Horrible, horrible weather - March 18th, 2011

No more gloating until tomorrow. I promise.

For the past three days we have had horrible weather. The temperature has dropped to 15C.

If that weren’t bad enough, it has been raining. In the dry season! The chutzpah!

The streets are wet and slippery. People ride their scooters holding an umbrella with one hand. The Mekong is bloated.

Our garden is soaked. Our swimming pool cover is soaked. Our lives are soaked. We spend every non-working moment huddled in blankets.

Luckily friends, Michel and Baj, lent us their car before leaving for France so I can take the kids to school with some semblance of dry dignity.

Tomorrow’s weather forecast calls for 30C and sunshine.

So I will live to gloat another day!

Summertime - March 14th, 2011

Fish are jumping and the cotton is high.

It has been a while, and my apologies to the numerous fans out there who have been awaiting news and photos.

First of all, it is almost impossible for a man of my fragility to live on sleep deprivation, teach, translate and update a blog.

Others can, I cannot.

The baby is cute I can assure you. Cute when he sleeps, cute when he eats, cute when he gurgles in joy. Less cute, much less cute, when he screams bloody hunger at 2 in the morning.

OK, here is the news scoop of the month: we bought a pool. Yes, folks, an above-ground plastic pool complete with pump and filter and chloride tablets and even a cover to keep the nasties out when we’re not using it.

A simple Internet search led us to a German in Udon Thani who is selling these things out of his house:

http://www.peterpoolthailand.com/

Nice enough guy but not much of a businessman. Instead of selling me the chloride tablets adapted for the pool he sent me down the road to a pool shop and let me fend for myself, calculating cubic meters of water, (The pool has a diameter of 3.6 meters and is 90 centimeters deep. If you can calculate the number of cubic meters of water in the pool you win ten points!) and learning all about PH from someone whose English is less than great.

Now, here’s the funny thing. I’m sure you have all memorized every word of this blog and know everything about how life functions here. So you know without me having to remind you that water enters our cistern every night and that is our daily allotment of H2O. The water trickles in slowly, painfully. So how do you fill a pool?

Well, believe it or not, there is a municipal service that you can call, a cell phone, and tell them that you have a swimming pool. Within a few hours (!!!!!!) they show up with a big truck full of water and fill your pool for you. Now we know what to do if we are in a Bo Mee Nam situation again.

So to resume – roads aren’t paved, garbage stagnates by the sides of the roads, medical care is across the Mekong… but if you have a swimming pool you can get water delivered to your door in a matter of hours.

Truly a worker’s paradise!

Post- Natal

My Lao Baby

Well, Thai baby, sort of.

Our son, Sayo Ephraïm David Hyman, was born in Udon Thani, Thailand on Wednesday, the Second of February, 2011 at the AEK Udon International Hospital.

Mother, baby, siblings and father are doing well.

Many thanks and much gratitude go to the staff of the hospital, which is an amazing facility. It is light-years ahead of hospitals in France or Canada or even the French Hospital in Hanoi. Doctor Rachani and his staff all speak good English, the equipment and care were superb and Marie-Do’s room (which had French windows leading to a large, palm-tree planted terrace…) was large and bright. Really no comparison to her dingy hospital room in Toronto which she had to share with a family wearing baseball caps, baggy pants, speaking loudly and stinking up the room with take-out fast food.

Sayo is a Têt baby, born on the Chinese New Year. For some reason it is the Year of the Rabbit, but in Vietnam it is the Year of the Cat (in a country where they turn back time…). The hospital staff got dressed up in Chinese robes and came to Marie-Do’s room to sing New Years’ songs and give us presents. Clearly, medical care in the Third World leaves something to be desired.

From the point of a pregnant woman, however, one drawback is that they will not administer epidural because of a past incident somewhere in Udon. It’s sink or swim, baby!

The day after the birth I flew to Bangkok to get an emergency passport for Sayo at the French embassy. Once again I was impressed by French consular staff. When Marie-Do and I drove from France to Vietnam ( http://www.eastofeden.fr ), French embassies we met on the way were always excellent. The Canadian embassy I just avoided

( http://www.eastofeden.fr/turquie/english/mad.htm. ). Why bother getting angry?

Bangkok is big and bustling. The Skytrain is a marvel of technology and the buildings sparkle. I am glad to be back in Anatevka. (See posting on this blog dated September 24, 2010: Anatevka)

The baby is beautiful as you can see, fit, and with a great pair of lungs.

Sayo’s name means Victory in Lao. His Hebrew names are Ephraïm and David, named after my Uncles Eph and Eddy, men who were very great influences in my life. It is an honour to be able to name my son after two such fine men.

Finding a mohel out here is going to be another piece of cake.

