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U&I Thai - How a little som tam made us cry

It's been almost two months living on theBside here in Vancouver, and I can summarise it pretty easily by saying we love it.  There aren't many days that we don't stop to comment on how happy we are with the city, the opportunities it offers, and our life in it.

Thailand, though, is still in our hearts.  It's a corny way to say it, but it's true.  People and places, sounds and tastes, they are always with us.  I am on constant alert to the sound of Thai, listening to every non-English conversation in public places.  I once interrupted a pair of women talking at the driver licensing office to simply say hi and ask where they eat.  Thailand has that effect on a lot of people, I suppose.

A couple of weeks ago, we went to U&I Thai for some som tam (ส้มตำไทย).  Anyone who knew us in Thailand knows that this was our comfort food, something we had at least once a week.  It made us happy, made us feel settled and gave us the chance to reflect on all that was happening in our busy lives.  Much of our travels were spent looking for and comparing som tam, trying to find the very best one.  Not eating som tam regularly here has probably been the most difficult part of our move. Seriously.  Going for som tam was part of our routine, part of our relationship to the neighbourhood, and just plain old delicious.

We were hopeful but simultaneously skeptical when we went to U&I Thai.  When we ordered and the waitress left the table, I don't think either of us was expecting the surge of emotion that followed.  I don't know if it was the opportunity to speak Thai again, the smile of the woman who took our order (because there is nothing like the warmth of a smile you sometimes get from a stranger in Thailand), or the memory of all the times we went to the som tam stall in the หมู่บ้าน (muu baan), but as soon as she left the table, we both were overcome with a surge of emotion and couldn't talk. Tears welled up unbidden and a few trickled down our faces.

Later, after a really amazing meal (both for taste and nostalgia), we asked where they find papayas green enough to make som tam.  Khun Oi, the waitress returned a few minutes later with the name, address, and phone number of the market where they shop.  She even gave us the name of her boyfriend who works there.  It may seem like nothing, but it meant more than I could ever explain.  We both barely choked out a thank you.

So, yes, I love my new life here, but there is a place in my heart where Thailand lives.  เมืองไทยอยู่ในหัวใจผมเสมอ

Thank you, U&I Thai.  Your food and your welcome are very special.

Operation Smile- Good times for a good cause

Coin Fairy

Once upon a time, a fairy with a seemingly endless supply of coins came to town…

For several years I have been involved in raising money for Operation Smile Thailand, an incredible organisation that raises money to provide free surgery to people with cleft lips and palates.  The doctors and nurses who perform the surgeries do so for free, but the cost of supplies, facilities, and medication still have to be paid for.  Operation Smile raises money to pay for these costs and then to organise the very complicated logistics of getting doctors together with patients.  The surgery is not a particularly complicated one as proven by the fact that most of us never see people who have a cleft lip or palate.  Only children born to very poor parents leave the hospital without it being corrected.

Several years ago, we came up with a truly simple but effective fundraiser in which students competed by class to earn the most 'points'.  Each teacher was given a jar; coins added to the jar were 'positive' numbers and bills 'negative' numbers.  If one of my students put two ten baht coins in my jar, we gained twenty points.  If a student from a competing class dropped a twenty baht bill in my jar, however, we lost twenty points and ended up back at zero.

The fundraiser usually ran for about a week and raised a lot of money.  At the end, we had students count coins by denomination and put them in ziplock bags of 100 coins.  Bills were counted as well.  The winning class - the one with the most points and not the most money - won a free lunch.

There was only one wrinkle in the plan - no one wants coins.  Our cashier's office, which usually handles and deposits all money raised - made it extremely difficult to deposit large amounts of coins.  They didn't do so out of spite but because banks simply do not want coins.  To discourage deposits of large amounts of money in coins, the banks charge a lot of money to handle the coins.  On top of that, the cashier's office asked that we sort and count the coins before handing them over to them (no problem) but then insisted on counting all the coins again while I was there.

