Thai/Tie Pun II: El(i)es and Wats' Wat

After a two month hiatus from blogging, I am returning with recollections--recollections of the two month hiatus from blogging. I do not feel like my vacation was a "whirlwind" or that it "flew by." Actually, eight weeks of vacation feels exactly like eight weeks of vacation when entire weeks are defined by a specific activity, reunions, and locations. This is the fourth and final entry of journal "highlights"--here is the first entry, the second entry, and the third entry (which was the first half of my time in Thailand). These are excerpts from what I wrote while I was in or around Chiang Mai and Cambodia. Hereafter, I promise my blog's contents will shift from personal journal regurgitation.

Eyes of the ele

***

01/28

I slept terribly last night; I woke repeatedly to mosquitoes biting my face. At least they weren't bed bugs.

Our cubby in our train car sleeps four passengers. Coincidentally, I bump into a fellow alum from my childhood summer camp--he sleeps two-cubbies-down.

01/29

"Good morneen," the car manager calls as she walks the aisle. "Brekfest fifteen minoots."

I slide open my lower berth's curtains. The air-con reasserts its unforgettable presence without the poor shield that was the curtain; I've been freezing for the nearly nine hours of Benadryl-clouded sleep. At some point in the night, I wake to put on my flannel; the cotton blanket does not match the pillow in comfort-level. 

While eating my rice soup with chicken, I join our cubby's roommates (a body-odor-plagued French couple) in watching the hills covered in tropical forest--not quite rainforest. We rumble past a pineapple orchard, and I wonder if I'm not stationary while everything crashes past.

Thai/Tie Pun.

After a two month hiatus from blogging, I am returning with recollections--recollections of the two month hiatus from blogging. I do not feel like my vacation was a "whirlwind" or that it "flew by." Actually, eight weeks of vacation feels exactly like eight weeks of vacation when entire weeks are defined by a specific activity, reunions, and locations. This is the second entry of journal "highlights"--here is the first entry and the second entry. These are excerpts from what I wrote while I was in Thailand's south and Bangkok. More soon, friends and family!

Thai style

***
 
01/17
 
I watch the sunset beyond the backside of the wings. Because of visa restrictions and unexpected inquiries at the ticket desk in Hawaii, I'm not even sure that I can enter Thailand without an onward ticket--I just have the plan to walk across the border to Cambodia.

After reading last year's journal entries, I begin a line of questioning about my direction and my context. I come to a conclusion that I do not feel lost, but I am certainly not feeling as engaged in my daily life as I would like to be.

Shorts

I am writing this post as I peel super glue off of my fingers. I bought the super glue to fix one of my cuff links. I bought the cuff links to match the bow ties that I have worn daily until the weather recently reached too uncomfortably high of a temperature and too dense of a barometric pressure--sweet sweet humidity. I even bought a set of cuff links to match the "Chinese-lucky-red" bow tie that I bought to match the lining of my custom made black suit which I wore to see Hilary Hahn and the English Chamber Orchestra at the Shenzhen Concert Hall.

***

 

A few weeks ago, several friends and I motorbiked our way up one of the local mountains. At the peak, we casually ambled through a Buddhist temple that was adorned with bright pink Japanese maples and mist machines enshrouding a network of small canals that provided shelter for hundreds of turtles. Beyond the peak's fifty-foot-tall golden Buddha, an expansive valley stretched into the hazy distance of factory smog originating beyond the far-side-of-the-valley's mountains. A small locomotive (in the fashion of a Wild West coal train) chugged around the peaks' sides and stopped at a water park on a lake, at a garden with millions of flowers categorized by color and not species, at a golf course that climbed the side of a mountain (seems like a difficult obstacle), and at a few stations in a village of alpine-looking buildings constituting a secret neighborhood called "Interlaken."

***

Pilipin

Everybody! Pose like a Chinese schoolgirl!

This post is a continuation of the last--my recent series of lazy rehashing of my journal.

01/27:

My thoughts (especially those I deem worth writing) have slowed. Is this a sign of relaxation? A shift in mindset due to current state and prospective jobs? Or an indication of having processed my anxieties to a point of acceptance?
*
I pass-out to power ballads blasting on a bus between Clark and Manila. When I wake, it's to a dingy city covered in filth, billboards, box buildings, and few green things. During our brief walk to get bi-bim-bop, our senses are assaulted by honking cars, neon, whispering drug dealers, and self-advertising prostitutes.
*

01/28:

Street vendors and hustlers walk the aisles of our bus as we slowly drift through Manila traffic with the coach door open.

