to Krabi for the night. So much for the land of smiles! Typical foreign “customer service.” But we were not really surprised and quickly let our frustration go. We have had a lot of practice at it!

Driving to Krabi in a monsoon rain, a dog ran out in front of doug’s pick-up. I thought we had hit a rock. Needless to say the rest of the trip was a pretty sober one.

Kuala Lumpur

Now we are in Kuala Lumpur. We checked into the Backpackers Travellers Inn in Chinatown recommended by Lonely Planet and an expat in KL. Wrong! Filthy concrete floors, no top sheet, had to purchase a towel, no soap but for $25 a night, in their generosity, we did have air/con. However with no sheet it got cold during the night and turning off the air/con just meant we got hot again. But the owner/manager was quite the charmer…think he charmed Lonely Planet a bit too much!

The next day, we found a nice hotel for $40 a night…worth every penny. Think the kids on the road are a bit too tolerant of some of these backpacker guesthouses. $25 a night was robbery! Usually a room like this is $5-10.

Thai Immigration in Kuala Lumpur

The next morning we took the local train to the Thai embassy…and after a two hour wait Doug was nearly ecstatic to get his Immigration O visa renewed for another year. We have learned to make it easy for the officials. Shove all the documentation you can think of in front of them (some of which could have been rightly questioned) and ask absolutely no questions! You never know what the requirements are in whatever immigration office you are visiting. “Depends,” Doug says, “on what how the local office interprets the myriad of rules, on what they think of you, what their mood is and whether they got laid the night before” Told Doug shame on him. But don’t think it’s too far from the truth.

One very angry farang, married to a Thai but living and working in Malaysia just wanted to get a Thai tourist visa to visit his wife’s relatives. It is required that he have a letter from his boss verifying his employment. But I am the boss, he said. I own my own company! Didn’t fit the rules. They refused to give him his visa. An older Malaysian gentleman spent quite some time at the window arguing with a young female officer. I told Doug to try to get the the guy at the next window who was whipping them through. Suspect that if you try to argue you are doomed.

Meeting a Burmese in Kuala Lumpur

While waiting for Doug, I had a great conversation with a young guy from Burma (Myanmar he calls it…I said we foreigners refuse to use the names changed by the junta). We lamented the damage to southern Burma by the cyclone that has killed more than 20,000 people and knocked out electricity and basic services like the food supply. A Thai friend and I have plane tickets to fly to Rangoon on May 19 for a week but think that trip is not to be. Probably can’t get a visa now. Internet is down and I can’t get ahold of my guesthouse. Travel web sites are awash with friends trying to get information about friends traveling in Burma. Pictures of Rangoon that looked like they had been taken from a plane on a Malaysian TV news program this morning showed widespread devastation.

A report by a young woman living in Rangoon found on the net:

“Hello everyone: I am finally in Bangkok after a Iloooooooong try to get out of Yangon. The cyclone was horrible, I felt guilty leaving all of my friends who have so much to deal w/ roofs off or w/ huge holes, windows gone or broken, cave-ins, tropical trees laying around on tops of houses, our school, roads and everywhere. yangon will never look the same…

The local people have no expectation of governmental help – they are used to a lifestyle that deals w/ daily challenges unsupported by the use of machinery nor having an expectation that their govt. will come to supply aide. they do not have one ‘iota’ of the services ‘we expect’ in the states. I only saw govt. people working close to the airport areas on Sunday and Monday when I was trying to find out about the airport traffic. its been a huge community effort to clear things up. people from all social economic levels were out sawing trees, clearing dibree and offering a helping hand. There were a few chain saws about, but very few.

The worse is yet to come. Our school will be closing due to lack of fuel and fresh water available for people. There are many unknowns – the last stat I heard about death toll was over 15,000 – there is no way of knowing the numbers. I pray for these peaceful people. Going there without support of an NGO or other agency to help would be foolish. Be careful!

Am beginning to wonder what is going on here…student demonstrations in Istanbul, tsunami in Thailand, military coup in Thailand, bloody 7 month teacher strike in Oaxaca, freezing cold among stranded travellers in freak storm in China…now Burma. Better get the hell home before the monsoons start in Thailand…assuming nothing will happen again for the next few months in the NW. Last year 8 tourists were washed away in Koh Samui. So glad Doug has his pick-up now.

U.S. Customs in LA

Meanwhile in the US of A Bob returned to Salem via LA and Las Vegas. Said he was “detained by customs in LA who were certain that they had apprehended the kingpin of child porn. Went thru everything including a half hour search of the nooks and crannies of my computer. Subsequently I missed my Las Vegas connection and had to spend the night in the LA airport sweet place between 2 and 4 a.m. Complained at the custom’s office but was patronized. Will write a few letters as they were abusive and caustic and played ‘big cop.’ A little scary re the potential of what the government can do in the name of national security…..”

The AP wire service today released an article:

“Interpol launched a worldwide appeal to the public Tuesday to help identify a man suspected of sexually abusing young boys from Southeast Asia – hoping the rare move will lead to a quick arrest. The suspect in the latest case is a white man, shown with gray, thinning hair in photos released by Interpol. He appeared to be in his late 40s or early 50s in the images.”

No wonder Bob was detained! Told him not to go through LA but what do I know…

Actually this has happened to Doug three times. Fitting the drug “profile” with only a small backpack and a frequent traveller back and forth from SE Asia to the U.S., he was very rudely harrassed in the PDX airport by customs for over an hour. He refuses to travel with his computer anymore.