When you're talking about thousands of coins, that is a lot of time from a teacher's day standing around waiting while coins are counted.  The times that I did do it usually resulted in most of my prep time spent counting and recounting piles of coins.  Oy.

Luckily the parents of a woman who works at our school own a pharmacy and frequently need coins to make change.  Several years ago, she and I made an arrangement in which I would make sure the coins were counted and sorted and she would buy them.  [No second count was necessary.]  I would then take the bank notes and simply deposit them with the cashier.  It was easier, and she was happy to get the coins.

The only problem?  She couldn't handle the volume of coins that came in, especially the one and two baht coins.  I ended up with a backlog of coins every year that I would tally and deposit cash for (bank notes) with the cashier's office.  I probably could have cleared the backlog by putting a little more time and effort into it, but somehow teaching full time got in the way of my banking duties.  Who knew?

Anyway, this year being my last at my school, I realised I really did have to get rid of all those coins.  When I went through my closets and cupboards at school, however, I knew that this was going to be a bit complicated; there were a lot of coins.  I worked hard get rid of them through the cashier and the woman with the pharmacy.  In addition, I started carrying bags of  5 and 10 baht coins with me wherever I went, paying for everything I could think of with coins.  I probably started tipping quite a bit more too, albeit using coins to make the difference.  Even after redoubling my efforts, in the end I probably had about 30 kilograms of coins to get rid of.

Again, I had already tallied the value of the coins and made out-of-pocket equivalent deposits in the Operation Smile account.  I decided that I would just consider these donations from me and started figuring out how to get rid of the coins.  This was easier said than done.  Thirty kilos of coins is a lot of coins.

By May, I realised that I would have to change tactics.  The value of the coins had already been donated, but my ideal was to donate the coins themselves.  The only thing stopping me was the practicality of getting rid of so many coins.  I could never carry them all in one go and didn't want to ask a friend to help me transport them.  Plus, I wasn't sure where I would transport them anyway.  The first thing to consider was the satang.

those darn satang

Satang are the 'cents' of Thailand.  Simply making them is a money losing venture for the Thai mint.  When 32 baht is more or less a dollar, one baht is about 3 cents.  That makes one satang 1/100th of 3 cents.  Only big stores like grocery stores give satang, and nobody wants them.  Banks have no interest in them, and stores won't receive them.  The only place I could think of that would be happy to take them was a wat, so I went through all the coins, separated out all the satang that weren't already bagged, and put them in a big shopping bag.  

Total weight?  About 6 kilos.

My wife and I had a day trip planned to visit a small river side neighbourhood that included a market, a good restaurant, and a really nice wat that had recently been restored.  We went in the late afternoon, me carrying a green bag full of satang.  We walked through the market to the temple.  I took off my shoes, entered the main part of the temple (which was empty), and went directly to the donation boxes.  My first thought was to dump all the coins out into the boxes, but I realised after the clanging of coins began that this was going to take a long time.  Plus, it was likely to attract attention since it sounded something like a slot machine payout at a Vegas casino.  I put the 6 ziplock bags full of coins on top of the box, quickly retreated to the centre of the floor in front of the very large Buddha, bowed a few times and exited.

For some reason I felt like I had to sneak out and breathed a huge sigh of relief that I had not been 'caught'.  As I was putting my shoes back on, a middle-aged couple arrived, and I urged my wife to hurry out of the wat grounds.

The question now was what to do with the remaining 24 kilos of coins.  A bunch of scenarios ran through my head.  Here are a few...