Pre-Natal

We went to Udon Thani three full days before the birth and checked into the EAK Udon Apartments, just to be on the safe side. We wanted to avoid at all costs a mad dash to the border with Marie-Do having contractions, and so we took our time. We spent three days walking around this very ugly city and even ate at McDonald’s one morning. When a pregnant woman demands an Egg McMuffin, you give her an Egg McMuffin. As you can see, Ronald McDonald says ‘sabadeeka’ like the well-trained operative he is.

Udon is a strange sort of place. They say that there was an American Air Force base here back in the day and a remnant of this is that the city is a magnet for Old White Men. And I don’t mean old like me. I mean really old. They sit around the bars at night smoking and drinking beers and not smelling good. Those who have the energy joke around with the bar girls. Some of them have Thai girlfriends or wives and children young enough to be their great-grand-children. The scene is one of alcohol and despair; and leaves you with a kind of washed-up feeling.

There is a vibrant Night Market, though; that most lovely of Thai traditions, and discount supermarkets where everything is cheaper than in Laos.

There is an old British kind of formalism in some aspects of life here that reminded me of Jordan. The parking attendants at the hospital, for example, all have cleats on the inner outsoles of their boots, so when they see you they salute very properly and click their heels together and say ‘kah!’

The back streets of the city are Thai intimate, little alleyways and people playing dominoes. People are friendly and welcoming, handing you meat skewers and glasses of beer as you walk by their street parties.

Three Days On A Bike

Three Days on a Bike

The baby is almost due. The College For Which I Work And Shall Remain Nameless is closed for two weeks. I managed to carve three days out of those very busy weeks to get on my bike.

My route was totally classic. I did not “go where no man had gone before”, to quote Captain Kirk in those pre-politically correct days. I very simply went up Route 10 until I hit Taalat and then over to Route 13, down to Ban 52 (see separate entry: Ban Fifty-Two Revisited) and then I threw the Specialized on a pickup truck down to the capital. Filthy and tired, I made it just in time to enjoy the Guinguette at the French Language Centre.

So, some words about the trip. One of the things you notice on a bike is that the country is filthy, absolutely filthy. It reminds me of the way France was 25 years ago, before the government invested massively in environmental education. So there is hope. As a matter of fact, a group of us farang get together every weekend to clean up the play areas by the Mekong and the Lao are most appreciative. It is only a question of time, but in the mean time, the country is sinking under the weight of plastic bags, garbage thrown from cars and the stink of burning garbage.

I made it as far as I could make it the first day before my knees, untrained for the trip, begged for rest. The guesthouse was a simple affair: dirty airless rooms for rent by the hour and nicer rooms at the back. The beer garden area was animated by three bored ladies of passion who stared at the television and asked me, without much hope: Passey? Lady?

But I had a great time with the locals at a nearby BBQ place where you buy roast pork skewers by the handful and can wash them down with BeerLao, the veritable local religion.

Lots of fun, glasses raised.

The next day I made it to Taalat. Many thanks go to the incomparable Reb Dovid who knows every nook and cranny of this country. Because my map ended before Taalat he was of great help telling me how to get there and where the 14^th Century fort wall was hidden away along the way and where the ancient Khmer statues of Buddha were. Reb Dovid scours through old French documents and then goes off on his old bike to see if things are really where the French said they were. I do appreciate an original thinker.

I loved crossing the river by boat. I loved stopping in Temples to catch my breath and talk with the monks. I loved my lunch time pho.

On the way south on Route 13, at kilometer 62 there is a fish farm where you can go in and sit in a sala overlooking a lake and enjoy a really excellent roasted fish. The place is calm and beautiful and, like the rest of this blessed land, totally filthy. The grounds are overrun by plastic bags and a huge pile of waste waiting to be burned stands between two very pretty artificial lakes.

Three Days On A Bike - Ban Fifty-Two Revisited

Ban Fifty-Two Revisited

This was my second visit to Ban 52. It is always miraculous to imagine so much rural beauty and architectural purity so close to the capital.

You may wonder why there are no photos of people. The answer is that I didn’t like what I saw. Sure, in the occasional courtyard you can see a family working on some stitching and I am sure they would be happy enough to pose.

But a lot of what is going on in Ban 52 I just didn’t like and I think that that is what is really going on in Ban 52. I saw macho teenagers going fast on motor-scooters and screaming at each other. I saw young girls with painted faces waiting for something, something unhealthy. I also saw people living at the rhythm of their ancestral genius, but I did not want to ask them to pose.

So here you have the grass huts and broken alleyways, the thatched roofs and pastoral setting in which some sort of drama – a drama I cannot decipher, is being played out.

It is good to know, however, that Ban Nongnak is still not a probleur!