Free WiFi in Kuala Lumpur

Doug and Luk have gone to the Thai immigration office again today to pick up Doug’s passport. This city is totally wired with free WiFi everywhere. Now I am ensconsed in the Golden Triangle in the BB Plaza in front of a shopping mall and coffee shop where I can pick up free WiFi and even plug in the computer for a limitless power supply and watch this diverse Malaysian city meander by. I am set! Glad to know I am not the only one who can sit for hours with my computer though. An Australian woman sitting behind me just got up to leave. It is 11pm. We sat down at 5.

Oaxaca’s Radio Wars
By Charles Mostoller
Despite assassinations, community radio is spreading throughout southern Mexico. “Some people think that we are too young to be informed, but what they should know is that we are too young to die.”

These were the fateful words of Felicitas Martinez Sanchez and Teresa Bautista Merino, two indigenous Triqui radio broadcasters who were assassinated in southern Oaxaca on April 7th.

The two girls, aged 20 and 24, had worked for the recently inaugurated Radio Triqui, “The Voice that Breaks the Silence”, in the autonomous Triqui municipality of San Juan Copala. Read the rest of this entry »

An excellent site in English for people wanting to understand China is “The China Beat…Blogging How The East Is Read.”

One of the writers is Peter Hessler Peter Hessler (b. June 14, 1968) who is an American writer and journalist. He is currently the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker and a contributor to National Geographic. He has previously written for the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, and other American newspapers and magazines. He is best known for his two books on China: River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (2001), a Kiriyama Prize-winning book about his experiences in two years as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in China, and Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present (2006), a collection of journalistic stories he wrote living in Beijing. His stories are about ordinary people’s lives in China and are not politically themed.

In 1996, he joined the Peace Corps and spent the next two years teaching English at a local college in Fuling, China. Since 1999, he has lived in Beijing as a freelance writer.

Found some trivia in a Bootsnall article:

Portland, Oregon, where it rarely snows, is about 130 miles further north than Toronto, and over 200 miles further north than Boston.

The entire country of England, with over 50 million residents, is a wee bit smaller than the state of Louisiana.

If you combine England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, then together they are a bit smaller than the deceivingly large state of Michigan.

France is about 30% larger than the state of California.

Crescent City, California is about 15 miles south of the Oregon border, but it’s about 10 miles further north than Newport, Rhode Island. In other words, you can still be in California and be further north than coastal Rhode Island.

Madrid, with summers so blazing hot that most people take a long break from work every afternoon, is about 10 miles further north than Salt Lake City, Utah.

About two-thirds of Africa is in the Northern Hemisphere.

Rome, which is located in the center of Italy, is located at the exact same latitude as Chicago.

Tehran, Iran, with its scorching summers, is located on the exact same latitude as relatively mild Tokyo, Japan.

About 90% of the world’s population lives in the Northern Hemisphere.

If you are trying to get a handle on the climate of India it helps to know its northern border is the same as the northern border of Mexico in Tijuana, and the southern border is about the same as the southern border of Panama.

Sunny and just-barely-tropical Rio de Janeiro is about 25 miles further from the equator than Hong Kong.

Scientists recently discovered that Florida and Hudson Bay in Canada are getting about 1 inch closer every 36 years.

New York Times Article

By SHAILA DEWAN

Published: April 29, 2008

LOS ANGELES — When the time came for the smiling Tibetan monk at the front of the University of Southern California lecture hall to answer questions, the Chinese students who packed the audience for the talk last Tuesday had plenty to lob at their guest:

…….

As the monk tried to rebut the students, they grew more hostile. They brandished photographs and statistics to support their claims. “Stop lying! Stop lying!” one young man said. A plastic bottle of water hit the wall behind the monk, and campus police officers hustled the person who threw it out of the room.

Scenes like this, ranging from civil to aggressive, have played out at colleges across the country over the past month, as Chinese students in the United States have been forced to confront an image of their homeland that they neither recognize nor appreciate. Since the riots last month in Tibet, the disrupted Olympic torch relays and calls to boycott the opening ceremony of the Games in Beijing, Chinese students, traditionally silent on political issues, have begun to lash out at what they perceive as a pervasive anti-Chinese bias.

Last year, there were more than 42,000 students from mainland China studying in the United States, an increase from fewer than 20,000 in 2003, according to the State Department.

……..

As the U.S.C. session wound to a close, the organizer, Lisa Leeman, a documentary film instructor, pleaded for a change in tone. “My hope for this event, which I don’t totally see happening here, is for people on both, quote, sides to really hear each other and maybe learn from each other,” Ms. Leeman said. “Are there any genuine questions that don’t stem from a political point of view, that are really not here to be on a soap box?”

At that moment, the bottle hit the wall

Read the full article here.

This is an interesting post in response to the Australian who described his experience in Canberra with the passing of the torch (read below.) This writer was born in China and has lived in China, Mexico and now France. She is well educated and speaks several languages.

After our discussion, I checked several big forums and found that almost all internet surfers are proud and encouraged by the passage [of the torch] in Australia. And Chinese who had taken part in the passage in Canberra (includes some of my friends who live in Aus) felt honorable. Today I read also some news about the torch in Korea. I just have no words and am really worry about the nationalist state [of mind] of many Chinese!

To explain the difference of Chinese value to the west is a bit long and complicated I think. I try to give you some examples. Chinese [were] educated by Confucion thoughts since more than 2500 years which [are] totally different from the west thought – freedom, equality, personally value, etc. For example, [the word] “Country” in Chinese is “Guo (state) Jia (family). Chinese also used to compare country as mother. That means for Chinese there first have country then family, the country’s (mother’s) interest is much more important than self interest. People could even forget or modify their own interest to adapt [to] the group or the country. For Chinese, though mother (country) has many faults, this has to be keeping [kept] inside. That means this is a family case, the others should better not criticize on.

