Chinese Food

Yesterday, my professor returned my essay on the Cambodia trip. It was a short essay, just four pages, and is worth 10 or 15% of our overall class grade. Just a filler assignment.

But the feedback on the paper was what I would expect on a final assessment. There was a lot of it, too. My professor engaged with the ideas, disagreed or agreed with me, commented on the writing style, called me out on poorly made points, and then wrote a one page explanation of my grade. I'm astonished that he did all that for such a relatively worthless assignment.


The grade also surprised me. My expectations were based on the 200 level (non-honors) classes I've taken at Oregon, and I was expecting an A- or an A, with a one or two sentence explanation. I took two 400 level classes last year and I got almost no feedback that impacted my writing (freshman year was better in that regard). And generally, most of the feedback comes one the final paper, when it is no longer useful in the context of the class.

Here's a class (or a professor, or a university - I don't know) where the entire term is a learning process. Specific critiques he gives me now I can assimilate and use on my final paper. It's completely obvious that this is the way classes are meant to work, and sad that I'm so surprised.

***
Tomorrow I'm flying to Hong Kong. I'll meet my parents there and stay through Sunday, though they're leaving Friday. I'd be more excited if I didn't have another essay due (same class) the Monday after I get back. I'll take my laptop to H.K. and pretend I'm on a business trip, like everybody else there.

I'm expecting good Chinese food.

Conversation in Class

"Where are you from?"
"The US"
"Which part?"
"State of Oregon - heard of it?"
"No..."
He draws a map.

"How about yourself - where are you from?"
"Guess. Here, I'll give you a hint: We fought a big war with the US"

awkward

I got it first try though...guess I know my history.

Americans in Singapore

It's 8:00pm Sunday. I just finished making my powerpoint for my presentation tomorrow morning on American expatriates in Singapore. To research this project, I spoke with a American professor at NUS who's been here for 18 years and doesn't like it at all and I visited the Singapore American School where he coaches the baseball team. I talked with some of the students and their parents.

I was astonished with much of what I found. The American community in SIngapore is well established and structured in such a way that there is minimal contact - almost none - with Singapore and Singaporeans. Walking around the campus of the Singapore American School, I felt like I was back home:


And both the students and the parents had no inclination to blend in or embrace Singapore. They create a little America based around the school and the American club. The students don't speak like Singaporeans, have never ridden the bus, and don't consider it home. It seemed like everyone on the baseball team was wearing a t shirt with the name of their home on it: state, university, or country.


They come here for one reason only: to make money. The financial, IT, and oil industries want American talent, and offer high salaries with lots of benefits (free tickets home, upper class life style, club membership). They come and work here for some years, then go home. Some stay, but they still want to go home someday.

I thought that wasn't acculturating very much. But relative to the rest of the Americans here, I'm practically a native.

Parents

Mom and Dad are in town. They're stunned like I was when I first arrived in Singapore. I'm taking advantage of that and tour-guideing them to all the places too expensive for me to go on my own. Today we went to the aquarium: feed the rays from your hand, pet puffer sharks, and walk through the aquarium tunnel. Popular with everyone. For dinner we went to a seafood center and got the chili crab, a "Singapore delicacy" that seems more popular in guidebooks than with locals. Maybe because it was really expensive - oh well, I wasn't paying. (thanks dad!)

I've got a super busy next 12+ days: tour all day Friday (tomorrow); conduct interviews Saturday afternoon, then in the evening go to an event at the US ambassador's residence (!) with the vice provost of the UO who's on an Asia tour and wants to meet the UO students here; Sunday I put together a presentation for Monday with a group; Monday give the presentation; Tuesday hand in a paper that I will somehow finish (another 3000 words....) between now and then; Wednesday I go to Hong Kong to meet up with the parents again - I'll return Sunday afternoon, just in time to write the paper corresponding with the presentation on Monday. Then I have a week to write a 10 page (single spaced) economic policy brief for the following Monday....

Mom, Dad: don't worry. By the time you read this it will all have been done already.

The only reason I'm up now is laundry.

Here're some picture to redeem this post that is actually a public to-do list:

My dad vacationing in the South Pacific.




A shark at the aquarium. Look at all those teeth...