• Giving bags of coins to people on the street: Bangkok does not have a lot of people asking for change on the street, but there are some.  I thought about dropping off bags of coins but had read too many stories about how the people asking were often victims of human traffickers. Giving them money was essentially giving money to traffickers and, at the same time, encouraging trafficking.   OUT
• Cleaning staff: I figured people who work as cleaners were as deserving as anyone of an extra 100-300 baht.  It might not sound like a lot, but the minimum wage in Thailand is 300 baht per day (about USD 10).  An extra hundred baht (one of the smaller bags I had at that point) would be a 'bonus' of about 33%.  One of the bigger bags would be equivalent to more than a day's wage.  The problem was giving the money.  I didn't want to put someone in the position of having to say thank you to some stranger who just happened to have mountains of change lying around.  I also didn't want someone to be insulted.  OUT
• Public bathrooms: This seemed like the perfect solution to my problem.  I could give the money anonymously with no thanks necessary to a target audience that I felt was deserving (people who worked as cleaning staff).  I attempted to do this three times, approaching a urinal and reaching into my messenger bag to pull out coins.  Each time I did so, someone walked into the bathroom.  It's hard to explain to someone that you are leaving a bag of coins for the woman who cleans the bathroom (and I don't mean because of a language barrier).  I felt like I was committing some kind of lewd act, so each time I discreetly put the coins away and left. OUT

I was now at a loss - twenty-four kilos of coins, a few hundred dollars worth, but no outlet for them. I talked about it with my wife but we came up with nothing.  A couple of days later, they erected a giant scaffolding around our apartment building to begin repainting the exterior.  They also drained the pool.  They had begun the summer repair/upgrade projects.  Aside from us, there was only one other family still in the building as all the other teachers had already left for their summer holidays.  The only people around were going to be the security guards, the groundskeepers, and the special workers doing the different projects.

I had my plan.

Two days later on our way out to get lunch, my wife and I dropped a 300 baht bag of coins off by the pile of broken tiles the workers had pulled off the bottom of the freshly drained pool.  I scurried away without looking back, but when we returned later that day, the coins were gone.  Success!

That night, I went out for a walk, bent down to tie my shoes, and tossed a bag of coins into the corner where they kept all the paint cans.  Next morning?  Gone.

For the next two nights, I went down to the empty pool a dropped bags of coins into the bottom.  Each day, the coins disappeared.  

At that point, a couple of new conditions began to emerge.  I wanted to spread the wealth and make sure as many people as possible got coins, and I wanted to come up with a different place to leave the coins each time.  I began to shed bags of coins at every opportunity.

Over the next days and nights - up until our last day in the building - bags of 100-400 baht magically appeared:

• in the garbage room after a mad dash on my bicycle to beat the garbage truck pulling up the drive;
• on the paths and sidewalks at night;
• by the pile of raked leaves and trimmings;
• on the scaffolding where the painters would be working the next day;
• and, in the bushes.     

For the most part, my scheming went as planned.  Once, however, I had a minor freakout when the previous night's deposit was not discovered.  I had left a 250 baht bag in the centre of the steps leading up the elevator.  It was in plain view of anyone who walked by.  I was sure that one of the security guards would find it when he did his rounds at night, but when I woke up and went to take the recycling out, the coins were still there.

I panicked.  Should I pick up the coins?  Should I walk right past them?  If I walked past them and someone saw me, would they realise that I was the one leaving the coins?  If I picked them up, would I look like I was 'finding' and keeping something that did not belong to me.  I ran back up to tell my wife, but she said not to worry about it - someone would find them.  I was at a loss, so I agreed.  Sure enough, when we went out later that day, the bag was gone.

The only other glitch was with the very last bag, a large bag I had left in some bushes.  I left it at night and was sure no one saw me, but the next morning, two women knocked on the door.  When I opened it, there they were with the bag asking me if I had lost a some money coins in the bushes.  One of them had what I was sure was a little sly smile on her face.  I assured her that they were not my coins and that she should just consider herself lucky, but I am pretty sure my cover was blown.

That was our very last day in the apartment and nearly our last day in Thailand.  I had shed about 30 kilos of coins in the last few weeks and felt pretty good about how things had gone.  The coins donated had essentially served double duty with equivalent amounts going to Operation Smile and to people who were not exactly poor but who were definitely not rich either.

If my cover was blown, that's okay, but I prefer to think that people will talk about the 'Coin Fairy' who, once, long ago, used to leave bags of money for good people everywhere.  When I think about it, this was one more small step in leaving Thailand.