Since last later of the 19’s century, china invaded by west countries and had been in a chaos. That’s the reason why when PRC was founded; china stopped almost all communications with the world. Later 70’s, Chinese understood that they have to reopen the country to make up for lost time, then Chinese try to learn as much as possible on other developed (democracy) countries. So there is a kind of complex feeling on Chinese, as I said in my last posting when we talked about the Tibet issue, which confused by pride, inferiority, curiosity and fear.

I have awareness about the problems, but I don’t think it works to simply complain and support one side. That’s why I suggested “less critical” and tried to explain about China and Chinese. Personally I feel there have big inner difference between two values. There are a lot problems in China, some can be treated and changed by exterior influence, some have to be changed from inside. Such as Tibet issue or any other human rights, culture reserve etc. This is just like a person who has many problems, people around him can give him suggestions but finally it’s himself who have to recognize and to change. If we criticize too much on him and forced him to follow our ideas, he would never listen and accept at all. Things would turn contrary as we would like to see. This just identifies the recent reactions from Chinese, no? Combined [with] the bad experience in the past, Chinese people feel one more time the “west control” on China and then the nationalism comes back more than ever this time. This is very dangerous and worries me a lot.

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Had a great conversation with a German guy in his 40’s the other night. Culture, politics, language, heritage…then I told him my maternal grandparents were from Poland. “When, did they immigrate…after WWII” he asked. No, they immigrated to the US through Ellis Island in 1892, I replied. Told him that the Germans wanted to conscript the boys into the army and force students to learn German in the schools. The main idea of the government was to “Germanize” the Polish community and education was one of the means used. So my great grandfather said…ok we’re out of here. They sold their land in the Prussian sector of “Poland” near Olstyn and sailed to America. I asked him what he knew about what was happening at that time. He said he had no idea. I thought this was odd. Even we in the states know what happened 200 years ago. But ill-feeling would be slow to die. Polish was my mother’s first language and in Montana, living on the family homestead, she used to say that the Germans in school would make fun of her.

The fact is that Poland did not exist as a country for about 120 years…from the late 1700’s until after WWI. Not having defensible borders, Poland was taken over by one country after another. But if you asked my ggg grandfather where he was born he would have said “Poland!”

Then, the next night, on a German TV channel that switches every 90 minutes from German to English, I watched a program describing an educational project. The Germans are rewriting the history books that are used in schools. Turns out there is much written about WWII…but nearly nothing about the history of Germany vis a vis Poland. To illustrate the point both German and Polish students were interviewed. The German students were shocked to find out their own history. The Polish students said they wanted the Germans to know what they did to the Poles.

Then my friend got up to leave. Over his shoulder he said, “when you go home say hi to that asshole Bush for me!”

I have been following a thread on a discussion forum on Couchsurfing.com about the Olympic Torch Relay in Australia. An Australian fellow who was among the Tibetan supporters wrote the following posts in response to what he experienced that day. Some of it is repetitious because he is responding to some others who are defending China, primarily a French girl living in Britain who felt that China should not be censored because the people there have not had much experience with protest movements. In the interest of space I am not reprinting her comments here… most of which were in marginal English and it was very difficult to tell what she was intending to say…which was part of the problem with the exchange. My intention, however, was just to reprint his description of what happened…not to argue the pros and cons of it.

However, that said, it is my opinion that the fired-up students were probably sent in to provoke the Tibetan demonstrators so China could capitalize on the unrest. I saw this repeatedly in Oaxaca Mexico during a peaceful teacher strike that was joined by many civil organizations. “Students” (called “porros”) were paid by the government to infiltrate the strike, provoke disturbances, and then the teachers would get blamed. The teachers never knew who was who during the marches when they were joined by several thousand supporters. We also saw it during the protests against the Viet Nam war. Sounds like China is getting the idea…it just needs to learn not to be so obvious.
Read the rest of this entry »

Found a great thread on a Bootsnall Forum so I picked out the ones I could relate to and added some of my own.

You know you are a traveller when:

you spell traveller with two l’s. (Every other English speaker in the world uses the British spelling.)

you know what a “gap year” is. (Year between uni (university) and career in Britain, Australia and New Zealand.)

you smile silly to strangers back home and want to know where they come from

you rehearse what to say before going into the post office at home, then realize that they speak English there

you actually don’t mind Nescafe coffee anymore

your friends email, and the opening line is, “Where are you now?”

you are home from Mexico long enough to remember you can put the toilet paper in the toilet…and then you go to Asia…

going into a McDonalds means a clean bathroom and a sit-down toilet

you carry toilet paper with you at all times no matter where you are.

you have “toilet money” in your pocket just in case.

You’ve mastered ‘the squat’ and the bucket of cold water in the bathroom

the idea of a bathroom in your own private room makes you feel like you’re in the lap of luxury.

you prefer to crash on somebody’s floor or stay in a Motel 6 even if you could stay in a 15 star hotel because that’s “just not you.”

you feel guilty about 3 quick showers a day in 95 percent humidity in Asia when all you hear on the TV is news about the lack of food and water all over the world

someone asks what your favorite country is and your mind goes blank.

your conversations with friends include “when i was in…” or “oh yeah, that happened to me in……” and then the veil comes down over the eyes.