Schooool

All of a sudden I have assignments due. I have survived this far in the term doing almost nothing and now at the end they spring all these papers and projects on me. I never saw them coming!

Speaking of coming, my parents. They're taking a package "Taste of Asia" trip around SE Asia - with a stop in Singapore! They'll be here this Thursday and Friday, then they fly to Bangkok for three days, then to Hong Kong for three days. I'm meeting them in Hong Kong next week. Very exciting! Of course, you can reasonably expect pictures 6-8 weeks after... Just kidding. I'll try to be better about putting up photos from my trips. I'm still working on the second half of my Indonesia trip. I've got good pictures and bad writing. Oddly, while I care about the latter, you may be more interested in the former. Oh well - I've got the post button, you'll just wait.

Here's a good picture from Cambodia that I didn't post:


That's a tarantula, meant for eating.

It may interest you top know that although I was in a restaurant in Cambodia, the tarantulas were from a province in China known for good tarantulas. The menu said so.

Days 3&4

This is another part II post. You can read about the first part of my trip to Java below.

After the first day in Jakarta, we spend the night in the Monica Hotel - the only hours of horizontal sleep I got the whole weekend. The next day began at five when we met the van and driver that we'd rented for a trip to the local volcanic plateau. I woke up at 4:55, so I forgot to bring my camera. The traffic on the way up was light so the trip took only 3 hours. The plateau is settled by farmers and is much more beautiful than the city. Sorry, no pictures. The ride back to our hotel took 5 hours, a period during which I lamented again and again my inability to say "toilet" in Indonesian.


That night, we left at 10pm for a bus ride to the base of Mt. Merapi. We joined a handful of other adventurers, and started climbing the mountain at 1am, with plans of making the summit for sunrise. The hike was not too long, but typical of the hiking trails of that continent, it was very steep and had eroded badly. The mountain itself is the most active volcano in Indonesia.




It's colder than it looks there. Also, that's volcanic steam, smelling of sulfur, not just clouds.



The top of the mountain was beautiful, as was the hike back down through the Indonesian morning.





We were exausted when we got to the bottom, but still had a long day ahead of us: a domestic flight back to Jakarta, then another flight back to Singapore. It was the longest 4 day, 1 night trip of my life!

This is Matt and a Frenchwoman after our hike off the volcano. Look at the facial expressions to really appreciate this picture.

Java, Indonesia

I'm sorry I've been late with stories from Indonesia. I'd like to say that I was waiting to get pictures from the other cameras on the trip, but really I've just been lazy.

So. Indonesia.
We flew Friday morning into Jakarta, the capital. Jakarta is the dirtiest, most crowded Asian city I've seen so far, significantly beating Bangkok - that's saying something. It's huge, sprawling miles out from a loose center area, has terrible roads, lots of slums, lots of pollution, and lots of bad smells. In a way, this was good, because it supported our plan to leave Jakarta that night for the (hopefully) more pleasant city of Yogyakarta.

Our intention was to explore Jakarta for part of the day, then buy passage on the night train to Yogya. I was astonished when the rest of the world didn't align to our plans. As it turned out, Saturday was Hari Raya, the holiday marking the end of the muslim fasting month of Ramadan. When a month of fasting during the day and abstention from fun ends, everybody goes nuts. (Indonesia, by the way, is the world's biggest Islamic country, with 88% or 210 million muslims.) As in, they all want to travel. At the first bus station (not the cheapest, not the most expensive) we were told that seats for the 8 hour ride to Yogya were sold out, but we could buy a standing ticket for the same price. We declined, then took a series of taxis around the city discovering that every other bus or train was completely booked. At one of the train stations, there were so many people in line that the local news station had a crew covering the story.

In the end we booked seats on a minibus (a 9 seater van) for about $30 US. After watching "The Office" in a local restaurant for a couple of hours, the van picked us up. We had to get three more passengers, we were told, then we'd start going to Yogya. Surprise surprise, traffic was TERRIBLE Friday evening before the biggest holiday of the year. Also, out driver didn't know where he was going. So we spent between 3 and 4 hours driving around Jakarta before we finally left the city.