Bye, เมืองไทย

มา8ปีแล้วเราอยู่ในประเทศไทย เป็นโอกาสที่จะไม่ลืมตลอดไป ทุกครั้งะที่คิดเรื่อง8ปีนี้จะยิ้มเพราะจะจำได้เพื่อนดีนักเรียนยอดเยี่ยมอาหารอร่อยและความสวยงาม ความตัดสินใจนี้ยากจริงๆแต่เวลาขึ้นเครื่องบินเรารู้ว่าใช้8ปีของชีวิตของเราในประเทศพิเศษกับคนพิเศษ 

We couldn't ask for anything else. ขอบคุณมากๆ

First Small Steps (Part 6) - Thip Samai

Leaving a place you love usually happens over a long period of time.  In the process, you inevitably make lists of the places you love that you have to visit one more time and the places that you have always wanted to visit but never have.

Pad Thai Thip Samai (ผัดไทยทิพย์สมัย) is one of the latter.  It's been on my list of places to go for a long time, but I just hadn't made it until recently.  Pad thai is good, but it's not one of my favourite dishes.  Plus there are other places near Thip Samai that I know I love, so it's always remained on the 'to-do' list.

With our upcoming departure, it finally made it to the top of that list and off we went.  It's just as busy as one would expect from reading about the place.  The lines start immediately upon opening; table service and takeaway are crazy busy.  The food comes pretty quickly, and it is indeed really good pad thai.

After the visit, I decided to look up some reviews for fun.  It was interesting because they ranged from the raving 'best pad thai ever' variety to 'yuck, don't go'.  The majority were very positive, but I think I know where the bad reviews are coming from.

So many of us have been trained by the thousands of Thai restaurants around the world to expect something very different from what pad thai really is.  For some people visiting Thailand, pad thai is a real disappointment because it doesn't match those expectations.

Thip Samai is kind of an extreme version of that.  Their version is delicious (seriously), but it's also quite shrimpy.  For someone 'trained' in the peanutty, sweet, and light version of pad thai some common around the world, this would be a very, very different pad thai.  So, if you go, be prepared.

Anyway, Thip Samai, thanks for the fine meal, and thank you very much for being one of the small steps in my long and love-filled goodbye to a place that I love.

The line, minutes after opening.

Signature style, wrapped in egg.

First Small Steps (Part 4)

There are so many things I am going to miss about you, dear Thailand.  Some are obvious - others not so much.

Take these two, for example.

In public parks, small patches of open sidewalk, or even under overpasses, there are free public exercise sessions each night at 6 p.m.  They are usually attended primarily by women, but the range in age is fantastic.  While we often view exercise as private if it doesn't take place on a team, this is shared and somehow beautiful

The second photo is rather innocuous but also very Thai.  Near Saochingcha in the old part of Bangkok fairly close to the palace, there are a number of stores that make and sell Buddha images ranging in size from something you would put on a table or altar to many times larger than life size.  Walking down the sidewalk, one often sees them on display or be loaded onto trucks for transport to wats.  Often they are wrapped in beautiful orange cloths like the robes worn be real monks.

This shot, however, is something much more mundane but also something that belies the nature of the stores even late at night when they are closed.  The sidewalk tiles there are multiple colours, but there are also swirls of gold.  They form the outline of the statues when they are brought out into the street for painting.  

Beautiful clues to Thai life.

First Small Steps (Part 3)

Leaving is hard, dear กรุงเทพฯ

These are just some visuals of what I'll miss. 

First Small Steps

To new things. 

Mixed Feelings มากๆ

It's hard to describe how I'm feeling right now. It's absolutely thrilling to think about what we are starting but sad to think about leaving this place we love so very much. 

I'm glad we're starting the leaving with baby steps. 

When you tweet 50 times a day...

