Too Much Kiwi Juice, Too Many Water Pistols

An
American in Asia:

His Quest for Cosmic Truth

(or at least a Decent Espresso)

I'm Still Alive

The site has been neglected for about a month now. Sorry about that. I've been getting the hang of my job, writing for a travel trade magazine, being a reporter, asking pointed questions and making points with the answers, and that has taken a lot of my writing energy. When it comes to Sunday and time to write a piece for the website, I'm knackered. However, I intend to take it up again and I'm toying with some new ideas for the format of the site. Or rather, I've been playing around with some software and I want to design a new look just for fun.

On the subject of kiwis....

I have too much kiwi juice. I bought a bottle of kiwi puree and I have to drink as much kiwi as I can while it's still fresh. It's one of the excesses that I encounter on a daily basis in Bangkok that make a lot of visitors use words like "paradise" when describing the country. Back home I'd pay dearly for two or three little fuzzy kiwis and eat them in tiny delicate slices, savouring the tart, strawberry-like flavour as if I was eating fine caviar. If I liked caviar.

But in Thailand they eat fruit like it grows on trees. Which it does. Expensive tropical fruits rot on trees here every day. So I got a lot of kiwi juice, but nobody's impressed.

In my work, I have to stay at places like this, get entertained by the owners and management, endure spa treatments and midnight cocktail parties in private bungalows on seaside cliffs and write about it. Pretty silly, really.

Thai New Year

Songkhran, the Thai new year celebration, has just ended. I've been on vacation for a week but I haven't been able to enjoy it much. I've been trapped in my home by people with water pistols. To be specific, an entire country armed with water pistols, driving around in their pickup trucks tossing buckets of water on anyone foolish enough to walk down the street. And once the target is soaked, they hurl handfuls of talcum powder.

I enjoy playing with water on a hot day. But hurling buckets of water on everyone in sight every day for a week is a bit much. I'm not exaggerating to say that, if you leave your house during Songkhran, you will arrive at your destination without a single dry spot on your body. Just to walk down my street 100 metres to the train station, I have had to pass three to five mobs armed with hoses and buckets who have absolutely no mercy whatsoever. So every time I needed to leave the apartment, I would come bolting out of the elevator, run to the nearby hospital, which was one of the few no-water zones, and flag a cab.

I'd then ride to wherever I was going, watching the mayhem around me that looked like a scene from Escape From New York. I should go on the record here, by the way, to say that I really dig Kurt Russell. I don't care what anyone says, he's a fine comic actor. Seriously.

Another aspect of my job involves watching battling elephants....

Cambodia

I just saw the new movie by Matt Dillon, City of Ghosts. It was filmed entirely in Cambodia and it does a great job of being a thriller without exaggerating the scariness of living in a third-world Asian nation. Cambodia is getting better and Thailand is a bit further along, but the corruption and intrigue that went on in the movie was a fair representation of reality. The place is fairly stable these days, especially considering they don't actually have a government and the people in power don't officially have power. I'm going to have to go there one of these days for a story and, after watching that movie, I'm both apprehensive and excited. I definitely recommend the film. Matt Dillon is much smarter than he looks.

Thai movies come from a bit of a different perspective than Hollywood movies. In an adventure film a la Indiana Jones, a Thai martial artist chases down an evil archaeologist who is plotting to find a lost statue of the Buddha, cut of its head and sell it to a museum. In the climax scene, the hero almost dies fighting the evil archaeologist's minions, and the archaeologist is finally killed when the Buddha's head falls off the statue and crushes him.

Jeffrey Studebaker has been (in no particular order) a SE Asian correspondent for a Singaporean travel magazine, a teacher, consultant and translator in Japan, a guitarist with the band, Swoon 23 in every city of the US of A, a coffee roaster in Seattle, a bike messenger in Portland, a marine fire system repairman in Seattle, an osteoporosis clinic researcher in Providence, a mental ward counsellor on the night shift in Portland, a brief success in New York, and he has now returned to the US after nearly a decade in Asia to pursue a publishing career.