We did get to see a lot of the celebrations. There were fireworks, music; I saw one group of people doing the proverbial "dance in the streets." There were also a lot of trucks covered in people with drums that drove around making a lot of noise.

I didn't get a lot of sleep in the van, which was too bad, because we didn't get to Yogyakarta until 8 am the next morning. Yes, a 14 hour van ride.

Yogyakarta was nicer that Jakarta. But the real attractions lay outside of the city. We booked a driver and a car through a tourist agency, and over the next three days saw some old temples, beautiful countryside, and volcanos. The temples were really amazing, unless you have just been to Angkor Wat, and then they're ho hum. They were ho hum.

Perhaps betraying my casual indifference towards these archeological wonders, I took many pictures, which I will now share.

This is Borobudur temple, the largest Buddhist temple in the world. Today, it sports many colored umbrellas, even when it's not raining.


Matt and Tom, traveling the world together. Someday in the future, children will play "Where is the world are Matt and Tom" and "Find Tom and Matt" and have no idea who Carmen and Waldo are.


This is (was) also a temple. I imagine this is what most everyhting looks like until it gets rebuilt to attract tourists.


This is a different temple - it's not built on a hill. Ignore the scaffolding on the right...



Apparently something was bothering me.


Can you tell which one is Vincent, the friendly Frenchman that set up this trip? This trip was unique for me in that our group were the only foreign (or at least white) tourists there. Several people wanted pictures with Vincent - one man even gave him a baby to hold and pose with.


I even had my own taste of celebrity! I don't know her name, but she wanted a picture with me and I think she likes me!

End day 2. The second half is longer and taller. Stay tuned...

Gifts

They take good care of us here at Prince George's Park student hostel. Just this evening, my cluster leader (the same guy who brings around the mail) came and gave me an oral digital thermometer and am aerosol can of insect killer. The insect killer is for mosquitos, and the thermometer is for me when I get Dengue fever. Apparently there have been incidents recently, though I haven't heard of them. The management also "gasses" large parts of the complex with thick chemicals that kills mosquitos and makes being here unpleasant. I feel loved.

This weekend I'm going to Java, one of the islands of Indonesia. I'm going with Matt, two people from France, and one from Canada. We're flying into Jakarta, the capital, then traveling around the island to see some nature parks and temples. The trip will be 4 days, a Friday morning flight to a Monday night flight. I'm way more excited than I sound.

You know what that means: picture to come.

EDIT: The thermometer is in Celsius. Useless to me.

Rain

It's raining now for the first time in a couple of weeks, and I am thoroughly appreciating it. It makes the air cooler and less humid and cleans the green of the campus. There are covered walkways everywhere so I only get wet if I want to. And the rain reminds me of home.

Two months in Singapore has dulled the exoticism (and there wasn't much to start with). I don't feel like a visitor, I feel like a long-term foreigner. I am more sensitive now to the little bits of life that are different and create discomfort, but also to the differences that I enjoy as an improvement on life in Oregon. Food-related items falls in both of those categories.

One thing I don't like: the lack of vegetables. The only vegetables available in most dishes are some sort of kale, spinach, or cabbage that is overcooked, then seasoned with salt and oil. Really no good at all.

The enjoyable counterpart: the fresh fruit everywhere. At any food court, there is a stall selling fresh cut fruit: papaya, mango, cantaloupe, pear, pineapple, watermelon, orange, honey dew melon, apple, banana, coconut, dragon fruit, star fruit, and kiwis are the basic selection. Nothing costs more than a dollar, and most cost much less. They'll also make fruit smoothies out of nothing but fruit and ice. Delicious!

Can you tell I'm hungry? I'm going to lunch now.


The crocuses here put the ones in my front yard to shame.

Choeung Ek Killing Fields

Choeung Ek Killing Fields
Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge sought to revert Cambodian society into an agrarian egalitarian utopia. To this end, the paranoid regime executed an estimated 200,000 of its own people. Two million more starved in the famine resulting from its policies. The victims at Choeung Ek were the cities’ intellectuals: past government officials, professionals, school graduates, multilinguists, skilled laborers, and wearers of spectacles were tortured and executed for having knowledge that would pollute the new society.