You have to fight the urge to say ‘Sawadee Kap’, or ‘Gracias’ to store clerks when you’re back home.

your backpack never quite seems to make it back into the closet

you wake up in the morning and have to remember where you are

you think a packaged tour is not travelling!

processed cheese and crackers from 7-11 sounds like a great meal especially after two months in China

you feel at home everywhere… but you feel like an alien in your own town

you catch yourself flipping your underwear inside out because you have run out of clean clothes

you can’t figure out how much something really costs without thinking about the exchange rate

you can’t figure out which way to look when you cross the street

you walk in the street at home forgetting you don’t have to watch out for the cracks, holes, telephone poles, phone booths, hanging electric wires or motorcycles on the sidewalks

you are at a party where people are listing off their accomplishments and you’re mentally listing off viruses you’ve survived, cities you’ve gotten lost in, and families you’ve lived with

a hotel (or hostel) room over 20 dollars makes you wince

When you have over US$200 in four different currencies in your wallet and you can’t even buy a coke during a seven hour layover in London’s Luton airport.

you have been listening to non-native English speakers speak marginal English for so long that you start making the same sentence structure errors and then return home and can’t switch back…”what we do today?” or “where you go?”

going days at a time with out hearing English spoken and you begin to forget English words

you return home and remember your life is not on the line anymore in taxis, tuk tuks, sangtaews , trucks, minivans with crazy drivers.

but you return home and driving a car yourself seems terrifying

you won’t eat Uncle Ben’s rice because it doesn’t stick together.

You have more guidebooks than pairs of pants.

You go to a chain restaurant at home and you still feel like a sell-out for not finding a good local place to eat.

you tell someone where you are going next and their response is, “are you nuts?” And you take this as confirmation of a well-made destination choice.

you hear the word “visa” and you don’t even think about credit cards.

your “home” is occupied by people other than you and all your worldy possessions fit into your spare room

you hear people back home tell you that they just spent 45 dollars on getting their nails done and all you can think of is how many nights in a South American hostel that could get you

you find it normal to go out alone

you can’t understand why everybody isn’t travelling

TV news at home is frustrating because of the lack of global input.

you come home from a long journey and people ask “Were you able to find yourself?” And you say, “Yeah, and I think I left it there. I need to go back.”

you eschew shiny new luggage with wheels in favor of your ten-year-old pack which carries the scuffs and dirt of three continents and which you have lovingly repaired by hand.

You look at the clock and think, ‘In Kathmandu, it’s midnight’.

you can finally understand all other English accents…Oz, Kiwi, British, Singapore etc.

you stumble off your flight to the airport McDonalds, and the value meal is the most expensive meal you’ve had in weeks

buying a full-sized bottle of shampoo/toothpaste/etc feels like a “long-term investment.”

you forget you don’t have to brush your teeth using bottled water.

It no longer makes any difference to your body when you wake up or when you go to bed

you know what time is being referred to when the ticket reads “2330”

you spend X amount of money on something (like $550 to fix your air conditioner, let’s say) and think, “Aw man, that’s enough money for a plane ticket to ___________”

you use web sites like Bootsnall, couchsurfing and rideshare and when you explain these to friends they think you are completely nuts to be meeting up with, staying with and driving with complete strangers that you talk to over the internet.

half your backpack is full of your computer, plug-ins, converters, cameras and video tapes and you only have room for two pairs of pants, three t-shirts and your toothbrush.

you hear people talk about how hard and expensive it is to travel and you think “huh?”

you feel like having a T-shirt made that says in six languages “I didn’t vote for Bush”

If anyone can think of any others it would be great if you wrote them in the “comments” section.

‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said,
‘To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing wax —
Of cabbages — and kings —
And why the sea is boiling hot —
And whether pigs have wings

Young and old revelers hanging off of pickups and sangtaews fling plastic pans of water from a garbage can at the traffic going in the opposite direction. Small children aim at cars and pedestrians alike from the sidewalks. Anyone brave enough to venture into the streets end up drenched many times over…no matter who you are.

But it’s a good thing! Sanuk! Fun! Often motorcyclists and pickups actually pull over and stop to get their blessed cleaning…and a dousing of white talcum powder for good luck from the splashers. The most fun, however, is surprising an unsuspecting target looking the other way.

On April 13th to15 Thailand took a bath…celebrating the lunar New Year…washing away all the events and sins of the past year. Called Sangkran, this is the one time of the year when the normally reserved Thais can release all their frustrations in one big splash. Buddha images are “bathed” and monks and elders receive the respect of younger Thais through the sprinkling of water over their hands…traditionally speaking anyway.

Doug’s wife Luk was not about to miss the fun this year…talking Doug into driving her and her friends in the back of his newly acquired pick-up through the streets of Lamai and Chaweng. But first stop was the 7-ll to get ice for the garbage can full of normally tepid water. Doug and I could hear peels of laughter in the back as Luk and her friends watched the unsuspecting react to the shock of cold water.

But after a few hours of this Doug got tired of dodging traffic so we pulled over and joined a couple young Finns and members of an original Samui family on the side of the road who were watching the scene pass by over drinks and snacks laid out on a metal table. It was great fun pulling a double whammy on the passers-by in coordination with the splashers on the opposite side of the road.

Two years ago I experienced my first Sangkran in both Vientiane Laos and Bangkok Thailand while traveling with an Australian friend. I must admit, however, that you can get pretty tired of it by the end of it all. And it’s difficult filming all this while keeping your camera safe at the same time. If being “bathed” means what it means here we are starting out the new year as innocent as new born babes.

I arrived on Samui, an island in the south of Thailand, from Bangkok on tuesday. Doug, my son and his Thai wife Luk found me a lovely quiet hotel with a pool right in the middle of Lamai but back off the street. Of course there was a method to their madness…Luk loves the pool but last night, she hit the bottom and chipped a tooth. She’ll have it fixed in Trang, where she is from, when we take Ting Tong (their Shamitzu) to stay with her mother while we all go to Kuala Lumpur next month. Prices much lower in Trang.