You're bound to offend someone some time.  This photo turned up in my twitter feed not too long ago.  I guess that whole 'isn't amazing that they have cell phones but no running water?' thing still plays well to some audiences, but I was offended (and I have both running water and a connected device).

Amantee: I love bread

My history with Amantee has always been good.  When they were located off Chaeng Wattana in a beautiful compound of incredible teak houses, I used to occasionally drop by for lunch and then browse their incredible antique collection.  Lunch in the sala or just walking through the traditional style Thai houses made me yearn for traditional Thai living.  Once, friends and I even planned a great party evening in the house, using the rooms for a fun mystery game and then having dinner.

When I heard that Amantee had moved downtown, I thought that the charm of the place might be lost.  Then I heard that they had started baking bread.  Knowing that they had done everything from building a masterful collection of Asian antiques to caring for gorgeous old wooden houses so well, I knew that this was not going to be a whimsical foray into brownies and doughy baguette.  I knew it would be good.

But when I got there, 'good' was not the word to describe what I found.  This was bread as art.  I got there late-ish in the day and was terrified to see that there was a whole shelf of baguette with little 'reserved' tags on them.  I panicked for a moment, but the woman behind the counter found one for me.  Then, like a find cheese shop, she started offering little slices of different breads.  There were Eastern European style ryes, hearty whole wheat loaves, and even some with fruit in them.  Each was fabulous.

And then I saw the einkorn.

Einkorn is, for those of you who are not history nerds, the 'original' wheat.  It is the wild ancestor first gathered by nomadic hunter-gatherers in the Fertile Crescent - probably the Natufians - that over time was domesticated.  Or you could argue that over time einkorn domesticated our ancestors because they eventually stopped being nomadic hunter-gatherers and settled down to farm the miraculous stuff.  Einkorn and its domesticate progeny - edible grass or human, however you look at it - gave rise to the very first urban civilisations of the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys.

Now I had a chance not only to taste a type of bread I had never had, but I felt like I was eating a bit of history.  I practically yelled, "EINKORN!"  My friends turned to look as I jumped and pointed at the loaf.  "Look!  It's einkorn.  Remember?  I've told you about einkorn before."

Blank stares.

"You know, the original wild wheat?  The Natufians?  Mesopotamia?"

A glimmer of recognition.

"Doesn't matter...just taste it."

And they did.  And I did.  And it was good.  I mean, I would still choose a baguette, but this was flavour and history in one bite.

The next day it was the first thing I told my classes.  They either loved the story, or they very kindly humoured me, asking questions about the bread, where they could have gotten the flour (which I will ask next time I am there), what colour the bread was etc.  If the place were closer to school, I would insist on a field trip.

Amantee, I not only love bread, I love your bread.

Water, Rivers, Boats, Thailand...Songkran

I love this documentary.  I watched it first to practice my Thai, but I loved it because it's beautiful. Love you always, dear Thailand.

The boat lady of Bangkok - Winner Vimeo WEC from Benjamin Parrot on Vimeo.

Faye Fang Kaew - Another reason to love Thailand

So I just added another reason to my long list of reasons to love Thailand.  I listen to Thai pop music to practice and improve my listening skills.  Yesterday I came across this video by Faye Fang Kaew, a trio of young women named, shockingly, Faye, Fang, and Kaew.  They are like many other pop groups - each one represents a supposed type (ingenue, fashionista etc.).  They looked strikingly similar to me in the video, but that's another story.

Anyway, I started watching their video and was so happily surprised to see that this was not just any old ballad.  In the video, the plot centres around the love between two female friends.  One is hiding her romantic love from her seemingly straight best friend.  I won't spoil the plot for you [Is that possible?], but the key here is that this seemingly typical pop ballad openly explores the potential adolescent romance of two young women.

Thailand, you are wonderful in so many ways.  Your openness about issues of homosexuality and gender is fabulous.  Love you always.

Thailand: More reasons to love you

ส้มตำ ภูเรือ

Som tam, you truly are one of my favourite things on Earth. It's hard to imagine a life without you just around the corner.