Van tires crunch the gravel parking lot and pleasant sunshine casts playful shadows on the chickens clucking in the clean grass. If it were any other place, there would be children, food, and games. But this is a city park fresh with death. Pits of exhumed mass graves interrupt the lush lawn. Wooden signs narrate in broken English a short walk among the pits on paths of bone and clothes eroding out of clay. Here, children were beaten to death against this tree. There, 450 bodies were removed from that pit. Some skulls still wore blindfolds, others wore plastic bags. A tour guide sketches the history and recites the numbers, but comes alive explaining why Cambodians forgive, but never forget; that the younger generation must learn to stop history from repeating. The familiarity of the clichés disappears in the passion of his message. Beyond the path and exhumed graves sprawl the killing fields and an estimated eleven thousand buried dead. Most of the field is flooded now and the government lacks the money and reason to uncover the rest. It would be a grisly task: hundreds of killing fields and hundreds of thousands of victims rest similarly across Cambodia, identifiable only as shallow pits breaking the flat green fields.

Cement memorials cannot encompass killings on that scale. But they still try. Here, the small square building hides nothing: past the tended garden and the sweet incense, visitors confront the dead directly. Stepping into the gaze of eight thousand skulls, everything else stops. Starring. Blinking. A sea of eye sockets addresses each individual, compelling a response. There is none. Someone has sorted the skulls by age and sex, a gesture that seems appropriate but completely inadequate. There is nothing to do but walk, look, and leave. Outside, the tour guide is waiting.

Kor Keh

The most interesting day of our trip to Cambodia was the one that took us furthest from the paved roads and slick guides that dominate the tourist zones. Our professor arranged for us to take a day trip to Kor Keh to see what site looks like before the tourists arrive. Kor Keh is a region about 2.5 hours from Siem Reap (the city that's the tourist base for Angkor Wat and the other temples), the last hour and a half of which is on dirt roads. There is a large temple complex, which everyone desperately wants to open up to tourists. The only only stopping them right now is the unfinished road. By crossing that, we were able to see parts of Cambodia not many others do.

The ride there gave a fascinating view into the lives of rural Cambodians. Beautiful rice fields and palm trees, bits of forest, and houses raised up the traditional way on 4 to 8 foot stilts. There were a lot of cows, too. Here's a video from the window of the van:



If rice farmers are part of the quintessential Cambodian landscape, so are minefields. Which we did see a lot of. For miles, both sides of the road would be undeveloped forest, with red signs warning in Khmer "Minefield." When the roads are built, the mines are cleared for 10 meters on both sides, and the rest is just left to be cleaned up later. When we got to the Kor Keh area (home to the temples and some villages) there were many signs like this:

The French, the Japanese, and the US sponsored many of the land mine clean ups.


Can you see all the dangers in this mock mine field? (from the Cambodian Landmine Museum)

We visited first the site of a daycare center and a school that were built by an NGO and the government, respectively, for the 150 families living in the surrounding villages. The school teaches students up through fourth grade in three classrooms. But there is only one teacher, and there are so many students that school is only two hours a day.

Part of our professors "program" was to dump 20 Singaporeans college students into a classroom with 60 Cambodian 7 year olds with no exposure to the world outside of their village. "Cultural Disconnect" doesn't even start to cover it.


We (some of us) sang songs like "twinkle twinkle little star" and "chicken dance" to which they reacted with stunned silence or boredom, it was hard to tell which. Our professor, out of pity for the children, ordered the distribution o fhte notebooks and colored pencils we'd brought for "Arts and Crafts" time. Not being much of an artists myself, I made a paper airplane for some little boy. The idea was unanimously accepted by Singaporeans and Cambodians, so soon the classroom was looking like a proper classroom:

Paper airplanes: my contribution to the westernization of rural Cambodia.



After lunch, we visited the temple complex. It was the same thousand year old temple ruin, blah blah. The cool part was the 40 meter high step pyramid with a ladder to the top. Amazing views of (mined so not developed) beautiful Cambodian forest. Spending a week in Yosemite earlier this summer meant the the climb up the ladder didn't even register as a "high" climb, so that was cool.


an amazing view of the pyramid walking out of the forest


I could live here.



Tomorrow I'm posting something focused and sad.