Bought an internet card at the IT Internet Complex up on the ring road so now if I walk up to the 2nd floor veranda of the hotel I can get WiFi reception on my computer. There is WiFi access over much of the island now.

Hard to believe how much Samui has developed since I was here two years ago. And the government has recently eased up on foreign investment after having previously clamped down. But a welcome change from noisy smoggy Bangkok. Blue sky…blue water…eye candy.

The price of rice has sky-rocketed in Thailand to such a degree that gangs have taken to raiding farmers’ rice fields. Some farmers have taken to sleeping in the fields to guard against thefts. One economic advisor on CNN Asia has called it a “rice tsunami.” He went on to say that this has been coming on for some time but people chose to ignore the signs…land crunch…draught…and other factors that are world-wide. And even though there is a draught in the north, local officials in Chiang Mai have decided to release more water from the dams to accommodate revelers during Sangkran next week (the water festival) much to the dismay of the farmers. More on the significance of Sangkran (cleansing ceremony) to the Thais later when I report on being drenched by water with buckets, water guns and hoses…some of it ice water provided by the bars! It’s the hot season so you can imagine how a sudden douse of ice water feels on a hot sweaty body!

Tonight I went out to the street and bought my dinner which I brought back to my room to eat. First, a Papaya Salad with only one little red chili and it’s still hot! 80 cents. The two sticks with small pieces of what we would call pork bacon cooked over coals. 30 cents. Then on to another cart with steamed hot corn which she cut off the ears for me and bagged. 30 cents. Then around the corner to a soup cart where he bagged up delicious hot broth in one bag, my choice of noodles with bits of chicken and leafy green vegetables in another bag, a little bag of chili vinegar and another little bag of chili. 25 cents. For dessert a huge mango for 40 cents. These are Bangkok prices however food prices are going up all over now. On Koh Samui where my son Doug lives, this food would would have been less…except for the soup.  In the countryside even less.

This is enough food for two people. The soup filled up my bowl twice. I will save my papaya salad and mango for breakfast.

Another cost: 11 plastic bags not counting the two little ones with spices.

Last night I opted for a foot massage at a place where the strong Isan masseuses from NE Thailand are trained at Wat Pho (Temple of the Reclining Buddha). Dating from the 16th century, this monastery in Bangkok began as an open university and is still the national headquarters for the teaching and preservation of traditional Thai medicine including Thai massage.

While zoning out in my reclining lounger, an older American couple walked in. Happens that although they are living in Singapore…he still working for Caterpiller Tractors…they are waiting to retire near Klamath Falls Oregon…the city of my birth and where I went to high school!

You hardly find a mention of Soi 22, where I usually stay in Bangkok, in the travel guides. Interesting. Not anything here for sightseers really. But good if you live here long term.

The well-dressed tourists in the high end hotels and serviced apartments here must just head off in a taxi because you don’t often see them on the street. The men in the high end hotels are mainly businessmen…many of them Korean or Japanese. Most of the farang (westerners) that live around here and are married to Thais or farangs. Some of them have lived and worked here for 30 years and just retire here. Hardly ever see female farang tourists by themselves, although on this trip I did meet a young Frenchwoman who missed her flight on a layover and was stranded. So here I am with the “boys” and the Thais.

I’m staying in a lovely refurbished room above the Bourbon St. Bar and Restaurant, a family restaurant owned by an American…in Washington Square…behind the Mambo Cabaret.

The guesthouse is small and they keep good track of me. If you stay a month they give you 25% off the room rate so I am paying 1000 baht (about $31) a night with free breakfast. Most of the people frequenting the restaurant are the male guests upstairs who are here on business (I’m the only woman) or farangs and Thais who live around here. The restaurant serves great Thai and western food including a whole menu of Canjun, Creole and BBQ dishes. Last night I splurged on one-half kilo of the biggest crawfish I’ve ever seen.
Read the rest of this entry »

Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej, who took over after Thaksin Shinawatra, the former PM, was ousted by a military coup after charges of corruption, claimed yesterday that he is being threatened by yet another coup…the result no doubt of political infighting. The military has promised there will not be another coup.

I was in Chiang Mai during the massive rallies in Bangkok. The bloodless coup finally took place while Thaksin was at a UN meeting in New York on September 19 2006 when I was already watching marches by striking teachers in Oaxaca. Thaksin was then exiled to London. But he returned to Thailand a few weeks ago and Thai political watchers are wondering what deals were struck even though Thaksin says he is finished with politics. No one believes it.

In the meantime the opposition to Thaksin has been mysteriously quiet. We have been waiting to see what will happen. Yesterday, the opposition party, PAD (People’s Alliance for Democracy), held a political forum at Thammasat University with several thousand attendees, while outside, Thaksin’s supporters held a demonstration.

But Thaksin still has friends in the government. The PAD has vowed it will stage massive rallies if the government moves to amend the constitution which they believe would protect Thaksin’s buddies…and Thaksin himself who is still facing corruption charges.

From a university student demonstration in Istanbul in the 90’s to win the right for women to wear jibabs, to the tsunami in Thailand when I was in Bangkok in December 2004 and from which my son and his wife barely escaped with their lives in Krabi, to unrest in Thailand before the coup, to a subway strike in New York City when we were living in Brooklyn, to a 7-month bloody rebellion in Oaxaca while I was living there, to immigration rallies in my my home state of Oregon, I wonder what I will next be witness to.