Children wearing only underwear sit on our fast-craft pontoon and beg while the sun beats on their tanned skin.
*
Thin beaches. Coves with bangkas. Perfect sunsets. Drunken admissions and mosquito net riggings. 

Taking It To Heart

Serenity now!

In the wake of my National Day vacation to emei shan (Mt. Emei, the holiest of Taoist mountains and located two hours southwest of Chengdu, China) and Leshan (home of the world's tallest seated buddha with toenails bigger than me) I am left reflecting on the balance of life. This seems appropriate and obvious (perhaps appropriately obvious) given the spiritually Buddhist sights I visited. Emei shan rejuvenated me with how it challenged me, with its beauty, with its spiritual essence that enveloped each of its hiking pilgrims much like the low-lying clouds that wrapped and permeated the mountain's sloping and sub-tropical forest; I returned lightened and having come to terms with pressing questions in my life--more on these questions later--only to encounter a burdening pain.

That is waterfall fresh laundry

I know I would fail in describing the climb up the mountain; I know as much because of how complexly beautiful Emei is. Since I feel like this excuse is more a cop-out disguising laziness, I will not use this lame reasoning to withhold  details of my experience on Emei. Instead, I will ask for your understanding given my struggle to find words while my thoughts are so helplessly scattered in the face of some personal and heavy-hearted trials.

A few stray descriptions and reflections will, I hope, suffice.

Battling thousands of Chinese people for a seat on a bus from Chengdu to Emei redefines "holiday travel." Imagine going to O'Hare airport on the busiest travel days surrounding Thanksgiving or Christmas; now, imagine that your airline has issued you a ticket to a destination but has not specified the time of your flight, the number of your flight, or your seat on the flight. The airline just sells tickets to passengers, thus allowing them to do whatever they feel is necessary to make sure that they get to their destinations in a timely manner.

I waited five hours with other sardines in Chengdu's bus station; it took me four hours to move twenty feet. I was elated that I did not have to use the restroom at any time during this experience. I was not elated that many Chinese people firmly believe that body odor is a "western problem."

The Zen Pedagogy [Dammit!]

I have found that being a foreign language instructor who does not speak the native language of his pupils has reduced me to two forms: reflecting shifter and aggravated grump. When I am the former, I picture myself like this; when I am the latter, I picture myself like this. Sometimes I transition between the two within one class period.

The zen side emerges when I encounter some success in teaching my students through a series of steps:
1) Awareness that I must reduce my speech to a basic level;
2) Passively slipping into a comfortable, concise, but very simple form of speech;
3) Seeing a glint in their eyes as they seem to have received a subconscious transmission from my brain to theirs--a transmission that imparts meaning where once there was none for the word "tired."

And it is in these moments of cosmic brilliance that I am optimistic for my current occupation. I become all the more reflective on the process by which I have created meaning in someone else's head. But, this, I believe, is where I fall out of the zen-like line of pedagogical communication.

I become too conscious about the process instead of letting it wash over me; maybe I am too resistant to remaining in an extended negation of my own education just so I can communicate with my students. To appropriately communicate with them (as they are just starting to learn a new language), I must respect them as adults, treat them as children, and teach them words as if they were babies. To do this appropriately, I need to think of what language is useful to a baby (or young child) just learning to speak. To do this appropriately, I need to, sort of, think what is useful to a baby (or young child) linguistically and pedagogically speaking.

Sometimes when I am lesson planning or [trying] to speak with students, I become all-too-aware of how simplified the language I am using is; then, I fear I am belittling the student. But, I see his or her lack of comprehension. So, I smile and continue repeating a phrase or word--all the while trying to encourage them to not worry about the 49 peers staring at him or her and, often, laughing at him or her. As I repeat the phrase or word, I see a look of pained fear and angered irritation cross their eyes (it washes over them just as easily as that aforementioned look of comprehension). Then, I become aware of how terribly annoying and cruel I must sound: I am verbally hammering a word into their face ("Mad. Mad. Mmmmmm-aaaaa-d. Mad. Mad. Mad. MAD. MAAAAAD.") while increasing my volume to compensate for the increasing volume of the classroom behind me. This poor kid must feel like I am yelling at him or her while his or her classmates are pointing and laughing. I sense someone behind me is goofing-off. I have so many reasons I want to escape this spiraling situation; I can only imagine how this kid feels. I start sweating. Or, at least, I become conscious of how much I am sweating. I smile and accept the kid's shaky-voiced attempt: "Blad."

"Blad."