Wanted to post some pictures of menu items created by my son Josh at the One East On Third Restaurant in the Hilton Hotel Beijing where he is the Chef de Cuisine but am despairing of getting menu descriptions from him. So here are a couple of pictures…one of Josh and another of his sous chefs. His wife Amy and I had two dinners there when I visited in January-February 2008…absolutely wonderful…even though I thought I was going to freeze to death during China’s recent hard winter.

Mexican journalist and author, Gustavo Esteva, in writing recently about the wrenching repression and resistance in Mexico and the world, draws an analogy:

The Pot and the Vapor

In the midst of the daily struggle, an image attempting to express what has happened in Oaxaca is now circulating.

Years of fierce corruption and overflowing authoritarianism converted Oaxaca into a pressure cooker above a slow flame. [Governor]Ulises Ruiz added fuel to the fire until the pressure hurled the lid off on June 14th 2006, with the repression of a teachers sit-in. APPO [Popular Assembly] articulated the discontent brewing inside the pot and converted it into transformative action. The ferocity of the federal forces put a new heavy lid on top of Oaxaca on November 25th, but the fire continues. Small holes, that opened in the lid through people’s initiatives, alleviate the pressure, but they remain insufficient. The pressure continues to accumulate and in any moment will hurl the lid off once more. The experiences accumulated in the last year might provide ways to let the pressure escape in a more organized way, but nobody can foresee what will happen. There are too many forces at odds with each other.

Another metaphor can contribute to an understanding of what is coming. More than 35 years ago, in the final pages of La revolución interrumpida, Adolfo Gilly quoted some phrases from Leon Trotsky: “Without leading organizations, the masses’ energy will dissipate, like vapor not contained by a boiler. But be that as it may, what propels the movement is not the boiler nor the piston, but the vapor.”

What is this “real material, invisible and indefinable” that Trotsky calls “the masses’ energy” and compares with “vapor?” In contrast to this, adds Gilly, that material has “sense, understanding, and reason and because of this does not dissipate, like vapor, but endures transmuted in experience, invisible for those that believe that the movement resides in the piston and the boiler (in other words, in the organizational apparatuses), but existing in unexpected subsequent aspects of daily life.”

Oaxaca is still “at full steam”. Part of what was generated in 2006 has condensed itself into an experience and transformed into a behavior: it is in the daily attitudes of many people, who will never return to the old “normalcy.” Another portion of the “vapor” generated yesterday, or that comes up every day, propels many initiatives. And there is “vapor” that continues to accumulate, that raises the pressure and that perhaps is trying to redefine its course once it succeeds in liberating itself from everything still retaining it—which is not a boiler with a piston, but the oppressive lid of the repression that continues: political and police mechanisms blocking off the popular initiative.

The obsession to ascertain who generates that “vapor” persists, according to the prejudice that people can not take initiative themselves. It’s taken for granted that somebody, a person or a group, would be throwing rocks and hiding the hand: it would have manipulated the docile masses and would want to continue doing so. The media constructed their leaders, presenting as leaders people better adapted to the image they were creating to better prepare public opinion to the violent liquidation of the movement. The authorities did the same to organize co-optation and repression; they seem now to believe that the APPO will be paralyzed or at least disabled while those that supposedly lead the movement remain in prison. Similar attitudes have been observed in the left, inside and outside the movement. Those who think that what has happened would be inconceivable without a leading organization, now see it dissolved or weakened and want to renovate it or reconstruct it. Or else, when the absence of real leaders of the APPO is recognized, everything is transferred to the past: that deficiency would have provoked the evaporation of the spontaneous popular outbreak. The popular energy would have dissipated, like vapor not contained in a boiler.

When the question is not about seizing the State apparatuses, but about changing the social reality, the vapor, which continually condenses in experience, operates in its dissipation, spilling itself onto reality. Occasionally adapting itself in boilers and the pistons generated by the vapor itself and used for certain tasks, the vapor can not be contained in “organized apparatuses” nor be driven by “leading organizations”. For those apparatuses and organizations to be relevant and play a role, they should renounce the pyramidal structure, when a web is needed, and they must learn to lead by obeying. Furthermore, they should operate on an appropriate scale, adapting themselves continually to conditions and styles of the real men and women that are always the vapor, the impulse, and those finally determining course and reach of the whole movement.

Mechanical metaphors always fall short of the richness of real social processes. But the pot and the vapor are useful images to observe the complex present situation, in Oaxaca and greater Mexico, when what is most important seems to be invisible.

Then he has this to say about hope:

More than 30 years ago, Ivan Illich observed that, “The Promethean ethos has now eclipsed hope. Survival of the human race depends on its rediscovery as a social force.” [Deschooling Society, London: Marion Boyars, 1996, 105. (First published in 1972).]

In my view, there is nothing about the Zapatistas more important than their contribution to hope. Given the current situation in Oaxaca, Mexico and the world, we are still hoping for the best but prepared for the worst. In our context, hope is not the conviction that something will happen, but the conviction that something makes sense, whatever happens.

San Pablo Etla, Oaxaca Mexico January 2008

(Italics are mine. If the above reads a bit rough in places it is likely due to the best job that the translator from Spanish could do.)

China, Cambodia, the Philippines, India and Burma are banning or reducing their rice exports in order to conserve enough supply for their local populations. Reasons for supply and demand are complex and theories abound. Iran and Indonesia are expected to place orders to Thailand the middle of this year. Thailand is working on a measure to sell rice at determined prices which are higher than the market price to slow exports. So you can expect the price of rice, especially Basmati and Thai Jasmine to go up adding to inflation.

Meanwhile the Bangkok Post had a front page story warning young boys not to seek early castration. The boys apparently are thinking that castration, comparatively cheaper than a sex change operation, will yield similar results like smooth skin and other femine traits. Now, any doctor performing the surgery on boys below the age of 18 without parental consent could have their medical certificates temporarily revoked. The owners of clinics performing the operation on boys under 18 without parental consent could also face a one-year jail term and a maximum fine of 20,000 baht ($636 U.S.).

There is an uproar in Bangkok about developers building high-rise buildings that reflect heat and sun glare. Developers are supposed to be required to use glass material that reflects no more than 30% sunlight. Hey, this might be the answer to Portland’s grey skies!

This week I went to Bang Phra fishing village near Chonburi on the Gulf of Thailand with my friend Jiraporn, Professor of Fisheries at Kasetsart University in Bangkok, who, with some of her students, are conducting a population study of the Swimming Crab, a small crab used mostly in soups and salads. There is a concern about the diminishing supply of crab. The students are temporarily living in the village for the duration of the study with a local university fisheries department contributing oversight.

I was blown away by the sense of community here…children playing with their families and each other…vendors bringing around food. I didn’t want to leave. I am now considering a month in this peaceful slow place when I return to Thailand. But I can assure you I won’t be wearing a jacket or a sweatshirt in the 95 degree weather like many of the Thais do!
Gulf of Thailand

Using Propane To Cook Crab

Cooked Crab

Fisher Family

Young Fisherman With His Child

Repairing Nets

Buying Lunch

Motorcyclists In Front of Typical Shophouse Opposite the Beach

Vendor

Soups And Other Items

Building A New Boat

Jiraporn With Students

How did China learn how to spin Tibet?

From Salon.com

By Andrew Sullivan

“Trust a public relations professional living in Beijing to write by far the best analysis I’ve seen of the Olympic-size mess that China has created for itself through its actions in Tibet. Writing in his blog Image Thief, William Moss provides detail and perspective that significantly outclass How the World Works’ own effort to make sense of recent events.

It’s a must-read for China watchers. The entire piece is great, but one section jumps out. Here, Moss is summarizing the ways in which China has effectively managed perceptions of the riots for a domestic audience.

• Harness as many Tibetan voices as possible in condemnation of the riots (more here)
• Emphasize brutal Tibetan attacks on Han people (and a Western perspective)
• Give Chinese Internet users free rein to vent their rage at ungrateful Tibetans who have bitten the hand that is lifting them into development (see also this AFP story quoting Danwei’s Jeremy Goldkorn and citing Mutant Palm’s work translating Chinese tweets, and John Kennedy’s Chinese Internet roundup at Global Voices)

For a good overview of the Chinese approach to all of this, see Mark Magnier’s interesting article on China’s P.R. efforts around the Tibet riots. It includes this damning quote from Chinese blogger and journalist Michael Anti:

“The [Chinese] government is showing more confidence and learning more about spin,” said Michael Anti, a well-known Chinese blogger on a Nieman fellowship this year at Harvard. “They’ve learned more PR tactics from Western people. They see the way the White House and the Pentagon do it.”

Yet another legacy for the current administration to be proud of: teaching the Chinese Communist Party how to spin.”

I must be getting old. Came across this shocking article in Newsweek describing teen sex taking place openly in public parks in Santiago Chile. Actually I remember being agape at the couples in public parks in Guadalajara Mexico when I visited a few years ago.

It reminded me of something my Thai friend who teaches at Kasetsart University in Bangkok told me a couple weeks ago. She said AT LEAST half of the boys at the university are openly gay. I asked if it was a reaction to so many girls chasing foreigners and she said definitely no. It’s more of a fashion thing she said. It has become “hip.”

Next wednesday night there is a talk at the Foreign Correspondent’s Club about expat authors and their writing about Thailand. Apparently, after all these years, expat writing is branching out from “older man looking for the hooker with a heart of gold only to arrive at a no good end” to more literary material. Ought to be interesting.

On a more mundane level, son Doug and his wife Luk left Bangkok today to return to Koh Samui. Another dentist appointment tomorrow and a doctor appointment Friday.

Update: The Bangkok Post had an article a couple days ago that the Thai military is trying to decide how to designate a third sex.

Have become familiar enough with Asia that the usual things you notice on the surface aren’t so eye-catching now. Am learning to adapt to surface cultural differences with less frustration. But adapting for a traveler briefly passing through is one thing. Another thing for someone spending significant time here. Much more difficult if you are having to learn how to navigate the unspoken expectations and assumptions.

“You eat like a monk,” she says. What do you mean, I ask, as I put my strawberries on the same plate where I have just eaten my fish. Monks are not supposed to enjoy earthly pleasures, like the taste and sight of food, she says. People earn merit by dropping bits of food into their begging bowls..food that gets mixed up together. So, not wanting to bother her for a fresh dish, I had put my strawberries on the same plate where I had eaten the fish. I had grossed her out. Caught again…unawares. I was shocked by the comment. And so it goes….

Other than that, have been spending time with mundane activites…dental appointments (teeth have really gone to pot recently) and great medical care at Bumrungrad Hospital…all details no one would be really interested in except me.

News in the Bangkok Post: Backpackers are furious for being blamed for a bed bug invasion. An entymologist at a local university says that Americans don’t like to take baths which has helped create the problem. Good grief! We are foreigners. We are dirty. Don’t we do the same thing to “strangers” at home…?

I spent five days visiting a Thai friend in her newly built home. She is a Professor of Fisheries at Kasetsart University and is encouraging me to accompany her to visit a field project in a small stream near the coast of the Gulf of Thailand…which I would love to do if we can coordinate our schedules. In exchange I am editing some research papers she is writing in English. Catching up on local politics, I mentioned that the Malay man sitting next to me on the plane to Bangkok had reminded me that the Prime Minister, unseated by the military coup last year because of corruption, did help the rural farmers. “Yes,” she said. “A piece of meat between the teeth!” This comment has added impact if you know that Thais take meticulous care of themselves…many using toothpicks after they eat…carefully covering their mouths with a hand so not to offend anyone. She and her university colleagues make no bones about their opinions of Thaksin and they feel that he will still be pulling the strings from the sidelines now that he is back in the country.

Son Doug and his Thai wife, Luk, flew up to Bangkok from Koh Samui to get off the island for a few days. We took a bus last Saturday to leafy Kanchanaburi…a couple hours northwest of Bangkok. Very hot and humid! The peaceful town on the Mae Nam Khwae River (River Kwai) belies it’s role in WWII as a Japanese-run POW camp where soldiers were worked to death building the “Death Railway.” You may remember the movie “Bridge On The River Kwai” telling the story of the brutal plan to carve a rail bed out of the 415km stretch of rugged terrain through the Three Pagodas Pass to the Thai/Burma border that was intended to be a supply route from Bangkok to Rangoon. Close to 100,000 forced laborers, captured Allied soldiers and Burmese and Malay prisoners, completed the railway in 16 months…only to have the Allied forces bomb the bridge across the river after just 20 months. The relatively small nondescript bridge has been reconstructed but you can imagine the planes careening down along the river…taking out the middle iron arcs. Tourists clog the bridge that is now just used by a short excursion train and pedestrians. Yes, it’s a bridge, says Doug when we visited it on a rented motorcycle. lol

I will take the one-hour flight to Samui on April 8 to spend a month there…after which Doug, Luk and I will fly to Kuala Lumpur for our “visa run.” This will be my first visit to Malaysia. Maybe there I can get away from the depressing news about the banking crisis at home…strange days…dangerous days…reverberating all through Asia.

Last Saturday (your Friday) I flew to Bangkok…carrying on a nice conversation with a Malaysian man sitting next to me. He says Thaksin did help the rural farmers…but the system takes time to change. And he says Thaksin began to feel like he owned the country…like Suharto in Indonesia. Thaksin’s web site says he plans to return to Thailand in two days. Will be interesting to see if there is a reaction from the Bangkok educated elites who hate him for his corrupt business dealings.

The weather is warm here but not uncomfortably so…yet.

I stayed the first night at the new Hi Sukhumvit hostel on Sukhumvit soi 38 where I had stayed before. But this time the single rooms were full. The mixed dorm I was put in was miserable…in…out…in…out…zippers unzipped…zippers zipped…light on…lights out…in…out…door slams…guys snoring…guy listening to music…lights on…door slams…and plastic bags should be outlawed after 10pm! Finally I hear slurp slurp and realize that the one other girl had crawled into bed with one of the guys. That did it. I went to the roof lounge to sleep. But woke up with little red spots all over my legs and arms…accosted by what I don’t know.

The next morning a Canadian guy took me around the corner to the Rex Hotel…an old Bangkok landmark. I get Fox and BBC on satellite TV. Today I explored the neighborhood and found the American Women’s Club, an expat group of women, down a sub soy off Suk 38.

Tonight I am in the Bourbon St. Bar and Restaurant owned by an American near Sukhumvit 22 using their free WiFi and listening to the NY Philharmonic playing in North Korea on the TV. A couple of older overweight French guys are spell-bound.

Tomorrow I go to Bumrungrad Hospital to make some appointments and my first dental appointment is tuesday. My body is beginning to feel like it is residing in Thailand and not China.

Joe, a gregarious Dai tour guide who hangs out at the tourist haunts looking for business invited me to join him and his family and friends, including a young French couple, at the new BBQ restaurants on the road along the river…the ones we couldn’t find before. His English was great and we shared many ideas. “My heart is breaking with the pollution in the environment,” he said. I told him about Amy’s International School and it’s mission to bring east and west together. Not against each other, he asked? No I said, entwining my fingers. Together. He liked that, as he entwined his own fingers. I told him he had one foot in each culture. He liked that too. Then he wrote a C on one shoe and a W on the other shoe as we laughed.

It is the Spring Festival here and fireworks are going off everywhere. Over 20-40 small dishes (river snails, cow’s skin, river moss and the like) we raised small glasses of beer too many times to shouted toasts…first among ourselves (we women toasted to our beauty…!) and then with a group of about 20 Anhi teachers sitting at the next table.

The next day a German woman and her son, who is getting an advanced degree in business in Hangzhou (SW of Shanghai), invited me to go with them to a small village on the other side of the Mekong River by ferry and then tuk tuk. She is here, like me, visiting her progeny. Her son has been here three years and is fluent in Mandarin…as are many of the Westerners I’ve met here. A group of American high school girls here in Jinghong on break from on a one year exchange program in Beijing to learn Mandarin amazed me with their ability to speak the language…their futures will be bright with opportunities.

I will be glad to leave the An Ya Jiu Dian Hotel, however. It is newer…clean and very nice with satellite TV and a hot and cold water cooler for about $7…and friendly owners. It’s just up the street from the western-oriented Mei Mei Restaurant on Man Lan Lu. But there is a restaurant down an ally behind the hotel…outside my window…that starts up about midnight…with many shouted toasts…and finally subsides about 3am. Ear plugs only take the edge off.

No lack of internet cafes on this street!

And I won’t miss the Asian toilet, if you know what I mean. The shower head is above the open-hole toilet in the floor so one must be very careful where one steps.